Pretty sure China was not buying all of Nvidia's chips. I hardly need to explain why. Nvidia does have other customers here and there.

It is a remarkable stretch to claim that copyright extends to turning something on. Copyright doesn't deal with that sort of thing at all. You could say that he did not have a license to turn the device on, but you cannot have a license violation against a party you have no privity of contract with, you can only go after them for some sort of alleged copyright violation.

There is a *reason* why every software company on the planet tries to have users accept a license electronically before installing or using a software package - namely, if they do not there is probably no contract between them at all, and the First Sale Doctrine or something like it generally applies, and the purchaser gets to do all sorts of innocent things (like reverse engineer software for example) that the publisher would prefer to prohibit.

If the end user did not actually purchase the item, things might be different, and that is why it is also common for software packages to include a notice that if the user does not like the offered license terms to please return it to the place of purchase for a full refund. And on occasion shrinkwrap licenses have been enforced in the United States at least, but guess how likely a shrinkwrap license is to apply to the purchaser of a surplus item? As far as I am aware a shrinkwrap license has never been applied to someone who acquired a previously paid for copy of a software package. A vendor might refuse to support such grey market items but that is an entirely different issue.

All that said, if Nintendo is the lawful owner of the item in question, he has to turn the item over to them anyway, and whether he turns it on briefly is irrelevant as long as he does not make an unauthorized copy, or public performance, or something like that.

There are some states especially in the Northeast where natural gas is extraordinarily expensive and has to be shipped in LNG form to local ports because of opposition to expanding supply pipelines. In most of the rest of the country, however, natural gas is cheaper or nearly so than it has been for about twenty years now, down from peak prices by at least a factor of five, partly due to fracking and partly due to producers getting very good at it.

Across most of the country natural gas is replacing coal for baseload power and that is the number one reason why net CO2 emissions have been in decline in the United States for about three decades now.

Sorry for your loss. Dating apps are indeed garbage. If I were single, I'd be talking to every attractive person I saw at a grocery store, museum, out walking, etc. I'm an introvert and it makes me nervous AF, but I've also realized that pretty much anyone who agrees to meet for a drink is already interested, so that makes it easier. I mean I hate doing job interviews too, but it's just part of the process, not the end of the world.

It intentionally flew a just-barely-suborbital trajectory, because the in-flight relight of the Raptor engine (required for deorbit burn) is still in the testing phase. The relight succeeded, so they may be cleared for a full orbital trajectory on upcoming flights. Note that Starship achieved the near-orbital trajectory with a significant amount of fuel still onboard, which was intentionally vented before reentry, rather than burning it for a few extra seconds to achieve full orbit. The difference is negligible from a difficulty perspective.

$9 million for what? With Starship, there's no downrange retrieval of booster/fairing, no remanufacturing of an entirely new second stage for each flight, and minimal refurbishment (implied by the first sentence of my above post). Perhaps $2-$3 million for operating costs around Starbase, sure, but not $9 million. Not once the launch cadence approaches and then quickly dwarfs Falcon 9 levels, at any rate.

If Starship achieves full and rapid reusability, then it will be highly cost-effective even with a 16-ton payload. The only marginal material cost is the fuel itself, which is about $1M per Super Heavy launch. Contrast this with $10M simply to manufacture each new Falcon 9 upper stage, which is expended after each and every flight, and Falcon 9's payload to LEO is only about 18 tons. Not to mention, Starship supports a much more flexible payload form factor, to accommodate e.g. Starlink v3 satellites; no other existing launcher can do that.

Agreed that Pica probably makes the most sense for Starships returning to Earth from Mars; I expect there will be very few of these, due to the exorbitant cost and complexity (for the next few decades at least) of ISPP on Mars, thus there would be minimal economic benefit for being able to reuse them without refurbishment. And it's not clear at all whether the ceramic tile design will be able to withstand a MUCH higher-energy reentry, returning from Mars (or even from the Moon, for that matter).

Another question for the short-to-medium term is whether it may make the most sense to simply replace the aft flaps after each flight (pop out the old burned-through ones, pop in new ones), rather than overbuilding them for reuse? If the burn-through damage is limited to the flap itself, the tower could probably be outfitted to perform such a replacement in a matter of 10-20 minutes, while the ship is being refueled. Of course, IFT 10 flew an intentionally demanding reentry trajectory to stress the flaps; we'll have to see what the damage looks like for a nominal reentry profile, and also after a few more design iterations.

Thermal expansion. Long strips would warp and buckle as they expand. Small tiles have slight gaps in between to accommodate the expansion.

Solar is a great way to shave peak demand in the late afternoon and evening when combined with batteries, but it cannot provide baseload power during the night or when the sun is not shining. You need natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, or coal(!) for that. But is a great thing as long as Congress quits subsidizing it. It isn't economically efficient to do so (excess deployment due to subsidies make retail electric rates go up not down) and we have a $2T a year budget deficit and we cannot afford it. Same for wind, with slightly different characteristics and more unreliability than solar. Like no wind for weeks in the winter sometimes.

I may not have a PhD in thinky stuff, but someone running Windows7 is on outdated software even if their word processor is current.

"Grocery store in the arctic goes out of business. Residents now have two choices: move or live in harsh conditions."

Everything is derivative (or just plain copying), though generative doesn't even imply novelty. I can generate a list of the first X positive integers and that will still be generative as long as I didn't specify each one literally. It will not be novel.

I mean, the same is true of many things that are automated. Every once in a while someone dies on an escalator, but far fewer people die from riding an escalator than by falling down stairs.

I'm curious what specific problems have been "solved" by particular generative AI startups. I'm aware of AI-based tools for specific tasks, but nothing that uses LLMs to solve a problem (other than perhaps code generation).