Re thumb vs finger control. RSI researcher once told me "Which could you live without, a finger or your right thumb?"

You think you do. The issue is it's just about impossible to isolate translation from rotation. You would always be doing just a little rotating every time you touched the ball, whether you wanted to or not. And any time you tried 'rotating', you'd also be moving the cursor.

6DOF devices have been done (ie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceOrb_360 or https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/12416/Logitech-Cyber...). They're sorta fun to use (at first) in CAD for browsing 3D models, but never caught on as once you get good at the CAD UIs, the extra degrees of freedom get in the way more than they help.

rotation works pretty well for scrolling on the kensington slimblade with a little bit of getting-used-to. when it detects rotation, it stops moving the cursor.

Just because one corp does something x bad, it means some other corp is ok to do something 10x bad?

There's a huge difference between a utility scale power plant (you know, with things like tall chimneys) and "truck mounted" generators in the impact to the local air quality. But you know this and are playing word games.

Also works in Firefox (144.0.2) / MacOS (10.15)

"There will come soft rains" Ray Bradbury

>Photos cannot be rare

BS. Only if you pedantically define 'photo' as collecting an image at xyz location at a particular instant. I'm quite certain that photos of the Eiffel Tower are NOT rare.

This article might point to a way: https://neuburger.substack.com/p/cities-panic-over-having-to...

FYI, on this android tablet (android v12 / FF 144.0.2), the 'start typing a book title...' field doesn't do anything. On the Mac, it brings up a list of matches to select from.

A long time ago, worked on a comm satellite program. It used a whack of tuned cans to combine high powered transmit signals with harmonics in each others' frequency bands to feed into the antenna. I once asked how they worked. The answer was 'magic'. I mean, they were physical RF filters, but no one could explain or reproduce how they worked. There was this one guy who could tighten the screws that adjusted the inside baffles so they 'worked'. No one else could.

Orbital and escape velocities??? The elevator is sitting over a stationary spot... it's moving at earth's rotational velocity. Only the portion above the GEO anchor is moving at orbital velocity.

But it has altitude. The stuff that's low down doesn't have a lot of orbital velocity, blow the cable and it falls nearby. And the stuff far away has enough velocity that it goes into a very eccentric orbit rather than hitting the atmosphere.

Just because it's moving below circular orbital speed doesn't mean the periapsis is in the atmosphere.