I think the history lesson is stop listening to bros who slept through history class saying things like "{X} pulled it off."

I doubt Trump will be remembered for the Iran war. Most American presidents for the last half century have gone and killed a bunch of people in the Middle East. He's much more likely to be remembered for some tariffs and comments about crippling export weapons freeing a bunch of countries from the burden of being American allies.

I like to keep an eye on my network exposure.

The question "who is responsible for accidents" here is no different from a thousand other "who is responsible" judgements. Unless you have some reason to think that a repaired John Deere tractor is more likely to cause accidents than a non-repaired one, this is just a distraction.

We have a legal system that addresses questions of who is responsible. If you don't like the way these decisions are made, you need to fix the legal system, because changing right-to-repair laws won't do beans to solve that problem.

There has been regime change. The old supreme leader was killed. The new one was thought to be too extreme by the old one, but that was before his mother, father, wife, child and a bunch of other family members were killed by the US and Israel. Much the same experience as a bunch of other young Iranians who might have been leaning towards the whole US = the great satan thing being a bit of hypoerbole.

AI is typically more efficient than the old hand-coded algorithms.

The reason you want to do this in space is that you want it to be autonomous. What might you want an autonomous satellite to do?

https://www.wearethemighty.com...

The data rate is likely to be the limiting factor

No, it's going to be the amount of processing power you've got. In the future you could put more up there but that has problems. You could also put more lasers on the satellite and have more bandwidth.

What you can't do is make light go faster. On-satellite analysis could be critical if you wanted to run a fairly simple algorithm on a fairly limited amount of data and detect a fairly obvious feature very quickly, and do something automated with that information right away in orbit, or at least on that side of the planet. Like detecting blooms on thermal imaging. For example.

There is no "oh, natural disasters and stuff" application where it's not more efficient to return the images to the surface. There also aren't any such applications where you wouldn't want to have the images available to view.

The problem with Reagan's Star Wars: no droids.

Uh huh.

Computers were more expensive in the past. Particularly 40 years ago.

Yeah, I didn't include the Air because it's kind of dual use. There are enough examples of machines specifically targeted at home users it wasn't necessary to give the trolls more room for pedantry.

I was actually there when Jobs announced the Macbook Air. Apple was very much talking up how great it was for business users and people who travel a lot, and BTW probably a good choice for students too. Not like e.g. the clamshell iMac. It only recently got a real colour choice too, and only barely.

What makes you think China wants to project power?

Maybe not the best examples. Genghis Khan did not conquer Persia. He got partway through then got distracted by China, where he died. The Mongol conquest took generations, spread the empire thin, and it broke up to civil war and internal resistance twenty or so years later.

Alexander did conquer Persia, then died about five years later. His empire broke up in civil war immediately.

The multi-km range seems a stretch, but quantum magnetometers based on Nitrogen-Vacancy defects in diamond is a real technology.

https://www.photonics.com/Arti...
  https://www.ll.mit.edu/r-d/pro...
  https://www.nist.gov/programs-...
  https://academic.oup.com/nsr/a...
  https://pubs.aip.org/aip/apl/a...

https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/...

iMac, iBook, white Macbook, eMac. The Classic and LC were aimed at the lower end too.

The last 15 years when Apple hasn't had a real mass consumer machine except for the mac mini have been kind of an exception. I guess that's also how long your memory works for.