I didn't miss the jr. high "figure out what g is" stuff in the beginning of the book. I was kinda bummed at how much the selective breeding was glossed over as they had to cram a line into the movie to explain the disaster at the end. But a the same time the movie is two and a half hours long. While there are a handful of other cuts I think they could have gotten away with (the extended Karaoke scene maybe), there wasn't a ton of fat to trim to keep the runtime reasonable.

I don't think Xenonite is made of Xenon exclusively, but it is strange enough that handheld spectrometers can't deal with it. Maybe it offgasses xenon when bombarded by charged particles? One thing the movie glossed over is how Rocky's species is in many ways much less technologically advanced than Humans. Their materials science is outstanding due to the hellish nature of their home world, but they don't have electronics. Their math and science are back in the early 20th century. They went interstellar before discovering relativity. Mostly due to the fact that the astrophage is basically magic. In the book one background character mentions offhand that the astrophage is a miracle that will solve countless problems and everybody just glares at him angrily because even though he is right it's also killing them. On the other hand, while reading the book I had thoughts of an interstellar ferry service that collects astrophage and brings it back to Earth where it is tricked into releasing its energy into the atmosphere to warm the planet and light up cropland. Spin drives open up the entire solar system to exploitation and the astrophage is the perfect energy storage medium.

Sure, you don't want to pay full sticker price, because that's the sucker price. You have to waste a day of your life haggling with the dealer so that he can charge different prices to different customers. If you buy straight from the manufacturer under a no-haggle system, they have to offer the same price to everybody. So it's likely to be quite a lot less than the sticker price of a dealership-sold car. The manufacturer still wants to segment the market and milk more money out of less price-sensitive customers, but they have to do it by selling more luxurious trim levels.

You people are all the same. You get a good faith response, and you respond with hate and anger. That's a lot of baggage to carry around.

We too have seen some negative issues with wind turbines in the NY/NJ region. When they fail, they tend to do so in a rather catestrophic manner tossing shrapnel, in our case, in to surrounding waterways where it kills or at least injures anything that comes in contact with the shards.

I meant, you get a stream straight from the studio master, not ripped from an audio CD.

I thought the "high res" thing was to sell you music straight from the 48KHz master -- not jankily downscaled to 44.1KHz, clipped because of loudness wars, and then lossily compressed. Am I out of date?

Except, based on Reddit, many of the people canceling were canceling their FREE ChatGPT accounts. I found that funny. If anything, a free account was hurting the company as much as a $20/mo account was benefiting them.

I still want to use iTunes on my phone to replace my CD collection (or let me put the CDs in the basement while still listening to them). Sadly Apple has crippled it in another way. Songs disappear from iTunes on the phone if they would not be able to stream in your region, even though you ripped them from your own disc.

A a fellow old fart, I completely agree. Even minor number was stable, odd was dev as I recall.

You've summed up how my journey to learn Unix and Linux began. In the early days of the internet we used SLIP or PPP connections, and usually that came with a shell account (typically some BSD variant). I was a young tech working primarily on DOS, Windows 3.1, and OS/2. I started playing around with that shell account. I tried to figure out how to display the contents of a text file. I figured out many *mix commands were two letters, and eventually typed "vi" and pressed enter. I had to call my ISP tech support and described what I did. The next day I stopped by Borders and bought a copy of "Teach Yourself Unix..."

Funnier read than I expected. I may steal the “journalist” line. That was fantastic.

Bingo. Financial strain, delaying starting families for a career, and abortion are the real factors we have a declining population. Two of those three are really uncomfortable for many to confront though, so it's easier to point the finger elsewhere.

You cant rely on illegal immigration to prop up falling birth rates. That's absurd. If we're concerned with why we have a population decline, we should be looking at falling birth rates, not importing bodies.

Tell me you have zero idea how financial markets work without telling me you have zero idea how financial markets work.

I read more but w than I have in my past 50-some years. The difference for me was an electronic device, and a well known one you’ve certainly heard of, and some of you probably hate. It’s so easy to have a dozen or more books with me, they don’t weigh a ton, and I don’t need to worry about needing light to read by. I read an average of 20-25 books per year now. It’s replaced a fair bit of tv/movies/gaming for me.