True, you can always have leaks, but hydrogen leaks seem to be way, way more common than leaks of other fuels as a percentage of launch attempts. The shuttle was scrubbed on average almost once per launch, and a large percentage of the scrubs were caused by hydrogen leaks (source).

And that's on top of the whole embrittlement problem, which can lead to catastrophic hardware failures if you're reusing parts over a long period of time, which is another reason why folks trying to do reusable rockets (e.g. SpaceX) tend to avoid it. And if you think embrittlement is a risk in something that gets used once, imagine the effect on fuel lines in cars that are pressurized for decades at a time.

It is a really, really nasty fuel, IMO. Mind you, hydrazine is worse in some ways, but that doesn't mean hydrogen isn't nasty. :-)

I've been using LO pretty much constantly for the last two years (even wrote a novel on it). Like any interface, it just takes time to become familiar. In fact, I like the way Writer organizes styles and style configuration far better than Word, and often, even for DOCX files, do initial style set up and layout in Writer and then move to Word if I have to (which is seldom enough).

LO is a damned good office system. Its default UI is older, but since I used MS-Edit and Word pretty extensively back in the 1990s, it feels familiar to me. There is a ribbon interface, but I've only tried it a few times before remembering why it is I actually don't like the Word ribbon.

One possible exception: Rental cars at airports. But only to a point.

WHAT is right there on video? That is NOT one of Zelensky's bodyguards. That's a random soldier from the 25th Separate Secheslav Airborne Brigade, which recaptured Izyum, during Zelensky's visit to celebrate the victory. Do you think bodyguards spend all their time taking selfies with the person they're protecting? Grow some common sense circuits in your brain. And it's not like Zelensky was handing the man an award with the patch prominently featured in front of the camera while he received it or anything. The Russian volunteer ranks are absolutely littered with Nazis.

What, you mean like the Russian governor of occupied Donetsk outright giving an award to a guy with a Totenkopf patch? Or all of the numerous Russian officials who have praised or given awards to the puppy-eating, unabashed Nazi, Milchakov?

Also, contrary to the misinfo sites you read, that was not a photo of "one of Zelensky's bodyguards". That was from his visit to Izyum where he was posing with random soldiers from the 25th Separate Secheslav Airborne Brigade to celebrate the retaking of the city from the Russians. That's why everyone has their phone out to take selfies.

Stalin was perfectly happy to ally with Hitler for the conquest of eastern Europe. The USSR only turned "anti-Nazi", not for ideological reasons, but because the Nazis betrayed them. Today in Russia, "Nazi" is used as a general insult for any external perceived enemy of the state, with any actual connection to Nazism not being at all required. Yet actual support for the actual principles of fascism within Russia is well tolerated. For example, Putin's good friend Dmitri Rogozin, now governor of occupied Zaporozhye Oblast, is absolutely a fascist, including speaking at a far-rally surrounded by people doing Nazi salutes under a only slightly modified Nazi flag, among so, SO many other things.

In most countries, the saying with respect to WWII is "Never Again". In Russia, it's "We Can Repeat It!" (Mozhem povtorit!).

I guess it depends on who you were. If you were Jewish, the Nazi occupation was definitely worse. Stalin was more of an equal-opportunity atrocity-committer.

It is kind of darkly funny how similarly Hitler and Stalin thought, though. For example, Hitler cited positively the Holodomor and the collectivization of Ukraine, and planned to use the Holodomor as a role model for resource extraction during scarcity, and to maintain the collectivization of Ukrainians set in place by the Soviets. He likewise viewed Ukrainians as a "colonial peoples", in the sort of Africanizing terms common among imperial powers of the time, and just planned to switch which foreign colonial master ruled them, arguing that ultimately Ukrainians would prefer the German yoke to the "Jewish"** (Soviet) one.

** How the whole Nazi view of the USSR as a "Jewish Empire" played out was I guess predictable. Because if the Wehrmacht rolls into your town, and you're some low-level communist functionary, and there's a bunch of soldiers knocking on your door who want to kill communists, but who also believe communists = jews = communists, what's your response? For most, it was along the lines of, "Yes, yes, you're right, communists ARE Jews, absolutely! And look, I'm not a Jew, I can prove it! But THAT GUY over there, HE is Jewish, that's the guy you're looking for!".

The USSR fought the Nazis to the last Ukrainian.

The highest price in that war was paid by Ukrainians and Belarusians.

Really, computer chips are the *hardest* thing we could compromise. It's way easier to e.g. compromise mechanical or electrical parts so that they fail under stress.

They use so many western chips, if we knew what the programming was, and actually cared to, we could contaminate the smuggling routes with compromised chips to do exactly that.

