What has the former got to do with the latter, other than both being Amazon products?

I like my Kindle, but I agree that Alexa is garbage.

So our lawns will survive.

I wonder about CAM plants - desert plants, and tropicals like pineapple? That's pretty similar to C4.

As the saying goes - even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

I can sort of see how working on getting bipedal robots moving faster than humans - and doing it well - might provide useful information to robotic companies, given the sort of roles they're developing these robots for.

But I'm not sure what the practical advantages would be in pushing them to cheetah speeds, for instance. At that point, why bother with bipedal versions? There are better, more stable means of locomotion.

But what about his brother, Insane Bolt?

This company just keeps getting back up out of its grave. Maybe a wooden stake is necessary.

... according to Quantinuum, the company that makes Helios. But realistically, it's basically just a different approach to constructing quantum computers that may or may not end up having some practical benefit over other approaches to constructing quantum computers.

Really, the most important part is at the tail end of TFS, although it's not actually saying anything that we weren't already aware of:

Having said that, Helios' computations have just been random benchmark tests, so the practical importance of this leap forward is still limited. To perform quantum computations of practical importance in science and commerce, even the most optimistic estimates suggest that quantum computers must be enormously bigger and better — of the order of a million qubits.

Nonsense. This backdoor was obviously put into place so Russian tanks could disable the cameras and speed through the cities, traversing Slovakia quickly on their way to the west. But, now that it's been discovered, those tanks will need to obey the traffic laws - foiling any invasion!

FTFY

Pity us Americans. Apparently two telescope rescue missions have failed just during the past few days.

This is woke nonsense. These people should be happy with the lungs they've got. What's next, outlawing cars and mandating bicycles? Free healthcare for all?

Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

Since obviously at least a few people have bought into that retcon, it's obvious Apple's PR team is doing an effective job!

Our local Winco - where we buy the majority of our groceries - recently (finally!) installed new POS terminals that allow tap to pay, Apple Pay, etc. It's still debit-only, but that's fine.

NFC payments, like Apple Pay and Google Pay, have been available in many US stores for well over a decade as well. The reported issue was indeed due to a specific decision made by Walmart.

Your subject line, "American issue, not Walmart specific", is completely wrong.

I've been able to use Apple Pay / NFC payments here in America for a long time at a lot of stores - my local hardware store, my pharmacy, both of my local grocery stores. But some specific stores - Walmart and Home Depot come to mind - made a deliberate choice (in the U.S. at least) to try and push their own payment "app" rather than adopt the standard NFC payment system. The main driver for this appears to have been they did not like how they couldn't collect as much monetisable personal data from customers using Apple Pay (or Google or Samsung).

The fact that, with Walmart at least, this appears to be an America-only issue makes me wonder if it's due to the different regulatory environment in Canada - perhaps they legally couldn't do it there.