RememberTheApollo_

NASA’s newest space telescope rocketed into orbit Tuesday to map the entire sky like never before — a sweeping look at hundreds of millions of galaxies and their shared cosmic glow since the beginning of time.

SpaceX launched the Spherex observatory from California, putting it on course to fly over Earth’s poles. Tagging along were four suitcase-size satellites to study the sun. Spherex popped off the rocket’s upper stage first, drifting into the blackness of space with a blue Earth in the background.

The $488 million Spherex mission aims to explain how galaxies formed and evolved over billions of years, and how the universe expanded so fast in its first moments.

Closer to home in our own Milky Way galaxy, Spherex will hunt for water and other ingredients of life in the icy clouds between stars where new solar systems emerge.

The cone-shaped Spherex — at 1,110 pounds (500 kilograms) or the heft of a grand piano — will take six months to map the entire sky with its infrared eyes and wide field of view. Four full-sky surveys are planned over two years, as the telescope circles the globe from pole to pole 400 miles (650 kilometers) up.

Spherex won’t see galaxies in exquisite detail like NASA’s larger and more elaborate Hubble and Webb space telescopes, with their narrow fields of view.

The Trump transition team is compiling a list of senior current and former U.S. military officers who were directly involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and exploring whether they could be court-martialed for their involvement, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the plan. 

Officials working on the transition are considering creating a commission to investigate the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, including gathering information about who was directly involved in the decision-making for the military, how it was carried out and whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as serious as treason, the two sources said.

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President-elect Donald Trump has condemned the withdrawal as a “humiliation” and “the most embarrassing day in the history of our country.” 

It is not clear, though, what would legally justify “treason” charges, since the military officers were following the orders of President Joe Biden to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

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“These generals lied. They mismanaged. They violated their oath. They failed. They disgraced our troops, and our nation. They got people killed, unnecessarily,” he wrote. “And, to this moment, they keep their jobs. Worse, they continue to actively erode our military and its values — by capitulating to civilians with radical agendas. They are an embarrassment, with stars still on their shoulders.”

The transition team is looking at the possibility of recalling several commanders to active duty for possible charges, the U.S. official said.

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Speaking to NBC News days before the election, Howard Lutnick, one of the two advisers leading the transition, said that Trump learned after his first administration that he had hired Democratic generals and that he would not make that mistake again.

I just started setting up a Jellyfin server and am moving all of my old DVD backups off of an ancient NAS that doesn't play well with modern TVs or Chromecast. Can't cast half the videos anymore because crhomecast says F you to certain audio and video formats, but jellyfin has zero trouble talking to my TV. It was going so well that I thought I might try to back up some of the aging DVD/BluRays we have laying around because they don't last forever and I'd hate to lose these titles. I used to use Handbrake/AnyDVD, but it seems AnyDVD is defunct these days... What are people using to back up their personal DVD collections these days? I prefer Windows apps, but I do have a good linux system that I can use to back them up with too, it's just slower than my Win PC.