Cheap.

Before my employer sacked their field staff and became a software-only company, we were charging $15000 per seat per year, and enforcing the lease with a week's worth of value of cryptographic dongle.

I dread to think how they're dealing with Recall. Probably have to air gap the machines from the Internet. Because the data being processed and presented is just ever so slightly commercially valuable.

All the dragons I've seen report of have had unmineralised shells.

Sorry - I take it back - Rowling had titchy dragons who were small enough to have mineralised shells.

Remember - the baby dragon (or ostrich) has got to break out through that shell. It puts a very real biomechanical limit on how thick the shell can be. The upper limit is the (extinct) Elephant Bird of Madagascar, unless someone has come up with a bigger bird. (Moas were in the same size range ; but I had to check.)

Yes, that news came through last night.

Well, "coma". "Atmosphere" in only the most temporary of senses. The average particle won't bump into another particle before it has left the vicinity of the comet and half way across the inner solar system.

As of this lunch time, nobody was reporting a visible tail that I'd seen. It's coming fairly straight-on towards us - about 15 off-direct, I estimate, so we'll struggle to see past the head for a while. Come ... August (?), we'll have a bit of an angle to it and see the tail. Unfortunately, it'll be approaching the Sun in the sky by then.

Which is why the window of opportunity for viewing it from the space telescopes is short, and rapidly closing. A bit better for the armada around Mars, but not much better.

When did the Milky Way get a bar,

I don't recall it being mentioned in the 1970s ; don't remember it mentioned in the 1980s ; was hearing mention of it in the 1990s, and definitely in the 2000s. I'll guess it came out of IR (dust-cloud penetrating) ground and space surveys in the 1980s.

and why haven't we been invited to it yet?

The invite is on the back side of Pluto, and we're meant to take Charon as our entry ticket. I don't think they're interested in primitives who can't even travel 50,000 ly carrying a 1000km dirty snowball.

It was assigned that name (for the telescope/ sensor/ computer system that found it) yesterday afternoon - sorry, the day before yesterday, now ; just after midnight, UT. In the same way that 2I is "Borisov" (the discoverer), and throwing 1I/`Oumuamua into contrast whose discoverers chose to give it a different name. Normal service has been resumed on the "interstellar object naming" front.

The discovery system has a name which is an acronym, and in their hundreds (thousands) of other discoveries they've maintained that capitalisation. But someone is going to try to "correct" them.

Occasionally ephemerides are calculated in geocentric coordinates - Earth-centred ones - but normally that's kept for Earth-orbiting objects and (potential) impactors. (I was reading up on this last night, and the author of one of the tools for converting observations (two angles, a time, and a brightness) commented that he'd only rarely came across a body that needed selenographic coordinates (Moon-centred), and and they'd all been artificial satellites, never a natural body.)

Generally the calculations are done in Solar coordinates - Sun-centred - though that particular software will by default switch to Jovian coordinates if the MOID for Jupiter is low, or the semi-major axis is close to Jupiter's - becasue there are 10s of thousands of "trojan" asteroids co-orbiting with Jupiter, compared to a few dozen for Earth and mars, and a few hundred for Saturn. With that caveat, almost all the calculations are done in Solar coordinates.

(And indeed, having RTF-ephemerides, yes, the quoted figures are in Solar coordinates ; it's a default calculation.)

1I/`Oumuamua was at approximately "local rest" with respect to the stars in the Sun's vicinity, and we sort-of "ran into it". (The Sun and the Solar system has a significant velocity to most of the nearby stars ; you need to cast the net wider - a few hundred light years - to get a meaningful average. Corollary : the nearest star to the Solar system has changed in the last few myriads of years (10,000 yrs) and will do again repeatedly in the future.)

3I/ATLAS (named for the telescope/ computer system that detected it, which is an acronym, so capitalized) has about twice the velocity compared to 1I/`Oumuamua, and in a considerably different direction, so has a substantial velocity compared to the "local standard of rest".

