Apple seems to understand that software makes hardware run and vice versa. To the vast majority of people the distinction is not just academic but nerdy academic.

They are not a hardware or a software company. They make computers in a few different shapes and sizes. Computers that you don't have to go buying a bunch of other bits so they actually do something.

What's ironic is that feeds his megalomania. Extreme-ego types love that their detractors are thinking about them all the time.

"Living rent-free" is the ultimate payoff.

Best to ignore them as much as possible.

Karp created a money management company, befriended Peter Thiel, and then created a company that makes some database query software used mostly by governments for surveillance.

Zamiska seems to have created this book and presumably the corporate affairs department at said database query company.

I bet some imagination was involved, but maybe not the kind that you'd like us to think you're talking about. I'm not sure either have much claim to "making the world better" either.

Western civilization ended slavery

Well, some of them did.

National service can be a great idea. Countries that don't have it and think it's a good idea should phase it in starting with the oldest people first.

The president would still be elected by the states. A "compact" is an agreement by the states involved that they'll vote in a particular way. Some states already have laws that require them to vote the way their states' own popular vote indicates. Others don't.

A pedantic distinction? Not really. Agreements like that, or even most of the state-level laws, can be changed pretty much any time. It's a band-aid fix because the real fix is too hard to implement. And even the band-aid hasn't been successful even after decades.

The American public imposed an illegal tax that it now has to refund to the entities that paid it. Using the money to distribute cheques to that same public isn't a good solution.

Don't like it? Don't vote for criminals or the people who let them get away with their crimes. You didn't in the first place? Welcome to being part of a society.

I suspect that Windows, being more common on business machines administered by IT departments, doesn't bother too much with not corrupting itself because IT never met a problem that a good format and restore from image (remotely over the network) couldn't fix. When an important portion of your users don't have a BOFH ready to nuke it from orbit at the slightest provocation, reliability is worth a bit more effort.

In Canada we do it with shovels. In some places they also make posts to run cords over the sidewalk so people don't trip over them. Still use shovels to clear the snow though.

There's nothing about an electric vehicle that requires it be "serviced at certain places." The kids are rewinding Tesla motors and building their own drivers for more power. If anything its easier to do that than it is for an EV than for internal combustion where you're mostly limited to bolting on parts somebody else made, unless you want to get into metal casting and CNC.

Sure. A few hundred dollars to have it synthesized. Another hundred bucks for sequencing the tumor genome.

Most of the cost of these things is typically the clinical trials, and covering the costs of all the trials for other drugs that fail. To make stuff like this fully personalized they'll have to validate the procedure for going from genome to vaccine rather than each specific formulation. There's precedent for that though, e.g. the flu vaccine. Also, the bar is much lower for something you're giving to people who are already sick.

The US freaks out whenever anyone looks like they're going to get nukes because nukes pretty much mean you can't be invaded. Ironically, the US's penchant for invading people is why everyone wants nukes, an outrageously expensive and impractical weapon by any other metric.

Nuclear war, not nuclear weapons. If you want a yield calculation he can probably do it, although he'd have to look up the formula because he's not a nuclear physicist, never mind a weapons engineer. But the story is about the chances of nuclear war, which is mostly a political thing. He thinks 1% per year kinda feels too low, so make it 2% and proceed to extrapolate.

Never mind that a nuclear war wouldn't end humankind anyway.

swallow it hole.

Pretty sure I don't want to know how that works.

I read a Bayesian tutorial that took a swipe at frequentists by mentioning that the maximum likelihood estimate for a rocket with three launches and no failures was 100%. I rolled my eyes because nobody would actually make that kind of estimate. I had not met the GP.