Indeed, this is such a central point that it's made clear in the first chapter:

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Remarkable that Asimov could overlook this.

The review seems completely consumed by professional bitterness to the point where it becomes laughable. By the 1980s the methods of KGB, Stasi, Securitate etc. were well known in the west; how can he put this on paper and not realize he was being a complete fool:

> [the governmnet in 1984] has a system of volunteer spies in which children report on their parents, and neighbours on each other. This cannot possibly work well since eventually everyone reports everyone else and it all has to be abandoned.

In fact, the human powered system of total state surveillance worked remarkably well, it was one of the few things that did work in most communist countries - because it was paramount for state security and enormous resources were dedicated to it.

In every block of flats, every factory floor, every friend circle there was an informer who wrote down weekly reports about who is making political jokes, who is listening to Radio Free Europe, who is planning to flee abroad or has access to contraband meat and razor blades and so on. These informers were themselves controlled by blackmail and fear, were fanatical supporters or were simply doing the work in exchange for favors or goods. Any individual harboring intentions to overthrow the system was thus isolated, he knew that any such talk would quickly get him sidelined from his job, evicted from his flat, sometimes declared mentally unstable and committed, and finally, if nothing else worked, disappeared.

The entire review reads like a clumsy attempt to soil Orwell's legacy, that was already, by that time, shaping to be far more significant than Asimov's own.

The historian Hubertus Knabe made the horrifying observation of the film "The Lives of Others" that "There was a Schindler. There was no Wiesler", i.e. that in the whole history of the DDR they didn't in fact have a Stasi officer turning against the system from a crisis of conscience, as Wiesler does in the film. To prevent such long wolves they took the simple expedient of always having two officers performing the surveillance, so not just the target but also the Stasi men on the case were monitored.

Asimov is right to think that the costs were ruinous, as was the area of agricultural land sacrificed to the restricted zone near the border wall. But it was very much a price they were willing to pay.

Absolutely! I'd read LotR many times before I first read it aloud as a bedtime story season and was abashed to find how much I'd been skipping over, mostly parenthetical details of geography and world-building, while hastening in pursuit of the plot, like the holder of a big box of bonbons gorging target than savouring.

Exactly - it's somewhat akin to listening to an album in one sitting vs the songs on shuffle mixed with others; but even moreso.

It wasn't until I had an audiobook version that I "sat through" all the poetry and tree-descriptions, and it was worth it.

Both Voyagers left the ecliptic plane with their final gravitational slingshots (Voyager 1 went north, Voyager 2 went south so only the Canberra radio dishes can communicate with it) so even when Earth is further from them than the sun there's 35 degrees of separation.

Searching for the tech angle... "the police had used a helicopter with a heat-seeking camera, and could see that some of the waste was indeed starting to decompose." - a less exciting but cheaper and more informative option could have been donning overalls and rubber boots and taking a spade and a probe thermometer across it

They'll add a footnote explaining that the term "flight" should be understood as a non-refundable ticket in a transport lottery. Similarly to how most sales of entertainment now are providing you with a revokable license to access it, rather than a reusable copy in your possession.

This is your receipt for your husband. And this is my receipt for your receipt.

We're all in this together, kid.

But unless you have a way of slowing down again you'll never see anything of your destination, just the briefest of flares of light as you sail past. And if you do have a way that involves anything like physics that we recognise, you've brought along a huge rest mass that then got accelerated to near light speed. Probably your civilization needs to be approaching Kardashev Level 2 to pull this off.

The article notes that this data would reveal abortions or miscarriages, and that in some states this information is used as input for criminal prosecution.

Additionally, using implicit hormone levels to adjust the ads that people with menstruations see is uniquely predatory and manipulative. It also serves to "out" trans men when this data can be tied to a profile of someone who as chosen a non-female gender on other online platforms.

Advertising by itself is directly harmful. Its secondary effects on the world are catastrophic. Adding a new layer of "this person is PMSing, let's give them makeup ads because they're feeling insecure" is just evil.

And it starts with the all-too-familiar "Chesterton's Fence" arrogance of the domain expert who sees something done wrong and presumes that this is due to the ignorance or laziness of the doers, only to learn that there are sensible decisions made by sensible people behind it.

Thank you for giving me the phrase "Chesterton's Fence".

Long needed.

If you like the phrase, you should read https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ to get the full context on what it means.

The only reason that the subsurface rock is cooler than magma is being able to conduct heat through to a cooler surface. When that surface becomes exterminatingly hot and remains so for a while the subsurface will be heating up too. Since the sun is estimated to remain a red giant for about one Gy it will become hotter than the surface.