What the IQ requirement of being in Mensa actually is?

It's like the price of a superyacht; if you have to ask, you can't afford it.

earth bugs would die from the intense radiation around Jupiter.

Oh, really?

Exactly this. We investigated moving our engineers (running Pro/E / Creo) and our drafters (running Autocad) to this setup because they're the only ones not running a VDI or VDI-like setup. We're a company well suited to this because we already have the entire setup minus the NVidia gear. We ended up skipping it (for now at least) because of one two things: money and productivity. The cost of switching to a virtual environment was significantly more than the cost of getting them all new hardware. We might look at it again in another year or so when they're due for new hardware anyway, but for now it's $40k plus that isn't needed or wanted by anyone other than IT. It makes our jobs easier, but reduces their productivity slightly at the gain of increasing ours slightly. Even with 10+ drafters and 5+ engineers that offset was enough to make us blink.

If I had at my disposal 65 TJ of energy that is very valuable - in anyone's eyes.

My eyes! Dear god why would you do that to my eyes!

BMW R1150GS Adventure

That $400 a year pays for your helicopter ride from the embassy as it's being stormed by the Viet-con-adians. In all seriousness, being a US citizen has its perks, the biggest being access to any US consolate or embassy, but they'll also try to find you body and ship it home if your plane goes missing or your night-club is bombed, and they'll (sometimes) rescue you if you are imprisoned or kidnapped. You can officially renounce your citizenship, but good luck getting back into the US for any reason if you do that.

24.37% for me. No deductions (or at least none that add up to more than the standard), no credits, filing status=single, cashed out investments. I usually pay less than an hundred in federal, and get back about the same from state, but this year I owed about $1000 overall. I'm not mad at my rate, but boy do I miss having a house. That one deduction alone took me above the standard deduction, which along with other small deductions meant I could change my W4 to take out substantially less each paycheck and still get a return. Why the federal goverment effectively subsidises home ownership but not rent is beyond me.

...with a smile on your face.

They have to grow silicon crystals too, and it is very complex and expensive to get a pure single crystal, but the source material is readily available and the process has been refined for decades. I imagine that the Gallium Arsenide process you're pointing to is used mostly because it's so similar to what they've been doing with silcon.

Iron man?

Ironically, in the post-desktop era, UNIX started out the leader, with Linux fairly quickly taking a commanding percentage of deployments. It is now Microsoft who is so far behind that the odds seem insurmountable.

Sold!

You can't design a system to use an infinite amount of steam, and the Fukushima distaster, you couldn't contain the steam because of damage to the facilities (which, of course, got much worse after the meltdown). The design of the reactor was old, and has been superceded by more fail-safe designs, but that is not the root cause of the disaster. The root cause is the failings fo Tepco install and manage the reactors in a safe manner (high enough from the sea, not have its backup generators in the basement, lack of continual safety enhancements with new technology, etc.) was the root cause. While initiated by a tsunami, the plant was specifically installed with the knowledge that it would get hit by large earthquakes and tsunamis. The Onagawa nuclear plant, located closer to the epicenter of the earthquake, remained wholly operational. The difference? the company in charge of management's safety culture was different, and has been different for decades.

Mimmiths indeed.

I've had enough, first the click farmers, and now Planters© peanuts!

Wait...maybe I'm just hungry.