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Comment Re:First against the wall (Score 1) 102

I stand corrected. All this stuff that's happening now is because *in the future* there will be identity verification!

It's not in the future, and if you could both read and understand the fine summary, you would understand that. Feel free to try to read and understand it again, it's right there.

Comment Re:Here it comes (Score 2) 33

Yeah. In particular:

with fragments likely to fall to Earth over the next few weeks

LEO FTW. Kessler Syndrome is primarily a risk if you put too much stuff with too poor of an end-of-life disposal rate in GEO. End-of-life without proper disposal rates have declined exponentially since Kessler Syndrome was first proposed (manufacturers both understand the importance more, and do a better job, of decreasing the rate of failures before deorbit - in the past, sometimes there wasn't even attempts to dispose of a craft at end-of-life). And now we're increasingly putting stuff in LEO, where debris falls out of orbit relatively quickly. It's not impossible in LEO, esp. with higher LEO orbits - but it's much more difficult.

Or to put it another way: fragments can't build up to hit other things if they're gone after just a couple weeks.

And this trend is likely to continue - a lower percentage of premature failures, and decreasing altitudes / reentry times. Concerning ever-decreasing altitudes, we've already been doing this via use of ion engines to provide more reboost (with mission lifespans designed for only several years before running out of propellant, instead of decades like the giant GEO ones), but there's an increasing interest in "sky skimming" satellites that function in a way somewhat reminiscent of a ramjet - instead of krypton or xenon as the propellant for an ion engine, the sparse atmospheric air itself is the propellant, so the craft can in effect fly indefinitely until it fails, wherein it quite rapidly enters the denser atmosphere and burns up.

Comment Re:Food shortages (Score 1) 44

If the midterms occur and are not outright stolen then yes, the Republicans are getting crushed.

But conservatives will absolutely double down on everything and it will probably work for them to regain power, because enough Americans are idiots. The Reagan-era policy of destroying our public education system (once world class, with high school students studying the classics and thereby having a chance to learn critical thinking) has paid off for the religious reich.

Comment Re:Doing the editor's job. (Score 5, Informative) 39

Relativity = gravity is represented by the curvature of spacetime. Curvature is linear, R. The formula treats curvature linearly. As things get closer and curvature spikes, the math just scales at a 1:1 rate

Quadratic gravity = Squares the curvature. Doesn't really change things much when everything is far apart, but heavily changes things when everything is close together.

Pros: prevents infinities and other problems when trying to reconcile quantum theory with relativity ("makes the theory renormalizable"). E.g. you don't want to calculate "if I add up the probabilities of all of these possible routes to some specific event, what are the odds that it happens?" -> "Infinity percent odds". That's... a problem. Renormalization is a trick for electromagnetism that prevents this by letting the infinities cancel out. But it doesn't work with linear curvature - gravitons carry energy, which creates gravity, which carries more energy... it explodes, and renormalization attempts just create new infinities. But it does work with quadratic curvature - it weakens high-energy interactions and allows for convergence.

Cons: Creates "ghosts" (particles with negative energies or negative probabilities, which create their own problems). There's various proposed solutions, but none that's really a "eureka!" moment. Generally along the lines of "they exist but are purely virtual and don't interact", "they exist but they're so massive that they decay before they can interact with the universe", "they don't exist, we're just using the math out of bounds and need a different representation of the same", "If we don't stop at R^2 but also add in R^3, R^4, ... on to infinity, then they go away". Etc.

The theory isn't new, BTW. The idea is from 1918 (just a few years after Einstein's theory of General Relativity was published), and the work that led to the "Pros" above is from 1977.

Comment Re:Oh but it works very well (Score 0) 67

Why any of the jokers in charge of our governments are still not in jail baffles me more and more every year. Oh yes, it's because they make the rules, sorry, my bad.

No, it's because of all the idiotic enablers. We could just solve the problem by walking into the halls of power en masse and removing them but you can only get that kind of energy from total fucking clowns who want anarchy, and not the good kind that doesn't exist (as it leads naturally to feudalism) but the bad kind with only chaos.

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