If listening carefully, the cause WAS explained. The old networking equipment is reliable, but slow. They connected new equipment that overloaded the old routers and switches. This was foreseeable, and indicates the involvement of insufficiently experienced engineers. Blaming Congress for ONLY giving them an initial $12,500,000,000 is a red herring.

Historically, POTUS has not brazenly done things that are known to be grossly illegal. For that reason, he was mostly unable to achieve his objectives unless they had either the tacit approval of Congress, or were legal. That was why he became powerless.
Trump is different. He simply tells his cronies to take actions (optionally supported by improper executive orders when convenient) and waits for people to try to stop him. Even during his first term, he
(i) completely ignored Congressional subpoenas,
(ii) relied on the Republican minority in the Senate to protect him from impeachment proceedings, and
(iii) delayed court cases until final Supreme Court decisions that (following Mitch McConnell's shenanigans) have a built-in Republican majority that could not be relied upon to curb Trump's power.
The situation now is much worse, as the DOJ has lost its independence and Trump has ensured a military leadership that is likely to follow illegal orders should Trump see fit to issue them.

Those who believe a Democrat Congress (or the courts) will be able to significantly derail Trump agenda are naive. Trump ignores norms, and even laws. Trump's ballroom project is an instructive lesson on how we can expect him to act. He will use executive orders and covert operations to initiate actions which will be challenged in the court and investigated by Congress. The Congressional investigations will be endless, involving ignored subpoenas and Republican obstruction. Actions in court will take a year or more. By the time there are decisions by the Supreme Court or Congressional votes (which Trump may or may not obey) there will usually be irreversible faits accomplis.

Indeed, while true that Trump could shoot someone on the street (or attempt a coup) and his supporters would still rally around him, it becomes a different matter when Trump costs them real money.

From 1947 until around 1980, China was absolutely a communist country, with disastrous consequences. The North of China remained largely communist until about the year 2000. It is now more entrepreneurial that most Western countries, though with heavy government support for what are seen as strategic areas. For instance, they have invested heavily in high speed rail and other transport infrastructure. Their heavy support for electric vehicle development is motivated to a large degree by their lack of domestic oil. They have been aggressively reducing the economy's exposure to potential future oil embargos. Gas powered cars are not subsidized. The tremendous success in car exports, while a nice bonus, was not the main reason for creating the world's most advanced electric car industry.

In the US, the government mostly wants to prioritize defense, something that has become even more true recently. Thus, heavy government support tends to go only to companies providing military infrastructure and related industries. Again, a nice side effect is that it has created the world's largest weapons exporter, but it's not the main reason the US does it.

Although virtually all the parts were probably manufactured in mainland China, and the the bulk of the assembly also done there, I thought the actual design was Taiwanese, not Mainland Chinese.

What was not Taiwanese was an attempt to put a fairly new version of Android together with an outdated application architecture version which causes some incompatibility issues which I am not confident the support organization will be able to deal with.

There are many objections to this plan, but clouds will make it even less desirable. I am not just referring to the reduced energy reaching the earth's surface through clouds, but the fact that clouds will defeat any attempt to focus the energy over a specific area. Clouds would diffuse the light in a way that would cause greater light pollution than any existing satellite.

I agree that the economics of the process are key to whether it can be widely implemented. TFA does include some limited discussion. The point it makes that the new filters can be retrofitted to existing filtration systems to make them more effective, rather than requiring totally new systems to be built sounds potentially interesting, but there is not even an estimate of the cost of wide-scale adoption.

As God intended. Don't make him mad by pretending to be him in a lab.

Indeed! Eating from the Tree of Knowledge to interfere with God's desire for us to suffer disease and death is a clear usurping of His authority

It depends on what you consider the core OS. How many device drivers do you need before you consider it an operating system? How many DLL files used by many (but not all) applications are needed to qualify as a core operating system?

Early operating systems were strictly supervisors, responsible for scheduling and dispatching "jobs", and controlling access to shared resources. It was not expected that they would provide application frameworks. I would not be at all surprised if you could create a heavily stripped down Windows 7, paired with application virtualization tools (such as ThinApp) where the operating system would be very small, and almost all bloat required for individual applications isolated separately in application packages. Would you consider those packages to be part of the core operating system?

Sorry, the algorithm used in quantum encryption is secure, being a one-time pad, exchanged via quantum pairs.

Any system that has a secure method for transmission of one-time pads between the parties in a conversation ought to be secure. However, there is no method of which I am aware that involves passing the one-time pads via a third party (in this case, Signal) where we can be confident the security will not be subverted by (especially) state actors. Would you be confident using one-time pads passed using Fedex?

It appears that a lot of effort has gone into designing a system that is theoretically secure (at least, against currently known attacks). However, it requires trust in the implementation which can never be completely transparent. State actors can insist on secret server-side backdoors that will store less secure copies of messages. These would not require code injection within clients (which would be detectable). There are many ways this could work, including such things as session key substitution.

I find it hilarious that Remington Scott is asking people to spend $15 to $20 to see the hologram before he considers any criticism of the idea to be valid. Of course, from his point of view, that is a great idea.

In astronomical terms that means it can happen 1 second from now, or 10 million years from now. Either way, it already happened

Since the system is around 10,000 light years from earth, while it has quite likely already happened, it is known that it had not yet happened 10,000 years ago.

Possibly, even more practical might be an airship. Existing airships can already lift up to about 100 tons, and they can land in any large open space.