How do you reach the conclusion that you did? From TFS:

On its face, that contradicts the idea that Whoever has the "biggest computer" can lock up all of human progress and collect rents for it into the future -- a natural person still needs to conceive of the invention, rather than patenting the output of tool that happens to be the "biggest computer".

The problem here is geekmux, not Excel. I've never heard of somebody saying a spreadsheet does, or should, "track[] to 42 decimal places". I don't even know what you meant by "rounding accuracy that makes GPS timing look like a 19th Century pocket watch" -- I can tell you what kinds of errors exist for different GNSS satellite and receiver clocks, but rounding errors are dwarfed by others.

If you have some technical complaint, be specific about it rather than trying to be cute, because you run a risk of making yourself look stupid rather than clever. There are some well-known problems with Excel's default behavior, like how it aggressively treats text as dates -- but a lot of spreadsheet errors and loss of precision are purely user errors.

It's mostly a contracting issue. Sometimes, if a customer wants full rights to all documentation and design details (or source code or whatever), they have to pay more. If they want exclusive full rights, they have to pay even more. This can be beneficial for some things, not so good for others. If you want to customize your ERP system (SAP or something like that), you'll generally bring in an outside company to do it. You could demand all the source code for everything they did and pay more for it, but if you don't have the necessary expertise on tap to make use of it, it's just throwing money out the window.

The taxpayers paid for the goods along with their research and development.

Not always. Companies do undertake their own research on their own dime, hoping to later sell it to government or other contractors. To take a simple example, a government that purchases a Cessna Citation jet for travel purposes is mostly buying off the shelf. They may customize it with their own communications gear, but they didn't pay for the R&D that went into it. Textron (owner of Cessna and part of RTX) paid for that and is making it up over time with sales of the jet.

A more complicated example is Anduril, which started developing families of weapons on its own and then started getting contracts to further the development process. How much of that should the government own, or at least get access to, if they didn't pay for it?

I agree that the government should be able to fix its own things through contractors of its choosing, and it should get access to all necessary design data. But it's still a contracting issue.

DuckDuckGo's LLM generates this, for example

... (emphases added) and if you click "more" it may change to say that RHD vehicles drive of the *left* side of the road (LHT, which is true).

What does ChatGPT say about a non-profit converting to a for-profit company (by moving essentially all of its operations and assets to a for-profit subsidiary)?

There's a big difference between "necessary for WiFi" and "necessary to do WiFi well". Patents often cover the later rather than the former.

That's only because there is no largest prime number. It's trivial to factor any prime number. The tricky part is proving that a number is prime.

Batteries are catching up faster than it will be cost-effective to build nuclear in the US. A month ago, Bremen Airport announced they had integrated a new sodium-ion battery with a 400 kW output and 1 MWh capacity into its infrastructure. The entire thing apparently fits in roughly one twenty-foot shipping container, and there is almost certainly room to expand that to additional batteries to provide power through the night and beyond.

Beyond that, Peak Energy just signed a deal to build up to 4.7 GWh of sodium-ion batteries by the end of the decade. This follows a successful 3.5 MWh demo project in Colorado. Time will tell if they can successfully scale up and avoid the fate of Natron energy, which just ceased operations.

But the market does appear to be moving rapidly in the direction of battery storage regardless of individual solutions, with BNEF forecasting another 92 GW of output and 247 GWh of capacity just for batteries in 2026, almost a quarter more than 2025. They expect growth of 2 TW/7.3 TWh by 2035. Some people think that's conservative, similar to how solar has blown past everyone's expectations from even 2015. I think if the iron- and vanadium-based flow battery demos work as hoped, that could let cheap grid-level battery installations soar beyond anyone's expectations. Whether lithium-ion, sodium-ion, or flow, they will land far sooner than we could build equivalent nuclear plants. It will be better to greatly expand solar, like over parking lots, irrigation canals, and other places where they can lower heat and supply energy to the batteries. It's politically easier and can provide more jobs in more areas that don't require college degrees. Many more winners than sticking with nuclear or fossil fuels.

I replaced my Galaxy Tab S6 with an S10 Ultra, and the new one is just too big for my druthers. I didn't realize that it wouldn't fit as well in places like my backpack's tablet pouch, and it's heavy. The pen might be good for some users, but I haven't found a place that I would use it.

On the plus side, windowed apps seem theoretically nice, although I haven't yet used them in anger.

It usually is possible to issue a chargeback. It might take some work on the customer's part, but it will get a lot more attention from the vendor than a customer who ghosts them.

The Apple App Store takes a similar slice of revenue and has a much smaller addressable market -- including just about none of the high-end gamers, given that current Macs are stuck with whatever GPU is built onto the CPU. "Might" is doing an awful lot of work in your comment.

The turbines are a sunk cost and so there's value in conversion than turning them to scrap and building fuel cells.

There are no sunk costs around the turbines. The existing turbines will be replaced. From TFS:

In their place, the DWP will install new combined-cycle turbines that are expected to operate on a mixture of natural gas and at least 30% hydrogen with the ultimate goal of running entirely on hydrogen as more supply becomes available.

They're reusing the land and part of the existing structure on it. Almost everything else is getting replaced.

Modern combined-cycle gas turbines are much more efficient than that. Most new installations now get around 60% efficiency if not better, and the current record is 64.18%, set by a Siemens turbine at Keadby Unit 2 Power Station in the UK. The end result won't be 68%, but it also won't be 34%. Given the losses associated with electrolysis, the net is likely to be around 50%, which still makes it a bad idea.

Well I *meant* to post as AC. I'll have to apply those mod points elsewhere :( ... and ironically Slashdot is throttling me, for reasons unrelated to whether my ISP uses CGNAT.

Can you elaborate on #2? In principle, an IPv6 firewall / stateful router can protect devices on the LAN by essentially using NAT logic except for rewriting addresses, right? Assuming that a more naive approach of blocking incoming SYN packets by default isn't good enough, at least.

(Posting as AC so I can moderate up some deserving comments below.)