for the rest of his working life?

I admire him for doing that. He essentially torpedoed his entire career for the sake of doing the right thing.

Thanks!

Then my questions stands: why do teams of scientists chase lunar eclipses around the world at great expense? What's the added value of a real eclipse.

Not really, because I didn't in fact read the article :) My question about the value of eclipses for solar observation is tangentially related to the satellite thing, which doesn't really interest me at all.

I understand that, by sheer coincidence, the moon has the right size and is currently at the right distance to mask the just enough of the sun and let only photons from the sun's upper atmosphere and corona through, making their observation easier.

But why is the moon needed? Why are even clever sun-blocking satellites needed? Do sun-blocking things need to be placed far away to observe the corona? Couldn't a beer coaster placed a few feet away from the telescope serve the same purpose?

I'm oversimplifying of course, but you get the idea.

The only reason I can think of is that the farther the sun-blocking object, the less fuzzy its boundary is when the observed through a telescope focused at infinity, making the moon truly useful when observing the thin boundary layer between the sun and the corona. Other than that, I don't see why a beer coaster - or perhaps a larger round object placed a bit farther out - wouldn't do the job.

Perhaps a reader who is better versed in solar observations can shed some light (pun not intended :)

I consider Theo-Fascism the worst type of fascism, because it abandons reason even way earlier than regular fascism. Both have a quasi-religious perversion of government, but at least with regular fascism religion is more of a sideshow. In Theo-Fascist regimes its front and center which turns it evil way faster and harder. On top of that, because its religion at the center, reason has been abandoned at the onset of fascism and not as a final result, making it much harder for a society to turn around or find "justifiable" ways to make life work.

Religious fanatics are the worst and these days its the Islam variants are the most ridiculous, are causing the most damage and are the most dangerous. Somebody needs to off the troika leading that country.

It's not because it's inconvenient that it doesn't exist. If you want to reuse a photograph you found somewhere for example, you're supposed to research who owns the rights to it and figure out if and how you can use it.

The problem AI companies have is, they hoover up billions of copyrighted works to train their AIs, but of course they don't have the time or resources to do due diligence on each and every one of those works.

So with typical big tech hubris, instead of taking the time to figure out this particular conundrum legally and cleanly, the tech bros just said "fuck this" and pushed ahead with their massively copyright-infringing products, arguing that you can't stop progress, this outdated copyright stuff is in the way and their bright future can't wait - and nevermind all the people whose work they essentially stole without compensation.

More like thirty or forty huge corporation submitting their list and waiting forever for approval, legally unable to release their AI products.

Early April, close to 30ÂC here in Germany. This isn't normal. I'm in western Germany where April weather lasts months. This year it was like a few days, maybe 2 weeks if you're generous. We had weeks of 35ÂC+ last year and the year before I was driving back from Portugal through the Toulouse Area and it was 37Â+ even as the sun was about to set behind the Pyranees. The Mediterranean last year was so warm the tourists stayed away. And we're taking about water temperature. The _water_ was so warm the tourists stayed away. This year's skiing season didn't happen in Germany. .... What we where warned about is happening: Cascading runaway effects of man made climate change are kicking in and we're headed for a new global equilibrium. Let's just hope that that will be survivable for modern civilization.

We are screwed. The chance to avoid that has passed. How hard we are screwed however is still up to us.

To each his own. Personally I don't really like clicky keyboards. The feeling annoys me. I much prefer linear keys.

A Wooting Two HE and I love it.

I'm not even a gamer: I'm a bit of an old school terminal kind of guy and I bought it to see if I could type faster with it. And I sure can!

It is a bit light for my taste, but it's nice to define different actuation depths for it. For example, I set the spacebar to work only at the very bottom, so I can rest my thumbs on it while I type (bad habit, I know). And HJKL are set to trigger higher for faster navigation in VI.

The absolute lack of friction feels nice too. And while it's noisy, it's not overwhelming like a Model M.

I'm also hoping the contactless action will make it last a long time. But I've had it for 8 months now and I can see it's getting clogged up with lint, what with the switches being exposed and all. That's a bit concerning.

Lastly, it's eye-wateringly expensive. But I reckon it's worth it if you're a heavy keyboard user like me. And I want to support them for making a configuration utility that works well in Linux. So I guess it's money well spent.

I meant active computing.

As long as those robots keep thinking with their tiny sixties electronic brains, they're as close to humanity's living children outside of the solar system.

When they stop thinking, sure, they'll carry data for aeons for someone or something to discover one day maybe, but no differently than a dead body would carry information in a side pocket. It's useful but it's not alive anymore.

I might very well stop thinking before they do. I'm a few years away from retirement and I smoked for 25 years. So it's certainly not impossible.

Who needs Doom when we have Duke Nukem...

Need to be celebrated loudly and publicly - those who are still alive.

The engineers who keep this thing going too.

The Voyager probes are literally part of my life. I've always known them. For me, they're a fixture of the sky like the Sun and the Moon. They're precious little bits of living humanity far out there. If they die, something inside would die too, and I sure hope I kick the bucket before they do.

Part 1 was made without part 2 being greenlit (they wanted to wait for the boxoffie numbers) and apparently part 2 was made more or less the same way. This is a tad annoying to say the least. Are movies going to be like video-games where I wait 18+ months for the fixed, debugged bargain deal gold edition to come out? Or will movies be crowdfunded in the future? Probably a mix of both. We see larger streaming serials becoming flaky and unreliable that way, now movies seem to go there too. ...

All that aside, Villeneuves Dune is _really_ good. I really liked part 1 and part 2 doubles down on the quality. Villeneuve didn't screw this one up and Dune is easy to screw up. He's proven once again that he can take a premium setting, _not_ botch it _and_ take it to a new level, as with Bladerunner 2049. His eerie brutalist visual style and "Lyonel Feininger Lighting" that he's know for hit the nail on the head when it comes to capturing the vibe of the Dune novel and the cast is top-of-the-line with good to very good performances all the way through. I also like the way he picks up and even quotes some elements and inspirations from the 1984 David Lynch version of the movie. There are obvious visual style-quotes from Gigers awesome set design present in the new Dune and some other details are clearly closer to the Lynch-Dune than the book. And all of it in a very good, awesome way. Hans Zimmers soundtrack is almost as iconic as Totos Dune theme from 1984 and is yet another grand masterpiece in movie scores.

Bottom line: I highly recommend the new Dune movie interpretation. Definitely a premium SF movie experience.

Improving quality of jpegs by improving its compression is a good thing. I still use jpegs a lot and I prefer them over PNG because PNG files usually are notably larger for the work I do. I hope GIMP ads this algorithm to their codebase ASAP.