That's a secondary problem. Most people worry about how they would *survive* without the paycheck that comes from having a job.

Oh, I can think of a reason: One or both members of the household has a strong sense of aesthetics and do not want anything resembling a computer in the living room.

In ran into this once with the girlfriend of the guy who owned the house I was living in. I was arranging speakers next to a big CRT TV. I noticed that the speakers interfered with the CRT, causing quite noticeable color distortion strong near the side and fading toward the center. I suggested moving the speakers out a foot as I found that this was enough to cure the distortion.

Her: "No, it looks better the other way"
Me: "But it doesn't work well"
Her: "keep the speakers close"

I gave up. Not my house and she watched the TV much more than I did.

The current current situation is probably considered acceptable only because the machine than drives it is a laptop and it gets packed away when not in use.

Parity can not correct any bits. It only detects single bit errors. While many ECC codes exist, the Hamming code overwhelmingly used in computer memories can correct one bit in a 64-bit word and detect two bit errors.

Or maybe he *was* using ECC. ECC can only correct 1 bit.

Jupiter is not a brown dwarf. It is not massive enough to even burn deuterium. No fusion == no star

So, how is this helpful for anything? If you want concentrated alcohol just do that. Sure, it's still liquid but it weighs 40% less than this powder and lightweight containment of liquids is a solved problem.

Sure, it might not taste good but reports are that the powder taste pretty bad too and involves otherwise unnecessary ingestion of questionable chemicals.

It looks to me like the only purpose is to make an end-run around liquor control laws. I'm sure the manufacturers banked on not paying the usual alcohol taxes either.

Ideally, you use congnitive radio and never grant exclusive use, only priority. If the priority user fails to show for X amount of time, another user can request the allocation as priority user. Cognitive radio implies a fair bit of spectral flexibility so they should be able to adapt to whatever is available fairly close to deployment time.

I really only bike when it rains or rain looks imminent. Otherwise, I skate. Almost every day. Like today: I'm headed to work.

If it was all good, they would not stutter. No, it looks like some important wiring is missing. Their brains have implemented a work-around that mostly does the job but is not a complete solution. There are conditions it does not handle well. A retraining program seems to help but it not clear if the wiring fault is being fixed or if they are just gaining an improved ability to avoid the problem cases.

1) The blight "breathes nitrogen" and destroys all plants one crop species at a time.
2) A society which never got much further than we are today and whose technological civilization is falling apart is able to mount a crewed mission to wormhole near Saturn?
3) Several habitable worlds very close to a black hole. Why are there any? Where are the host star(s)?
4) The future utopia never went back to the black hole worlds but got along fine anyway. So what was the point?

With all the sloppy science, technology, and plotting going on, does it really matter if the visuals of the worm whole traversal or subtly wrong, exactly right, or just pure bologna?

Africa would benefit little from free IP since it mostly lacks the means to manufacture sophisticated technology. Africa makes use of clean energy technology the same way the use other technology. They buy it already manufactured from more advanced regions. No patent license is required to deploy a solar array.

China could manufacture. But China also has the resources to license the IP and they own IP themselves. Would free IP allow China to deploy clean energy technology faster? A little. But mostly it would allow China to demolish First World competition much faster.

Linus comment is out of context, I hope.

Getting hired really quickly changes nothing. You are still an unpaid volunteer unless the new job pays you to contribute to the kernel. Lots of people contribute to open source projects on their own time while drawing income from other work. That does not make them paid developers in the context of the open source project.

Everything is useless in a nuclear war. Everything can be expected to be destroyed, including the submarines. "Success" means launching your attack before you are destroyed. The submarines might delay engagement thus their crews might live a day longer than then those on surface ships but the result is much the same. Submarines have greater ability hide but nuclear depth charges are devestating weopens. An 8 KM kill radius makes precise location information unnecessary.

They may have tried that but her French wasn't that good or the accents were mutually unintelligible.

That French is the official language does not guarantee perfect fluency and certainly does not mean that French is her native language. It almost certainly is not.

A given African country will have many languages. Educated Africans typically speak several languages with varying fluency. The Congolese woman would be most fluent in her tribal language but they may not be in Google Translate and it would be difficult for the paramedics to figure out which one it is anyway. Swahili was probably a fortunate guess after French didn't work well.