Is it feasible to make sapphire smartphone screens which are not too shatter-prone? or not?
Are the properties of the material at that physical thickness and expanse just not good enough?
Or could it be done, if done more carefully?

Never mind the bolloxed business deal and manufacturing process in this case, is it feasible in principle at this stage of physics and engineering knowhow?

If so, isn't someone else going to pick up the slack here?

and promotes more total and more entrenched network-effect monopolies.

If you came up with a way better peer to peer movie sharing site that had better quality and paid the actors and director directly through a tip jar which also funded their next productions (just throw the business process patent my way now, I won't even bother applying :-), you woudn't have a fair chance to compete, because the Flixazon competitor's product would be free for the users and you couldn't get into the market.

And because their's was free to end users, network bandwidth would be swamped with use of their service, leaving only low quality fits and starts of movie streaming for you.

The state forgets YOU!

Yes. It's called the robots.txt file, and google search engine respects its wish not to crawl a site.

And this is exactly how this kind of issue should be managed. If some false and defamatory/libelous content is published on some sites, then the affected party should request its takedown, and if refused, then a criminal charge should be sought, or a civil lawsuit should be brought.

We're on the slippery slope to where if I post a photo of a wall of a building on which slanderous graffiti has been scrawled, I can be held liable for that. Or worse, if my future google-glass-like always-on baseball-cap cam happens to catch the graffiti wall because I glance at it, then again I'm liable.

A place where dirty laundry that has been removed from the google search engine can be listed.

This would rely on some kind of time-based diff, or on Google publishing a list of the links it has removed just prior to removing them.

Wish I had mod points. Insightful as hell. Well said.

By the way, "The Economist" worshippers ("The Economist(ake): Make dollars not sense"), enjoy your 100-dollar-bill salad with diamond croutons and a maraschino penny on top for dinner when the shit hits the fan.

FYI demand in summer in many states is highest with mid-day air conditioning, same time as solar peaks.

The grid as a whole needs to add much more storage, and long distance HVDC transmission lines, to balance intermittent power sources.

My general position is maybe start reducing the incentives for solar, EVs etc once we are at say 50% of where we need to get to in the level of penetration of these technologies. Until then, get any additional needed infrastructure revenue from gradually increasing carbon taxes.

Make sure there are both carbon taxes and affordable alternatives to burning fossil fuels.
That's the recipe for a successful transition of the energy system.

"fees proposed by utilities on customers who install solar and take advantage of net metering, or the ability to sell excess power back to utilities"

this reminds me of the states that are passing taxes on electric vehicles because they don't pay gas tax.

There is a monumental, staggering level of myopia in those who propose and enact measures like these.

We have to transition to ~ 90% of the transport and energy in the economy to non-fossil, in a damn hurry (e.g. 2050), and we are way less than 1% of the way to where we need to get, so why the H3LLLLLL! would anyone be trying to put the brakes on the change already. Insanity, or stupidity of the highest order.

I disagree. One needs the right to use the word "process" in its general but still technical sense: A series of causally related events and states. Often but not always an "organized and constrained" series of causally related events and states. Often but not always achieving or configured/designed/arranged to achieve some particular purpose or end result.

If conventional, present-day computing has borrowed this common English term and specialized it further, fine, but that shouldn't prevent someone correctly using a more general version of the term in a discussion of an alternate information processing architecture, such as the brain's.

The nature of the computational problems being solved by the brain suggests that a good processing architecture would be a hierarchy of processing (with feedback of course) in which parallel processing and serial processing take place at many levels in the hierarchy, with the leaf nodes of processing being massively parallel search/matching/associative traversal, but with serial decision / aggregation of result mixed in there. Map reduce anyone?

But that sort of mixed parallel serial computing should happen at different granularities up and down various hierarchies of functional processing organization, and it would not be surprising if at one of those many levels, there were about 50 concurrent instances of computing processes running. Further down toward primitive feature recognition and primitive feature associative inference there would almost certainly be many many more parallel computations going on, feeding up into the higher-level model formation and higher-level concept formation and inference processes.

at the bottom of the classic slashdot homepage.

9.5 out of 10 on the annoying and intelligence-insulting scale.

Dice please exterminate this local outbreak of this putrid Internet fungal growth.

Hey, maybe we don't even need those credit card companies in the mix at all.

May all those who are not earth-huggers be spun off into space by their own inertia.

Or, you could use grid-scale energy storage, combined with low-loss HVDC long-distance transmission. HDVC lines can be over 2000km long, bigger than an individual weather system, so a network of them can redistribute intermittent wind and solar output effectively.

Our governments, and, oops, those who elected them.

The kind of target they are going for (especially the 2050 one) is in the ballpark of the kind of target we would all have to hit to avoid a complete screw-up on this file.

Are you a betting person?

I think it's great what Denmark's doing, but it saddens me to realize that political will in the rest of the world is so far far off the mark.