The aiming is still a problem. The Hubble is relatively small. Even then, it can’t track fast enough to image the moon, let alone the earth’s surface.

Any useful reflector would be measured in Km^2 . Aiming that, with the same precision as Hubble would be a tall order. Added to that, the mirror would have to be light enough to launch. You’re basically trying to aim a sheet of tinfoil, as large as a stadium (minimum), with active tracking.

The same reason a dam owner panics over a finger sized leak. A hole becomes a crack, a crack a breach, and a breach can collapse the whole dam.

A while here too.

I remember earth gov went ever more extremist in a right wing direction. Babylon 5 ended up declaring independence, and later led a coalition to liberate the people of earth.

It might also be a single dev who pushed for it. With only a 1-3% market share, the company is unlikely to push resources at it. That 1 dev getting any working version out is a win in many ways.

Also, most Linux users are a lot better trained at reporting bugs. Most of the time, this is a good thing, letting them get fixed in FOSS development setups. Unfortunately, in gaming, it ends up making Linux look a buggy mess. When 60% of your big reports come from 0.5% of your users, companies can panic. Even if the same bugs exist in windows, just no one bothers to report them.

To anyone who’s seen it, the spoiler definitely counts as a mild /s

The series Expeditionary Force" by Craig Alanson actually plays on this.

Spoiler to protect those who might want to read the series.

It brought time, to finish the stations and build the aircraft. Given how close the RAF came to being broken, it made all the difference.

A lot of investment went into the RAF. Alongside the chain home radar net to guide it.

Without those, Dunkirk would have been soon followed by the invasion of the UK.

Fully agreed. There’s a huge difference between tactical appeasement, and being cowards. Chamberlain at least knew what he was doing was bad. It was trying to fix it.

American democrats don’t even have that excuse. I also doubt they will fall on their swords for the sake of those coming in who might be able to fight back either.

Appeasement did its job. It gave Britain time to retool for war. He also fell on his political sword, at the end. That let Churchill actually defend Britain, with a clean slate, and the military he had built.

Terry Pratchett captured it well in death’s speech.

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

MY POINT EXACTLY.

Justice is a communal lie. It doesn’t exist. Yet, but believing it it, we can make it real.

It’s worth noting, that the police issue in America is very solvable. Most of the Western world’s police use a “police by consent” default. America’s “police by overwhelming force” is the outlier. It leads to a lot of your issues over there. While they are far from perfect, the UK police are far better than America police.

It’s worth looking for the opportunity to reform the police in the process, not just hate on them (ineffectively).

If you treat people as a group, they tend to lock together as a group. The police are already getting pissed off with ICE, in many places. That crack needs to be pryed open. Indifferent, pissed off police/FBI etc is a lot better than them standing in lockstep with ICE.

I’ll take compatible.

Most people game on windows. It’s monolithic nature also means that they will mostly encounter the same bugs.

Linux has a wider base of functionality. A bug might only show up on Debian, not Ubuntu.

End result, they spend 60% of their effort solving bugs, for 2% of their base. That’s not cost viable.

Compatibility means they just have to focus on 1 base of code. All we ask is that they don’t actively break the compatibility. This is far less effort, and a lot easier to sell to the bean counters.

Once Linux has a decent share, we can work on better universal standards. We likely need at least 10% to even get a chance there.

It’s not dark rooms necessarily, but low stimulation environments. Many ND conditions limit mental “bandwidth”. Sensory processing can eat up a lot of that bandwidth normally. Throw in something like socialising, that eats even more, and we can saturate.

The manifestation of that saturation can vary a lot. My personal preference is a quiet, well lit place, with a static environment. It’s change and ambiguity that cause me problems. I fully understand the appeal of darkness, however, particularly if your sensory filtering on intensity is prone to failing.

First off, have you got HA up and running yet? That should be your initial focus.

There are 3 main options.

• Old laptop

The cheapest option, but only if you have a spare. It doesn’t need that much grunt. You definitely want to check how much power it draws however. It’ll be on 24/7 and the cost of that can mount up.

• Raspberry Pi (or other single board computer)

This is a good “play around” option. It’s one of the cheapest choices as well. Unfortunately, Pis can become a bit unstable down the line.

• NUC, or other mini PC. The small mini PCs are my preferred recommendation. They are powerful enough to do more complex tasks, but power efficient enough to not be problematic. They are also a lot more reliable than the SBCs.

As for other hardware. Z wave is the best, but also more costly. ZigBee is cheaper, and still very functional. WiFi does the job, but needs a bit more planning. I personally use a mix of ZigBee and WiFi.

If you’re buying WiFi hardware, I would try and focus on esp based options (ESP8266, ESP8285, or ESP32). You can replace the firmware in these, with either Tasmota, or ESPhome. I personally use sonoff and/or athom hardware, but there are plenty of other options.

This might help finding appropriate hardware.

https://templates.blakadder.com/

Outside of the USA there still seems to be some competent politicians. Whether there are enough, in the right places is a different story.

We can at least hope for the best. There’s not much else we can do.

We do, light travels 1 lightsecond per second.

Oh, and 1 lightpicosecond is around 2.998mm.

100 lightpicoseconds is also very close to 1’.

Last year, a house near me had a hotdog cooker going. It was an absolute hit with the kids (and parents!)

FYI. Chamberlain’s appeasement was actually quite calculated. Britain couldn’t stand up to Germany, and knew it. Appeasement brought time. It let Britain build fighters and tanks. To set up its radar defence net. To prepare for a major war.

When it failed, as Chamberlain knew it would, he fell on his political sword. This cleared the way, and let Churchill take charge, with a clean slate, and a functional military.

I’m hoping that current politicians are half as competent as Chamberlain was with his appeasement.