I really only bike when it rains or rain looks imminent. Otherwise, I skate. Almost every day. Like today: I'm headed to work.

If it was all good, they would not stutter. No, it looks like some important wiring is missing. Their brains have implemented a work-around that mostly does the job but is not a complete solution. There are conditions it does not handle well. A retraining program seems to help but it not clear if the wiring fault is being fixed or if they are just gaining an improved ability to avoid the problem cases.

1) The blight "breathes nitrogen" and destroys all plants one crop species at a time.
2) A society which never got much further than we are today and whose technological civilization is falling apart is able to mount a crewed mission to wormhole near Saturn?
3) Several habitable worlds very close to a black hole. Why are there any? Where are the host star(s)?
4) The future utopia never went back to the black hole worlds but got along fine anyway. So what was the point?

With all the sloppy science, technology, and plotting going on, does it really matter if the visuals of the worm whole traversal or subtly wrong, exactly right, or just pure bologna?

Africa would benefit little from free IP since it mostly lacks the means to manufacture sophisticated technology. Africa makes use of clean energy technology the same way the use other technology. They buy it already manufactured from more advanced regions. No patent license is required to deploy a solar array.

China could manufacture. But China also has the resources to license the IP and they own IP themselves. Would free IP allow China to deploy clean energy technology faster? A little. But mostly it would allow China to demolish First World competition much faster.

Linus comment is out of context, I hope.

Getting hired really quickly changes nothing. You are still an unpaid volunteer unless the new job pays you to contribute to the kernel. Lots of people contribute to open source projects on their own time while drawing income from other work. That does not make them paid developers in the context of the open source project.

Everything is useless in a nuclear war. Everything can be expected to be destroyed, including the submarines. "Success" means launching your attack before you are destroyed. The submarines might delay engagement thus their crews might live a day longer than then those on surface ships but the result is much the same. Submarines have greater ability hide but nuclear depth charges are devestating weopens. An 8 KM kill radius makes precise location information unnecessary.

They may have tried that but her French wasn't that good or the accents were mutually unintelligible.

That French is the official language does not guarantee perfect fluency and certainly does not mean that French is her native language. It almost certainly is not.

A given African country will have many languages. Educated Africans typically speak several languages with varying fluency. The Congolese woman would be most fluent in her tribal language but they may not be in Google Translate and it would be difficult for the paramedics to figure out which one it is anyway. Swahili was probably a fortunate guess after French didn't work well.

Yes, it seems like most phones are abandoned by cyanogenmod at about the same time the manufacturer does. Certainly, this was the case Mytouch 4G/HTC Glacier. The last manufacturer release (less than a year after I bought the phone) was Gingerbread. The last Cyanogenmod: also Gingerbread.

They're good with Google's phones and the most popular Samsung phones but anything else is a gamble even if it is supported at the time you buy the phone.

No. It means they will be the last 747's in the president's fleet. Boeing isn't going out of business. They are just winding up construction of 747's. The next time around, they will have to choose a different airframe. But it may still be made a Boeing.

For some Android devices. Not for all. For others, device driver issues prevent a fully functional Cyanogenmod, much less one that is officially supported. My Mytouch 4G, for instance. It stuck on Gingerbread, bugs and all along with buggy third party apps whose bugfixes are only available on later Androids.

Reach the end of a roll of film and it auto-rewinds with distinctive hum.

From a travelogue I wrote in 2003:

As the light started to dim and elephant to disperse, I heard a familiar hum. The film has reached its end and was now returning to the start. I felt a sense of completeness. Previously, I had toyed with the idea of visiting one of Bangkok's inevitably overtouristed sites. But that now seemed wrong. A rushed viewing of an overcrowded temple in a polluted city was not a fitting close for an epic Asian adventure. Better to stop here, at the last frame of the roll. To end with elephants.

It was the last photo that camera ever took. Digital cameras today emulate some of the noises of film: film advance, mirror clack (even for those that have no mirrors), but not rewind.

Actually rewind sounds of all kinds have mostly disappeared. Reel to Reel, audio cassette, VCR tape. Backup tape rewind still happens but not many hear it anymore.

While not a bad idea, it doesn't solve the problem. When you have your own fab, you are pretty much obligated to use it. Even when it is late, low on capacity, or a full node behind. You can reduce this risk by throwing a lot of money at R&D and spare capacity. However, this is more than a little bit expensive. That is why AMD doesn't have a captive fab anymore. They can't afford it.

TSMC is in the business of making chips. They don't make money if they can't make chips. I haven't heard that Apple or Samsung have an unexpected block buster products at 14nm. That means that either TSMC grossly underestimated demand at 14/16nm/20nm (not likely) or they are having manufacturing problems that are slowing production. If it were just TSMC screwing up, you would bet UMC other fabs would exploiting this opportunity to steal business. Since this isn't happening, it is good bet that a hypothetical AMD or Nvidia fab would have the same production trouble.

Getting up to speed is really really hard. So much so that you can largely forget about taking advantage of time dilation. Unless you can salvage a Bussard Ramjet (current thinking is that it won't work) you are not going to get that fast. Traveling 3LY instead of 16LY means only having to reach 1/5 the speed to arrive in a "reasonable" time. That's a big help. It might be the difference between doable but hard and hopeless.

SATA is not hard to find. *Dual* SATA is hard to find and dual SATA with dual Ethernet is basically non-existant among ARM boards.

I have a PCduino Nano that I picked up at a raffle. It's a cute little board but single ethernet means it can't be a router or a firewall. Single SATA means no RAID so it doesn't really have any business being a server either.