I am curious to hear their ideas on how to phase out use of fertilizer and plastics. Sustenance farming living in log cabins wearing animal skins is one way to do it.

Pointless sentiment. Of course countries will still use oil products. The whole point is to not be putting those oil products into the atmosphere. For instance, by using it for fertilizer and plastics.

Well, first of all, hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, and carbon makes up something like 0.5% of the total observed mass of the universe (it's the fourth most common element), so along with other trace elements like sodium, phosphorus and the like, we're simply looking for places where there is sufficient energy to create the necessary reactions to produce organic compounds. No lack of energetic sources, in particular stellar system formation. Indeed many comets and asteroids host a lot of precursors, indicating that some fairly sophisticated organic chemistry was going on early in the solar system's development.

Panspermia would require that life itself was raining down on the terrestrial planets. Precursors would simply indicate there were a lot of strange and complex organic compounds falling on to the surfaces of planets like Earth, Mars and Venus, and were also likely constituents of bodies like Europa and Titan (well, we know Titan is covered in a literal hydrocarbon stew). What this discovery indicates, at the very least, is there was indeed a lot of organic compound in the early solar system and these organic compounds, at least on Earth, led to abiogenesis. Panspermia would advocate abiogenesis happened at some undetermined point further back.

If we find other life in the solar system, such as in Europa's or Ganymede's oceans, and it has DNA or some very close relative, with similar translation and transcription systems as we find in archaea and bacteria on Earth, then that would be a very strong argument that life in the solar system had a common origin. If however, there is no clear relationship between the two populations; say, they use something similar to DNA, but the genetic codes are different (all extant life on Earth uses the same canonical genetic code mapping codons to amino acids, strongly suggested the canonical code evolved prior to the Last Universal Common Ancestor), then we're very likely looking at an example of convergent evolution, and not in fact at two related populations.

They're certainly not going to break it out in the future, regardless of any threats. Any company that did has now created a specific liability, and could end up receiving tons of small claims cases if they don't refund. Companies that didn't can just claim they absorbed the cost, and don't owe anyone anything.

Have a look at the map dude. Iraq is a mostly land locked country on the far end of the persian gulf, far from where the hormuz straight is. They definitely could have fucked with the oil facilities in Kuwait, but last time they tried that the americans dropped the hammer on them very rapidly.

Plus, the Iranian military is around 7-10 times the size of Iraq's, and around twice the population, so theres that.

Back in the 1990s when I used to attend a lot of "extreme" metal gigs, there was a local grind metal band who where on this permanent quest to discover the "brown note", a mythical infrasonic frequency that would cause the listener to shit their pants. Thankfully for us punters, no such tone exists. One could imagine however using an ultrasound frequency like the researchers suggest to induce a perception of smelling shit. Heck, even get the audience to puke. Thankfully said band are now all in their 50s-60s (and likely not actually a band no more) and probably less interested in such irresponsible, but possibly funny, experiments.

Im not sure what actual power the judge has here. Internationally those sorts of orders have no status and at best are just suggestions. Same goes with orders to comply if Annas Archive is hosted internationally. Probably russians, who in turn probably dont give a flying fuck about the opinion of some random american judge.

The thing is , offence is defence if your devs are competent. One thing I've always stressed is we should be attacking our own products all the time. Using security linters and static analysis, fuzzing and all the other techniques to kick holes in our own systems so we can identify and patch them. These AI tools are no different.

And I'd argue for an attacker the stakes are just as high. If you screw up, you might just expose who you are, and while your target risks losing his money, you risk losing your freedom..... or worse, if you pick a gnarly enough target.

Speak for yourself. We moved a lot of our AWS workload onto the Arm VMs and where pretty shocked to see how good the performance is. Bang for buck, theres not a lot of reasons left to stick with Intel for compute.

