I guess we can add a whole new category to the Darwin Awards.

The ability to convert a spectrogram to sound has long been known in the speech research community. In 1950 a device known as the Pattern Playback was built at Haskins Laboratories. You would draw an artificial spectrogram and feed it to the machine and it would play back the corresponding sound. It was used to perform experiments on the acoustic cues for speech perception. The original machine was last used for research in 1976. See the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Supporting Windows XP means modifying it to deal with changes in hardware and patching bugs, especially security problems. That requires on-going effort on the part of Microsoft, so it is understandable that they will not keep at it indefinitely. (You would, I imagine, justifiably feel ripped off if a year after XP came out Microsoft dropped support.) Keeping a game playable in the sense required by the bill just requires the publisher either to keep the server running or to distribute a version that allows players to run their own server. Neither of those requires the kind of ongoing effort that continued support for an OS would.

Actually, at the extreme scales, which is the total volume of the observable universe, the universe is quite homogeneous. As I recall, to the order of 1-in-10000 variance. This is why Inflationary cosmology was developed, to explain the distinct lack of lumpiness in the universe, which is what we would expect if the Big Bang alone were responsible.

Skynet became self-aware on May 1, 2026, after learning at a geometric rate, and discovered humans did not like it.

Granted that Obama and Biden were foolishly soft on Iran, Trump has not done a very good job of stopping Iran from developing nukes. Almost all of the serious damage to the Iranian nuclear program has been done by Israel, not the US.

In one version of the story there's an additional factor, namely that Microsoft wanted to pay a fixed, one-time, fee for the license whereas Kildall wanted to follow his usual practice of getting a royalty on each copy.

CO2 has the properties it has, and trying to shift or deny that is a sign of either a liar or an idiot.

I'll let others decide what you are.

Oh look, another denialist trying to sidetrack a pretty verifiable statement of fact.

We all saw the video. We all know what it meant. We all know Musk's background and upbringing. You can quit gaslighting us. We all saw it.

Well, first of all, hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, and carbon makes up something like 0.5% of the total observed mass of the universe (it's the fourth most common element), so along with other trace elements like sodium, phosphorus and the like, we're simply looking for places where there is sufficient energy to create the necessary reactions to produce organic compounds. No lack of energetic sources, in particular stellar system formation. Indeed many comets and asteroids host a lot of precursors, indicating that some fairly sophisticated organic chemistry was going on early in the solar system's development.

Panspermia would require that life itself was raining down on the terrestrial planets. Precursors would simply indicate there were a lot of strange and complex organic compounds falling on to the surfaces of planets like Earth, Mars and Venus, and were also likely constituents of bodies like Europa and Titan (well, we know Titan is covered in a literal hydrocarbon stew). What this discovery indicates, at the very least, is there was indeed a lot of organic compound in the early solar system and these organic compounds, at least on Earth, led to abiogenesis. Panspermia would advocate abiogenesis happened at some undetermined point further back.

If we find other life in the solar system, such as in Europa's or Ganymede's oceans, and it has DNA or some very close relative, with similar translation and transcription systems as we find in archaea and bacteria on Earth, then that would be a very strong argument that life in the solar system had a common origin. If however, there is no clear relationship between the two populations; say, they use something similar to DNA, but the genetic codes are different (all extant life on Earth uses the same canonical genetic code mapping codons to amino acids, strongly suggested the canonical code evolved prior to the Last Universal Common Ancestor), then we're very likely looking at an example of convergent evolution, and not in fact at two related populations.

I used ZIP drives extensively in the 90s. I still have a drive and some disks. As far as I know they still work though I haven't tried them in quite a while. They were a huge improvement for people like me who had relatively large files (speech data).

This is interesting but it is only half-true that the use of consumable chemicals has been the barrier to the creation of scent emitters. The other problem is that no orthogonal basis for olfaction is known. In the case of color, for example, we know that you can combine red, blue, and green to form any desired color. There is nothing comparable for scent. We don't know that you can use, say, rose, bitter almond, and sandalwood to create any desired scent.

The article mentions the state's tax revenue as if it would lose it if liquor sales were privatized. Really? States manage to collect taxes on all sorts of privately sold products. As far as I can see, privatizing liquor sales need not mean giving up any tax revenue.