The reality is that if Russia launched nuclear missiles at the U.S., the U.S. would wipe them off the map. If you honestly think otherwise, I have a bridge to sell you. And if you're really that detached from reality, you're right. There's no point in this discussion.

On the one hand, the idea of an iPad with two large-ish screens sounds tempting. Lots of people I know use 12.9-inch iPad Pro displays for reading music, but it is challenging if you can only see one page at a time. It's a lot better if you can show two.

On the other hand, 18 inches arguably isn't *quite* big enough. Two iPad Pros would be a little over 20 inches, and those are really on the small side.

And knowing Apple, it would be a $3500 tablet. Meanwhile, I'm doing it with a 24-inch wall-mount Android tablet that cost me something like $450.

No kidding. Those guys are scary.

It's really not. There is no plan, just a series of impulse-driven changes, shying away from the ones that cause problems that happen fast and are easy to see.

For the moment, until he randomly lurches in a different directly.

US policy looks like a drunken toddler staggering in random directions because that's exactly what's happening right now. The toddler bumps his head and lurches away from the pain, but the lesson doesn't stick.

The only answer for US business leaders right now is exactly what most of them are doing: hunkering down. No hiring, no expansion into other markets or offering new products, and cutting capex and opex wherever possible to build a cushion of cash to give them freedom to absorb whatever may happen in the future.

My conclusion that there's no reason NATO needs Ukraine is backed up by the fact that NATO hasn't let Ukraine in. If it were a meaningful strategic military advantage, it would have happened long ago. NATO doesn't want Russia to be its enemy, and is wary of taking on countries that are actively at war with Russia. Committing arms in a proxy war is one thing. Outwardly engaging Russia except in defense is quite another.

At the same time, a lot of countries near Russia often want to be in NATO because they regard Russia as their frenemy at best, and a loose cannon just waiting to go off in their direction, and being part of NATO strongly discourages Russia from doing so. Georgia, Ukraine, now Finland. It would not surprise me if Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan or Mongolia pushes in that direction within the next few years. All because they have seen what Russia has done and are afraid that they will be next.

The only way Ukraine would be a strategic advantage would be if it just happened to provide some path with low population where missiles could strike before anyone sees them. But either way, Russia has dead man's switches and stuff, so if the missile silos aren't 100% taken out before anybody notices, it's over. It's a suicide mission even without committing actual troops. NATO wouldn't be crazy enough to do that. And Russia fearing that sort of outcome is just plain bats**t crazy, because there's no rational reason for them to do so.

The U.S. hasn't cowered in fear of Russia nuking us since the Cuban Missile Crisis. We don't even think about the possibility of that outcome, because we know that they know that nobody in Russia would survive if they tried. Russia badly needs to reach the same level of trust. They may not agree with NATO or trust it, but they should at least be able to trust that NATO won't behave in an irrational, ridiculously self-destructive fashion. And if they can't get to that level of trust, the problem isn't NATO or the things that NATO does. The problem is that their government is paranoid delusional, and their people have been led to be similarly paranoid delusional through limited access to non-state-run media and widespread brainwashing by government propagandists. And the only way to fix that is by getting Russia to open back up.

The subject of your post is Kessler Syndrome, but Kessler Syndrome is definitely not a concern with these LEO constellations. Anything not regularly reboosted at these altitudes quickly deorbits because they're flying within the outer edges of the atmosphere. Kessler Syndrome is a potential problem at higher orbits where stuff in orbit tends to stay in orbit for a very long time, making accumulation problematic.

As for being hit by falling space junk, It's super rare for stuff that has reached orbit to hit the ground. That tends to be a concern with stuff that doesn't quite make it to orbit, which is one of many reasons why launch reliability is important.

Besides Kessler? These satellites cannot cause Kessler Syndrome precisely because they deorbit. There may be ill effects of burning a few hundred tons of material in the upper atmosphere every year, we'll have to see, but Kessler Syndrome is definitely not an issue.

And icons that aren't as recognizable, and black text on a dark grey background, where unless the brightness is all the way up, the average person can't read it, and...

The number of things Apple did wrong in this design is so staggering that nothing short of setting fire to it will fix the problem. Someone designed it to be pretty with apparently absolutely no thought given to making it actually be readable or usable.

