I also forgot to mention that splitting water from up there means you don't have to ferry it up. An even bigger benefit.

The idea is to use energy when you are close to the sun, where photovoltaics are practical. The stored energy is then used when you are distant from the sun, where photovoltaics are not practical.

Look up Lagrange points for a "neutral spot".

Hand in your nerd card at the exit.

At what $ value did Motorola license these patents to other companies?

"or is he unaware that children happily used vertical touch screens forty years ago on UIUC's PLATO System?""

You had to dig up an example from forty years ago because apparently nobody has bothered to do that since. Your forty year old exception proves Apple's contention - people generally prefer horizontal displays. There have been vertical displays in computing history but they are the negligible exceptions. For a reason.

There are some classes of problems that cannot be solved with all the theoretical computational power in our universe. For example, trying to brute force a secure cipher key with enough key bits (a Vernam cipher at the extreme) - this is not a good physical problem to break the simulator but it illustrates there are problems that no amount of compute power can compute.

The goal is not to notice a slowdown. The goal is to force the simulation to expose itself by taking a computational shortcut so that it remains economically viable to run for its creators- at the risk of being shut off completely.

Yes, it slows down the tick rate. But I would presume the simulation is running for a reason - the beings outside are looking to gain something by running the simulation - it could run the gamut from wanting to to learn something (computer models) to entertainment (the sims). If we can run enough of these problems to sufficiently slow down the system - the simulating beings will have no use for the simulation as it is unacceptably slow or uneconomic to keep running as is.

I always thought a good method of testing if we are a simulation is to attack its economics by slowing down the simulation to a crawl.

Math is universal regardless of your position in the simulation hierarchy. If we perform an experiment in our simulation that would require inordinate amounts of compute power on the simulator's part to maintain the simulation (say something like an NP problem that the simulator would need to solve), that would reduce the economic utility of the simulator to its operator. There are two possible outcomes to the experiment if we are indeed simulations: the simulator cuts corners on the solution and we learn we are in a simulator; or the simulation ends.

As to what puzzle we could pose the universe. I don't know, I'm not a physicist.

Container shipping is charged by volume, not weight.

If you have a decent mover (never really know until you get your stuff back...) your stuff should be just fine if you pack it reasonably. A good mover will also pay attention to what you say is fragile and will treat it accordingly (you can also watch them stuff everything in the container to make sure).

Nevertheless, you always want a backup of your data going a different route. Create a backup and either FedEx it to the destination or take it with you.

I think the population explosion in poorer countries over the last 50 years pretty conclusively shows that to be false.

Instead of facilitating the addition of millions of babies into poverty, perhaps a much greater emphasis should be placed on preventing their conception.

Still bog standard exhausts on those engines. I'm not convinced till they can show a stealthy exhaust. It's a dead giveaway that the book is all cover, no content.

Because your vendors are Google or the Kremlin. I didn't create the choices.

I think I'd rather have my data go to Google rather than the Kremlin...