A lot of trading schemes appear to be to set up highly leveraged positions betting against something unlikely happening. Eventually due to statistics the unlikely thing actually happens and it all goes up in a puff of smoke, and often someone else is left to deal with the consequences.

Similar to putting everything on black after 10 roulette reds and it comes up red again...

Virtually brand new fully loaded MBP. Sitting down at home with a pint of beer doing some work and the inevitable happened. Turned it off as quickly as possible, washed it with de-ionised water, dried it out with a hair dryer.

First power up - nothing. Shit. Left it for a day. Next power up got a chime but no screen. Hmmm. Connected to a TV via HDMI port and desktop appears. Whoopee! But not very portable now as plugged into 75inch TV.

After a couple of hours, there was a flicker or two from the screen and voila, it was back! Worked perfectly ever since, apart from a very faint whiff of hops to start with when it got hot enough for the fans to come on...

One of the more interesting statistics that I have seen was that, even given the very high density in the core of the Sun, the average energy release per unit volume was about the same as a well tended compost heap...

I agree. I am old enough that labelling was not a thing when I was at school otherwise I am sure I would have been placed somewhere in the Spectrum. I was just regarded as difficult but ultimately rewarding (luckily).

I have the ability to concentrate on tasks for long periods of time, amongst other things, but also the handicap of putting off starting them (not an uncommon one, I think). I would have definitely slotted into the weird category socially when I was young but was fine with people who outside observers would have said needed supervision.

I made a conscious decision when in my mid-teens to break away from the kind of fantasy world I was starting to inhabit. I now hold down a very responsible job, literally in charge of peoples lives and lots of highly valuable resources but I retain the high functioning aspect and use it to my advantage completely consciously.

Projecting forward my existence, I could see that society would view me as mentally ill if I progressed much further that way. Several of my friends carried on in that direction and still need regular professional attention decades later. I have to admit the pull of complete geekery, to coin a phrase, was strong and I nearly gave in to it. I still enjoy these kinds of pursuits but they come second to family, job, other people, etc. I am fine now, ha ha ha!

I was going to rubbish the car but I thought I would look at their website and actually it is pretty impressive. You can tell it is super aerodynamic but would perform very well without messing around with solar panels, which IMO are a distraction from the inherent economy of the vehicle.

Ultra low drag and light weight make a big difference and being able to use a power pack 25% the size of a Tesla makes that possible. An extra 700W at low latitudes when the sun is out and at the right angle is nice but a couple more % on the battery capacity and hook it into a fixed solar array at home or use grid energy would be my solution. The payback time for solar cells on the body is probably on the order of the lifetime of the car (or more), so not worth it.

The problem of repair access is not the engineers fault, as further investigation has discovered layers of hardened pork products up to 20 feet deep in places that are blocking the way in...

There is actually a village in Bavaria called Wank. I know this because we drove through it when I was little and my mum pretended not to notice...

'Why? China would just put a giant H-bomb into a shipping container, one of the 40.000 that land in the US every day. No need for rockets.'

Maybe they already have?

As the RAM is all in the SoC, I would expect the M1 *could* be outfitted with more than 16GB but it would need to be integrated into the package on manufacture. As the M1 was explicitly optimised for low power entry-level systems I would expect the M1X, M2 or whatever they call it to have 32, 64 or even more as an option...

That is a reasonable methodology. I find it hard to understand why tech-savvy people try and create their own passwords with their minds, based on things they know, when it obviously reduces the entropy enormously compared with an entirely random process.

VR - you are looking for total immersion and realism most of the time, so retina or above level resolution with the widest gamut and field of view for best effect.

AR - some sort of clue (pixels, colours, etc.) is actual a good thing in many applications for glasses, as do you really want reality being overridden with something plausible as you walk around or pick things up?

I think things like tracking and latency are far more important than resolution when it comes to overlay. No point having an 8k display if it does not refresh fast enough...

What is the definition of an astronaut? Would someone with no abilities in that area who bought a ticket to Mars and is now living there qualify?

As to not being able to launch from the USA - are they going to stop all international flights/voyages as they go to other countries with different laws?

There are plenty of valid reasons for making a peripheral component untrusted if it cannot prove itself to the device it is connected to, most of which are self-evident, like a replacement camera that steals your personal data in some manner.

The other side of the equation, is why would you want to swap the camera on the latest iPhone that has only been on sale for a few days? If it goes wrong, take it back to Apple, and if you are really worried, get AppleCare for 3 years which will likely be not far off the cost of a non-Apple new camera plus labour, etc. If you smashed it to bits, claim on the insurance. By 2024 when it is out of cover there will be a workaround and/or official repairs will likely be pretty cheap. iFixit clickbait if you ask me.

If they really did not want it to be repairable, they would fill it full of glue like some of their devices in the past...

I think that is what scares people still. That the most powerful flying control on the aircraft could be moved repeatedly against the wishes of the pilots on the output of *one* sensor which had no range/validity checking.

For something like this to make its way from specification to production in a, despite all the jokes, *engineering* company, is such a gross failure of design, testing and general common sense that it beggars belief. A 1st year student would not make mistakes like these in their first project.

What else is waiting to bite? That is what worries people and Boeing have lost almost all of the trust they used to enjoy. What has changed since these appalling decisions were made apart from denial turning to shame?

Then as a species we have *totally* lucked out. Who needs Dyson Spheres when we can just throw garbage down our local, friendly black hole and get energy equivalent to a large amount of the rest mass of what you chucked in?

Kardashev Type II here we come! (OK, the chances of it really being a BH are microscopically small, but one can dream...)