Thanks, I do enjoy Mentour Pilot.

Planes already have multiple accurate ways to determine altitude though. They knew long before they got GPS, and typically do not use GPS as their primary way of sensing their height about the Earth.

Even big industrial plant kills a lot of birds. Every big mining operation kills a lot of birds.

Also the plant itself isn't the only area that becomes difficult for wildlife to survive in. Due to security concerns a much wider area has to be made safe and defensible. Trees and other plants that can conceal people cleared out, for example.

Typically they will have a power management system that limits the maximum output on a first come, first served basis.

Say you have 1000kW maximum to share between all chargers. Two cars start pulling 400kW each, and a third arrives. It will get 200kW, until one or both of the others slows do or disconnected, at which point the full 400kW will become available to it.

Some sites have batteries to increase the maximum output beyond what the grid can supply too.

Or there are a couple of manufacturers doing battery swaps, with Nio being the leader. Their latest swap stations take under 3 minutes.

50 years sounds about right. The first GPS satellite was launched in 1978. By the time they have finished approvals and started commercial deployment, it will be about half a century since GPS began operation.

The idea is much older, of course. I happen to be read The Hunt For Red October right now, and in it the Soviets have developed a system that uses the Earth's magnetic field of navigation. Accuracy is about half the length of a submarine, so better than this system, and they use it to race through under sea trenches that the US subs can't follow them through for fear of hitting a mountain.

550m is less than 10 seconds of travel time in a light aircraft, a couple of seconds in passenger jets. Knowing your position down to 1m isn't very helpful at those kinds of speeds.

Keep in mind that 550m is probably the extremes of a bell curve, so most of the time it's better than that. For navigating without visual references (at night, over seas, over barren areas, at high altitude etc.) 550m is extremely useful.

And even 550m is more than enough to tell you if your GPS is being spoofed, or your inertial navigation is way off. You aren't going to be flying within 550m of anything dangerous even if you believe your GPS is more accurate than that.

It's not just "Linux" that they need to support though, it's a dozen different distros all with a slice of that 5%. Linus Torvalds commented on it a few years ago. To support them all, with different desktops, different window managers, different software management systems, is a lot of work. Not only for companies who want to make Linux software, but for the volunteer package managers.

If you look at commercial software that does support Linux, it tends to only support one or two distros, and even then not fully. Davinci Resolve, for example, only supports a few distros and has worse codec support. Proper colour grading isn't fully supported on Linux either. It comes with a PDF to help you install it, it's far from simple.

I think spinning wind turbines look nice. Like modern day windmills. They enhance many landscapes. There is a feeling of being connected to nature as they harvest energy from the wind.

Certainly nicer than endless fields of crops and walls dividing it all up, as we have in the UK. The patchwork look isn't great.

Most studies show that nuclear power kills more birds per MWh produced, and of course fossil fuels are far worse.

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The reality is that human existence and modern life are going to have an impact on the environment, but at least with wind and solar it is minimized. With solar there can also be benefits thanks to the shade provided.

Wind turbines are a threat to fossil fuels because they push the grid to transition away from big central generation like coal and gas plants. They also make peaker plants less profitable, especially when paired with relatively small batteries.

That's one of the reasons why the fossil fuel industry supports nuclear. A new nuclear plant getting the go-ahead is another 25-30 years of fossil fuels, minimum. It ensures that the grid will remain designed around big single points of generation and failure. While the nuclear plant is being built they can keep supplying dirty energy since it acts as a placeholder for them.

It's about having a mixture of sizes and geographic locations. That improves the overall capacity factor of the fleet as a whole.

Offshore is more expensive, but has the advantage of using space that is otherwise under utilized. Also the wind is more consistent out to sea.

Hydrogen fuel cells are already obsolete for cars and utility vehicles. With 1000kW charging, long range batteries, and battery swap tech that takes a few minutes, it's just not worth the extra complexity and inconvenience of needing to produce, transport, store, and transfer hydrogen.

They may still have uses in other areas. Possibly aircraft, or very heavy machinery. Even haulage is using batteries now though. They keep improving and the cost keeps falling. LFP is also very safe.

I don't know if that's true where you are, but certainly not in the UK.

Not in relation to the cost of living though. Property, for example, has gone from 2-3x average wages to 10-12x.