Cheap.

Before my employer sacked their field staff and became a software-only company, we were charging $15000 per seat per year, and enforcing the lease with a week's worth of value of cryptographic dongle.

I dread to think how they're dealing with Recall. Probably have to air gap the machines from the Internet. Because the data being processed and presented is just ever so slightly commercially valuable.

All the dragons I've seen report of have had unmineralised shells.

Sorry - I take it back - Rowling had titchy dragons who were small enough to have mineralised shells.

Remember - the baby dragon (or ostrich) has got to break out through that shell. It puts a very real biomechanical limit on how thick the shell can be. The upper limit is the (extinct) Elephant Bird of Madagascar, unless someone has come up with a bigger bird. (Moas were in the same size range ; but I had to check.)

Yes, that news came through last night.

Well, "coma". "Atmosphere" in only the most temporary of senses. The average particle won't bump into another particle before it has left the vicinity of the comet and half way across the inner solar system.

As of this lunch time, nobody was reporting a visible tail that I'd seen. It's coming fairly straight-on towards us - about 15 off-direct, I estimate, so we'll struggle to see past the head for a while. Come ... August (?), we'll have a bit of an angle to it and see the tail. Unfortunately, it'll be approaching the Sun in the sky by then.

Which is why the window of opportunity for viewing it from the space telescopes is short, and rapidly closing. A bit better for the armada around Mars, but not much better.

When did the Milky Way get a bar,

I don't recall it being mentioned in the 1970s ; don't remember it mentioned in the 1980s ; was hearing mention of it in the 1990s, and definitely in the 2000s. I'll guess it came out of IR (dust-cloud penetrating) ground and space surveys in the 1980s.

and why haven't we been invited to it yet?

The invite is on the back side of Pluto, and we're meant to take Charon as our entry ticket. I don't think they're interested in primitives who can't even travel 50,000 ly carrying a 1000km dirty snowball.

It was assigned that name (for the telescope/ sensor/ computer system that found it) yesterday afternoon - sorry, the day before yesterday, now ; just after midnight, UT. In the same way that 2I is "Borisov" (the discoverer), and throwing 1I/`Oumuamua into contrast whose discoverers chose to give it a different name. Normal service has been resumed on the "interstellar object naming" front.

The discovery system has a name which is an acronym, and in their hundreds (thousands) of other discoveries they've maintained that capitalisation. But someone is going to try to "correct" them.

Occasionally ephemerides are calculated in geocentric coordinates - Earth-centred ones - but normally that's kept for Earth-orbiting objects and (potential) impactors. (I was reading up on this last night, and the author of one of the tools for converting observations (two angles, a time, and a brightness) commented that he'd only rarely came across a body that needed selenographic coordinates (Moon-centred), and and they'd all been artificial satellites, never a natural body.)

Generally the calculations are done in Solar coordinates - Sun-centred - though that particular software will by default switch to Jovian coordinates if the MOID for Jupiter is low, or the semi-major axis is close to Jupiter's - becasue there are 10s of thousands of "trojan" asteroids co-orbiting with Jupiter, compared to a few dozen for Earth and mars, and a few hundred for Saturn. With that caveat, almost all the calculations are done in Solar coordinates.

(And indeed, having RTF-ephemerides, yes, the quoted figures are in Solar coordinates ; it's a default calculation.)

1I/`Oumuamua was at approximately "local rest" with respect to the stars in the Sun's vicinity, and we sort-of "ran into it". (The Sun and the Solar system has a significant velocity to most of the nearby stars ; you need to cast the net wider - a few hundred light years - to get a meaningful average. Corollary : the nearest star to the Solar system has changed in the last few myriads of years (10,000 yrs) and will do again repeatedly in the future.)

3I/ATLAS (named for the telescope/ computer system that detected it, which is an acronym, so capitalized) has about twice the velocity compared to 1I/`Oumuamua, and in a considerably different direction, so has a substantial velocity compared to the "local standard of rest".

That it's coming from (broadly) the direction of the centre of the Galaxy is suggestive, but not terribly informative - we already knew violent things happen in there.

Except ... people have been arguing about "are all type Ia supernovæ the same?" since the 1980s, to my personal knowledge, and probably longer. So there has always been a weighting factor included in the calculation of the results which should reduce the effect of actually demonstrating that this, that, and those SN Ia are SN Ia2 while those are SN Ia1.

I'd expect the error bars to increase, moderately.

This doesn't affect the other steps in the "cosmic distance ladder". The red shift calibration against Cepheid variables (remember the 1940s discovery that there are two types of Cepheid, with different period : absolute luminosity relations, and how that completely didn't upend the rest of cosmology?) remains valid. Maybe a bit noisier if the SN1a[1 or 2] records need some sorting out, and possibly re-observation. It's not as if SN aren't already observed for years after their explosion until their light curves are lost against their host galaxy.

There were already hints that the infamous "Hubble Tension", between the CMB derived values for H_0 and the near-universe derived values for H_0 could be due to a systematic error in the "cosmic distance ladder", and this could be just the thing needed to remove the ~10% offset between the two types of estimate and bring them into alignment.

So, 2.92% total for all other versions of Windows combined, plus Macs, Linuxen, BSDen and everything else.

Do try to be credible. That won't even cover the number of machines not connected to the Internet (so, incapable of getting force-updated by MS).

The sun is hurtling around the solar system at ~230 kps (relative to the local standard rest frame), but so is the asteroid.

Since both objects can be considered to be orbiting the milky way at the same speed, we generally consider that speed to be zero for the purposes of comparison, and only compare the two objects motion relative to each other.

I know that a decade or so ago we did not have the ability to detect and monitor all objects capable of destroying life on Earth yet. Do we now have that ability? Are we now identifying and tracking every potential candidate of that kind, or is that even possible?

He absolutely was hit by the shock wave from a passing bullet, which caused visible damage to his ear.
Yes the metal of the bullet did not touch him, if it had there would not be much left of that side of his head.

WTF? You think the US government trusted what the Soviets said?

Also that is "federal income taxes". The poor pay a huge higher percentage of their income on sales taxes and fees than the rich.

So the bottom 50% have 2.5% of the wealth, and pay 3% of the taxes. Got it.

Things are getting really bad when some of the top 10% are now considered part of the middle. There is a cutoff, maybe 5%, above which the effective tax rate goes way down.