I didn't miss the jr. high "figure out what g is" stuff in the beginning of the book. I was kinda bummed at how much the selective breeding was glossed over as they had to cram a line into the movie to explain the disaster at the end. But a the same time the movie is two and a half hours long. While there are a handful of other cuts I think they could have gotten away with (the extended Karaoke scene maybe), there wasn't a ton of fat to trim to keep the runtime reasonable.

I don't think Xenonite is made of Xenon exclusively, but it is strange enough that handheld spectrometers can't deal with it. Maybe it offgasses xenon when bombarded by charged particles? One thing the movie glossed over is how Rocky's species is in many ways much less technologically advanced than Humans. Their materials science is outstanding due to the hellish nature of their home world, but they don't have electronics. Their math and science are back in the early 20th century. They went interstellar before discovering relativity. Mostly due to the fact that the astrophage is basically magic. In the book one background character mentions offhand that the astrophage is a miracle that will solve countless problems and everybody just glares at him angrily because even though he is right it's also killing them. On the other hand, while reading the book I had thoughts of an interstellar ferry service that collects astrophage and brings it back to Earth where it is tricked into releasing its energy into the atmosphere to warm the planet and light up cropland. Spin drives open up the entire solar system to exploitation and the astrophage is the perfect energy storage medium.

I, Steve Wozniak, did not participate in the theft of the BASIC. It was funny to me to see others enjoying doing this. I had never used BASIC myself, at that time, only the more-scientific languages like Fortran, Algol, and PL-1, and several assembly languages. I sniffed the air and sensed that you needed BASIC to sell computers into homes, because of the book 101 Games in BASIC. I loved games and saw games as the key. It was the [MS] BASIC that inspired me to write a BASIC interpreter for my 6502 processor, in order to have a more useful computer.

It's hard to find people with Tim Berners-Lee's integrity. We should 'own' our own lives. It's a lot deeper than just being watched.

For 20 years, plus or minus, personal computers reversed that idea.

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

Known VPN services have identifiable server addresses that can be blocked. Instead, you can set up a cheap raspberry pi (or other) at your home and use an encrypted SSH connection to that [raspberry pi] from far away. Then turn on your SOCKS proxy (part of WiFi Details on Macintosh) and check to see that your IP address shows to the world you access as that of your raspberry pi. I do this all the time, including right now. It also helps to watch sports events.

Thanks.

For me self-checkout is just the new express lane. I like using it if I only have a few items but only if there is not a line at the self-check. One caveat is that when people are slow at self check, they are extremely slow. If a line has formed it is not worth it, just go to a regular checkout instead. The bagging area is also too small to handle more than an express-lane sized load as well, and the machines will freak out if you remove a loaded bag to make room for a new one.

It depends what you see a stock as. If you think it is a distributed measure of the value a company can bring to an economy then meme investors are wrecking your engine of economic growth. However, if you think stocks are a way for people to make money without having to produce a product or service themselves, then this is just average joes butting in on a rich person game.

Cable companies are in a bind. They are losing subscribers and the only option they can think of is to raise prices. I guess it's time for another price hike. It has to be clear at this point that they're pricing themselves right out of the market and yet they don't seem to care.

https://downloads.aaronia.com/datasheets/solutions/drone_detection/Aaronia_AARTOS_DDS_FAQ.pdf

Breeder reactors are very expensive and nuclear fuel is cheap.

Nuclear waste is 100% a political problem, not a scientific one. The total amount of waste generated by all of the US Nuclear reactors ever fits in about 16 Olympic size swimming pools. Storing it safely effectively forever is not difficult technically, but is basically impossible politically. If you think about it these reactors have been running for several decades without a waste solution and somehow have not run out of space on-site to store it, the total volume can't be too large. It's not like the fly ash from coal that would completely bury the average plant after only a few years if it wasn't trucked away constantly.

As for why new plants aren't being built, that's mostly political too. It's a shame too because pushback on nuclear has ironically increased the amount of radiation in the atmosphere. Coal plants release more radioactive material in the air every year than was released in the Chernobyl disaster in addition to releasing planet destroying levels of greenhouse gasses.

You might have missed that Musk made the same claim about 2016, with the 1-camera sensor system. The 2017 claim was with the newer 8-camera system, and the claim was made before Tesla even had software for the new sensors, and the Tesla then lacked adaptive cruise control, adaptive high beam, self parking, summon, and other things that the prior model did have. I'm embarrassed that I actually believed these claims.

Don't worry, the same company has a product they would like to sell you that can solve that problem.