octaane

Yes.

The actual linked wikia article is short on the actual detail and background of exactly why the Butlarian Jihad actually happened. I’m an avid Dune fan. Sidebar/background: The son of the Dune writer, Brian Herbert, and his cowriter Kevin J. Anderson wrote the setting, events, and conclusion to the actual Butlarian Jihad conflictt. It’s largely derided by scifi fans, but is highly entertaining. It’s actually still ongoing almost 3 decades later. And frankly not as deserving of the harsh criticism it got when it came out. But I digress…

Here’s how it went down in the dune universe (I’m certainly messing up some details, but these are the broad strokes):

Humanity has spread to the stars. No FTL involved, just good old fashioned sublight engines. The dune universe takes place about 50-60,000 years in our future. Mankind has spread across a couple dozen solar systems and everything is going peachy. However, mankind gets complacent, fat, and happy with their success and society stagnates. A handful of eager, ambitious humans scheme about how they can take it all over. They do, and then eventually start turning themselves into cyborgs, or disembodies brains in a jars that swap bodies and are effectively immortal. One of the cyborgs gets lazy and makes an AI to manage things, which promptly takes over, overthrows the cyborg rulers of humanity, makes the cyborgs it’s slaves (who have great autonomy/are conspirators) and generally rules over everything. A small group of solar systems is left under human control, who fall back to a feudal-ish type system of government with lords and dukes and whatnot.

The AI does all sorts of nasty shit to the humans in it’s dominion. Unit 931 and Auschwitz type experiences, slavery until death, etc. Untold billions, if not trillions, of humans live in animal-like conditons worked to death. The human group of systems isn’t cool with this, but they can’t do much and are vastly overpowered by the cyborgs, so a fragile peace is held. One day, the son of one of the subservient cyborgs knocks up a human slave, and they have a kid. In the background, all sorts of rabble rousing and shenanigans are being done to stir unrest amoungst the slaves by the free human system. The human systems develop FTL, with spice as a catalyst, except it doesn’t work 10% of the time and kills the pilots. The AI’s main henchman (who does all of the nazi and Unit 931-type experiments) decides it would be cool to kill the baby of the cyborg son and the slave. The slaves last name was “Butler”/ This sparks a massive revolt by the slave worlds. The free human systems then go on to fight a prolonged war against the machines, using the FTL drive at great loss of life, to begin a “Butlarian jihad” to free the humans from thinking machines. Lots of other stuff happens, and humanity eventually wins, but this is why machines no more advanced than a desktop machine are allowed in the dune universe, and why they technologically hobble themselves.

RIP to an actor who was not defined by his disability in the show, but also at age 16 managed to hold his own against veteran actors dean norris, bryan cranston, aaron paul, and betsy brandt.

If I give you 10 dollars, and then you put it in your pocket, and then you take it out again and give me 10 dollars back - no actual economic growth occurred. It's simply shuffling money around; the amount stays the same.

I would argue that it is not underfunded, as most big pharma companies with oncology products have dumped enormous amounts of money into research pipelines and clinical trials. Immunotherapies like nivolumab or ipilimumab or pembrolizumab have varying (but often very decent) efficacy data for metastatic disease across tumor types.

> Four years after that, he contacted his father to share what he’d been told and Prince Laurent agreed to a DNA test.

“We went to the hospital together and I remember him saying, ‘I’ll go first so you’re feeling at ease,’” Vandenkerckhove told VTM.

Good on the dad for not trying to weasel out on this and stepping up.

Yeah, no shit. As a non-tech person who has tried to use it for non-tech stuff: Having the compulsively-lying, halluciating POS algorithm that everyone thinks is the second coming of Christ burn an obscene amount of non-renewable energy to create said lies while my company wants us to train it to steal out jobs is kinda something I'm not interested in.

How is training my replacement on a plagiarism machine that is actively putting people (including myself) out of the job while destroying the environment (but whose results are still not as good as a human) in any world a good thing?

There is no boost in productivity for non-tech related stuff. If you need to double-check the output, it is de facto not as productive as a human, since you need to effectively do the work twice.

Also, it adds nothing of value where is is being crammed into everything, and just seems to be a cynical techbro PE driven buzzword play.

Science fiction beat the author of this article to the punch re: novel cooling solutions in space. The author proposes squirting oil from one arm, through open vacuum, to another arm - the oil droplets radiate the heat en route from arm 1 to arm 2. However, like most modern tech, science fiction writing has anticipated it. In the book Saturns Run (2015), by John Stanford and Ctien, their spaceship cools down it's megawatt nuclear reactor by using a eutectic metal as coolant, which runs as a molten ribbon through open vacuum from arm 1 to arm 2.

My take is also a missile, but as an interceptor, not offensive purposes. North Korea has shown that they can deliver a payload to Japan if they want. If the NKs do decide to launch something at Japan, it's not going to be tipped with conventional explosives. It'll be a nuke. Hypersonic interceptor seems the more likely application is this tech to me.

Long-time ebay seller here. I'm seeing comments floating towards the top that are essentially positing that the physical GameStop locations can be used as hubs where people can buy or sell their stuff in general (especially items that are 'pick-up only'). A pawn shop, basically.

Thing is, GameStop is, well, for videogames and videogame paraphernalia. It's not a general store. Doing this would turn them into a thrift shop, not a pawn shop, as people are trying to offload their carpets, desks, etc - bulky stuff.

I don't think this makes sense.

This does make sense when you consider the collectable market, another domain I'm involved in. Trading card games, specifically pokemon, have exploded over the last 5 years. GameStop is making a killing off of buying, selling, and grading these cards. Ebay is the primary marketplace to buy and sell those cards. There's also tax free havens ("Vaults") offered by multiple companies, grading service passthroughs, and scalping offered through ebay too.

Viewed through the above lens, that's what's prompting this offer, I think.