I actually think that you could craft good arguments for allowing trojans. It's the stuff in temporary resonance orbits that I was really thinking of. There are a lot of orbits that are only semi-stable, say stable for a century or two, but not for millennia.

Don't be hypnotized by the names. What is most significant (after the orbit) is the mass. And that's a pretty smooth gradation (at least on a logarithmic scale).

If you want "planet" to mean "stuff in orbit around the sun", you end up with most planets weighing micrograms...or possibly less.

N.B.: By the strict definition of "planet" used by the IAU, even Jupiter wouldn't really qualify, because it hasn't cleared it's orbit. There's a lot of small stuff and, of course, the trojans.

Yeah, but...
The guess at the size is based on the guess of the albedo. If it's covered with something dark, it a LOT larger. (I'm presuming they're guessing it's covered with methane ice.)

Plausible. Most communicable diseases are addressable by social habits...if you can get people to do them.

I disagree. I think it probably CAN get much faster, but I'm not sure how much cheaper it can get.

The approach I think could succeed is the "bio-chip", with lots of cells and feed lines so different wells in the chip would host different combinations of bacteriophage and sample. This would need to be screened frequently, probably by an AI, that would pick out the most successful set. I think this could, in principle, usually be done within a couple of days in a mostly automated way. But that's a pretty complex setup, and I doubt that it could be done really cheaply.

It's not even that. Most of the drug-resistant bacteria existed before antibiotics came out of the lab. But they weren't a very successful part of the population. Antibiotics killed off their competition, and now they're successful. Most methods of resisting antibiotics have an energy cost, so bacteria that don't use them are more successful if the antibiotics aren't around. Unfortunately, it's not usually a very high cost, so stopping the use of an antibiotic doesn't reset the population, at least not quickly.

But, yeah, bacteria mutate really rapidly to fill a new niche, so you probably literally CAN'T have an antibiotic both in wide use and remaining effective.

Actually, getting the CO2 out of the atmosphere is possible, but *quite* expensive. Thermodynamics + entropy mean it will take more energy to get the CO2 re-concentrated than it released in being created.

Not fair. There are applications for which nuclear appears to be the best solution.

But, yeah, solar and wind scale a lot faster and more cheaply, even when you include the needed storage.

If you're invested in the company, you have a reasonable argument. If you're hoping for a job, you don't. (But see the comment by TWX.)

You left out that he doesn't only have one class.

Well, the use of AI *should* be encouraged, but that's a lousy way to do it. After graduation the students will need to live in a world where they deal with AI...but we don't know what the shape of that world will be.

OTOH, the main thing you're supposed to learn in mathematics classes is "the shape of mathematics". Learning to do the mathematics is secondary, now that calculators have advanced to AIs. (I've become nearly dependent on spell-check, but I don't really think of this as a problem.)

The tapes I was talking about were 800 bpi reels even parity. (The odd parity ones had better error recovery.)

That would have been really useful for some mag tape systems I used to use. They had too many errors for their error correction system.

OTOH, this kind of thing is very likely to have bugs. Test it THOROUGLY before folks start depending on it. Perhaps, after it passes initial tests, make it an optional choice in the installer, and require extra steps to do the install (with warnings: CAUTION: BETA FILE SYSTEM HAS BEEN CHOSEN).

File systems need more thorough testing that most software choices.

Currently a good rule of thumb is "If it's easy to check the answer relative to creating a good answer, AI is a good choice.". That's just a rule of thumb (i.e. it's not always true and use sense in applying it), and that's just "this was true up until this month from at least the start of the year". There's no guarantee that it will be true next month, but that's the way to bet. Next year gets more problematic.

OTOH, robots will introduce an entirely new set of problems. But this rule of thumb is pretty likely to be good for them when they start being significant.

Yeah, it *is* better, if you can afford it. Just don't forget that it's dangerous. Care is needed. Possibly even extreme care.