Sometimes a hypothesis has potentially observable implications, even if a mad scientist can't reproduce everything in their lab.

I think it has been decades since cosmologists believed the universe is expanding at a constant rate.

IANAPhysicist, but isn't a thrust of 1g specific to the mass you are accelerating? Same device pushing heavier mass gives less acceleration?

Is a claim that you can create a thrust of 1g even meaningful without additional details?

No, its not. It wouldn't be SO bad though, except that they no longer allow memory upgrades after the fact (at least on all the entry level stuff where they start at 8gb), and whilst 8GB of memory for a PC cost $25 or so, Apple wants $200 to bump up from 8GB to 16GB of memory.

Apple uses their software to lock their users into their hardware ecosystem where they charge exorbitant amounts for stuff.

To a large degree, yes.

You don't annoy people into submission. There is a societal contract where we all have to live together at some baseline level of cooperation. There can be disagreements that don't affect that, but when you start interfering with societal level functioning (blocking traffic, etc), then the rest of the public just becomes angry at the protestors.

Societal controls are what keep those other people from mowing you down wholesale with their cars. You can't expect to benefit from those parts of organized society while trying to halt others, because eventually the people in the cars will start "protesting" in their own way by running you over.

If you want society to keep them from running you over, then you also have to expect society to clear the road.

I reckon one of his biggest worries right now is how to find a running mate that won't backstab him with the 25th Amendment at the first opportunity.

I'm sure some branch of the government will cover the damages. Realistically on a governmental scale the cost to repair the damage is peanuts so even if they COULD argue their way out of legal responsibility, the PR just isn't worth it.

Where's Bert bot?

Technology "advances" to the point where a civilization has to expend 3.5 whatzits to acquire 1.0 whatzits, and it isn't even approximately sustainable.

1. Bare minimum, we should definitely hold Chinese vehicles (electric or otherwise) to the same safety-testing standards as domestic vehicles, and enforce it absolutely relentlessly (like we haven't been doing with Boeing until very recently, but we should have been). There will be huge pressure to relax this, but we dare not, because any loopholes will be abused in the worst possible way and people will die. This one shouldn't be negotiable at all.

2. Tariffs and sanctions remain an option, to be used correctively whenever a foreign company receives inherently unfair advantages resulting from things like government subsidies, currency manipulation, and so on. The details here are potentially negotiable, but...

3. There's no point negotiating *anything* with the CCP until the keep a few of the promises they've already made. Send them an open letter that says "Do some of the stuff you already said you were going to do. We'll wait." When they call to try to negotiate a better (for them) deal, have an intern put them on hold and go to lunch.

That was 12 years ago. A 12 year out of date critique of a web technology that has had ongoing language updates and two entire rewrites in that interval should be viewed with some suspicion. Also, are you really just citing the title of the article and none of the content?

I'm not even defending PHP here, just questioning lazy kneejerk, "but it sucked once, so now I hate it forever" thinking.

Decent-quality aluminum ore is still abundant. In the first place, it was more common than e.g. high-quality iron ore; but the real reason is, we didn't really start mining it in earnest until we figured out an affordable way to refine it, in the late nineteenth century. So compared to just about any other metal you care to name, there's significantly more of the good ore left still accessible, for aluminum.

> Even with that, you're still not going to the stars, i think.

Nobody's going to the stars, regardless of technology level. They're much too far away, and the incentives are much too weak. Staying on a planet in a nice comfy habitable-zone orbit around a star, is just *overwhelmingly* more convenient, than setting out on a multi-generational voyage to a distant location that probably offers you nothing you don't already have closer to home.

We're going to continue to explore the system we're in, and we're probably going to put telescopes in a few more places (perhaps at a couple of the earth-sun lagrange points, for instance) in an attempt to *see* a bit further out. Maybe we'll even send probes. But actually going ourselves, is a total non-starter. It's fun to write stories about, for entertainment purposes, when you don't have to be realistic. But it's not even remotely practicable.

People underestimate how far away the stars are, and think things like "Oh, if we could go maybe a tenth of light speed, then a trip to the nearest star could be 40 years." But it couldn't, because you're assuming instant acceleration, and nothing can survive that. Spreading the aceleration out means you can't do most of it with the slingshot effect, so it becomes very expensive to achieve. Using thrusters, for example, the amount of reaction mass needed to handle a voyage that long in a comfortable way (acelerate for the first half, then decelerate for the second half) is prohibitive, even if the energy is free. The only *practical* way to do it is with laws-of-physics-optional sci-fi propulsion technology. Hyperspace or warp drive or wormhole generators or space folding tech or some jazz like that. None of which is consistent with what we think we know about physics. So unless we find out that the standard model is very very wrong in some fundamental way, going to the stars is not happening.

woke, adj. - "Not a knee-jerk reactionary like me."

> I challenge you to find an example of any federal court ruling
> wherein it has been decided that foreign governments, have
> the rights granted in the US constitution. They don't.

And furthermore, if they did, some of the treaties we've made at
the ends of wars, would be violations of our constitution. The
agreement we made with Japan at the end of WWII, and the
constitution we forced them to adopt (certain points of which we
later regretted due to the Cold War), are a prominent example.
But no, the German inter-war and Japanese post-war governments
don't have second-amendment rights. If foreign governments had
fourth-amendment rights, most of what the CIA does would be
unconstitutional.

If you don't understand the constitutional basis for who has rights,
maybe look at the wording in the ninth and tenth amendments.
Maybe you will find a clue there.

I will say it again: the Chinese Communist Party does not have
rights under the US constitution. They have certain rights under
international law, but running propaganda companies in other
countries isn't one of those rights.