The physics has been very well understood for decades. It's the engineering that requires much more than just 'suggesting'.

They indeed have much patching to do.

You have to be able to do much better than 'suggest' if you are going to be have any credibility: the controlled, net energy-yielding nuclear fusion field is littered with the corpses of entities who 'suggested' that much.

I understand why they are doing it. Trying to spin it as a good thing for users amounts to adding insult to injury.

If I understand the summary correctly, both groups start from a small set of requirements plus a number of assumptions that are not observed in nature, the whole thing leading to the near inevitability of something that looks like string theory. Hardly the endorsement one would wish for a physical theory that, after half a century, has yet to be seen to have much to do with the observable universe.

What is remarkable is that said trophy wife looks like a cheap hooker - I have seen streetwalkers that looked more classy than her. If you have the wherewithal to purchase a trophy wife at least show a modicum of class.

Amazon ought to take a cue and drop dead too.

Scientific American reports that, according to external experts, MS is talking through its asshole: that technology has never worked, and still doesn't. The paper where MS makes those claims apparently is such poor quality that would not make it as part of research toward a PhD.

ENIAC solved relevant problems from the moment it was deployed much faster than could be done with any other means available at the time, with the possible exception of some single-purpose analog devices. QCs computers are not there yet and, despite Google's and MS's optimism, I am very skeptical that they will have any QCs of practical interest in two and a half years. I.e. in my opinion they are pushing vaporware.

As long as MS has the power to tweak its formats at will, thus making sure that documents will display correctly only with their software, competitors will not stand a chance no matter how good. This has been ongoing for twenty years now.

Quite. What is amazing is that so many still come back for more.

Well, that's how a capitalist, free market economy is conceived in the US: the fiduciary duty of for-profit companies consists of maximizing profits for their shareholders, and ethical considerations must not get in the way of the pursuit of that goal.

This amounts to work done for for-profit companies for free. What are people who report such things getting from the companies that will directly benefit from such reports? In this case, could the guy have reasonably charged, say, 100 hours at $100/hr? I understand that some companies give some compensation, but I don't know how much, and according to what criteria. What happens if they don't give what the reporter thinks that is deserved?

Bezos is a consumate asshole, after all.

Accumulating negatives quickly leads to confusing sentences. For example, what does "This is a book that you must on no account fail to miss" mean?