Perhaps not catch up to. But serve as a repeater at an intermediate point. If it moves fast enough, it could reduce the power that Voyager must expend to send data back.

Lets save the natural gas for cooking, heating and some industrial uses that will be difficult to convert.

We are going to need a lot more electric power. If oil becomes scarce, that's about the only other thing we can use for transportation. Cars, trucks and possibly electrifying freight rail.

But wait! There's AI. And then (here in the Pacific Northwest), we need to return the water to care for the fish. Because it's all our orcas will eat. Being too stupid to go after the sea lions that eat all the fish. So our hydroelectric resources will become more constrained in the future.

Yes. But we have to protect the snowflakes. Expanding nuclear power could cause serious psychological trauma. And we will need to invest heavily in the mental hospitals to care for them going forward.

Spotted the frequentist. More serious comment: If someone offered you an even bet on one side for $10 that next year Jesus's Second Coming will occur, I'm pretty sure you would take the side of it not happening, even though that's a single event. If they made the same offer for first contact with intelligent aliens, you would do the same. And I can list many similar examples. So you are able to make estimates about probabilities for events which will only occur once, based on your evidence and world models.

Coal markets are local. So electricity generation is less affected by international conflicts.

Lets see .... 81 years since the creation of The Bomb. Shave a decade off that to get the cold war industrial complex up and running. What are the chances that we haven't already died in a nuclear war? And this is just Hell?

E911

The $1000 extra I cited was a conservatively derived estimate of vehicle value. My POS is worthless and I don't have collision or comprehensive because that is pointless. If I were to purchase a vehicle that was worth something it would dramatically increase my insurance costs.

No idea what my added fee for vehicle weight would be. I presume an extra 500-1000lbs in curb weight. I didn't even think to include it in my estimate.

While I have joked with EV owners about this it still isn't worth it. Owning an EV that costs any serious amount of money there is an added yearly $150+ EV registration fee and at least $1000 in added yearly insurance costs. Yearly fuel costs for my ICE POS assuming $4/gallon is lower than that even if the energy cost to run the EV were $0.

The real problem is "connected", not un-encrypted.

This.

The Supreme Court has said that corporations are people. Abraham Lincoln said we can't buy and sell people. Something has got to give.

That's not exactly what the linked page says. That appears to be about searching the content of your phone. Tracking (i.e.your location) is a separate issue.

Cell site emulators/IMSI catchers/Stingrays are also popular, particularly with the feds. Our state has some pretty strict privacy laws. But they mean nothing when it's the FBI/DoJ setting the sites up. Same for surveillance camera systems. Cities around me are pretty active about giving Flock and others the boot. But the feds operate their own systems, about which local and state governments have no say. And they are pretty well hidden compared to the Flock cameras (which I think are actually going for brand recognition with their obvious installations).

Not really. Turning off GPS and location services might "fuzz" your location to a circular error probability of a hundred yards or so. But the cops can still track you using a feed from the telecoms triangulating you within a cell site. I listen to out local cops tactical channels on a scanner and it's pretty obvious when they can locate a vehicle within a parking lot or an individual down to which business they have entered.

This. But some people are so attached to their toys they just can't leave the behind. Or so impulsive that they just knock over convenience stores on a momentary impulse. With phone still in pocket.

... we will all remember Microsoft with this mixture of fondness and hate.

Except for the poor person who jumps in and says, "We still use it. Millions of dollars in sunk costs for data and applications that can't be transfered elsewhere."

Got of those, too (the early USB 1 ones, with the exposed ATAPI connector. I ended up buying Iomega's Firewire expansion that attaches on the back of the slim USB and latches on that ATAPI connector, as Firewire 400 had much better bandwidth than USB 1, provided enough power and thus required only a single cable, and I had a cheap Firewire 400 adapter laying around from some video project (funily: the Firewire 400 card was a free bundle bundled with some crappy movie software that was selling poorly and was on heavy sale at the shop I bought it from. Threw the useless CD, kept the Firewire card).

Mine still works too. The most difficult was trying to find the barrel power plug (since back in the days I was mostly using the Firewire attachment and because Firewire provides enough power, I wasn't using the barrel jack much. Nowadays most of my machine are USB only.

Yup. The slim USB were also a good solution to carry data around.
Bring the slim USB and the cables at the university, download shit with the fast bandwidth, then bring the drive back home, plug into the Firewire attachment and load it onto the computer.
Later the university aquired computers (from Dell) that came with ZIP IDE drive built in, so I only carried the Zip250 disks and kept the drive permanently plugged into the Firewire attachement. And almost lost the power barrel adapter as mentioned above.

Yeah I "bet" on LS-120 kinda.

Though the bet at the time was on a Mac (I recommended it to someone over a Zip drive). I thought they would take off more. I don't think the drive ever got used for anything other than floppies, but floppies stuck around for way past their time anyway so it wasn't a complete waste!

It wasn't a genius move when the first iMacs shipped without floppy drives. They didn't have CD-RW drives, and USB memory keys didn't exist. There was basically no way to exchange data or back up anything with an iMac in its out of the box configuration.