Though I did a quick check and apparently DRM+ uses QAM-16, so perhaps my knowledge is far too out of date :S

Some people save energy by turning their appliances off at the plug rather than leaving them on standby. Clearly Radio 4 chose to avoid having Brian Blessed on too frequently instead ;)

And technically while some people do call it MPEG2, it's actually MP2, also known as MPEG-1 Audio Layer 2, an audio codec in the same family as MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3).

I imagine that today they'd probably use something like Opus and a fountain code or similar, yes... But you can't expect everyone to replace their radio every 10-15 years ;)

If I was to hazard a guess, the BFS concept is 2035 at the earliest, most likely 2040 -- and it'll be at a much smaller scale than previously advertised.

That's not enough range to do London - Sydney, it's not enough to do Los Angeles to Sydney either, or Los Angeles to Tokyo, it's basically a replacement for trans-Atlantic flights only because even US cross-continental Mach 1.3 is only about 50% faster than a 737 (3h vs. 5h)... It's pretty much geared to the prestige market only.

Under an hour to anywhere on the planet, meanwhile, is absolutely someone would be a premium for -- and they'll do it for most/all long haul flights if it was available.

You also have other services: Starlink is an obvious one they're pursuing now, but there's many other things that they could branch into with no effective competition right now, from harvesting resources such as Helium-3 to Rare Earths (ironic name), to... (thinks for several minutes) banishing people to the Phantom Zone?

But you get what I mean, it's not just about rockets, it's about the things cheap and reliable rocketry enables.

[0] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v7.0/process/submitting-patc...

While it's an April 1st RFC, I've seen this implemented at a Hackspace in Amsterdam, works very well!

Bazel, on the other hand, is completely in control of this, and it makes perfect sense to do this at that point -- and it seems to be a relatively efficient implementation too, really nice to see!

I imagine a lot of it came from that push to "use outside world tools more rather than writing our own" which is great in theory, but really felt like a huge leap backwards in terms of convergence.

Yeah, I was working out of the Sydney office. Almost everything was incredibly slow due to that latency, not just chromoting but also just accessing most sites through beyondcorp.