The cost is less from the design and more from the safety regulations. Best case scenario the state just starts making nuclear power plants, it’s just not a good idea to mix profit incentive with nuclear.

Pretty hard to detect. But… probably easier than finding the petunias I guess.

They did show them sweeping through a horrificly deadly funnel defended by relatively well covered rebels and toasting them with no issues is the very first scene of the movie. The assault on the Tantove IV was basically suicide, and they still mopped up like it was Tuesday. The double reveal, by both Leia and Tarkin, is more than sufficient to make the point, instead of a hamfisted scene earlier of Vader giving them orders not to kill and eliminating all the tension from the escape.

The hippocratic oath, in this case. Medicine is all about risk management, the worse the “disease,” the more tolerant we are of side effects for the cure. Pregnancy and birth are still pretty traumatic events that, while much safer than they used to be, are still dangerous. Female BC just has to be less risky than that. Male BC on the other hand, has to be as low the risk for a man impregnating a woman, which is to say, almost zero. Pretty much any negative side effect is worse than that, so it’s very difficult to pass. I would gladly take one with comparable side effects to female BC, but sometimes unflinching ethics are inconvenient. Better than the alternative, but still.

This is why we need to bring back yae and nay. We used to have two different yes and no words, one set was used in exactly this context. French still has it IIRC. I can’t remember which were which in English, I think yae and nay were for positive questions, and yes and no were for negative questions. Aha, quick Google shows that is right, neat.

That doesn’t really work either. Human brains are not great at computing unless you are looking for “good enough,” results, and only on some pretty narrow fields, facial/speech recognition, some physics interactions, etc. But worse than that… we’re kind of using them. If they wanted us to compute, the whole function of the Matrix is just taking up run cycles. And you can’t just coopt them during sleep, we need the rest periods ,or we literally die. Only one answer makes sense to me, it’s a nature preserve. They didn’t want to be responsible for destroying their creators, and the only other sapient species known to exist. So they build the Matrix to keep us docile. Then, the energy reclamation actually makes some sense. They’re never going to be net positive, but assuming they are having difficulty keeping their society powered, they would be incentivesed to reclaim every watt of power they could from us to reduce our burden on their grid.

I think so long as you maintain consciousness that issue is fairly null in this particular circumstance. There’s lots of tolerance for changes in thought while maintaining the same self, see many brain damage victims. So long as there is minimal change in personality, there are lots of other circumstances that have a stronger case for killing one person and having a new person replace them due to change of consciousness, imo, I don’t think most people would consider a brain damaged person killed and replaced by a new consciousness, or a drug addiction with radically altered brain chemistry, etc.

I don’t see an issue with that. A prolonged brain surgery that meticulously replaces each part with a mechanical equivalent in sequence. Could probably remain conscious the whole time.

Starting a new habit is easy, keeping up with it longer than a couple months is hard. For what it’s worth, regarding your question, I used to get in a 10 min walk every day, and that was the time I felt the least dragged down mentally and for the first time in my life had some actual motivation amd energy. It was never right after the walk, just kind of overall after I kept at it a few days. New job with different schedule nixed that, and I’ve been trying to get in some sort of exercise for years now with no luck, back to feeling bleh all the time.

Even when you own the medium that’s true, it’s just much harder to enforce. As media has gotten more and more capable of being widely shared, the licenses have clamped down harder and harder. From books, to home videos, to video games.

Nick was supposedly fired for failing to meet goals, goals he was apparently never informed that he should be targeting.

Lawful>chaotic isn’t about better>worse. If anything, using the gear that came with the product is the definition of lawful in this context. Lawful is more about following the expectations of society. That’s not the full meaning, but close enough for this post. If anything, I would swap true neutral and chaotic neutral.

As a fan of both, neither are truly Sci-fi. They both use it as dressing, but one is an action fantasy and the other is drama with emphasis on social commentary. Neither are really harder sci-fi than the other in the grand scheme of fiction. Star Wars may even be a bit better in that at least they don’t try to explain most of the tech so it can’t self contradict as much as Trek does.

They were all celestial bodies. The rest just got more myth attached to them. The Norse names are all sort of kinda mostly the equivalents of the Roman counterparts, and those are famously where we get the names for the planets.

Sunday

Moonday

Mercuryday

Jupiterday

Venusday

Saturnday

Ther wasn’t a great Norse version of Saturn, so it just kept its name. Even as it is, some of those conversions are pretty flimsy.

What level of abstraction is enough? Training doesn’t store or reference the work at all. It derives a set of weights from it automatically. But what if you had a legion of interns manually deriving the weights and entering them in instead? Besides the impracticality of it, if I look at a picture, write down a long list of small adjustments, -2.343, -.02, +5.327, etc etc etc, and adjust the parameters of the algorithm without ever scanning it in, is that legal? If that is, does that mean the automation of that process is the illegal part?

Sentience is the little hump that we can at least sort of see some evidence of, judging by how similar regions of brains activate in certain circumstances. Sapience is the real tricky one.

Kiss the sky.

They are called Mondegreens in English, after Sylvia Wright wrote an essay about how she misheard “laid him on the green,” as Lady Mondegreen.

I came here to “correct” you to that, yes. But then it’s not really IPA anymore, and the other character doesn’t make sense now. May as well stick to the more universal system.

Wait, Rocket? Where is Bradley Cooper, is he safe, is he alright?