Depending on the mission and compared to the alternatives, yes they are very lightweight. Solar panels can quickly become much heavier once you start outfitting outer solar system probes. Also, if you need continuous operation without solar exposure, you start needing heavy batteries and power-wasting heaters. Large arrays require supports and actuators to deploy and present more failure modes.

The RTG used in Curiosity, for example, is only 45 kg, which sounds like a lot, but Spirit and Opportunity carried nearly half that mass in just batteries and panels, produced less power with them, and still needed to carry a radiothermal heater.

Distant missions like New Horizons would have been prohibitively heavy had they not used an RTG.

Yikes, fair enough. I, of course, didn't read TFS and was operating off of the poor summary.

Publishing a blog called, "Evading security systems for cat burglars: a vocational manual," sounds just as sketchy and well-past-that-line.

Is imparting (academic, general) knowledge really "aid", though? And where do you draw the line?

"Hey, I'm going over to Syria to kill westerners and enslave Christians for the raping and whatnot..."

"but my car broke down Ms Librarian. Do you have a book on automotive repair?"

"but my car broke down Mr Mechanic. Can you point out the distributor for me?"

"but it costs money to get there. Do you have any investing advice?"

"but I have no idea where Syria is. Can you point me in the general direction?"

At some point, you can't be held for responsible for the intentions of others, even if they tell you what they are.

The DEA's MO on all drugs, beyond just marijuana, consists entirely of overhype. Have you ever looked at the schedules? Schedule I, which consists almost entirely of psychedelic drugs is described as such (hilarious emphasis added):

Of course, Schedule II drugs are by far the most abused drugs, including things like prescription opiates, methamphetamine, cocaine, ritalin, etc. But Schedule II is described as having "less abuse potential than Schedule I drugs". It's BS all the way down.

So you do have a problem with reading comprehension.

Here's a tip for successfully debating with people: argue against what they are actually saying, not against whatever nonsense you assume someone idiotic enough to argue against you would say.

So in addition to not understanding the human sense of humor, you're also incapable of reading and comprehending a simple post. Do you really not understand what I said, or are you just too offended and outraged to think straight? I hope you're happy with the trashing that you gave to those strawmen.

Honestly, that's exactly the property that makes most jokes funny. Humor is our way of dealing with awkward, uncomfortable, and troubling details of our reality. A joke that has no basis in reality does not generally appeal to many people.

The one line printed in TFS isn't funny, but we're provided with no context so it may be the punchline to an actually funny joke.

Yeah, nothing says selfless giving like having an organization change their name in your honor. He bought the name of a department at Harvard with his money. This is entirely about sentimentality.

Is this really about philanthropy at all? His donation bought him the name of the engineering department at Harvard. That was an extremely effective use of his money.

"East Bumfuck Community College John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences" doesn't have quite the same ring to it, even if it would help more people.

What oath did he break? The only oath he took was the one that all federal employees take:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.

Now that money equals speech, it's imperative that it happen. It's the most straightforward way to amass enough money to "say" anything.

That's not flashy, takes resources away from more visible (to the manager's manager) tasks, and may not even pay off until after the manager has moved on to a better gig. Management's job should include a lot of things that management doesn't actually do because the incentives are structured so that there's no point in actually doing those things. (Which, of course, is a result of failures at even higher levels of management and so on...)

"Of any value" is the catch here. Eliminating the boost circuit makes the device cheaper to manufacture and offloads that cost to the operating cost for the user (which means higher profits for the manufacturer). The devices that he's talking about (remote thermometers, rain gauges, etc) probably tie him to a single manufacturer, so there's no competition anyway.

Modern day engineering of consumer devices is almost completely rooted in "value engineering". For an expected level of function, everything that isn't absolutely necessary is cut from the design (from quality of components to niceties like efficient use of batteries). The target for expected level of function is a distribution just to the outside of the warranty period.

The different chemistries are described this way because of the characteristics of the discharge curves. As you can see here, the NiMH battery (and NiCd is similar) spends most of its life at 1.2V, while the ZnMnO2 batteries have no such plateau.

Under any considerable load, both battery types will drop from 1.5V/1.4V very quickly, so measuring 1.2V across a loaded NiMH battery doesn't mean that 60% of the energy is gone. Self-discharge alone will drop most NiMH/NiCd cells to below 1.4V pretty quickly.

Not at all. That's some populist nonsense that's supposed to end bribery. It's no wonder Google had no hand in it.

What Google needs to make is a system that streamlines bribery, synergizing capitalism and Web 3.0.