Fossil fuels are finite too. (Also "rare Earths" aren't particularly rare despite their name). There are battery technologies that don't use cobalt. There are technologies under development that use sodium which is enormously abundant.

There are other types of battery technology being developed for stationary storage - for mass power storage, you don't have quite the constraints you have for mobile power like an electric car so you can use materials that would not be optimal for use in a car or a mobile phone. Unconstrained by weight, you can use flow batteries (some of which have been developed with tremendous energy densities and very high numbers of charge cycles compared to conventional lithium ion type batteries).

Batteries are a *huge* part of our future of electrical generation. It might take a while before the grid is transformed, but it took a long time for the grid to develop in the first place anyway (how many years of engineering development did it take to arrive at the modern highly efficient combined cycle gas turbine power plant, something that would have been scoffed at in the 1970s?)

Obesity doesn't make your legs longer nor your body taller. Someone so obese that their stomach would touch the seat in front probably doesn't have the mobility to even get tot the airport, let alone in the plane.

The airline easyJet has a load factor of 95% (so nearly all of their flights are totally full). Ryanair is probably similar.

The A321 isn't the A320's successor - they didn't stop selling the A320 then begin producing the A321. The A320 is a family of aircraft, all being made concurrently (so the current models being sold are the A318, A319, A320, A321 - numbers smaller than 320 are a shrink and numbers greater than 320 are a stretch of the base A320 model).

You must have people in much worse than average health, then. Around here there are plenty of over 50s, and there's hardly any sick days. We have no problem planning. Only being 75% certain that people will be well enough to work four days per cycle sounds like you have a catastrophically unhealthy workforce at any age.

The production countries will notice: undoubtedly demand for their products will fall with an increased price due to tarriffs.

However, wind generating capacity does tend to be the greatest when we need lots of electricity. We tend to need the most power during the wet and windy winter months...when the wind bit of the wet and windy means wind generation is at or nearly at peak production.

A number of sci-fi writers have already explored the topic of us creating something which provides the perfect breeding ground for the kinds of diseases which would wipe us out. I believe there's merit in considering these possibilities. We don't yet have enough data to determine if GMO crops are going to produce some new vile bug which would prove disastrous, however findings now state that advances against pests and organisms (fungal, viral or bacterial) only beat the organism for a few years, before they adapt (clever little buggers) and start over from square one. What do we do if we create a host for a super bug? Not like we can modify our own DNA every few years to keep ahead of the game.

Google aren't merely offering their services, they are attaching exactly the same strings that Microsoft used to attach. Microsoft used to say: if you want to ship Windows, you may only ship Windows on all of the PCs you sell. If you ship one with OS/2 or Linux on, then the deal is off.

Google are doing the same thing. If you want to ship phones with Android and Google Play (which is increasingly necessary for many apps to just work), then *all* your phones must ship with this, and none with a competitive operating system or environment.

This is the monopoly abuse they are being punished for. They are not being punished for making good apps, they are being punished for using their dominant position (which on the lower end is 100% dominance) to prevent competition from even getting going.

What where they even thinking to launch a smear site like that? It's certain to backfire: the message such a site gives is that RISC-V is a serious challenger to ARM, if ARM has to go out and smear it, and people who've never even heard of RISC-V will now be checking it out because this kind of story gets picked up by the computing press and gives a huge amount of free publicity to RISC-V.

Because Apple isn't in a monopolistic position. Apple has quite a small marketshare, but Google have an effective monopoly (and an actual monopoly for non-premium devices). It's not about whether Apple is doing anything better or worse, it's about whether Google has an effective monopoly or not. If the situation were reversed (iOS being on 90% of devices), then the EU would be going after Apple.

No, investing isn't gambling, it's not black and white like that.

There's more of a scale. At one end you have "gambling" and at the other you have "investing". At the far gambling end of the spectrum you have games of chance (e.g. roulette), binary options (which is gambling dressed up to look like investing), slot machines etc - basically all the types of things where the house always win. At the other end you have things like bonds, traditional long term buy and hold in blue chip companies etc. There's still some risk but on that end of the spectrum, it's not a zero sum game nor "the house always wins".

If you say all investing is gambling because there's some risk and can never be a sure thing, then you get to the reductio ad absurdum argument that absolutely everything is gambling, e.g keeping your money in a savings account is also gambling because that's not a sure thing either.

The murder rate in the USA is around 5 times higher than what it is in Western Europe, so there is some justification to the "murderous pricks" reputation.

To be fair, there were 17250 murders alone in the US (not including suicides) in 2017, versus 723 murders (of all kinds) in the UK in 2017. Turning that into a percentage of population, the murder rate is almost 5 times higher in the US than in the UK, so the view that you're all just a bunch of murderous fucks does have at least some justification.

I'd agree. In my experience, as well as in lots of news stories, the reaction of most companies to ai "failures" would be to threaten prosecution of anyone (especially employees) who releases the information to the public. They and probably the courts would all agree that such info is and should be trade secrets and proprietary.