Establishment power isn’t really a thing. Yes, there are coal companies, but at this point there are more people employed in renewables than coal. Coal knows it’s dying.

It sounds like this is something in the same vein as Lockheed Martin’s reactor. They also apparently have a patent for space-based reactor ignition.

Honest question... Couldn’t this be a good thing? First off, the obvious is that cops are less likely to be shot at, which would be nice. I think it may go beyond protecting them though. If you’re stopped by an officer, you’re interacting with a meatbag who has a vested interest in not dying, so anything you suddenly…

I’m just going to point out that the question was vague. If he took it to mean “when will we hit the singularity?” 50-100 sounds about right.

This just sounds like someone who’s never taken a philosophy class ranting about epistemology not making sense. You can’t possibly prove anything like this. You can’t even logically prove your own existence, let alone the universe’s or the presence of anything beyond it. Basically no one actually thinks the universe…

Funny as that would be, mainlining a laser into a fusion reactor won’t work. You need capacitors to actually fire the laser. If you have a reactor big enough to directly power a laser, it’s probably going to melt your truck from the waste heat.

So a first-strike by America has the potential to wipe out much of Russia’s silos.

I’m interested to see how this shakes out. I read the first two and preordered the third. They were by no means the best fantasy novels I’ve read, but the premise was cool. While my excitement for this is nowhere close to my hype for Sanderson’s Cosmere (and more specifically, Mistborn) hitting the silver screen, I’d…

Ugh, it’s not a phase, Earth.

Very cool, and it will definitely be great to see the data from our next generation telescopes on these.

My thought as well. When a friend of mine from music theory class transposed Greensleeves to some obscure key (I think it was Gxm) and handed it to my sister-in-law, she spent like one measure being confused and then played everything else by memory, transposing it in her mind, not really even caring what the paper…

The interesting thing to me here is the confirmation that larger networks are more capable of social dynamics. Obvious as it may seem, this is a neat finding.

While Uber may have been vilified over all this, I question what the economics would have been on this. Obviously the taxis not going to the airport increases demand, but surge pricing (unless I’m misunderstanding Uber’s model) increases supply by incentivizing drivers to meet demand. By suspending surge pricing,…

Err... No, at least for most of them. My entire family for instance is pro life and it’s because they think a child’s life trumps a woman’s control of her body. I’m pro choice because I put focus on sentience and economic utility rather than some idea of a soul.

That’s neat that they got it to match the real world, but that’s as far as it goes.

Suppose that we don’t have one, what would it look like if two neighboring countries disagree about a gene drive? Threats of sanctions and war might happen in rare cases, but most of the time, the country that wants to keep things the way they are will just run a reverse gene drive on the population of creatures…

Sort of. Swarms are only a problem if you can’t shoot them easily, also, small objects will always waste more energy on air resistance, so they’ll always be subsonic. If Lockheed can figure out a way to mount its laser turret in a modified F-35, it could laugh at subsonic swarms all day.

So far, this is the most impressive thing to come out of CES this year as far as I’m concerned. The potential for a universal plug-and-play guts system like this in your average home would be phenomenal.

I assume it’s because we have basically no experience with something like this. Either that or they were just geeking out because SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!!!

I’d imagine the advantage of water is that you can use it for something in addition to just being dead weight. Steel shielding is just shielding. Water shielding is shielding, air, reaction mass, thermal insulation, etc.