Yup, very American. Wait until they know it's unarmed, that it's leaving, and then shoot it in the back.

FWIW It's most likely a Chinese version of Google's "Project Loon" that got away, and is very similar to a device found floating over Japan a few years back.

JP Aerospace know a thing or to about the technology (and hold the airship altitude record) so well worth seeing what JP reckons https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

But why tell everyone otherwise? Politics I guess.

That's a typical clickbait headline. It's not what the article actually says in the text, it's not what the Russian government says, it's an "if maybe some things" shitpost from Roscosmos that doesn't call it either.

It's interesting that after the collapse of the Just In Time warehousing under Covid, and the bollox-up of Suez Crisis 2 that is yet to hit, Boston Dynamics decides to launch a robot to help cut Just In Time margins even thinner.

That strategy only works in a stable world, and I don't think we've got one anymore.

I think you're confusing the incredibly highly refined silicon metal used for making solar cells with silicon dioxide.

Made the move to Mastodon, and managed to drop a whole load of high blood presure on Twitter.

There seems to be marked reluctance to stop using fossil fuel for air transport. It requires a shift in attitude: High speed long distance travel is out; it's beyond our carbon budget. Much like Concorde.

The obvious solution to long distance air travel is to use airships. We're waaay past Hindenberg-era technology. They'll cross the Atlantic on the fuel needed to get an A380 to from the departure gate to the runway at Heathrow. They can run on biofuel, batteries, solar, whatever. They're limited by weight, not volume, which means plenty of cabin space for R&R on the inevitably longer flight. Sure it takes longer, but when the alternatives are not flying or scorching the planet people might come round to the concept of a more leisurely, comfortable flight.

(This is very similar to the "we need natural gas power stations as a temporary measure" gambit. The gas plants are obsolete already, and only hold up the installation of carbon-neutral plant.)

Huge amounts of coal are used in Germany for making steel and cement. Not entirely sure how much - hard to google the numbers - but the steel companies in particular aren't going to like it. They rely on cheap electrical power to run arc furnaces as well as using roughly a quarter of the coal directly.

PS One thing I didn't get in China was spam.

Absolutely agree. Going to China made me realise how dependent we'd become on a very few communications service providers, all of which have government hooks deeply embedded. Worse, the West has an open season on corporate information gathering and trading schemes using said services.

In China, I used WeChat because it is used for every damn thing over there. However, on my return I became very keen on promoting Open Whisper Systems' Signal, using DuckDuckGo.com instead of Google, abandoning Facebook except for communication with uneducated family members, and not physically taking my data through borders in any recognisable form.

The link in that article goes to goldseek.com, which has dick all to do with Uber trucks.

What is going on here? Are that many people really ranting without clicking on the link, or has it been subsequently hacked?

Not much bleeding point in having the most secure voting software in the universe if the client's OS or GUI is compromised. This is what TOR users found out when the NSA broke not the TOR network, but simply hacked the user's browsers and got them to betray themselves.

You can telnet into most Huawei/Vodafone DSL modems with admin/{VF-}[Countrycode]hg[ModelId] through the ethernet port...

Forget the infotainment/bugging crap - we have that already and it's called a smartphone. What we need is Open Source and Open Standard systems for controlling the car and - new kid on the block - battery management.

Real hardware and software already exist in projects like Tumanako which even have the foresight to integrate with distributed power generation systems. But no, big auto manufacturers still focusing on bling that will date faster than a Miley Cyrus video.

Convergence is no longer in active development, and TACK uses elliptic curve keys, which are suspect.