Artemis II is breaking Apollo 13's record by about 4100 miles. The primary reason they're going further is because they're passing much farther from the moon, about 4000 miles, compared to 158 miles for Apollo 13. The moon is also a little further from Earth, accounting for the other 250 miles.

Agreed. I live in the mountain west, and our forest and mountain landscapes are just covered with fencing, even though most of it is public land, because it's BLM "multi-use" land -- a lot of cattle graze on it. Fences are expensive to build and expensive to maintain. If you think a fence is something you build once and then ignore, you've never dealt with cattle.

Cowboys (and sheep herders) have a term "ride fence" as in "Bob, you're gonna ride fence today", and it's a regular and tedious task that means "get on your horse (or ATV) and ride past miles and miles of fenceline, looking for places where the fence is broken or going to break, and fixing them". It's necessary and expensive drudgery and having all of those fencelines is bad for other uses, and bad for wildlife. I've put down a few deer that jumped a barbed wire fence and didn't quite clear it, slicing their guts open and leaving them in agony as they slowly die.

In addition, there's an obvious tension between the cost of building and maintaining fences and the cost of rounding up cattle when it's time to move them. Obviously if you slice the land up into lots of small fenced areas, the cattle will be easy to find -- but they're also going to graze it out fast, so you're going to have to move them more often. If you use very large enclosures (common on BLM land), then your cows may have hundreds of square miles to roam and feed... but when it's time to move them you have to find them. Luckily they're herd animals so when you find a few you've found them all, but still. And occasionally, singles get separated from the herd and you just lose them, which isn't great since a cow is worth about $2k.

So... if we can replace those miles of expensive and constantly-breaking fences with virtual fences, that's good news for everyone. Wildlife and outdoorsmen can roam unimpeded, cattle can be far more tightly controlled, strays quickly identified, located and reunited with the herd -- via remote control!. This is an innovative idea that is worth quite a lot.

Does it actually bog down a reasonably-speced computer? I don't think it does, I think the sluggishness is just from the sheer volume of stuff that has to be downloaded, and the inefficient way it's downloaded. And the reason the web devs don't notice the awfulness is (a) their browsers have 98% of it cached and (b) they have a GigE (or 10 GigE) connection to the server. They certainly don't have computers faster than your M4.

I think you didn't understand what this feature is. It's pretty much the opposite of annoying, and it has no effect at all on bandwidth consumption. Though I suppose when devs get used to their sites seeming to load faster they'll bloat them up even more...

To what are you alluding?

Anyway, how is ol' Boris doing?

We had the good sense to not put him back in again. He's relegated to being some TV personality on crappy entertainment channels, not senile dictator in chief.

And yours is a monarchy

Yes and?

We also have a national anthem with a lightly veiled threat against said monarch. A threat we've executed before of you will excuse the pun! Keep Britain weird, that's what I say eh what.

Thing is your constitution doesn't mean Jack diddly squat when it comes down to it if no one's prepared to actually enforce it. Democratic laws are only as good as democratic norms. Lots of places have marvellous constitutions, and hey Putin still holds elections! You've not got widespread gerrymandering, special protections for corporations with no restrictions, open, legalised bribery of supreme court judges, a president prosecuting his political enemies, armed thugs murdering and deporting American citizens, and so on.

Yeah I'm happy to criticise my own country but I'm not going to take shit from an American who's trying to make his own shit show off a country seem somehow less bad. Especially when your only idea of how the country works is culled from right wing Americans who also don't understand anything.

Basically everyone who lives in the area or studies the climate or hydrology would tell you that you're insane.

More like a once-in-a-millennium event. Though I suspect it's going to be considerably more common going forward.

Deserts have some amount of normal precipitation, too. And when you get a lot less than normal, that's called a drought. Yes, even in a desert.

We do have pretty good data from tree rings. Unless you think the trees came from somewhere else?

Your country voted in Trump so you don't really get to be on a high horse about the quality of American voters.

He's got congress and the supreme court in his pocket, so they won't lift a finger.

Don't undersell it. Only 57% of the population (that's only a little over half) actually disapprove of Trump. 36% still actually approve. 7% are somehow undecided.

He's got congress, the supreme court and a really substantial fraction of the population either cheering him on or standing aside.

Regardless, I've long advocated for removing party affiliations from ballots.

That would just result in Aaron Aardvark getting elected.

Even worse is when they compromise the VPN operators and then monitor your usage until you do something that makes them decide to crack down on you.

People erroneously think of VPNs as privacy protectors. They aren't, not unless you have very good reason to trust whoever is running the server. If you don't, then they're concentrators for likely subversive traffic and its origins.

The solution to this is to join a party and get involved in the decisionmaking. It's a lot easier than you might think, and you can have a lot more influence that you might expect, precisely because not that many people do this.

You missed the part where as a cyclist you are most likely to die due to a car accident, and with less cars on the road (and less peak hour stress causing less anger among motorists) your trip becomes safer. So sure *you* may not benefit since you have a segregated path, but other cyclists would.

Look don't get me wrong: fuck cars. Anything that gets angry, reluctant drivers off the road is good, but frankly I can get behind Sadiq's Londonistan (as supported by er... Boris?). My current route in is on mostly LTNs, which forbid through traffic, and without the ability to go anywhere useful drivers mostly avoid it.

And this is precisely why you didn't understand the premise being made. Small companies are not the cause or even a contributing factor here. The problem is corporations.

I use to work for a big company. I fought long and hard against RTO when I was a manager there with about as much success as you may expect. So, fuck you I understand on a visceral level. We offered *new hires* flexible working which the company reneged on. I fought as much as I could then quit. Not over that specifically in isolation (lol there was more lololol), but it was a contributing factor. I do not like tome made a liar and I will not countenance that. I suppose that's why I can count many former coworkers and reports among my good friends now.

And yet.

Some people, well, quite a lot of people don't work effectively without someone looking over their shoulder. That's a big company thing by the way. At a small place you can hire well. At anywhere big, you won't brat the average by much. Pay can push the mean slightly, but even with that it's tough, and that's ignoring all the incentives to hire bad hire quick. And also despite the relenetless whining from the peanut gallery, yeah ther eis use in time spent pair programming or around a white board. There is use in teaching and learning.