But dark matter curves space-time inwards (toward the center of mass).

So - exactly like "bright" matter. Which - from a gravitational point of view, is exactly correct. Dark matter has the same effect on gravity as normal matter - it's oddity is twofold : that it doesn't produce as much light as a similar amount of "bright matter" (baryonic matter), and it seems to interact less with electromagnetic radiation than"bright matter" in other ways then generating EM radiation. Which also - automatically - means it's going to be harder to detect in the lab. (Show me a measurement technique that doesn't involve EM interaction, and I'll buy you a pint while I find the holes in your argument.)

Yeah, bleeding edge indeed, about a century old at that point.

Give or take a couple of millennia. Simply describing it as "non-Euclidean" means someone has looking at Euclid's axioms, and wondering "what if?"

By the time that calculus and projective geometry were around, and in particular the routine use of complex numbers (for example, in infinite series for calculating trigonometric ratios and constants like pi and e) - which really challenge the algebraic interpretation of geometry - people were starting to see that it might be worth actually following these loose threads in the fabric of knowledge.

"Head Canon" has a very suggestive misspelling. "Just stick your head in this small round metal-edged window", your Pontificate."

"Next Pontiff, please!"

Eileann Sgiathanach - the island of the wings, which is a reference to the five "wing-shaped peninsulae which make up the island.

Some sort of twisted, ironic humor?

Nope, just a different language.

I thought, with so many Americans being "proud" of their Scottish ancestry, there would be no shortage of Gaelic speakers over there to have explained this in infants school. I mean - I just live in the country and have never professed to Scottish ancestry, but I've got a working language of "mountaineer's Gaelic", describing the shapes, colours and textures of the hills. Obvious relations to Erse Gaelic too - not that I know much more of that. It's on my "to-do" list, but at lower priority than my Swahili (because I liked working in Tanzania). And higher priority than Korean, because I hated working there. Unless the much interfered-with DPRK project gets off the surface and into the ground, when it would shoot up the priority list. I wonder if Southern and Northern Korean have diverged much in the couple of generations of separation.

He is angry. At people not accepting the arrival of Messiah Trump.

Specifically, who is going to pay for this device - and it's solar charging([b]*[/b]) - to be fitted to my 25 year-old bike, which is otherwise perfectly functional? It certainly isn't going to be me. I'll stick with the reliable tech - which is 10 years older than the bike - of cycling with a wrench in my driver-side hand, and smashing the wing of any car driver stupid enough to come within reach.

The law here is to give at least 1.5m of road space when overtaking any cyclist. My arms are not over 1.5m long, so your, dear driver, dented wing is your admission that you were driving illegally. And I hope your insurance company denies your claim - because you were driving illegally - and kills your no-claims bonus because of your actions. Even better if the court cancels your driving license until you're passed the current driving test.

I've had drivers pull over and start making threatening gestures. Oddly, a large wrench in the hand is worth a lot of loud arguments.

[b]*[/b] - well, I'm not going to pay for batteries for it. It's to protect car drivers from their own stupidity.

... access to my physical location.

If you've brought hardware, then the delivery branch (also known as - a separate company ; I'm not even sure if Dell have a company in my country ; but I know they deliver boxes through Amazon's delivery system. Or did several years ago ; that could change, frequently.) needs temporary access to that data. No other branch of the company (including it's sub-contractor infrastructure) needs that data. So they should not have access to it. And frankly, "Sales" should be checking if the "delivery address" is intended to be different to the "billing address", for every sale. It's a routine part of maintaining customer engagement.

I'm surprised that in the august company of Slashdotters, we got this far in the comments without anyone bringing up "Rule 34". Which touches (consensually or not) upon the difficult - if not impossible - problem of defining pornography.

People were probably having this conversation when Mediaeval woodcutters started making porn for printing on the first printing presses. You can see how totally unsuccessful we have been at achieving consensus in the intervening centuries.

Then your car will accumulate it's few weeks of sun in the first couple of years. Imagine what it's like with a new car on Skye - it'd take decades.

Plus the car will be full of dead midges.

The gov't needs to figure out how many people die due to time lost trying to unlatch their seatbelts.

I'm sure they already have.

(This next bit may contain distressing information. Viewer discretion is advised.)

It is possible that the government's analysis disagrees with your opinion.

Shocking idea, isn't it?

I don't know what "driver training" was like in your country, but my passenger-while-flying training (between my first and second flights) included specifically the point of how to locate your seatbelt latch while (when necessary) upside down and underwater. It takes about a quarter second. Perhaps your driver training was less comprehensive than my passenger training - quite likely ; I don't know what your driver training was like. But that's the numbers, for properly trained users.

I'll add the possibility that your driver training might pre-date the availability of seat-belts. (My first car, a Volvo 122S, had seat belts as a factory-fitted but not legally required feature. You could remove them, but YOU had to do that.) Which would raise questions of whether your driving license should be suspended until you have taken (and passed) the current driver-training programme. I'm cool with that - I've advocated since I first shovelled a driver's brains back into his skull that driving licenses only last for 10 years before the driver has to re-sit the exams. As a flying passenger, I had to re-sit the courses and exams every 2 to 4 years (the numbers changed over the years) - so when seat-belts were changed from "2-point" or "3-point" harnesses to the now-standard 4-point harnesses, that was automatically covered in the (re-) training programme. Still, a quarter second.

