One good timesaver: debug in the easiest environment that you can reproduce the bug in. For instance, if it’s an issue with a website on an iPad, first see if you reproduce in chrome using the responsive tools in web developer. If that doesn’t work, see if it reproduces in desktop safari. Then the iPad simulator, and only then the real hardware. Saves a lot of frustration and time, and each step towards the actual hardware eliminates a whole category of bugs.
But it’s based on a misunderstanding. Xenomorph just means “alien”— it wouldn’t make any sense for that to be the term for that specific alien, because their existence isn’t common knowledge.
In "Aliens", when Hudson (or was it Hicks?) asks, "is this another bug hunt?" the lieutenant says, (paraphrasing) "there may be a xenomorph involved".
I interpret this to mean that
(a) The marines have previously fought alien creatures of some kind (and they had no problem dealing with them).
(b) They used the term "xenomorph" to mean any alien creature--not specifically the titular alien, which they had never before encountered.
So I agree. Calling it "the Xenomorph" is a misunderstanding. At best it's like calling something "the Beast", or calling all ships of a certain size "dreadnoughts".
The Marines also referenced sexual relations with "Arcturians" which might be human colonists or sentient aliens.
I really like your point about the Marines having fought/hunted/exterminated other "bugs". It casts their bravado in a different light. Even after seeing catastrophic damage from "acid for blood", the Marines are still very confident, which after beating other alien species, makes perfect sense. It's only when they get into the nest do they start getting scared.
I love the scene where the marines go in for the first time. They start out well-disciplined, well-trained badass marines, but things start to go wrong one by one. First, they have to put away their rifles (too close to the fusion reactor), then they see movement on the motion-detector but can't see anything ("Maybe they don't show up in infrared"). Once Apone gets killed, the entire unit falls apart. They come out shell-shocked and demoralized.
It's just an adjective. It would literally be like calling your aliens "humanoids". It describes a shape, literally "alien-shaped", probably because all the other animal-shape adjectives were inadequate.
It isn't a portmanteau, it's a classic Greek word construction (an ordinary expression of classic Greek morphology). "Morph" generally just means "shape" as a Greek root so "xenomorph" is more accurately "alien-shaped". Which gets back to it being a very generic term said in a fancy way (like "we don't even know if it is an alien, we just know it is alien-shaped"), like much technical and scientific jargon will do when it goes to constructing Greek words to describe something ("gynomorph" => "woman-shaped"; to call to a different sci-fi horror Species).
Solar is getting cheaper by the day, batteries are getting cheaper and more efficient by the day, and there's a ton of money pouring into research. Maybe I'm crazy, but I can see a future, maybe a few decades from now, when power is "too cheap to meter" because of renewables.
Electricity use is only one part of energy consumption. Transportation costs, production costs, and even food generation are all included in the umbrella. Also, "costs" aren't just referring to dollars spent, but also environmental impact. Having cheap electricity is only a small part of the equation, and barely a relevant one at that.
Energy is roughly transferable - if you have cheap electricity you can use it to produce cheap process heat, synthetic fuels, food, environmental cleanup, etc. You get enough solar panels for a low enough price and all the other problems become trivial.
Electricity is already priced negatively in some markets at some times of the day because of the mismatch between demand and supply from intermittent wind and solar generation. The trick here is how to design an energy storage solution that can exploit that mismatch. It’s the ultimate buy-low sell-high opportunity.
The trick is to design energy-intensive industries so that they can use DC power for a few hours each day and to site them at the PV/wind farms.
This is already happening with desalination and hydrogen production via electrolysis, and hydrocarbon production (for carbon-neutral transport fuel) is being piloted too. Future likely applications include electrolytic refining of iron ore to the metal. Cheap electricity is going to enable new industries we haven't thought of yet.
Fox news has been beating out the other networks in ratings for a while now though. I have no love for fox news, but it doesn't seem true that they wouldn't last. Even more far right news networks, that have been cut out of the normal media distribution channels seem to be doing fine with organic viewer support.
If Fox news ratings fall, it's because they are bleeding viewers as they attempt to move back to the center and ditch Trump. Notice that Carlson consistently has the highest ratings of any fox news show...
