Isn’t Enterprise Windows a subscription model with a minimum number of seats ? That's a hard no if it is.

I heard that pitch one time from a bride: "My diamond had this small distinguishable crack so it can be identified later if it got stolen." I did not say what I thought. "My new car has an identifiable scratch so it can be recovered later if it gets stolen."

Also being cheaper, it is gets lost or stolen, it is easier to replace especially since nearly identical diamond can be ordered again.

And which girls think it is cool that someone dug up a rock in a mine? Most of them care how diamonds look. Between lab grown and natural, there is no difference in that regard. Without lab equipment it is hard for any person just to look at a diamond and tell where it originated. The value of the diamond is currently about bragging rights; but that price is artificially controlled by DeBeers.

Diamonds are not as rare as the industry would like the public to believe. Cartels like DeBeers control the supply. For the purposes of jewelry, synthetic ones have less variability which makes them more attractive for manufacturing. The main drawback is the stigma. If the public sentiment shifts to not caring, then DeBeers will face a decline.

"RoddyVision, please make all the cars look like hot rods and all the people walking look like babes on roller skates."

Sorry, but all RoddyVision allows you to do is pierce the alien signal and allow you to see things as they really are. Side affects include chronic migraines and an unfortunate tendency to run out of bubblegum.

One human pyromaniac with a bic lighter can probably do more damage.

I'm picturing a robot powered dog sled.

...to an extent. Sure, the Army and Marines measure ground distances in kilometers and e.g. elevation in meters, and all services describe their weapons in terms of millimeters, but beyond that? The USAF and Navy still use nautical miles for distance, knots for speed, and feet for elevation. The navy still uses yards for range.

This is more accurate, and the reason is simple: those guys only see one color, and that's green (or blue for the Navy and Air Force) and there are no atheists in foxholes.

If idiots like this actually locked down systems ( offshoring makes it easy to crack these ), OR refused to pay, then these nations/groups would stop. Butâ¦.

Just like nations that trade prisoners or pay for others, makes their citizens easy targets.

It's hard to write something that will blow peoples' minds when you're writing in a genre that's had decades of writers mining the same material. But we ought to beware of survivor bias; the stories we remember from the Golden Age are just the ones worth remembering. Most of the stories that got published back then were derivative and extremely crude. Today, in contrast, most stories that get published are derivative but very competently crafted. I guess that's progress of a kind but in a way it's almost depressing.

I think the most recently written mind-blowing sci-fi (or perhaps weird fiction) novel I've read was China Mieville's *The City & the City*, which tied with *The Windup Girl* in 2010 for Best Novel Hugo. I was impressed both by the originality of the story and the technical quality of the writing.

I recently read Ken Liu's translation of Liu Cixin's *The Three Body Problem*, which I enjoyed. In some ways it reminds me of an old Hal Clement story in which the author works out the consequences of some scientific idea in great detail, but the story also deals with the fallout of China's Cultural Revolution and the modern rise of public anti-science sentiment. So this is a foreign novel which doesn't fit neatly into our ideas about genres of science fiction. It's got a foot in the old-school hard science fiction camp and foot in the new wave tradition of literary experimentation and social science speculation camp.

Using an expendable cargo version starship, including a small rocket for launching the samples to orbit would be possible. That would also fit in with what SX wants. From there, ESA's return rocket would be able to bring them back. And this could be done in the next couple of years assuming that SX gets Starship done this year.

I was extremely disappointed by Three Body problem. I thought some of the concepts were pretty cool (I actually thought the part where the Trisolarians build the Sophons was great) and the the story through the lens of the Cultural Revolution was an interesting viewpoint. But damn, the writing sucked. Like you, I plodded on hoping it would get better and like you, I wondered if it was just the translation, or because I didn't have the right cultural background to get the cues, but ultimately... it's some good ideas that are just awfully executed.

And it's not a very well done thing, mostly due to the not so stellar resolution even in the middle of the field of view. Works for workload where one doesn't need super fine resolution (e.g.: video editing), but forget about using this with walls of tiny next (not usable for coding, for example).

Another use that some people have experimented and Apple has touted with their "spacial computing" moniker: leaving multiple windows and applet floating virtually around a large real-world space (e.g.: have various control apps for your widgets in the work area, have browser with receipe and cooking timer in your kitchen, etc.) so as you move between real-world space, you get the revelant stuff already open and floating wating for you.

The problem is that, at the price of that Apple asks for the Vision Pro, and at the price one finds electronics on, e.g., AliExpress: for the 3500 bucks that Apple asks for their "Spacial Computer", one can buy 35x sub 100 bucks no-name tablets, and leave actual tablets lying around the real world to have "already opened and ready to use apps" all-over. Meh.

Well, it's like in Econ 101 when you studied equillibrium prices. At $3500 the number of units demanded is small, but if you dropped that to $1000 there should be more units demanded, assuming consumers are economically rational.

There is a tech adoption curve in which different groups of people play important roles in each stage of a new product's life cycle. At the stage Vision Pro is at now, you'd be focused on only about 1% of the potential market. The linked article calls these people "innovators", but that's unduly complementary; these are the people who want something because it's *new* whether or not it actually does anything useful. This is not irrational per se; they're *interested* in new shit, but it's not pragmatic, and the pragmatists are where you make real money.

Still, these scare-quotes "innovators" are important because set the stage for more practical consumers to follow. Perhaps most importantly, when you are talking about a *platform* like this people hungry for applications to run on the doorstop they just bought attract developers. And when the right app comes along the product becomes very attractive to pragmatists. This happened with the original IBM PC in 1981, which if you count the monitor cost the equivalent of around $8000 in today's money. I remember this well; they were status symbols that sat on influential managers' desks doing nothing, until people started discovering VisiCalc -- the first spreadsheet. When Lotus 1-2-3 arrives two years after the PC's debut, suddenly those doorstops became must-haves for everyone.

So it's really important for Apple to get a lot of these things into peoples' hands early on if this product is ever to become successful, because it's a *platform* for app developers, and app developers need users ready to buy to justify the cost and risk. So it's likely Apple miscalculated by pricing the device so high. And lack of units sold is going to scare of developers.

But to be fair this pricing is much harder than it sounds;. Consumers are extremely perverse when it comes to their response to price changes. I once raised the price of a product from $500 to $1500 and was astonished to find sales went dramatically up. In part you could say this is because people aren't economically rational; but I think in that case it was that human judgment is much more complex and nuanced than economic models. I think customers looked at the price tag and figured nobody could sell somethign as good as we claimed our product to be for $500. And they were right, which is why I raised the price.