The United Nations overwhelmingly said it was justified, and more to the point, was authorized by the U.N. Security Council, and one of the two resolutions was unanimous; the other had 5 abstentions (the usual suspects). The United Nations overwhelmingly said Russia's invasion of Ukraine was unjustified. These are not the same.

Afghanistan provided material support to and knowingly harbored a terrorist organization that hijacked aircraft and flew them into the World Trade Center, killing thousands of Americans.

A rational person would say that it has been in their interests for many years. Russia has continually attacked its neighbors on so many occasions that I've lost count. And Russia's tendency to buddy up with the most tyrannical world leaders and support them against international punishment for crimes against humanity has made the world a far worse place on an ongoing basis almost continuously since World War II.

The world would almost certainly be better off if Russia's current leadership were buried under a ton of rocket rubble. Yet the U.S. has not attacked. Do you honestly believe that it is because they haven't brought Ukraine into NATO, and because that extra 200 miles compared with Finland is an insurmountable distance? Do you honestly believe that if NATO decided to go to war with Russia, Finland wouldn't have helped even before they joined NATO? Or Türkiye, or Georgia, or Azerbaijan, or any of the other dozen countries bordering Russia that pretend to be friends with Russia out of fear, but actually hate Russia's government and would love to dance while watching it burn?

Tell me you're not serious. Russia isn't afraid of NATO attacking it. Russia just recognizes that every country that joins NATO is one more country that it can't bully into doing what it wants them to do. Russia recognizes that it won't be able to put puppet governments in NATO countries, because the elections will be monitored more closely. Russia recognizes that it won't have the level of regional power that it currently enjoys because of its aggressive, bullying, almost sociopathically militaristic behavior towards its neighbors.

Again, if Russia is doing nothing wrong, Russia has no reason to fear NATO. The problem is that Russia is pretty much always doing something wrong. And that's the real issue here. The last time the U.S. invaded one of its neighbors was 1846 to 1848. In that same time, Russia in one of its various incarnations has probably done so triple-digit times.

And to the extent that Russia does fear NATO because of a genuine belief that NATO is going to invade, that's just because its what they would do in their place. In other words, it's irrational, and represents Russia's gross failure to understand the rest of the world, coupled with a naïve belief that everyone else would act like them if they could.

I remember the first time I saw someone interrupt their video to show a short clip of something vaguely relevant that was much better than anything they did.

I was so pissed. I hate those things. It is the ultimate admission of your own stupidity - trying to do an in joke with strangers. Strangers! Worse, often they do it so poorly. OK, some people may like this crap, but not me.

Now AI is basically the same principal but worse - copying funny people because you think it makes you funny. No. real comedy requires timing and so much more, and AI does not have it. I hope it never does.

There has always been the good stuff, the people trying but failing to do the good stuff and the people who have no idea what good stuff is.

The reason people think X was better 10+ years ago is simple. You are comparing the absolute best stuff from all of history with the crap people put out this year. It's like comparing a random film today with the Oscar winners of the last 50 years. Of course the best of fifty years is going to be better than the best of this year.

That does not mean this year is crap - you have to wait for the oscars and compare the winners of this year with the winner of a single year 20 years ago.

Same thing with the internet. We forgot how much crap used to exist and only remember the good stuff. Now we have a lot more crap being put out. But don't compare the current crap with the award winners of yesteryear. Compare the best stuff of today with what came out 20 years ago and you see marked IMPROVEMENT over the past 20 years.

Let's see:

• Serbia: Stopping mass genocide (on my list of reasons above).
• Kosovo: Stopping mass genocide (on my list of reasons above).
• Libya: Enforcing UN no-fly zone mandate (peacekeeping, on my list of reasons above).
• Afghanistan: Defensive/retaliation for a direct attack on the United States (on my list of reasons above).
• Iraq: Not a NATO mission. The only actual NATO-authorized action in Iraq was providing training for Iraq's security forces *after* the 2003 mission.

Care to try again?

In comparison with Russia, yes, it's tiny. Russia's military was somewhere around 3 million including reservists, versus 980k for Ukraine. And Russia has almost five times the population, which means almost five times as many people who could potentially be conscripted.

The part you're conveniently omitting is that the number is that low only because so many of them died. Russia has *lost* over a million troops since the war began three years ago. The fact that only 150k were in the battlefield at any given time only makes that number more shocking, because it means they sent wave after wave of people to be slaughtered.

Put another way, Russia has already *lost* more troops than Ukraine ever had.

I maintain my original statement.

Ah, but here's the thing. NATO is a defensive organization. In approximately every NATO military action, either the legitimate ousted leadership of a country asked for NATO's help, NATO was acting defensively, NATO was acting to stop mass genocide, or NATO was providing peacekeeping forces to stabilize a region. NATO is not a military force that goes out and attacks other countries unprovoked, and it never has been.

So the only reason Russia should consider NATO expansion to be a threat is if they intend to attack their neighbors and subjugate them.

So are you saying that Russia is dangerous to all the countries around it and can't be trusted to follow international law and stay the f**k out of neighboring countries' sovereign territory?

No, Russia funded paramilitary terror groups and had them take over Donetsk and Luhansk by force. And after eight years of fighting, Moscow invaded to make it easier to provide weapons for their proxy army.

That's some pretty seriously messed up propaganda you're spewing there. In the entire history of NATO, it has engaged in non-defensive, non-peacekeeping wars how many times again? And you think it is going to suddenly start now because...