Except that was already done, and done brilliantly by Deep Space Nine. In reality, the Star Fleet Academy idea had a very old lineage, to the smoking shambles that was Star Trek V, when the idea was posited of having a prequel with the TOS characters, or at least the main ones, portrayed by younger actors, during their Academy days. It was pretty quickly rejected because at the time they didn't think audiences would buy the idea of new actors playing Kirk, Spock and Bones.

Of course, in the end, that was effectively what the first part of the 2009 Star Trek, which, for me at least, proved that the guys who rejected the idea in 1989-90 were spot on. But other people like the Kelvinverse films, so to each their own.

The real problem isn't writing per se. There were no lack of justifiable complaints against Voyager and Enterprise. The real problem is that no one really knows where to take it. The whole 32nd century gambit is because no one really knows how to portray the technology of the intervening period. The Enterprise temporal war rubbish demonstrated just how incredibly problematic it can be for an established sci-fi franchise to push itself across a broad timeline when you start with ships that go multiples of the speed of light, create holodecks and replicators and have computers so intelligent they can create conscious beings, and that's just by the 24th century.

With James Bond they can just keep resetting the character over and over again, and updating the gadgets along the way. Star Trek, for all its faults, has established a sort of permanent 70s-ish technology vibe, and because it's more fantasy then science fiction, the controls for the super planet buster never have to change! That franchise fell on its sword more because of a lack of imagination, lazy writing and an obvious desire not to pay Extended Universe authors some royalties for a cache of rather interesting ideas, and ultimately having to go there anyways.

In all cases, I think the fan base is the worst enemy. No franchise like Star Trek is ever going to measure up to the mythology of the older series. TOS really has entered the realm of cultural myth, and TNG, though everyone forgets how much the first season was disliked (and on rewatch a few years ago, I have to say it feels like a wonder that it ever got a season 2), isn't far behind. Even DS9's critics have finally stopped talking, and for my money, it is the most consistently well-written and well-acted of all the Star Treks. But that kind of legacy is absolutely toxic, because if you try to be too different everyone screams "It isn't Star Trek", and if you try to be similar in tone, then everyone complains "We've seen it all before!"

"Strange New Worlds was a nice partial deviation from this - they still made sure to pander to all the current 'sensitivities', but if the writers of the show didn't love the original series and its fundamental qualities, I don't know who does."

Have you even seen the original series? Racism, bigotry, classism, human rights, ethics, not to mention nationalism, were all dealt with. TNG went further, particularly with Riker's penchant for rather open sexual interests, and of course DS9 dealt with everything from war crimes to the undermining of civil society. Voyager and Enterprise in their turn covered similar issues, though perhaps not always as ably as the first three series did.

While I would agree the way Nutrek at times has tried to do social commentary has perhaps suffered from a lack of metaphor and allegory, which the older series' writers at times had to work through since things like interracial kisses and non-binary identity would have, at the time, caused stations to go apoplectic (and indeed some did, with the Kirk-Uhura kiss). But I suspect more than just some iffy writing is at play here. Everyone accepts, well almost everyone that is, that mixed-race couples can kiss in public, and most people accept gay couples and class and racial equality. But if you try to push further into social liberalism, past what many conservative elements in society have been forced (kicking and screaming the whole way mind you), well suddenly it's all evil woke trash trying to reprogram our brains.

In other words, many have not progressed very far at all, and because TOS and TNG in particular had to hide the underlying message beneath makeup and latex, the less progressive fans can watch it and, well, almost willfully miss the point of The Outcast (TNG) or Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (TOS), assuming, I suppose, that the metaphor is buried so deeply they don't have to challenge their prejudices.

My best guess is that with the second season of Jury Duty being about a corporate retreat

Occasionally I need reminders as to why I havent owned a television set in 20 years. Yep, shits still brain-damaged out there in TV land

I've been very fond of the "actual money" currency. Its got a much less "fiat" backing than cryptocurrencies, doesnt involve any expensive proof of works and is reliably handled by almost all brokerages.

And you can buy pizza with it. Hell, keep it in paper form, its even anonymous.

There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.

But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.

Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.