There's the old story of a newb typing in all caps, someone replies telling him to press caps lock, and the newb says, THANK YOU, NOW I DON'T HAVE TO KEEP HOLDING SHIFT!

No, it's really inefficient. In order to be useful for power generation, the three square mile circle it illuminates would have to be completely full of solar panels in order to capture all the energy being reflected. And it it's as bright as the moon, that's about one half millionth as bright as the sun. So those solar panels, assuming no cloud cover, will be operating at one millionth the efficiency of daytime.

Meanwhile, battery technology, particularly for terrestrial power storage, keeps getting better and better. This has zero potential to offset CO2. Which is deeply sad for the science fiction geek in us all, but honestly, right now solar generation technology is starting to feel pretty science-fictiony, so maybe that's okay.

They are the first step toward a slippery slope toward a ban on anonymity.

Because privacy is something only Bad Guys(tm) want. You're not a Bad Guy(tm), are you?

I was employed at IBM from 1990 to 1991. One thing IBM did was provision their PCs with huge amounts of RAM for the times. I'd use a RAM drive to run things. Their standard PC was a 16 MHz 80386 with 16M of RAM. Yes, the 80486 had just been released, but even IBM struggled to keep up. I had an 80286 clone PC with 1M of RAM, fairly standard for the mid 1980s. They had some old 80286 PCs (genuine IBM brand PCs of course) they'd supplied with 12M, which they kept in use as network bridges. One big difference between the clone and the genuine IBM was that the clone could skip the memory test. Another was that the clones tended to run a few MHz faster, 12 MHz for mine, 6, 8, or 10 MHz for these genuine IBM beasts. Upon powering up, it took that genuine IBM 80286 PC's BIOS 10 minutes to run its memory test, 64K at a time in real mode, then again in protected mode, and you couldn't skip it. To this day, those hold the record for the longest boot times I have ever seen in a PC. Had hard drives that had to be manually parked, and one day the idiot among my coworkers moved all the machines around for no good reason (he wanted all the servers physically near him because he thought that gave him more control and power), but forgot to park the hard drives of those 286s, thus ruining them.

In 1993 I used these VAX workstations that took 20 minutes to boot. They were intended to stay on 24/7. The day that thunderstorms knocked out the power for an hour, twice, 30 minutes apart, I didn't get much done.

I remember noticing a huge speedup at some point, seemed like only 5-10 seconds to get the login prompt. This was 20(?) years ago when I was still building my own towers. Then something happened, I'll guess 10-15 years ago ... my next laptop took that long just to ask for the full disk decryption key. My latest laptop sometimes takes 30 seconds just to ask for the decryption key. No messages, nothing. After that, it's still only 5-10 seconds to get the login prompt.

Of course, this is all from memory, not logs or anything. I'm sure the timeframes are off. But the general trend is right ... slow, then much faster, then slow asking for decryption keys.

The other thing about saving is that if you can depend on UBI, and it's enough to live on, then that takes the pressure off of individuals saving for retirement. Right now the amount of money people have to save for retirement in the U.S. is actually a problem, because there's no safe place to put that much money. And so we wind up with things like private equity and various other forms of securitization a specific group of which led to the 2008 crisis.

All of these securities are just ways of storing value, but you can't actually store value—value is work. "Stored value" is an obligation that someone else will have to work to pay back: I use my wealth to pay you money to do the work that I need done.

So public support for people who need it is actually the same thing as living off savings, except that living off savings is individual, and public support is collective. So public support can take advantage of the law of averages, and private savings can't. Which massively increases the amount you have to save as an individual to be sure you'll be okay in retirement.

And this motivates wealth inequality, which makes things worse and worse for the people who are creating the value you as a person with a decent amount of retirement savings need done. We've already had people saying "no more taxes" because they don't want to work to pay for other peoples' retirements. This is the same thing, and at some point it either turns into runaway inflation, which means your savings loses its value, or else it turns into regime change, which means who knows what? Right now, it means that a bunch of elected people are just raking in money through fraud, which isn't likely to end well for the rest of us.

It's weird how people think of socialism as being somehow expensive in comparison.

Cue.

Reminds me of something I've read: boxing with gloves is massively more dangerous than bare-knuckle boxing. Normally, punching someone's face with full power will also wreck your hand. Gloves remove this drawback, and thus lead to many more cases of severe brain damage.

More taxes. of course. Or they could rely on SpaceX, but that contradicts their insistence on autarkey.

Technically impressive, but other than a few early adopters, the public saw no need for it. 8K might do better, but few people can tell the difference with 4K, so they'll need a better hook than just imperceptible resolution.

I wonder if AI game players could benefit. Their fake vision is as good as they want.

Ubisucks: Get used to not owning games!
Gamers: Get used to not having customers! /s

No wonder The Lord of the Rings was such a critical and financial failure! /s

If these trends continue... eyyyy.