That's not a series of tubes, THIS is a series of tubes!

I asked because I play with the speed control on videos too, and I can rarely set it above 1.5x before it gets unintelligible. But I guess for those "I've heard it all before" videos that doesn't matter.

5x? Are you a chipmunk? Overdosed on cafeine?

Giant Lego bricks did happen, at a slightly larger scale, over here in .nl. A few years ago, a concrete factory started making bricks of about 160 x 80 x 80 cm with 8 pyramids on top, and matching holes in the bottom. They did this initially with the leftovers that came back from building sites. These turned out to be ideal as roadblocks, for marking boundaries at building sites, building temporary walls etc.

In the EU, standard e-bikes are regulated to a top speed of 25 km/h. We already see an increase in bicycle accidents due to cyclists being unable to handle 25 km/h safely. This applies to kids who don't know their limits, and older people who have been cycling without assistance all their lives and are now getting an ebike for the first time, and are driving faster than their reaction speed warrants.

I have a faster model (similar to the Class 3 from the article) with a top speed of 45 km/h. It is regulated as a moped, so I need liability insurance, a drivers' licence and I'm required to wear a helmet specifically for this class.

In the part of the Netherlands where I live, I get the option to use this on the road network, or on bike paths. On a bike path in the city, at 45 km/h I'd be a danger to unassisted bikes which rarely do more than 20 km/h. 45 km/h is also incompatible with the road surface of many bike paths, and with the limited sightlines into site entrances etc. When I'm on a bike path, I rarely exceed 30 km/h.

CA's approach isn't "ignorance and stupidity", it's paying attention to what has already happened in other places.

So the albedo goes from 12% to 16-18%. Is that significant, in view of the four orders of magnitude brightness difference we already have?

in what way do you think I did that?

The moon is not that reflective: on average it only reflects 12% of the sunlight that falls onto it. Still, that's 12% of 1360 W/m2, which means the surface still is four orders of magnitude brighter than the very dim stars.

IDK if the crew took photos of the stars. Just for fun, try taking photos of the stars tonight, under these circumstances:
1. you have to use a large DSLR.
2. you can't put it on a tripod, the only support you are allowed to use is the windows in your house.
Try keeping the camera still for the 10 seconds of exposure you need.

Voyager used a simpler method: pack all of the Pu-238 in close, and just radiate the excess power away.

The Voyagers transmit at 12 or 18 W. We receive those signals with the DSN, using dish antennas with a diameter of 34 or 70 meters. These days, the 70 m antennas are used most of the time.

For playback of the onboard tape recorder, all of the DSN antennas at one site are arrayed together so Voyager can transmit at 1400 bps instead of the usual 160.

Those are also used to send data to the Voyagers. For one of them, transmission is done at 20 kW. The other one had some failed component in its receiver, requiring more transmitter power: 100 kW.

Each system on the Voyagers can be switched on/off by the onboard computers.
There's no way to replace anything, but the main systems are redundant: There are 3 computer systems, with two main boards each. There are two radio transmitters, etc.

A repeater won't work, and is not the best way to solve the problem.

1. For the price of a repeater spacecraft, we can build several 70-meter antennas on Earth which are far more sensitive than any antenna we can put on a spacecraft.

2. The Voyagers are at 120 and 150 AU. For a repeater to be useful, it has to be somewhere in the middle between us and the Voyagers, so they would have to go to 60 AU. That takes 25 years.

3. The transmitters on Voyager have fixed power levels. They can be switched between 2 settings, and are using the lower power level (12 W) for most transmissions already. There's no way to reduce transmitter power below that.

I had a Macintosh LC II at the time, with a 80 Mb harddrive. I bought a Zip drive for it and suddenly I could a. back up all my data onto a single disk, and b. massively increase available storage, for a price that was a lot lower than buying an external SCSI harddrive. It was amazing.

The SCSI interface made a big difference: mine was a lot faster than the parallel interface ZIP drives I encountered.

Please! We prefer 'beleaguered'.

(shakes fist) Damn you, sans serif!