"It’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products"

That's hardly unique to the self-help world - doesn't a lot of tech also fall into that category?

I'm pretty sure I watched this when it was broadcast - when I was 12. It was fairly clear to me at the time it wasn't a real documentary.

I can see why you might think that - but people and machines and groups are free to leave if they want - at least one of the Culture stories is based on this: e.g. "A Gift from the Culture".

Free-to-roam pets are still pets. The Minds are benevolent dictators, and generally seek not to be seen as such by humans.

What would the Minds do if all humans wanted to leave?

Probably sublime... who knows!

I now have visions of an Apple Extended Extended Keyboard that comes with a crank...

It’s nothing new. In fact, many of the comments on this site were made by keyboards with cranks.

Er… I meant to say cranks with keyboards. Sorry. It was a rough weekend.

I don't think it's just a matter of ethics - some legal entity owns these mountains (park authority of some kind?) and drilling holes and placing bolts done without the permission of the owner sounds like vandalism to me.

And I think even before 1950 there was a feeling, particularly in the US, that it was good to have the Germans on-side in a military conflict due to their recent experience fighting the Soviets.

The long term viability of the UK nukes does rather depend on support from the US though - they use our own fissile material, but the warhead designs are believed to largely be based on the US W76 and the actual Trident missiles come from a pool controlled by the US.

I'd like a 600 HP 1.5l supercharged V16 - doesn't even need to be in a car, mainly just to listen to!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Racing_Motors_V16

If the displacement isn’t measured in cubic meters, can you even call it an engine?

Bonus points if you have to heat that crap you call fuel before you inject it into the massive cylinder.

If it doesn’t make at least 200kW per cylinder, can the engine even do any real work?

I’d opt for the V10 from the F2004 Ferrari F1 car if I had to pick an engine to listen to, it’s what a race car should sound like. There’s just something about a V10, it sounds musical.

https://youtu.be/gLyqoX3LZrk

That BRM V16 is a close second though! It’s probably more impressive given it’s 50 years older than the Ferrari engine and was not designed by computers.

https://youtu.be/A4w22LJrLeU

Then all you need is a good recording and decent headphones

A good recording and a sound system which can move the exact amount of air that the engine has moved, to be precise.

Ok, me too now. But you can’t have that, so maybe you could settle for a high-reving V8 in a tunnel?

Won't they have monitored their slaves quite closely?

One thing I discovered years ago was that even if you are pretty good at soft-skills type stuff and also pretty good at technical stuff what I couldn't do is context switch between an hour or so of doing "soft" stuff to a technical question - even though it was a trivial question. I lost a CTO position over that - mind you I think they went out of business a couple of years later...