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 this is a publicity stunt, it's certainly horribly misguided. It's been a while since I last went there so I just headed over to kuro5hin to see what if anything is going on. The place is an absolute dump now. There is little if any content, just an endless stream of trash posts and comments. It doesn't look as if Rusty or in fact any other moderators mind at all.

For some reason this really gets to me. With all the residual fame and search engine glory it would be so damn easy to just go in there, throw all the garbage out, terminate the trolls, modernize the site, and open up for business again. Why is Rusty not doing anything?

Wow, that's a gross misrepresentation of my position. If this is what you took away from my post, there is really nothing more to say.

Designing a functional FTL drive with the knowledge of today is the equivalent of a prehistorical human observing a lightning strike and then speculating about electrical household appliances. Yes, we have made some observations, we can even grasp some of the phenomena intuitively and mathematically, we do have some idea of the power behind the thing, but actually accessing it and doing things with it is so far off it's not even funny from today's perspective.

So yeah, if you told a cave dweller that some day everything on earth will be powered by vast amounts of electricity, he'd have to assume this would involve incinerating the planet too.

There is no parade to rain in on, but I do think it's premature to argue categorical impossibilities like the one you're citing - not only from a logical perspective but also historically people like you have almost always been proven wrong. People like me also get proven wrong all the time, the only difference is that sooner or later something almost like the thing we envisioned does come along. Let me put it this way: tech/sci optimists are always on the advance, whereas naysayers have to retreat constantly.

The Alcubierre drive is just one approach to warp drives that we cobbled together with our extremely limited understanding today. If we knew a lot more about the nature of gravity and spacetime (and let's face it: to manipulate it in this fashion we'd have to) I'm sure we'll come up with tons of new ideas.

Even if the impossibility of negative gravity and/or gravity dampening does hold up, there is still a million cool things we could do if we could manipulate positive gravity directly without having to expend the usual amount of energy - especially things for space flight such as true artificial gravity*, efficient nuclear fusion, cheap launch technologies, fast propulsion systems and even FTL drives. Not that this technology is even remotely within our reach, but if we discovered some kind of catalyst for manipulating the Higgs field directly that would really open up the universe for us, science fiction-style. Should we ever be able to make something like this work, this would be the biggest thing since mastering electricity.

* though on second thought that would probably require the capability of negating gravity or at least the option to put it in a tightly confined loop to be really useful for making spaceships habitable.

I can see where you're coming from, but I worry about the fact that "power users" are nobody's core audience anymore. What does consequently catering to the lowest common denominator do to a society? We now have UI that actually spreads tech illiteracy to a whole generation of young people, how is that a good thing? I also worry that we're losing any but the most basic functionalities, instead we're increasingly having advanced features being handed down to us "auto-magically" and behind the scenes whenever the UI designer sees fit - a process that lacks transparency and dis-empowers the user in a tremendous fashion. As users we're now spending a lot of time on deceiving the UI, tricking it really, into whatever we actually want it to do (and software gets better at thwarting us at this with every version that goes by).

And people who say that I can always drop OS X in favor of some open source pseudo-GUI wrapper around a commandline don't get it, either.

Crohn is not an autoimmine disease, it's a bacterial infection

While this is technically not a lie, it's at least a very misleading statement that obfuscates the underlying problem. Crohn is a disease of the immune system. Newer research indicates that it might be a deficiency in some immune cells' ability to produce immuno-modulating agents that are needed for a coordinated response to bacteria occuring inside the colon. This allows those bacteria to stage an attack on the colon's tissue. The bacterial infection itself is, however, just a symptom of the immune defect.

The Mac Mini is hampered mainly by its very slow hard drive. At work we recently replaced the hard drives of a couple of (very old, like 1.8 GHz Core Solo) Mac Minis with smallish SSDs, this made a whole lot of difference. Of course, if you need raw CPU power, this isn't going to help you - but if your typical usage profile is just "normal" productivity apps, this will definitely give your Mini a new lease on life.

As an aside, I then bought an SSD for my MacBook Pro - wow, the battery life and performance of this thing is just incredible now.

Have you tried putting a + in front of your words on Google recently? The plus is deprecated, they are going to drop it, it was all over the news. But even if the plus was supported in the future, it's a usability nightmare.

If they don't know why they're slipping, they should take a long hard look at their own front lawn instead of glancing nervously sideways at Bing. Google Search is getting more worthless by the day. Each time they "tweak" the algorithm it gets worse. The quality of the search results themselves isn't even the most problematic issue.

The main problem is that Google refuses to search for the actual terms you entered. They search for things that are sometimes kind of related to what you're looking for and they don't even show you which parts of your search term they ignored! The only way you're getting a real search result out of Google is when you trick it into doing its job by putting quotes around every single word of your search term (and even then it sometimes ignores you). It's mind-boggling to me how they fucked this up so badly, but it sure doesn't look like they're even aware of the problem.

I'm curious: why do they think it's fake? Are they flat-earth creationists or something? Or do they simply believe it's too expensive to launch an actual probe into the outer solar system? What's their motivation?

When one is a scientist, i.e. when he/she believes in the scientific method, he/she cannot believe in religion, for the simple reason that, when the scientific method is applied to religion, religion is falsified.

Exactly. I never understood those people who claim to be scientists and religious persons in one. If they're religious, they simply cannot be "real" scientists. They may still perform scientific work, but their mindset is clearly religious. In many cases, the difference between performing scientific work and being a scientist may not be so important for day-to-day activities, though.

I also guess there are many ways to support and overcome the obvious cognitive dissonance - for example, by moving the realm of the supernatural into areas that are not covered by whatever research is being performed. I vaguely remember a religious astrophysicist who acknowledged and believed in the veracity of the scientific models of the universe but couldn't bring himself to "believe" in evolution.

This trend of combining religion and science into an unholy chimera worries me, especially when the underlying assumption is that the two must somehow be brought together (by force if necessary) for our lives to make sense.