The JWST won't be "in orbit". The L2 Lagrange point technically orbits the sun and is far out of reach even for starship. There's currently no way to service the thing if something goes wrong.
The speed of light puts a hard constraint in the simultaneity of data availability in a network. You can't have data replicated faster than c no matter how fast is your hardware.
> I can't help but suspect that a lot of the genome is a part of the boot sequence that helps you go from one cell up to all the differentiated organs and tissues and systems.
Boot sequence. Amazing. I've always been interested in how the DNA transcription looks like a Turing machine with the RNAP being the head and the one DNA strand being the tape. Is there any research in that kind of computational analogy or is it just a coincidence?
If I want hard sci-fi I can read Lorentzian Wormholes from Matt Visser or something like that. You can't explore such crazy ideas from TBP without going off the rails with speculation.
> - Attack of the Flat, Interchangable Characters
Yeah, I agree with you, but I don't know yet if this is a cultural thing with Chinese literature that can't be translated to English or simply that Liu can't write good characters.
I'm sorry but is this a template response? This kind of situation is a bureaucratic mess spanning an awful lot of jurisdictions. What "your representative" can possibly do to help abandoned crewmen on a ship in a forgotten port in whatever place in the world when the ships operator is a chain of shell companies to the point that's virtually impossible to pinpoint a single entity to blame. It has to be a better way.
> EV passenger cars are feasible for the average person today.
Where? California? The world's bigger than the US and Europe and massive EV adoption in the developing world isn't a thing. EV are still a expensive luxury in most countries.
It's The Economist, they're their own platform to support whatever content they want. Banning them from HN will hardly have any impact. It's not like banning a single individual.
> Amazon has also changed the lives of basically everyone in the developed world, which definitely cannot be said of
How so? This is way too generous to Amazon. Buying things online faster is not a life changing feat. Neither are home assistants like Echo or Alexa. Maybe I'm missing something.
The "red background with five yellow stars" is the chinese flag. It's a common graphic pattern when you want to convey the idea of a person of geopolitical interest. Like putting Biden in front of the American flag o Macron in fron of the french one. Isn't specific to china nor represent any anti-china meaning.