Congrats on your rich and interesting life journey, and congrats on "owning" a Slashdot troll at 96yrs old. I hope to be as engaged with the world as you are should I make it as far.

True story, for your amusement:
In a previous life, I was a mechanical engineer developing new devices at a product development consultancy. Our company had been hired by a medical device company to develop a new (2.0!) version of an existing medical device, but the client's CEO - Neil - turned out to be paranoid, dictatorial and, quite likely, sociopathic. Unlike Apple, the wider world probably didn't give a crap what new product they were developing - it was a decidedly unsexy, niche B2B thing, but according to Neil's wishes, we treated the project as super-super secret and gave the project an obscure meaningless codename: "Xenon." The client company's name was never uttered out loud: the client was "Xenon," the project was "Xenon." All was safe, all was fine.

And then one day, the project leader shipped a box of stuff (prototypes, I don't know what) to Neil, the client CEO at his company address. 24hrs later we get a raging phone call. "What the F- are we doing? Are we all idiots? This is a disaster!!!"
The crime: the project leader had written the meaningless codename "Xenon" on the outside of the box where ANYONE COULD HAVE SEEN IT!
What the Fedex guy did with this inside knowledge, we'll never know.

They could, and other publisher do. It's all about branding and marketing. There's been dozens of soccer games in the last 40 years, most not FIFA branded. They don't own the game or rules of soccer (after all, they didn't make them).

I think that's the point that EA CEO Andrew Wilson is making: they get very, very little from FIFA for a huge amount of money. The image rights for the players (and permission to use their names), even the rights to use accurate models of the stadiums are all negotiated with other bodies (the player's organizations, the clubs themselves). Taking Wilson literally, all FIFA gives them is the ability to write 'FIFA' on the box and portray themselves as the 'official' game of soccer.

Think of it this way, if a different game publisher was suddenly able to sell a completely unrelated game called "FIFA '24" in a year's time, would it hurt EA?

To be fair to the person that I was responding to [notes 4-digit user ID], I guess the point was more along the lines that if you need 3-redundant reaction wheels, what alternatives are there?
Reaction wheels are kind of great, in that they can have exceptionally long service life and (unlike a thruster, which could do a similar job) require no fuel apart from sunlight.
The real question seems to be - does Ithaco (the space tech company making a some of the failed reaction wheel on Kepler, Dawn and Hayabusa) have a systemic design issue? - not "are reaction wheels a bad idea?"

I think it's safe to say that NASA considered these factors in great detail when designing SWIFT, they hire what I'd call 'pretty good' engineers and scientists. I would guess that six reaction wheels was a compromise between anticipated service life and weight. To give you an idea how that worked out, the mission lifetime of the SWIFT was 2 years, meaning it was planned to conduct all the science that justified its launch within 2 years. It's now just over 17 years old.
Honestly, it shouldn't last forever: there's such a thing as over-engineering! And even with one reaction wheel down, the news is that the smart folk at NASA will probably find a way of making it usable with five.

Trust is a strange, slippery thing on the internet: can anyone tell me why I should trust DuckDuckGo? Beyond, 'it's founded by this guy who seems pretty cool'?
I mean, if the CIA can set up and run a (compromised) Cryptography company in Switzerland for over 20 years (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/11/crypto-ag-cia-bnd-germany-intelligence-report), a 'privacy focused search engine' is well within their abilities... and an excellent honey-pot for people to keep an eye on.

I live less than a mile from Project Titan HQ (or where it is strongly rumored to be) and although I can't speak to how far along they are, I can stay there's been a very noticeable spike in the number of their white Lexuses driving around our streets since around spring of this year. I used to see one every few weeks, now I'll see 2-3 every *day* - even out at night and in the rain in the recent storms.

For reference, it's probably comparable to the amount of Waymo/Google 'Panda' cars that were on the street of Mountain View about 10 years ago (about 4miles away). I'm pretty confident the first ever autonomous-autonomous car accident is going to be really close to my house.

I'm no legal scholar, but if "On the other side, it could be argued a phone is an extension of the mind, which you can plead the fifth to." is the best counter-argument we have, I think I can guess which way a judge is going to rule.

Is there a better argument, or is this a lost cause already?

"Apple has managed to take a very powerful mobile chip and make impressive laptops out of them."
It's very Slashdot that this whole conversation is framed as if performance was Apple's goal.
Intel maybe doesn't need to worry about the M-series chips, but their customers selling laptops certainly will. Most consumers buying laptops use them as internet/email/light office task machines, so performance benchmarks are pretty much irrelevant. Once the battery life is up to 15-20 hours (as it is with these machine) even that isn't a big deal. My guess is that Apple's goal is product design:

What this hardware does make possible is smaller, lighter laptops than ever before, because Apple can use a smaller battery (the largest single component in the envelope) for acceptable battery life and performance. I'm really quite excited about the new MacAir in 2022.

Vox has an excellent story on this topic in their 'Unexplainable' podcast series. One of the things I like about this series is that, as the name implies, they aren't trying to come up with a definitive answer, but explore the theories.

Having said that, they come down fairly strongly on a category of ailment called a 'functional disorder' - real, long-lasting injury to brain function (ie. the processing of sensory information) that is a result of a cognitive process. The belief that you have received a brain injury creates neural pathways that reinforce and manifest the symptoms that you may have for any other reason (other illness, psychogenic, etc). This isn't a theoretical thing - you can actually see the disordered brain processes in a functional MRI scan. It's well-explained in the podcast as something in-between an organic injury and a psychological condition.

We are horrendously judgmental about 'psychosomatic' illness, people seem to have a completely false idea that we are in control of our subconscious. The truth is that it's the other way round entirely. The subconscious is driving the bus, and controlling all the inputs to the bus driver.

https://megaphone.link/VMP4538...

I share your anxiety on this point...
Reading around the topic, I found this sobering Wikipedia article called 'The Great Filter.' Assuming that the answer to Fermi's Paradox is 'they all died,' what is the inevitable step in the development of a civilization that leads to this extinction? This is 'The Great Filter' - it might be genetic science, or fission, or bioweapons, or AI, or gray goo, or a combination...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's not good news: "On the other hand, if we find that life is commonplace while technosignatures are absent, then this would increase the likelihood that the Great Filter lies in [our] future."

Well, I didn't go into what the apocalypse is in the book because that would be a spoiler. But it's not the invention of transgenic farm animals, it's just a complicating factor after all the shit goes down.

Chalk up another point to Margaret Atwood on the 'this really is the unspeakably grim future that we are inevitably heading towards':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
'Oryx and Crake' really is a terrific dystopian sci-fi novel and I'm very much looking forward to it coming to TV. The post-apocalyptic landscape is infested with pigoons, a genetically-developed pig-baboon farm animal that goes feral and hunts down humans in packs.

This isn't necessarily true, Woolly Mammoths lived at the same period as the pyramids were being erected. They were rendered extinct by the Quaternary Extinction event, which means that hunting by humans was probably a large contribution to their eradication. They are quite likely to be perfectly comfortable in the arctic tundra, which while much smaller in area than in their day, is a similar climate.

I'd agree that it's a questionable use of resources and effort, tho...

thanks, appreciate that, maybe it's not a great article!