To generate thrust in space, a craft needs to eject reaction mass from a rocket, ion thruster, or some type of engine. The engine might indeed be solar powered, but we will need to transport more reaction mass to the shade disks periodically to keep them operating.

The space mirrors could be useful. A more useful idea would be to launch "shade disks" that are stationary at the L1 Lagrange Point between the Earth and the Sun. They could provide shade for cities and polar regions that are too hot and cool them with partial shade. The challenge is keeping them fueled so they can move to track where the shade is needed as the Earth rotates. Question: Do the Lagrange Point forces allow us to position a disk such that we don't have to expend a lot of fuel just resisting the solar wind?

Ha! Thanks for that link to the short story.

"Unauthorized Bread: Real rebellions involve jailbreaking IoT toasters"

2020 ARS Story: Cory Doctorow’s book, Radicalized, is up for a CBC award. To celebrate, here’s an excerpt.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming...

Is there an archive of the 2026 Factbook anywhere? Project Gutenberg only has up to 2010 available.

All editions - https://www.gutenberg.org/eboo...

2010 edition https://www.gutenberg.org/eboo...

Siglent oscilloscopes charge a subscription for features too. I am fine with the practice because it reduces costs to sell one piece of hardware, but enable higher end features for those that want to pay extra, but Siglent does it in a scummy manner.

They sell a scope with all features enabled, and then a month later things stop working and you have to pay more money. It is not clear when you purchase that things will stop working. Some essential features of spectrum analyzers stop working. (And Murphy's law says they will stop working when you need them. :) )

Siglent does offer some very nice scopes at a good price, and I recommend them. But they provide a demo unit with all features enabled, and you can't tell what will go away after a month when you buy the base model.

They should have a menu allowing features to be turned on and off during the trial period.

https://about.gitea.com/
Gitea can be used for either hosted or self-hosted Git repos.
"Open Source - Free, self-hosted Git service under the MIT license. Full control, unlimited users and repositories."
Our company uses it with Redmine for tickets.

Let the gamifications begin!

Yes, but there is a nice simplicity to an AVR microcontroller that makes them enjoyable to work with for small projects, and makes them learnable for newer hobbyists and students. ARMs are great, but they are overly complex.

The USA seems to ignored the purchase of competitors in most cases. Why is this any different? FedEx bought TNT Cargo which was a much for affordable air courier just to kill their competitor and expand their business. Air shipping costs have gone up as a result from what I can see.

For greater security, your organization can host their own Gitea server rather than be exposed to the MS security gaffes at Hithub. Check out Gitea.com and https://github.com/go-gitea.

"Gitea = Painless self-hosted all-in-one software development service, including Git hosting, code review, team collaboration, package registry and CI/CD"

It is stupid for advertisers to just play the same ad over and over and over. That also annoys customers who will avoid the product.

I would find Google much more usable if there were some selection switches to turn off AI images and turn off the stock images.

.

Google would also be more helpful if you could tell it "yes I'm looking to purchase something" or no I'm not. Sometimes it's pushing all the retail links when I don't want them, and other times when I am actually searching for something I need to buy the other sites are clutter.

Altavista was good at letting you define what you were looking for.

I find that the window dragging and docking and sizing works very well in Win10 and haven't seen the problems you describe. But my monitors are smaller. I wonder if it's a driver thing, or if Windows just can't handle big 4k screen sizes well.

One weird thing I noticed is that recently some applications start up behind other windows rather than at the front. They didn't do that before so I blame some Win update.

I'm hoping Windows 12 will fix the sins of Windows 11 (just like Vista and Windows 8 were largely fixed in later releases).
However, Windows 10 is enjoyable only because Open Shell fixes the craptastic Win10 start menu.
[ https://github.com/Open-Shell/... ]

Win11 broke so many nice Win10 things it's painful. e.g.
- Why use white popup windows with no borders against the white running application?
- Hiding all the most useful items in right-click menus is a mistake.
The GUI experts are out of touch with the reality of what their users want / need.

However, I think Windows will only get worse as Microsoft pushes AI features that really suck.
They should make Win12 the "no AI" upgrade from Win10 that runs on existing machines, and make a separate Win42AI for people that want to waste their time on it.

I am really annoyed that our local library shelves are kept half empty, yet they purge books every spring. Our librarians don't seem to value preserving old books and building up the collection.