"It's the darndest thing, I tells'ya. This man threw himself at the wall so hard he cracked all his ribs. Then he threw himself at the *ceiling* and fractured his skull. After that he smacked hisself on all four walls in his room and broke all his arms and legs. After that, he crawled - on his broken arms and legs! - and threw hisself out the window, died on the ground twenty floors below. I tells'ya, if a man wants to kill himelf so bad, there's just no stopping it"

The urge to defend one's country led to revealing the country's secrets and (potentially?) hurting the country's actual defence

I think part of it is a general ignorance toward "science and technology" on the part of "the general populace".

It's all a hand-waving mystery to most people, such that they cannot tell the difference between:

(1) "college dropout creates amazing software startup" which is entirely plausible

(and if this college dropout has been delving deep into software since childhood because of an obsession with computers, it's more than possible he/she is actually *more* knowledgeable/a better coder than many CS grads out there)

vs.

(2) "college dropout creates amazing medical startup that normally requires post-grad levels of understanding of biochemistry", which should have raised many many questions. Where did she gain the required precursor knowledge from? Was she reading biomedical texts on her own time in grade school?

I've been clicking around to find out exactly what country uses "Miss" for (female?) children and Ms. for adult females, and have not found anything. This is worth knowing I think, its an interesting "cultural difference" - if it exists.

Do the foundations really do anything genuinely useful?

It seems to me that Google might well be contributing more to Linux by spending the money hiring these guys to improve security, than by giving the same money to the foundations

Omen laptops have been selling well. Recent generation has been reviewed positively.

1. Embrace
2. Extend
3. .... Destroy?

...that Mozilla isn't some kind of "enthusiast project". That's how they market themselves etc. but no organisation that signs deals where Google pays them hundreds of millions per year for search engine placement is something that is for "enthusiasts" alone.

I heard somewhere their CEO uses a private jet? Can anyone confirm?

How on earth are they going to prepare and launch a rocket to bring them back to Earth? The infrastructure to send them there and back would be entirely prohibitive and preclude doing other useful things with the same amount of resources expended.

Quite frankly, this is precisely the reason why space exploration is best with robots. At least until we have a better means of lifting things out of the gravity well we're in other than chemical rockets. We have things like antigravity or fusion drives etc., we can talk about sending humans to Mars or wherever. Until then, it makes no sense.

The whole thing started for cosmetic reasons, yes?

Probably won't have such a drastic side effect

Probably

Is it certain that Nvidia will "withdraw" licences to competitors? I'd imagine all of these people would have negotiated and bought "perpetual" licences (i.e. ARM cannot withdraw it). ARM might be able to cut them off from future developments by ARM, but that's not the end of the world (for example, I'd be very surprised if Apple doesn't have a perpetual licence that allows Apple complete freedom to develop its own extensions etc. - Apple has basically forked ARM into its own lineage already).

Every company that maintains a platform must be monitoring usage, and taking profit-seeking action based on it? It's one reason why some people have moved off Amazon Web Services because they did not want a potential competitor to get insight into their business, for example. And the decision on what is going to show up as an AmazonBasics product must come from analysis of the sales made off their main store.

It's one of the reasons why VCs love platform plays...

I think you might be underestimating what Boston Dynamics can do in 20 years.

Apple has (as it always does) made a decision about what it wants to push, and what it's decided is that AR is more important than VR. Augmented Reality is where Apple things the action is/will be, and that's going to suck the oxygen out of VR efforts on its platform, even when Apple isn't actually doing anything against it. Steam saw the writing on the wall

(and, has VR adoption really been THAT high on the other platforms?)

that's what I was thinking was interesting when I read the summary - current oxygen levels on earth are, as I understand it, the end effect of (1) a lot of the carbon is locked underground as fossil fuels etc., and (2) plants "emitting" oxygen as a by-product of their own chemical processes, since oxygen is so reactive, given time everything in the atmosphere would have eventually bound to something else. What is causing any detectable oxygen level in the air if it's not life? Are there any "natural" geologic processes that free up oxygen? I mean, volcanoes don't emit oxygen when they erupt right