I think what is missed here is that the device itself still works fine. You can download books to your computer and transfer via USB cable like always. The basic e-reader functionality is still there. What Amazon is pulling support for is all the services around it that made it more convenient to use- buying a book and having it delivered over the air to the kindle, and I presume the actually very useful method of emailing a book to an email address that behinds the scenes gets it delivered to your device.

I guess one point that I could see people being upset about is that they are in some sense losing access to books they already bought. That's not really entirely true, there is a kindle app and such, but its not the same. Even so, you do have the opportunity to download them all before they shut things off.

The hardware still works though, nothing is getting bricked.

This actually drove me back to Pixels. I felt like I was constantly fighting against all of Samsung's crap. They IMHO made the messages app look deceptively similar to the actual Google app, same with contacts. I felt for years Google and Samsung were in a low key war to own my contacts. And eventually you reach a detente- you have all the bloat in check... and then a big update comes and its alll back again. And then one time I had these random terrible games just appear- and the cause was another helpful Samsung update that somehow installed some kind of backdoor to install these games. The same went for the UI- nearly every departure they did from stock android IMHO made things worse, and I was constantly trying to tone it down- I couldn't get the clutter of notification icons to go away without having to do pretty invasive mods that again often undid themselves when updates came.

The hardware was better from the POV of a specsheet, and that's what kept me on Samsung for a bunch of years. However, when the Pixel 6 came out I decided to give it a go. And it was just a huge addition by subtraction in terms of experience. I hardly tweaked a thing- the OS just stayed out of my way. The hardware, for whatever it lacks on a spec sheet or benchmark, has never felt sluggish to me. Whatever flaws in the optics are more than made up for by the software. I feel like I own the phone again.

There was just so much underhanded crap that Samsung tried to pull, I just felt like I spent way too much time managing the phone. The tradeoff for "lesser" hardware is 1000x worth it IMHO, even if I lost a bunch of features that I rarely used (example: split screen view- which was recently-ish added to PIxels). I am long past the point where I want to mod my phone with roms, I just want it to work and stay out of my way.

There are extended sessions, the market is open effectively from 7am-8pm: https://www.nyse.com/markets/h... (ctrl+f "late trading session")

Why not longer? Effectively exchanges, brokerages, and anyone involved in trading would need staff 24/7. Its been awhile since I was out of the direct electronic trading world, but no firms I saw had an ability to do zero-downtime deploys, so you needed maintenance windows. I myself had a little "oops" when I was doing an upgrade on a trading engine right after FB announced earnings that made the price jump. I made some kind of error and it was down for roughly ten minutes, but exactly the wrong ten minutes, and it was costly to the firm. Prior to that, we didn't really think about the post market that much, because very little action happened there.

I was under the impression that sending things to space requires a ridiculous amount of non-renewable energy. Has anyone seriously calculated when the solar panels would break even, especially compared with a comparable installation on Earth? Also, what is the cost of replacing panels 20 years down the road when they start degrading?

It is probably much cheaper to just fill Sahara with panels and invent some way of storing and reusing energy during the night.

You are correct. This isn't a discovery of a new fundamental particle.

The math that describes particles can also be used to describe various quasiparticles that arise in materials. For instance, one can rigorously define a "phonon" as a particle that carries vibrational energy in a solid material (the phonon is essentially a localized packet of atoms vibrating), or an "exciton" as an electronic excited state (an electron and the corresponding positively charged "hole" it leaves behind), or a "plasmon" as wave of electron excitations at the surface of a metal. All of these are interesting concepts, and defining them as particles is extremely useful. But they are not fundamental particles. They are collective excitations of known entities (electrons, atoms, etc.).

One can thus establish a mapping between the math of fundamental particle physics (the standard model), and the math/behavior in various electronic systems (like superconductors or other "strongly correlated electron" systems). This is useful because in principle if you prove something in one instance, then there is a good chance the analogous thing is true in the other system. So discoveries can go both ways.

The problem is with media reports that do not make these distinctions clear. What the current researchers did was identify an "axial Higgs mode" in a "charge density wave" (CDW) system. They basically discovered a particular kind of excitation of the electron configurations in that material. Very cool stuff. But to then make the leap and pretend that this means they've discovered a new fundamental particle is just bad reporting.

