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

Why the hell bother using an AI when you could just type what you would prompt into the comment directly?

To the point you put into the LLM, it's perfectly plausible that someone wiring up an LLM to their email and their bank account suddenly are at huge risk of a scam working. Whatever problems exist in the technical implementations the fact remains that folks greasing the wheels for their money to go out autonomously incur the risk of..... their money going out autonomously...

Yes, but not for you and me. Graphics designers have been using stylus-displays for years and years, because it's great to draw on the thing you are making instead of drawing on a different surface like a Wacom.

But I'm like you, I don't have a use case for a touchscreen and if you touch my notebook screen I'll be angry because I prefer it without fingerprints, thanks. So my first question is: Do they offer this thing with OLED but without touch? I guess not. Pity.

I've been slowly moving towards my dream setup: Solar panels, battery, EV car, island mode capability. This is one thing that'd be a factor in my buying decision. Using your car as a battery or secondary battery is a big plus, and if they built the necessary equipment to run independent of the power grid, it'd come in a neat package.

While power failures are rare where I live, I expect them to become more common with the move to renewable energies. I support that, but it's more fragile than constantly running power stations. So being able to run your home at least for a few hours on your own energy is something that I consider a good idea.

If we build it, then it will frictionlessly tell us what to build.

Well the answer is of course they are out of touch and I don't actually have a 'right question', I just wanted to fit in.

Darn vague memory but - Yes. Keypunch machinesâ"such as the IBM 026, IBM 029, and IBM 129â"allowed operators to duplicate an existing card up to a specific column to correct errors or edit data without re-entering the entire 80-column sequence.

No, it's just the sort of thing that the UEFI design kind of does.

You load a bunch of stuff that all initializes, just in case it might be needed. One of the key optimizations in some UEFI implementations is trimming down the things that get loaded based on an early assessment of whether this or that would be relevant to the expected boot. For example, hit key to enter setup and suddenly it has to load all the things to make sure all the various menus work.

Kind of like setting up the NIC in the OS before anything asks for network access, so that every network access isn't burdened with having to set up the network access. If the driver is already loaded then a variety of potential UEFI network code could just use it (PXE, HTTP, iSCSI, various crap from vendors like pre-OS firmware download)

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)

We will see, but *so far* Ford has not been as aggressive about that sort of thing as BMW or Chevy. The BlueCruise requires actively curated lidar maps, so at least they have a rationale for that being an ongoing subscription. The other subscriptions are similar, updating GPS maps (who needs those with phone) and data connectivity (but if you have a phone, you don't need it). So far they haven't charged for remote vehicle services which arguably could be charged for the SIM service and/or server infrastructure they have.

Note that their point is they state they had the car's onboard system also provide AC to the load side, making the cost lower to incrementally make it a backup unit.

Most solutions provide DC and a separate inverter is required to power the house.

Presumably this came from the desire to consolidate things and wanted to do the 'plug power tools into the truck' feature and the delta to get to 'car side house scale inverter' was appealing.

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*.