Presumably though cell phones have a power constraint, the battery. If it were constantly sending full audio and video back to the mothership battery life would nose-dive.

Plugged in smart hubs though? Buying one is probably considered opting in to full time surveillance.

1984 seems so quaint now. Relatedly, I'm pretty sure GIFs are the 21st century Newspeak.

It wouldn't happen tomorrow, but the demand could be there if the energy/materials were.

Some combination of sequestration and transmutation (not literally, but CO2->carbon fiber) could be a winning ticket. Not to mention we could try and reforest areas. That'd have a pretty large negative carbon effect. I recall recently reading an article about how in the early 90s in Costa Rica they dumped tons of orange peels onto depleted scrub land. 30 years later the growth was so impressive that they couldn't find their original signs marking the experimental area!

Am I being optimistic? Of course. I'd prefer to waste my brain cycles on thought experiments like these vs the 'Subject of hate du jour' or 'Look what The Idiot said now' being peddled everywhere else.

Closing one of the last analog holes means that your music an only pass through digital approved devices.

Soon:
*Danger, music from an unverified source detected, sound output disabled*

You may have said that as a joke, but you might not be that far off.

There are processes now using molten-lithium carbonate electrolytic cells to pull the carbon out of the air. The real innovate though is the electrode has nucleation sites that allow for the growing of carbon-nanotube whiskers long enough to be harvested and spun into a carbon fiber with not much more processing (compared to current forms of carbon fiber manufacture). The other component to making useful carbon fiber materials is epoxy resin. Resin is pretty much all organic, read-carbon!

This coupled with cheap PV solar and focused solar heating (for the carbonate cells) we could really be pulling truly significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Not just sequestering, but providing true value-added structural materials (ie market driven!!)

But publicly funded research should be available to the public.

No you don't.

I bet universal healthcare and an amazing social safety net that (nearly) all citizens seem to approve of and enjoy is part of the equation.

Same. This also (partially) explains why many black populations in the US are so screwed over today. They weren't able to get mortgages in the 50s and 60s, so they never were able to start accruing wealth to pass onto the next generation.

God damn! Who the hell is cutting onions in my office?

Ow my feels.

NC lost numerous concerts, conferences, NCAA tournaments and other large events due directly to HB-2. None of that counts the individual people who decided not to vacation here. It was easily $1 Billion in economic activity lost. Easily. The NCAA tournament (which UNC won!) would have been held in NC except for, yep, HB-2.

No impact at all?

Seconded.

I've been on this site since about 2001. The 'This site has gone to shit' arguments have been around that long too. However, in the past 2 years (since around the /. Beta fiasco it seems) most of the quality comments have all but left. 'Conservative echo chamber' kinda hits the nail on the head. The libertarian dog whistle / talking points get trotted out so often it's just boring now to read. Arm-chair economists with such deep insights as 'Don't like your job, move and get another one, dummy!' seem to be about the best the site has to offer now.

Why am I still here then? Habit mostly, I gave it up (and read Soylent) for a good while, and now I come back, thought not as often as before. As for reading comments, I guess I still do out of some hope that they might get better again...though my tolerance is lower I spend only a fraction of the time trying to sift through the Randian garbage.

I think you forgot to tell us to get off your lawn.

I considered the static firing a test fire. However, recent news suggests that it was the fueling that caused the explosion. It'll be interesting to see what they determined to be the cause.

Isn't this pretty much WHY they do static fires in the first place?

I'm sure they didn't expect the whole damn thing to explode though. Either way, the data they got from this is incredibly valuable. Whatever happened I'm willing to be won't happen again.