Truth is they never really did, but this might make it even less so.

That's flash storage that uses tunnelling, not USB. USB is just regular electric signals traveling along a conductor serially (as in one bit at a time and opposed to parallel, which would have multiple bits at a time).

Flash USB sticks are common, but you can have flash without USB and USB without flash. Flash is how it saves the data, USB is how the data is transferred between the storage and device using it.

Pressure plays an essential role in sound (sound is pressure), so it's hard to separate the two. A vibrating tuning fork would transfer kinetic energy to anything that gets close enough to touch it, including a pocket of air that is somehow held together in a vacuum. If you had a microphone inside that, I think it would pick up those vibrations as sound.

That's assuming you didn't blow your eardrum completely in the transition to a vacuum. Which is possible if the pressure differential was maintained (pressure reduced on the inner ear at the same rate as outer).

A "pocket" of air would want to dissipate from it's own pressure in a vacuum/near vacuum. If one were to exist long enough to stick a tuning fork into it, it would dissipate faster. Think like a pile of sand on a vibrating table (not a resonating table with high and low energy standing waves, but just a table where the whole thing is vibrating at the same rate).

Dual thread cores have nothing to do with quantum mechanics (other than how they affect physics in general). It's just duplicating some resources that can't be shared and adding an identifier bit to the others that can be shared and taking advantage of instruction level parallelism mechanisms to execute instructions from two threads at once.

While some quantum mechanics effects are used in computing (eg flash memory uses quantum tunneling to write values into bits), quantum effects are more of a limiting factor for bleeding edge classical computing. Things are packed so closely together that it's difficult to prevent undesired quantum tunneling, which breaks the rules we normally associate with electrical circuits, like current preferring to flow through a conductive connection instead of through insulation protecting a nearby conductor.

Though, that said, the fact that we continue to make progress at the bleeding edge despite that implies that these quantum effects are becoming better understood and designs are at least compensating for them, if not outright taking advantage of them. But that's at a lower level than bigger features like hyperthreading.

Computers that use quantum effects at a higher level are called quantum computers.

Not to mention the erasure of some of the progress they did have between exposure to European disease, conquest, and religion.

I tried it but didn't have beer so I substituted milk, and I didn't have coke so I substituted soy sauce. A bit on the salty side but not bad overall. I'm going to start recommending this cocktail myself.

This is great! I've always wondered about the process of creating art that is so bad it wraps around and becomes very interesting. Like watching a car crash. How long did this take? 16 hours!? How many of those hours were spent staring off into space? Could you explain why you kept going instead of trashing it at like hour two?

Some paint thinner should get that right out.

Imo the real problem for the far future is when the plastic-dependent life uses up all the plastic we're leaving without any way to make more. We could be creating not one but two extinction events.

Makes me wonder what kind of evidence of this all will be left in millions of years. If there's anything that eventually digs up our fossils, will they know what caused the current extinction event? Would they be able to figure out a peak plastic extinction?