P.S. look at the Dragonfly mission planned for Titan. It will have a nuclear power source, but it has the advantage of Titan’s crazily dense atmosphere and reduced gravity, so there’s no problem with lifting the RTG mass in powered flight. But that kind of flight is just not possible in the thin Mars atmosphere.

Baby mammals, including whales and dolphins, have differences in the skeleton that are well understood. I think they would know.

Nuclear needs a limited resource, NASA has enough plutonium for a single-digit number of future RTG missions. So they were never going to devote that inventory to a tech demo, which is what Ingenuity was. (It’s no longer a “demo” but they didn’t know how well it would work when it launched.)

Weight is also a huge…

It hasn’t been hit with one of those big months-long dust storms yet, thankfully. But when it does, it might not have enough battery to shake it off when it’s over. And those dust storms can make the sky very dark, so it wouldn’t be able to recharge even if the solar panel was clear.

Amazing that this thing was only planned for 5 flights, and is now on flight 54. It has turned from a tech demo to doing reconnaissance for Percy, still running 2.5 years later. Someday the dust will get it, like all the solar powered rovers before it, but not yet. (Curiosity and Perseverance are nuclear powered, so…

It could be orbital/tidal energy from the moons. Phobos loses 1.8cm/year in altitude, and will eventually cross the Roche lobe and fall apart into a ring.

Businesses? That’s even more weird. Who pays extra money to site their business on a lake unless the business needs the lake? (And how many businesses can really use one small lake?)

They do still have a link to Internet Archive with their old data. (Including the above mentioned Forte Agent.) But the company itself has moved on to other things.

Nothing lasts forever, but Lemmy, Mastodon, and other Fediverse sites have one difference from Reddit, in that no single entity controls it directly. (yet?) So it hopefully shouldn’t be damaged by the kind of corporate greed that is afflicting Reddit and Twitter. If particular instances lose their focus on important…

Oh wait, Tucows is actually still alive? It is! But not quite the same.

Even Apollo, which was a spark for many of the complaints, was ok with a charge for API access, but the problem was the timeline and the lies. January: “no, we’re not changing the API you use for years to come.” July: “you have 30 days to start paying us five times your current subscription revenue.”

but it goes without saying that you really should get out of your car on a highway unless you absolutely have to.

Yeah, but they play with their toys when they arrive at an anchorage, not the middle of the ocean where these orcas seem to be operating. And most of their toys are power, not sail, so they don’t have huge rudders.

The oligarchs usually have much bigger boats.

I certainly wasn’t trying to minimize it. But “byproduct” has a specific definition, which is that CO2 is produced which is not the primary product of the process. The word does not make a value judgement about how much CO2 is produced. And steam reforming certainly produces more CO2 than a similarly powerful methane…

But 42 is not the question.

Yeah, wake us up when it figures out how to say “I don’t know” instead of confidently spouting nonsense. (And I don’t mean the current practice of placing some topics off-limits in the limiting instructions.)

Sounds like they already went that route when designing one of the toys for an in-game robot. But that won’t help them release it for PS5.

He could change his name to Elon MuX

The whole point of the deposit is to say you are serious about it. If you’re the one who walks away, the deposit is usually forfeit. But if they change the deal, they should be refunding the deposit.