Of course you need reaction mass, so unless your design is one where the reactor fuel itself is spat out the back (NSWR, fission fragment, ...), yeah, you need reaction mass. You're not talking about nonsense reactionless drives are you? This is the real world, where we need reactions.

Why is the Space Shuttle required to perform a rescue operation? Actually, why would you use the Space Shuttle to perform a rescue operation? That thing only had a few hundred m/s of maneuverability once it made orbit.

Solid core NTR has roughly double the specific impulse of the best (practical) chemical rockets, but you lose it all in tankage for that liquid hydrogen. If you try to use something easier to store, it's going to be heavier, and your specific impulse suffers significantly.

I don't know if you could call that a new idea. It certainly seems a fairly obvious one, and it's one I've heard many times before. The "afterburner" running on "superheated" hydrogen really doesn't get you any more performance than a traditional hydrolox chemical rocket would. What it does get you is not having to build two separate engines to get a higher thrust engine. You can reuse all the existing turbomachinery to save weight. What it also gets you is an extra pump tied to your expander turbine, a whole bunch of plumbing, more tankage, and an overengineered thrust chamber and nozzle that now has to withstand combustion temperatures.

If you need the extra thrust for quick transit through radiation belts, you're better off either adding an expendable kick motor, or just staging your mission above the belts.

Maybe one of the original designs from the 1800s, operating on the same principles of pneumatic tubes? Just ignore those pumping losses...

Linear Induction Motor

I'm honestly surprised they don't dock themselves right now, at least in a secured yard at a large facility. Counter to the above example, there is no unpredictable traffic, and there's plenty of room. The math to calculate a docking maneuver isn't tough, especially at a known, mapped facility, where you can trench guide wire or broadcast local navigation.

Have the driver drop the trailer off at a gate, and a cabless electric tug picks it up and takes it to storage or a door. The biggest complication is coming up with some mechanism to manage the brake lines.

Quantum cloud computing? You can't actually tell if the service is running, but at least you no longer have to reboot it yourself...

Depends on the carrier, and even from region to region. Some people would get everything but the premiums, some would get nothing. Even more annoying, broadcast TV had a copy protection flag in the spec, that was never implemented on broadcast receivers... except it shows up and is active on cablecard equipment, meaning you can be blocked from recording broadcast television.

I've not paid attention to this in several years, so it may be the whole industry has shifted to copy-once/never, which activates full DRM.

Transmitting everything ClearQAM is stupid. They would have to structure their system so that no two packages used the same channel, and then install hardware filters for each subscriber at the pole. It would take weeks to get a tech out to change your subscription, and it would be a massive, pointless hardware overhead.

There's no problem with conditional access systems, and there's no problem with CableCard when it is used as a simple conditional access system. The tuner feeds encrypted data into the card, and the card feeds unencrypted data back to the system. No expensive hardware filters, easy management of subscriptions, free and clear access to everything you're paying for. Everyone is happy, except for the pirates wanting to steal cable, and the content providers who don't want subscribers to have free and clear access to their rightfully purchased content.

CableCard is only a problem when it actually invokes its DRM capabilities, and because of the expensive certification process it requires of authorized hardware to uphold its DRM capabilities.

Hardware key loggers are a thing...

That's bullshit. Weather and heavy vehicle traffic are what cause roadway deterioration. A whole year's worth of car traffic on a residential street doesn't equal the damage done by a few passes of a plow truck, heavily loaded with brine that it's spewing onto the surface.

The machine she was working on was not the one that crushed her. This sounds more like bad industrial design, that allowed one robotic arm to reach into another work area. Either they should have been separated further, or they should have been energized through overlapping lockouts.

What kind of sensors and processing are you using that update the full scene every microsecond?

What happened? I blacked out.

Objects in space are very quick to lose heat, when initially exposed to the vacuum, due to all the evaporation.

Everyone uses it, every time you have to do more with the temperature than simply knowing what it is.