Technology

Believe it or not, gray-with-age Windows 7 gained market share in March and April 2018. Even now, Windows 10, which arrived not quite three years ago, is running on only 39.3% of all Windows PCs, compared to Windows 747.3%.

I believe it. Month in and month out, one of the most popular articles I have posted on the internet tells you how to still get Windows 7 legally. Hint: Windows 7 Pro SP1 OEM edition on Amazon is going for $199.

Drip Capital is raising a $20 million funding round from Accel, Wing VC and Sequoia India. The company is helping small exporters in emerging markets access working capital in order to finance big orders.

The startup also participated in Y Combinator back in 2015. Many small companies in emerging markets have to turn down orders because they can&t finance big orders. Even if you found a client in the U.S. or Europe, chances are companies will end up paying for your order a month or two after signing a contract.

If you&re an importer or an exporter, capital is arguably your most valuable resource. You know where to source your products and how to ship many goods. But you still need to buy goods yourself.

And in many emerging markets, you have to pay right away. It creates a sort of capital gap.

At the same time, local banks are often too slow and reject too many credit applications. Drip Capital thinks therean opportunity for a tech platform that finances exporters in no time.

The startup is first focusing on India because it meets many of the criteria I listed. This could be particularly useful for small and medium businesses. Large companies don&t necessarily face the same issues as they can access capital more easily.

So far, Drip Capital has funded more than $100 million of trade. After signing up to the platform, you can submit invoices and open a credit line to finance your next orders. Family offices and institutional investors can also invest some money in Drip Capitalfund and get returns on investment.

This isn&t the only platform that helps you get paid faster. But larger companies tend to do it all and optimize the supply chain for the biggest companies in the world. Drip Capital is focusing on a specific vertical.

With todayfunding round, the company plans to get more customers and expand to other countries.

Space is a big place, and mostly empty — but thereno shortage of objects which, should they float our direction, could end life as we know it. A new national plan for detecting and handling such objects was proposed today, and it includes the possibility of nuclear strikes on the incoming asteroids and other &planetary defense missions.&

The plan, revealed and discussed this morning, is far from a joke — itjust that the scales these threats operate at necessarily elevates the discourse to Hollywood levels.

Itnot so much &letdo this& as &letfigure out what we can do.& As such it has five major goals.

First, improve our ability to detect and track near-earth objects, or NEOs. We&ve been doing it for years, and projects like NEOWISE have captured an incredible amount of these objects, ranging in size from the kind that will safely burn up in orbit, to those that might cause serious damage (like the Chelyabinsk one), to proper planet-killers.

But we often hear about NEOs being detected for the first time on near-collision courses just days before approach, or even afterwards. So the report recommends looking at how existing and new programs can be utilized to better catch these objects before they become a problem.

Second, improve our knowledge of what these objects can and have done by studying and modeling them. Not just so that we know more in general, but so that in the case of a serious incoming object we know that our predictions are sound.

Third, and this is where things go a little off the rails, we need to assess and develop NEO &deflection and disruption& technologies. After all, if a planet-killer is coming our direction, we should be able to do something, right And perhaps it shouldn&t be the very first time we&ve tried it.

The list of proposed methods sounds like it was sourced from science fiction:

This assessment should include the most mature in-space concepts — kinetic impactors, nuclear devices, and gravity tractors for deflection, and nuclear devices for disruption — as well as less mature NEO impact prevention methods.

I wasn&t aware that space nukes and gravity tractors were our most mature concepts for this kind of thing! But again, the fact is that a city-sized object approaching at a significant fraction of the speed of light is an outlandish problem that demands outlandish solutions.

And I don&t know about you, but I&d rather we tried a space nuke once or twice on a dry run rather than do it live while Armageddon looms.

At first these assessments will be purely theoretical, of course. But in the medium and long-term NASA and others are tasked with designing actual &planetary defense missions&:

This action includes preliminary designs for a gravity tractor NEO deflection mission campaign, and for a kinetic impactor mission campaign in which the spacecraft is capable of either functioning as a kinetic impactor or delivering a nuclear explosive device. For the latter case, the spacecraft would contain all systems necessary to carry and safely employ a nuclear explosive device, but would carry a mass simulator with appropriate interfaces in place of an actual nuclear device. Designs should include reconnaissance spacecraft and methods to measure the achieved deflection.

Actual flight tests &would not incorporate an actual nuclear device, or involve any nuclear explosive testing.& Not yet, anyway. It&d just be a dry run, which serves its own purposes: &Thorough flight testing of a deflection/disruption system prior to an actual planetary defense mission would substantially decrease the risk of mission failure.&

Fourth the report says that we need to collaborate on the world stage, since of course NEO strikes don&t exactly discriminate by country. So in the first place we need to strengthen our existing partnerships with countries sharing NEO-related data or studies along these lines. We should all be looking into how a potential impact could affect our country specifically, of course, since we&re the ones here — but that data should be shared and analyzed globally.

Last, &Strengthen and Routinely Exercise NEO Impact Emergency Procedures and Action Protocols.&

In other words, asteroid drills.

But it isn&t just stuff like &herewhere Boulder residents should evacuate to in case of impact.& As the document points out, NEO impacts are a unique sort of emergency event.

Response and mitigation actions cannot be made routine to the same degree that they are for other natural disasters such as hurricanes. Rather, establishing and exercising thresholds and protocols will aid agencies in preparing options and recommending courses of action.

The report recommends exploring some realistic scenarios based on objects or situations we know to exist and seeing how they might play out — who will need to get involved How will data be shared Who is in charge of coordinating the agencies if ita domestic impact versus a foreign one (See Shin Godzilla for a surprisingly good example of bureaucratic paralysis in the face of an unknown threat.)

Itstrange to think that we&re really contemplating these issues, but ita lot better than sitting on our hands waiting for the Big One to hit. You can read the rest of the recommendations here.