This is possibly the only objectively justifiable use of the phrase "He's an old soul" :D

It's okay. All posts on the internet are just screaming into the void anyway.

I am not passing any opinion on the origins of COVID; I have no information and hence no way to make a meaningful opinion. I don't believe in conspiracy theories either, and I think "man eats bat, virus spreads" is a much more plausible scenario than "multiple layers of biohazard protection fail, sinister bioweapon escapes" simply from Occam's Razor. ALL I was saying is that protection is probabilistic.

It wouldn't help them to go looking for "a guy". The code is in the world. Nothing can unpublish it. They might DDoS forums where people are talking about how to improve the software, but they can't get the cat back in the bag on this one just by having a few people fall out of windows.

Point of order: mistakes are made. Take the Sverdlovsk incident for example - which released anthrax, much easier to contain than a virus. You can add layers of protocols and equipment, but if the holes in the Swiss cheese eventually align, there will be an incident.

And such a system would be pointless because all the nation needs to do is build a few hundred cheap vehicles that simulate the launch, to overwhelm the very limited number of interceptors that could be carried by each orbital platform. You wouldn't even need to build silos for them, because nukes can be launched from TELs just as easily as from fixed silos. Put your dummies on TELs.

The whole idea is ludicrous on multiple levels.

Can't argue with ya. There are absolutely no details https://www.twz.com/space/trum... not because this is super secret megaweapon info that can't be revealed in public, but because this is an aspirational project, a headline, a sound bite designed to boost some ego or other. But anyway, boost phase is the stated goal, and there is vague talk about orbital-based interceptors. Mkay. How many rounds does each orbital platform carry? (Don't tell me it can carry enough energy to power a sufficiently frisky laser to take out multiple targets). And even if the idea worked, it would allow a first strike to anyone willing to take a scorched-earth approach by launching a satellite or two with a nuke onboard, and triggering an orbital EMP at the time of their choosing to disable all the Golden Dome satellites.

If the first funding round is granted in the "big beautiful bill", what it means is no less and no more than "one or a few contractors who made the right noises will share in a $25BB pie and never need to deliver anything except maybe a cool 3D rendered marketing video".

Reading words is an important skill. Note how I said "popping up"? I am aware of the theoretical attack mode of using an underwater nuke to cause a radioactive tsunami, but that is NOT what I was talking about. I was talking about essentially a Bouncing Betty attack where the warhead gets close to the coast underwater (probably a supercavitating torpedo like Shkvall et al) then pops up to at least groundburst altitude. Lots more area denial that way. A tsunami is kinetic; a groundburst or airburst gives you lovely warm fireball damage too.

Heh. My first CD-ROM drive was an A570 CDTV-ROM, possibly the least useful peripheral I've ever owned. I was so excited to see that it supported CD+G, then so disappointed to see that there were almost no CD+G discs on the market. So I bought a copy of Anita Baker's "Rapture" just so I could see what CD+G was all about. I don't think any CDTV software itself ever made its way to store shelves in Melbourne, Australia where I lived at the time. Oh, and the joy of caddied drives.

Then I started working at what was then a tiny PC store (Swann Computers - and yes it's the same Swann that sells all kinds of rebadged electronics these days) and I had access to drives at wholesale prices. Eventually wound up building a full tower PC with five CD-ROMs in it, which was ZWSBBS 3:634/396.0 :D

The Golden Dome will never exist, and even if it did it would not prevent catastrophic consequences of nuclear war. To name two immediate vulnerabilities: a) since it is aspiring to take out missiles in their boost phase, it can easily be overwhelmed by a bunch of dummy missiles that consist of a first stage only, and b) submarines can bring nuclear devices very close to coastal cities essentially undetected, and they can be delivered underwater. A 5MT device suddenly popping up a mile or two off the coast of California would be quite exciting for all concerned - not even counting the fact that it's still believed possible that even a relatively small number of devices detonated _anywhere_ could trigger a global nuclear winter. There is no cure for nuclear war, only prevention.

CD-ROM != CD. CD-ROM is an adaptation of audio CD. Red Book spec for audio CD was published in 1980; Yellow Book for CD-ROM wasn't published until 1986. The WWW is generally taken to have been invented in 1989. All the devices you specify use Red Book audio CD, not CD-ROM. You _do_ need a computer (of one kind or another; game consoles count) to use the data tracks of a CD-ROM, though a regular audio CD player can read the audio track off a hybrid audio/data CD.

Right? I thought I had seen everything, but now I learn about work LARPing?

These are the same ultra-liberals who are antivaxxers; the type is well known.

Swing and a miss. The whole way the effects of fluoride were discovered is correlating dental health with local water supplies that had naturally occurring levels of fluoride. You CANNOT obtain the full benefit using topical applications. The fluoride is incorporated into the dentine as it accretes; toothpaste does NOT penetrate deeply into the tooth. Having it in the diet during childhood is key to having strong permanent teeth.

... but this is absolutely yet another harbringer of how GenAI is already - not "going to" - decaying science and the law. This is obviously a special case where the prompts were manipulated to get a desired outcome, but even the innocuous "I saved time by using GenAI to look up my references" is basically throwing lumps of styrofoam into the concrete on which we build our civilization. Sooner or later the weak spots accumulate and the structure collapses. Perhaps the outcome we should be fearing isn't an apocalyptic "AGI takes over the nuke stockpiles and ends everything", but rather "everything becomes tainted and untrustable and society falls apart". Pollution in the digital domain could be just as damaging as an industrial accident like Bhopal.