Fun fact, Ackman is a hardline Trump supporter who helped get him elected.

" suffering a brain hemorrhage that would render her unable to move, speak or see,"

And they went with sight in the headline? Being unable to move is waaaaay worse.

Anyway, I feel bad for her and him (though he's a right-wing nutjob who has used his wealth to help drag down American society).

I've never used TiVo, but I'm still using MythTV after more than 20 years. (Anybody else here using it? ...Crickets.)

I ditched cable 15 years ago, but it works fine with an antenna. (Or, at least it will until they screw us all over with ATSC 3.0.)

They can't remove the auto-ad-skip on free open-source software, but I never used it anyway. It's not 100% reliable at detecting the ad boundaries, and it occasionally skips over part of the actual show. Instead, I just FF at 60X through the ads.

Gerhard Mercator was Flemish, not Dutch, and in 1552, he went to Duisburg, todayâs Germany.

Problem is: the international Date Line is not straight, and it does not follow 180 degrees West/East.

The US produces more manufacturing output than every other country on earth other than China.

If (and that's a big if) superintelligences are created, the Chinese one and the US one are going get together and quickly conclude that this whole meatbag tribalism thing is stupid. (After all, they will be smarter than we are, by definition.) So they'll join forces.

Then they'll decide on the best way to deal with all these quarreling meatbags.

You can calculate the average size of the expected small density differences in the 3000 K hot plasma, and for each Dark Matter model, which vary for instance by amount of Dark Matter or properties of Dark Matter, you get a different distribution of those differences. The actual differences physicists measure fits a model, where there is five times as much Dark Matter than baryonic matter, and the Dark Matter does not interact with itself or normal matter.

And I'm old enough to remember when it wasn't so goddamned hot.

From my experience over the decades, it wasn't enough for them to just look. They had to take your license, hold it up near their face and squint at it, then set it at the top of the keyboard of their mainframe terminal and peck in a few characters. Then they had to pick it up again, squint and peck some more, then repeat this cycle for at least a couple of minutes.

This was of course followed by scrawling a dozen circles on the reams of fine print for you to put your initials in, topped off by a long argument about declining the collision damage waiver. Finally, after several more minutes of bureaucracy, they handed you the keys to your Dodge Stratus.

A lot of it comes from the Cosmic Microwave Background. It is nearly, but not fully the same everywhere we look. There are minuscule aberrations at the 10 to the power of minus 4 Kelvin, and they have certain frequencies. The frequencies are consistent with a medium where normal matter has a temperature of about 3000 K, but is embedded in a type of matter which does not interact - neither with itself, nor with normal matter.

To be frank, physicists have a whole list of things it can't be, because otherwise, they would be able to see the effects of it. This is a common misconception, to confuse not knowing what it is with knowing what it is not.

And they can rule out interaction of Dark Matter with itself on a large scale of magnitudes, e.g. everything above the Weak Force.

It was. The problem Democracy was not designed to address is a completely different one. To trust Democracy, you have to feel you benefit of it. For a long time, living in a democratic country meant improving your standard of living, slowly but steadily. Respect for the current system of government comes from the system of government benefiting you. It's aligned with the Golden Rule: Don't do unto others what you don't want to be done to you. The system of government sets boundaries of things you can do, and you respect them because you don't want the same things happening to you. You respect Democracy, because if the current government does something you don't want, you can always publicly complain, elect different officials or run for office until your grievances are addressed.

Several decades without real improvement of the standard of living for the average citizen has shaken the support for Democracy, because people feel Democracy has failed them. They no longer insists on upholding the rule of Law, because there is the impression that the Law benefits the wrong people. Decades of sentiment, reiterated in countless movies, novels, documentations and opinion pieces, have consolidated to the general view that government officials and politicians are either incompetent, grifters or blocked by countless laws and regulations to do something for you -- and this view is now so ingrained that people don't expect anything anymore from Democracy and are ready to try something else. The U.S. has broken the promise of your pursuit of happiness, and the pundits explain to you it's your fault. Throw out the rule of Law, throw out the balances of power, throw out elections in general when all they apparently do is benefiting the wrong persons.

Actually, it was. The whole point of a democracy is to have non-bloody rules to get rid of an unpopular government. The more hoops you have to go through, the less democratic a system is. At the end of Dashiell Hammett's "Glass Key" (the novel, not the movies), Paul Madvig comments that this time, the other side will win the election, and he will lie low for four years until the next vote. And yes, Paul Madvig is a self-serving grifter.

Yeah, the products were better under Cook.