nearly half a mile wide and spinning once every 1.88 minutes -- the fastest known rotation for an object of its size.
May I present this pulsar
spinning at 42,981 revolutions per minute , with radius "under 16 km", so I assume somewhat larger than 500m.
If you don't want to talk semantics, you've posted to the wrong article.
Travel insurance companies are saying this was an act of war.
A blockade is an "act of war". Or a missile attack. A major act of sabotage, a cyberattack. Insurance policies have definitions to refer to.
Invasion is bit vague. In common English, an invasion can mean something larger, intending to take territory, as Polymarket says. Its not a word I'd have used for what happened.
But in formal legal and military language an invasion is "the unconsented entry of one state's armed forces into the territory of another."
So unless they defined it otherwise, it *was* an invasion.
The future was promised to be that robots do the manual labor, and humans make art and sing merry songs.
It turns out that making art is a whole lot easier than doing something useful like building houses and roads. Who'd have thought?
VIC-20 had 20KB ROM. So I guess this is the HP-2000000000 .
But, as the saying goes, all good things come to an end.
Only MS DOS^WWindows is immortal.
PG&E residential service averages 45.33 cents average per kWh.
That's crazy? California has huge amounts of solar generation, but no cheap mid-day tariffs ?
I'm seeing 15c/kWh for SDG&E at night. Hang on, you have no choice. Privately owned for-profit state-protected monopolies -WTF?
Here in Perth Australia, same climate as LA, its 6c/kWr from 9am-3pm if you choose the appropriate tariff. (us0.36 peak)
So if you live in an apartment and can't install your own soalr panels, you can benefit form excess from others.
So I guess the reality in California is if you want to charge from home, install your own solar panels?
And a home battery, if you drive to work every day, so can't charge direct from solar. Ah - I see 2/3 of new solar installs in California include a Powerwall or equivalent. Makes sense now.
EV's should cost less then ICE vehicles, they have fewer and lower cost parts.
It's the battery. The only reason we did not have electric cars 100 years ago (they existed before ICE cars) is the battery.
EV minus battery should be cheaper. And the battery should be cheaper than gasoline.
In Australia, a BYD Atto 2 small SUV is around us$22k. So already cheaper than non-Chinese petrol competitors.
Cars used to be far more expensive in Australia - until they abolished the tariffs.
(from Claude)
Actual Purpose (The Legal & Practical Impact)
While the stated goals focus on "security" and "waste prevention," the primary practical function of the bill is to resolve ownership disputes and expand the rights of coal operators at the expense of general mineral owners. Key "actual" functions include:
- Granting Automatic Mineral Rights to Coal Lessees: The bill effectively changes the default terms of any coal lease, "whenever granted." It stipulates that a lease for coal is now deemed to include all critical and rare earth minerals contained within that coal unless they were specifically excluded in writing. This retroactively grants coal companies the right to valuable minerals they may not have originally paid for.
- Protecting Facility Owners (Coal Ash Ownership): The bill clarifies that coal ash and byproducts resulting from combustion or gasification belong to the owner/operator of the facility, not the original mineral owner. This secures the "downstream" value of these minerals for the utility companies.
- Limiting Liability: It includes language protecting facility owners from being held liable for "waste, conversion, or destruction" of minerals during the combustion or gasification process.
- Legal Retroactivity: By making these changes retroactive, the bill seeks to bypass potential litigation over existing contracts where the ownership of minerals like lithium or uranium found in coal seams might have been ambiguous under older laws.
In summary: The bill uses the high-profile justification of "national security" and "rare earth production" to codify a legal framework that ensures coal mining companies and power plants have the primary right to profit from these materials, even if those rights were not explicitly secured in their original land-use agreements.
YKWIM
The Moon is sunlit almost all the time except during a rare event called a lunar eclipse.
I'm sure "ground-based telescope using astronomers" already loathe the moon as much as vampires hate the sun.
You doubt? You clearly know even less about orbital mechanics than I do, so why post ill-informed guesses?
The scientists and engineers say that 70 km makes a difference.
That "slightly-further-down orbit" has something like an order of magnitude lower air density. And I'm sure you know that drag is proportional to that.
Two closely related reasons why lower orbit is safer:
1) there is less debris there now, reducing the chance of collisions damaging the satellite.
2) if a satellite lost control, or was destroyed by an impact, it or the debris will return to Earth much faster, avoiding cascade risk.
As Anton Petrov points out in this video, a Kessler syndrome catastrophe could be just around the corner
Petrov is a prolific and successful youtuber, not a scientist. His dramatic claims do not accurately represent the paper he refers to.
You can read it here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.096...
(Jump to "discussion" on page 7 to avoid the math)
Technically, we already have a Kessler Syndrome in higher orbits . Based on what is already in orbit, collisions are generating new debris faster than the debris is
returning to Earth. But this plays out over decades, centuries and millenia. Not the Hollywood apocalypse that sensationalist click-bait youtubers imply.
The paper says that if all control of the exiting Starlink constellation was lost, a collision would likely occur within days.
We emphasize that the CRASH Clock does not measure the onset of KCPS, nor should
it be interpreted as indicating a runaway condition. However, it does measure the degree
to which we are reliant on errorless operations. In the short term, a major collision is more
akin to the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster [22] than a Hollywood-style immediate end of
operations in orbit. Indeed, satellite operations could continue after a major collision, but
would have different operating parameters, including a higher risk of collision damage
people who blindly assign the term "cunts" to a group
In Australia, we call those idiots "bogans". Its a bit like redneck, but not necessarily rural.
Too much of everything is just enough. -- Bob Wier
