I can't say that I'm entirely surprised, given what else they've been getting up to; but it seems downright crazy to just unleash a slop engine without even giving your volunteers a heads up; then patronizingly ask if you can perhaps arrange a meeting to understand their concerns.

If your options are 'nothing' and 'hire bilingual tech writer' you can see the attraction of having a not very good but extremely cheap option; but just tossing away the expertise you already get for nothing out of some sort of weird technophilia? Is there actually some nutjob out there who was all "Oh, but machine translation makes my CI pipeline so efficient" or something?

Yes. Watt peak. And it does, at least for me. Let's say I can get 120 Watts on average over 8 hrs at 300 days/year, this means that I can get 300 kWh a year. If I pay 20 ct/kWh, it will pay back my initial investment of $300 within 5 years.

There is nothing that forbids me to install more than one of those $300/800 Wp systems in general. But I am no longer allowed to just plug them into the next wall socket according to local regulations, and inform my utility after the fact. If I want more than 800 Wp, I have to apply for a larger system, and I have to get it approved. If for instance, I want 10 kWp, I buy 12 of them, costing me $3600, a power management system for maybe $1500, and I need a board certified engineer to approve the setup. At the end, I'll pay maybe $8000 for the whole 10 kW setup, but not $50,000.

That's not what I claim. But for $300, I can halve my energy bill.

No, but it's not about being off-grid. It's about generating about 50% of the electricity you need over a year yourself - for $300.

That's a very U.S. centric problem. Apparently, the U.S. make it extremely cumbersome and expensive to build and own Solar, while I can go to the next departement store or to an online store and buy a 800 Wp setup for $300, mount it myself, and all the paper work I have to do is to tell my utility, that I have that 800 Wp system in place.

If we listen to the current rhetoric, every country is a direct rival. And the idea was that people who trade with you are seldom interested in killing you, because that would stop the trade they profited from all the time.

Sorry. The matter densities lost their minus signs in the exponent. It's 10^-28 grams per cm^3 respective 10^-31 grams per cm^3.

If you read Fritz Zwicky's original 1933 and 1936 papers, that's what he actually said about Dark Matter.

Helvetica Physica Acta, Vol. 6, p. 122

An expansion rate of 500 kilometers per second per million parsecs is equivalent to an average density of rho = 10^28 grams per cm^3, according to EINSTEIN and DE SITTER. From the observation of self radiating matter HUBBLE estimates rho ~ 10^31 grams per cm^3. Of course, it is possible, that radiating plus dark (cold) matter put together result in a massively larger density, and the value rho ~ 10^28 grams per cm^3 seems not unreasonable.

As you can see, Zwicky himself coins the term Dark Matter as the place holder for non-radiation stuff out there to resolve a discrepancy of 1 to 1000. Better measurements of the Hubble constant, which at the time was estimated to be 500 km/sec per million parsecs, and is now estimated to be 70 km/sec per million parsecs has shrunk the discrepancy to about 1 to 5, but still, Dark Matter is exactly that, postulated stuff to make up for a discrepancy.

Has it been determined whether the IT situation was related to the theft that occurred?

Obviously it sounds like basically no bad option was left unchosen when it came to their IT config; but I'm curious whether this was a situation where the perps were actually sophisticated enough (or unsophisticated at traditional smash-and-grab/balaclava-when-on-camera techniques) to incorporate the bad IT into the heist; or whether the entry was more or less pure physical access control failure that happens to put the general state of the system in stark relief?

Obviously if it were a heist movie there'd be a hoodie kid using the power of fast typing to haxx0r the cameras and guide the operatives while using a precociously cobbled-together AI to selectively delete them from the surveillance footage; but if the overall physical security posture was bad, and the building is largely accessible to the public, it seems entirely plausible that someone just cased the joint and walked in much as they would have 50 years ago; though a different interested party is probably hosting a C2 server or some exploitation payloads on their DVR.

This is the part in the bad summer blockbuster where it turns out that there was some sort of alien organism involved in the collision; and now people are quietly scrambling to ensure it doesn't make it back to earth, right?

It is always confounding how people always point at Dark Matter and Dark Energy and complain: See? Physicists make things up to keep their theories intact. And physicists then try to explain, that yes, they make those things up, because otherwise theories break. And people then complain: But you don't know what it is! And then physicists replay: Exactly. We don't know what it is. And people cry: But this is a problem! And physicists answer: Yes, this is a problem.

Writing derogative statements is easy. Coming up with better theories is hard.

So you are taking the easy way out, the Ignoramus Ignorabimus.

You know what panels are made off? Silicon. You know which is the most prevalent metal in the Earth's crust? Also Silicon. Only Oxygen is more prevalent. A quarter of the Earth's crust is silicon, and you are wondering if we have enough of it in 30 years time?

Let's put it like this: I live in a village (less than 10,000 inhabitants) directly neighboring a small city (130,000 inhabitants). In my village, we have seven bus lines, one train stop with trains running every 30 mins, and a tramway line (and a second one, which is technically not on village territory, but from my place, it's a 5 min walk).

Just in the Alpine region, where for instance Homo neanderthalensis lived, we had

1. Biber Complex (2.6 mio to 1.9 mio years ago)
2. Danube glaciation (1.8 mio years ago)
3. Gunz complex (800 tsd to 600 tsd years ago)
4. Mindel glaciation (475 tsd to 370 tsd years ago)
5. Riss glaciation (300 tsd to 120 tsd years ago)
6. Würm glaciation (115 tsd to 10 tsd years ago)