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Thanks! It’s wild that this is a thing now. It’s like we’re living in a cyberpunk dystopia!

What, no company names to help out a fella?

The argument is that the US government doesn’t have to follow US laws when interacting with US citizens outside of the US?

That’s especially dubious when “outside the US” is referring to a legally flimsy distinction like the international terminal of an airport which is on US soil and controlled exclusively by the US government.

There’s no way this isn’t going to be abused if allowed by courts.

Using ordnance survey maps is often like navigating a minefield. The ordinance survey maps are pretty helpful though.

I don’t know. It’s alarming how many people don’t even have a rudimentary understanding of basic scientific principles. We were taught the laws of thermodynamics in elementary school here in the states in the early '90s for me.

The biggest lesson from thermodynamics is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. We may only be taking a minuscule fraction of the wind energy, but taken to an extreme there are bound to be some bad effects. In between those extremes, there are likely less predictable effects like disruption to local wind patterns.

I doubt we’re anywhere near that and there’s probably little chance of ever getting close to that without huge jet stream harvesting generators or turbines covering most of the land, but we can’t pretend that the energy is free and completely without side-effects.

Are you Dutch? Historically, Dutch engineers have handled some pretty impressive mountainous civil engineering projects.

RTGs aren’t used for power in earth orbit, because of the danger of releasing the radioactive contents on deorbit and because there’s enough sunlight here to make solar a much better option (lighter, cheaper).

RTGs are mostly used for the outer solar system where the sun is too dim to be useful.

A slop PR should be the submitter’s responsibility, but if they’re trying to push out unreviewed slop, you know they’re just going to ask an LLM to refactor it instead of looking at it themselves. The best response is just to reject it outright and have someone else work on a new solution.

Who will all have a harder time finding investor money and will meet with more skepticism as development proceeds.

Like all other aspects of our greedy scam culture, the possibility of this new battery chemistry and some of the remaining social trust has been monetized and traded for cash to line somebody’s pockets.

Because this is how research works and if we manage to get fusion power generation working well, we’ll have practically limitless clean energy available.

Fair enough (even though I could pick some nits concerning ionic (de)polarization and chemical signaling, all driven by various redox reactions and powered by aforementioned hydrocarbon oxidation).

In actuality, nearly nothing in the universe seems to be powered by electricity. Gravity powered fusion drives the stars, radioactive decay (fission) and gravity drive planetary activity, chemical (including photochemical) reactions drive life. Electrical current flow happens naturally, but it doesn’t seem like a big driving phenomenon.

Not to say that we shouldn’t use electric cars, or really electric everything. We should! It’s just that the OPs argument was dumb.

Your body runs on oxidation of hydrocarbons and generates CO2 exhaust, like an ICE engine.

In Cuba the old cars are meticulously maintained, though. In the US it will be all rusty old death traps.

[Seriously though, the bad economy is already turning the roads into this. The number of frighteningly unmaintained and crashed-but-not-repaired cars is noticeably increasing lately.]

Any problem is solvable with unlimited energy at your disposal. Protons are charged so you divert them with an electric field. If you’re using a ramjet for propulsion, you collect them to fuse. The incoming velocity could be a benefit there.

True. As much as I hate to admit it, the Windows phones were actually pretty good.

Had they not botched app adoption and then immediately given up, they could have done fairly well.

Always has been meme.

Not very well documented, that one.

For real. Thermal regulation of spacecraft is a problem that current, non-data center, satellites are struggling with and increasing the load by orders of magnitude isn’t going to make things easier. You can easily calculate the area needed for radiative heat transfer for a perfect radiator and you quickly end up with some gargantuan panels. Perfect radiators are also perfect absorbers, so the whole system goes to shit if the panel isn’t facing deep space.