Possibly, even more practical might be an airship. Existing airships can already lift up to about 100 tons, and they can land in any large open space.

It seems to me that some kind of heavy lift helicopter solution might make more sense. My understanding is that a reliable 100m turbine blade can be made weighing about 35 tons. Although the most capable current helicopters can only accommodate an external lift weight of about 20 tons, it seems easier to build a more powerful helicopter than a massive aircraft that can land on a makeshift dirt runway.

I am not familiar with the current state of the art, but CCM devices seem to have one major flaw: they only work in extremely low temperature conditions. Indeed, they only remain non volatile under such conditions. Outside of niche applications, having to keep your storage media continuously at similar temperatures to those needed for super conductivity does not seem very practical. Changing bits on CCM media may require negligible power, but maintaining the necessary environment continuously is costly.

Of course, we do not know if the environmental requirements in the latest Chinese research are any less demanding, but they might be on to something.

Those are mind blowing numbers, certainly, and I will treat them with extreme skepticism until I see some corroboration.

From all I have read, it is highly unlikely that anything equivalent to the microbiome in our digestive tracts exists in the brain. However, the presence of a limited group of protective organisms seems plausible. As hinted by TFA, circumstantial evidence suggests conditions like Alzheimer's are affected by gut bacteria. The most likely reason for such an effect seems those organisms crossing the blood brain barrier and acting directly within the brain. Really, though, we simply do not know yet.

There is no way of knowing whether or not this was suicide. Most likely, the police know it is either (i) suicide; or (ii) a highly professional hit made to look like suicide, a crime that the investment of vast amounts of police time would be unlikely to solve.

The police can legitimately say that it looks like a suicide, with no evidence to the contrary. It allows them to cleanly close the investigation. In the unlikely event that evidence surfaces pointing at foul play, the investigation can be reopened.

One email service I use, Fastmail, has had this kind of alias capability for over 20 years. It makes spam management a lot easier and (by hiding your account name) also contributes to security.

That would be equivalent to about 1.9781441e+21 (or 1,978,144,100,000,000,000,000) US football fields I hope that helps you visualize the scale more easily.

For the establishment, there must be ways to influence the votes even of independent representatives. A mayor, Congress critter or whatever making decisions based purely on their analysis of the facts and the wishes of its electorate would be an unacceptable challenge to the status quo. Ways must and will be found by the existing power brokers to kill this idea.

Some statistics I should have included in my original post:

Country-wise production capacity in 2022 (GWh)

Country GWh Share
China 893 (77%)
Poland 73 ( 6%)
United States 70 ( 6%)
Hungary 38 ( 3%)
Germany 31 ( 3%)

Sorry about the formatting. Slashdot these days does not properly support blockqotes

Right now, China has almost a monopoly on the world market for reusable batteries of all kinds. The best chance for countries like the US to catch up is technological advances that can leap frog China in the world market. This is an urgent strategic imperative, as are other actions to reduce the West's reliance on China in potential economic warfare down the road.

Frankly, if you want private companies to make public service announcements, you should not pass laws that require them to pay while doing so. The law, overall, is ill conceived but, at the very least, should have allowed for exceptions in times where its citizens have a critical need for up to date news coverage.

I am sure a suitably framed ChatGPT dialogue will bring up an answer to satisfy your curiosity. (It may look more convincing than many provisional patent applications.)

King Canute was unsuccessful in holding back the sea. Similarly, the power and applications of AI are increasing at a rate that cannot be halted. The result is going to be a mix of the positive and negative. At best, we can try to create mechanisms that limit the negatives, though there will be limits to how successful we can be with this. AI is going to change the world out of all recognition over the next decade. Mostly, we can just pray that the world that emerges will be one that is positive for the majority of us.

Nonsense. When you use commercial hosting you are completely dependent on them doing things properly, and when they turn out to be incompetent fuckwads, you're screwed.

Using your own servers is preferable and better in every way, but only if you hire good people who know what they are doing. If you don't hire good people who know what they are doing, that's YOUR fault, and has nothing to do with internal servers vs. commercial hosting.

Frankly, that is a pretty ignorant comment. Sure, if you can afford to hire a better IT team than Amazon, Google or Microsoft, there are advantages in running your own datacentre. However, even then, large hosting services can have advantages. Almost no private company is going to be able to survive major DDoS attacks. Doing so requires, in addition to a talented team, a network infrastructure costing an absolute fortune.