*word

The government of Switzerland may disagree that Geneva is an international city. Cosmopolitan might be the world you are looking for.

Also, it wasn't the web that prevented closed-garden internets, but rather universities. Until the mid 1990s, nearly everyone on the Internet (on any protocol) was at a university or research institute (like CERN). The universities weren't trying to make a profit, so they embraced an open architecture. It was US dominated, because then as now, most large research universities are in the US. Then, mainly US companies took that university network and popularized it. So, it's very much the fault of the US university system that the internet is so open.

This sounds like a perfect experiment for ISS. They mainly do biological experiments (it's not really a good platform for anything else), and this could be a neat result. CASIS (the ISS science institute) is always looking for new experiments and experimenters for the station.

They probably will, as it benefits the ecosystem (i.e. chips designed to a kernel, kernel designed for a chip). Like Android and ChromeOS, though, patches will be slower than ideal, but still there. Google does it because they are in the long game and have an interest in keeping Linux current. It sounds like Valve are thinking the same thing.

And I run Arch for a reason too, on an Arm Chromebook with Google's kernel patches.

'Cause y'know [b]Greenpeace[/b] are *totally* unbiased and *totally* free of preconceived political options.

There was a time when environmental organisations actually cared about science. Nowadays, they just blindly campaign against fossil fuels (and nuclear) and ignore any connections between their claims and actual science. Especially when there are things caused by human impacts other than greenhouse gases, like an area flooding because half of it is covered in parking lots, but knee-jerk "environmental activists" claiming it is due to climate change, despite have not actaul rigous scientific evidence.

Science is hard. Conspiracy theories and political defamation is easy. Thus Greenpeace and their ilk tend to favor that later...

Well probably the Russians.

For its bluster, the PLA is better thought of as a large, poorly manged investment company that happens to also have (poorly trained) soldiers and fighter jets. It hasn't really fought a war since 1949, and has very little anti-missile capability. The Russians would not give two chits about launching all the ICBMs at China if the PLA ever invaded.

That's the problem with grouping science and engineering together. A shortage of engineering jobs means the market is saturated. A shortage of science jobs means that Congress and the President cut the science budget again. The two are not nessisarily related.

Flagstaff, it should be noted, was the first official international dark sky city. Every time of year except for now (the two-month rainy season), you can almost guarantee a good night's viewing. The seeing is generally better than Tucson (we're at 7000 ft/2100 m, so less atmosphere), though it can really cool off at night (again, less atmosphere; low tonight is 52F/11C). The streetlights are fewer and low-pressure sodium, but the main light-pollution difference is that high power floodlights are banned.

And yes, I am an astronomer here in Flagstaff.

Unless TechCrunch has a time machine, this is a work of speculative fiction. The dateline of July 25, 2023 should be a dead giveaway, but since when did the Slashdot edittors ever RTFA?

It's *meant* to hold whatever I damn well want it to hold. Nothing more, nothing less. Anyone who says otherwise is a fascist pig.

Come the revolution, "User Interface Designers" will first against the wall, I tell you...

Inside the optics. For optical/near-IR astronomy (i.e. roughly in the wavelengths that your eyes can see), atmospheric opacity only comes into play if there are clouds. You always want to look at objects higher in the sky (meaning through less atmosphere), but that's more because they have less distortion.

Inside the telescope, you lose some light every time you have a reflective surface. A simple telescope might have three reflective surfaces at 0.9 reflectivity, and so no more 3/4 of the original light reaches the detector. A complex AO system typically has closer to ten mirrors, so no more than a third of the original light will reach the detector. And that's before you account for all the other losses, like scattered light and the parts of the distortion that deformable mirror in the AO system can't correct for. So at worst case, it might be only 10% of the original light making it to the detector.

AO systems are great, especially for bright targets, but it always makes me cringe when people claim they are "better than Hubble". Space telescopes exist for reason...

What they rarely mention in these sorts of press releases (everyone with AO system has a "better than Hubble" press release) is that the cost of getting to that resolution is losing most of the light along the way. It's not hard to beat HST with perfect atmospheric correction, as Hubble is only a 2.4 m aperture, and nearly every AO system is on a larger telescope. It's just that the correction is achieved by sufficient optical contortions that only a small fraction of the original light actually makes it to the detector.

My personal experience is that even the largest and most sensitive AO system in the world (NIRC II on Keck II with laser guide star) still really struggles make an observation in 20 minutes that Hubble can do in 5 minutes. If anyone were to launch a >3 m aperture visual-band space telescope (NOT JWST, that's IR), it would blow all these AO systems out of the water.

Yes, as even the summary says, it's based on ChromeOS, which is in turn based on Gentoo Linux. But there is typically more software on a server than a kernel.

The better question is whether they are just making a custom Gentoo Portage repository...

With enough government subsidies, I'm sure you could build a profitable solar plant underground...