The solar wind, at our distance from the sun, produces a pressure on the order of a few nanopascals. I don't think that's enough to make it worth building a wind farm on the moon.

Radiation pressure from sunlight has been studied as a means of propelling spacecraft using solar sails. I'm not sure whether that could be used to turn a windmill, but it's silly to do so when you could just use a solar panel.

Yeah, I messed up, and shared the same link in the post above yours. Thanks for the reply.

Update: the poem exists in several versions including the one AC quoted. The best-known version excludes the first stanza. The original version in German is worded differently, and references communists but not socialists. So AC didn't "make up" the first stanza. Sorry.

Good quote, but you appear to have made up the first stanza. This quote/poem is attributed to Martin Niemöller and that stanza does not appear in his version.

You don't need to be a citizen to get a "Real ID." You just need to be a legal resident. That may be enough to satisfy ICE that you're here legally, but it's not enough for voting.

Great post. Thanks for it. One point though:

It shouldn't be. I'm not a citizen, yet I have a driver's license.

All states allow legal residents (even non-permanent ones) to obtain a driver's license. Some states even allow undocumented immigrants to obtain one.

But they can be protected with a design patent. I'm not sure whether the font-owners have one.

There are a bunch of conflated issues in your post. Let's break them down.

- You're right that fonts generally cannot be copyright. However, they can be protected with design patents.

- Printing a book in a particular font does not convey "gatekeeper" status on someone else's IP. If the publisher wanted to reprint the book using Adobe's font, they'd need to talk to Adobe because, well, it's Adobe's font. But the publisher could choose some other font and Adobe could do nothing about it. They own the font, not the contents written in it.

- Someone who has a design patent on a font may very well object to clones, and take legal action. I don't know whether they'd succeed in court.

- Design patents, like other patents, have a finite lifetime (far less than "hundreds" of years) after which cloning cannot be stopped.

- Some people create things and protect them with copyright or patents because they want to earn an income on their work. And some people create things and protect them with copyright or patents with the intent of controlling their distribution. Free software is an example of the latter.

Lots of strawmen and misrepresentation of liberal positions, but to your more worthy point: yes, people do need to take responsibility for their own actions.

But can they? For the longest time, alternatives to fossil fuels simply weren't available to consumers. Now they are, but they're still priced out of reach of a sizable chunk of the population. And fossil-fuel companies have fought against the adoption of technologies that would replace what they offer for sale. They have exploited their incumbent position to maintain the status quo. If renewable transportation technology became more popular, it would also become cheaper because more providers would be competing, more suppliers and manufacturers would be participating, and so on.

Try this on for size: what if the cost of a technology reflected the cost it incurs on the environment? You could accomplish that by fining or taxing fossil-fuel industries, or taxing consumers at the pump. (I assume you'd prefer the latter.) In either case, the cost of fossil fuel would go way up, thus discouraging its use. On the other hand, renewable transportation technologies would start to look a whole lot better. Obviously this scenario is unlikely to occur in the real world, but it should serve as an illustration of how dependence on fossil fuels is unsustainable: either you tax it to fix the environment and thus see it go out of business, or you move away from it altogether.

You are right: "blame" is a political (not scientific) issue.

But the scientists are not doing that. They're not blaming anyone. They're calculating the cost of a company's contribution to carbon emissions. Whether to hold the company responsible for that cost is, as you say, not a scientific decision.

That said, the companies are hardly blameless. They have fought to suppress the science that has identified fossil fuels as a source of climate change, because they see such science as a risk to their profits. I see no justice in allowing companies to profit from products that inescapably harm the planet. Paying to undo, or even mitigate such harm should be part of their cost of business.

By and large, those technologies exist already. But we need to have the will to adopt them, and say goodbye to less climate-friendly technologies. That is occurring, but not quickly enough.

TL/DR: Blame the consumer for products provided by industry. Products those same industries fought tooth-and-nail to protect from incursion by greener alternatives.

I'll go with "charming and relatable" -- someone who, at first sight, would be someone you'd like to have as a colleague or friend. In short, a good choice for an AI avatar you might be looking at every day.

In 2024, Trump called on Christians to support him, saying they could vote for him and then they wouldn't have to vote any more. He said later that he was just trying to get Christians to vote, because they tended not to. It's understandable that this could be interpreted as cancelling elections, but in all (uh, cringe)... fairness to Trump, he didn't say he was going to cancel elections. He couldn't anyway, because of the Constitution.

That said, the guy has not exactly behaved like he respects elections. I mean come on, look at Jan 6, 2021 for starters (and the follow-up pardons.) Then look at how he has attacked mail-in ballots without evidence, and sought to undermine the authority of the states to run elections themselves. I could go on. So I will: he keeps claiming the system is "rigged" -- unless he wins, in which case, well never mind.

And elections aren't the only thing Trump disrespects. He hasn't even had his first 100 days of his second term, and already we have seen him suspend due process for deportations, flout the courts when he disagrees with their rulings, disrupt international trade, and get perilously close to crashing the economy. Winning indeed.

I don't suppose you include Slashdot. Maybe it's just me, but I can find it quite distressing.