US wind tech is quite primitive anyway. Chinese companies are already deploying blades twice this long. When you see photos of them at the factory they look photoshopped because the scale is hard to wrap your head around.

Airships and windy areas don't mix well.

Chinese companies solved this by being able to build factories really fast, close to where the blades are being used. They are great for large projects where a factory can produce about 1000 blades/year, enough for ~333 turbines. They are much bigger blades too, over 130m each, nearly double what these guys are hoping to move.

They will need to scale up though. SANY has been installing 131m blades for over a year now, and the next generation will be even bigger.

SANY has also developed a system for setting up a new blade factory very quickly and reliably, so they can simply build one near to where the blades are needed.

It demonstrates the issue though. You have to get the reactor up into orbit, and make sure that if and when it comes down it doesn't pollute. There isn't enough research on non-nuclear satellites re-entering the Earth's atmosphere and burning up to really be sure what the environmental impact of that is, especially with the new mega constellations.

It's probably doable, but

1) The cost will be high.
2) The tech will take time to develop and prove safe.
3) Maybe your country can do it safely, but do you trust every country with a glorified ballistic missile to do it safely too?

I had a similar thing years ago. I noticed the RX light on my modem flashing periodically, even though I wasn't doing anything. Did a bit of analysis and saw it was ICMP packets coming from some random IP address. Back then firewalls were novel and computers responded to pings from the internet.

I tried telnet out of curiosity and got straight into some system at that IP address. Not sure what it was, but seemingly some kind of server with a lot of work related shared files on it. Financial info, employee records, that sort of thing. I didn't hang around for long and after randomly trying a few commands found that "reboot" worked, and stopped the pinging.

Could Facebook afford that?

Brexit is costing the UK at least 4% of GDP, every year. It probably won't be undone this decade, if ever before the UK breaks up.

That's £145 billion per year, every year, just in economic losses. The actual damage to people's lives, especially young people's in terms of lost opportunities, greater poverty and suffering, over their lifetimes, is difficult to calculate but must be more billions per year.

In 2023 Facebook only made about $30 billion in profit. They can't afford to put this right.

If the API is available then hopefully someone will build a better Teams app.

People often make this mistake about EU rules. It's not like the US where everything has to be watertight legalese or they will exploit some loophole. Here it works on the basis that there was a negotiation with the people looking at the anti-trust issues, and they agreed but will monitor for compliance and look again if Microsoft acts in bad faith.

It's the same with fines. Just because they didn't open with a trillion Euro fine doesn't mean that the company will consider it the cost of doing business and ignore it, because non-compliance will result in ever increasing punishment.

When a Japanese doctor says "cut down" on smoking, the patient will take it as a pretty serious warning to try to stop. It's just a cultural thing, using less definitive language but the listener knows what it really means. It's baked into the language. For example it would sound a bit weird if you said "my boss was angry", rather you would say "my boss seemed angry" or "I think my boss is angry", even though you are 100% sure and the listener will be in no doubt either.

Japanese food is very filling for Westerners. You get used to it, but it takes a while. I think it's the amount of protein.

It's true, public transport in Japan is generally a lot better than elsewhere. The trains in particular are excellent. Busses are more hit and miss. Their busses are tiny too, to the point where I can't sit in the normal seats on some of them because there isn't enough leg room.

There are lots of places to park a bike too. Many stations have rental bike parks, for example. I've seen bikes parked at bus stops too. Not chained up or anything, because theft is so low that there is no need.

Japanese streets often don't have pavements/sidewalks either. Major roads often do, but smaller roads often don't, especially around homes. Sometimes there is a white line and a ~30cm area where you can kind of walk.

Many roads are poorly lit too. Street lighting is far from universal, and I've spent a lot of time wondering around in close to pitch darkness in urban areas. Very unlike the UK where everywhere is well lit.

Speed limits are lower, 30 kph (20 mph*) around where people live. Lots of cyclists. Lower rate of accidents than many comparable countries.

It's hard for people to imagine because they don't have all the safety systems that we do, and seemingly allow cars, cyclists, and pedestrians to mix, yet somehow it is safer.

An hour drive and you can be in very rural areas, lost in the mountains.

* Actually many parts of the UK are now going to 20 mph as well, although I doubt it will work as well as Japan.

The cheaper models are fine in cold weather, or at least the good ones. MG MGS5 EV is a good example. Battery thermal management, no issues in the cold, about 26-27k Euro for the top spec (~30k USD).

Bjorn Nyland tested it in Norway, no issues.

Many EVs let you enable built in battery heating from the car or from an app. For SAIC (MG) ones there is an integration with Home Assistant too. Many also offer a timer so you can have it do it automatically in the morning, before you go to work.

The bigger story with the Mitsubishi Outlander is that, if the claims are true, it apparently shuts down when the battery is too cold. That seems very odd, as it's a hybrid so can run from its combustion engine. If the lawsuit is right then they somehow designed it so that it needs the battery to be working well too, which is usually not the case for hybrids.

I wouldn't say any of this is news to consumers though. At least in the UK the newspapers can't shut up about it.

It's largely a non-issue though. I don't think there are any modern EVs without battery thermal management. The older ones tended to overheat with heavy use, the only issue with the cold being maybe 10-15% less range (mostly due to rain/snow, not battery temperature) and slower charging initially (as charging heats the battery).

It's just a paper design, at a time when focus needs to be on practical solutions. It's 50/50 who gets back to the moon first now, with the balance tipping in China's favour a little more every day. They will probably be the first to do a Mars sample return mission too. All based on developing well established technology, some of it novel but never pinning their hopes on getting anything too exotic or far out.