It is guaranteed, actually. US law imposes requirements on telecoms providers to support wire taps

No, basically. They would love to be able to do that, but it’s approximately impossible for the generative systems they’re using at the moment

By that logic, you should object to cheese being labelled as “cheddar” cheese, because that’s a place too and you’ve almost certainly never seen cheese which came from there.

It’s a stupid rule

They certainly won’t be bored. Astronauts time on the ISS is a precious resource, and work will have been found for them even if they weren’t expected to be there

Third party, sure, but Starlink is absolutely a US corporation. They have joint projects with the US military, even

The assesment that he’s the wealthiest person on earth is pretty dubious, actually. The analyses which list the worlds wealthiest people always are, because they have to decide what counts as wealth and how to count it.

Normally that’s fairly easy, but for very powerful people (who, as you point out, the people at the top of those lists are) it gets murky because of things like stocks and options which they could liquidate in theory, but which would crash in value if they tried to actually do so. Does it still count as wealth if it only exists so long as you don’t spend it?

There are also people who’s wealth isn’t held in any currency, or gold, or stocks. How do you measure the wealth or power of a sovereign king, or any other kind of dictator? You certainly can’t neatly put it in a scale alongside people who just have a dragon’s horde of cash somewhere, that wouldn’t be comparing like for like

HARM is a category of weapon which seeks things like radar or jammers. They weren’t suggesting that the jammers are literally harmless.

In unrelated news: the jammers are, in fact, harmless unless you’re making a habit of riding on top of the tank. The radio energy isn’t going to penetrate a significant thickness of conductive material, such as armour plating. Or unless you’re the person being jammed, in which case they’re a different category of harmful

Destroying a nuclear sub, or a nuclear weapon, doesn’t lead to a nuclear explosion. It takes considerable care to cause a nuclear explosion, and smashing a reactor or warhead just leaves you with a pile of radioactive scrap.

Not saying that isn’t a problem, but it’s way less of a problem than a nuclear explosion

It’s amazing that people seem to be taking this comment literally

Can anyone explain to me what the exemption actually is? The article keeps mentioning “minimum steering angle”, but I’m not sure what that means. Is it as simple as saying the steering wheel must have at least some particular range of travel?

They should last indefinitely so long as the process of accretion which created these nodules keeps going. A battery becomes drained when the chemical interaction between the two metals uses up all the available metal, which happens quite fast in our modern batteries because we’ve designed them that way.

We’ve made them powerful and cheap by using relatively small amounts of each metal, spread thin and sandwiched together. The downside is that those things films of metal get used up fast.

These nodules, meanwhile, are lumps of metal. They won’t produce lots of power all at once, but they can generate small amounts for ages, and so long as they grow faster than the metal gets used up (it doesn’t actually go anywhere, it just changes chemically) they’ll keep going

I know that for two reasons: first, we already know that oxygen concentration in the deep ocean is generally pretty low compared to the surface, and second we can already account for the general composition of our atmosphere. There just isn’t a big chunk of mystery oxygen who’s source we can’t identify.

While it’s not impossible that we’re mistaken and a bunch of it is coming from somewhere other than where we expect, it’s sufficiently unlikely that I’m comfortable making such statements I told and unless presented with evidence to the contrary.

The article is being pretty hyperbolic. There’s no mystery here, this is just something which happens if you put two different metals together. It’s nothing more or less than a crude battery, just like the ancestors of the AA battery the article kept harping on about.

This discovery could be important for people studying the climate on very early Earth, people studying early life, and the ecology of the deep sea today.

That last one is particularly troubling, though. If this is widespread, then this might be a major source of what little oxygen is down there. If so, then taking those nodules away (like a lot of people are keen to do, since some of the metals they’re made of are valuable) could destroy an entire ecosystem.

More research is required

We can, it’s just electrolysis. All you need is electricity, and these nodules are simply batteries.

We’re not short of oxygen up here though, so it’s not terribly useful. We could get hydrogen that way, which would be greener than the way we get it at industrial scale now, but it would be way more expensive

They haven’t hijacked that, it’s their turn to chair it. The core members of that council take turns to do that.

You do realise that the key reason for that council to exist is so that nuclear armed powers talk to each other, right? However much we may disapprove of Russia’s wartime policies, the council is doing its job so long as there’s neutral ground where everyone else can talk to them about it rather than getting itchy trigger fingers

Systems like that can easily be difficult or impossible to test on the ground, because they aren’t strong enough to work under gravity. They might need to be in free-fall to survive being deployed

The president can’t actually make law, as far as I understand it. He, and the various offices managed by the executive branch, apply and enforce the law which Congress has written (give or take some interpretation by the courts).

Sometimes of those laws specifically give the executive broad enough authority over something that it’s very similar to the president being able to write laws about it, but it’s not quite the same and it cant overrule actual laws

There’s no need to leave earth, just lift it into a medium earth orbit. There are literally thousands of kilometres in between low earth orbit (where there are lots of communications, spy, navigation and weather satellites) and geosynchronous (where there are lots of communications satellites), and outside of those two there’s virtually nothing there

Oh, sure. It’s not likely to be a serious threat, but not for the reason people keep saying

People keep saying that, but it isn’t true that the leak being in the disposable part of the vehicle means it’s not a safety problem.

It’s the pressurisation system for the thrusters. If that fails, then they won’t be able to control the capsule until it hits the atmosphere. That could mean they get stuck on the ISS, in the most extreme case, or it could mean that they lose thrust mid-manouvre and they re-enter the atmosphere incorrectly. That could be anywhere from inconvenient (they miss their landing spot and someone has to come get them), to dangerous (they land so far away that they’re in danger of sinking or being eaten by bears before anyone reaches them) to outright fatal (they skip off the atmosphere, or tumble their way into reentry and burn up)