Given how quickly this technology is proliferating I think that could change. Numerous non-state groups are using drones offensively in Africa and Colombia. If a drone hit something like a refinery and there was significant impact, don't you think the status quo could change quickly?

Insurgents in several countries in Africa are using them. Narcos in Colombia are using them. Its inevitable that they will be used here.

That's the point. Nuclear weapons don't deter a group like Al Qaeda.

Yes they don't, mostly because it's a relatively small group of individuals dispersed in a huge country. The same cannot be said of the Iranian government.

You said

> An attack on American soil could be met with a literally nuclear response against Iran or whoever perpetrated it.

Al Qaeda is in the "whoever" category that you claimed would be met with a nuclear response.

Wiping out the Iranian government will only strenghten the IRGC and other rabid anti US Iranian groups politically. As demonstrated by the recent US strikes that killed Ali Khamenei, wiped out senior Iranian leadership and that girs' school.

Trump didn't ask Zelensky to stop the strikes because German diesel prices are high. He did it because the US midterm elections are coming up and his party's base are disproportionately harmed by high gas prices.

Interesting to see this and the targeting of data centers in the Middle East. Its critical infrastructure and a hit gets the attacker a lot of bang for the buck in terms of economic damage.

From what I see, these are the "tit" part of the "tit for tat" strategy. Neither Ukraine, nor Iran targeted these in the beginning, however when other side started to escalate, both replied by attacking more critical infrastructure for the other party.

Ukraine has been at war for 4 years. They didn’t have the capability to hit Russia this hard and deep until fairly recently. These are mostly home grown weapons developed during the war.

That's true, however they don't use this capability like it's infinite. They only utilize this when Russia does something similar or plans of doing something similar leaks.

I'm not a fan of wars, regardless of where they happen. OTOH, I still believe you can fight relatively clean or be an unethical bully. If the war is unavoidable, I prefer to be the former.

I also commend Ukraine's ingenuity and bravery, as well.

Still not necessarily wise to voluntarily escalate an air war when you have very little air defence. But hey what do I know

Exactly, long-range drone attack capability is an asymmetric advantage for Ukraine only relative to their other capabilities, not relative to Russia. Russia can easily make Kyiv unlivable, as they are just starting to do.

Russia has tried to make Kiev unlivable for four years.

I mean "physically or psychologically impossible to continue living in"--I have Ukrainian colleagues living in Kyiv and they report that only in the last few weeks has it become absolutely unbearable with air raid sirens around the clock.

I just hope my elite understand the concept of pecking order ...

I seem to recall that this is optimal game theoretic strategy - don't initiate, but always immediately retaliate.

Whatever is happening now is payback for Putin's birthday present to himself from 2 days ago, firing a missile into a Ukrainian apartment building that killed 22 civilians (mostly women & children).

I think the Wildberries strikes were a unilateral escalation on the part of Ukraine and the current escalation cycle has ensued from that.

Russia has been hitting comparable logistics centers in Ukraine from the first year of the war. If someone has been escalating, it's Russia.

Apparently Wildberries carry/carried over 1/4 million items tagged as "for SMO" (Special Military Operation), so they had become a major part of the supply chain for Putin's war, which is why they were hit.

In the case of Wildberries we're not talking about "dual use" items like a sleeping bag that your government fails to provide you, we're talking about specifically tagging items (1/4 million of them!!) as being for the war. It's Wildberries' business (literally) if they want to be a supplier for the war, and profit from it, but obviously that does mean they become a target.

Cutting off the enemy supply line is a classic and obvious military strategy. Ukraine didn't choose to be attacked, nor did they choose for Wildberries to become part of the supply line. They are playing the cards they were dealt, and I would say doing so with remarkable restraint.

Ukrainian military and security officials have stated on and off the record that a major objective of the Wildberries strikes was civilian terror. Russia has taken them at exactly their word.

of course that'd be fine, under the Geneva convention a civilian object loses its protective status when it makes effective military contributions and its destruction confers a military advantage.

What's supposed to be the argument against it, inconvenience for American shoppers during a war of aggression?

I don't think the Geneva convention is that unequivocal, I believe there's also a duty to assess proportionality of military advantage vs. civilian risk.

I don't know what sites you frequent but strikes on distribution centers by both sides has been covered by mainstream US news.

Do the sites you frequent mention that Russia does double tap strikes to kill civilian first responders or that they have stolen thousands of Ukrainian children?

Russia has been hitting civilian logistics centers for years now. At least 2 of my packages were destroyed :C

Complaining about an information bubble while being in one is pretty funny.

Yes. Reddit and here as well as local newspapers. That's what I was commenting about I thought but the reception was a lot angrier than I expected :).

That's because it's nonsense. Russia has been targeting Ukrainian civilian logistics for years.

You frequent bad sites then. Don't make a conspiracy based on your own bad media consumption.

In theory it could. The advantage of enhanced geothermal is it allows for a much wider variety of sites to be used compared to conventional geothermal. So, it may be possible to create one near an existing district heating system and use the excess heat for it.

> There are more than 50+ existing projects using EGS starting from the 1970s! What exactly is the "world's first" here?

First commercial operation with a grid connection. You'll notice that those 50+ are listed under the "research and development" section.

The last project in that table is this project! Really, we have no way of knowing that all those other projects were never connected to the grid, except some company PR.

Except this article telling you that.

The new thing is using new-ish fracking drilling techniques to create a geothermal resource. Conventional geothermal relies on finding very specific geology which is why its so rare. Enhanced geothermal can (in theory) work in many more places since it can create the geology needed to produce electricity.

Certainly a welcome development. Let's hope this pilot can be repeated and scaled.

We didn't have big enough compute and data to do interesting things with them until recently. That changed with ImageNet in 2012

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/03/1011616/ai-godfa...

Sort of- Yann LeCun had working neural network based letter recognition, used by the Post Office.

That's a fair point to make. It was impressive what they achieved with 90s hardware. Of course OCR to general object recognition is a big gap in how interesting it is.