None of that matters.

If he wrote a history under NSA auspices it would be classified regardless of much of the material being about public developments. Recall that they successfully suppressed material in 1967 all of which was about publicly available information. Recall also the large amount of formerly classified stuff that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s that Kahn never wrote about - the electro-mechanical crypto machines which were the backbone of spy work into the 1990s. It is a fact that Kahn never published a significant update on his 1967 book.

Also, although the NSA does naturally rely on the open literature on cryptography they have in addition their own math geniuses doing highly classified work on top of it. I recall that when the NSA recommended new public crypto-standards, which they had deliberately undermined, academic researchers found evidence that the weakening was so specific that it hinted that the NSA had a theory of the algorithms that was unknown to the outside world.

What do you suppose that journalist-historian was doing as an NSA Fellow for 15 years? Little or nothing has emerged about that. We know that classified agencies hire historians to have classified histories written about them - the CIA has that, Betty Perkins at Los Alamos wrote a whole series of histories about nuclear weapon development, which only one has ever been releases in any form (very heavily redacted).

The Codebreakers was a ground-breaking, deeply informative and fascinating work when it was finished and published in 1967, although parts of it were removed and never published due to government pressure so it was not entirely up-to-date to the public state of knowledge even for 1967.

So the enormous Second World War codebreaking operations, the work of Turing and Bletchley Park, Engima, and knowledge of crypto-machines generally is absent as this information did not start coming out until several years later. And the vast changes driven by computers and algorithmic advances are nowhere to be seen. So it would have been wonderful if Kahn had updated his work, which remains very much historical -- more or less the story of cryptography and codebreaking before the modern era.

In fact he may have done just this. Only we can't read it or even know of its existence because it is so highly classified. After the publication of The Codebreakers the NSA found a more effective way to suppress the publication of code-knowledge by this gifted historian -- they hired him. Not right away, but when we might have hoped he would produce a The Codebreakers II to cover the dramatic changes of the preceding 30 years in 1995 he became a scholar-in-residence at the NSA. When his original work was republished a year later it had a cursory add on chapter that skimmed the developments since, but did not rise to the level of an actual history of them and provided no knew insights to the subject. He maintained his NSA ties for the next 15 years.

This was an end-of-life test, operating JET above its design power level for the highest power level of any tokamak ever to date: 13 MW for 5.2 seconds. It had Q=0.33 because this was not its most efficient power level.

This is 2.6% of ITER's power level for about 1% of its planned operating cycle time -- quite impressive for what is strictly a laboratory instrument. JET will always have a legendary status in fusion power history as it provided the design data and proof of scaling principles used to design ITER, which will be engineering test bed for a full scale power plant.

Wow, you are really making stuff up bigly. Good work coward!

Since dams create artificial lakes that entirely destroy all of the habitat on the submerged land it is odd that you regard damming up rivers as being particularly benign, and opposition to destroying such habitats particularly deluded.

A 2% reduction in insolation only reduces the output of solar power plants by 2%. So you build 2% more of them to compensate. Do you even read the TFS?

The gas flow is way down from the start of the war, about 30% of pre-war levels and steadily declining. Ukraine allows the gas through because it is needed by countries supporting its war effort, especially Poland and Slovakia. These countries are in the process of transitioning off of Russian gas, and the level of flow is expected to go to zero next year.

Yeah I know, you meant to provide context then totally forgot.

LLMs seem more than half-way there in putting out glib bullshit ("being convincing in person"), so it seems what we are lacking is the robotic golfer. "Full self-driving", also "full self-putting".

Silos are unmanned. No one is there, except when people go out to do maintenance (rarely). There are control centers that are a long distance from the silos, and they are underground heavily shielded facilities. So the notion that the balloon was getting cell phone signals from soldiers manning the missile system is just fantasizing.

Try not to do low-balling, it is irritating. Commercially used panels are in the range of 18-22%, so lets take a current average of 20%, not the incorrect 15%, and over time (remember you are comparing it to pie-in-the-sky systems that won't exist for a decade or more) the steady improvement of panel efficiency makes a long term target of 25% realistic (laboratory silicon has broken 30%).

I gave done that a number of times, and it does work pretty well, but it becomes very problematic if you keep doing it. I have had five Linux systems (after giving up on dual boot) in series, and if you do it a two or three times it is works but odd issues accumulate, along with lots of "dot" directories of unknown purpose. Eventually you must give up and do a clean install then try selective copying from an old home directory and hope you get everything you need (and archive the old one forever just in case).

I don't think the quantum tech is there yet either, but the idea that TLAs will get the ability ahead of everyone else is not "indulging in conspiracy theories". First, they have access to everything happening in the public space and in the commercial world, public or not. In addition they have billions of dollars of black budget money to invest in exploiting and extending all of that tech in secret, and the privileged position of a government spy agency. The first organization on the planet to have an operational quantum cracking operation will be the NSA.

True. NFTs are at best a pointer to a JPEG,

A more informative way of looking at it is the the "space junk" problem is so severe that it restricts large scale exploitation of space to 600 km or below. The original plan for StarLink was to place all of their satellites at 1100 km - which would have been a disastrous decision. When outsiders started pointing this out Musk reduced the altitude to 550 km. This means that StarLink has to operate at a sub-optimal altitude to avoid this problem. Thus the claim that "most satellites are in LEO, 600 km or below" is not because "that's where the people who operate them want them" but because they have to be below that altitude to avoid a Kessler Syndrome catastrophe.

For reference previous studies of the Kessler Syndrome have concluded that most LEO altitude bands above 600 km already are above the critical density and that collision cascades are inevitable some day unless this stuff is deorbited by special means - which is why deorbiting schemes are being studied and proposed..

Quite true. The ill-considered objection the poster was making is a manifestation of the "energy budget" obsession of lots of space fanbois that neglects that the cost of doing stuff in space is entirely driven by the cost of space hardware and operations support, not energy expenditure. The reason for this seems to be an attraction only to physics and not the essentials of engineering, which are fundamentally economic and involve complex systems.