That it's coming from (broadly) the direction of the centre of the Galaxy is suggestive, but not terribly informative - we already knew violent things happen in there.

Except ... people have been arguing about "are all type Ia supernovæ the same?" since the 1980s, to my personal knowledge, and probably longer. So there has always been a weighting factor included in the calculation of the results which should reduce the effect of actually demonstrating that this, that, and those SN Ia are SN Ia2 while those are SN Ia1.

I'd expect the error bars to increase, moderately.

This doesn't affect the other steps in the "cosmic distance ladder". The red shift calibration against Cepheid variables (remember the 1940s discovery that there are two types of Cepheid, with different period : absolute luminosity relations, and how that completely didn't upend the rest of cosmology?) remains valid. Maybe a bit noisier if the SN1a[1 or 2] records need some sorting out, and possibly re-observation. It's not as if SN aren't already observed for years after their explosion until their light curves are lost against their host galaxy.

There were already hints that the infamous "Hubble Tension", between the CMB derived values for H_0 and the near-universe derived values for H_0 could be due to a systematic error in the "cosmic distance ladder", and this could be just the thing needed to remove the ~10% offset between the two types of estimate and bring them into alignment.

So, 2.92% total for all other versions of Windows combined, plus Macs, Linuxen, BSDen and everything else.

Do try to be credible. That won't even cover the number of machines not connected to the Internet (so, incapable of getting force-updated by MS).

enjoy your enjoyment of 'sound'.

as you get older (GOML) the sound of the sound matters so much less.

there were times that listening to a single speaker fm pocket 'transistor radio' was good enough to enjoy the songs.

have your fun with your rumble and explosions. as you get older, that shit becomes SO much less important, you wont believe how irrelevant all that hype really is.

I have not been to a theater in - 20 years? more? I cant remember.

its been unpleasant for decades. and with home theater, unless you're a teen trying to escape home and get 'privacy' somewhere else, theaters have long outlived their usefulness.

I think I stopped theaters around the time I cut the cable.

all around, what passes for entertainment is just plain rotten and/or boring.

you can keep it.

There's a strong clue in TFS : they talk about running a cable from Morocco around to make landfall in "SW England".

Not "SE England", where the government and a significant part of the population live, who'll be using the power, But "SW England". Because it is cheaper to move megawatts over high voltage lines on pylons than to move the same number of megawatts the same number of kilometres using HV sub-sea cables.

It's actually a lot cheaper to move megawatts over land than under-sea. At work, we'd do a megawatt or two for 5 km sub-sea, rather than building generators and 4 * RB-211s on glorified poles above sealevel ; but for a 10km stretch the balance shifted to building a bigger platform (artificial land) and dropping the jet engines and generators onto that.

For any Morocco/ North Africa solar farm, the logical way to proceed is to export the power across the Strait of Gibraltar (e.g. Ceuta to Algeciras), or Melilla to Almería ; include appropriate load balancing into the Spanish and French on-land grids, and then jump the power From Calais to Dover, or Dieppe to Hastings.

But that would mean talking to our neighbours, which is as radical as the US and Canada continuing to have a demilitarised border.

UK doesn't need more Solar as much as it needs more storage.

Listening to the foaming-at-the-mouth of the NIMBYs, that's not going to happen any decade soon.

They have sufficient geothermal for their needs. If they build (surely the verb should be "mine"?) more, they'll most likely use it locally to generate higher-value exports (say, BioJet-A1, or $cryptocurrency-du-jour$) than waste money and maintenance on thousands of km of sub-sea power cable.

... it's servers in the US (and therefore, rooted by the NSA), then why haven't they moved the EU branch of their services to local servers?

The obvious inference is that the NSA won't let them - or will require them to root such servers for NSA surveillance. And the obvious next step would be that the NSA then gives this data to US corporations that bribe the Executive appropriately.