BTW, firearms are a bad example of "looks like magic" to somebody 500 years ago. Those automatic weapons haven't changed much in 100 years, and single-shot firearms very similar to what we have today have existed for over 400, with gunpowder-fired projectiles around 800 years old.

The only significant firearm-specific advancement from 1600 to the late 1800s was the cartridge (which also made clips possible). Better metalworking techniques, etc., also helped, but those were general-purpose. At that point, the first self-loading firearm that didn't use human power to load the next cartridge (i.e., a semi-automatic) came along in the early 1900s. Since then, the change in firearms is almost identical to the change in rocket technology...scale is larger, and materials are stronger, but the design really hasn't changed much.

There were rockets in 1903. They weren't as powerful, but the physics of rocket flight was pretty well known at the time.

The only difference between fireworks and the Saturn V is scale...more powerful fuel, stronger materials, etc.

If you didn't know any of Tolkien, why would you feel "terrified" by a ring?

Everyone (children, too), learns through exposure to things. They learn that hot stoves hurt you when you touch them, and that ice cream tastes good. So, where, exactly, would you have "learned" that a ring has the power to turn you invisible other than fictional stories like Tolkien? If your home life has led you to believe that magic is real, then you have a lot more problems than being threatened by a magical ring.

And yet, all personal income taxes are based on revenue.

Sure, you might have some deductions from income, but unlike a business, you can't subtract all the money you paid for food, housing, and paying your "employees" (like babysitters, taxi drivers, etc.).

How about writing his own character out of the next movie?

The problem with the "reboot" is that there are thousands of stories that can be told in the Star Trek universe without involving Kirk, Spock, McCoy, et.al., as proved by four television series.

I don't need any licensed (or even installed) Adobe software or Microsoft Office in order to play games or browse the web, but I need the OS.

Please provide a step-by-step list of the commands needed to remove systemd from CentOS 7 "minimal install", or a pointer to such a list.

I have now been told literally dozens of times that "you don't have to install systemd", but no one has yet to back that up with steps for an install without it, or how to remove it from an existing install.

The word you (and others) are looking for is "route-able", not "public".

There are a lot of IANA-assigned (i.e., "public") IPs that aren't routable from all other arbitrary IP addresses, while many places have made private IPs routable for some or all of their network, just like North Korea has done.

I set up a RAM disk on my Windows machine because of Audacity.

It creates temp files to store intermediate work (like the decode to PCM of a compressed format, or the output of a filter) instead of using RAM. Even with an SSD, this was not nearly as fast as it should have been, and a serious waste, since the total space used by the temp files is far less than the memory space available to the application. The RAM disk solved the speed problem quite nicely.

I also store things like Firefox's page cache on the RAM disk.

Actually, most motherboards today have auto-switching slots, so that they have 16 lanes assigned to 3 slots, and the motherboard and card negotiate so that each card performs as fast as it can regardless of slot, up to the total maximum of 16 lanes across the three slots. This means there is no "primary" slot any more, and helps you lay out cards where clearance is an issue.

What this means is that you can install that x16 video card in any of the three x16 form factor slots, and it will get all 16 lanes. If you install a card in another of the x16 form factor slots, it will get up x8 if it asks for it, and the first card will be dropped down to x8 as well. Install a third card, and you end up with x8/x4/x4, but again, no slot is "primary".

No, it's inflated because it's Sony.

This player has a high quality DAC, etc., gets great reviews from audiophiles, and yet only costs $350. Sure, you need to spend an extra $100 for a 128GB MicroSD card, but that's still $750 less than Sony wants.

Yeah, the hardware they are talking about is interesting, and if I could set up a local server to control it, that might be useful. But handing over information and control to someplace out on the Internet sounds like about the worst idea ever.

Nor is it required to give you better sound at home than the average movie theater.

IMDB ratings have a serious problem as far as new movies are concerned, as the latest movie of any reasonable quality tends to get many people rating it a "10" (which should mean it's perfect). It takes a while before a movie settles down to what its real rating should be. This is caused by the "aging" algorithm and number of required votes per year that IMDB uses. It means that a movie that has a lot of buzz will be listed until everybody stops caring about it and it drops out of the list, even if it has a rating that is technically better than movies in the list.

Likewise, there is no reason for movies in the top 250 to be evenly distributed by year. It's far more likely that good movies should be much older, as being evenly distributed by year implies that this year movies have been good enough to push some other movies out of the top 250, which means that the best movies are getting better, which most people agree isn't true. Even, then, there are a lot a problems with ratings being inflated as time goes by. As little as 5 years ago, a movie could crack the top 250 with less than an 8.0 rating, but now some movies are left off even though they have that same rating.

If you use IMDB info, the "Top 1000 Voters" and "Metascore" are far better indicators of the overall quality of the movie, especially if you take into account the number of "Top 1000" that entered a rating for the movie. Basically, these are people who see and rate a lot more movies than anybody else, so even if their score is high for the movie, if a lot of them never rated it, that says something by itself. For example, Star Wars and The Dark Knight are two movies that have both been around for long enough for everyone to get a chance to see them and vote on them, and have ratings of 8.6 and 8.2 from the top voters, with 930 and 898 votes. Both ratings are close to the overall ratings. On the other hand, The Hunt from 2012 (also old enough for such die hard movie viewers to have seen it) gets a 7.3 (considerably lower than the 8.3 from all voters), but only 421 bothered to see it. Django Unchained from the same year, OTOH, gets 710 votes for a rating of 7.8 (still lower than the 8.5 from all voters, but not as much of a drop). The confidence that the rating on Django Unchained is more accurate is much higher. Even using overall votes, Interstellar has less than half the votes compared to the average of the two movies immediately surrounding it on the list, and as such will eventually fall to where it really belongs.

Microsoft could start by changing the default Windows Explorer settings to always show file extensions and not have a configuration option that turned off the display.

No, it wouldn't stop everyone from doing stupid things, but it might help a few people make better decisions.