Yep, governments only care about control. Currency is a big part of that. It's clear our future is going to be very locked down. Big Brother will say it's for our own good.
It's one thing for the US government to surveil people using dollars. Dollars are fiat currency issued by the United States. Generally speaking, governments have long controlled the manner in which citizens use fiat currency...for good or evil. Bitcoin is not issued by the US government. Bitcoin is not under US government control. Therefore, the government has no nexus or connection to Bitcoin. Meaning the government should not be able to put restrictions on something that they did not issue or control according to first principles. Obviously the government is attempting to overrun existing case law and establish a dubious level of control over Bitcoin. We should remember that governments control their citizens by many means, and that includes how they use fiat money.
I propose that intelligent life is improbable generally speaking. The other issue is distance. Assuming there is an energy breakthrough and relativistic speeds are possible, the craft will be destroyed long before arriving at a destination. Think collisions and blueshifting of radiation. At non-relativistic speeds, you are looking at extremely long transit times. Think 40,000 years to 200,000 years. No energy source can last that long. You ship would have lost it's energy long before arriving at a destination. Biological entities would have died in the first 100 years. Robotic entities cannot function without an energy source.
Evidence has been building for some time that the Ediacaran period was more important than first realized. It looks like many lineages had already formed prior to the Cambrian. If anything, it's furthers the mystery of how all the diverse lineages could have just sprung up in such a short period of time and why is there a dearth of fossils. My own thought is that there is a discontinuity in the fossil record. As to why the fossil record is blank for this period of time, it's hard to say.
Does anybody seriously expect anything to change. On Capitol Hill, they are going to posture and make grandiose statements. Later in the day, everybody will meet at one of those fancy beltway pubs and get all cozy.
Why would Google do this in the first place? The reason is that they did not have time to figure out what capabilities might be needed in their own solution. So copy the API from someone's other competing product and then later, put code behind those API calls. Is it theft or cheating? Kind of, I suppose. It saved them time from having to engineer the API surface.
Since we have never been visited by aliens, or witnessed time travel, these things must not be possible. It they were, there would be proof and it would be documented. It's as simple as that.
The F35 is a strange aircraft. It has a very powerful single engine but the airframe is still too heavy. So the plane performs poorly and lacks the potential energy to exploit any particular edge case. So they are pushing it as a "networked" platform that supposedly allows commanders to control the battlefield, because everything is connected in real time. It sounds fanciful and kind of made up.
Dr. Goebbels is alive and well inside these tech firms. His tactics are being dusted off, updated and put into action. You say it doesn't bother you, but tomorrow or a little down the road, you may wake up and find you don't have a voice either. What happened at the Congress was unfortunate, but I don't think the Horn Man was going to overthrow the government, or that idiot sitting in Pelosi's chair.
Once the signals reached them, the aliens finally watched 2001 Space Odyssey and they thought cool, let's actually put something on that little blue planet.
I use a repurposed Dell Precision workstation here at home and it's great. The Xeon 6-core rips through applications and the 64GB allows for multiple VMs as the case may be. In my mind, this setup is superior to ordinary desktops.
It's nice to know that the superluminal space is not just an isolated fantasy land with imaginary particles like the tachyon. Could be a real place where quantum weirdness actually resides. Very interesting indeed.
Here's the deal. There seems to be a default mode of behavior where people automatically reject news that conflicts with the status quo. In this case, these people are senior scientists not involved in the original mission. It's very unfair. Breakthroughs in knowledge could be happening right beneath our noses and people (not involved in the project), are actively surpressing or invoking pretzel logic to belittle the findings.
I got a suggestion. Pick up a late model MacBook Pro, then go down to your local used PC shop and pick up two PC laptops (300 bux each), and install Linux and Windows. At that point, you have all 3 platforms covered and don't have to choose sides.
The 737 MAX has new powerful engines and are placed more forward on the wing. This changes the handling characteristics and is most noticeable during takeoffs as the nose tends to rise more readily. The simple solution is to require an hour or two of simulator time to train pilots on the new handling characteristics. In hindsight, using MCAS to account for this new behavior was the wrong choice. I know simulator time is expensive and so on, but this would have been the logical thing to do. Besides I hear the MCAS software was not developed by Boeing but had been outsourced.
I have the 2017 MacBook Pro. It did take a while to get use to the keyboard. Now I find other keyboards are mushy by comparison. On the touchbar, never really thought much about it. Seems to work okay for me. I'm amused by some of the folks that just seem to hate the later MacBook Pro's. Their hatred seems misplaced and over-wrought.