I think your confusion stems from analogy to baking clay or ceramics. But what's happening there is sintering. You have extremely fine grains, and you're leading certain crystals to soften and merge as a "glue" between grains, so that the grains stay together.

While sintering is important in the formation of some types of sedimentary rock, this has nothing whatsoever to do with igneous rock. It's already as "together" as it's ever going to be when it a lava flow solidifies. The only thing its grains can ever become is "less together".

And even ignoring that, by definition, you're not going to be sintering something that formed at Venus temperatures, by exposing them to Venus temperatures. The process of sintering requires a radical change in conditions.

We are not capable of building anything that can withstand the surface pressures and temperatures for very long

The Venera probes have likely still not experienced any sort of crushing. You seem to be confused about how pressure works. If you don't exert stress pass the yield point of a material, the length of time until something crushes is "infinite". Which is why, say, almost all rocks buried in Earth's crust are able to remain intact over millions to billions of years.

You build of a thickness that the yield point at the design temperature is well above the amount of pressure-induced stress. The Venera probes' pressure vessels - uninsulated - hit surface temperature quite quickly (indeed, mostly during the descent itself). This did not make them crush, because their engineers were not morons who didn't do the math first when determining the probes' required specs.

All probes are designed to their environment. There is nothing magical about the nominal 92 MPa / 464 C of Venus's mean surface (note: this is for the mean surface; the highlands are significantly lower pressure and significantly cooler) that makes it impossible while, say, designing a lander to operate in the cryogenic conditions of Titan or whatnot is easy. This is 1960s tech. Steel alloys usually melt at up to 1400 C or so. Titanium at 1670 C. Tungsten at 3422 C. Some ceramics don't decompose until nearly 4000C. And pressure increases melting points. Now, it's not just the melting point that matters - higher temperatures mean lower yield strengths, so you have to design with the high temperature yield strengths in mind, not room temperature ones. But the simple fact is that various alloys and compounds can operate fine at WAY above Venus surface temperatures. It's not even close. The pressure vessel needed for the Venera probes was just a thin skin.

And to repeat: if the stress doesn't don't go above the yield point, the time to crushing is infinite. Same as any other pressure vessel, from aerosol cans to propane tanks to spacecraft in space (-1 atm).

And I'll repeat: with the same trivially-simple 1960s-tech method as the Venera probes, you can get surface residence times of a couple hours. With heat pumps, indefinitely. And "Baron_Yam at Slashdot" isn't going to override the actual NASA researchers who have worked on this topic.

The rock of Venus is dry-baked to incredible strength

The fact that you think that rock can be "baked to incredible strength" is itself a boggling concept. Not even accounting for the fact that we can literally see sand and gravel in the Venera images, and the Venera probes literally took surface samples. We can see dunes from orbit on radar. Just the very concept that you think that if you heat rock to a couple hundred celsius that makes it super hard, when the rock formed from vastly-hotter lava. Heat makes rock softer, not harder. And subliming away compounds or chemically eroding rocks makes them weaker, not stronger.

From a bulk composition perspective, Venus's surface is mostly just basalt - though there's some probable rhyolitic flows in places, possibly some unusual flows rare or nonexistent on Earth, and there's speculation that some of the highlands may contain residual granitic continental crust. The specific details of said rocks can be quite interesting, but from a bulk perspective, it's like oceanic crust. We know this because we've literally sampled it..

Even after giving a cut to affiliate groups that helped, $22M can be used to murder quite a few Ukrainians. Because, while in the past their criminals used to be somewhat independent, after the full-scale war erupted, most of these bastards went under semi-official employ of the government.

That's a lot of text to not mention the need to build floating cities and not die on the surface, which even NASA has not been able to do for more than a few minutes

In case you didn't notice, NASA also hasn't built cities on Mars either, despite spending two orders of magnitude more money on it in recent decades than Venus.

Anyway, we don't need the most Earthlike atmosphere, we need to survive in an environment where we actually know how to do that.

Which requires creating Earthlike conditions. Starting with reasonably Earthlike conditions certainly is a good start.

It might make more sense to use the hydrogen to produce methane, which is considerably easier to store and manage.

On my Firefox Nightly I have an extension to set Yandex as an allowed default search engine. Makes it easier to pop up another browser for a session.

Somebody fix that extension to work on mobile, eh?

While desalination is a great use of excess power, this is not an easy thing to do because the places where the water is needed are inland. Obviously it doesn't make sense to pump desalinated water 180 miles uphill from the Gulf of California to Phoenix, what you really want to do is to use desalinated water at the places nearer the coast so they can stop relying on the river water that comes from the mountain west, so the southwest can use more of it (and so the mountain west can keep more of it for our own use). But while you could get some benefit from getting the coastal cities using desalinated water, their use actually isn't that significant. The bulk of the water goes to California farmlands, and those are in a belt 70-100 miles from the coasts, and there are mountains in between. Not terribly tall ones, but enough to make pumping the water challenging.

