But what's the use if the returned Mars samples just re-enter over Moscow and explode?

The risk of reputational harm is very real. Whenever a big company or government releases a model, you can bet a lot of 'journalists' will be trying to prod it into saying something offensive so they can print the headline "Microsoft AI is racist" etc.

Is there on vs off-peak pricing? For example if you don't have an EV and got one thus quadrupling your electricity, would your bill quadruple or not so much if you charged it at night?

They are working on it

"California Tops US EV Adoption: 25% EV Share Of Total Sales In H1 2023"

https://insideevs.com/news/688...

This story from a couple months ago says "Texas is the only state in the U.S. that generates more than a third of its electricity from wind and solar energy."

https://www.newsweek.com/texas...

And yet, electricity in Texas cost 11.36 cents / kWh vs 19.90 cents / kWh in California in Jan 2024.

https://www.electricchoice.com...

So where does that leave the idea that renewable energy must be very expensive?

Also I'm curious where 40 cents above came from.

I won't defend the wording of the headline, but it is an important threshold, because it's the point at which the conversion to renewable energy gets harder and more expensive.

As long as renewables are just cutting into demand for fossil fuels, you don't have to worry about storage / demand shaping / discarding energy. But now California has reached that point.

That was 12 years ago. A 12 year out of date critique of a web technology that has had ongoing language updates and two entire rewrites in that interval should be viewed with some suspicion. Also, are you really just citing the title of the article and none of the content?

I'm not even defending PHP here, just questioning lazy kneejerk, "but it sucked once, so now I hate it forever" thinking.

I think that occurred to the prosecution also:

Apart from three years in prison, Ahmed was also sentenced to three years of supervised release, and ordered to forfeit $12.4 million "and a significant quantity of cryptocurrency and pay restitution to the Crypto Exchange and Nirvana in the amount of over $5 million," according to the prosecutors' press release.

Not sure whether he actually has all he stole +$5M, or if this constitutes a financial death sentence.

Apple's market dominance in the U.S. means that people with Android phones face significant headwinds. Being the only Android user in a group chat is its own special Hell. That lack of interoperability works against Apple in places where Android phones are more established. It is hard to convince people that your phone is so much better than theirs when every time you put a picture in a group chat it looks like you took the picture on a flip phone from 1995. Everyone else's pictures look fine. In these cases Apple is clearly the problem, and it is a bad look for Apple.

That doesn't stop iPhones from being a status symbol, and there are certain parts of the population, where all of the rich and powerful people have iPhones, where being part of the crowd is worth the price of entry. However, in a country where 90+% of the population is using Android you have to be pretty darn snooty to justify buying an iPhone. I suspect that is a very hard market to sell into.

Where it exists, competition is the solution, as your experience indicates.

I hope some of this federal incentive is being used to grow competition.

Maybe we need to have a fiber network as a regulated infrastructure monopoly, and have competition for internet service over that infrastructure.

If you're happy about it, why? If Apple is pushed out of China, either by protectionism or simply cost, what do we gain by that?

Changing population and miles driven per person don't matter to their calculations because they are based on vehicle miles traveled:

Traffic flow data were obtained from the Caltrans Performance Measurement System (PeMS). (44) Data for 693 PeMS observation sites within the BEACO2N region of influence as of 2018 were included in our assessments. We calculated vehicle miles traveled (VMT) as the product of the vehicle count at each PeMS site and the segment length to the next PeMS site...

For fVMT, the PEMS data set was used as a proxy for vehicle miles traveled in the region. (44) Preprocessing of the two data sets is described in Section 2.7. We conduct a simple multiple linear regression (MLR) to derive the coefficients m1, m2, m3, and c, using the posterior derived hourly anthropogenic emissions as emsanthro. The value of m1 was 2.3, which means about half of the observed seasonal trend is explained by the PG&E reported natural gas consumption. The constant emissions (c = econstant) were 156 tC/h. The term m2t + m3 can be factored out, and the rate at which this value changes over the 5-year study period is a reasonable proxy for the rate of change of overall vehicle fleet efficiency (average CO2 emissions per vehicle mile traveled).

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.10...

"Over here if the film start time is given as 6pm there will be adverts"

If the "showtime" is 6pm here and you show up 15 mins early you'll get 15 mins of adverts off a digital projector and some silly "movie quiz" bits. When the main projector starts and the lights go out at show time we get about 4 or 5 more ads (with much higher production value) that last about a total of 10 mins max (usually about 5 mins) and one of them is for the concession stand and one specifically for Fanta Sodas (ugh). This includes the "no talking", "no phones" and "no laser pointers" PSAs and MAYBE a local "donation" request.

The trailers are rarely less than 15 mins before the "main feature".

Yes, the ads are annoying. RARELY they are entertaining -- but it happens. I usually take note of the ads and promise myself never to solicit any services or products from them.

I'm not so sure a lower-tech strategy would have saved Germany. They simply didn't have enough men to keep sending wave after wave to die in battle, so they had to make the most of each soldier. Too bad for them they chose the strategy of invading in every direction and trying to occupy and hold millions of square miles - not something a small number of elite forces can do. The US doesn't have this goal.

Secondly, the WWII wunderwaffe was invented, but at Los Alamos. Beating us to the Atom Bomb and making even a few dozen really would have been a game changer. I hate to think of the British Isles. Could it have happened? The first paragraph of this reference has a nice long-list of people who probably would have been helping them instead of us, had Naziism not chosen to drive them away.

https://digitalrepository.unm....

True, that was the greatest wunderwaffe in all of history. No doubt it influenced, maybe distorted, our views.

It has been eye-opening as multiple waves of initially game-changing weapons seem to yield only a short-term advantage in Ukraine, as the other side adapts tactics and develops countermeasures.

If we have a major conflict anytime soon and our lead in stealth turns out to be not as big as thought or not very durable, and the F35 is quickly rendered vulnerable, we're going to be in a world of hurt.