Regardless of whatever budget Congress sets, the majority party has already been clear that they have no intent to enforce it. If the president uses the NASA money for something else, or even just puts it into his own personal pocket, we can be confident that he won't be impeached, and if impeached, he won't be convicted.

The only thing that matters is the total budget. The president is free to spend that total however he wishes. This isn't the law as written, but it's the law defacto. If voters have a problem with that (do they?) they can choose a different party to be the majority.

"Rational actor" has been disproven for a very long time.

My favorite easy experiment (you can run it with a grade school class) is this one:

Two participants. One participant is given one dollar. The other participant is given nothing.

Now, the participant with one dollar must offer some amount of that dollar to the other participant. The other participant can say 'yes,' take that amount, and they both walk away, or 'no,' and both participants get nothing.

The 'rational actor' would accept an offer of 'I'll give you a penny.' After all, walking away with one penny leaves you materially better than walking away with zero pennies.

The average participant, however, will only accept, at minimum, something like 37 cents. Anything less than that is seen as 'insulting' or 'greedy' and worthy of punishment.

Their population absolutely dwarfs Canada and the US as well, so that isn't much good, is it?

BTW, remember the secret of Ti Kwon Leap- Anger is a weapon only to one's opponent.

I still think we need, given the microamps involved, a hamster powered cell phone charger.

Yes it is. Radioactive materials are made in the planet's core, and float up in the magma. Radon Gas is a normal and natural resource from decaying uranium.

It's as renewable as sunlight and wind.

The question isn't 'are they number 1' or 'are they number 2' but 'did they sell enough hardware and software, or otherwise benefit from having the brand, to make it worth their while?'

After all, you mention the Wii, but a lot of people who bought a Wii never bought a game past Wii Sports. Many people bought PS3s to be Blu-Ray players, just like many people bought a PS2 to be a DVD player.

Difficult is not equal to impossible. Heat can be used to boil working fluids, which can be used to drive turbines, which can create energy, which can in turn be used to run AI chips, which give off heat, which can then also be harvested to boil working fluids...Not really a perpetual motion machine, but the inefficiency in the system can be used to suck more heat out of the heat pumps anyway. Inefficiency in this case is a feature.

My answer to environmentalists claiming this is "You first". Stop being hypocrites, eliminate your own fossil fuel usage- including wasting fossil fuels storing articles like this in data centers.

Would this be the same China that is building coal fired plants at a rate of 95MW a year?

Nuclear power is a renewable.

Fission and fusion are replacements, carbon free.

Not the solution. Heat is energy. Energy is needed to feed AI. The clear solution is to figure out how to harvest heat directly, cooling the planet by feeding heat to data centers as electricity.

So when Lindsey starts reading from her AmEx-approved script, callers are infuriated by what they perceive to be another machine.

If she's accurately executing the programmers' script, I'd say she is a machine. Somebody port Doom to her!

This is a fuckin' awesome idea, but there's an easy improvement over the red rectangle and block symbol. Seriously, dude, you gotta use the sign images from They Live (1988). You know you want to.

If people don't have a government-granted monopoly on their features, they'll have no incentive to have any features at all.