This is Saudi Arabia. These are foreign, third world workers. Imported expendables like any other construction material.

Narrator: some of them are doing malicious things.

Security theater at its finest. At least the escort can tell that they are not obviously goofing off, maybe the only thing Micro$oft cares about.

These social "generations" appear to represent 15 year units in time. That matches the Boomers (1949 to 1964) for sure.

Interesting that you choose to frame this with an ethnic slur.

I will bet that a large share of influencers are not what you choose to define as "real influencers" -- yet they may wield quite a bit of influence on-line. Restaurant critics of yore, were reporters, employed by newspapers not free-lancers out to make a buck or score some loot or special treatment for themselves.

Back in 2016 Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Marketing, declared that removing the headphone jack from the iPhone took "courage".

Real courage will be if Apple ignores the speculators driving down its stock price right now and continues with its current strategy. Apple does not need to pump up its stock price. It still has a 3 trillion dollar market cap, with $50 billion in cash on hand. It can just ride the AI bubble out without shedding any sweat.

This is the standard explanation, but I am somewhat skeptical that this is the real one, at least for Xitter. Its utilization has been dropping and its owner does not care because the content the likes had taken over, by design (he is not trying to hide it). The "favor toxicity" because "engagement" is neutral as to the type of toxicity, but clearly the result is driving in one direction only. Xitter is toxic because its owner wants it to be, engagement be damned.

The Zuckerbot is more subtle but favors the same general politics.

There is this bizarre paper that claims to "show how extracting tidal energy could lead to environmental destruction in a relatively short period". The argument is that if just 1% of global energy demand is met through tidal power the Earth's rotation will slow so much in 1000 years that it will be tidally locked with the Moon (i.e. rotating at about once a month instead of once a current day).

If this seems hard or impossible to believe, you are right. Two fallacies are used here to make this conclusion.

First it assumes that the global increase in energy demand over the last 50 years (when population is growing and the poorer parts of the world are industrializing) will remain in steady for the next 1000 years -- which is a four hundred million fold increase in power consumption. That is very closely related to taking world population increase over the last 50 years (it doubled) and estimating that the world population in 1000 years will be 8 quadrillion (8x10^15) people, rather than the likely result of eventual stabilization at level well below current levels. We can't actually make population estimates so far in advance but current demographic patterns look instead like long term depopulation to the nearly world-wide preference now for small family size. Current analyses have the world with a population the same as today in the middle of the next century (2080 peak to 10.8 billion then slow decline), not having 32 billion in 100 years. If the slow depopulation rate estimated at 2100 continues for 1000 year the world population would shrink to 3 billion people.

Second is the physical absurdity that there is that much global tidal power that can even be extracted. It is not an energy tap we can turn on that will suck rotational energy out of the Earth at arbitrarily high rates. It would be like calculating eventual Earth bound solar energy production (based on current deployment rates) at higher than the total insolation on the surface of the Earth.

BTW there is an odd thing about population projections. Around 2000 most long-term demographic projections ran 100 years, to 2100. Now 25 years later they still mostly end in 2100, now only a 75 year frame. It is as if no one wants to bother with 100 year projections any more. In another 25 years will we be down to making only 50 year projections?

This is like twitting those silly astronomers for building telescopes on Earth to look at the stars when the Sun is up half the time, a fact they must have overlooked. Also there are sometimes clouds. Didn't they know that? That makes the whole enterprise a waste of time! (/s)

In this case the "Sun" is radio-noisy Earth, and "night" is when the Moon is blocking it for the satellite. Being able to collect data half the time is shooting under par for astronomy -- no Earth bound system can do that well.

With a title like Cosmos one would expect that the magazine could trust its readership not to recoil in confusion if they provided a more specific description of what the mission does. A good discussion can be found here:

They are observing the highly red-shifted 21 cm (1420.4 MHz) neutral hydrogen emission line with a radiospectrometer that has extremely fine frequency resolution allowing them to measure its intensity at various closely spaced red shifts in the range of Z=13 to 150. This allows them to collect data on the formation of neutral hydrogen clouds in the "cosmic dark ages" from about 380,000 years after the Big Bang and 400 million years when stars first formed. Currently we can detect the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) emission all of which is from the 380,000 year horizon, and then the light from early stars 400 million years later, but nothing in between.

The Cosmos article needlessly obfuscates this by mushing it into: "CosmoCube’s radio will operate at low frequencies (10–100MHz), which should hopefully be able to detect extremely faint signals" without explaining what they are actually observing and why.

Also the /. article has a a terrible headline. This observing signals that are 13.3 billion years old, or older, not "billion year old. That is like reporting on a Roman excavation and titling it a "century old site".

CITATION NEEDED

But no citation of a verifiable claim can be provided. Bones were found on the putative island suggested to be the cite of her demise in 1940 but never identified as being hers, or even female, or of the right body size, or age. To the extent they were examined successfully the results suggested that they were NOT hers. Lots of other people die also, so simply finding some unidentified human bones somewhere where someone in particular may have died proves nothing. You can't use a circular argument: those might have been her bones because that is where she landed; we know that's where she landed because we found her bones.

Those things did not exist in a practical sense until after 1940-1950. Even television only had a 1% U.S. adoption rate in 1948.

But before any of those things we had high quality prints available for centuries at affordable prices, and then there was player piano reels and radio and phonograph records. Which does take us up to the 1940-1950 period.

Meanwhile, back on Earth Prime, West Virginia is right next to the state with the fastest growing electricity demands in the country -- Virginia, land of lovers and data centers, and also Pennsylvania. Indeed the heart of the coal belt is just 200 miles from the axis of the Northeast Megapolis where one in every six Americans live. Run one very high capacity long distance transmission line to tie in to that vast grid and you are golden.

Very high capacity because that "near 300 GW" figure is over 20% of the capacity of the entire U.S. grid today. If that much power producing real estate is in West Virginia then it is very worthwhile to wire it in to the very nearby east coast grids.

Good thing for those coal mines that it consumes no power to ship the coal and the barges and rail lines are loaded and unloaded for free! Darn it that electricity just can't be shipped anywhere by those wires since a bit of it is lost and we just can't have that! Better to have no power at all! (/s)

In reality a 200 mile HVDC line loses 1% of the power transmitted. Heck AC lines are only 2%.

Indeed? I have some in my refrigerator right now. They are wax covered cardboard and they hold milk just fine.

The main outrage is Rush killing innocent people. But we may also lament that when his end came it happened so fast that Rush never knew he had failed.