Yup, Dahl did scifi too.

This will be the first perpetual motion machine in space! Normally perpetual motion machines exist only in patent filings and in almost functional condition in the back yards of crackpots.

Are there enough assets to cover everything? The liquidity problem had to do with needing to liquidate bonds, which had lost a bunch of value, so to liquidate them they sold them at a loss. This means that maybe there are no longer enough assets to cover everything.
If the bank bought $100 worth of bonds with investor and depositor money, then sold them for $90 then somebody has to lose that $10, and that somebody is not the depositors.

They work as door stops, bookends, monitor risers, any number of things.
On a more practical level, if they have a function that does not require unsafe exploitable software to access the internet, then yes. If you are talking about a general purpose web browser machine then your problem is going to be finding a browser that is not vulnerable to just visiting the wrong infested web server.
Most exploits that get consumer PCs these days are not poking at external vulnerabilities in OSs, because most consumer PCs are being some type of natting router, and incoming ports are not accessible from the internet. Most exploits are vulnerabilities in software that reaches out from the PC and asks for things from the internet, which can then exploit internal vulnerabilities in the OS. There are no modern browsers that I know of that will run on Windows XP.
An old linux system? I guess unless you have an emotional attachment or a very special piece of hardware I don't understand why. I get the emotional attachment, I still have a 386SX with Win3.11 on it, I just don't try to get to the internet with it, and haven't since I before I quit dialing up to AOL.
I remember when I gave up using my SGI Indigo 2 as my primary machine because of loss of browser support on Irix, giving up on real worstation hardware was rough. When Apple switched to Intel and OSX and browser support for PowerPC disappeared I was really bummed.
If you want to do things on old hardware/software you just have to find things that don't involve direct internet access.
On the topic of firewalls for protection, there are firewalls capable of deep packet inspection, and even sandboxing downloads before you let them in, but they are always playing catch up with the bad guys, they cost $Ks per year in maintenance fees for all the updates, and if you lock them down tight enough to probably protect a vulnerable machine the user experience on that machine is going to be abysmal.
So I guess the answer actually is "no".

I am glad I wasn't the only one who immediately thought of Art Linkletter. I am not at all versed in AI development, but must admit to some curiosity about the advantages/disadvantages of letting the AI digest its own development infrastructure. Is "self awareness" necessary for the AI to filter itself in response to these types of seeding prompts?
I am also very concerned, given the human tendency to trust machines without understanding them in a mechanical sense, that we will trust data machines the same way, and there will be decisions made without external verification that harm people. An obvious example is AI based stock trading, but there are many other decisions people make after doing some research that can affect them in various ways, and a publicly accessible AI like this takes the "search" out of research.

I used the term corporations in the interests of brevity, in my mind, when I use the term corporations I am referring to organizations that are owned by shareholders and as such are beholden to those shareholders. In current societies where business is driven by capitalist ideals these corporations produce whatever they produce, whether it be quality or junk, solely to drive dollars toward the other organizations that actually hold the stock, or act as proxy for those who do.
As I age and learn more history I have really come to question the drive to efficiency. Efficiency != Good. Making more widgets that cost less with less manpower might be good, but it might also be bad. I expect in most cases it is both.
I feel the same way about growth. I think the larger corporations get the more increased growth tends toward a net negative result. I personally would rather have more smaller corporations making similar but not identical widgets. I think a society benefits from a variety of solutions to the same problem, corporate growth possibly leads to less expensive widgets, but society as a whole is lessened by the decrease in variety.
And a simple fact does remain, as efficiency increases less people are employed to produce the same number of widgets. I think if a company is profitable, then they are efficient enough. I am not a luddite saying stop improving your processes, I am just saying that efficiency and growth as the primary objectives does not improve society. Making a better quality widget and employing a larger portion of the population does improve society, maybe at the cost of less value to the shareholders.
We have plenty of jobs left that efficiency and technology still do need to significantly improve. One that always bugs me is mining. Every nasty dangerous underground mining job we eliminate with technology is a net good. That is an extreme case, but there are a lot of jobs that are inherently dangerous, and replacing those people with technology and processes that separate the people from the danger are good.

Because animators have discovered that if they don't make enough money to buy groceries they have to find another way to live. There seems to be a corporate trend toward trying to use automation to solve labor shortages that are created by the corporations own unwillingness to pay a decent wage, and animation is an easy target because many animators are project hires not full time permanent hires. Animation, like other creative arts, tends to be populated with people who really want to do what they are doing. This also makes them an easier target for exploitation.
An interesting twist to this is that the people writing the AI engines to do this are also passionate artists in their own right, and also fall into that category of easy to exploit project based hires.