Apparently he took out a "Flash Loan" and borrowed the tokens. Once he executed his trades to grab the money he bought up enough tokens to repay the loan and all was fine.

It seems it is totally normal for 18-year-olds to take out multi-million dollar loans with no collateral to back them in the crypto world? I feel like this points to a whole lot of other potential problems in the crypto/DeFi world.

I don't have mod points but 100% agree. I actually turned down a job offer from Peloton about 5 years ago, partly because I thought it was a fad. Wife was addicted to Soul Cycle, I went with her a few times and learned I HATE group fitness and vowed to never go back. She decides she wants a Peloton, she had been going to Soul for about 10 years regularly and it was starting to feel a bit stale. I roll my eyes, figure its going to be a dust collector but say whatever lets give it a go, this was a few months before the pandemic started. I am mostly sedentary at this point- I get all of my daily activity from commuting more or less.

Today, I am at a 105 week streak and have lost weight and am actually fit and look good- I am not quite six pack abs but close enough. The "gamification" with the leaderboard, the engaging enough instructors, the quantitative ranges that tell you exactly how fast to turn the pedals and exactly how much resistance you need (Soul Cycle would just say "alright two turns to the right and now we are going 1-2 1-2 1-2" and I would get scolded for not being able to match the cadence from that) the tracking of stats over time so you can see just how much you have improved, the library of classes so you can choose the people you really like... its all gotten me over the edge and exercising regularly.

It just frustrates me because people hate on the idea and have never even seen one- and this shows most because those critics don't even realize that there is far more available than just the bike- yoga, strength, running, bootcamp classes... etc. I guess people can hate, but it absolutely brought value for me, and even saved my household money- the wife has not been to Soul Cycle since we got it (and Soul classes are about $40 each after water and shoe rental). I looked into pricing out a DIY setup with a decent bike (which alone can easily cost more than a Peloton bike), a zwift trainer, and a tablet and all that, and it came out to more than the Peloton for a hacked DIY solution. I am pretty sure the types that are like OMG so expensive what idiots!!!- don't even realize how expensive a bike you actually want to ride for real periods of time are.

The only thing I disagree with is the IPhone/Treo comparison- I knew in 2007 when I was rocking my Treo 650 that I was willing to pay big bucks for a device that could combine an Mp3 player, an e-reader, a pda, a phone and GPS into one package. I didn't even realize with an Iphone I would also get a decent camera a basic web experience, and how much location bases services would allow useful apps...

Indeed, but the message that people with Ferraris aim to give is not just that they have a fast sports car, but that they have money. Hard to accomplish this with a $5 lightsabre NFT.

You only need a something over 50% of the mining power -- as long as they can add new blocks with no Assange transactions at a faster pace than than the rest of the mining pool they can keep the longest chain Assange donation free. A 51% attack isn't just for double spending, and simply blocking particular transactions is the kind of thing you might be able to get tacit agreement for; and it does only have to be tacit if you are fine with a few transactions getting through every now and then (which also helps hide any collusion).

Hell, he is polling at less than half of Rick Lynn Perry, who is not the former Governor Rick Perry but a "senior desktop technician" currently contracted out by a staffing agency to work for Lockheed-Martin.

It swaps in some different powers that be. If Wikileaks published something that embarrassed people behind a bunch of the major miner consortiums and they decided to just not include any bitcoin transfers to Assange or Wikileaks in blocks they mined that could severely limit or completely stop such transfers, depending on how big a proportion of the mining pool they pissed off. And let's be clear, there are a very small number of mining consortiums that control a very large fraction of the total hashing power; this is a lot more possible than it may appear at first blush.

Hell, even the old school powers that be could put a severe crimp in things if they were sufficiently motivated. If such a power decided to lean on the mining consortiums they could likely get the result they want with either enough bribes or a big enough stick (and they would have both).

There isn't a single project plan for fusion (that I'm aware of), mostly because this is a challenging problem being attacked by a host of different organizations (some publicly funded, some commercial) across many different countries. However, there is communication and coordination among these efforts, and they do have concrete plans that are moving steadily towards viable fusion power.

