To be useful in deep space, you're going to have to deal with very harsh radiation, far harder than the Vikings dealt with. You really want to have some large number of computers, where the number has to be odd and exceed 5. The reason it has to exceed 5 is that you need 5 in order to be able to use the Byzantine General's Problem to discern which computers are working correctly and which are radiation damaged. Since some will be damaged over time and you want 5 computers still operating around the time the power runs out, you have to start with more than that.

Massively radiation-hardened highly-robust low-power chips could be done. If you were clever enough, you could do this as a wafer-scale system where you marked parts as bad and networked around them. Free space optical communication across the wafer might be doable.

They might well still end up being low-density CMOS discrete logic.

Lead-lining the electronics isn't as much of a problem if you've launchers capable of handling heavy objects and don't mind burning through a lot of ion drive propellant for course corrections. This would improve the hardening beyond what can be done through the usual operations.

But, yeah, you'd need defect-free microelectronics. You really can't handle F00F bugs or defective instructions once you pass Earth orbit. And I can't think of anyone who knows how to do that.

Well, not just the solar system but the heliopause as well, and the near-Sol galactic winds. We can estimate the effects of space from just about any ancient near-Earth space junk, but I'm not sure how we'd go about calculating the impact of the galactic winds on something. The Voyager sensors won't be sending back nearly enough high-quality data to establish that.

It's actually a lot harder. The fly-bys invovled gravitational slingshots, which not just steered the probes but vastly accelerated them. Without the slingshots, human rocketry of the time would not have had the capacity to get probes to solar system escape velocity.

Our understanding of asteroids is now reasonably good. We know they come in solid and rubble-pile formats. We know that several show signs of lava flows, suggesting they come from disintegrated planetoids with a liquid core. We've managed to land on some and even retrieve samples from one.

Our understanding of comets is much weaker. We know that several appear to be multiple bodies fused together with ice (the one we tried sending a lander to was of this type) and the break-up pattern for Shoemaker-Levy 9 is suggestive (but not proof) of it having been a composite structure too. The one icy body we've seen in the Kuipier belt was also two bodies frozen together. Photographs of the core of Halley's Comet also suggests two bodies fused together with ices. This leads to some interesting questions. Obviously the probability of this configuration is very high, but what is the probability of other configurations? Is it so incredibly low that the odds of finding single-body or triple-body configurations is practically non-existent?

(This is kinda important if NASA is serious about a DART-type project to redirect one.)

Our understanding of solar system captures is non-existent. If there are extra-solar objects flying through every few years, then there is a definite non-zero probability that there are significant extra-solar objects that have been captured by the solar system in the last 5.5 billion years. That would be kinda very useful to know.

Current solar system formation models don't work well, but planets have sorted their composition by mass. Studying them only tells us so much. Asteroids are more useful but hit each other too often, so we don't know how much mixing and reconstitutuing has occurred there. The Kuipier Belt is much better, from that point of view. The density is far too low and most of the objects far too small. A lander could obtain a lot of extremely useful data about how the solar system formed that we can't obtain closer.

The Oort cloud is theoretical only, at this point. The only way to find if it is real is to send something out there.

If we're to get any probes in the future to go between solar systems (and such missions are entirely possible), we need to know a great deal more about the heliopause and the galactic winds.

Probably LRO vs. Danuri

Well, viruses and bacteria. And that last one is critical.

We know that the microbiome alters blood chemistry and we know that this alters brain function.

I do NOT postulate bacteria cause mental illness, but I do postulate that there is a non-zero probability that bacteria can aggravate mental illness. And that is all that we need here. If we can develop a vaccine that triggers the immune system to either attack the bacteria directly OR to produce antitoxins which attack those changes in the chemistry which are harmful, then the vaccine would lessen the impact of this particular vector.

That would not prevent mental illness, but that's fine. Reducing it is perfectly acceptable.

We know that brain function is altered by the blood chemistry changes made by gut bacteria. This means that any mental illness exacerbated by this route where the chemistry added is verifiably unique to an undesirable bacterium can be targeted by the immune system.

Will this be all mental illnesses? Obviously not.

Do I know of any such chemistry? No, which is why I said "in principle". The potential for the vector exists and the potential for training the immune system to attack it exists, but the reality of such a vector actually existing is unknown and the safety of attacking it is also unknown.

"Potential" and "Unknown" are very important words here. They mean that we do NOT know if the probability of such a vaccine being possible exceeds zero, but equally we do know that a key underlying requirement has a probability that isn't zero. But that is all that we can definitely say at this point in time.

Although it would be wonderful if we could retrieve them, realisically we can't. And if we could get something to them to fit new nuclear batteries and replacements for components that cannot be revived, we could get newer probes out there with better sensors and a more powerful nuclear battery that could last a lot longer.

Having said that, I honestly wouldn't trust any of today's manufacturers to be capable of building anything with a comparable level of robustness, so a recharge mission isn't quite as stupid as it sounds. Almost, but not quite.

Still, fresh probes sent into the Kuipier Belt and the Heliopause would be extremely interesting.

So a murder suspect can appear in court and explain that someone gave him the wrong photograph, so it's not his fault?

The US, and many other countries, need to put forward a new law -- if an excuse applies to officials, then it applies to the citizenry. This is not because officials don't sometimes need extra freedoms, but because the vast majority of manmade disasters are "perfect storms" and because this case is a perfect illustration of the banality of evil.