If this were the first time Apple had done something like this, it would be bad, but Apple has done things like this previously on multiple occasions. It's time to bring back the human interface design experts that made their technology great prior to about 2003 and pay them to be the people who say "no" to all the graphics designers who think they know human interface design.

Depends on whether you think they will launch them knowing that it means annihilation rather than mere regime change. It's a huge gamble.

Not even slightly. America has nuclear-capable cruise missiles with a range of up to 1550 miles. There is not a single target anywhere in Russia that could not be reached by those missiles when fired from out in the ocean.

Either the cruise missiles are capable of evading Russia's air defense systems and taking out the silos or they aren't. If they are detected first (and realistically, they would be flying for probably multiple hours, so the odds of not being detected are rather poor), nothing else matters, because the nuclear missiles are either going to launch or they aren't. Flying for a hundred extra miles over a neighboring country on its way to such a target would neither make it easier for Russia to detect nor cost it a critical bit of extra range.

The way you take out the nuclear launch sites suddenly would likely involve sabotage from the inside and/or compromising computer systems, not missiles from a neighboring country.

That's a fair point.

I mean, they're not useless to NATO. When you need more planes quickly and Russia is willing to sell them cheaply, it doesn't matter if they would be outclassed in a dogfight with an F-35, because you're not going to be fighting against those anyway.

They're still way, way behind.

Define successfully. A few hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from subs off the coast, and the war with Ukraine would have been over years ago. Russia's military tech is decades behind at this point, and although they might get off a lucky shot or two, they are hopelessly outmatched by NATO.

Their war with Ukraine made this obvious to the general public, but you can bet the spooks at various three-letter agencies knew it many years earlier, if not decades.

The only real threat Russia poses comes from the possibility that they would decide to launch nuclear ICBMs to destroy the entire world as a final act of spite. Were it not for that, they would be a total paper tiger from a military perspective.

If your definition of "successful" is "regime change" or "destroyed all military targets", yeah, they could have successfully attacked Russia long ago. The only definition of success that they probably can't achieve is taking out all of Russia's nuclear launch sites before they can launch.

This is a common strain of misunderstanding I see all over the place. People think that evolution is somehow magical and that what it produces is mystically better because it's "natural". That's all garbage.

Evolution is a random process. There's no intelligence guiding it, nothing that ensures that the "choices" it makes are the best alternatives or can't have horrific consequences. In fact, the vast majority of evolutionary changes are utter failures that immediately get selected out.

Also, it's silly to claim that climate change is moving "too fast for evolution". Evolution absolutely can and will respond to climate change... it might be that corals go extinct and something else evolves to fill their niche in ocean ecology, or it might be that corals do evolve in something like their current form. Evolution is fine either way and will produce something that settles into a new equilibrium. It might not be an equilibrium humans like, and it might not settle fast enough to make us happy, but we need to realize that what we're concerned about isn't the ecosystem -- that will survive regardless, unless we get into some runaway feedback loop that turns Earth into Venus, or Neptune -- what we're concerned about is maintaining an environment that we're accustomed to.

Given all of that, our potential creation of genetically-modified corals isn't somehow subverting evolution, it's just another evolutionary avenue. Rather than random mutations, we'll create some specific ones and then we'll throw them into the mix and see if they get selected for or against. The same mutations we create deliberately could also have occurred randomly and would that make the outcome any less "natural"?

And if we've already altered the environment so much that our preferred ecosystem is going away anyway, what's the harm in trying to use CRISPR CAS-9 to "guide" evolution in a direction we'd prefer, rather than letting it randomly go in whatever direction it will? Could our genetic modifications make things worse? Sure! Could random mutations also make things worse? Sure! Which is more likely to maintain an ecosystem of the sort we enjoy? No one can say for sure, but in general if you want to get from point A to point B you're better off aiming for B rather than just walking randomly.

Even better would be to stop changing the climate, but at this point all we can do is try to limit the amount we're changing it. And we should do that! But the best that we can do might still not be enough for corals as we know them, so if we like reefs and reef ecosystems (and we really do; I'm an avid SCUBA diver and I love reef ecosystems), then we should probably put some effort into researching modifications that can survive warmer and more acidic oceans.

Both are true, I think. Without discussion and care the numbers would probably be an order of magnitude larger, maybe two... but that's still very small.

Clearly. If NATO wanted to attack Russia, they could have done it ten thousand times by now.