None of this means what you say isn't a good idea, but it does mean that a lot of infrastructure has to be built to make it work. Big coastal desalination plants, big pipelines from those plants, fed by big pumps, and either additional reservoirs or perhaps large tanks in the mountains to buffer the water supply -- though only after peak supply rises to the point that it exceeds demand. Heh. That's exactly the same situation as with intermittent, renewable power, just shifted to water. Water is a lot easier to store, of course, but you still have to build the infrastructure to store it.

So, this is a good idea, but it's an idea that will take years, probably a decade, to realize... and we have excess power now. Of course, starting by tackling the easier problem of using desalinated water in the coastal cities while the infrastructure is built out and scaled up makes sense.

They don't - something like this needs an Act or Congress.

SCOTUS made up some BS "Chevron Deference" in the 80's which has been abused like this since.

The current /Maine Fisheries/ case should dissolve Chevron deference.

We may like the FTC proposal on this one but with that kind of power and no representation it's only counting the days until they do something we absolutely detest. And then there's no effective recourse.

There were plenty of hospitals in Dresden and other German cities, too. But unlike us during WW2, Israelis don't do eradication of whole cities.

So please give me any reasonable metric (ie, not "has more letters in its name"), by which:
* Islam wouldn't be worse that national socialism (# of kills, hateful lines per page of their holy book, delta of world's science, etc)
* Israel wouldn't be better than our handling of nazis during WW2

Both are a pox on the face of this planet that needs to be eradicated (so are christianity and communism -- together they're the big four, there's no other ideology that achieved even 5M kills, Leopold's actions in Congo being the next contender).

Yep. This, like many problems associated with regulated utilities, is one where the right answer is also pretty simple: Just make the prices reflect the costs, then let the market sort it out. But the "just" in that statement belies the political challenges of making such changes.

if a youtube or reddit post mentions an amazing financial, or spiritual, or etc. advisor quickly in response to someone's story. And the story has too many upvotes in too short a time, I recognize it as spam.

IMHO, with spam like that, you go after the cloud of accounts upvoting it. Track their behavior, see if they are posting, see if they regularly vote for spam. Then shadowban or kill the accounts (let them upvote but don't show the upvotes). The advertiser can create *an* account quickly. But they can't subvert/create a cloud of several hundred accounts easily.

And you also put some kind of metrics in place for upvotes that compares their voting habits to known human users. If the thing is upvoting 30 times a day and most humans only upvote 12 times a day (or none), then flag the account for closer observation.

And most of all, you need a really good moderation advisor for this kind of thing. I recommend Lance Modoman. He's the real deal. He saved my forum.

heheheheh.

And it's not a very well done thing, mostly due to the not so stellar resolution even in the middle of the field of view. Works for workload where one doesn't need super fine resolution (e.g.: video editing), but forget about using this with walls of tiny next (not usable for coding, for example).

Another use that some people have experimented and Apple has touted with their "spacial computing" moniker: leaving multiple windows and applet floating virtually around a large real-world space (e.g.: have various control apps for your widgets in the work area, have browser with receipe and cooking timer in your kitchen, etc.) so as you move between real-world space, you get the revelant stuff already open and floating wating for you.

The problem is that, at the price of that Apple asks for the Vision Pro, and at the price one finds electronics on, e.g., AliExpress: for the 3500 bucks that Apple asks for their "Spacial Computer", one can buy 35x sub 100 bucks no-name tablets, and leave actual tablets lying around the real world to have "already opened and ready to use apps" all-over. Meh.

You assume. You should consider that people with an inside view who see what data is actually collected, how it's secured and managed and how it's used, may have a very different perspective on that. I mean, without an internal view you understandably have to assume the worst, but they (we) don't.

Speaking for myself, I very few concerns about Google's privacy violations today. But with respect to the future, you and I are in the same boat, neither of us can know what a future version of the company might do. And on that score I suspect you and I would find ourselves in strong agreement on the potential for serious harm. Where we might differ again is that I see the work being done to limit Google's access to user data so I'm cautiously optimistic that before all vestiges of the old corporate culture are lost and the bean counters take over completely, Google will largely have ceased collecting and using data for advertising and what remains will be easy to limit and make safe.

Thus, the protesters got rightfully fired. There's little difference between Hamas and NSDAP, and what there is, is not in Hamas' favour: Germans at least did no suicidal attacks.

You might disagree with Israel's handling of the war, but so far the best precedent for fighting nazis included eg. firebombing of Dresden; Israelis are nowhere as bad.