"changing perceptions" through marketing? that sounds like an arms race with the other side. Long time ago we thought the right way to change perceptions was through good education and development of critical thinking skills.

Where did it all go wrong :)

It all went wrong when each sides of the discussion concluded that scientific papers supporting the other side were marketing fake-news, trying to gaslight them into supporting a scam to let the opposing side acquire money and/or power, rather than actual science.

Warmists think evidence against any aspect of their side's story is akin to smoking research sponsored by tobacco companies. Skeptics think any evidence for a global warming story has been corrupted, ala early drug war research on psychedelic drugs, to feed government power grabs and attempts to put rent-seeking taxes on commerce (e.g. Gore's carbon-credit exchange).

Now neither side believes academic papers on the subject. We'll just have to wait and see what the climate does.

Following this paper's prescription, of course, would just put the nail in the coffin on any remaining hope of convincing the population to pay attention to the sort of propaganda it prescribes. (Assuming the very existence of the paper hasn't already done that.)

Flight time is about 20 years. (Proxima is about 4 light years away and the swarm is averaging about 1/5th lightspeed.) I suspect even some of us boomers can hang in here that long - even if life-extension treatments don't become available.

Oops. Maybe not. They're talking about 75 years before getting around to a launch.

I'll be surprised if the project stays funded, since even without delays everyone funding it will die before there's any payoff.

Flight time is about 20 years. (Proxima is about 4 light years away and the swarm is averaging about 1/5th lightspeed.) I suspect even some of us boomers can hang in here that long - even if life-extension treatments don't become available.

Also, I wonder what it will cost to fund the laser for half a century.

The launch and acceleration of the whole swarm is over in about a year. Individual elements are up to speed in much less than that.

(You HAVE to do it fast: Once they're moving they're out of range darned quick, so you have to get them to cruising speed before you can't hit them any more. Fortunately the little motes are really sturdy so you can give them a BIG big push.)

Read The Paper.

You cannot aim sufficient energy over distances like that
[description of betavoltaic battery run off "interstellar wind" of high-speed travel]

Oh, yes...

You CAN aim the propulsion energy well enough for long enough to get them up to 20%ish of lightspeed. After that the energy is stored in their momentum relative to that of the interstellar gas. You don't have to keep powering them from home and there's far more than you need to power them for the rest of the mission.

(I happen to know one of the people involved.)

You cannot aim sufficient energy over distances like that

They were originally intended to be powered by betavoltaic batteries (solar cell sandwich with a charged particle emitter for the peanut butter - like the "radioactive diamond" batteries but with Strontium 90 for the radiation source). But another dude computed what local interstellar hydrogen looked like when treated as a proton/electron beam at 20% of light speed and concluded no other radiation source would be necessary - by a long shot. Just launch with the supercaps charged and you're up to power-generation speed long before they're discharged. You only harvest a fraction of that energy - the "solar cells" are far to thin to stop many of the protons but they make lots of electron-hole pairs on the way through - and you use heavy atoms (much charge per atom) in their semiconductor structure to maximize that. That gives you plenty of power to run the computer, sensors, and attitude control. Also the transmitters to phone home, with several watts total over the surviving portion of the swarm.

and you can't slow these gram-weight "robots" down with this propulsion system.

Sure you can. That not-quite-relativistic hydrogen wind through the radiation battery gives you enough friction, when combined with attitude adjustments, to bring the swarm into proper formation and all traveling at the same speed by the time it reaches the target. (You launch it over a considerable period, with the later ones faster than the earlier ones so they all arrive at the same time.) It's slowed a bit by encounter time, but not by very much. So it has to look fast as it flies by.

Isn't Safari kind of Chromium based? IIRC, it was based on KHTML and later WebKit, which turned into Chromium. So even if Safari isn't fully based on Chromium, its underpinnings are close.

You're missing the point that the original pro Palestinian demonstrations at Harvard were a lot more than just that. They were mixed with antisemitism and harassment of Jews on campus.

Publicly, students called for "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" which is a mere dog whistle for genocide against Jews in Israel, In more private tirades and epithets, the same antisemitic students talked about "the Jews" and how they hated them. Jewish students all over campus who had little or nothing to do with Israel advocacy suddenly became very afraid mainly because of how the public calls quickly produced a torrent of private abuse against them. Those who vocally defended Israel were targeted by daily threats on a whole worse level, culminating in violence in some cases, and continue to be.

This bigotry by some Harvard students was further vented by various Harvard student groups. While the blood was still warm, a mere hours after the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, they put out a statement that they âoehold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violenceâ. As though mass rape and mutilation of live babies is in any circumstance justified. They viewed an act of terror against Jews as the fault fully of Jews, just like antisemites have been doing for the last 2,000 years.

At that point Bill Ackman, a Harvard alum, started to worry about how his alma mater had sunk so low into an abyss of hatred.

Timestamp doesn't match if the signing is done by remote server, which at least some of these services have been doing.

A camera that has to be connected to the internet and a remote timeserver/signature generator to record and sign a picture? JUST what I DON'T want to press "take picture" on in a war zone.

Can't you just imagine an automatic "hear the camara talk to the net, identify its location, and hand that to the weapons aiming system" device, and how deploying that would affect war reporting?

