I didn't miss the jr. high "figure out what g is" stuff in the beginning of the book. I was kinda bummed at how much the selective breeding was glossed over as they had to cram a line into the movie to explain the disaster at the end. But a the same time the movie is two and a half hours long. While there are a handful of other cuts I think they could have gotten away with (the extended Karaoke scene maybe), there wasn't a ton of fat to trim to keep the runtime reasonable.

I don't think Xenonite is made of Xenon exclusively, but it is strange enough that handheld spectrometers can't deal with it. Maybe it offgasses xenon when bombarded by charged particles? One thing the movie glossed over is how Rocky's species is in many ways much less technologically advanced than Humans. Their materials science is outstanding due to the hellish nature of their home world, but they don't have electronics. Their math and science are back in the early 20th century. They went interstellar before discovering relativity. Mostly due to the fact that the astrophage is basically magic. In the book one background character mentions offhand that the astrophage is a miracle that will solve countless problems and everybody just glares at him angrily because even though he is right it's also killing them. On the other hand, while reading the book I had thoughts of an interstellar ferry service that collects astrophage and brings it back to Earth where it is tricked into releasing its energy into the atmosphere to warm the planet and light up cropland. Spin drives open up the entire solar system to exploitation and the astrophage is the perfect energy storage medium.

They seem particularly unreliable when asked to tell the difference between a headmaster and a fundamental rule.

Translation: we don't currently have a quantum algorithm for reversing hashes. But there was a time, not that long ago, when we didn't have a quantum algo for factorization either. However, I don't expect to see a quantum algo for hash reversion any time soon, because the whole problem of reversing hashes is pretty complex.

Factorization as a classical problem is essentially trivial, in that there are very simple classical algorithms for it. They just take a lot of time to run. But coming up with an efficient quantum algorithm was not trivial, and the algorithm itself isn't so simple. So you can estimate that a quantum version of any algorithm is a lot more complex than the classical counterpart.

I've only taken fairly general master's level courses in quantum information and regular cryptography, but I agree with this overall sentiment. My math professors used to say that no asymmetric encryption scheme has been proved unbreakable; we only know if they haven't been broken so far. Assuming something is unbreakable is like saying Fermat's last theorem is unprovable — until one day it's proved. So to me "post quantum cryptography" is essentially a buzzword.

Interestingly, Finnish government was planning to move election systems to Amazon's cloud, but the plan was just recently cancelled due to public outcry. https://www.heise.de/en/news/F...

Topography, schmopography. Just load the oil onto trucks, the same way Trump suggested working around the Hormuz strait situation.

Balloons are powered by hot air. What better way to generate it than a room full of AI-enhanced suits?

Seriously, though, the story of Banksy being Robin Gunningham has been out for years, so that part is nothing new.

RIAA should be after all the people who illegally distribute music to others with their speakers.

Europe's first lithium mine just opened in Finland a couple of weeks ago.

Also, why are people comparing the ingredients of a battery — which is recharged a thousand times — against petrol, which you need to extract and process anew for every fscking "charge". I keep seeing this over and over, and I'm never sure if it's a new level of stupid, or just a very hairy troll under a very large bridge.

I'm a bit late to this discussion, but I also notice that the Hormuz Strait is being closed. Gas guzzler owners all over the world are whining over rising oil prices, while the civilized world is moving into energy sources that don't depend on access to conflict areas. The grandparent whines about China, but it's not exactly the sole source of Lithium. They even opened a mine here in Finland.

3.11 for workgroups

Did you mean: NASSA?

Also, does anyone remember when web browsers were considered thin clients? I think the last time this was true was in the late 00s with netbooks. Then, more than a decade before the Al craze, browsers became these turbocharged Javascript engines that need multiple gigabytes of RAM to run.