How many hours of video per minute are people watching?

...especially ones who make lots of campaign contributions. For example, the state tried unsuccessfully to require anyone selling on eBay to obtain an auctioneer's license.

Not that this is limited to NC by any means. God forbid anyone should step on the toes of health insurers, real-estate hucksters (sorry, my mistake, Realtors (tm) (c) (R)), taxi operators (jitney laws)...

Let's just pile on more software.

I understand the concept of layered security, but I'm not convinced, especially not when things are bundled like this -- instead of serving as an independent layer, it seems like it'll just make a bigger attack surface.

If only I had mod points.

If FTL is possible, everything -- everything -- falls apart, because we've knocked out causality. There may be something left if causality falls, but no branch of science or philosophy offers us any tools to analyze it.

If FTL is not possible, then the more advanced our communication and computation and HCI become, the less motivation we have to move even beyond low orbit. Think of how gamers whine about hundred-millisecond ping times today. Now imagine continuous, fine-grained, fully-integrated access to post-Google at the pre-conscious level -- and imagine that suddenly half your thoughts are experiencing multi-second latency. Not even the most inveterate stoner would be eager to tolerate that sort of impairment.

And the idea of traveling to another solar system? It would amount to forking reality, with the travelers effectively removing themselves from Earth's consensus universe forever.

Well, I'd like for it to be burrows or casings...

What sort of progress? Oh, I don't know -- perhaps the six-order-of-magnitude increase in memory size, or the four-order-of-magnitude increase in processing speed, or the one-order-of-magnitude-plus reduction in weight, or the two-order-of-magnitude reduction in volume, or...

Look, if what you want is a machine with the power, storage, battery life, and durability of the PC8201a, we can easily hook you up. Of course, you're going to pay for it, because there's no economy of scale in manufacturing it -- nobody wants a machine with those specifications, unless it's in the wristwatch form-factor, and dedicated to a fairly simple task. I'm guessing that a heart-rate monitor is a pretty close match.

I seem to remember reading (decades ago) about people successfully grafting tomato plants onto hemp root stock, and getting THC-bearing foliage. Guess it was a false report, though, or by now it would be pretty widespread.

I'm still not clear on why these plant structures are necessary for production of the chemical, as opposed to concentration. But that's not surprising, as I'm no sort of biologist.

Well, most ionic liquids are expensive. Not all, though -- you can make one with a eutectic mix of choline chloride and urea that's liquid at room temperature, and the components are available for pennies per kilogram. (Choline chloride is chicken feed, and urea is a bulk fertilizer.)

I'm sure a semiconductor manufacturer wouldn't be using anything so mundane. Then again, they'd probably be using micrograms at most per chip.

No, no, no. You're supposed to ditch your old-fashioned, behind-the-times collaborators and start hanging out with the cool kids. "Work" and "substance" are totes last-century.

So, heart attacks go up by 10% in the wake of spring-forward, but fall by 10% in the wake of fall-back? The solution is clear, then -- we need to adopt an official 25-hour day.

The twice-yearly clock shift really is a silly, silly exercise. Not so silly as a uniform, one-size-fits-all, year-around schedule for work, school, and entertainment, but silly all the same.

Pulse dialing actually cost the phone company more for a long time, as I understand it, because it kept the switching circuitry busy longer than tone dialing. But they'd won the right to charge extra for tone dialing, and the more people shifted to tone dialing (for its obvious benefits), the more money they could get.

My wife and I were also holdouts, keeping our cheap electronic phones set to pulse-dial (hit "speed dial 8", then wait for the clickety-clicking to finish), switching to tone-dial as needed for voicemail. Even if it wasn't worth spending a few extra seconds a day to save a few extra cents a day, it was worth it to us to deny the phone company those ill-gotten cents.

And if you had ignored all the people who said "you can't do that" or "it won't work" or "no one has ever done that", you... probably wouldn't have survived grad school in chemistry. Or, for that matter, driver's education.

Sometimes, when everybody says you're wrong, it's because you're wrong.

I don't know how far you're going to go with this.

Electrically reinforcing molecular bonds?

Unfortunately, no. But it does look at least a bit more interesting than "electrostatic attraction draws the film upward", which was what i guessed before reading the linked articles.

For a given budget, you can field a whole lot more drones than manned vehicles. Even if they have to be continuously teleoperated, drone controllers are a lot cheaper than pilots, and drones are a lot cheaper to operate than manned vehicles.

I expect that before the end of the decade every squad car will carry multiple drones. This horse is out of sight of the barn.

MPW

ParcPlace (?) Smalltalk

Lightspeed/Think C

Hypercard

I did a project or two on Mac Common LISP, but I don't even remember whether that was an IDE or not. It's been a looooong time.

Even earlier than that, I used some Pascal dev environment on the TRS-80, but I don't think you could call it an IDE. Not much room for integration in 48K.