Have you listened to the way people talk? I wouldn't want to listen to it either.

That is true, but the archaeology shows that this won't work for all island-hopping or all river navigation.

For example, we have clear evidence of hominins not just living on islands across the Mediterranean when no ice was present (it was free-standing water) but commuting to and from shore. We also have evidence of technologies travelling upstream along river-based communities at speeds that cannot be accounted for by simply walking.

So we need a model in which they could actively navigate against the water flow AND across significant distances of open water.

- AxCrypt 1.7.3
- MS Publisher 2010

On my Linux Mint 22.3 system, I'm using 7z (with longer passwords) in lieu of AxCrypt, at the moment, and will have to get better with LibreOffice and/or learn Scribus for the the things I did in Publisher, mostly greeting cards. I converted my more complex Word docs and Excel spreadsheets to LibreOffice a while ago.

Until he complains he was treated unfairly, ponies up some $$$, and gets a pardon from Trump. Maybe get a discount if he tries to blame his treatment on Biden or Obama. Trump's okay with white collar crimes, especially if he gets a cut.

We know that boats built 1.1 million years ago (so around the time of the split) were capable of going long distances up/down rivers between settlements, and across open waters beyond visual range to islands. This places certain language requirements on the hominins of the time, although we can't be sure hobbits had full access to all of those requirements. (There's not much evidence of boat building.)

However, they must have genetically had the capability, whether or not their brains were large enough to make any use of it.

That is all perfectly true, but we have a problem. Boats were capable of navigating reliably and robustly up/down rivers and across open sea beyond visual range. This requires much more complex communication than a gorilla or a chimpanzee is capable of, but obviously orders of magnitude less than a modern human or a Neanderthal.

It would seem reasonable to say that homo florensis was as much like us as those who first built deliberate boats for voyages requiring complex navigation.

The homo genus arose 2.2 million years ago. Evidence of complex communication exists as far back as 750,000-1.1 million years ago. Homo sapiens arose 300,000 years ago and are technically the "modern humans" as far as outward physiology is concerned. The brain was the size of modern humans for much of the 2.2 million years, but it is disputed how much. Since homo florensis is clearly not being likened to modern humans in the morphological sense, it would seem reasonable to conclude that they must be talking about some intellecual capability.

Fusion is going to be necessary at some point, and you can't start those with solar panels. Reducing wilderness is acceptable up to a point, but beyond that you start to screw up vital corridors and endanger whole sections of the food web - including those not directly impacted by the panels. So yes, you can increase solar and wind, but there are upper limits you absolutely should not cross. We're nowhere near those in the US, yet, but they shouldn't be ignored.

Nuclear as a general purpose fuel is dangerous, yes. So you need much much higher standards for designs and maintenance to keep them safe, and you really need Gen 4+ in order to be able to use nuclear waste as fuel (as we've a lot of that and can then dispose of the energy locked in it quickly and safely). A few more nuclear plants won't cause problems, provided they are Gen 4+ and preferably molten salt not water.

It's hard to not blame TEPCO to some level, as the tsunami was a one in 500 year type and was around 500 years after the last one of that magnitude. Although they're not exactly clockwork, it does become kinda obvious that you need to take such things into consideration. Yeah, yeah, there was no "legal obligation". Honestly, that isn't worth a damn. Either you update the design as new risks are determined (regardless of the law) or you knowingly take that risk.

However, you're absolutely right that the tsunami and the earthquake caused most of the property loss.

There is no spoon.

AD or BC? This matters. If Bill Gates is a time-travelling reptile from the Pleiades, and put chips into vaccines, it could be that all who took the vaccine will be spirited back into the Bronze Age and offered up as human sacrifices.

The truth is way out there.

The only way you can lose heat in space is through radiation. But radiation carries momentum. Not much per photon, but it was enough to cause the Pioneer probes to move in unexpected ways. This means you have to emit equal amounts of heat towards Earth and towards space. If your resultant is zero, then you're fine. You can even direct some of the heat backwards. It won't do a huge amount, but every bit of atmospheric drag you overcome, the less fuel you need to use to stay in orbit.

So you basically need absolutely gigantic radiators behind the space-based data centre, located inside a parabolic dish that will generate drag of its own (not to mention a potential difference betwen the lower and upper sections).

This is an insane level of complexity. You're better off parking it in a stable orbit between the Earth and the moon, so it's absolutely clear of atmospheric effects. You're still going to need radiators, but it's marginally better as you don't have to do quite so much directing of it. The latency would be horrible, maintenance would be next to impossible, and there's all kinds of other issues to consider.

No, I don't think you can make this workable.

However, space might be useful. This very same issue of heat only being radiated means that you can make wafers with much more even loss of temperature, no dust, bacteria, or dirt, and much lower gravity. If you were to make extremely high quality wafers (silicon or gallium arsonide) in space, then you should be able to make WSI processors, which should in turn reduce the demands that datacentres make.

The time it would take to set all this up would be about the same time as it took for IBM to perfect its stacked transistor topology. Intel was talking 90 cores per wafer-scale CPU a few years back - the shrinkage in transistors since then plus the x10 density IBM proposes might push you to 1800 cores per wafer, provided you can get the quality high enough. Which, in space, is quite possible.

You wouldn't need your datacentres in space. Your wafer-scale CPU plus packaging would be about the same size as a CD drive. You could pretty much dispense with datacentres at that point. A typical tower will have two spare bays. "Cartridge datacentres" could simply be plugged in as needed. A regular CPU-based cartridge for heavy general-purpose computing, a GPU-based cartridge for LLMs. Yes, home users would have power usage through the roof, but then it's no longer your problem.

Not usually is NOT GOOD ENOUGH when human lives and health are at stake. Confusing 'usually' and 'always' COSTS LIVES. Potentally substituting a comma for a period can cause a chat to deviate; and predicting is impossible.