Of course, that's why they hid the disclaimers in the article where nobody reads them. I seriously doubt Anduril actually cares about any of that, or even takes it seriously. They want to sell some expensive laptops to the US military and "USA USA USA" currently turns enough peoples' brains off that it makes a great marketing slogan.

You've got a shovel and you're determined to dig hey? Well, have at it!

Thank god for that. It was hard enough to learn 9 (now 8) planets at school. Can you imagine having to learn all the names if the hydrostatic equilibrium definition held?

Since when does science work by a standard of "what is easy for children to memorize lists of"? Do we say "There are 8 rivers in the world, and all others are dwarf rivers, which really aren't rivers" to make it easier on kids? Do we say "There are 8 bones in the human body, and all others are dwarf bones, which don't really count as bones"?

That's not how science works. Science is focused on practical distinctions about how things developed and their physical properties relative to each other. Hydrostatic equilibrium is a very practical definition. The process of undergoing relaxation induces metamorphism and releases heat, altering bodies. You go to non-equilibrium bodies if you want to study the primordial makeup of our solar system. You go to equilibrium bodies if you want to study tectonics, volcanism, non-primordial chemistry, and search for past or present life. The boundary could not be more meaningful. Yes, there is a bit of fuzz between equilibrium and non-equilibrium, but the same applies to pretty much all scientific fields.

holding the value of the asset directly on the blockchain. For example, the blockchain holds the actual bitcoins I just mined.

WTF does that mean? A blockchain holds numbers. That's it. There's no such thing as "a bitcoin." Bitcoins are numbers. The Bitcoin blockchain has a mechanism where transactions (not bitcoin) are trackable, but that's definitely not the same thing as "value."

physical share

What is this? A share is a portion of a company. There used to be certificates that said you owned some number of shares but those weren't shares, they were just pieces of paper that proved ownership, and even those are virtually unheard of today.

Supporters of the IAU definition (which I should add was a deeply biased sample, in that it looked like they were headed toward no definition or a hydrostatic equilibrium definition, so most supporters of that left, but the people trying to switch it to an orbit-clearing definition stayed) will argue that it's cleared if the remaining objects are trivial transients or in orbital resonance. But that's not what the IAU definition says. Also they'll point to the Stern-Levison parameter, but (A) that was based on the ability to scatter today's distribution of asteroids, not the primordial distribution, which included outright planetissimals**; and (B) Mars didn't even clear it's own orbit, Jupiter did. Also, in the paper that introduced the Stern-Levison parameter, they argued for a better definition where you combine adjectives and nouns (each with specific implications about the body) as needed to describe its size, composition, etc.

But the OP's point stands, in that it's stupid to say that something is a "dwarf planet", yet not a planet. It's like saying dwarf stars aren't stars or dwarf galaxies aren't galaxies or whatnot. An adjective-noun is almost always a noun, that's how language works. In the cases where an adjective-noun isn't a noun - say, "shooting star" or "slow worm" or whatnot - we treat these as scientifically erroneous colloquialisms, and formalize corrected scientific terminology. We don't do literally the opposite and have science codify misleading language.

Speak for yourself, Pluto is fascinating. Tectonically active. Cryovolcanism so abundant it appears to have formed large mountains by the merger of individual domes. A gigantic scar exposing its mantle, which over time roils in massive convection cells, pockmarked in sublimation pits. Mountains drifting like icebergs and accumulating on the shore. Penetentes (sublimation ice spikes), the size of large hills. A multilayer blue atmosphere, in which organic chemistry occurs, depositing not just organic matter onto its own surface, but that of its moon as well. Active glaciation. A probable subsurface ocean, in contact with rock. Conditions suggesting it was habitable when it formed.

IMHO, it's way more interesting than a number of recognized planets.

(Also, I'm confused by your response. This isn't about the moon, and the moon has no atmosphere for flying)

Are my servers on Alpha Centauri IIC are not fine then?

Will it be better if I relocated them to Wolf 359?

Commander Brainworm will just declare the germs to be helpful... eliminating the threat and any evidence to the contrary is fake nooz.

I have to think a bit to organize why and advantages and disadvantages of this, so I thought I'd share.

I define "tokenizing shares" as using a distributed blockchain with universal ability to transact as a way to trade shares.