My next heresy : the only people allowed to fit, or re-fit after removal, child restraint harnesses should have to pass appropriate training. Because no child has ever been strangled, or had their neck broken, by a well-designed child seat badly installed by one of their parents. But I'm sure you're happy with untrained people strangling their children through their own inability to retain and read the fitting instructions.

OK, for me specifically, this issue will change my annual games-spend from 0 to 0, which may not be a big deal for the industry. But that is largely because I'm not interested now - and never have been (since I last played an "online" game") - interested in playing games with "online content", because I spent so much of my life several hundred miles from an internet connection.

But adding adverts to games - well that just increases the number of "no chance" barriers by 1.

Clearly EA think they've already saturated their market, and are now in what Cory Doctorow would call the "enshittification" stage of their development.

Investors should take note.

It has been known that ChinaÃ(TM)s SO*/NO* was holding temps down all over northern hemisphere.

"Known" for values of "known" that go as far as "strongly suspect". But yeah, that's definitely a suspicion that climate scientists have had for years.

Oddly, I saw something the other day that might help the arctic.[pumping mechanism]

The Proposal has been around for a couple of years, but I didn't know it had been used previously.

I hope that someone did a deal of science on this back then, to constrain the uncertainties on the process. Obviously the presence of significant salt (~32 permil) would have an effect. The big problem I can see is how to keep the PV panels above the new ice that you're forming. You could - temporarily - solve that by putting the (floating) PV farm at some distance from the pump and new ice floe. Floating PV is certainly in development - but that then changes the problem to that of getting the floating PV to climb onto the edge of the expanding new ice floe ... which is a different problem. Maybe you'd need to put the PV farm up onto (buoy-supported) stilts, and allow the ice to form below the farm ... choices, choices.

This could be started in April using PV, and pulled out in oct.

Hmmm. Look at numbers. Say you need 10,000 of these, each producing a 1km radius reflective floe (so 31,416 sq.km extra ice - is that anything like the necessary scale? Another order of 10?) - that is a lot of deployments and retrievals. It very rapidly - long before you get to that scale (unless you want to be building many, many additional harbours, storage facilities, construction yards too. Boatyards ...) gets to the point of leaving the things at sea permanently. You've still got a servicing and deployment problem, but you haven't created a deployment/ retrieval problem.

Hopefully, this would not turn darker than normal since it will have a constant small particles falling on it

I don't think you'll be adding to the existing issue of "soot in ice" significantly, as long as you put your water inlets ... order of 10 times the diameter of the suction pipe above the seabed. That's an estimate - from the effects of pumping into fluids - and needs updating from (I hope) the 1960s experience you refer to. I'd start with a keel of 20x diameter, just to be on the safe side. That will affect the water depth you need for deployment, hence distance from shore, hence number of deployment harbours, construction/ assembly facilities ...

You're talking about the Alaskan and Canadian coasts, because the chances of getting Russia to contribute meaningfully is negligible, and there is zero infrastructure in Greenland on it's North coast (and a few hundred thousand sq.km of reflective land ice too, just next door). So .. the Canadian northern archipelago (where the complex bits of the NW passage are). Yeah, that's a complex question. How much overland transport do you rely on in winter (when it is less unreliable than intermittently-iced sea) ... complex.

Someone, somewhere should be doing test deployments. To see if it works at all. And if it works, how well?

It's spelled "dementia". The dilemma is "shorter jail time versus admitting to the obvious dementia" ; neither is a disbarment form standing for presidency, AIUI.

Or the alternative dilemma : make allegations of dementia a thing against Biden, and see those allegations reflect upon yourself.

When does America face it's biscuit problem? November, just before or after Thanksgiving?

(The Biscuit Problem : choosing the lesser of two weevils.)

it is not hard for software to correctly read most of the signage, and flag ones that are difficult for a human to decipher.

So, Amazon shut down their "Mechanical Turk" service? Or is that dressed up in the clothes of an "AI solution" by some "fake it 'til you make it" startup?

How much does a room full of English-speaking (or in this case, -reading) Indian wage slaves cost these days?

What use case do you have for street name signs to be computer readable? Delivery companies use - as far as I can tell - geographic coordinates to direct delivery drivers (leading to things like Amazon drivers having to turn off data on their phones in order to deliver to premises where the delivery location has been wrongly encoded, and the driver has to deliver to a location distant form the nominal delivery location - farms were great for this, "leave parcels in the barn with the red door". Few delivery days working for Amazon didn't have several of these "disable data" events.)

Those little Amazon delivery robots use geographical coordinates too, but aren't bound to the road network, using cycle paths and paved footpaths where available.

The databases for this are essentially complete (though needing maintenance - Amazon request their deliverers to flag errors as described above, but few ever bother).