Heck, we could probably do it with rough guess work if we actually cared. For GPS receivers it's obvious how to manipulate them, but even in CPUs, if you see e.g.: two floating point registers with values that look reasonable for latitude/longitude coordinates in a non-occupied part of Ukraine, and another two registers that look reasonable for latitude/longitude coordinates in an occupied part of Ukraine or in Russia... swap them. And of course, delay your functionality by some number of weeks or when a pair of registers is within range of a known production facility, so that the batch passes QA.

The fact that there's been no apparent signs of any effort at all to contaminate Russia's smuggling routes with compromised parts just screams about how lax the west has been taking this all. Heck, forget about compromising smuggled part streams, just cracking down on the smugglers at all. Like, EU trade with Tajikistan increased by an order of magnitude after the war started - gee, I wonder what's going on there!. Yet zero effort was made for years to crack down at all.

Ukraine's far-right unified in the last election under the Svoboda party. They won 2,16% of the vote, putting Ukraine the weakest electoral performance by the far right in all of Europe.

From the Wikipedia article on Utkin:

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According to several news outlets, Utkin was an admirer of Nazi Germany and had multiple Nazi tattoos, including Schutzstaffel (SS) insignia.[13][14][15][16][17] Utkin also reportedly used call sign Wagner after German composer Richard Wagner, because his work was greatly admired by Adolf Hitler and was appropriated by the Nazis.[3][18][19] Allegedly he greeted subordinates by saying "Heil!", wore a Wehrmacht field cap around Wagner training grounds, and sometimes signed his name with the lightning bolt insignia of the SS.[20]

Members of the Wagner Group have said that Utkin was a Rodnover, a believer in the Slavic native faith.[21]

And why stop at Wagner? Let's take another example: Rusych. They have been heavily used since 2014, and their leader - the infamous puppy-eater Alexey Milchakov - is a proud and unabashed Nazi, who openly marches with a Nazi flag and openly declares himself to be a Nazi in interviews, and nonetheless, has received awards from multiple high-ranking Russian government officials for his brigade's successes in Ukraine.

You're grossly overestimating the required range for most of those things. School buses travel an average of just 63 miles per day. Mail trucks? 25 miles per day. Or were you planning to charge them only on weekends? :-)

Mind you, that's not the whole story for school buses, because they also have to be able to take the sports teams and bands to out-of-town games and competitions within a 200-mile radius or thereabouts, so for those long runs, you would need at least a 400-mile range to do a round trip, or else the driver would need to be able to take it to a Megacharger or similar close to the destination with a 200-mile range. But you could also keep a small number of diesel or gasoline buses for that purpose if you want, at least for the foreseeable future.

To be clear, I'm not saying it isn't the right choice for them. I'm just bothered by claims that they don't have a choice, as though this were forced, rather than a strategic decision to prioritize profits and simplicity of their billing architecture over inclusiveness.

Sure. That's common when technology is in its infancy. Those problems could be solved, given enough time and money. In theory, so could the leaks, though given that NASA tried to fix them for three decades and still had leak problems on Artemis, that remains a theory. :-D

Hydrogen has much bigger problems than filling time, freezes, or the occasional explosion from dispensing a gas at high pressure incorrectly. If those were the biggest problems, I'd be totally in favor of doing more with hydrogen and fuel cells, because those are manageable and/or fixable technical problems.

A much bigger problem is fact that almost all hydrogen comes from natural gas, which makes it anything but green. The dirty little secret is that your losses from leaks would make distributing it over oil pipeline infrastructure completely infeasible, so you'll end up distributing natural gas instead, and cracking it to make hydrogen. And now, you have all the CO2 emissions from burning natural gas, plus all the efficiency loss from cracking the natural gas ahead of time, and you're about as green as a forest fire.

And of course, if you get it through electrolysis instead, you're likely wasting considerably more than half the energy you put in, versus more like 1% loss when charging a battery, making it a huge drain on our power grid.

And the elephant in the room is the cost per mile. In California, current prices for hydrogen fueling are hovering around $36 per kg, or about 50 cents per mile in a typical hydrogen-powered car. This makes it almost an order of magnitude more expensive than BEVs, and there's no real reason to believe that this will improve at this point, given how long it has failed to improve. At best, the whole thing feels more like a glorified government subsidy capture scheme, rather than a serious means of powering cars.

Hydrogen is a terrible idea on multiple levels. The fact that ostensibly it could have been a short-term workaround to provide multiple means of getting energy into rural areas (gas pipelines and power grid) is nice in theory, but in practice, the losses are just way too high, and batteries just work way too well, so the benefits just don't hold up in practice.