Vvector

The Snowden revelations revealed just how vast the intercept of internet communications could be. There was already talk of needing HTTPS everywhere. Snowden's release got more support behind it, and brought the timeline forward.

Solar noon already varies by up to 30 minutes throughout the year, due to axis tilt and elliptical orbit.

A chronometer off by one second gives an approximate error of 0.25 nautical miles at the equator. Meanwhile the general precision of celestial navigation is 1-5 nautical miles. If you need high level accurate positioning, celestial navigation is already not an option.

In the open seas, celestial navigation is more than accurate enough. Once you are closer to shore, where the greater precision is needed, better options exists. Lights, ranges, radar, visual, etc.

The vuln required "port 5900 was accessible from the Internet"

Why would anyone open up random ports (or even all ports) to the internet?

AndonLabs wins

I'm confident that the Land Paths need bridges to cross the numerous rivers along the route. You need a different qualifier.

An acre of alfalfa is typically irrigated at 5.5 AF per year. The standard center pivot field is 130 acres ~ 700 AF of irrigation, to grow alfalfa to ship overseas. Converting to gallons, 210 million gallons, for one field.

80 fields of alfalfa equals all the data center water usage.

USDA estimates that total irrigation uses 55 million AF of water per year.

This is why i use Firefox

"But over time, if we didn't have leap seconds, the difference would accumulate. The accumulated difference now between UTC and TAI is 37 seconds--which is almost twice the maximum variation in actual solar noon from mean solar noon that you refer to."

No, the 10-15 seconds I mentioned is the daily variation in solar noon.

From the link I posted, in NYC, solar noon on 2026-01-01 is at 11:59am. On 2026-01-31, solar noon is at 12:09pm. In one month, it has drifted 10 minutes. That's much greater than the 37 leap seconds we have added in 60 years.

"We humans have collectively decided that we don't want that, and that it's better to do the adjustments a little at a time rather than in bigger lumps."

Yet we just reversed that decision. No more leap seconds after 2035. After trying it, we decided it was terrible.

Isn't this just RGB, with 246 of the 256 values removed from each channel?