predicted that it would be the greatest embarrassment in the history of automobiles.

Said about every single Tesla model and non-vehicle product, and about the company as a whole, every time, by millions of people, for its entire history. That's hardly a badge to pin on yourself unless you were also saying that the Roadster, Model S, Model X, Model 3, and Model Y, and grid batteries would be massive successes.

Also, don't confuse "putting down a refundable $100 reservation" with "prognosticating about the future". Re: prognostication about the future, that's not "putting down a refundable reservation on a product you can choose to buy or not based on its stats when it comes out", that's making investments in the market. And back in the day, I made a TON of money long on $TSLA, predicting the overall company's success. How much, perchance, did you make shorting it, like millions of people did, talking doom and gloom about how every vehicle model was going to be the greatest embarrassment in the history of automobiles?

There was plenty of interest in the beginning**, and the electric truck market really doesn't have good competition for a given price point. The problems were:

1) The price shot up heavily
2) The stats and capabilities went down
3) Musk went hard-right, and rightly or wrongly the Cybertruck became seen as a symbol of being MAGA.

These things together pushed away ~90% of prospective buyers. Combined with the fact that the Cybertruck's production line was unique, as well as being a generation back, and it made it hard for Tesla to justify owning it.

** - Including from me. Beyond the stats-for-the-price point as introduced, I liked the engineering behind the design. If you want to make it rugged, that implies a thick skin. So make it an exoskeleton to bear the internal loads. Want to maximize strength while minimizing the mass? Resist torsional loads with a braced cantilever design (the triangular rear). Which, with a retracting tonneau, creates a very long, gradual rear taper, allowing detached air (from the angles necessitated by an exoskeleton) ample time to retract and minimizing the drawn wake. On and on - from an engineering perspective, there was a lot of great stuff that appealed to me. But little of that ended up staying. The final design hangs the (thinner) exterior metal onto a frame just as dead mass. The big raft of changes led to mass growth, cost growth, and range decline (despite advancing battery tech and pricing). And of course, I'm not super eager for Elon to end up with any of my money these days. Another family member had also been interested, and also cancelled.

No. Gravity comes from a lack of space.

A small percentage of a few billion people is a big problem.

Yes, regardless of whether their name is Muhammed or Breivik.

Why not here? Because for starters, humanism isn't a religion (and I say that as a humanist). It's a philosophical stance within atheism. And atheism is the absence of religion** (it's literally right there in the name), not a religion. You can't claim "religious" exemptions as an atheist. What this person actually wants is a philosophical exemption, akin to, say, a vegetarian wanting an exemption from having to cook meat at a restaurant or whatnot.

** - Well, except for those atheists who worship Athe.

Yeah, nothing insular about the Amish.

(Oh wait...)

Courts might even decide that the original copyrights apply.

The courts never decide on something substantive, and when they do, they usually get it wrong.

Headline from 1845.

Agreed. If you don't know what you're doing it's hard to even ask for the right thing or know what's possible. For example: I'm currently developing a system that uses a local AI to help debug internal issues. The initial incarnations of it were very slow to start up each command; clearly, it wasn't doing proper KV caching and was having to prefill every turn; it required patches on the llama.cpp fork and our API wrapper, and also adjusting the system prompt to keep variable content at the end. But if you have no idea about KV caching issues, how do you even know something is wrong with the backend, let alone what to tell the AI to fix? You'll end up deciding you need to upgrade the GPU instead.

(That said: "lovingly handcrafted" code is a hilarious phrase that should give any developer who's ever worked on a big corporate software project the giggles, and also, these software devs are clearly people angry at knowing they're going to be let go looking for revenge by badmouthing their boss to the press)

Escape from Pluto is much easier, and the Pluto-Charon distance is 1/20th of the Earth-Moon distance.

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.

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)

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.

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*.