There's a lot of speculation about a rather prominent crypto developer who died very suspiciously shortly after Satoshi's farewell message.

lol I shouldn't post tired. Quick look on wikipedia informs that they did an occultation mapping for the asteroid with another star in September so they could be ready for a more detailed one now.

A really cool trick you can do when this happens is have various observers around the globe time the occlusion. This lets you build a really accurate image of the shape of the asteroid at the time. It's pretty neat.

What do you call the diesel and E85 pumps? And before that you had to make sure you pumped from the leaded/unleaded pumps.

Yeah the CONNECTOR isn't an issue but that doesn't mean the pump is compatible with your vehicle. (Though one actual connector incompatibility I can think of is that truck diesel nozzles are too large to fit in diesel passenger car ports)

It seems like a better solution would be to electrify segments of the route where it's easiest to, only needing the battery to cover the gaps, rather than trying to travel long distances on battery.

A bunch of the cost of a fully electric line is taken up by utility headaches in specific areas (far from supply, no place to build substation easily, etc.). If you just create a dense enough patchwork you would only need small batteries.

Depends. Some EPROMs last longer than others, and it can also depend on the voltage they were programmed at. I've seen plenty of EPROMs programmed 1980-1983 read/dump just fine.

I believe storage temperature has an effect as well.

...but my job is engineering principles. I'm a very principled engineer.

The obvious problem here is that buildings are primarily stores of value, like NFTs, rather than productive properties. Owners would rather stomach vacancies than admit that maybe the rental value has gone down (and thus potentially affect property value). Supply and demand is broken here.

With a steep vacancy tax, owners would actually be forced to rent out their properties at whatever rate matches demand.

Modernise the train coonnections -- they're already there, and it won't take much more than 10 minutes and be a heck of a lot cheaper for the volume.

Going by surface area, an olympic swimming pool is 1250 m^2, Wales is 20.78 Gm^2. This makes an olympic swimming pool roughly 60.15 nanowales.

Going by volume or mass is much more difficult to calculate as you would first have to agree on a definition for what the volume or mass of Wales is.

It NEEDS to go through the Central Valley. It is not an empty unoccupied pastoral land, it has some of the largest population centers in the state. One of the major advantages of a train is that it can stop at intermediate stations in a way that planes can't (without wasting fuel and large amounts of time). By hitting Bakersfield, Fresno, and other population centers, it dramatically increases the utility of the line.

A train is not a plane. It is not a point-to-point connection. The majority of the ridership will not be going from LA to San Francisco, they will be going from Fresno to San Jose, or Bakersfield to LA, or Merced to San Francisco. All the route pairings that you can do with a single line.

One half of incredible cost of the line is because of hierarchial levels of costs from consultants hiring consultants instead of having a solid in-house design and build team that countries like Spain have (Spain being the same size and population density as California, making it a good equivalent).

The other half is the ridiculous system of lawsuits that hold up the project, forcing them to spend as much on lawyers as they do on construction. The lawsuits are not in good faith and merely ploys by people with political opposition to the project, or people who think they can get more money by using lawsuits as a cudgel.

That's not the takeaway from Challenger. For a manned launch, you DO listen to your engineers' concerns -- you don't shut them up. In both Challenger (and to a lesser degree, Columbia) engineers had identified the problems.

For an unmanned rocket, build it fast and cheap to test your technology, listen to your engineers, and if they have a concern that can't be quickly addressed, make absolutely sure you have instrumentation relative to their concerns, then launch anyway and collect the appropriate data relating to their concerns. If it blows up, hopefully you got the data. If it doesn't blow up, you can examine the data that the engineers specifically requested.

For Challenger they already *had* the data. They knew the o-rings were burning through, and in some cases only barely held on. For Columbia, they knew the foam strikes were a concern, and when engineers noticed a problem during the flight, they chose to ignore it instead of getting the data they needed (and then attempting to perform an Apollo 13-level save).

And the Columbia crew *could* have been saved. They had a Pegasus XL ready for launch during the mission timeframe that could have had a last-minute payload swap to send up supplies (and crucially since Pegasus is air-launched, they wouldn't have to worry about orbital inclination or waiting for a launch window). They also had a Delta II almost ready with GPS satellites that they could send even more supplies up given a larger launch window. Running at minimum power usage, the Shuttle could last a long time preserving hydrogen in the fuel cells, and they had the Spacehab module with plenty of life support supplies.

It would have required some epic, dangerous spacewalks, but danger is better than dying.

Pixy actually seemed like a pretty good product.

Of course countless clones from Chinese companies will now flood the market, since the firmware is there, easy to clone. (really, it's just a toy quadcopter like any other, it was only the custom firmware that made it special). American companies are really bad at chasing the long tail.

They blocked the website of a piece of freely redistributable open source software. Where will anyone download it now?

I don't really think that's true anymore. China's blue water navy is pretty darn good now. Their power projection is limited by their lack of bases, something they are trying very hard to fix, but still something that US allies have a huge advantage in, particularly in the Pacific. Other than EEZs, this is why the US, France, and Britain maintain their overseas territories and have so many base agreements in other countries.

That's why a potential Chinese base in the Solomon Islands has the west so worried. That's why the port in Sri Lanka is a danger, and why Djibouti would turn into an instant inferno since everyone has bases there (it makes Djibouti safe from being nuked at first, but the conventional warfare would be immediate and ugly).

But in a stand up fight, with access to nearby bases to provide air support and shore-launched missiles, China's navy would win. Their missile saturation ability is unparalleled -- as good or better in quantity as the Soviet Navy at its peak, but far better quality. The US advantage in naval aviation won't help much if the Chinese have land-based aircraft nearby.

The aircraft carrier isn't dead, but it's not the queen of the seas that it used to be. You don't have to sink the carrier, just score a mission kill.

If China scores a base in Kiribati (which they are trying to do) then even the eastern Pacific isn't safe, and the US would be forced to heavily fortify Jarvis Island and have a brief, mutually suicidal missile exchange between bases if hostilities broke out.

The main problem is that almost all of the United States and its possessions are almost completely undefended. The defense is based around aircraft, which can't respond fast enough to counter missiles. Defenses are all forward in the western Pacific, and even those are of questionable sufficiency. A layered defense of THAAD, Patriot, and Aegis Ashore would be needed, and a lot of them, the problem is we don't have the capability to build them quickly enough. New production capacity would have to be built *now*. It would still do nothing against hypersonic missiles (which while limited in cost/benefit in a conventional war, could still take out key targets).

The US military has great new tech but none of it is deployed in any numbers sufficient to face a peer adversary, or produced at all. It all went to tax cuts and then we became reliant on the "peace dividend" to fund the rest of the government.

The only thing stopping China right now is that they're contained by unfriendly bases. If China can build and arm new Pacific bases in peacetime, that protection ends. The only way to maintain deterrence is to take the threat as seriously as we took the Soviet threat in the 20th century. The Russians have the right idea by defending their territory with many, many mobile SAM batteries.