Good name for a rock band

Problem solved.

We have three unused Alexa units in the house - gift from my sister to my kids. Two kids have privacy concerns, and the third doesn't know how to set it up (I could, but best she learns how to set things up herself). Last I saw one in the house it was being used as a raised pricey coaster.

If your trip has more than two stops you may get to see places you've never seen before - the "hidden" stops; hopefully there is a supercharger along that path.

Photonic because everything is better when done with lasers, right? Does you i7 make "pew pew" sounds?

Quantum Not so bad, but add it to computing and the number of people who get it is drastically reduced

Analog computing Because two states are never enough, we need 42

Brown ball means bug we can fix after the release, red ball means we can't ship until the precog AI is made happy.

"in serious hurt if one of us were hit by a truck"

Kind of goes without saying, but is better than being serious dead.

Not much there to go on, but that said the Wikipedia article is substantially outdated. A more recent description of field experiments can be found at: http://www.jhuapl.edu/techdige....

There are plenty of papers paywalled at the SPIE site as well if you'd like to get a better feel on what the state of the art is post the 2012 experiment described in the linked article.

All that said, the environment is your enemy as you go up in frequency - things like clouds, rain (but not always), fog (again, not always), and the pigeon that someone mentioned previously can break the link, but proper design of the modems can get through some of that. That said "some of that" will not get you 5 9's link reliability over all weather condition. It's not just optical; the mm-wave stuff being thrown around for 5G systems has many of the same problems - heck, certain bands of high frequency (say around 60 GHz) get soaked up by oxygen at incredible rates.

Regarding data rates, RF systems will struggle to beat FSOC. Well designed FSOC systems leverage technologies used in fiber communications; I've worked on air-to-ground links that exceeded 80 Gbps over a decade ago, it would be trivial to double (or more!) that rate.

Another consideration is cost - FSOC systems in general utilize pretty sophisticated optical systems that are effectively your antenna. The modem cost can be driven to par pretty easily, but RF antennas are generally much lower cost than optics.

But you don't have to fight for spectrum, which is a major advantage. The FCC and I imagine nearly every other country's spectrum regulatory agency do not regulate the near IR wavelengths FSOC systems run at. There are safety issues that need to be taken into account (eye damage), but those are well defined and don't generally represent that much of a problem.

Vehicular Integration for C4ISR/EW Interoperability (VICTORY) - https://victory-standards.org/. Not a "go boom" system, but I did get the acronym.

Planetary travel takes too long using the conventional routes that Google Maps is likely to select, Waze might be the answer to this. There is the downside risk that it will route you through a planet's core to save a few hours of spaceflight.

Problem solved. Now we just need someone to install the things.

This might actually impact the Federal employee productivity metric - bring down Quora alone has increased my work output today.

He has merged with his iPhone in such a complete way that it's not clear where the kid ends and the machine begins. It's to the point where it's easier to get his attention through the machine rather than his biological audio sensors.

I can't believe no one caught the Spinal Tap reference here.

Linky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

While I see the thinly veiled attempt to push coders further into a commodity, this is wrong at so many levels. My oldest son loves to code, is "multi-lingual", and understands that his learned languages are just a method of expressing how to solve a problem. He understands that being able to code is a tool for solving problems, not the ultimate end. My younger son loves foreign languages, and couldn't care less about coding. His STEM subject scores are perfect, so it's not the lack of ability to grasp technical concepts are solve complex problems. He plans on solving problems by using understanding the nuances of international situations (business, political, whatever) through his knowledge of human language.

Different people have different interests - Disney has made a nice living, as have all the various social media outlets who are likely right behind this as well, telling the human story or more appropriately taking advantage of it for profit. They should understand that reducing a generation to low-paid commodity coders does not play to their future best interest of selling their products.