Man I loved Trade Wars 2002. I played the heck out of that, with {COMMO} macros and a series of BBSes I'd call into every day to manage my empires. It now amuses me that it was set 24 years ago.

May he go forth in the sunrise boat,
May he come to port in the sunset boat,
May he go among the imperishable stars,
May he journey in the Boat of a Million Years.
— The Book of Going Forth by Daylight (Theban recension, ca. 18th Dynasty)

It took sixty years to move from comics to reality. Magnus, Robot Fighter 4000 A.D. first appeared in 1963, published by Gold Key Comics.

And exactly how surprising is this? Did anyone expect him to say what would boil down to "You're right; this is an unsupportable invasion of privacy; legislate my company out of business and eliminate all the work and value I've put into the company, as well as put all my employees out of work"? If he actually thought ubiquitous surveillance was bad, he wouldn't have created the company in the first place, much less worked to get Flock cameras used everywhere he could get agencies to buy and install them.

which could make running out of gas mid-journey a doubly-frightening thing.

From @sif@cathode.church (fediverse):
7" Apple Watch just dropped.

My late wife did undergraduate research in photosystem II where there was quantum effects back in 2002. She did her PhD thesis on proton coupled electron transfer (PCET) in soybean lipoxogenase, then had a long career developing models for Fortran code that did quantum simulation of proteins (she was behind Tagdock in Amber MD). This is nothing new; several biological systems have quantum effects that are central to their mechanism.

Since all of the climate-warning cutoff values — 3C, 2C, and 1.5C — were taken from papers where they were tossed out as aspirational goals, each with no scientific justification for that value over any other, although dire predictions were ascribed to exceeding these values, such as a 2022 study published in Science titled Exceeding 1.5C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points. The IPCC parroted the study: "Exceeding 1.5C could also trigger multiple climate tipping points — such as breakdowns of major ocean circulation systems, abrupt thawing of boreal permafrost, and collapse of tropical coral reef systems — with abrupt, irreversible, and dangerous impacts for humanity." (1.5C: what it means and why it matters) And since the UN has declared we've already blown past this critical temperature goal, we can sit back and wait for the catastrophes that we have been repeatedly told, in increasingly apocalyptic warnings, would happen once we inched past the 1.5C breakpoint. Based on the accuracy of the 1982 declaration by the UN that the planet would be facing an ecological disaster within two decades, its 1989 warning of a 10-year tipping point, IPCC chief Pachauri's 2007 declaration that it would be "too late" if action wasn't taken by 2012, and its recent retirement of the IPCC's RCP 8.5 (aka SSP5-8.5) warming scenario as "implausible" (despite having been used for more than ten years as the foundation of other individuals' and organizations' apocalyptic claims, some of which continue to be made despite their foundation having been pulled out from under them), though, I'm not expecting much from this UN announcement, either.

And the legislators somehow make the blatant assumption that forcing computers to announce "The user of this computer is underage" when queried would never be used by bad actors to more directly focus their attention on individuals identified as children.

You can thumb your nose at the renaming a bit by opening Google Maps, searching for 'Lake Ontario' or 'Lake America', then using the "Add a Label" function to label it something like "The Lake Formerly Known as Ontario", optionally with some obscure Unicode glyph as the icon.

Or go back to the origin of the name "America" and label it "Lago di Amerigo Vespucci", tell Trump that he's renamed the lake after an Italian, and see how long it takes him to have another tantrum and rename it again.

It's been done, and decades ago — Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis (1971). A new, highly-resistant plastic sold around the world for a variety of hostile-environment uses begins to fail in highly-public situations, causing deaths and panic. The company that created it was also working on a plastic that would decompose when exposed to a specific chemical, to address the buildup of plastic waste, and through the novel the characters come to believe that this is the source of the degradation of the supposedly resistant plastic. The actual cause is a scientist employed by a completely different company who, annoyed at the clogging of his pipes from plastic toys his kids throw down the toilet, wonders whether a bacterium could be created to eat the plastic and dissolve the obstructions; He comes up with a variant that does, but suffers a brain aneurysm, dropping the petri dish into the sink, where it breaks, releasing the strain into the sewers; it turns out that the decomposable plastic is a superfood for the bacterium, which mutates to eat more and more varieties of plastic, spreading first through the sewers and then elsewhere via all of the connected piping and wiring made from or sheathed in plastic.

What was the T-shirt slogan? Oh, yes — "Plants are not food. Plants are what food eats."

I have a shirt with the text "I don't usually test my code, but when I do, I do it in production." Seems appropriate here...

lol, like phys.org (somewhere between journalism and breathless huckterism) has never got crucial facts or inferred conclusions wrong.

College press releases, science journalism, and medical journalism THRIVE on hyperbole and overexaggerated / misunderstood conclusions like this.