Apple actually added a feature to prevent this. If you have an iPhone it is supposed to notice that you have an airtag traveling with you that isn't yours. It then alerts you and you can make it play a sound to help find it if needed. I suppose you could use an AirTag to stalk someone who doesn't have an iPhone.

Is travel from Russia banned or allowed? What about China?

If they wanted to do something truly great with the Atari brand, they would finish the Atari 1450XLD project and bring it to market. My parents promised to buy me one as soon as they were available. That was 36 years ago. I still am waiting to have a computer with speech synthesis, a 300 baud modem, and a floppy drive all built-in! No more cables running everywhere to connect all these separate things.

Uh, have you checked the prices on an iMac Pro? I was easily able to configure one that costs over $14K.

Great. Some stupid fucking shit that Apple will force on Mac users who just want a regular laptop that isn’t weird.

I used to live going to Fry’s but the last time i went to the store here in Austin the shelves were empty and there were very few people in the store. I can’t imagine it could continue like that very long.

I live in Austin which has Ride Austin as an Uber competitor. It is a not for profit ride sharing service which pays the driver more than Uber does. I have never used Uber, but I use Ride Austin. If I take a ride that costs $25, i will usually tip about $10. I did not realize that was more than most people would tip. I assumed that the driver probably makes $1-2 plus whatever I tip which is why I tip that much.

My daughter is a nuclear engineer who has worked on molten salt reactors. She thinks they are great. There are multiple advantages of molten salt reactors. It eliminates the inherent problem of highly pressurized water. But the big advantage is being able to access the fission products and extract each isotope for use. Instead of calling it all nuclear waste and burying it in Yucca mountain you can use it for all sorts of things. There is a probability curve (a double humped curve) that predicts what fission products are made. The fission products can be sold which yields another revenue stream for the reactor operator and is a supply of medical isotopes which otherwise have to be specifically made and rare earth minerals which would otherwisr need to be mined. The main advantages of Thorium over uranium are that the Thorium fuel does not yield plutonium or other transuranic elements. Also, Thorium is very abundant compared to Uranium. The second one isn’t such a big deal right now because Uranium is currently so cheap, but will be Important in the longer term. Also, since Thorium reactors can’t make plutonium you have less of a chance of plutonium being diverted for a nuclear weapon - though that is a lesser concern in my mind because an energy reactor is a poor way to make fissile plutonium.

I have one of the new MacBook Pro laptops and the keyboard on it is completely unusable because the keyboard sucks. I use it plugged into an external mechanical keyboard but if I had to work on the built in keyboard my productivity would be terrible. Why can’t Apple make a decent keyboard anymore? I honestly do not care about the laptop being thin anymore. The Titanium PowerBook G4 was thin enough for me. Subsequent iterations to make it thinner have offered zero value to me as a heavy user of Mac laptops over the years. I didn’t mind the laptop being thinner until they started sacrificing basic usability of the machine for thinness. It is insanity. I wish they would license MacOS to someone else or make a laptop with a usable keyboard.

It was nice to be able to go the movies as much as I wanted to with my wife and our friends. It was a good deal. Not a very sustainable business, but hey if rich investors want to pay for us to go the movies a lot for a couple of years until they run out of money from suckers who am I to not take them up on it?

Every piece of matter in the universe is radionuclides. That is like saying that everything is chemicals.

The reality is that any trip I would take on an electric scooter would be a trip I would normally have walked to take. I do not need a replacement for walking. Walking places is not bad for the environment. If were a replacement for driving a car - well I already driver an electric car. It would seem to me that the main difference is that I'm way more likely to get injured riding an electric scooter which would create a cost and a bunch of medical waste. So probably on the whole I don't think there is much benefit to be had from scooters for me. I tried charging them for money. It was not a good way to make money either.

I started hearing about Apple being doomed back in 1982 when the Apple III turned out to be not such a great computer.

Are you familiar with SMRs? They are Small Modular nuclear Reactors that can be built in a factory. A company called NuScale has an SMR design that was approved by the NRC and a pilot plant of their design is under construction at Idaho National Lab. Building the reactors in a factory is a way to lower costs and increase quality. Also, NuScale specifically created this design so that it could be manufactured in the US using parts and materials that are available here and now. This is important because most of the heavy industry that built our existing fleet of reactors no longer exists in the US.

No, you really just have to do a statistical analysis of the cancer rate in the area around TMI and compare it to other areas. That statistical analysis was done - the rate wasn't higher. As expected given the amount of radiation released was so small.