It's been done. And it was cool.

https://www.lloyds.com/about-l...

Yeah, he only owned a few percent of Nvidia. Much easier to get voted out when you're not voting half the shares yourself.

Though realistically, because 240Pu (from waste) is worse in a fission bomb than 239Pu - generally no more than ~20kT, and challenging to get more than a few kT - still enough to take out a city centre but not a metro area - you'll generally want a fusion weapon, which means deuterium and tritium supplies. And Ukraine doesn't run CANDUs, so you're not going to get tritium from the coolant. They'd need lithium targets / lithium in the coolant to breed tritium. Separation of tritium and deuterium are a mix of chemical, electrochemical, and/or physical separation, but are much easier than uranium isotopic separation (deuterium is double the mass of protium, and tritum triple the mass, so the chemical / electrochemical behavior is actually notably different in a lot of situations, unlike uranium).

For a fusion bomb they'd also want a depleted uranium tamper, but Ukraine probably has ample access to that, whether from weapons, armour, old Soviet stocks, etc. Even spent nuclear fuel is mostly 238U, if they don't mind the tamper being highly radioactive.

Full moon areas are pretty standard units in astronomy journalism. The summary also says it's 14% of the mission goal, which is "more than a third."

Their IPO paperwork was, to put it lightly, very confident in that future.

It wasn't really. It talked about it a lot but on the will-it-work front it said "we've got no idea."

I'm sure this is just a test. I'm looking forward to seeing the prototypes that sit in the Arizona desert and don't use any water at all, generate their own electricity, have no fans, and require zero staff or maintenance.

My personal best guess would be that Ukraine's unstated policy is to have "sprint capacity", like Japan and South Korea do. That is, to not make weapons or anything that would get them flagged as having a weapons programme, but to have everything needed that, if the word "Go" was given, that they could nuclearize very quickly.

Unlike your typical rogue state that seeks to get nuclear weapons, Ukraine has no need for mass centrifuge facilities or anything like that. They already have plutonium en masse, as they're a major nuclear power generation state with extensive waste supplies. Plutonium extraction via PUREX is merely metallurgy (it's not a simple metal to work with, but it doesn't require isotopic enrichment). You need nitric acid (bog standard, nobody will blink an eye), a reducing agent like ferrous sulfamate (not much of a red flag, it has tons of uses), and an organic solvent like tributyl phosphate (a little bit of a red flag, but it has other uses, and there are alternatives), and a bit of gallium (~1%) for alloying - not a problem. Ukraine could very readily have all of this on-hand, an underground lab ready to go, and a rolodex of people to staff it if the order is given. They'd need high explosives like PBXs or TATB, but nobody would blink an eye at Ukraine buying them. High speed switches for the detonators used to be a big red flag item, but today they increasingly overlap with power electronics for motors and power grids. You need neutron initiators, but there's a number of options for that. And running bomb physics simulations and doing small component tests is something they could easily have under the radar - if they don't outright have old Soviet design plans dusted off and ready to go.

The biggest red flag would be Ukraine inexplicably removing nuclear waste (for processing) and/or trying to defeat IAEA monitoring, so that would likely be not done unless nuclear tensions looked severe. Because if it looks like you're sprinting to a nuclear weapon, it increases the odds of a preemptive nuclear strike against you.

Anyhow, there's nothing wrong with settling on the side.

They wanted it sitting upright so the upper deck would be shallow enough that recreational divers could reach it easily and have a decent amount of time on site. It would also be safer sitting upright because the superstructure creates a minimum of overhangs that way. Diving in an overhead environment is much more dangerous. Finally, ships are designed to sit upright. They deteriorate and collapse faster when they're on their sides, which would put the shallowest part of the ship even deeper.

Guess what - we're stuck with that guy.

You're stuck with him because a large enough proportion of the voters, acting through their elected representatives, don't think its worth getting rid of him. Nvidia's voters, acting through their elected representatives, will make the same decision: is his value to the company greater or less than the damage from the bad PR he's brought.

Map of agricultural production changes in the nuclear winter following a minor nuclear exchange, posted for no particular reason.

(For a full-scale exchange...)

Also, for no particular reason, a map of Russia's population distribution, alongside a reminder of Russia's nuclear missile failure rate, particularly booster failures. And that nuclear warheads have been commonly lost disturbingly often even during peacetime, with at least seven weapons from four incidents lost in flight landing in a way that left them fully intact and easily reparable, just from the US alone. And that Ukraine is rich in nuclear engineers, including still some retirees who worked in the Soviet nuclear weapons programme.

There's also this myth that "if you just use a nuclear weapon, you automatically win the war". Nuclear weapons are immensely effective terror weapons, but their effectiveness on the front is a lot weaker than most people think. People on frontlines tend to be in trenches, bunkers, basements, armoured vehicles, etc, and can be surprisingly close to a tactical nuclear blast while still surviving. They're effective against hard points but struggle against a broad, diffuse front (aka, today's front, which is a sparsely populated, deep, amorphous zone, thanks to drones). Amortizing Russia's estimated budget for tactical nuclear weapons comes up with ~$15-25M per weapon (not counting the delivery system), so they're hardly a dime a dozen either.

IF, via terror bombing or threats of terror bombing, you can convince your enemy to surrender, then congratulations, you have won (enjoy your nuclear waste heap and restive population who wants nothing more than to kill you). If they do not, however, their only goal remaining will be to focus 100% on using their extensive nuclear waste supplies rich in plutonium, their extensive long-range strike weapon supplies, and their extensive metallurgical experience, to render your major cities to ash in the same way that you did theirs.

(I also just assume herein that Ukraine doesn't actually have a secret nuclear weapons programme already, which is certainly an assumption).

I look forward to the unplanned broadcast of Swan Lake.

Slight difference here, what the Obama administration subpoenaed was call records: what number called, and how long the call lasted, which does not include the content of the conversation . What is to be seized here was the actual messages. It was widely criticized at the time.

-- also, 18 months is a much larger window to search than two months. It's hard to see that asking for 18 months worth of records is a search for one identified leak.

Your logic doesn't close.

Indeed you're right, flat environments are easier for legged locomotion. But they are essential for wheeled locomotion.

Legs work in flat and non-flat surfaces. Wheels work poorly in non-flat surfaces. Wheels lose in most locations that aren't engineered by humans to be usable for wheeled locomotion.

To the contrary. In most locations legs are better.

We're just accustomed to environments that have been reshaped for humans: rooms with flat floors, outdoor locations with roads and walkways, wheelchair ramps so people can get up the steps.

They were implied as being able to fly earlier, but the one you're thinking of, the first time they actually were shown on screen flying, is "Remembrance of the Daleks":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...