Sorry. Not casting aspersions on you, just despairing at the situation.

The math leans towards the former, but when the two hypotheses suggested by the data are “we are actively and selectively targeting noncombatants” and “we just don’t give half a shit who we’re killing,” in a sane world you’d be universally branded as “the baddies” in the conflict.

On most carriers this is code for “coach, but it’s an exit row so we’ll charge extra for the legroom.”

In that case (as is the case with most games) the near-worst case scenario is that you are no worse off trusting Valve with the management of item data than you would be if it was in a public block chain. Why? Because those items are valueless outside the context of the commercial game they are used in. If Valve shuts down CS:GO tomorrow, owning your skins as a digital asset on a blockchain wouldn’t give you any more protection than the current status quo, because those skins are entirely dependent on the game itself to be used and viewed – it’d be akin to holding stock certificates for a company that’s already gone bankrupt and been liquidated: you have a token proving ownership of something that doesn’t exist anymore.

Sure, there’s the edge case that if your Steam account got nukes from orbit by Gaben himself along with all its purchase and trading history you could still cash out on your skin collection, Conversely, having Valve – which, early VAC-ban wonkiness notwithstanding, has proven itself to be a generally-trustworthy operator of a digital games storefront for a couple decades now – hold the master database means that if your account got hacked and your stuff shifted off the account to others for profit, it’s much easier for Valve support to simply unwind those transactions and return your items to you. Infamously, in the case of blockchain ledgers, reversing a fraudulent transaction often requires forking the blockchain.

The idea has merit, in theory – but in practice, in the vast majority of cases, having a trusted regulator managing the system, who can proactively step in to block or unwind suspicious activity, turns out to be vastly preferable to the “code is law” status quo of most blockchain implementations. Not to mention most potential applications really need a mechanism for transactions to clear in seconds, rather than minutes to days, and it’d be preferable if they didn’t need to boil the oceans dry in the process of doing so.

If I was really reaching, I could maybe imagine a valid use case for say, a hypothetical, federated open source game that needed to have a trusted way for every node to validate the creation and trading of loot and items, that could serve as a layer of protection against cheating nodes duping items, for instance. But that’s insanely niche, and for nearly every other use case a database held by a trusted entity is faster, simpler, safer, more efficient, and easier to manage.

There are sophisticated and nuanced critiques to be made of Western power projection, soft and hard. “Nuanced” and “sophisticated” are not words appropriate to the average hexbear or lemmygrad denizen’s take on geopolitics, and for those of us who live in the real world rather than living to argue over how many Maos can dance on the tip of the icepick that killed Trotsky, the loud and unrelenting naysaying of anything less extreme than “armed proletarian revolution now!” got to be incredibly tiresome, not to mention the constant cheerleading of brutally-repressive regimes that don’t have any values in common with actual socialists or communists just because they oppose the US and its allies.

Please be moddable…

With regard to this specific issue, you don’t even have to go looking for cases of young women being discouraged from reporting rape and sexual assault allegations against promising young athletes, because “think how you could hurt his future prospects” – examples are so plentiful that you can’t help but find them if you spend any time reviewing sports news. It’s really only been in the last decade or so that anybody has seriously pushed back against the idea that Johnny Sportsball’s ability to score points for the local team is more important than the safety and bodily autonomy of women.

A combination of resting on their laurels during AMD’s lost decade, and failure to retain competitive process technology during the extended gestation and ultimate failure of their non-EUV 10nm node. The arrogance of taking their foot off the gas and assuming nobody would ever catch back up to them backfired hard.

The reverse. OceanGate saw how planes were being built and said, “let’s do that for submersibles!” even though in airplanes, composites are subjected to <1 atmosphere of tension loading and <2g aerodynamic loading, whereas their submersible was going to be subjected to >400 atmospheres of compression loading, and a much more corrosive environment.

Composites in aircraft have a fairly long and uncontroversial history, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with them in that application. The biggest problem with composites is what happens with them at the end of their service life. Finding ways to recycle them without compromising safety is a good thing, and if it weren’t for Boeing having such a damaged reputation at the moment I think nobody would bat an eye.

The average American house on a basement will have something like 40 m^3 of concrete in its foundation. If all of it could be utilized, that’s still ~12kWhr of storage capacity. Nothing to be sneezed at.