For example, the US fusion community has produced several reports (2018, 2019, 2020). The US Department of Energy is one key player in this space (here are the reports for various sub-topics). A key aspect of the current fusion strategy is ITER, which has a set of concrete milestones.

If you glance through those reports, you will see they are more focused on fundamental science aspects, rather than the more practical milestones you mentioned. This is in part because these public reports are issued by organizations whose mission is to pursue fundamental research (and then pass those results onto industry for commercialization), and partly because there are indeed many fundamental science and engineering questions that need to be resolved.

The EUROfusion roadmap (2018) provides a plan for successive projects (ITER and beyond) in a transition to viable power plants.

The NIF press release is a bit better.

Fusion yield was 1.3 MJ per pulse/capsule. Laser energy delivered to the fusion capsule was 1.9 MJ, so the efficiency is 68% by that metric. However this omits the laser energy that didn't get correctly focused/absorbed by the capsule, as well as the energy lost in the lasers themselves (which are probably ~1% efficient). The press release doesn't list a gain factor, but based on other results NIF has reported, I believe this new result is roughly Q ~ 0.007. This is a huge achievement for NIF (who were sitting at Q ~ 0.00008 in 2013 and Q ~ 0.0003 in 2018). However Q = 1 is what's necessary to reach "scientific breakeven" where the fusion energy output equals the energy input for heating the plasma. Obviously a viable power plant needs to be Q > 1 to account for other losses (like the inefficiency of capture/conversion into electricity). Q > 5 ("ignition") is considered necessary to achieve a self-propagating fusion reaction.

By way of comparison, the current record for magnetic confinement fusion is Q = 0.67 achieved by JET in 1997.

Should we be excited? This is great progress, and every new experiment increases our understanding of the complicated physics of fusion plasmas. From a scientific and engineering perspective, this is amazing. However, if you're most interested in eventual fusion power, then magnetic confinement (tokamak designs) are well ahead, and ITER is much more likely than NIF to provide a pathway to fusion power plants.

The biggest current (last couple of years) price rises have been in Bitcoin, which is over a decade old now. Since it has been around so long, but the price is still going up a lot, presumably that is happening because of "tangible useful applications". So what are those applications? As a currency it has stalled, not least due to price volatility. Despite occasional bursts of announcements of retailers accepting Bitcoin, the number of retailers actually accepting Bitcoin remains very small, and often quite niche. Bit coin is not taking over as a currency. How about Bitcoin as a means of fast, easy, cross border money transfer (remittances). In the early days of Bitcoin is was widely touted that Western Union was going to get crushed by Bitcoin. It turns out Western Union is doing just fine. And over the major money transfer corridors WU fees are often lower than Bitcoin. Other major remittance agencies are also doing just fine using traditional methods. If any service is getting squeezed out of the remittance industry it is crypto ... fees can be larger, money often still needs to be exchanged from Crypto to local currency with all kinds of associated other costs, and so on. How about "digital gold", a hedge against inflation? It is not clear Bitcoin is really doing any better here, and assets and investments to hedge against inflation is a pretty huge market; Bitcoin has very limited appeal over all the other options available. So again, what are the magical tangible useful applications that make Bitcoin so very valuable? It's been a decade, but there still isn't anything to show ...

The first mistake is evaluating bitcoin by its "price". Assuming the key is that it is a currency the real question is the volume of actual transactions going on in bitcoin.

What is the amount of good purchased with bitcoin? It certainly isn't huge. How about remittances? Money transfer was one of the big use cases. It turns out that, despite a lot of hype and years to make a difference, bitcoin in particular and crypto-currencies in general, have made practically no dent in the remittances market. How about total volume of transactions? That's certainly higher, but how much of that is speculation trading based on the price of bitcoin? Hard to say, but surely we would see higher amounts of goods purchases and remittances if it really mattered.

So, instead of looking at prices, if we look at utility how is bitcoin doing? It's been a decade and it still hasn't had any significant uptake as currency -- not on any scale that justifies the hype anyway. Might it still be useful and gain traction in the future? Sure, it's possible. But the outlook isn't that great.