To be fair, we'd expect any interstellar spaceship to be a weapon of mass destruction in of itself. Even without invoking new physics, the amount of damage you can cause from up there with minimal effort is staggering. If you add rapid automated construction into the mix, you could also easily convert a planet into a swarm of solar mirrors designed to incinerate every last square centimeter of the solar system.

But I do agree that people casually invoking radically new physics often don't consider the consequences, as in: what a universe where that's possible would look like, and what capabilities alien civilizations would actually have in those cases.

However, for aliens to show up on our doorstep, none of this is necessary. For example, FTL technologies like the Alcubierre drive only seem important from our current perspective, because humans are so short-lived.

I wonder if there is a public service that provides close-to realtime alerts of such events. Not for any practical reason, it's just so I would get a kick out of it...

I can't find any info on how the distance of the progenitor star was intended to be understood: whether it's proper or light-travel distance. However, the difference between those two are not that big at that distance. At 90 billion ly proper distance, however, the light-travel distance is "only" about 14 billion ly. In any case, 4.5 billion ly is about a third of the distance from us to the cosmological horizon, that could be considered pretty far.

I would like to propose the following definition for whether an object is "relatively close" at cosmic scales: everything that could not be reached from Earth, even if you fired a ray of light at it right now, because due to the expansion of the universe that ray will never reach the target - let's define that as "far away". On the other hand, stuff that is reachable at light speed could be considered "relatively close". And stuff that is reachable at insane but theoretically achievable travel speeds could said to be "close".

It's true that the reason for why we don't synchronize minute cosmetic details across players in multiplayer games is mostly bandwidth/latency (also, complexity). However, with the bandwidth and latency requirements Stadia has, it already has to operate more like a LAN connection to the end user as well.

I also don't necessarily see the complexity of networking implementations going down in Stadia, because they still have to synchronize game state across datacenters since the whole concept only works if the rendering server is physically close to the user (of course they could just dictate that you can only play with people in your region).

I still see some advantage for game developers in publishing on Stadia, because it's in essence a console: a single, well-defined platform you have to test for, as opposed to the heavily fragmented PC platform. On the other side, whatever dependency you already had with Steam or Epic, your future reliance on Google will be much tighter. And Google does not have a history of treating their content creators or users very well.

If you look at revenues, they're sideways over the past years. So OK, she didn't turn the company around. But she took a has-been company with little really going for it and... well, kept it from going bankrupt. Given that the market cap is currently $50 billion, I think $186 million is not excessive for keeping a sinking ship afloat. Hell, who could have done it? Sure, Jobs did an amazing job turning around Apple when he came back, but it had a strong niche in OS and hardware design, and Yahoo never really had anything like that once they passed their peak. And while I'm not some sort of hard-core feminist, I think there's a bit of hypocrisy that she's taking flak for making money off mediocre performance running a mediocre, has-been company. Any number of male CEOs have had been highly compensated for driving good companies into the ground, to the point that it's hardly even news. It's just sort of expected.

Watching someone else' head motions is never anything like it matching your own. Unless you've worn one, you can't speak to that with any basis in reality.

Think of it as a massive site filled with their own little slashdots that are, more or less, self moderated.

Isn't flipping "about:config?filter=browser.pocket.enabled" enough?

Start with "about:config?filter=browser.urlbar.unifiedcomplete" - also consider "about:config?filter=xpinstall.signatures.required" if you need to use unsigned addons.

Sure, in the same way a croissant does.

Meaning, not at all.

git pull [URL]
[do stuff]
git add [modified files/dirs] (might not be necessary, probably mixing up git and hg)
git commit -m "message"
git push

WOW, That was so incredibly complicated! Seriously, I'm not seeing a difference (to the user) for basic use between svn and git. I'm speaking from the perspective of a user who has a few local repos for random things he's created.

Serious question, as I'm not really a coder... what makes Git harder on newcomers than svn, cvs, and so on? I've touched git, hg, svn, and cvs, and of them, git/hg seem to be MUCH easier to work with than subversion or cvs (especially cvs - I hate more than is healthy).

From my layman experience I'd consider git and mercurial more or less equivalent. The only downside I could see is how clients effectively get the whole branch history locally, which can grow to be pretty large if people aren't disciplined about avoiding large binary files and such.

What's wrong with the rear, where I presume the DC terminals are located? You should have little access holes in your rack so you can feed cables between racks if necessary. Doesn't take much, an inch of clearance is way more than you need - but it's enough to shove a console cable through if you need to access it from the wrong side,

"Average" anyones don't buy datacenter equipment.

"I was not thinking a lot when I got in. There was so much work to be done. We had so many problems around the world. I didn't really stop and think what kind of email system will there be."

... and you shouldn't have. It's not your damn job. There's IT people who are supposed to do that, not you. You created this problem by trying to run the chef's kitchen for him.