Startide does give some context to make some of Reef's anomalies more interesting earlier than Reef by itself would reveal. (Don't want to say more to avoid spoilers.)
Not zero reason. Some people with certain disabilities could benefit from such a device. (Stephen Hawking for instance, was limited to about 10 words per minute with his button interface. A brain interface on a similar patient could be closer to normal conversion speed.)
It's like looking through frosted glass. If you're looking at someone, and trying to figure out what they are doing. Frosted glass means you can kinda see their overall posture, and some big movements. That's like the skull cap. In order to use it you would have to make large changes in your brain patterns so it can be detected. But put clear glass, even a small window, and you can see exactly. Even a small window on the right place will let you read their lips, or watch their hands. That's like the implant. Even though the implant reads a very small part of the brain, the data it gets is very clean and gives more precise control to the user.
Our eye perceives color as a mix of red, green, blue. The lowest color of the rainbow is red (hue 0 degrees on a color wheel) but our red cones have another sensitivity just above blue, so the rainbow shows as violet (hue 270 degrees) when both blue and red cones are triggered. But here, blue is triggered more than red. Then the rainbow extends into the ultraviolet which doesn't trigger any of our receptors. But the color wheel still has another 90 degrees or so of hue where red gets stronger and blue is weaker. These are not pure spectral colors, because they must activate both red and blue cones at different frequencies, not just a single frequency like violet does.
The Fourier transform is a way to convert from a raw waveform into all of its distinct parts, and back again. Computers do this for some types of sound data compression, such as MP3. Your ears do this (in the cochlea) when converting the physical movement of sound waves into electrical signals for your brain.
But the fees for check processing were already baked into the system before credit cards even existed, so they're not allowed to charge extra for a check, no matter how much they want to be rid of them.
There have been US court cases where arbitration clauses were voided if they weren't prominently visible outside the box before purchase. Dang vs Samsung
There have been US court cases where arbitration clauses were voided if they weren't prominently visible outside the box before purchase. Dang vs Samsung
Fun fact: pretty much all the helium we have access to comes from alpha decay of heavier atoms, such as natural uranium. An alpha radiation particle is just a "naked" and fast moving helium nucleus. (Missing the electrons.) When this happens deep in the earth, it quickly runs into something, stops moving, and picks up some electrons to make it helium, which can accumulate in certain rocks.
GMail has an option to snooze an email until a later date. It disappears from your inbox, (but could still be accessed from the snoozed folder) and then shows up again on the requested date.
Startide does give some context to make some of Reef's anomalies more interesting earlier than Reef by itself would reveal. (Don't want to say more to avoid spoilers.)