It's so unimaginable, that was an episode of Thunderbirds Are Go.

It's certainly true that the brain does not exist in isolation, and that any tightly-coupled system essentially acts as a single system.

However, smartphones don't necessarily offload the right stuff from the brain. You ideally want the brain to do the thinking stuff and your smartphone to offload all the mundane stuff that interferes with coherent thinking. This is because of how the brain works.

If you push specific parts of your brain hard, you can extend them by up to 20% in the number of neurons involved (and much more than that in the number of synapses), but only by sacrificing neurons from other functions in the brain.

The ideal is to have the smartphone do the stuff you need to shrink in order to grow the stuff you want to actually utilise, so that your functionality hasn't worsened anywhere but you can still actually become a mega-genius at some tasks.

This is not how smartphones are designed and this is not how smartphones are used. Smartphones are designed stupidly and used stupidly. This is a serious problem, leads to phone addiction, and a net redunction in mental capacity. Now, off with ye, I need to get back to that minesweeper app.

Ummmm, no. It has never been deciphered. It is definitely not any language indigenous to any part of the Americas. It predates Columbus by almsot a century, the materials are European, the drawings do not match any architecture or plantlife in any known part of the world. If you want to claim otherwise, feel free to provide a link.

A larger satellite can have a larger signals collecting area, can have much more sophisticated electronics, can have better shielding against radiation, and (if it uses solar panels) can have substantially larger panels because it'll have the fuel to manoever.

Now, whether or not these particular large satellites are better, proof is in the pudding. Clearly, they're still being idiots about reflectivity. (Yes, you've got to get rid of the heat, and that's best done in a direction that doesn't worsen your altitude, but there's ways to do this that don't interfere with astronomy,)

I have no idea what any of this means, or has to do with Harris or Walz.

You mean, the couldn't stomach a sane government run by rational people?

The good thing is that it seems to be the same language used in the Voynich Manuscript, so hopefully they will be able to decipher it. The problem is, we won't be able to understand them when they do.

1. Lasers don't shine sideways, and laser light doesn't scatter on its own. Test it yourself, get a laser pointer and try to bounce off a building a thousand feet away. You will NOT see the light.

2. If you seriously think that searchlights are lasers, you've problems. Gigs aren't going to use lasers into the sky because that has a very nasty habit of blinding pilots.

3. You're an idiot.

The BBC has never been run by the government but had the power to regulate and fine. And used it.

British Telecom has never been run by the government (the prior organisation, the GPO, was but BT was not) but had the power to regulate and fine. And used it.

These were public corporations. The BBC still exists as a corporation by right of charter. That is to say, the government has never had any meaningful say in their governance but rather could set down in their charter (just a fancy contract) what a public corporation had to provide and under what general conditions.

But they've never been short of teeth.

They add a great deal of dust specifically to make it visible (and safe). When beaming energy, you don't want scatter. You select a frequency where virtually nothing along the path is going to scatter the light.

In the short term it would most certainly hit profits, not merely because of lower revenues from interest, but because credit card is unsecured, bad debts taking a bigger bite out of profits. The ultimate result would be that it would become much harder to get a credit card. In the end consumers would effectively have their short-term lending capacity reduced.

Regulation in the US is done badly. The agencies are government-run, which means that whoever is in power essentially decides on what the rules are that week, which is no way to run a regulatory body.

Regulations should be consistent, stable, and updated only as necessary and not with every election. And that means taking things like the FCC (and the FAA) out of government hands entirely. Nor should they ever be run by those with a vested interest, so frankly I'd rip the RIAA and MPAA from industrialists as well.

These bodies should be independently run, with NO TIES to any other body, where the "no ties" bit is rigidly enforceable by government, industry, and consumer, and where those who are in charge of the body should be politically and commercially independent so that honest regulation is not merely done but is seen to be done.

The higher the frequency, the more energy the photons have. You want shorter wavelengths, not longer. Ideally, as short as possible. Because you're wanting to do this as a tight beam, or as tight as you can get, other applications are irrelevant. This isn't a general broadcast in all directions, it's unidirectional and should only affect a very small area of ground. All of which you will have collectors on, so there won't be any people there for the beam to interfere with.

You wouldn't be able to see a laser, it's too directional.

To be clear, it's not so much that he thinks that AI agents are sophisticated enough as to deserve being granted personhood. It's that he thinks actual human people are nothing more than resources for him to exploit; thus no more useful, and just as expendable, as a computer algorithm. That is the clear context of the discussion--his only conception of a human's value is through the labor that they produce for the enrichment of the capitalist class. And so, the logical conclusion of such a stance is that an AI agent is a "person," because in his mind, "person" = unit of labor to exploit.