I don't understand the nature of your comment. Are you confirming that you were 11 or 12 at the time?

Hint: Have you checked my /. ID?

That is what we've been doing for generations. Each teaches the next, and some of it gets absorbed into automation. We certainly don't make buggy whips the same way we used to.

And yet you'd never heard of the Transformers before you saw the Michael Bay movies. I guess you were 11 or 12 at the time?

I'm told she's had some well-liked stories.

Still, James Gunn seems to have this obsession with pulling up C-list characters from the comics and putting them in central roles in movies. For a lot of the running length of Superman, it was a movie about some guy named Mr. Terrific that nobody's ever heard of. I assume this is because he wants to tell new stories, rather than rehashing the same old origins and motives for characters that everybody's known about for years. But it's not the same as actually introducing new, appealing ideas; these characters are C-listers for a reason. Nobody cares.

Haven't seen the movie, but I've heard it's not just that ... she also apparently spends a lot of the movie not seeming to believe there's much urgency to the situation at all. That has a way of hamstringing the idea of a "ticking clock" plot.

Buying a 'tech' firm at the peak of a tech boom is a dubious idea, at best.

Two words: Government contracts.

"These things"? You mean the government shouldn't be drafting regulations for government, which is what we're talking about here? Instead, private industry should be telling the government what to do?

Technically, but I think it's still an important point to make, you don't actually need approval from the authorities to drive a car, you just need it to drive a car on public streets. If you want to take your car to a private raceway, or if you have a large enough property where you could drive a car on it, you don't need any sort of approval for that.

So that's meaningfully different from this kind of rule, where you can't even fly a drone on your own private property.

No, but HPE is. HPE does not sell printer ink.

If the rest of our existence as a race, for the next however many years until we go extinct, is entirely based on what we know currently about physics, and there is nothing left to learn, no short cuts, no loop holes, no new approaches, then.... fucking hell, the future is going to be boring.

I refuse to believe that our future abilities have been set in stone by scientists who barely knew atoms existed when they came up with their rules about how the universe operates - I fully expect future generations to get around those rules, otherwise we had better get used to living in the 2020s for pretty much the rest of humanities existence.

I remain eternally hopefully that there are different ways of doing things that Einstein et al could never conceive.

Failing that, stroke something else.

Hmm. Just from my own bullshit experience, if you find yourself in an empty room, you probably look to the right and then, naturally, you're moving counterclockwise.

(Disclaimer: I'm an Israeli, though rather opposed to the genocidal attempt at ethnic cleansing currently being conducted by my country. That said, keep that in mind in terms of potential bias in this post).

It's not precisely correct to say that the US has sent hundreds of billions of dollars to Israel. it's a bit more of a 'closed ecosystem' than that -- the vast majority of financial support the US has provided Israel has been in the form of weapons and munitions, which Israel has then purchased from US companies. In other words, while in some respects this absolutely is financial and military support of Israel, in addition to that it's also a vast transfer of tax revenues from us (I'm a tax-paying US citizen these days) to the military-industrial complex and more specifically American companies.

So most of this money has stayed in the US, it's just been transferred from the people and their representative government to commercial entities.

Ah yes, the "I'm going to take my toys and go home" threat, uttered by children and oligarchs everywhere.

Companies unwilling to abide by a country's laws are welcomed to not operate in that country. These threats happen all the time and so far what it takes to get a company to not operate in a given country is pretty much a legal order (see: Russian and Iranian sanction laws).