And the best way to tell a lab diamond from a mined one: the lab diamond is better. Yet somehow after decades of selling diamonds based on how few flaws they had, they flipped the marketing and got people to buy that flawless was bad.

Oh, one more thing...

Give it a couple of classic pineapple grenades for testicles and have them set to go off if the system faults or the weapon runs out of ammo.

Why remote control it and risk getting jammed? Why use a flamethrower and have horrible range and ammo limits?

I say, strap a PI to it in an armoured box and make it autonomous. Give it target coordinates before it starts with the murdering.

When you have that working, replace the flamethrower with a sentry gun and mount a firearm with a high-capacity magazine in it.

Maybe replace the battery with a fuel cell for extended range and duration, and add a microwave area denial device to stop people from getting close enough to attack it physically.

After that? Give it swarm intelligence and release a dozen at once.

They say hours in the library can save years in the lab. I read a long, long time ago about experiments regarding human perception of time show it to be fairly steady in the present, but when you are recalling the past its rate of passage is determined by novel memories.

Which makes sense when you think about it - it's not like we have a time clock in our heads, the only way we have to judge time is unique memories. And as you age, fewer and fewer things are novel to you, so time seems to be passing faster when you think about the past.

Do something new as often as you can and you'll feel like you're living longer. Try to make those new things good experiences, and you'll feel like you're living a longer good life. You might as well, after all once you have food and shelter taken care of what else is there to do with a life anyway?

The dash brightness is computer-controlled and flaky, but I really don't think that's due to the OnStar removal. That's it.

But I was worried about issues, so I unplugged it and tested for a while before I actually threw out the unit.

I ripped the OnStar out of my GM as soon as it was in my driveway. Google still tracks my phone and knows way too much about me even after I rooted it and removed a bunch of 'unremoveable,' Google apps, but I'll be damned if I'll give up one more bit of data than I have to in order to get the functionality i want.

It's a car. Get me from a to b safely, that is not only all I ask, it's all I want.

And that 'counterpoint' is hot garbage.

We are not capable of building anything that can withstand the surface pressures and temperatures for very long. The rock of Venus is dry-baked to incredible strength, you're not mining anything even if you could build equipment that could survive there.

Ofc I don't mean LITERALLY nobody. There are niches of readers here and there.

But my kids are all in their 20s and 30s, and they have many friends who say things like "you know, I haven't read a single actual book since college".

To me it's incomprehensible, and I sort of take it as evidence of the collapse but...is it really all that different than say, the 1950s? 1930s? Sure, intellectuals of all eras read but I don't believe the % of intellectuals by nature has particularly swung one way or another since then.

I pretty much stopped building my sf&f collection in the 1990s. The writers moved on and I don't like where most of them moved to.

In fact, I put off updates as long as possible. A lot of things can't be backed out of they go wrong, and the devs do this on purpose to avoid having infinite version compatibility issues. It really sucks to update something like that and find people who held back a version are OK... And you just have to deal with having something broken until a dev feels like it should be a priority.

They're pretty good about that, but I just want my system to work.

Typically I back up my entire VM and then spend a day or so trying to update all the configurations they've moved or changed the formatting on. If it's too annoying, I revert the whole thing and try again at a later date.

Only tinkerers should have auto-updates enabled.

The reason people look to Mars is that it is more hospitable than the Moon and has greater potential to be made self-sufficient.

We really ought to be putting small mammals in centrifuges in orbit though, to get some data on whether or not our biology will function normally in .38g. It might be no better for our health than freefall.

I honestly don't know what to say to that. I run my HA in a VM on a grossly over-powered server now, but I started on a PI and never noticed an issue beyond it being difficult to install and configure the RTL_433 addon back in the day.

Venus is not a valid colonisation target with current or foreseeable future technology.

Floating around in a bubble in an acidic atmosphere above a surface you will never reach for resource extraction limits you to an Earth-based supply chain. At least on Mars you can walk around and dig stuff up. On Venus you are crushed and melted.

Not sexism, statistical accuracy.

35 is also young enough you could be creating a horde of desperate, violent men.