Even when residential and office/retail type businesses pay flat rate, heavy industrial electricity users pay based on time of day. When there's high demand, they can even be cut off (in exchange for getting lower rates the rest of the time). Being able to buffer electricity use allows them to cut costs.

It's not scifi at all.

They hit the Earth's atmosphere at just below escape velocity (they were going 11.024 km/s, escape velocity is 11.186 km/s). If you do that at an angle that is too shallow, you skip off the atmosphere and enter an elliptical orbit. They intentionally did one skip to bleed off some energy, to give them a more precise entry to the landing zone.

LOL outsource it to the same SpaceX who's repeated failure to meet targets and obligations are the reason Artemis III won't be landing on the Moon? SpaceX was contracted to supply the lander and is so far behind they have no idea when (or if) they will, so NASA has re-opened the competition and is trying to get Blue Origin back in the game.

Well, aside from anything else... coming down way off target wasn't really much of a possibility. They were either going to splash down on/very near target, or not at all. The reentry corridor coming from the Moon is extremely narrow, and missing it long or short would not result in a splashdown (either bounce off the atmosphere or burn up), and similar for heat shield or parachute issues.

Again, it's about power saving. Idle 1000BASE-T draws noticeably more power than idle 100BASE-TX (IIRC the drop from 100BASE-TX to 10BASE-T is not as significant). There are Energy Star ratings and EU rules about how much power an "off" and "standby" device can draw, so dropping to a lower NIC speed helps reach those levels.

There was a proposal for a "low power idle" mode extension of 1000BASE-T, not sure if that went anywhere or got implemented.

My $DAYJOB's data center switch upgrade got switches that have 48x 10G SFP+ ports plus 8x 100G QSFP+ ports. When we installed them, we realized that some really old Dell Poweredge servers try to drop to 100M when using shared DRAC (with the dedicated DRAC port also being 10/100M only), and the switches don't support 100M. We also had to look at a bunch of rack PDUs to find options that were 1G rather than 10/100M.

100M uses less power than 1G, so I guess that's why Dell did that (sounded like a good idea to some engineer), and probably PDUs are using ancient embedded chips that only do 10/100M. Supporting 10/100M adds complexity to the switch port PHY that isn't commonly used in DCs, but it's still an annoyance for us.

"I don't love AI slop myself" says the biggest contributor to the generation of AI slop.

It sounds great, but the primary benefit is quickly providing open space. However, work done in space isn't done in open space, but with equipment. So now instead of having the bulk of the equipment mounted inside a module on the ground (where it's usually much easier to handle, with lots of lifting equipment and people and tools), you've got to do it in zero-G.

You still have to launch the entire mass (possibly more if there's extra tools and packing) and much of the volume, you've just significantly expanded the amount of on-orbit construction, which also means you're using very expensive labor to do it.

It may eventually even out, but I don't think the economics work today. It would only make sense if you had a specific need that required a larger-volume module than can be launched on a vehicle today, and I don't think anybody's had such a requirement.

Industrial and medical uses of helium require very high purity. What gets used in party balloons is basically the impure waste left over from processing (that has no feasible process to purify sufficiently for other use).

Ookla charges ISPs a bunch of money to host speedtest servers for them. When I worked for a company that supported a bunch of small rural telephone company ISPs 5+ years ago, IIRC Ookla charged them each over $2000/year. I expect they charge bigger companies (especially with multiple servers) a lot more, and they plaster the app with ads. They also have more than just the regular speedtest servers.

I think there have been some fan efforts. It would be a lot of work but possible to replace the full-CGI scenes. The problem is the live-action+CGI composite scenes - the original film elements apparently no longer exist, so you can't really fix those.

The DVD version was the 16:9 transfer.

The original was shot on Super35 film, with framing for 4:3 and 16:9, but the CGI was only rendered for 4:3 (and 480i), since even that was pushing the technology available in the day. The belief was that eventually the CGI could be re-rendered at 16:9 (and potentially higher resolution), but then Warner Brothers lost the files and the composite scene source elements. So for the 16:9 transfer, live-action only scenes were re-framed (as originally intended so look okay), but pure-CGI and composite live+CGI scenes were cropped and zoomed to fill the screen, looking blurry at best (and in some composite scenes, very badly framed).

Also, WB didn't take good care of the original film, so some was scratched and dirty, leaving some scenes (especially early in season 1) looking snowy.

With some renewed B5 interest, there was a Blu-Ray release a couple of years ago. It's the 4:3 original, with cleanup of the quality. It's much better than the DVD release. What I see on Youtube appears to be the Blu-Ray edition, with 4:3 content at 1080p, except for the pilot "The Gathering", which is the TNT "special edition" (in addition to getting the 16:9 treatment, it also has a few story edits, which is why that's generally the "preferred" edition even with quality issues).

When I read deeper, it sounds like the state probably did not have authority to "allow" physical penetration testing to the county building... it's really not much different than me trying to tell someone they can do physical penetration tests against your home. At that point, the letter is just Ron Swanson's "I can do what I want" permit. In my state, the county owns the property and the building for the courthouse (they can use it for other county offices as well), there's nobody at the state level that could authorize physical access to the building like that.

And apparently it was unclear if the contract from the state agency even truly authorized physical testing of the building in question; the contract conflicted with itself in parts, which goes to showing that the testing company had incompetent management and/or lawyers. And since clarity of what is legally covered is rather important in that line of work... that's really bad on the company's part.

Their "get out of jail free" letter is so vague as to be useless; the biggest thing is it doesn't say anything about what buildings they could access. And it turned out that the state organization who hired them didn't have authority to grant them access to county-owned facilities (which I believe would also be the case in my state). It also sounds like both the testing company and the state agency failed in how the contracts were written. Really, while not surprised a state agency wrote a bad contract, a testing company should know better, so comes off as somewhat incompetent (having legal coverage for every action should be rather high on the priority list).

That said, when it became obvious it was a good-faith test and not an attack, at most there should have been some civil penalty against the company, not arrests of the individuals. Probably some sheriff up for reelection looking to get his name in the news for "protecting the county".

The most tedious part of using the Internet now is avoiding all the "AI" crap being foisted on us.