Their population absolutely dwarfs Canada and the US as well, so that isn't much good, is it?

BTW, remember the secret of Ti Kwon Leap- Anger is a weapon only to one's opponent.

I still think we need, given the microamps involved, a hamster powered cell phone charger.

Yes it is. Radioactive materials are made in the planet's core, and float up in the magma. Radon Gas is a normal and natural resource from decaying uranium.

It's as renewable as sunlight and wind.

Difficult is not equal to impossible. Heat can be used to boil working fluids, which can be used to drive turbines, which can create energy, which can in turn be used to run AI chips, which give off heat, which can then also be harvested to boil working fluids...Not really a perpetual motion machine, but the inefficiency in the system can be used to suck more heat out of the heat pumps anyway. Inefficiency in this case is a feature.

My answer to environmentalists claiming this is "You first". Stop being hypocrites, eliminate your own fossil fuel usage- including wasting fossil fuels storing articles like this in data centers.

Would this be the same China that is building coal fired plants at a rate of 95MW a year?

Nuclear power is a renewable.

Fission and fusion are replacements, carbon free.

Not the solution. Heat is energy. Energy is needed to feed AI. The clear solution is to figure out how to harvest heat directly, cooling the planet by feeding heat to data centers as electricity.

>This is the final refuge of the defeatist: âoeTheyâ(TM)re already watching you, so why care?â

Please don't put words in my mouth. Try, "They're already watching you, so you're going to need to find another way to avoid them if it's important enough, and it'll take a lot of work".

Ah yes, this moral panic is totally different than all the other times people have been whipped into a frenzy by an almost bon existent problem.

We have real problems to solve. I'll leave the fake ones to people like you.

So basically this is a new version of "Listening to Judas Priest will make you commit suicide", the Satanic Panic and all the other utterly moronic moral panics that make people afraid of unlikely things.

Oh good, another moral panic. If people aren't terrified every waking moment of their lives, someone hasn't done their job.

Having spent a whole hell of a lot of time lately on Gnome, configuring it and testing various configurations for rollout at the company I work for, all I can say is that it just works. There's a browser, and bizarrely, printers just work on Linux now in a way they just used to work on Windows, and it's now Windows, at least in an enterprise environment, where printing has become the technical equivalent of having your teeth filed down. Where work does need to be done is on accessibility, so we have one staff member who will stick with Windows 11 for now. Libreoffice's Calc is good enough for about 90% of the time, and Writer about 95%. We remain open to Windows machines for special use purposes, but most people after mucking around for a bit are able to navigate Gnome perfectly well, since once they're in the program they need to use, what's going on on the desktop is irrelevant.

On the enterprise back end, supporting global authentication has been around a long time, and if you only have admins who know how to navigate a GUI, then you have idiots. The *nix home folder is infinitely superior in every way to the hellscape that is roaming profiles, so already you're ahead of the game.

Enshittification, where even the most modest of talents is pushed aside by someone writing "Draw me a picture of a Florentine woman with a smirk" in ChatGPT.