My dad bought me a kit of beanbags that looked like globes when I was 9 or 10.

My incentive to do it right was "I want to juggle." I'm glad I didn't have to chase them around, what a waste of time.

Apples was my choice of juggling fruit! Good weight/size ratio and also the reward at the end of my training session :).

Do we have anything that self-replicates physically?

Software, sure. I know 3D printer folks will sometimes 3D print parts for new machines. But nothing that fully replicates itself, right? Especially autonomously.

Maybe we'll see what a moon base can bring us.

Basically all of life is self replicating, physically.

I guess the OP meant something that is more flatous for human vanity to feel like a demiurge when at most it would be a tool of cosmos in its experiment.

Yes, but this isn't what the paper is talking about.

Additionally, you also have to consider that a self-replicating space probe should be able to find, retrieve, and process the raw materials needed to build new probes on its own. A 3D printer can print some of its own parts, but with externally-provided material that it isn't able to produce on its own.

My first video card.

Getting it working in linux in ~1999 was really not easy, especially for a teenager with no linux experience.

My networking card wasn't working either, so I had to run to a friend's house for dial-up internet access, searching for help on Altavista.

Very cool project. Way above my head, still!

A 3dfx Voodoo Banshee was the first graphics card I ever bought. I bought it to play the EverQuest beta, which also would have been around 1999. I remember logging into that game for the first time and it felt like a life-changing experience. And it kind of was.

I remember really liking the 3dfx splash screen[1] for some reason. Maybe because it was the only thing that actually ran smoothly on that card. But still, I was a loyal 3dfx user - probably because of their marketing which someone else mentioned in the comments - and was sad when it went out of business a couple years later.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LanTZ_AnAso

I exhausted my teenage savings to buy the Voodoo 1 due to the Linux support. Granted, I was running Red Hat at the time so the installation consisted of installing what, two RPMs? Played a lot of Q3 and Unreal on that card.

I wound up getting it working out-of-the-box with Mandrake Linux. I bought a copy at the local Office Max.

I believe I tried redhat, but had issues with that as well. I never went back to it--moved to debian and never looked back.

Same here. I remember some kernel module or video driver named tdfx, and then, struggling to make X11 work with this DRI (Direct rendering infrastructure or something like that) setting on. It was very rewarding to see it enabled on glxinfo's output after days compiling half of your system and trying to figure out what was wrong, specially when the access to the internet was limited, and then being able to launch GLtron with hardware acceleration. Also remember playing Quake 3 and America's Army games around that time.

Fun times, now everything is straightforward on Linux but I somehow miss that era when you actually had to do everything by yourself.

My first as well, getting drivers working on *nix I. The mid 90’s.. was always a fun challenge.

Also had the issue with modem, paging through the manual figured out the initialisation string

AT&FX1

"This will surely raise revenues and get me a promotion before I make a lateral move to a new company!"

If you can sell the ads as a subscription with a yearly contract you can get a 10x multiple on it in your valuation.

Perhaps those nations don't have laws against poll taxes; the US does.

I was born before that and issued my SSN at birth.

The first pilot project to issue SSNs with the birth certificate automatically was in 1987. You can read the history here:

https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v56n1/v56n1p83.pdf

Prior to that, getting the SSN required giving your birth certificate to the government. If the family wasn't getting government benefits, many didn't bother.

Look up the 25 states that already have voter ID laws, and corresponding free-id programs to avoid being considered a poll tax.

I haven't run into those (I mostly drive in rural areas--in fact, there's no stoplight in my county) -- but I do run into some lights that just change in the middle of the night, for no reason, and then take a really long time to change back to green, despite not even a single car being present / going through.

Lights with sensors have a backup pattern of timed changes so that you won’t get stuck at a light where the sensor isn’t seeing your car.

Okay, well it should be about a 10 second green light, but it's more like 2 minutes.

This is a side street that in high traffic times might see 4 or 5 cars waiting.