You seem obsessed with f***ing kids. I'd see a psychiatrist about that.

Depends on how close the other things are to nuclear physics. In this case, we're looking at political theory and military strategy, which are not things very similar to nuclear physics.

No, I only think that the fact that his brains can do physics really well is not a guarantee that it can do other things really well as well.

He's very qualified to weigh in on the mechanics of how the weapons function. Weighing in on the politics of why they might be used, not so much.

I can think of four reasons ticket sales have dropped.

1. Much of what Hollywood has been putting out is crap.
2. Politicians increase taxes constantly, resulting in less disposable income for potential movie-goers.
3. Ticket costs increasing - Not much can be done there, theaters do it to compensate for the loss in sales.
4. Streaming is a thing. Why go to a theater to sit in a sticky, uncomfortable seat when one can wait a little while for the movie to hit $STREAMING_SERVICE and watch it from the comfort of one's own home?

This isn't really surprising.

The "AI experts" (oof) are the people who are best poised to reap any economic rewards either through being in tech pushing AI, or being otherwise invested (personally or financially) in AI succeeding. These include the people who magically think that productivity gains will benefit workers, as opposed to owners, which ignores 100 years of productivity-gain data.

The "non-AI-experts" are presumably regular workers who see the C-suite and owners salivating at AI as the fastest way to stop paying actual humans to do a service, or for companies to degrade quality with a magical-thinking "I can't believe it's good enough!" mindset that actually gives customers a worse experience (for a greater profit).

What this divergence doesn't rule out is that the "expert" class has well-founded reason for optimism, and the "non-expert" class has well-founded reason for pessimism. It just suggests that one side sees itself as the owner class in a corpo-owned dystopian cyberpunk future where wealth has access to skill and skill doesn't have access to wealth.

Just imagine, you might be in conference with a soulless unfeeling thing.

Or you might get the AI.

Not only that, it protects them from Aliens too! It's the whole package!

This depends considerably on the paper. Acidic paper, widely used because it's cheap, oxidizes in a few decades and degrades as you have seen. Because of this, acid-free paper has become increasingly popular. Your newer books are in fact likely to last much better than the ones dating from the 20th century.

..which doesn't support 486s, so the OP's statement that OS/2 still supports 486s is still not true.

"Entertainment purposes only" Note that they don't say *whose* entertainment.

"Support", not "in use". IBM sure as hell doesn't support OS/2 any more.

No, they only found the cow tools.

The first person to think of the concept of solar sails was Johannes Kepler in 1610, when he observed that comets' tails always pointed directly away from the sun and speculated that whatever force caused that could be harnessed by sails. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1921 made the first serious proposal, with the concept of light pressure being fairly well-understood at that point.

As far as Star Trek is concerned, I might point out that while TOS never had solar sails, Deep Space Nine did entire episode centered around a solar sail vessel ("Exploters").