Link points at "The Unlikely Revival of Nuclear Batteries"

Yes solar panels have been used on landers that shut off during the night. That's not what we are talking about and you know it.

I agree, doesn't this mean you can't change any reported numbers without throwing away all later reported numbers? Seems a method to lock in incorrect amounts and outlaw readjustments when more information becomes available.

Bridges are actually straight. The curves are on land.

However the basic problem is that raising the maximum speed is not going to make any difference when the previous trains couldn't reach their maximum speed either.

The coast is not the straightest route. The straightest would pretty much follow the 5 freeway. I have heard it would have been less expensive to build as straight a line as possible PLUS build a branch that went to Fresno anyway.

What has killed it is NIMBYs and also a lot of land owners who realized they could demand any amount of money they wanted to build some tracks on their land.

Reading the rest of the article, the "grid" in the proposal has a radius of 2km, so it is a small circle about the south pole. Apparently this is long enough to reach the permenantly-shadowed craters. It's not some kind of moon-wide grid.

Holy crap, I suppose when I said "night is too long" I have to also say "except for the spots on the moon where there is no night" so you could not nitpick your way out of this. Ok, show me a proposal for solar panels IN THE NIGHT. And also the article says: "Astrobotic hasn’t ruled out nuclear—it has partnered with Westinghouse to develop fission reactors for a joint NASA/Department of Energy contract."

And thanks for proving my point with your rant against batteries. You obviously don't actually care whether nuclear power is used.

It sounds to me like the flight was successful, nothing blew up that they did not intend to. They did intend for it to crash into the ocean as It did.

I'm not sure why they didn't catch the booster however, as they seem to have figured that out and done it many times.

If these hydrocarbons replace other hydrocarbons that are no longer dug out of the ground, this is a net reduction.

Does anybody know if this product could be used to make more plastic? That would reduce the CO2 output. Also making plastic does produce waste CO2, so maybe it would be more like crude > CO2+PVC > petrol > CO2+PVC > ...

Nobody ever suggested trying solar on the surface of the moon (the nights are too long). You are making things up, which is why people get called shills. Also disingenuous attempts to discredit batteries and electric vehicles even though they can be charged by nukes as well as solar, because you think some requirement that hydrocarbons be synthesized will force nukes to be used.

Why is "nuclear energy off the table"?

But anyway it is pretty obvious that solar and wind have a serious overcapacity problem in order to deal with variation in wind/sun, and it is plausible that this excess energy could be used to sequester CO2. A nuke could also provide energy to do this (most likely not because it was built much larger than necessary, but because demand for electricity varies and it has to be built large enough for the maximum).

This isn't "synthesizing hydrocarbon fuels" the plastic was originally created from hydrocarbon fuels and a lot of the chemical bonds are still there.

I agree that actual synthesis is incredibly inefficient and worthless, unless perhaps you are at war and the enemy has sunk all your refueling tankers, or you are stranded on Mars and need to refill your spaceship. That is the only two cases any proponents have ever come up with where it might be worth it.

I'm starting a new venture, all by myself, to design an AI that will assist people in differentiating between Solo entrepreneurs, Han Solo, and Solo drinking cups when they are mentioned online. I'm ready to go, just gimme my VC capital! What, you won't do that? You must be biased against Solo!!!!!

DRM means authenticating through a server (someplace), correct?

DMCA defines a "technological measure which limits access" (what we informally refer to as "DRM") in 1201(a)(3)(b) as

a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

Authenticating through a server is one way to implement DRM, but there are many other methods, where DMCA is every bit as applicable.

the DMCA is a thing... but can they do anything if they don't know about you copying/transcoding files to your phone or tablet or whatever?

Generally no, and especially with offline DRM schemes like what DVDs use, the copyright holder can't detect when you read the DVD, so right, you won't get caught. But of course the worst part of DMCA is not that it just prohibits doing things, but prohibits trafficking in tools for doing things. So the software for working with DVD DRM is illegal to create, distribute, sell, etc which means I-know-nothing-about-computers grandma would have to go off the mainstream.

If grandma is a punk rock computer user, no problem. But most people these days apparently want to go to a centralized authority (probably within their own legal jurisdiction) and just click to install things, and any centralized authority is going to be at least somewhat vulnerable to trafficking charges. Or if they solve that problem by being outside US jurisdiction, they might have payment processing issues.

Again, you're not wrong that you can do these things with DVDs (I see how being able to watch them on an unconnected-to-internet bus definitely helps, compared to proprietary streaming) but there are barriers keeping it from being a general solution for everyone. Media without DRM lacks this problem.

Presumably more. MT's user ID is from the 90s.That's when I signed up.