What's the solution for storage outside of pressure vessels or cryogenics?

Metal Hydrates (e.g. 1:3 palladium/silver alloy).

How about this then: Enough fraudulent takedowns and the copyright is revoked and becomes public domain.

Unfortunately the trolls aren't always the owner of the copyright or acting with the owner's permission or in the way they told the owner they'd "protect" his/her interests.

... if [companies like Google] find that someone is abusing DMCA requests, they absolutely do have a right to sue the abuser. Google has done this at least once, and rather recently, at that.

They should use it as a revenue source. Troll the bogus-DMCA trolls for $ome big buck$.

Maybe let the people hit by the bogus takedowns join the suits as co-plaintifs, boosting the bite by THEIR damages and giving THEM a cut of the swag. (Provide running and lawering the suit as a service, for a cut of the winnings-if-any for any co-plaintifs who want to sign up for that rather than run their own lawyers. Google: win, Co-plaintifs: win, Trolls: LOSE!

The concept of corporate personhood well predates the Citizen's United ruling. All that ruling effective did was say "we have all this precedent and case law saying that corporations are effectively people, and a whole bunch of other case law saying people can spend their own money to create advertisements and otherwise campaign for political issues (i.e., free speech), so we really have to admit that these corporate persons that already exist can do the same things." You might not like the final outcome (and it is problematic), but to change it you either have to change how corporations are treated by the law or limit what people can say and do with their money.

Personally, I would prefer the former, but it would be a lot of change for how we do things. For example, would the changes allow for a corporation to own and control property, both real and imaginary (IP)? What about monetary assets? Can a corporation sign a contract? Currently, a person representing the corporation physically signs, but if the contract isn't upheld for some reason, that person isn't personally responsible, the corporation is. All these things that corporations can "do" make them look like a person.

Of course, other things don't. For example, a corporation cannot be sent to jail. Also, for some reason, real people effectively pay income taxes on their revenue (with some allowed deductions) while corporations pay income tax on their profit (because they are allowed a lot more deductions).

Changes to how things currently are might be a net positive, but they would also affect a huge amount of our economy, and getting things wrong would be disastrous. I don't personally have any good ideas for reform of corporate personhood that address the problems without causing other big ones (the closest I have is to change the tax code to make corporations more like real people by limiting their deductions). And as you say, corporations are currently politically powerful, and probably would prefer the status quo to changes.

Do you have any thoughts on what true corporate personhood reform could be?

An elephant in the room is the efficiency, Solar electricity through electrolyser and fuel cell to power for the forklift (including electronics such as max-power-point trackers for solar panels) vs. equivalent devices (inverters, charge controllers, etc.) for alternatives such as battery-electric.

LFP and several other lithium battery systems are now 93-97% efficient round trip from solar or line input to line-equivalent AC. Going to motor control should be at least that good. Last I heard, electrolyzer/fuel cell systems were nowhere near that. Charging time vs. refueling time issues can be handled by swapping low battery packs with fresh ones on chargers. (The packs-on-chargers can also do time-shifting for shifts during no-sun periods.)

I hear now NASA used to find hydrogen leaks was by having a worker hold up a big sheet of cardboard as he walked forward. When it caught fire he'd found the leak. Hydrogen burns with an almost invisible (in sun or bright light) but VERY hot flame and "There's no such thing as a hydrogen leak that's NOT on fire." after non-trivial time.

Banning high-sulfur fuels in cargo ships was a good move when it comes to reducing acid rain - but it became obvious very quickly that the ocean-spanning clouds seeded by the resulting sulfur dioxide had been causing a powerful global cooling effect, and removing them is nearly doubling the rate at which the planet is warming.

In particular, as of a couple months ago the climate scientists were estimating that the sulfur cleanup driven ship track reduction was more than enough to explain ALL of the ocean surface temperature rise during the last two years.

Up front note: this post (at least the first part) is from a Christian perspective, which I am most familiar with. Other perspectives would probably use different terminology.

For someone who believes that God created everything, including the universe itself, why would that person have to believe that God is subject to the same rules as we experience? Let me put it another way: if God created the universe and everything in it, it stands to reason that He created space itself, the 3 spatial dimensions we perceive. And given that and how space and time are related, it is reasonable to follow that God must have created time in that process as well. If God is creating all these things, then by definition, He would have been outside of them when they were created. We really have no idea, perhaps cannot even perceive, what sort of reality that God would experience. Is cause and effect even a thing for God, or is that part of creation? Did the act of creation essentially create the concept of "creation" in the first place? It's a weird thing to consider, as we think of certain concepts as immutable, but that is because of our experience with time.

Even if you don't believe the universe was created consciously, that it was an extra-universal random equivalent to a nuclear decay, there's no reason to believe that any of the normal rules that exist inside our universe in any way have to apply outside of it. Even the ideas of "inside" and "outside" are based on our 3 spatial dimensions.

No one knows what happened before the universe was created (regardless of random big bang or conscious effort). That might not even be a reasonable question if time only exists inside our universe and outside there is no "before" or "after".

The point is your third statement is not unreasonable. In fact, requiring anything that might have caused this universe to itself require a cause itself requires the belief that cause & effect exist outside our universe and that is not necessarily true.

God could have created our universe and not required something to create Himself.