The DARPA demonstrations made too many people too sure that multiple cameras and AI would make self-drivers cars simple to pull off. Then they followed up with tests where it's warm and dry and the weather doesn't get weird. They wanted to get investment in before things started getting interesting. What they've got now is a technology that has slowed down and needs to learn more about what to do when there's a road crew digging holes in front of them. It's going to be much more of an adventure then the optimists thought.

The original footage was a deep-fake footage sent back by a time machine.

Trump's $175 billion Golden Dome project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... includes a space-based ballistic missile defense, which the Russians might want to be able to knock out if necessary. And one of SpaceX's subsidiaries called StarShield, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... which uses StarLink-type technology for military satellites. They have a classified $1.8 billion contract with the National Reconnaissance Office.

Why not just open another Gmail account and keep the old one? I have multiple Gmail accounts and have an email server that downloads from all the accounts and merges the email streams. Gmail hasn't noticed.

The first time a passenger gets whacked for $50+ for not closing the door may be the last time they take a Waymo.

Dump gravel into low-earth orbit and repeat until the you trigger the Kessler effect to turn low-earth satellites into shrapnel. For every measure, there is a countermeasure, for every countermeasure there is a counter-counter measure and so on infinitum.

The smog was a major reason why I left the Los Angeles area after graduating in 1969. It burned by eyes and hurt my lungs and I started having asthma. I have no regrets.

I do the same thing with Google Maps and it works very well. Visualization is a big help, and once I have traveled a route I can remember it will.

I learned to drive a stick-shift in 1971 and have not owned an automatic since then. My wife and I snow share a 2013 Honda FIT five-speed that has only 46,000 miles on it. It's a joy to drive, high maneuverable and easy to find a parking spot for. One of the nice things about the stick is that shifting gears keeps my mind on the road. Sometimes when I watch idiots driving with their eyes on their phone, I wonder how more distracting automatics are.

How do I turn it off, or delete Google from my machine and my life?

Reasonable point. To clarify terms, what Livermore calls "ignition" measures the input energy as the laser energy delivered onto the target, not the power used to generate the laser pulse, which is what would count in operating a power plant. What makes ignition significant is that it marks the threshold where the energy generates starts increasing faster than the energy delivered, so there's hope that if we could make a laser that could deliver higher energy it could produce a lot more power. However, it took over a decade to build and start running the National Ignition Facility and another decade to improve its performance to reach ignition. The NIF design is over a quarter of a century old, and the laser technology has improved a lot, but we need to scale up the laser design and build a new generation of laser, and that's going to take time to get up and running. We're still much better off than we were in the late 2010s, when most observers thought NIF would never reach ignition.

It's not just China. DoE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported the first ignition of a laser fusion target in December 2022 and have scored six more ignitions since then. https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/b... It's the first real proof of principle for inertial confinement fusion, and it uses powerful laser pulses to achieve ignition. Inertial (laser) confinement fusion is the major competition for magnetic confinement, and what Livermore has done with the National Ignition Facility is to greatly improve the uniformity of target compression. It's taken a long time coming, and fusion reactors are not just around the corner. It may have been the final blow for First Light Fusion.

Also challenging the traditional "wisdom" of the US auto industry of pumping up the size and the price with bells and whistles, getting buyers to trade the flashy cars for even flashier ones in 2-3 years, and milking the repair market for everything it's worth afterwards. At first glance it makes a lot of sense for people with tech skills and sense.

Nobody warned you about them because they didn't exist until recently. It's a scam that grew out of colleges and universities insisting that professors publish papers to demonstrate their academic credentials, but never looking at the papers, just counting them. That, in turn, arose from "publish or perish" and legions of academic bureaucrats. I write about science and I get invitations to conferences around the world that are another academic scam; many of them don't exist, but the conference "papers" also serve to demonstrate academic credentials for the bureaucracies.

EBay works for me. I've never been on Facebook, but I've been on eBay for years and it works for me. EBay sellers are more professional and great for things like spare parts, cables, adapters, reading glasses, and components that you can't find if you don't have a hardware store handy. Try finding USB-C adapters, for example. It's also great for finding old -- or selling -- books and collectables, and odd things you'll never find. It's my go-to place for useful stuff at a cheap or at least reasonable price unless you're looking for real rarities, and it's a good place to sell things you don't need. Check it out; you'll find much of the same small stuff you see on Amazon,