I find projects and problems that interest me, and write code (and, mostly, make it available). I don't actually care whether no one else finds the projects/problems/code interesting. It keeps me somewhat sane in a world that has essentially forgotten what it is like to be a human being.

Actually, it was about 25% more contacts for the Morse code contest last year... I should learn to check my numbers before posting.

Indeed, in last year's running of the American Radio Relay League-sponsored amateur radio contests in which US and Canadian ham radio operators contact the rest of the world, the Morse Code contest recorded about 12% more contacts than the radio telephony (i.e., speech) contest. In years with fewer sunspots, there are typically about twice as many Morse Code contacts as telephony ones.

Er... I was a co-Investigator on Voyager; the "photos" we are familiar with were actually from an old-fashioned vidicon tube (well, there are two: one narrow-angle and one wide-angle). It took the system 48 seconds to acquire a single monochrome slow-scan image, at 800x800 quasi-pixels. To generate the colour pictures we all know and love, colour filters (red, green, blue) were moved in front of the lens, then three sequential images were taken over the course of (at least) 144 seconds (i.e., 3 times 48 seconds). These were combined back at Earth into a single colour image.

(And between the time the (monochrome) images were acquired and the time that they were transmitted they stored on board... on the DTR -- an actual, physical Digital Tape Recorder.)

https://www.cdc.gov/media/rele...

I went to go and try out this new, improved, proton.me. And quickly discovered that in order to continue to use my regular e-mail client (Thunderbird), I have to have a paid account and download and then download and install the above bridge program. That suggests that something about the client/server interaction is non-standard; in any case, I'm not inclined to get a paid account just to try something out to see if it is actually useful for my situation.

Also, as far as I can tell, the bridge program isn't open source (I could be wrong about that, but pointers to the source weren't obvious on the pages that talk about e-mail); I certainly wouldn't willingly install a proprietary blob into my e-mail chain.

Also also, the idea that if I want to access my e-mail from a different computer using Thunderbird or some other MUA I would have to install the bridge program there as well does not exactly overwhelm me with enthusiasm.

And right there is why Starlink isn't installed here. If it doesn't provide an option for a real, publicly-routable static IP address at a reasonable price, I don't consider it a replacement for a terrestrial ISP. Last I looked (which I admit has been perhaps a year at this point), such an address wasn't available with Starlink at any price, reasonable or otherwise.

I realise that probably more than 99% of people don't care about that capability, so I fully expect Starlink to be a great success. But unless something changes, I won't be a customer.

A correct quote, and I nearly modded you Informative. But then I wondered about the obvious possibility of selection bias and saw the following later in the same paper:

So the situation at this point seems rather less clear-cut than it would appear from the initial quotation. "[S]uggests that the booster offers some protection" is much less dramatic than "are much less likely to test positive". So it seems that more data are necessary before a definitive conclusion can be drawn.

That's just one way of stating the Uncertainty Principle, so there must be more to it than that. (No; I haven't [yet] read the paper, although I am planning to do so.)

Do you have pointers to how to make this work? It stopped working for me several years ago [probably when Hangouts replaced Talk], and I just tried it again with no success. But I could easily believe that there is now some set of more-or-less arcane steps that have to be followed -- but I couldn't find anything relevant; everything I found was old information.

And only if you have smartphone (see step 1 below). Most people I know who care about this sort of thing -- including me -- do not own such a thing.

Steps to get on the waitlist:
        1. Download DuckDuckGo for iOS or Android
        2. Open Settings > Beta Features > Email Protection
        3. Click “Join the Private Waitlist."

Only if they start to support static IP addresses so that one can run servers with globally routed addresses. My understanding is that that is not the case at the moment.

There isn't really any proof that Waymo vehicles are driverless, only that the driver isn't in the vehicle. If you compare a dozen dubiously driverless vehicles to a million collecting data every moment and already doing a pretty good job at autonomy, which do you think will succeed?

The fact that the driver is not in the vehicle does not mean that there is no driver.

I believe that this was figured out in the amateur observer community before NASA confirmed it. I saw it go by in my twitter feed. Not sure I can find it now...