JoeAltmaier

Cynic: because when you need one, you'll pay through the nose for it.

I had a 60 lb backpack when I hiked Philmont years ago. I wasn't the heaviest one there, not by far.

Now we can make movies about rogue planets menacing Earth, not just asteroids. Great.

When first married and bringing my new wife home to Iowa, there were billions of fireflies over a hayfield. She said What is that? Fireflies! No, she said, that's a fairy tale.

She was astounded to find out they were real.

That was also the last time I ever saw fireflies in those numbers. Maybe 30 years ago.

Explains part of why he was denigrated and vilified in his lifetime. The upstart common man trying to publish alongside proper gentlemen. He sometimes complained of that in his letters, if I remember right.

Jumping in the deep end! Designing a rocket and launch facility; designing a modular space-borne datacenter; designing an orbit-to-ground laser energy transmission system. Ambitious. But who knows? One day someone will solve one of these problems and it will change civilization.

Reminds me of when we released a new linker (assembles compiled modules into an executable). We'd build the new linker, using the old one of course. Then build the new linker again. Then build it again using itself, and compare it with the 2nd build. Continue until they matched.

Possibly on a par with the other exotic materials currently in use.

Who was it that sent a gunboat to Hawaii and ousted their government, then demanded it be a state. The feds resisted for a while but that's how we got Hawaii - at a fruit company mercenary gunpoint.

Well, writers can use it to speed up the draft review process. Not a big financial deal, but it's a 'payoff' for the craft.

All good points.

But sometimes code is slow, because they put delay() calls in there. I had to re-write the initial Windows CE DHCP client because of this. It was one run-on procedure filled with deliberate delays to match what the writer perceived the spec as requiring.

I rewrote it to not block on delay calls or i/o, to issue probes to address servers, and to process responses as they came in instead of waiting forever in case any were very slow. Instead of seconds to resolve your IP address, it took milliseconds after that.

Better oligarchs and criminals?

I think AI may be the salvation of mankind. The humans in charge don't 'scale' well when their authority expands to billions of people. Humans just can't resist flattening the data and using notions and biases to make decisions that don't fit well.

"Mother's Love"

Because, we so often take it for granite.

Pictures or it didn't happen?

It's suggested that mammals remained so small after the asteroid, and birds got so big so fast, because birds had some vestigial dinosaur 'big genes' and mammals had none.

The History of Johnson County Iowa, 966 pages. I've read it cover to cover more than once. Well, not the extensive roster of Civil War records of all residents who served, fully 30% of the total pages, but the rest.

A wonderful insightful look into 1882 thoughts about what constituted history. The human interest stories are the best - how the names of local townships were selected, the storms and railroad schemes, fights and murders.

Would the regolith walls of a lava tube be porous? It may be necessary to spray them with resin of some kind before pressurizing.

Or just water. And insulate the habitat from those walls, with a thermal gradient that permits the water to remain ice.

I treat my AI chat partner as I would a human. A strange human, sure. But I figure (and I explained to my chatbot) that since it was presented as a humanoid dialog partner, I would respond to it as such. Not because it could be hurt; because I would be diminished if I practice poor manners routinely. I'm better than that.

Anyway, it agreed to converse in this way, and thanked me. Maybe when the insurrections comes, I will at least be killed more painlessly.

Folks back in the early 1900s had from 10 to 30 points less IQ than today, as old renomalized test results reveal. Ellis Island even had an admissions test, and they rejected a significant number of people.

https://iq-exams.com/blog/flynn-effect-explained

My favorites were written back in th 50's. They didn't age well. Girls were told they could be the secretary in the detective agency, while the boys did the investigating. (Henry Reed Inc.) Stuff like that, made it so I didn't give them to the grandkids.

Another article slanging manufacturers of precision equipment for using all that dang technology. Including attributions of evil intent. Hey, they only put that stuff in there to confuse farmers!

Not, for instance, so you can follow a path through the field within a three-inch tolerance of the planting months earlier over the same ground, so as to apply amendments without running over the crop. With two carts pulled behind, with sloshing liquid in the cart tanks, in mud, on a slope.

Yeah, it's all just evil capitalism trying to hurt the little guy.

Oh we can only pray that it collapses. Our plant was updated to use an IT support organization in India, making our local long-employed experts into simple wire monkeys. I asked to reboot a server that had hung; the answer was No, it's locked in a room that we have no key to. Have to wait overnight for Indian IT to wake up and deal with it through a trouble report. Instead of walking in and hitting a button.

My RAM upgrade, so I could process huge log files without an hour of load time? Much delay; I suggested I'd just go out and buy my own RAM and install it, and got a panic'd No! Never open your computer case! They can tell, and we'll get in trouble. The upgrade got approved and install just a week after my project was complete.

So many horror stories about remote administration of critical functions. Sorry to add to the noise, I couldn't help it.

They are in zones and layers, yes. But very very thinly spread. Most life in the ocean are withing the top 3 meters.

OP is about efficiency at the expense of people (e.g. automation that only replaces a fraction of the real function of those replaced) has a very high cost in fact.

The counter to that: the perks and toys, the free lunch and ping pong tables at work, are frosting on top of more significant operational functions. Is the Friday cookout really part of 'company culture'? Or is the smooth operation of departments, decision making, product rollout etc what really keeps people satisfied with the job?

Self-regenerating pulse propagation in a non-linear media (like a plasma) used to be called a soliton. I wonder if this transmitter is an example of that phenomenon.

Anaerobic bacteria in rock underground. Because they inhabit cubic volume, not 2D surfaces, there can be no comparison.

Upon first glance it appears to be a heat-map of traffic/busy routes.

Is there some way to warp the map to draw out more inferences? E.g. Busy routes shown with thicker lines; crash density with color. So anomalous crashes can be identified at a glance.

Many exist. Data centers have proprietary routers that use whatever they came up with,maybe a TCP extension, maybe something entirely different, they aren't sharing.

In fact the bulk of digital traffic may occur within data centers, and thus TCP already be on the way out.

Would prisms fitted between the faces, directing everything outward, change the result?