JoeAltmaier

Now we can make movies about rogue planets menacing Earth, not just asteroids. Great.

When first married and bringing my new wife home to Iowa, there were billions of fireflies over a hayfield. She said What is that? Fireflies! No, she said, that's a fairy tale.

She was astounded to find out they were real.

That was also the last time I ever saw fireflies in those numbers. Maybe 30 years ago.

Explains part of why he was denigrated and vilified in his lifetime. The upstart common man trying to publish alongside proper gentlemen. He sometimes complained of that in his letters, if I remember right.

Jumping in the deep end! Designing a rocket and launch facility; designing a modular space-borne datacenter; designing an orbit-to-ground laser energy transmission system. Ambitious. But who knows? One day someone will solve one of these problems and it will change civilization.

Reminds me of when we released a new linker (assembles compiled modules into an executable). We'd build the new linker, using the old one of course. Then build the new linker again. Then build it again using itself, and compare it with the 2nd build. Continue until they matched.

Possibly on a par with the other exotic materials currently in use.

Who was it that sent a gunboat to Hawaii and ousted their government, then demanded it be a state. The feds resisted for a while but that's how we got Hawaii - at a fruit company mercenary gunpoint.

Well, writers can use it to speed up the draft review process. Not a big financial deal, but it's a 'payoff' for the craft.

All good points.

But sometimes code is slow, because they put delay() calls in there. I had to re-write the initial Windows CE DHCP client because of this. It was one run-on procedure filled with deliberate delays to match what the writer perceived the spec as requiring.

I rewrote it to not block on delay calls or i/o, to issue probes to address servers, and to process responses as they came in instead of waiting forever in case any were very slow. Instead of seconds to resolve your IP address, it took milliseconds after that.

Better oligarchs and criminals?

I think AI may be the salvation of mankind. The humans in charge don't 'scale' well when their authority expands to billions of people. Humans just can't resist flattening the data and using notions and biases to make decisions that don't fit well.

"Mother's Love"

Because, we so often take it for granite.

Pictures or it didn't happen?

It's suggested that mammals remained so small after the asteroid, and birds got so big so fast, because birds had some vestigial dinosaur 'big genes' and mammals had none.

The History of Johnson County Iowa, 966 pages. I've read it cover to cover more than once. Well, not the extensive roster of Civil War records of all residents who served, fully 30% of the total pages, but the rest.

A wonderful insightful look into 1882 thoughts about what constituted history. The human interest stories are the best - how the names of local townships were selected, the storms and railroad schemes, fights and murders.