IMO, If FTL was possible, something, somewhere, at some point in time would have engineered a self replicating organism capable of it. These things would be everywhere by now we would see evidence of them.
Manus just answered this correctly for me in one crack:
Me:
I put a coin in a cup and slam it upside-down on a glass table. I can't see the coin because the cup is over it. I slide a mirror under the table and see heads. What will I see if I take the cup (and the mirror) away?
Manus:
This is a classic riddle! Let's think it through. You placed a coin in a cup, turned it upside down on a glass table, and then slid a mirror underneath the table. Looking into the mirror from below, you saw 'heads'. Since the mirror reflects the side of the coin facing downwards through the glass table, the 'heads' side must be facing down. Therefore, the side facing up, hidden inside the cup, must be 'tails'. When you remove the cup, you will see the side facing up, which is tails.
Sorry, was a 1/2 hearted attempt at a joke about his pamphlet titled "What is to be done?", similar to the wording used in parents comment. No need to alert the inquisition here just yet.
Seems like a no brainer in the current environment though right? At least temporarily in sectors underserved by the market but still crucial to the national interest? Can always privatise them again down the track if they're ideologically unacceptable for whatever reason?
Is this in the Imperial Mall quest in Pacifica? Have to hack into a van or something, then talk to some Netwatch guy? A quest trigger bugged there for me as well last week, there was a door that should be open that wasn't, had to reload an earlier autosave and replay for it to trigger properly.
Other than that one large bug, the game has been great, little bit of jank but no worse than say, Skyrim without the community bug patch. I only purchased it in the last steam sale so missed all the rough stuff.
Surely there are very few situations where it would be worth gambling your children's life over some data. Perhaps if there were many other lives at stake but even then...
> Could you imagine the telephone company shutting off someone's phone service over something they said or who they associated with?
This isn't why they're being dropped though is it? I was under the impression they were being denied service because further terrorist attacks were being openly planned on their platform with no attempts at moderation happening.
Generally the paper would at least be glanced at before unloading the criticism though right? Did parent even know how much phosphine they'd found when making the above comments?
I don't doubt his (or her) PHD claim either! The casual dismissal of the work of a team of experts across multiple institutions like this just surprised me, and that parent has a PHD in the field made it even more shocking.
The team that worked on this said they were thorough in going through the possible abiotic pathways that could cause this on a rocky planet like Venus. Now of course it's possible they missed something, like parent says: "There's about eleven bajillion abiotic routes to phosphine". I guess it was a sarcastic remark, but maybe parent really could have saved everyone a ton of time and $$. They're publishing as a starting point for the rest of the world to dig into this now, hopefully someone nails down what's happening one way or the other without waiting on a probe to be sent there!