Most of the PhDs I've known are in the private sector, doing basic research for companies.

PhDs don't have to work in academia while still being able to use their degrees.

Shouldn't it be possible to design farm equipment that could run off of diesel fuel for the short term but switch to E85 once ethanol-producing agriculture is scaled for it?

I mention E85 because as a hydrocarbon its carbon comes from the atmosphere and photosynthesis pays some of the energy costs associated with producing it. It's not digging up carbon long-sequestered deep in the ground in order to burn it, it's taking carbon out of the air, turning it into fuel, then burning the fuel to release it back into the air. Engines that run on E85 commonly have compression ratios of around 14:1, while diesels tend to start around 15:1. Seems like it's merely an engineering problem to design farm equipment that would initially run on existing fuel production but could migrate to a new fuel when it's produced in sufficient quantity.

The effects of cold welding are reasonably well known in vacuum conditions; it would not be a surprise if this effect is essentially attributable to it. Would be nice to be proven otherwise though, particularly if such effects could be seen within Earth's ambient atmosphere at STP conditions.

I feel I can be outraged. I have a Samsung 24" display that I brought into work and it stopped working. Fortunately work was willing to replace the display that I had sourced with one in work's inventory, but it was very annoying that a 1920x1200 display with DVI and HDMI inputs had its drivers removed and would only run at 640x480.

...then there's not a lot of difference compared to the status quo.

My point was to reduce the dependence on it, not to try to eliminate it. At this point we've invented so many uses for the leftover oil byproducts from the fuel refining process that I doubt we'll be able to truly eliminate them, but if the petroleum wax, or the polystyrene coating is net reduction in the quantity of oil required compared to making the full-plastic bottles.

Also fund research into those non-petroleum plastics and create and enforce labeling laws, so that consumers can know with certainty that if they're buying these alternative plastics what exactly goes in to them.

You're treating this like it's a binary proposition.

The GP post is correct, if it's left in the ground then the carbon in the hydrocarbon soup remains contained, sequestered. The GP post didn't say anything about all of the byproducts that society has become accustomed to, you brought up all of that.

A great many products that people buy and use only exist or came to exist because of a desire to find a use for the byproducts of crude oil refining for fuel purposes. There are other ways of accomplishing the tasks that many of these products do. Hell, it's not a stretch of an argument that products made from wood, where the growth and harvest of timber is managed, are closer to zero-carbon since forests get their carbon from the air itself. So even if the wood products are burned at the end of their usefulness, they're just releasing the carbon taken from the air right back into the air again. And they don't even have to be burned, they can be landfilled, leaving the carbon captured from the original timber further captured.

We would do well as a planet if we reduced our dependence on crude oil for transportation and heat, and stopped making excuses for why we need cheap plastic crap that was invented to use the byproducts left of from producing petroleum-fuels as justification for pumping oil. We may never stop pumping oil as it has proven itself useful, but removing it from the ground simply to burn it when there are other energy sources available is wasteful.

I'm not sure. I myself made a similar argument about GUI management tools when the CLI tools were still required for troubleshooting, advanced configuration, and other similar things. I was concerned that the use of the 'dumb GUI tool' would lead to generations of IT engineers that couldn't fall back on basic principles.

In my thought experiment I was proven wrong, but only out of those GUI tools failing to provide a complete enough solution to begin with that the IT engineers could forego the CLI. They simply haven't. The CLI is still required because either the GUI tool can't do everything, or the GUI tool can't troubleshoot for shit, or the GUI tool itself breaks. So I guess technically the jury's still out on my own little thought experiment, but if AI works similarly to the GUI tool then there's going to be a lot of tinkering to make things operate anyway.

yes. It would seem that when it comes down to it, actually doing the work is what causes one to learn the material and basically shortcuts don't result in learning the material.

For what it's worth I didn't even like taking notes on a computer, I liked taking them by hand. And don't get me wrong, I don't like handwriting and my penmanship leaves a lot to be desired. I just found that if I wrote out my notes on paper that I learned the material, I did not even have to refer back to said notes most of the time. The act of writing them down helped me learn far more than typing the notes did.

This feels more MD Delta Clipper than anything else to me. To me the interesting part isn't that a rocket has flown this test, the interesting part is that Honda has chosen to get in on this.

But then again, Chrysler had been a major contractor on Apollo, so it's not like there isn't precedent for automakers to get in to rather unexpected markets.

I was assuming that they were mandating that these so-ordered officials stop using digital communications themselves altogether, phones or otherwise.

While sometimes there's strategy in communicating exactly what one is going to do when one is in such an overwhelming position to where the adversary knowing what's coming can't do anything about it to the point that it might be even more demoralizing and force and advantage, I doubt that the method that the drunkard used is going to achieve that.

Obviously one of the problems with the use of any given technology during wartime is that if it isn't local, there's a reasonably good chance that there will be attempts by one's adversary to use that technology against one in some capacity.

For traditional conflicts before the computer age this was often a matter of raw materials or finished products being denied delivery. In the IT age it means things like hidden subroutines to degrade performance or outright disable or damage systems, or to snoop or locate.

So yeah, Iran is using the same Internet protocols and other systems that the rest of the world uses, and there are lots of known issues with those open protocols, and that's even before getting to the hardware itself, where it sources from, and what sort of backdoors or other penetration into that hardware might have been achieved by Israel. If Iran is mostly using commercial, off-the-shelf equipment that anyone including Israel could purchase same as they did then I have no doubt that samples have been obtained and put through testing.

Musk hasn't ever taken his own rockets into space.

Don't get me wrong, this is not a defense of him, I'm only pointing out that if he had gone fully down the road that Rush did, he would have been getting into a capsule and blasting off.

Unfortunately the collegiate football system is a perfect example of giving them what they want. Alumni and students want football enough that the programs are very popular and thus are competing for coaches and even players. Some college football programs are even directly profitable through ticket sales, merchandise sales, and media licensing.

The reason why all professional football players went to college is because there is no 'farm' system for football players separate from the college system. There's no minor-league or farm-team like baseball and hockey use. Basketball is largely similar to football in that regard, but at least for basketball there are international leagues and a few other places for players to gain experience other than using the collegiate system, even if it is still the most common way.