Legitimate causes are just that and they won't cause problems. If, indeed, they are truly legitimate. Excuses mean that they knew they were doing wrong but felt that finger-pointing would confuse the issue for long enough for the storm to die down. Innocent people do not make excuses. Innocent people don't need them.

But this isn't something officialdom will ever accept. Nor will they tolerate a loss of power. So you don't take away their power, you merely insist that powers they claim are the same everywhere for everyone, and that the powers they deny are likewise denied to all. The sensible ones will see in seconds precisely where that's going to go and will get rid of the stupid ones very quickly. Not because they're morally better, but because such a rule is highly volatile and self-interest takes on a very different meaning when the consequences are unpredictable.

Except instead of pursuing policies that would help open models at the expense of Big AI, anti-AI people pursue just the opposite - policies that can cripple open source AI but have no realistic ability to meaningfully hurt big AI. It's so short sighted.

Actually, no, what they usually do is much more insidious: fingerprinting rather than watermarking. The fingerprint isn't actually included in the audio, it's included in a database. If they want to tell if the track was generated, they just try to match the fingerprint in the database. Can't filter it out of the track like you can with a watermark.

The two mainstream options (both about half a year old now, we're due for something better) are Ace Step-1.5 and Stable Audio 3 Medium.

Ace Step has full vocals with its music. See here for examples. The downside in my opinion (judge for yourself) is that it has Suno's flaw of sounding too "clean", "mainstream" and "uncreative", except even moreso (Udio was always much better than Suno at this, albeit "less well behaved" - but Udio is out of the game now).

Stable Audio 3 doesn't do vocals, though it has other useful features, like inpainting (great for fixing glitches in recorded tracks for example). In my view, it sounds a lot better. It can also be used to create sound effects. License is a bit more restrictive, though, if you actually care about that, but generally won't affect the average user.

Both are trained on fully licensed data and both are open-weights. So even if the devs released a version that included some sort of watermarking in the future (or someone developed a fingerprinting algo for the existing versions), you could just finetune them to break that.

TL/DR, if you want open source and want to just churn out a full track: choose Ace Step 1.5.
If you want open source and want to do instrumental tracks or to supplement manual work (such as your own vocals) or do audio editing: chose Stable Audio 3.

In principle, it should be possible to develop a vaccine for certain forms of mental illness. Regrettably, no such thing currently exists and antivaxers are probably too far gone.

This has to be a troll. Nobody on Slashdot is actually this stupid.

I often wonder how all these people who believed that COVID vaccines were a plot to sterilize or murder humanity have justified to themselves the continued-unchanged existence of babies-in-specific and humans-in-general, respectively.

Hawaiian eruption last a long time and the lava flows persist for years.

Your effusive eruptions last on average no longer than our effusive eruptions. The fact that Iceland also has phreatic eruptions doesn't change the fact that most of ours are effusive basalt, just like yours, with corresponding eruptive dynamics. Also, FYI, for a given total effusion volume, slow eruptions are easier to divert. Diversion is much more challenging when an equivalent volume of lava is effused in a short period of time. And it's not like you have vastly larger average lava flows than we do. The largest lava flow on Earth in the Holocene (modern era) is in Iceland (the THjórsárhraun - 900km2, 25km3, 70km underground travel followed by 130-140km on the surface). For comparison, Hawaii's largest holocene flow is the Ailaau Flow at 430km2, 4-5km3, and 40km.

If we want to limit to more recent flows (since Ailaau was fairly recent, in case you think Iceland stopped having big eruptions), Iceland's biggest *after* Alia'au was Laki (1783–1784 AD), at 600km2, 15km3, and 80km. It lasted for 8 months to 2 years, depending on whether you count the concurrent Grímsvötn eruption as part of it. So much gas was released from that huge volume of lava that despite us being nearly arctic (polar volcanoes have much lower near-term climate impacts than equatorial volcanoes), it caused a winter so severe that the Mississippi froze at New Orleans and ice was seen floating in the Gulf of Mexico.

We simply get bigger effusive eruptions than you, full stop. Not all eruptions, of course, both of us have a huge variance in eruption scales and dynamics. But trying to claim ours are somehow "easier" is just not in line with the facts. Also, Hawaiian eruptions tend to occur on terrain that slopes significantly more consistently toward the sea, aka where you want to divert lava toward; on flatter or less-consistently-angled terrain, lava "piles up" more and makes it easier to overtop berms.

There is a practical side that it is easier to move people and build coffee shacks

I'm not talking about "coffee shacks", I'm talking about whole communities and beloved places. In particular, I'm thinking about the 2018 Lower Puna eruption. Of course the homes near the vents in Leilani Estates were doomed, but there is absolutely NO reason why you should have lost anywhere close to as much as you did so far from the vents. Losing Kapoho Bay for example was simply cultural fatalism. I watched a person crying on the news saying she didn't understand why Pele chose to take such a beautiful place. It's not Pele who took it, it's your insane resistance against doing anything to protect yourselves. That was one of the easiest possible flows to divert. Most of the lava fronts moved at a crawl, you had warning long in advance of the eruption and a very slow eruptive rampup (didn't really take off until June), and you had a steep slope to the south into unpopulated areas you could have easily diverted it down. Losing all that was a choice.

"Oh, we can't!" is just an excuse for your fatalism that gives you an excuse to not put forth the effort to actually do it. It's not the 1940s anymore, we're not chucking surplus WWII bombs at lava tubes anymore. Lava diversion is a science and is routinely effectively done. There are limits, but you were nowhere near said limits for sites far from the vents. There are costs, but they are nowhere near the costs that you paid by refusing to act.