I currently have a web radio transceiver front panel application that works on Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, Amazon Kindle Fire, under Chrome, Firefox, or Opera. No porting, no software installation. See blog.algoram.com for details of what I'm writing.

The one unsupported popular platform? iOS, because Safari doesn't have the function used to acquire the microphone in the web audio API (and perhaps doesn't have other parts of that API), and Apple insists on handicapping other browsers by forcing them to use Apple's rendering engine.

I don't have any answer other than "don't buy iOS until they fix it".

Have you ever had a LEGO brick turn squishy on you? Because that's what they're made of, ABS plastic.

It's a plenty tough enough material that I used it to manufacture parts for a geodesic dome for outdoor use as a greenhouse, and it held up fine. I also manufactured gears for a friends high end RC car after the manufacturer had gone out of business. Those gears see a lot of stress, and they held up fine.

ABS is a great material, and so is PLA.

Super Dracos are for escape in flight too, including in and past MaxQ. But they are on Crew Dragon, not Cargo Dragon. Cargo Dragon did not carry a crew and wasn't programmed to save itself.

Most of us do have a need to transmit messages privately. Do you not make any online purchases?

Yes, but those have to use public-key encryption. I am sure of my one-time-pad encryption because it's just exclusive-OR with the data, and I am sure that my diode noise is really random and there is no way for anyone else to predict or duplicate it. I can not extend the same degree of surety to public-key encryption. The software is complex, the math is hard to understand, and it all depends on the assumption that some algorithms are difficult to reverse - which might not be true.

The original "Planetary Grand Tour" project would have visited Pluto, but it relied on a planetary alignment that would have to have started in 1976 or 1977. It was originally announced as a single craft, which became four before it was cancelled (I don't remember that, but for a brief history, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...). This was replaced by the two Voyager satellites launched in 1977. The later launch date made Pluto harder to visit, but it was still possible.

Most algorithms to do this use the time between keypresses, measured to very high precision so that the lower bits are chaotic. So it doesn't really matter what keys you hit, and it doesn't matter how rythmic your typing is.

The problem with FM static is that you could start receiving a station, and if you don't happen to realize you are now getting low-entropy data, that's a problem.

There are many well-characterized forms of electronic noise: thermal noise, shot noise, avalanche noise, flicker noise, all of these are easy to produce with parts that cost a few dollars.

True randomness comes from quantum mechanical phenomena. Linux /dev/random is chaotic, yes, enough to seed a software "R"NG. But we can do better and devices to do so are cheap these days.

I wouldn't trust anything but diode noise for randomness. If I had a need to transmit messages privately, I'd only trust a one-time pad.

I reckoned you could do the equivalent with a superconducting cable around Mars' equator carrying about 500 amps. This sounds more do-able than it perhaps is, because the magnetic field has an enormous amount of energy so it would take years to establish the magnetic field; and all the energy would all come out if the cable is broken.

Communism has been tried on a large scale - see Mao's Great Leap Forward.

Nope. That was a totalitarian socialist program pushing a collectivism that didn't work. Communism is a post-scarcity society and obviously scarcity was the thing Mao produced best.

That's why most places (at least around here) also screen for behaviours which could end with blood borne disease spreading.

i.e.: You can't immediately donate blood after having a tattoo done.
Even if you are HIV negative, there might be another unknown disease that could have spread from improperly cleaned tools.
Need to way some time (1 year) before starting giving blood again.
By that time you'll have started showing symptoms and/or news of a new blood borne disease will have been heard.

Whatever it has been used for subsequently, A113 is a classroom at Cal Arts.

I didn't actually work on GPUs very much at Pixar, the image computer I worked on was the grandfather of the SIMD image processing instructions on modern CPUs. What would become a GPU later on was a very expensive box from Silicon Graphics, I had one that cost at least a quarter Million dollars.

Not exactly "So like every other prototype "hoverboard", then"

This one uses magnetic levitation. (Thus works only over a steel surface).

The one from the kickstarter project uses magnetic induction (Thus works over any conducting surface).

Get a bunch of engineers, split them into groups, and pack each group in a different room.
Ask them something awesome like an hoverboard, and they'll come out with probably a dozen of different solutions, each with its own advantage and short-comings. Including levitation solutions that explicitly work over water.