Re: And yet
"blaming Russia."
Clearly it must have been "rouge engineers" :-)
Yeah, the rouge one, thanks ------------->
25246 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"I suspect this couple will spend no more than five years in prison."
Considering the FBI had enough to arrest/charge/go to court with the evidence passed to them from Brazil right at the start, I wonder what the sentence would have been then, rather than spending probably $millions on a two year honeypot sting getting the offenders in deeper and deeper?
It almost sounds as if instead of some minor FBI official getting a couple of brownie points, a higher up saw an expensive way of grabbing many brownie points for him/her self.
How many spaceports does Virginia have that this one needs such a specific and distinctive name?
Or is that there are a number of "regional" spaceports such as North Atlantic and South Atlantic, possibly also in Virginia, with which we may get confused?
And why "Mid-Atlantic"? Why not West Atlantic? After all, they can't have an East Atlantic space port. That would be in Ireland, the UK, Spain, Portugal, France etc.
"On the other hand, I haven't heard much from/about him lately,"
I think he spends much of his time at his EU based holiday home dealing with his EU business interests.
I do wonder if some of the high profile Brexiteers didn't want Brexit to improve the UK, but secretly thought the EU would be better off after Brexit as many of them seem to have significant EU business interests.
"Losses are greater if it's in GEO,"
Assuming the power is beamed tightly enough to keep it focussed on the receiving station such that it doesn't cook the people and wildlife outside the area, how much extra loss is there between LEO and GEO? Loss is normally defined as the inverse square law, but isn't that based on a point source with an ever expanding "zone of reception"? I'd think most of the loss would the the final leg of the journey through the atmosphere. Am I completely off base here?
Yeahbut, those hedgerows are ecosystems vital to the survival of $something!!!! You can't save the planet by killing stuff, oh nooooo!
On a slightly more serious note, any field used only for sheep grazing should be good for solar panels even using the standard mounting systems used now. I doubt the sheep would care. They might even be grateful for the extra shade in summer or, more commonly, somewhere to shelter from the rain :-) Cows, not so much. They'd probably knock them over using them as scratching posts, even of they were built taller to allow the cows to move around more freely.
And then there's fields of solar panels mounted vertically, south facing which apparently only reduces capacity by a small amount but still allows the machinery to get in and plant/maintain/harvest crops. between the rows of panels.
"The US has never been a democracy. It is, and has always been, a constitutional republic."
Considering that, so far, 124 people have been elected to power that have publicly stated that Donald Trump "really won" the 2020 Presidential election, it may not even be that for much longer.
1. People have short attention spans
2. All publicity is good publicity.
If a name or brand is in the news, people quickly forget why, but still remember the name.
Here in the UK, a major ISP, Talk Talk, got hacked TWICE, losing large amount of customer information, and people are STILL signing up to them.
On another note, I see Chase Bank are coming to the UK.
It's surprising how much you really need to pack in and live a life of relative luxury in foreign climes. Most people severly underestimate how much they need to start how hard they need to keep "working" with their money and investments to keep that standard.
I remember naively thinking back when I bought my first house that if the mortgage was paid off and I had about £60,000 in the bank, I could live comfortably off the interest alone. Savings account interest was in double digits back then, as were mortgage interest rates. I was earning about £7k PA back then. Not a huge amount, but enough to be comfortable so with no mortgage, a 10% interest on £60k seemed adequate. Obviously I didn't really think it through or understand long term inflation and the decades of very low interest rates ahead :-)
I wonder which, if any, cryptocurrencies could cope with cashing $3B in one go?
Stealing $3B in crypto requires a certain skill set. Cashing it out safely and hopefully anonymously and moving it somewhere you can then use it, is a very different skill set. And IIRC, it's tanked down to less than half it's value since it was stolen. And you'd not get the full value back in cash anyway if you have to start using middle men to launder it.
Yes, latest one here in the UK is Made.com, mail order online furniture shopping website. It seems far too many companies who made out like bandits during the switch to onlne during lockdowns somehow thought that was going to translate to a permanent situation.
Another big part of it is how companies and the stock market operates. Once upon a time, a large wealthy company had money in the bank and could weather a storm. Nowadays, money has to be put to work, so companies invest their profits all over the place and then borrow money for expansion because their investments earn more than the cost of borrowing at the historically low interest rates we've had the last few decades. Not only is that borrowing now costing more, but for tech companies hitting a post-lockdown slump after the lockdown profits are seeing their stock prices drop because they can't maintain that high profit level now. The stock market demands growth. Fail to grow, and no matter how well the business is doing, the share price falls.
Obviously there are other factors too such as inflation, fuel costs, etc that are affecting all businesses, but the ones who expanded during lockdowns seem to be affected the most because they didn't plan for the obvious end of lockdown and people going back off-line, but now their external investments have fallen and borrowing costs have risen.
"Maybe, if the Chinese product is really inexpensive to buy and operate they might sell a few outside China. But not a lot?"
If they ramp up production to higher levels than their huge internal market can accommodate, or for "influence" reasons, they will be selling cheaper to non-traditional growing markets such as much of Africa and Asia. I very much doubt they will bet targeting the US or EU markets for at least a decade or two, maybe longer.
"Even then though, you'd have thought that the major markets are likely to be Russia and African nations, and possibly South American nations. I doubt that they'll be seen in Europe or North America anytime soon."
That's not really an issue for China. They have an enormously large internal market and plan in decades, not four year election cycles.
My first ever company car was a Citroen BX. The only significant problem it had was the back box of the exhaust fell off the day before the car was due to be replaced at 180,000 miles (just over three years old!) :-) Oh, and the paint on the fibreglass bonnet didn't seem to adhere properly. Chunks of paint across our entire fleet had flaked off along the front edge.
Not having a turbo, the diesel engine was a bit slow to get up to speed though.
Thanks, I just did quick search. Looks like few tried for more than two terms although limiting to two terms was more a gentleman's agreement in the past, Teddy Roosevelt tried for a third and lost, only FDR had almost four terms, dying in office and the 22nd amendment happened in 1952 limiting it to two term whether consecutive or not.
"throw out voter registrations because the voter is presumed to have a felony conviction and make it virtually impossible for the record to be corrected"
Whoa...wait...what? It's not just those in prison who can't vote, but even those who have served their time and been released, if it was a "felony" conviction, can NEVER vote again for the rest of their lives? Or is there some sliding scale where even after release, they can eventually become a voter after some length of time has passed?