If you could figure out how to recreate it on the small scale, you could do away with that pesky second law of thermodynamics and have perfect thermal insulation, heat pumps with double digit COPs over any temperature difference, and probably a perpetual motion Sterling engine while you're at it.

And if you have this magical planet-scale method of stopping the transport of heat from hot equatorial regions to cold polar regions...why you could solve all of global warming too! Just pick your least favorite country and dump all the excess heat there. If you can stop thermally driven ocean currents, you can stop thermally driven air currents too and the heat will just stay there, make the place hot enough to dump all its energy radiatively into space, and problem solved! /sarc

Or maybe the models aren't quite right.

Here you go.

Clarity of communication is a very important part of any human undertaking, especially so for technically difficult things like spaceflight where precision to seven or eight decimal places is the bare minimum for numerical quantities and ambiguity in written or verbal communication can be the difference between success and failure for machines and life and death for people.

I wouldn't say that politically-mandated homophones are innocuous here. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

If we are mature enough as human beings to understand the importance of clarity of speech, then we are also mature enough to not change our vocabulary every few years to keep with with the euphemism treadmill or to keep ahead of an ever-shifting list of taboos defined by a small minority of people whose incentive structure has word games at its base and mission success as an afterthought.

I try not to make my profession or my job into my entire identity for my whole self, but when I am on the clock I do take professional exception to bullshit that stands in the way of the mission objective while adding nothing objective toward its completion. The higher paygrades can argue about the subjective stuff so long as they stay out of the way of the real work.

Maybe that's true, but I'm not getting that from the summary. What I'm getting is:

• OnlyOffice spent a decade developing their office code, distributing code that they authored under a modified AGPL license that requires attribution to be preserved.
• EuroOffice removed the attribution.

If EuroOffice removed attribution requirements only on code that was created by someone else other than OnlyOffice, and did not use the code authored by OnlyOffice, then they're fine. But I think courts have already ruled that the AGPL term about being able to remove conflicting terms applies only to someone other than the author adding those terms, so if they used code authored by OnlyOffice, they may have a problem.

Probably because they can't afford to pay for the launch themselves.

I'm spitballing here but I'd guess a launch to mars requires a falcon heavy fully expendable...something like $200m or more?

Rounding error if you're the US military and even NASA but not so much if you're ESA with 1/3 the budget of NASA.

They may also need to use the DSN. Not sure if ESAs network has the same 360 degree coverage in longitude as NASA does.

The natural antonym of unmanned is manned.

The natural antonym of uncrewed is crewed.

"Crewed" sounds identical to "crude" in every accent of English I am aware of.

And it has always sounded dumb for a premier space agency to speak of "crude missions" to anywhere.

Doubly so when some of the most famous words uttered by said agency's astronauts were "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Only the pathologically offended or the pathologically misogynistic would interpret that statement to apply to only half the planet.

Secretary of War is a more accurate description. I agree that legally it's Secretary of Defense, but that has always been a misnomer.

Generating bad pathogens is quite plausible. Generating narrowly targeted ones that will stay narrowly targeted is currently implausible, and probably will remain so until well after the singularity. It would require designing genomes that were strongly error correcting. Elephants and naked mole rats do a reasonable job of that, but I don't think it's plausible for bacteria.

He planned at losing, but being the colossal loser he is...he accidentally snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. He's such a loser he can't even lose right.

Do you people even listen to yourselves?

It's pbs, not npr. I blame millionaires and billionaires for swapping those letters around right under your nose.

None of it is accurate unless the writer's job/life/whatever depends on it. And even then accuracy comes in shades at best.

I've seen fundamental errors of fact slip into legal proceedings. They weren't material to the argument, just context, in the instance I saw. And it wasnâ(TM)t worth anyone's time to try to get it fixed. But it was probably the only official record of that backgrounf context that was ever going to be made. And it was factually wrong.

Reality is either experienced directly or read about indirectly. And both ways are squishier and less rigid than you might like.

We can't do that yet, and may never be able to be that specific. Trying to do it, however, could be exceedingly dangerous.

N.B.: All bacteria and viruses have a very high mutation rate.

Yeah, I mean thats the thing AI will crack it if it has enough training data.

To be fair, its not open id but a different corporate identity that Sam Altman is also running that is behind it. So like open ai, but much much much much scummier.

> I'm talking about load shifting, you're talking about base load and frequency maintenance.

And I'm saying you cannot effectively do load shifting without storage. Renewables tend to peak mid-day, especially solar, and the ability to soak up that surplus energy is dependent on actually having loads that can be dispatched at that time. We're talking about domestic energy use which is not very flexible; Okay great you can do your laundry with cheap solar electricity at 10AM but that's not helpful if you're not home at 10AM. There's very little a typical homeowner can do here unless they've invested in additional equipment. Storage batteries and water heaters are the most obvious choices and are easily scheduled to take advantage of electricity rates. Taking a half day off work to do all your household chores is a bit less practical.

> If I can shift enough of the load away from 7pm, then I don't have to turn on a coal plant in anticipation of base load need at 7pm.

That's exactly not how coal power works, and that's actually the core problem. You can't turn a coal plant on and off on a whim; it can take north of a full day to get one of those things started. This means you can't afford to turn off a coal plant from 10AM to 3PM when renewables are peaking because you won't be able to turn it back on in time for the 4PM peak demand. The coal plant stays on, and now you have to soak up the surplus energy to avoid blowing up the grid. In case you missed it, this is *exactly* the reasoning discussed in the article.

This is not about saving you, the consumer, money. If electricity is expensive to buy then that cost gets passed on to you. The only economic factor at play is the cost of curtailing renewables - curtailment also costs money and those costs CANNOT be passed on to the consumer. Utilities want to avoid curtailment and would rather give electricity away for free than absorb those costs. This point is, again, in the article.
=Smidge=