Nuke them twice?

You'd think so, but the war in Ukraine shows otherwise. The Russians suffered heavily early on due to using cell phones--and they kept using them even after figuring out they'd lost something like four general officers due to them/staff/bodyguards using their phones, causing even more losses. I can't help but agree with the GP, some assholes are always going to come to the conclusion that "everyone else shouldn't do it, but it will be fine if it's only me."

Agreed. I have a desktop from about the same time running Mint and have had almost zero problems running Firefox. I had one lockup about a month ago, but that's been it.

Other than the excessive nagging about updates which can't be removed, it does exactly what a browser should do: display web pages.

They didn't feel pain, which is good, but I would say that they almost certainly "suffered." They knew they were fucked for some period of time before they died, and they spent their last minutes sitting in their coffin in the dark two miles below the surface. I imagine the father/son duo had it particularly awful, with dad knowing that he killed his kid, and the kid knowing that his dad killed him. I wonder if they discussed that fact amongst themselves while waiting to die.

The interesting part is the human psychology behind it, i.e. what causes (allegedly) intelligent people to perform a necessary test, and then simply ignore the results of that test when the results aren't what they had hoped for? Were they imagining that the ocean would just give them a pass because they had made an effort?

I don't think the Chinese government has a whole lot of motivation to make life easier for gullible Americans at the moment.

Yes, how can we tell the difference between a true random number generator, and a device that is simply reading the next entry from a very long one-time-pad that our mortal enemies also have a copy of, and therefore can trivially "predict" future results from, no matter how perfectly random they are?

Hiring a guy who injected children with an anti-puberty drug to show vaccines cause autism.

Correct. If Congress okays a president receiving a gift, money, title or such from a foreign government, then it is okay. Otherwise, it is not permissible.

For more information.

It's a very good question. It looks like it was mainly failures to generate a result within a predetermined time. Some of the failures were due to cryostat hardware failures (a fridge went out during a NIST campus closure); some due to fiber + interferometer polarization drifts; and so on. It also appears that [perhaps?] a few of the misses are due to latencies in the timetaggers to record a common timebase. I can't quite tell from the arXived version of the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.052...

All in all, it's a marvelously good overview of the impressive experiment!

No. If you read the text, it is only on receiving items from foreign heads of state:

Article I

Section 9 Powers Denied Congress
Clause 8 Titles of Nobility and Foreign Emoluments

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

It's just that all past presidents did their best to not enrich themselves while in office. Carter put his peanut farm in a blind trust to avoid a conflict of interest while he was in office.

The patent is granted by the government in the first place, they don't need to give it away and then buy it back.

The government doesn't own the patent. All the government is saying is a particular idea/concept/formulation/whatever is unique and was created by (fill in the blank). They are not paying the person/company anything for the patent. The person/company pays them.

They can't give away a patent because it's not theirs to give away.

How fast do you think this will fail? Given his track record of business failures, this will be another one added to the list.

Americans are lazy. What else needs said?

There are plenty of crappy scripting languages out there. Why did Python rise to dominance over AppleScript and Visual Basic and bash and MS-DOS .bat files and Perl and Tcl and all the rest?

I suggest that it's because Python is significantly less crappy than its competition.