So, this is a picture from before Australian men discovered the glory and the majesty that is the mullet.

I feel like you should have closed this with, "Boo that man! Booooo!!!" and then slap that downvote button.

I'd imagine that if you're making generation ships, the only group that needs to be physically able is the group that's going to land. Everyone else, it would behoove the mission to have people who are as small as possible, so as to conserve resources.

"I NEVER LEARNED TO READ!!!"

Don't forget the licensing costs for using copyrighted works on your tattoo. If the MPAA catches you wearing an unlicensed video, they're within their rights to cut your limb off and impound it for the court hearing.

I'm sure his attorneys are currently trying to lowball the state by saying something like, "No jury would ever convict my client. He lacks mens rea, because he's a moron who should never have been given that much money by people who should have known better."

I know I am. Fools and their pretend digital money are soon parted.

What happens in international waters stays in international waters. If I'm running a combination human cloning lab and monkey knife fighting arena, that's my business. Why should everyone live by your sense of morality? What makes your sense of morality any better than anyone else's?

And, honestly, why would either one of them say, "I have to destroy the other! I am the original"? That's like some garbage out of a bad sci-fi movie. Please don't consider being a writer.

"Sam Bankman-Fried to enter plea"

Well, yes, that's typically how it works. They ask you how you plead, and you give the judge an answer. Brilliant article. Ten points for Gryffindor.

Is it, though? Because as far as you're concerned, you're still alive? You can even testify at the murder trial, "No, your honor, that couldn't be murder because I'm right here. Go ahead, ask me anything about my life."

Will it, though? Let's say that somewhere in the past, you had a medical emergency and they had to put you under. While you were under, they copied your memories and whatever passes for consciousness into a new body, and then they pulled the plug on the old one. And then, when you wake up, they say, "It's a miracle! The doctors managed to get all of your organs going again, and they say you've got another forty years."

In that scenario, where everyone is lying to you (or perhaps the doctors are lying to everyone), how would the replacement know it wasn't the original? As far as it's concerned, it went to sleep and then it woke up.

I am fine with that. You know who else is fine with that? The imposter who is, for all intents and purposes, me. How much guilt would you feel if one day you woke up, then watched someone who looks just like yourself die, and then you just went on living for another hundred years? To you, you're not an imposter. And the dead guy doesn't care, because he's dead.

But, from the robot's perspective, it's you, so I don't see the distinction. In The Prestige, does it matter that the Great Anton in the balcony isn't the one in the tank? Not at all.

I have to wonder if animal rights activists would latch on to places that serve slaughtered meat and then treat their customers like people who wear fur coats.

Yeah, I didn't want to get the attachment, particularly after finding out that I was already getting trails at the 20 second mark. If I had a tripod that could adjust for the rotation of the Earth (which I could totally build, given my current major in college), then it'd be a good buy, but astrophotography is a flirtation more than it is a love.

Worth it, though, even though I've never tried astrophotography with a phone.

What you have to remember is, when you start getting beyond fifteen or twenty seconds on the exposure, you're going to start getting trails. I tried doing thirty-second exposures (the maximum with unmodified firmware) on my Canon 60D, and the star trails just weren't worth the extra number of stars that I was picking up on the sensor. And, since my choices were to ratchet down the exposure time, buy a tripod that could match the rotation of the Earth, or plead with the almighty to stop the rotation of the Earth for the duration (the book What If? tells us this would be bad), I went with shorter exposure times.

If I recall, the best solution is to open your aperture to its widest value, set the focus to just shy of infinity, set it on a tripod, and either trigger the shutter remotely or set it on a timer to start the imaging at some point after your hand has cleared and the tripod has stabilized. Pretty simple.

There's one more thing, and I don't know how it affects phones, but long exposures can create a fair bit of heat on the sensor, and that can muck up your shot. Given that the same sensor can shoot 4K video at however many frames per second, it's probably not the problem that it was, but you never know. I'm sure the hardware would probably kill power to the sensor if it sensed a thermal overload, but I've never looked into that.

Fury Road.

Sure, and people don’t die from HIV; they die from diseases that they never would have gotten if they didn’t have HIV. You have to attribute credit where it’s really due.

Well, the alternative to Musk exiting the company is the Tesla institutional investors exiting their positions in the company. At some point, they're going to have a Come To Jesus meeting with Elon Musk, where they tell him to settle the hell down or get the hell out, because they own significantly more of the company than he does, and he'd never be able to get the pension funds behind him if the alternative is for the stock price to plummet as the institutions exit their positions. Anything negative that happens with Tesla's share price would be the result of Elon Musk's own poor life choices.