I really enjoyed The Chronicles of Amber, but have found very few people have read them, even the scifi and fantasy nerds I know.
I hope this gets an honest treatment, unlike The Wheel of Time (didn't make it through the first episode, they just weren't the characters I love) or Shannara (I know, The Sword of Shannara was derivative to the edge of plagiarism, but the video series was just formulaic pablum.)

These companies could have contributed capabilities to OSM, and built on that base, but instead they are going to pull from Open Street Map and build out proprietary capabilities, because $$.
I am not against innovation and monetization, but I really hope that OSM doesn't now wither on the vine because of the shadow this new GEO API or whatever they are building. With the resources they bring to the table I am sure there will be some significant improvements in map freshness and especially real time data. Microsoft has been playing with Satellite imagery and mapping longer than anyone else not concealed in military secrecy, and TomTom brings a lot of map tech, AWS brings horsepower, and Meta brings people data, so the members of this coalition make a lot of sense.

Was a machine my dad built to control an industrial process at work in the 70s. It ran on a Z80 with a hand written boot loader. It spoke machine code, in octal and had 7 segment LED displays that showed address and contents. It used a numeric keypad for input. On the top of it was a breadboard with some i/o, and he had various input and output modules that were appropriate for what he was controlling, so things like pushbuttons and stepper outputs. Some of the input modules were raw, some of them were smart, like debounced switches, so you didn't have to debounce them in code.
People talk about learning to program BASIC, I remember being excited when we got a TRS80 Model 4 and I could program it in assembler instead of raw machine code. The Z80 machine still exists, he got to keep it after the work project was finished.

But will be a lot more useful when the holodoctor gets a mobile emitter.

If I wanted to see what was behind an annoying screen I would just open the freezer. I wonder if the companies doing this are tracking freezer door open time and whether they will notice a difference in energy consumption because people open all the doors to find what they want.

That kinda means they have the same voltage as a AA, a C and a D cell, as well as any other cell using either carbon zinc or the ubiquitous alkaline chemistry. The real problem here however is that a capacitor doesn't have a "voltage". If you apply any voltage to a capacitor it will charge to that voltage, at a rate controlled by whatever series resistance exists. The voltage is only limited by the breakdown voltage of the dielectric used to separate the electrodes.
The headline completely misses the significance of the paper. What the paper is describing is a tubular electrolytic supercapacitor, in which the electrolyte is blood. The capacitor seems to have a breakdown voltage of ~1.6V, which leads to the misleading headline. They also describe a mechanism by which the capacitor can self charge, basically by using a blood based battery type reaction.
This is indeed a necessary advance for internal nano sensors, but if you read TFA they point out some necessary parallel advancements, and mention at least one potential hazard.
There is no mechanism for communication with these nano structures, no methodology to actually tell where they are in the body, and if you use blood as a component in a chemical reaction it will damage the blood. The paper says they tested for some blood breakdown and clotting mechanisms, but I expect there are a bunch of years of testing even before they get permission for human trials, and of course that is only after they manage to solve the communication challenges.
I don't mean to say this is not important science, just that this (the power supply) is one small piece of some very hard long term science. I wonder if this technology could be used to build a "blood battery" that could be used in things like subcutaneous blood glucose monitors allowing a more permanent install without the need for external charging. That would be a useful application that could be used in the near term while the nano sensor applications iterate through the development process, however I imagine building an array of these things to power macro devices would greatly increase the blood damage and clotting effects. I guess a blood glucose monitor that caused strokes would have to be considered "bad".

We have a company which by the reports coming out amidst legal actions and historical allegations is thoroughly permeated with misogyny and abuse. So the president steps down and two men even closer to the systemic problem take over?
If such a thing as a tech culture exist, how can those of us in it settle for less than the complete replacement of the entire management team from outside?
The fact that this has persisted as long as it has, with none of the management team blowing the whistle to stop it, demonstrates that the entire management team is unfit to lead people. To change a culture you have to do more than remove the figurehead and shuffle the insiders underneath.
I look around and see a lot of noise and "me too" but when the dust clears some rich people have changed places but no one has actually been hung up as an example of our society holding people accountable for their actions.
When I see ex millionaires living in mobile homes doing minimum wage jobs because society will no longer tolerate them holding authority over anyone, and their fortunes have actually been taken from them to recompense the victims of the abuse, then I may believe there has been change. Until then I see lawyers and PR firms making lots of money, and millionaires at worst taking their millions somewhere else and going on as normal.
In almost all cases these presidents and CEOs are allowed to step down and take their full severance packages with them. This is not accountability. This is whitewash.

So Tony Stark is intimately involved with the data availability to the people making decisions on who to proactively kill. That can't be a problem.