Thanks for admitting up front your laziness.

The most important thing to understand is that the whole mission is to explore in detail the surface of Mars in an area that has never been examined before. Although over time we want to rover to check out different areas as it continues its mission it has no need to get anywhere fast. Every meter of unexplored Mars surface is, at this point, as informative and unknown as every other meter. It is making detailed observations every centimeter of the way. NASA was never thinking -- "Oh we wish we could make this thing go a lot faster, but we just can't (gnashes teeth)"! They could in fact drive it faster than they have, or could have built it to go faster, it that somehow improved its ability to carry out its mission. The rovers are being driven in fact at less than 1% of their top speed on average as it is because their mission is not to get from place to place quickly -- it is to study everything carefully. Most of the time they are not moving at all, they are static observation platforms, and that is by mission design.

It will be interesting to see if the idea is ever verified in practice.

Still seems like part of the humanoid robot will still be cheaper than the whole robot.

Since there are lots of desalination plants being built around the world, which consume electricity to produce freshwater this is not a well-thought-out notion.

Umm... what about the $4 billion from NASA?

Starlink only turned cash flow positive last year.

I am currently re-re-watching Mr. Robot and just saw a Season 4 episode where the Elliott main character comments on the massive privacy and security implications of everyone uploading pictures to the Internet without thinking about all the data that is embedded in the files (such as the exact location and time it was taken).

Here we have a phonemaker forgetting that their fake staged images have the camera information embedded in the file if they don't scrub it with some utility.

The perfect statement on this is provided by Weird Al Yankovich Mission Statement.

Most of the people responding this and saying "but Nordic countries aren't socialist!" are missing your point entirely. Actual socialism isn't even in the discussion here of course. Policies or programs that make economies and societies more livable for most people, like universal health care or unionization, to provide good working conditions and wages, are attacked by right-wingers as "Socialism!" which is bullshit.

Never provide personal or especially financial information to any communication (phone call, text or email) that you did not originate. The increasing sophistication of scammers requires making this a hard rule.

I have seen some clever scams recently -- a call from my "bank" that actually showed up as my bank's number, that then had me call them back on a number that showed up as belonging to the bank on Google, and they recited to me some correct information about myself. It failed when they could not provide a piece of information that they should have had available if they really had access to my account data as they claimed.

What they did to set it up was to spoof the actual bank phone number, and had seeded the web with pages listing the fake number as a bank number so that Google would show it as belonging to the bank. And they had gotten publicly available information about me from one of the privacy invasion companies that sell your data and they had a sophisticated script and a guy who was a pretty good scam-actor for the person I called. I can readily see most people being taken in by a scam set up like that. They key to revealing the scam -- you must tell them to provide a secret piece of information that you select that the real party would have but someone who did not have actual access to the internal systems could not.

You sweet summer child. There will be no difference.

There is nothing wrong with the grammar of the title. "New Type of Supernova Detected" is one clause, "as Black Hole Causes Star To Explode" is a second clause. Nothing implying that the detection cause the supernova.

No different from watching anything anywhere ever. There is always a time delay between an event happening, and the signal from the event reaching us. When the delay is short and the event takes much longer to unfold we don't notice and don't feel the urge to point out the time delay in our observations as if it was a significant revelation. Within our solar system this compulsion to point out the time delay between when the observations reach us doesn't usually arise, even though it is equally valid. When we were watching the impact of Shoemaker-Levy in Jupiter in 1994 few people felt in important to point out that the time delay was 50 minutes, so the impact had occurred almost an hour before we could see it. To everyone doing observing they were collecting data in real time.

The immense pull comes from the tiny dimensions of the black hole -- the mass is infinitely more concentrated (about the only situation where you can use the word "infinitely" literally). This was a binary merger event, and when a black hole -- even a smaller one -- merges with another star the black hole swallows the other star. No other outcome is possible.

The merger will begin with the black hole stripping off the outer envelope of the other star, with the absorbed mass causing it to spiral in even closer to the center.

The actual article in The Astrophysical Journal (Slashdot seems to have a policy of only linking to popular press pieces, never original sources.)

No it is a supernova -- it brightness peak was -18.7 which is more than a Type II Supernova and close that of the brighter Type 1a. But not like any other supenova event ever seen because it had a second brightness peak almost as large: -18.5 that were 240 days apart -- the timescale for this system to finally stablilize by completing the black hole's ingestion of the remnants of the other star.

If the content was ad-free, reasonably priced and convenient there would be minimal piracy. We actually had that for a little while.

...as the fractured, ad-laden streaming market struggles to deliver profits and customer lock-in regardless of the toll on convenience and value.

"Waste" is stuff that benefits non-billionaires. Now graft on the other hand, which is what this is all about, benefits billionaires so not "waste".