As it stands, once the non-Tesla car manufacturers start rolling out vehicles that may not perform as well as a Tesla but cost half as much, they'll start grabbing market share, and that's when Tesla's stock will start to plummet, because the thing that's been keeping Tesla's stock price where it is is the faith that as the EV market goes up, Tesla will maintain its current 68-ish percent market share, and that is definitely not going to happen, especially if Musk is still throwing in with the deplorables, which means the very people who want to buy EVs are going to go, "Y'know what? I can just buy from one of these other companies."

And the rest of what you said is pretty much ludicrous, considering the five-year timeframe you've put on it. Particularly the point about the flu epidemic fatalities being the result of ineffective antibiotics, given that the flu is from a virus and antibiotics are always ineffective against viruses. I mean, come on, that's just basic science.

Oh, and the Russians definitely aren't landing on the moon in five years. Chinese, maybe, but if they do, they're establishing a permanent base because they didn't put enough fuel in the tanks to come back.

That's pretty reasonable, considering the price tag for the tech demo that introduced Steve Jobs to the GUI was Xerox having the opportunity to buy 100,000 shares of Apple stock at a pre-IPO price of $10 per share. Considering Apple's IPO price was $22.00, that wasn't bad, and it closed at $29. Remember that this is before a long series of CEOs who were desperately trying to run the company into the ground.

But I digress. That opportunity to buy a million dollars' worth of stock wasn't any sort of a license or anything like that; it was just for a demo, because Xerox PARC was where all of the cool stuff was happening. Yes, at Xerox. Stop laughing; it's not funny. Okay, fine, cool stuff was happening at IBM, too. ... You know what, if you can't take this seriously, I'm just going to leave.

Anyway, that price tag didn't come with a license, so Xerox was waiting to see how the "look and feel" part of the Apple-Microsoft legal wars shook out, because if Apple could take Microsoft for basically stealing the Mac interface for Windows, then Xerox could take Apple for doing the same for the Macintosh operating system. But, turns out look and feel doesn't get legal protection and turning a trash can into a recycle bin is just enough of a change to qualify as different. And so, Xerox never got any more out of Apple than a good purchase price on the stock.

No, I couldn't tell you when Xerox sold that stock. Hopefully before the end of the Sculley administration, let alone Michael Spindler or Gil Amelio, who were desperately trying to sell the company to anyone dumb enough to buy it. Yeah, there was a time when Apple had about two weeks' of operating capital left. But, to close out the Xerox story, because of stock splits and such (a 4-for1, a 7-for-1, and three 2-for-1s), that $10 per share would have been about a nickel per share today. You might think, "Wow, they're so dumb for selling," but you have to remember that at the end of 1997, Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy, and that split-adjusted stock price was floating around fifteen cents. Nobody knew if Apple was going to be around in six months, and if a time-traveler told you that it would be the biggest company on earth, you'd have asked the guy where he gets whatever drugs he's smoking, so Xerox probably sold before that.

To be fair, if you could actually get up to lightspeed, you would instantaneously arrive at wherever you were going. Or, at least, that would be your perception. A photon, from the moment it is emitted to the moment it is absorbed, experiences no time at all. If you want real world examples of time dilation, you need look no further than particle accelerators, where a particle that exists for, say, half a second before decaying into other particles can be accelerated to a significant percentage of the speed of light and its lifespan, to us, will be significantly longer, in seconds or perhaps even minutes. But, from the standpoint of the particle in the accelerator, it will still decay in half a second.

Thankfully, you can never actually travel at the speed of light, because to achieve that goal would cause you to attain infinite mass, and that would be bad for the rest of us.

If you think programming computers to push pixels is the future, you’re ten years behind already. The future is programming robots. Not walking, talking humanoid-esque robots; arms and conveyor systems; PLC controllers; that sort of thing. Siemens is working on a robot that can sew blue jeans more cheaply than a third-world blue-collar worker.

So, if companies are looking to develop systems to be cheaper than the cheapest labor in the world, imagine what they’re looking to do to first-world unskilled and semi-skilled labor. If you unload a truck, get an education. If you drive a truck, get an education. If you do anything where your decision flowchart basically loops back around on itself without any decisions that aren’t a yes or no for an answer, get an education.

That said, it ain’t magic and it ain’t that easy.

I would want to have my memory of the Barbie Museum scene from Rat Race erased from my mind, just so I could experience it again for the first time. It is the perfect amount of build for a joke that drops like a hammer.

Now, if we were to include television, I'd want to have Reverend Jim: A Space Odyssey removed for the same reason, because it features what I think is the funniest joke in the history of television. I mean, it's still hysterical every time I see it, but there was a sense of wonder to it when I first saw it. It is perfectly written and perfectly played, and I have never seen its like.

Ooh, when do scientists predict we’ll get a Pyramid of Darkness?

And those people are just going to be jobless and will have to survive on the subsistence income that is UBI. Short of a mental defect, stupidity is 100 percent curable; most people are just the living representation of, “Ignorance is bliss.”