Advantages of tokenizing shares:

* Universal access to fractional trading, not just inside a single trading platform. (Most likely, anyway.)
* Near zero transaction costs outside the spread. There are trading platforms that offer $0 commissions for regular retail customers, but there's still regulatory fees and these could potentially be skipped. (NOTE: There is likely a larger spread on a distributed ledger than a regular exchange, due to slower transactions. See below.)
* Ability to trade 24h
* Access to purchasers that don't want to or cannot use traditional platforms (e.g, crypto fans, people in developing countries). This may be stopped by "Permissioned ledgers", where there contracts that stop the transfer of stocks into a wallet unless it's on a whitelist.
* Resistance to total failure (due to the distributed nature of the setup)

Changes with good and bad sides:

* Slower trades; expect max speed of milliseconds rather than 1us
* Thus, a loss of the ability to do HFT (High Frequency Trading), which means that we lose the information transmission and market making ability of HFTs, but we also lose their ability to do front-running and decrease their ability to cause flash crashes and similar
* Loss of ability to shut down the trading. This remove an abusable tool of power, but it also lose a tool used to stop bad situation (like flash crashes), which is used to deal with bad market situations (like flash crashes due to trading software bugs), to avoid insider trading when major news is about to hit, and to deal with regulatory concerns.
* All trades are final. In the regular market, trades can be reversed by the courts or banks if done quickly (clearing in the US is in one business day, in Europe it's mostly two business days); in an anonymous, immediate clearing system based on a final distributed ledger, trades can't be reversed. This removes some types of risk, but adds in risks of theft (as we've seen with cryptocurrency) and makes mistakes more difficult to reverse.

Disadvantage if both on a regular exchange and a blockchain:

* The slower trades on the blockchain will lead to latency arbitrage. To avoid losses from price sniping, the blockchain market has to have wider spreads. Market makers will also typically provide limited liquidity in the slower market, to minimize the amount of loss the times they do get sniped.

Disadvantages of stocks on a blockchain in general:

* The distributed nature of the blockchain will allow frontrunning: A retail investor place an order in a market, and a frontrunning company with faster routing setup will then buy the stock elsewhere at a lower price, and re-sell it to the investor at the higher price. If there are distributed validators for transaction order, frontrunners may instead use techniques to bribe the validators (e.g, they may run validators themselves, and have their purchase jump the queue). The net result of both is that instead of negative spread going as profit to the retail investors, it goes to the frontrunners.
* It provides larger liquidity pools for criminals and terrorist organizations to do money laundering; e.g. Russia may be able to move billions around outside sanctions (though there are protocols in place that try to stop this)

Disadvantages for this particular blockchain at this time, for the companies that are resistant to getting on it:

* It is cheap to say no now, and they can't say no later
* There is little time to evaluate
* There is likely some level of legal risk

That's a quick attempt to sort my thoughts - they're not strongly researched for this particular blockchain, though I did a couple of searches to fill in details that I wasn't certain about.

Yep. Back in the early days of Slashdot, when helium usage would come up, I'd grumble about how wasteful the medical industry was with helium.

It still uses a lot, but it's nowhere near as wasteful as it was before.

That's nowhere near true. The current system is administered by regulated entities that have a decent amount of information about most owners. Are there ways to play the system? Yes. But it's nowhere near the same level of anonymity and flexibility as making stocks into tokens that can be freely transferred to anonymous accounts.

Yes, like the Nile Delta, water flowed in from wet regions further away to the desert and near-desert lowlands, and humans began using it for agriculture. Around the Tulare Basin, there's dozens of inches per year in the mountains due to orographic uplift, but only half a dozen in the lowlands. The problem is that farmers first consumed the water from the mountain-fed local rivers and are now consuming water shipped in from as far away as the Oregon border and drawing down groundwater much faster than it's being replenished. At the same time, the mountain rivers are becoming less reliable as climate change leads to snowpack melting earlier. As it stands today, it is not sustainable. More water is being used than is long-term available.

Indeed, I have no clue what you think you were trying to prove with this link:

The conversion of this water system to a lake-and-slough wetland to agriculture began in the mid-1800s when European settlers began to build canals and diversion structures to irrigate their crops. This early irrigation infrastructure upstream from Tulare Lake slowly cut off the lake from its source waters, shrinking the lake's footprint. By 1899 - less than 50 years after irrigation was initiated - Tulare Lake went dry for the first time in history.

They were overdrawing the rivers *even before the 20th century*.

Only in the most utterly pedantic sense of the word "different" wherein you mean that by definition, infant mortality occurs early and wear occurs later. But they can both stem from the same root cause, which is a component not built with adequate tolerances. In other words, they can be the same fundamental issue, just expressing themselves at different times.

Most products don't have an MTBF. And things that do have MTBF are based on accelerated wear testing on a small number of units, and can have almost zero basis in reality. There was one model of major brand hard drive about twenty years back where a couple of RAIDs where I used to work got lost because the drives all died after such a predictable number of powered-on hours that by the time you could re-stripe the RAID, the next drive would die. They ended up making sure the drives had a high variance in powered-on hours before using them in RAIDs after that.

It's an example that proves or demonstrates a point. And the point it was proving was that the same root cause can be responsible for both catastrophic early product failures and premature deterioration-related failures.

They use TSMC and Samsung, so South Korea, Taiwan, or, theoretically, the US.

Components sourced from U.S. and allied-country suppliers account for more than 90% of the BlueChip prototypes’ component procurement cost.

Both South Korea and Taiwan are US allies.

The more interesting question is what are the 10% that they aren't sourcing from allies?