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What was not Taiwanese was an attempt to put a fairly new version of Android together with an outdated application architecture version which causes some incompatibility issues which I am not confident the support organization will be able to deal with.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

It seems to me that some kind of heavy lift helicopter solution might make more sense. My understanding is that a reliable 100m turbine blade can be made weighing about 35 tons. Although the most capable current helicopters can only accommodate an external lift weight of about 20 tons, it seems easier to build a more powerful helicopter than a massive aircraft that can land on a makeshift dirt runway.

I am not familiar with the current state of the art, but CCM devices seem to have one major flaw: they only work in extremely low temperature conditions. Indeed, they only remain non volatile under such conditions. Outside of niche applications, having to keep your storage media continuously at similar temperatures to those needed for super conductivity does not seem very practical. Changing bits on CCM media may require negligible power, but maintaining the necessary environment continuously is costly.

Of course, we do not know if the environmental requirements in the latest Chinese research are any less demanding, but they might be on to something.

Those are mind blowing numbers, certainly, and I will treat them with extreme skepticism until I see some corroboration.

From all I have read, it is highly unlikely that anything equivalent to the microbiome in our digestive tracts exists in the brain. However, the presence of a limited group of protective organisms seems plausible. As hinted by TFA, circumstantial evidence suggests conditions like Alzheimer's are affected by gut bacteria. The most likely reason for such an effect seems those organisms crossing the blood brain barrier and acting directly within the brain. Really, though, we simply do not know yet.