The summary fails to mention the 5 year warranty, which is obviously quite fantastic. It was only a few years ago many hard drive manufacturers were cutting back from 3 years to 1. A quick survey of amazon indicates many HDDs are currently offering a 2 year warranty. I'd be peeved if a drive died at 2 1/2 years. 5 1/2, not so much.

Pfft, the sexual revolution might be THE most familiar topic of the entire 20th century, so it's a perfect example of simple extrapolation.

If we're really supposed to want to read thing we can't relate to, don't look to sci-fi, because people (including authors) aren't actually capable of not being themselves. Look to the past, plenty of obscure foreign stuff from centuries past. Go read a few thousand pages of pages of Islamic philosophy from the 5th century. You'll be bored silly. But then, that's what's wrong with this premise in the first place. The idea that people like to dwell on ideas they don't sympathize with is simply incorrect. What people really want from sci-fi (and everything) is to be told that their values and vision of human nature and the future are correct. The most popular way is through dystopian future, which is a form of "I told you so!"

It's not hard to understand why companies might be slow to hire ex-cons in a market with a long-term labor surplus. What is harder is fixing the problems created by such policies - you release somebody from prison into society. You deny them voting rights, and employment, and even welfare and food stamps. They literally have no way to get food. And then sit back and wait for the self-fulfilling prophecy of recidivism. You could hardly design a system more likely to fail if you tried.

You assume he chose some country and reached out to them? Most likely the FBI that invented the (phony) plot. They probe people, and particularly people with names like Mostafa Ahmed Awwad, for a willingness to compromise their loyalty to the US.

In the past, the "terrorists" behind some of these plots turned out to be almost pitiable, evidently just simple-minded muslims that probably never would have taken any initiative had they not been recruited by the FBI:

Following a series of similar widely ridiculed so-called "sting" operations, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced last week that it had foiled yet another "terror plot" that, like virtually every supposed "terrorist" case in recent years, was created and managed from start to finish by the FBI itself. This time, the dupe was a 28-year-old California man, Matthew Aaron Llaneza, with a documented history of mental illness, who apparently believed his government handlers were helping him wage "jihad." Critics, however, say the whole scheme smacks of entrapment and a waste of taxpayer money.

Guess it depends which you think is the bigger threat to Intel - technological inferiority to a peer competitor (first priority: protect IP), or technically inferior but "good enough" low-cost competition (first priority: ramp up low-cost production).

Both seem like serious threats. If you lose on volume long enough, you then also lose your technical edge. Just like Intel did to DEC, Sun, etc.

Hard to say what X is, but 0 is not a reasonable guess.

They're not building coal (power) plants any more in the U.S.

Even if true, that's just my point... take a coal plant built 10 years ago. That's a long time ago, right? There was no Tesla. Solar was practically still a unicorn. But that "old" coal plant sitting there still has about 3/4 of a billion dollars tied up in it, and the only way to get it out is to keep shoveling in the coal for 30 more years. Either that, or there's going to be a lot of jockeying around on who eats it.

alternative power producers (who want to be paid per kWh when it's convenient for them to generate, but expect someone else to fund the 'smart grid' or demand shifting necessary to make their product viable).

Keep in mind the benefits of one household using solar are shared equally by everybody - cleaner air, reduced global warming, and reduced depletion of fossil fuel reserves. That is the rationale for placing the additional cost of renewables and variable supply on power consumers in general.

And it is not at all clear that local storage is the most efficient way to do it.

Jobs are fairly fluid as you say, but infrastructure less so. It costs about a billion dollars to build a coal plant, on the anticipation it will operate for 40 years. I would imagine the financing and legal arrangements (such as price guarantees) that entice people to make such investments could easily leave not only investors but taxpayers in the lurch.

The idea of encryption as a silver bullet is a myth. PGP accomplishes nothing on a compromised host (at either end), which is what this bill is about. (This on top of the fact that PGP accomplishes nothing on hosts on which it is not installed, which is to say, effectively all of them).

These things only go the last part of the journey, and only with small, lightweight objects (about 5lbs or so). You're still going to need a massive delivery fleet to move everything to local warehouses from other states or countries

If you ask me, interstate trucking will be automated before doorstop delivery will. Think about it, freeway driving is pretty easy.

It sounds to me like this contact-free coupling actually is basically like an electric motor - except stationary:

Prototype number two is designed to be used at room temperature. In this case, the magnetic reducer sees the gear teeth replaced with permanent magnets that repel and attract each other so that "the transmission of couples and forces between the moving parts with contact is achieved."

This is what an electric motor does, except some mechanism (such as brushes) enables and disables the magnets in phase, such that the armiture is always magnetically attracted forwards, in the desired direction of rotation.

Capitalism is not a social system - it's an economic system. I.e. It is about making and trading THINGS.

There is no sharp distinction. The very concept of "owning" things is simply the right to tell other people what they can and cannot do - don't take that thing away from here, don't walk on this plot of land, go make me a sandwich. Therefore Capitalism is essentially a system for determining who is in charge and gets to make decisions. To imagine this has no social implications is not correct.

My guess is he had previously used a monitor on his computer, but now connected it to the TV. Most TVs do induce some delay by default, but may have a "game mode" to disable the signal processing that causes the delay.

What changed everything was the ability to operate beyond visual range - that was really limiting.