Horseshit. Russia sent people into the Donbas to rile them up and stoke anti-government sentiment after Ukraine's previous Russian puppet leader got ousted. Russia provided money and weapons for paramilitary groups (otherwise known as "state-sponsored terrorists") to rise up against the government of Ukraine and divide the country.

The Donbas region had not done anything to separate from Ukraine even one day before they requested assistance from Moscow. Russia funded and supported the DPR and LPR secession attempt from the very beginning.

What invasion? It was their country. The closest thing that region had to invaders were the Russia-backed terrorists who took over part of the country. They were a fringe group that took control of the territory at gunpoint and caused most of the population to flee. Were some of the people fighting for a right of return for those refugees bad people? Maybe. Do I care? No.

There's a right way to secede in the modern era, and it isn't with a violent overthrow of the government. See Brexit for an example. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who took money and/or weapons from a foreign government and used them to overthrow their own government gave up any claim to moral high ground long ago.

You said it, not me.

Only because Ukraine wiped out all of Russia's tanks right off the bat, shot down a large percentage of their missiles and drones, etc. Russia had more soldiers, but their technology is so far behind that Ukraine has basically been holding them back with a relatively tiny force, and at this point, Russia has lost so many troops that they're having to borrow some from other countries in bulk just to keep the war going.

Russia hasn't killed many civilians because they have basically lost rather badly, despite dogged determination to turn it into a win, no matter how pyrrhic.

The U.S. should have done that a long time ago, IMO. There should have been a U.N. peacekeeping force in Gaza and the West Bank for the last thirty years, and then we wouldn't be dealing with any of this s**t over there.

But although the best time to do that would have been decades ago, the second best time is now. It's not too late to fix that mistake.

Not true. We could easily sustain far more people. But most countries don't want people from other countries these days because of a combination of xenophobia and a nationalistic desire for their resources to be used for their own people instead of supporting random refugees. So instead, we allow 1% of our population to hold a third of our nation's wealth and basically squander all of those resources, most of which will likely never be spent or used for anything worthwhile.

We live in a screwed up world.

Alternative spelling : Just think of it as Evolution in Action.

(With the caveat that people need to do the Reddit thing before dying without issue, to have maximal eugenic effect.)

They must have run into very strange and unexpected artefacts to have to rely on machine learning to correct this...

Or someone developed a new deconvolution algorithm some time between feature freeze on the instrument package (2012, thereabouts?) and today, and it turned out to be particularly more useful with the AMI focussing-aid.

But it's on-the-ground post-processing, so it can be retrospectively applied by any researcher on their "proprietary" period data, and by anyone else to non-proprietary data in the STSI archive.

Do you have any idea how competitive the process of getting observation time on JWST is? Something approaching 10% of time requests get granted. The other 90% don't get granted.

Your sketched procedure fails at

1. Take lots of photos of the same shot

And again at

2. Repeat step 1 for a lot of overlapping images

Curiosity (and Perseverance) are in a different situation - while the arm/ drill/ XRF tools are nose-up on a rock doing one set of analyses, the cameras can be more-or-less independently pursuing the sort of photographic oversampling you're talking about. The data from, say, an hour of XRF scanning is going to use a lot less bandwidth to Earth than an hour of imaging data.

Building design tends to go for a 2:1 safety margin between expected loads and design strengths. Bridges tend to be a lot more conservative 6:1 or 8:1 between design strength : expected load.

There are good arguments you can have whether a design (and construction process) should have an 8:1 safety margin, or a 6: 1 margin, into which you can easily get a 60% materials cost. If you can justify the lower safety factor and lower cost.

As the Forth road bridge example I just mentioned upthread illustrates, changes in vehicle design can seriously impact the expectations for a structure. The introduction through the 1980s of increased lorry weights from 28 tonnes when the bridge was designed and built to a maximum of 44 tonnes when a replacement bridge was commissioned lead to increased rates of wire breakages in the suspension cables and ... well you (and the bridge managers) can see where that's going to end up.

So, order of a hundred years?

Note : you asked about "bones", not fossils. The process of turning a bone (any tissue, really, but most often a bone or a tooth, for a vertebrate) into a fossil is a subject of it's own, stretching in effects from forensic science, through archæology and into regular palæontology Look up "taphonomy".

A 100 year lifetime isn't at all unreasonable for a structure. No structure is eternal (though the Pyramids are making a decent attempt - they'll probably not make it beyond their half-million).

I was driving over the new Forth road bridge recently, eyeballing the 140-odd year old riveted cast iron of the Rail Bridge, and the old road suspension bridge (which made it past it's 50 year design life but didn't make it's century because of increases in vehicle loads and counts leading to accelerating wear rates). I wonder how they're going to bring the old road bridge down? Dismantling, or dynamite? There are enough ships using that channel that dynamite has a *lot* of difficulties.

The sheer irony of Microsoft - Microsoft, of all people/ corporations - protesting about the bad effects of ransomware and extortionate demands.

I don't know if you could make up something as funny intentionally, but it's certainly beyond me.

How many people drive a pickup with a huge cargo bed that only gets used a couple times a year?

In this country? I can't remember seeing one that didn't have a company's logos down the side. Oh - tell a lie ; one of my neighbours uses one. It's a day-to-day load shifter for his building work business, but he doesn't waste money on vinyls for it. He has a normal car too, and they alternate on the street outside his apartment.