They only work if your hardware and your operating system actually support them. I know of some systems where the floppy drive is not easily replaceable by a hardware emulator. Old phone switches come to mind, of which some backup their configuration routinely on a 3.5" disk.

In a very profound way, all the crypto scams surfacing prove the dream of many a libertarian wrong. Liberating money by creating a money devoid of any governmental oversight? What could go wrong?

Now the milk is spilled, and the government (e.g. the judiciary branch of government) is tasked with sorting out the mess.

So you subscribe to the "I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution." school of thought.

If you are a pension fund manager, all you know is that 1st of next month, you need X dollars in pay-outs. And this preferably has to come from dividends, otherwise you would have to sell stock or to take a loan, which detoriates your financial base, or you have to find new future pensionists to use their payments for your pay-outs, which would turn your pension fund into a Ponzi scheme. So you better make sure that almost all of the money you need comes from dividends, otherwise you put your pension fund at risk.

Another problem is the way pensions are set up in the U.S.. Most of them are 401k or similar stock market based investment funds. They manage huge amounts of money, they sit at practically all blue chip companies' board of directors, and they demand regular pay-outs for the pensions they have to pay. And because the single retiree has to live by his pension cheque from month to month, they can't afford to have a long term view, because in the long term, all their customers are dead, but until then, they depend on the ability of the pension fund managers to squeeze out the maximum dividend payouts from all companies they are invested in.

PS: Alternatively, you can imagine to unroll the time-space-curve around the Black Hole into a flat surface, and if you then plot the hyperbolic curve of your object onto that flat surface, you will notice that it winds infinitely often around the singularity before leaving the Event Horizon.

As the time slows down when approaching the Black Hole, you have to wait for infinity until the object comes out at the other side. Hence for all you know, the object disappeared into the Back Hole forever.

Yes. Sometimes stuck since 1371 (650 years ago), like the house my brother lived for some years (a normal townhouse in a larger German town). A room layout that works for 650 years might not be easily improved upon.

As someone who has lived in such houses (and in a country where the majority of all houses is built with brick or concrete interior walls) I can assure you: It works fine. As a matter of fact: The house I am currently living in is the first one with interior drywall. I start to understand why U.S. houses often come furnished. They are a pain in the ass to work with if you want to mount your own cupboards. And why every room except kitchen and living room is called a bedroom - you can't effectively do anything else with them.

It is also possible to turn lead into gold by nuclear transmutation. And there surely have been and probably still are governmental programs to investigate this and turn this into a profit. Albeit they turned out to be much too expensive for now, and until someone comes up with a new idea how to transmute nuclear cores, it stays that way.

Spraying clouds with Barium salts to induce rain is possible. It has been proven to be unreliable, to cause numerous problems and to be very expensive for a minimal result, hence people stopped doing it. It is as real as lead-to-gold facilities - possible, but no one is really considering it.

It reminds me a little of that town with a law in the books that forbids exploding a nuclear device within city limits and puts a $500 fine on it.

Our currently colder climate compared to e.g. the Jurassic or the Createceous or even the first 10 million years after the K/T boundary is mainly caused by the Himalayas rising and binding atmospheric CO2 in Calciumcarbonate. We are back on track to temperatures we last had 55 million years ago, despite the Himalayas still rising and exposing fresh Calciumhydroxide to the atmosphere.

Those are very, very outdated numbers. Currently, the battery (the only thing in an BEV that costs more energy than the equivalent part, the gas tank in an ICE) creates an energy deficit equivalent to about 20,000 miles of distance travelled - and that would only be true if the battery builder uses normal grid power and does not generate its own power on site.

If you are willing to pay the electricity bill for that 50 year old refrigerator, that's up to you. I would throw out that thing rather yesterday than today and buy something sensible. By the way, my two fridges (both no-name brands) are running fine for more than 10 years now. One has lost its handles, but someday, I'll 3D print a new one, if I am feeling like it. But right now, it's not a top priority, as I can easily open it by the door frame.

Still, you can interfere the air quality of sparsely populated areas from the neighboring ones. If they, while being polluting the air due to human activity, still have clean air, it is quite improbable for the empty regions to have very small and localized pockets of bad air, like a heavily used road or a coal power plant would be.

First, operating system does not mean operating system with a shell for desktop work. OS/400 was not meant to be a machine to install a word processor on or browse the World Wide Web. An operating system at first is a program (or a set of programs) to administer all resources of a computer and share them between the applicartions. The way you act with the operating system is the shell. Everything else is an application.

If you compare Linux to any of the three systems, you will find that they are much better suited for structured data storage and retrieval. If you compare them for instance to a LAMP stack, they are pure MP: Middle Ware and PostgreSQL (or DB/2 in OS/400's case and MultiValue in Pick's). Yes, they suck if you want to post something on Facebook or send a short message to an acquaintance. But that's not what they were designed for.