heat exchangers against solid / liquid "heat stores" (aka ground/water) do not need large fans and huge airflow, just pumps - and they are comparatively extremely quiet. Granted, boreholes aren't cheap either. And retrofitting isn't helped by that either.

But heat pumps needn't be noisy. Ground source / water source heat pumps are extremely efficient and extremely quiet. For new developments like block of flats (US "condos"?) those "are the ones".

Shallow boreholes are pretty cheap, but trenching can get expensive real quick.

Tech Ingredients used a borehole they dug for $300. The trick is they used soil amendments to increase thermal conductivity, allowing use of a small low-cost borehole.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-41UF02vrU

there's still / again a number of Czech companies in the sector ... the "passive Radar" came from a Czech cold war project (Tamara). Yes it had a spotlight moment when some F-117 were shot down in the Yugoslav war.

Only one was shot down.

And it was almost entirely due to poor opsec and hubris by the US, not unexpectedly fancy radars.

It's a human problem. Noone "expects" their own "minimal" checks to compound. And everyone (re)implements periodic checks in ever-more-inventive ways. BSD cron solves this ? Alright. Does prometheus use it to schedule its periodic polling ? Do OTel collectors use it to smear their backend metrics uploads ? Does your own code use cron jobs for its "periodic" heartbeating ?

If the answer to that is all-yes, then my compliments to you. Alas ... at least my experience says that's not how things are done.

This is beautiful - thanks for sharing.

If you solve your cooling problem in space by distributing 10000 servers across 100 orbits then you replace one engineering challenge with the next; good luck with the satellite-satellite optical crossbars, and even more with the time travel beam shapers to get the communication latency between the components of your "orbit-distributed data center" to-target.

(the sarcasm is intended; there are some usecases for "space servers", around stealth for sure; to "scale it like a terrestrial DC" though ... dunno; not matter how I turn it, it just seems crazy expensive)

Communication latency and bandwidth would present big issues for AI satellites used for training. But if they are inference-only, then the latency and bandwidth demands are much, much lower. Starlink already demonstrates the required parameters.

Indeed ... yet the servers for that already exist and are largely ground-based - "edge" compute of the large CDNs through which much of the internet's traffic flows anyway.

Will starlink build its own edge ? Maybe. We'll see. Whether it makes sense to have this infrastructure "colocated in space" if you're not also the owner of the "connection infrastructure in space" though? It'll come down to cost. If I were anyone else but SpaceX ... that's where my eyes would be.

To merely destroy "space data centers", you need not have very advanced targeting technology nor space lasers or whatnot. Just launch a few things releasing little ball bearings or steel needles or something like that - and "poison" the entire orbit.

If all you seek is to destroy (how en-vogue...) then that's more than perfect; not just destroy what's there but also make sure that by virtue of what remains (debris) nothing will get re-built.

That’s not how orbits or satellites work. Imagine you were attacking a Red Bull airplane race where they are circling pylons. What would happen if you throw some ball bearings up at them? You might hit one plane and then they all fall down. Same thing happens in space if you aren’t traveling orbital velocity. Imagine you throw the ball bearings sideways to try and hit more planes - you still hit maybe one plane, they fall down, it falls down, the rest keep going.

A single EMP would be enough without causing excessive space debris. It's not like someone will simply fly in and swap some hardware.

Well ... first, that needs a "gadget" suitable for creating an EMP - which is still higher-rate tech than a missile being able to just reach a few hundred miles altitude and then "conventionally blow up into tiny pieces". And second ... as I said, as belligerant or terrorist, why would you not want to destroy / orbit-poison ? Why would it ever be a good idea to "destruction-less disable" space infrastructure?

While it's correct that fusion stops producing energy once the fusion product is iron, it is not true that all elements beyond iron are only produced in cataclysmic events (supernovae / neutron star collisions).

Stars can function as "breeder reactors", where the natural flow of neutrons produced as intermediate / side effect of the various fusion reactions going on in a later-stage-life star get absorbed by nuclei and then (by beta decay) produce beyond-iron elements. This is called the "s-Process" (slow), and responsible for a large range of elements into the Lanthanides or so. And stellar winds, or the planetary nebula stage at the end, will return some of this to the interstellar medium.

It's correct that the heaviest "naturally present" elements require the so-called "r-Process", heavy overabundance of neutrons / extremely high neutron flow as in supernovae, or direct fusion of beyond-iron nuclei as in neutron star collisions.

There is rather active research happening here, both astronomical (trying to detect various nuclei from x ray spectroscopy of cataclysmic events) and theoretical (because r-Process cannot be simulated in labs since the neutron fluxes needed are not within our reach).

That said, it remains true that many "transition groups" elements are bred via s-Process in relatively-ordinary stars.

It’s true - sustaining was the key word I picked :-) but thanks for the more complete explanation

What a weird argument. If one doesn't trust private enterprise to "do right" then the state is nannying and oppressing companies, and if one does and therefore only inspects once a year or so then the state is neglecting their duties...

Public inspectors can't do right.

Maybe it is also fair to ask, did the developer/operator try to get away with something there? Do and hope for forgiveness instead of asking permission?

(and the "fine" is laughable, especially since retrospective permit is rather likely; in fact the fine might not even be higher than the cost of any project delay from requesting the generators at planning approval stage...)

"Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo" probably rings a bell for you. With respect to drug addiction, in Europe/Germany at least, I'm more inclined to say "little has changed in 40 years" than to say "things are worse now".

It's sobering to think we've not made much inroads into giving addicts a better perspective (or getting "preemptive" messaging across) in all that time.

I do wonder; my naive expectation is that while it will solve "petty criminality out of need" it would do little to "pretty criminality out of boredom / for-fun".

And BI would be attacked for the latter - some ingrateful on-basic-income person committing vandalism for no financial benefit. It's the "workhouse"/"treadmill" argument - supposedly boredom breeds crime and people must be made to work, even pointless or below-poverty tasks, else the streets get taken over by criminals or worse.

Like tourists taking over the country.

Arguments acknowledging (and steering / manipulating) feelings weigh stronger here than economic facts, alas.

Right. Where I live, there is plenty of vandalism. Breaking public benches, defecating in public toilets outside the bowl, rampant littering when there are trash cans all over the place, etc.

There's no financial gain in that. Doing this won't get you healthcare (we've got socialized healthcare anyway, and it's pretty much free for "the poor"), won't help you eat. It's just stupid, antisocial people. How would giving them money help any of that?