Robot flamethrowers have existed for a long, long time, and arson even longer.

The only thing different about this is the somewhat cute robodog. But if a person is nasty enough to want to kill others in this heinous way, the old standby molatov cocktail will suffice.

We probably don't see that too much because those who might use it know what is likely to happen if they do.

I am simplifying the situation just as much as is called for.

Publicly held corporations exist specifically to separate the people profiting from a corporation's actions from responsibility for those actions. They have no other purpose as literally everything else a public corporation does can be done by some other type of entity.

Most will be used by the forest service for controlled burns and fighting forest fires. Limited liability for controlled burns, and all bets are off in the event of forest fires.

The insurance risk will be for any used for entertainment. At least here in verdant Pennsylvania, we take our forests pretty seriously. If you are burning trash and it turns into a wildfire, you are going to jail. So this flame-spittin' doggobot is probably not going to be used too often for entertainment. At base, insurance will be hella expensive, and there is a fine line to be crossed that turns using it into a crime.

Yep. For all its drawbacks the PC was an amazing platform for its day.

When it came out, nothing could beat the Amiga for versatility, though. It was even better at having all kinds of stuff on its bus at once than the PC was. The bus wasn't any faster than 16 bit ISA in the real world, but it was at least a dozen times more convenient.

Sure, but roads are the same in that regard — we pay for them, too. But they are a lot less efficient and they lead to a lot more pollution, and arguably just as importantly they just get clogged up with more cars in short order and then we've essentially spent that money to hasten our own destruction and make more people sit in traffic longer.

Perhaps the emotional reaction to this is the so called "robot dog". Because civilian flamethrowers are and have been in use for a long time, largely used as firebreaks these days. The US has a lot of area prone to wildfires. In addition to fighting fires with firebreaks to limit their spread, we have a lot of controlled burns. The controlled burn is a weird but successful concept that since an area simply will burn at some point from natural causes, you do a controlled burn during a time when it is least likely to spread. clears the litter and even enriches the soil.

This flame throwing robot makes it hella safer on humans fighting fires or control burning. Monkin' about with a tank of gasoline on your back is kind of scary and dangerous.

The fact that it is freaking awesome is just a side effect to its utilitarian uses.

That's a pretty decent amount of game to be able to run in 64kB.

I did have a memory expansion on the ISA bus of my IBM 5150. The additional 384kB brought it up to 448kB, which was enough to run most but not all DOS software that would run on an XT (which could be expanded to 640kB onboard.)

I probably should have piggybacked the system memory, I could have gotten it up to 512kB which really would have run almost everything. But instead I got a 286-6 with 1MB and ran Xenix on it.

There's no reason it needs any more than a USB-C cable to carry power and compressed video. When I think "substantial" cable I think something like a VGA cable, where even the narrowest ones are quite a bit bigger than that (and also absolute smeg quality.) By the same token, there's no reason it needs to be driven by a computer any larger than a typical power bank, which will fit comfortably in pocket or purse. Your average decent phone has enough processing power to drive such a device, unless you have high expectations for graphics. What it doesn't have is enough battery power to last very long, but if you're eliminating the screen and making it thicker you can solve that problem easily enough.

All of the real problems relate to the hardware on your head. Making it smaller and lighter and at least equally importantly solving the focal depth problem are the real issues.

The monorail was placed off the strip for the benefit of the MGM Grand and Ballyâ(TM)s. It was designed to be worthless to everyone else, bypassing other properties. Then it was extended to go to the Flamingo and near Harrahâ(TM)s and Imperial Palace. From everywhere else it's a substantial distance away. By the time you've gotten to it, you could have walked most of the way to your destination, unless you're going from one end to the other. If they had put it over the strip, it would have really been something.

It's tax dollars at work to support not needing to build a wider highway, not just now but also in the future. Traffic on the route from LA to LV can literally double the time it takes to get there, while in the very best case it takes about 3 hours.

This is the same argument for the stalled California HSR project. It is a good and reasonable argument. We equate the ability to travel with freedom. Making travel more possible while also reducing transportation-related pollution is a good use of tax money. Unfortunately, we should have built a new rail corridor decades ago when it would have been more legally feasible, and a lot cheaper. It wouldn't have been HSR at the time, but it would have avoided a whole lot of senseless freeway expansion that only ever provided momentary relief.

That's 9.16% of the route. It's less than 1/10 high speed rail!

Well, no. The correct answer is never God. Even if God were real and were involved, he always works through someone else.

That entire region was populated for literally thousands of years before there even were Jews as we know them.

"many hundreds of years ago" is not a date, nor is it the first history of the region.

ED: Just saw your second paragraph. But the things you speculate on are not exactly common on Titan, if they even exist on the surface at all (it's an icy crust ,not a rocky one). And either way, it'd be much easier with compounds other than methane.

And no, there doesn't seem to be meaningful amounts of nitrates in the atmosphere at least. You can see a list here. Nitrogen compounds are cyanide and nitrile compounds.

Metabolized with what oxidizer?

It's just the opposite - methane on Titan is like nitrogen on Earth; it's things like acetylene and free hydrogen that are the potential energy sources, and to a lesser extent the more common (but less reactive) higher mass alkanes, etc.

The main problem is that LAWKI isn't even remotely compatible with existing in the cryogenic environment of Titan. There are a lot of interesting alternative chemistries, but they require basically redesigning life from scratch. We're simply not up to this task with our current technology.

Sadly it's being launched to near the equator, not the poles :( The geophysicists won out over the geochemists...