Ah, my favorite among such is the warning from a hair drier I bought some years ago. It said: "do not use while sleeping."

That kind of thing is something that centrally controlled economies are prone to. It's the mirror image is the problems experienced during the "Great Leap Forward". Market driven economies have different problems (monopolies, concentration of power in the hands of the greedy, etc.) . I'm not really sure which is inherently more deleterious. Perhaps it depends on details of implementation.

It's almost certainly "too late", but I wouldn't say that it's "too little", as I don't think it's even the right move. The announced goal, however (move manufacturing back to the US) is correct. OTOH, sabotaging world trade is a really bad move.

Yes, but the projections I've seen give them several years before their chips catch up (to TSMC). So the question is "Is this a worthwhile move *this* year?". Clearly they should consider the US an unreliable supplier, however.

Unfortunately, the data isn't consistent. That's why they need to make corrections. The question is "Do the corrections make it more nearly accurate?", and that's really hard to demonstrate. When there's too much noise in the signal, it's really difficult to filter it out without losing the signal.

When you're talking petabytes and "reading DNA", I don't think 60 minutes is the right order of magnitude.

Class 1 and 2 e-bikes limit assist to 20 mph, not 15. You can ride them faster than that, but you have to provide the power. 20 mph is well above what most recreational cyclists can maintain on a flat course, so if these classes arenâ(TM)t fast enough to be safe, neither is a regular bike. The performance is well within what is possible for a fit cyclist for short times , so their performance envelope is suitable for sharing bike and mixed use infrastructure like rail trails.

Class 3 bikes can assist riders to 28 mph. This is elite rider territory. There is no regulatory requirement ti equip the bike to handle those speeds safely, eg hydraulic brakes with adequate size rotors. E-bikes in this class are far more likely to pose injury risks to others. I think it makes a lot of sense to treat them as mopeds, requiring a drivers license for example.

Would treating them as mopeds be so bad?

What weâ(TM)re looking at is exactly what happened when gasoline cars started to become popular and created problems with deaths, injuries, and property damage. The answer to managing those problems and providing accountability was to make the vehicles display registration plates, require licensing of drivers, and enforcing minimum safety standards on cars. Iâ(TM)m not necessarily suggesting all these things should be done to e-bikes, but I donâ(TM)t see why they shouldnâ(TM)t be on the table.

I am a lifelong cyclist , over fifty years now, and in general I welcome e-bikes getting more people into light two wheel vehicles. But I see serious danger to both e-bike riders and the people around them. There are regulatory classes which limit the performance envelope of the vehicle, but class 3, allowing assist up to 28 mph, is far too powerful for a novice cyclist. Only the most athletic cyclists, like professional tour racers, can sustain speeds like that, but they have advanced bike handling skills and theyâ(TM)re doing it on bikes that weigh 1/5 of what complete novice novice e-bike riders are on. Plus the pros are on the best bikes money can buy. If you pay $1500 for an e-bike, youâ(TM)re getting about $1200 of battery and motor bolted onto $300 of bike.

Whatâ(TM)s worse, many e-bikes which have e-bike class stickers can be configured to ignore class performance restrictions, and you can have someone with no bike handling skills riding what in effect is an electric motorcycle with terrible brakes.

E-bike classification notwithstanding, thereâ(TM)s a continuum from electrified bicycles with performance roughly what is achievable by a casi recreational rider on one end, running all the way up to electric motorcycles. If there were only such a thing as a class 1 e-bike thereâ(TM)d be little need to build a regulatory system with registration and operator licensing. But you canâ(TM)t tell by glancing at a two wheel electric vehicle exactly where on the bike to motorcycle spectrum it falls; that depends on the motor specification and software settings. So as these things become more popular, I donâ(TM)t see any alternative to having a registration and inspection system for all of them, with regulatory categories and restrictions based on the weight and hardware performance limitations of the vehicle. Otherwise youâ(TM)ll have more of the worst case weâ(TM)re already seeing: preteen kids riding what are essentially electric motorcycles that weigh as much as they do because the parents think those things are âoebikesâ and therefore appropriate toys.

I can't tell if you're being intentionally dense or not, so I'll err on the side of naivete. The construction and operational validation has been paid for, which is the largest part of the cost. The ongoing costs are things like salaries, materials and supplies for subsequent operation, maintenance, and improvements, which are far smaller.

There is no scientist I have ever met who thought LIGO was, in the end, a poor choice of investment of national research funds. There were plenty prior to its stunning first detection (myself included) who thought they were chasing ghosts, but all of those doubters have been converted. The important thing to understand is that LIGO's contributions weren't just detection of a black hole merger (in itself, a hugely important event because it demonstrated the hypothesized existence of gravitational waves), but the establishment of a new field of astronomy based on gravitation, an entirely new means to observe the universe that provides information previously completely unobtainable. Our eyes have been opened where we were previously blind, and the ongoing results are, and continue to be, astounding.

There's a nice fact sheet summary at: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/s...

I'm not sure this is going to be public facing. Many of the objections seem to assume that it is. OTOH, AI is known for returning the answers you want it to return, regardless of the truth of those answers. So perhaps it's the perfect yes-man.

I'm not going to claim those are harmless, but banning them appears more socially destructive than allowing them.

Going to a particular date on a tape is a seek operation. A better reply would be that there's more than on kind of cassette. (1/2" tape has been in cassettes before, just not the kind you usually think of. And that was durable enough to allow a reasonable number of seeks. But I'd sure hate to have to patch a tape with that density.)

But how long does it take to search to the particular bits you were looking for? How many times can you search through the tape before it breaks? There are reasons random access cassettes were never popular.