Sounds like it could make a dandy anti-personnel "mine" - a "hive" with a swarm of bumblebee sized robots that that fly out when disturbed and inject neurotoxins repeatedly into any and all humans in range. With a flight time limited to two minutes, it's self limiting in range, horrendous in effect, and my kill many more than just the poor unfortunate who triggered them.

Could be a battlefield menace. Maybe even remotely triggered like a claymore mine can be.

Makes sense to use an FPGA while designing what you want - after that it is far, far cheaper to make ASICs (and they can run a lot faster too). Similar to 3D printing - get the bugs out of your design for a part, but you don't make a million of them with a 3D printer - you get them stamped out instead. Faster, cheaper. By the time you get to making the ASICs you have fixed whatever mistakes you made in the design. Screw ups do happen, but they are very rare. And you can still update the ASIC design and crank out replacements.

as for the rest, billions ARE being spent on data centers, that is true. The chips are not going to be boat anchors in a few years - they are going to be considered to be 100% depreciated in, IIRC, 5 years, so to the IRS they are now worthless. In reality those chips may be running 10 years from now, still cranking out 'tokens' the owner gets paid for. And none of them would make the investment if it was not going to be profitable - they can run the numbers.

So, what's the fair use then? Parody? Are you making fun of his tree?? That's so RUDE!

That's right Tony! It's not all black and white.

Indeed. The Navy used to operate blimps using helium for the lift. Hence a strategic reserve. Kind of like how England kept a strategic reserve of forest for making the masts and spars for sailing ships and men-of-war before evolving to a navy run on internal combustion. Eventually, the government realized we are never going to use blimps again for military purposes, so the strategic reserve was liquidated.

I don't know about pay, but the new AI mode is certainly adding value to me. However, I was NOT searching for something to buy (i.e. make Google ad revenue).

I just ran into a bunch of error symptoms on a Signal Analyzer, and asked Google about it. Got a super detailed and specific answer with a set of troubleshooting / fixing steps to take, in order.

Probably more actionable info in that 30 seconds than I could have gotten out of our SA supplier (we have support contracts) in months. So to me, it's adding a lot of value. For Google? Not so much.

I wouldn't be hung up on the number of satellites. It's a better comparison to compare the capabilities of the different constellations. Starlink is much more capable, but for the amount of satellites they have, Globalstar does all right. But the BIG item is the spectrum Globalstar has control of - that's most if not all of the value.

I would venture to say that a squad would be 9 "soldiers" - 4 x 1 dog + 1 handler / section lead. 4 sections plus 1 squad leader and there you are. 2 squads = 10 men and 8 dogs.

3 MREs per day per human, plus 2 per day (suitably modified to support canine nutrition) per dog, minus any 'foraging', should feed them well enough. War dogs often carry packs so they can help carry supplies - though I'd like to see some form of quick release so the dog can shed its pack quickly in need.

NOT a chicken and egg problem. The real genius is building the two businesses together - you need to build a large capacity for space launch, and make it less wasteful (i.e. reusable rockets) to get the cost down. BUT to get costs down you need volume. So you start your own business that needs a lot of launch capacity, paid for by your customers. The need for huge volumes of space launch capacity will come, so later your simply expand your customer base to fill your launches.

IIRC (and I may be wrong) Rockefeller did something similar - bought up all the oil refineries and built railroads with the sole purpose of moving oil from the oil wells of others to the refineries he owned. And other cargo on those railroads came later.

Maybe look at it more of "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps" than a chicken and egg situation.

Anyone thought to build massive solar power arrays ON the grounds of old nuke plants???? Problem solved!

As in mine. Seems simple enough - you need an ID to get a ballot, and are crossed off the current roles by the attendants who look you up, so no repeat customers. You mark your ballot, no identifying information on it, just the votes. Then feed it into the counting machine and are shown the door out - with police there to make sure you do in fact exit.

The counting machine tallies the votes and there is no reason it can't be updating a master count somewhere for near-instant vote updates.

Simple, anonymous, with the paper ballots there for re-counting if necessary.

With everyone at the polling place watching everyone else there is no way to stuff the ballot box or cheat. No way to vote multiple times (unless impersonating others with fake IDs, and even that would be found out if the others showed up to vote themselves).

Still cannot grok why anything more complex, (or good god involving Windows!), would be desired by anyone.

I think the idea is that it is a safety net. If you have a job you pay into it and it mostly cancels out (probably though pay more in than get out, so it's a tax to you). If you lose your nice job, the payments continue and your payments back in get cut off. Giving you an income again - immediately - instead of applying for aid and jumping through hoops while the bills pile up. In that way, it is superior to what we have in the US today. In most other ways I think it's generally infeasible, but that's another discussion altogether.

Well said Charlie! Getting old is not much fun, physically. Many don't make allowances for that. My knees are complaining enough days now that I'm going to look into the new powered exoskeletons in a few years. Still early days for them, but they show promise.

Not at all - I've done the Crawford trail hike up (and down) Mt. Washington in New Hampshire with friends. 18 miles of Mountain terrain in one day. At the top you can get souvenirs like bumper stickers for your car: "This car climbed Mt. Washington".

Unfortunately they did not have any T-shirts like: "Forget the car - this BODY climbed Mt. Washington".

Pity - I would have bought one. There being an auto roadway to the summit in no way diminished our satisfaction.

Found the other Amiga user!