Still, Slashdot doesn't have to play along with their weasel wording. For example, "ergonomic collars that deliver an electric pulse" - just say "shock collar". Don't help them whitewash what they're talking about.

They survived by manually moving the cattle frequently, using fences and gates. This worked pretty well when you've got lots of cheap labor. Heck people used to live amongst the flocks, keeping an eye on them, and driving them to the better pastures.

I'm not sure you've actually ever seen cattle grazing. They will graze the good grass right to the ground, leaving the other grasses they don't like as much, and then they'll follow each other to some other area. It's not random; you can't just expect that over time cattle will graze equally every square foot. It's far better to move them on before the grass gets that short and essentially removed in favor of the poorer grasses. This is part of what these collars do. They really do work. My family's been using collars like these on some cattle for a couple of years now. It's really been a boon. You can graze more cattle on less land with healthier pasture.

Great points. I forgot about those other aspects. E-sheperd sends a warning to the phone if an animal doesn't move for a while.

That said, herding definitely is a part of it. These systems can actually move cattle around a pasture. The cattle learn pretty quickly what the collar is trying to get them to do.

It really does work. My family's ranch has been using a similar product called e-shepherd for a couple of years now. Doesn't take the cattle very long to learn what they collars want them to do.

I can tell you are not a rancher.

There's a Canadian company doing something similar called e-shepherd. It's more than a virtual fence. It's part of an integrated grazing plan. Currently there's a certain number of acres required for a certain number of cattle. The cattle don't graze randomly, so you end up getting areas that are overgrazed and the grass damaged. With e-shepherd or a system like this one, the cattle can be slowly moved around the pasture. This basically allows you to keep the same amount of cattle in a much smaller area, as you can move them more frequently without a lot of gates and fences. It doesn't take long for the cattle to figure it out, and it's quite remarkable how the collars can train them to move when you (or the AI!) want them too. It really does work.

Who's dumb?

You talk as if NASA just up and went to the moon in a matter of months in the late 1960s. Despite JFK's speech, the preparation to go to the moon began a long time before, and involved three separate families of rockets. Mercury, Gemini, and finally Apollo. It was really Gemini that that developed the technologies that eventually made the moon landing possible. There were a lot of test flights. Granted back then there was more political will than there is now. But it was always a battle with Congress and the president. If you think we can just skip all that development and testing phase now just because we once did it years ago, you are mistaken.

It's hard to talk about goals when the folks controlling the purse keep changing their mind.

For about $3000 USD you can buy an AMD Ryzen AI 395 with 128 GB of integrated RAM, which I'm tempted to do to run coding models. Although it seems to me that 256 GB is more of the sweet spot for local LLMs that can do things at a decent speed. For that size of RAM, the only real game in town is the Mac Studio, will cost about $10k (and rising). Of course even $10k is cheaper than a personal assistant. Now with the true cost of agentic AI starting to fall on the customer, $10k doesn't seem so ridiculous.

Current spacecraft velocity relative to earth is 3697 kph according to the latest spacecraft status display.

La Nina turned out to be extremely weak. It basically ended last month. We're already seeing indications that we're swinging back towards La Nino again.

I agree. I used to be a big fan of Raspberry Pi and SBCs in general. But I realized for 99% of what I want to do with a small computer, mini computers work so much better even though they are (or used to be) more expensive. I also grew really tired of dealing with custom distros and kernel forks for the various SBCs. For server applications (home automation, little file servers, etc), I'd much rather deal with AlmaLinux on an x86 mini pc. I'm tired of kernel forks and device trees and funky bootstrapping systems.

Obviously if you working with hardware sensors, SBCs have their place. I've seen some very cool hardware projects done with Pi Zeros recently.

Back in 2019 on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, someone put up a fantastic web site to play back the mission in real time. Complete with actual radio and mission control comms and telemetry data. https://apolloinrealtime.org/. Such an amazing historical data trove. I spent several days listening in real time to the flight unfold from launch to moon landing, to splash down. Even though I knew this was just playing back recordings from 50 years ago, and knew the outcome, it was a neat experience and it filled me with wonder and excitement at what was being accomplished as it were. I remember going outside and lookup up at the moon and thinking about people being on it, as someone in 1969 would have done.

Fast forward now to Artemis II and I have such mixed feelings about it, and the space program in general. Anyway I wish them a safe and uneventful journey.

Oh wow. The burning is where the pollution comes from! Natural bodies burning up in the atmosphere typically don't contain aluminum. Satellites do. And in fact we can measure an increase in aluminum particles and compounds in the upper atmosphere since starlink satellites have been regularly do-orbited. We have no idea what the long-term affect will be. I've heard atmospheric scientists call this one of the largest uncontrolled experiments in air pollution we've ever done as a species. Surely you agree that's a bit reckless?

Claude has already seen it.

The region where Starlink satellites orbit, and many other of these massive constellations live, will clear itself out after a year or two, after which we can start over. But besides light pollution problem, Starlink's biggest problem is air pollution. We don't know what the long term effect of thousands of satellites burning up in the atmosphere is. This is quite concerning. These satellites are contaminating our upper atmosphere at rates we've never experienced before.

In the orbits above this region, Kessler syndome is a real possibility.

You're confusing the importance of avoiding Kessler syndrome in LEO with the difficulty of causing Kessler syndrome. GEO debris can potentially remain there for millions of years before interactions between the gravitational pull of the Sun, Earth, and Moon sufficiently perturb it. LEO debris remains for weeks to months. You have to have many orders of magnitude more debris in LEO to trigger Kessler Syndrome, where the rate of collisions exceeds the rate of debris loss.

The fact that a LEO Kessler Syndrome would also be short is something that exists on top of that.

It's also worth nothing that not only are modern satellites not only vastly better at properly disposing of themselves than they were in the 1970s when Kessler Syndrome was proposed, but they're also vastly better at avoiding debris strikes. All of these factors are multiplicative together.