Any time you see perovskite-based cells mentioned, you can assume for the time being that it’s just R&D. Perovskites are cool materials that open up a lot of neat possibilities, like cheaply inkjet-printing PV cells, but they have fundamental durability issues in the real world. When exposed to water, oxygen, and UV light, the perovskite crystals break down fairly rapidly.

That’s not to say that the tech can’t be made to work – at least one lab team has developed cells with longevity similar to silicon PVs – but somebody’s going to have to come up with an approach that solves for performance, longevity, and manufacturability all at once, and that hasn’t happened yet. I imagine that when they do, that will be front-and-center in the press release, rather than just an efficiency metric.

This is actually becoming somewhat commonplace. For example, in many cutting-edge cancer therapies, blood is drawn from the patient, processed in tissue-culture suites on site to extract the patient’s immune cells and sensitize them to some marker expressed by their specific cancer cells, and then the modified immune cells are returned to the patient room and transfused back into their bodies. It’s not cheap per se but it’s something that most top-tier cancer centers can do, and to do the similar process of extracting stem cells, inducing them to transform into pancreatic islet cells, and transplanting those into the patient’s pancreas isn’t that big of a jump – and it’d be cheaper than a lifetime of insulin in any case. It also points the way towards treating other kinds of organ failure without the risk of rejection, too.

Data center cooling towers can be closed- or open-loop, and even operate in a hybrid mode depending on demand and air temps/humidity. Problem is, the places where open-loop evaporative cooling works best are arid, low-humidity regions where water is a scarce resource to start.

On the other hand, several of the FAANGS are building datacenters right now in my area, where we’re in the watershed of the largest river in the country, it’s regularly humid and rainy, any water used in a given process is either treated and released back into the river, or fairly quickly condenses back out of the atmosphere in the form of rain somewhere a few hundred miles further east (where it will eventually collect back into the same river). The only way that water is “wasted” in this environment has to do with the resources used to treat and distribute it. However, because it’s often hot and humid around here, open loop cooling isn’t as effective, and it’s more common to see closed-loop systems.

Bottom line, though, I think the siting of water-intensive industries in water-poor parts of the country is a governmental failure, first and foremost. States like Arizona in particular have a long history of planning as though they aren’t in a dry desert that has to share its only renewable water resource with two other states, and offering utility incentives to potential employers that treat that resource as if it’s infinite. A government that was focused on the long-term viability of the state as a place to live rather than on short-term wins that politicians can campaign on wouldn’t be making those concessions.

I mean, if nothing else they got Republicans to embrace gun control.

I exaggerate – but Magic Rock is doing booming business installing strings of natural gas generators at Buc-ee’s across the state, and I’m currently dealing with an institutional client who wanted to provide backup power for a satellite campus, and didn’t even stop to consider battery-backed PV on the way to asking for a natural gas generator farm.

If it ain’t leaking that means it’s empty, etc…

My grandfather was a Marine and later a Secret Service agent. He didn’t tell many stories, but one of the few he did was about riding a helicopter down to the ground through autorotation during engine-out testing – this was apparently while they were qualifying the original Marine One for Eisenhower’s use.

Helicopters are sometimes rightly derided as “a collection of spare parts flying in loose formation” but in this case it seems like they were spitting in the face of God and daring him to do something about it – flying into dangerous terrain, in inclement weather, in what very likely was an old and ill-maintained aircraft. That’s a lot of bad choices to make at once.

It’s not a coincidence that Texas is a hotbed of development for “microgrid” systems to cover for when ERCOT shits the bed – and of course all those systems are made up of diesel and natural gas generator farms, because Texans don’t want any of that communist solar power!

I’ve got family in Texas who love it there for some reason, but there’s almost no amount of money you could pay me to move there. Bad enough when I have to work on projects in the state – contrary to the popular narrative, in my personal opinion it’s a worse place than California to try and build something, and that’s entirely to do with the personalities that seem to gravitate to positions of power there. I’d much rather slog through the bureaucracy in Cali than tiptoe around a tinpot dictator in the planning department.

The only link I am aware of is that Intel operates an R&D center in Haifa (which, it happens, is responsible for the Pentium M architecture that became the Core series of CPUs that saved Intel’s bacon after they bet the farm on Netburst and lost to Athlon 64). Linkerbaan’s apparent reinvention of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the contrary, the only real link seems to be that Haifa office, which exists to tap into the pool of talented Israeli electronics and semiconductor engineers.