Town where I grew up had an awesome laser tag - you started off with a basic blaster but could unlock a shotgun (more damage, but fired slower and had limited ammo) and a rocket launcher (single shot insta kill) by doing different things in game
Idk, “people who argue about different energy generation methods on the internet” isn’t exactly a representative sample of the general population.
I like talking about ITER because it’s a really clear example of how, most of the time, big discoveries and innovations don’t just magically happen cos one genius sat down and came up with a thing - with a few exceptions, science hasn’t worked like that for most of the last century - innovations happen because of the accumulation of effort by hundreds of people over years.
Viable fusion energy has been “about 10 years away” since the 70s, and that’s not because noone has been working on it, it’s because it’s hard, and it’s more work than one group could achieve in a whole career. It takes serious sustained investment on the scale that only governments can stomach - imagine if Musk had poured his billions into fusion research rather than lighting it on fire to try and make people like him - and there is very little chance that that investment will ever directly turn a profit, but indirectly the gains to be made for societies are gigantic.
Less a breakthrough, more “science is slow and incremental and big advances rarely happen all at once”; Japan have bought their JT-60SA Tokamak fusion reactor back online after spending the last few years upgrading it - it’s nowhere near able to produce electricity, but will provide important data that will be used to guide the experiments that will be performed at IETR, the much larger Tokamak that the EU is building that is much closer to being a viable power generator.
I don’t know that it’s that clear cut - trying to enforce a provision like that would almost certainly be seen as unreasonable, but unless there is some specific law forbidding it in your jurisdiction you’d probably need to ask a court if it conflicts with broader employment law rules to the level that a court would nullify it. Getting an answer to that question is likely to be very expensive, even if you are right.
I get boycotting Israeli companies because of the actions of the Israeli state, but characterising a private organisation as explicitly endorsing genocide simply because they are Israeli owned is bullshit
I’d want them to be just successful enough that they keep doing it - plowing time and energy that could otherwise be spent on fulfilling hobbies or real relationships - but not so successful that they could really commit to it. Like if they made ~$100/week, it’s not nothing but is it really worth the dozens of hours on weekends and evenings that you are spending to make that?
Place I used to work had a “we own all the IP you generate” clause, except it wasn’t very clearly written so could easily be read to mean literally all IP - write a song on the weekend, they own that. Got the wording tweaked in my contract to make it explicitly only cover things done in connection to my role, on company time, but I do wonder about my former colleagues. At least one of them has a mildly successful YouTube channel that I guess the company technically owns?
I backed the Pebble Core Kickstarter (kickstarter.com/…/pebble-2-time-2-and-core-an-ent…) - never actually happened cos Pebble ran out of cash before they shipped any, but I’ve always thought the idea was really interesting
A lot of depictions of teleportation seem to imply that you instantaneously move between two distinct points in space without having moved through the intervening matter - if that’s the case you have to deal with a whole lot of complexity to ensure that you are moving at an appropriate speed at your destination - it depends a lot on your reference point, but imagine teleporting from the equator to the north pole without accounting for the difference in velocity of the ground due to the earth being a sphere. If you were standing still on the equator but preserved your momentum through the jump, you’d be moving at 1600km/h when you arrived. Air friction and the sonic boom alone would mess you up, let alone if you collided with something.
You are right, you could solve it by having the teleportation move you through some sort of hyperspace and making the jump almost instantaneous so you have time to accelerate and decelerate, but even then you’d need to hand wave away where the energy goes. Imagine the same set up, you’ve accelerated through hyperspace towards the pole, then decelerated back down to end up going 1600km/h slower than you started. For an average person this is about 8 MJ of excess kinetic energy that has to go somewhere
Teleportation would be neat assuming you can just totally disregard basic laws of physics like conservation of momentum - otherwise you end up either as a red smear somewhere, or accidentally turn yourself into a kinetic energy weapon
Because the list is “certified” not “works with” - essentially, the “certified” list is for hardware that not only works, but that Canonical will guarantee works and will make software changes to fix if it breaks