I was wondering how the scientists went from proposing a planet that was 1.5 to 2 times the size of earth, to proposing it being 5-10 times the size of earth.

You Should Really Considering Explaining Acronyms Before Posting, obviously.

A remote command from some random phone to reboot does sound like the a wonderful vector for malware, though

YSRCEABP

I remember doing the bear grills one, and one of the choices was to jump over a ravine, or walk over it using a fallen tree as a bridge.

Being the hiker I am, the obvious choice of walk around it being missing kind of annoyed me, but I chose the tree option.

Bear died.

So I got to go back and pick the jump over option, which was apparently the right one.

Who the fuck does running jumps over a 15 foot deep ravine.

I never bothered with the choose your own adventure things again. When the correct choice is just not available and the next logical choice just means an instant loss, you don’t have a very fun game

If you’re a government, you can pretty much put anything in a rocket fairing and call it a reconnaissance satellite.

The only warning that actually has to be given is that a rocket is being launched, so you don’t accidentally trigger WW3 by setting off launch detection satellites without warning. After it’s in space, no one can really tell what was in the fairing. Could be a spy satellite, could be navigation. Could just be a box with a bunch of little rockets in it, designed to slam into whatever you want at ridiculous speed.

But it’s way more likely that this was just Boeing having a tiny leak in a propellant tank, or a bad thruster and as soon as the concentration of propellant and oxidizer got high enough, it triggered a detonation. They certainly have a history of not leak testing their shit: airplanes falling apart, space capsules with leaky thrusters, and now a blown up satellite point more towards incompetence than malice.

There was a big idea a couple decades ago that corporations were going to copyright natural genes and sell them for massive profits to other biotech companies that could use them to make cure for diseases and other things.

Michael Crichton wrote a few books about it, pretty good reads.

They did do the gene copyright thing in the real world, but it turns out that doing anything with a random gene is pretty hard and the genome isn’t just something you can copy paste a gene into and have it cure aids or cancer, so no one wanted to buy genetic sequences that they would then need to do a whole bunch of work on anyway to make it useful.

Pretty much all 23andMe did was increase the size of the Law Enforcement dna database by letting cops send in samples of suspects and get back their family members info. Of course the company said that was very naughty, but no one got into real trouble for it. And now 23andMe owns a lot of other people’s genetic code, and it’s not worth the hard drives it’s stored on.

I could actually see this being useful for dangerous working environments like steelworks or inside nuclear facilities. As long as the control system is on a separate intranet that’s properly air gapped.

You should still pay the operator their full wage though. The human still needs all of the technical knowledge to do the job, you’re just removing most of the physical risk.

That’s an extremely bold assumption.

The space shuttle was designed originally to be rapidly reusable, but its shortest turn around time was still measured in weeks, not days.

And its main engines only produced water as a by product, no soot or carbon deposits to worry about.

Semi drivers require a commercial license, and special training. They’re monitored way more closely than your average American driver.

And side mirrors only let you see what’s behind the car to the sides and at a distance, not what’s immediately behind the car. I don’t want some idiot in his $80K battering ram to roll over me because I happened to walk behind his death trap and he couldn’t be bothered to wait for the rear view camera to come up.

Not being able to see what’s immediately behind the vehicle is a safety hazard, especially in suburban areas or parking lots where most people are reversing out of a space with other people walking around.

The Cybertruck has no rear view mirror when the back cover is down.

So any reversing requires the use of the backup camera.

The car also accelerates really fast, and weighs 7,000 pounds.

It’s also an $80,000+ car that was preordered by a lot of people without test driving it. So it’s primary driver is someone who makes risky and impulsive decisions.

So a really fast, heavy car that can’t see behind it without a reverse camera, driven by impulsive people makes me think the reverse camera should definitely come up really fast.

It’s not about converting the car.

I have a 2009 Chevy with an automatic transmission. I’m order to convert it to electric, the ECU would have to be replaced so the car knows when to shift to a higher gear without a combustion engine.

Because of environmental reasons, ECUs are pretty tightly controlled by the government. I don’t know if any company even exists that can sell an aftermarket ECU. There’s plenty that can hack or reprogram ECUs, but even that is becoming increasingly regulated and legally questionable.

I would love to convert my car to an electric, but it’s an automatic so I’d have to spend as much as a new car to convert it.

A drop in ECU replacement and motor/battery would be great, but I doubt the auto industry or the government is going to allow the sale of third party drop in ECUs.

Have you seen the average griefer or troll in any multiplayer game?

A summary is useless if it’s not accurate.

It’s YouTube, there is no line, just a vague squiggle that you can cross without any warning.

We’re still trying to get people to quit smoking.

If phones killed you, we’d all just have to die

I’m just amazed it wasn’t a dancer in spandex again

Because companies have been promising tidal power for decades and it never works because the tide is really strong and full of animals, plants, and garbage that really shouldn’t be around large moving machinery.

So this is the alternative

GRRM gave the showrunners his notes on the last two books.

Now he famously doesn’t do traditional storyboards, he’s a very organic kind of author. He makes a character in his head, puts them in a situation, and just writes what they would do, and everything flows from there. But, every story does have to have a beginning, middle, and end. So the major plot points have to be written down somewhere.

You know how Jon turned into an NPC who just kept repeating that he didn’t want the throne, pretty sure that’s a major plot point that was in the notes. The note was probably “Jon doesn’t want the throne” so that’s all the dialogue the writers gave him.

There is a decent chance that season 8 was a beat for beat execution of George’s notes, white walkers invade, Jon unites the north and with Dani and they defeat them, march on kings landing, Dany descends into madness and burns down capitol, story over.

If that’s really how it’s ultimately going to pan out, I can see GRRM not wanting to release it after seeing how fans disliked the ending. I think fans disliked the execution of the ending more, but I can also see how disheartening it would be to get a glimpse of how people would react to the ending of a story you’ve been writing for almost 30 years, and finding out that it’s almost unanimously hated.