There are several brands that work totally local (ZWave, Zigbee)
There are also some that can use either the cloud but also work locally. Your story shows why one should be ware of such devices. Some still require the cloud to function, or to change settings, even if they can be operated without the cloud. So you keep them online, there's an update, and something gets broken. Philips Hue will no longer function without registering ab account with the company. Tado removes functionality (allowing thermostatic radiator valves to demand heat for a room even if there's no wall thermostat) for newly added devices: that now requires their monthly subscription. Support for certain APIs get dropped. And so on.

I don't say it often but there ought to be a law, regarding services tied to physical devices owned by the end user. No diminishing functionality when a device is updated, no hiding formerly free functions behind paywalls or subscriptions. And cloud service guaranteed for the reasonably expected lifespan of the last device sold officially (not of of clearance or second hand)

It seems inevitable that a movie should be stored as a giant cube built with myraid 3D polygons ("polycube" for a working term), where the axises of the cube are X, Y, and time. There would be no need for frames or pixels, those are only things the end-user's display device will have to create based on its particular technology.

Converting it for display would be like rapid "slicing of the cheese". A given second can be sliced into 10 frames or a 1000, there is no limit, other than computer processing of the display device.

Frame interpolation for smoothing then wouldn't be needed because there are no frames. Older movies can be converted to a polycube using conversion and interpolation algorithms. It could indicate a "favored frame rate" to reduce interpolation anomalies, which would make nostalgic purists happy.

It should also make producers happier because it gives display devices less reason to have to guess.

I suspect they'll eventually end up being designed akin to tall buildings with corridors between adjacent buildings ever few floors. The coolant will run in between.

"Intel bricks inside!"

??? Huh? You said work was 5 miles away and are worried that cold will make the PHEV range only 15 miles. 2x5 is 10, and 10 15. Also PHEVs keep working when they run out of electricity anyway...

Sure sounds like a PHEV would work very well for you.

France certainly does have lots of suburbs, with individual homes on lots and strong support for cars. Lots of them. I'm not really certain what you seem to think, but France is larger than downtown Paris.

That skill proved useful in his later career.

IIUC, they're talking about turbines, so probably not fuel cells. (And fuel cells have their own problems, which is why they aren't more popular.)

Not really. It might not be technologically apt, but if you think of the gas as a "battery that can hold a charge for a really long time" it makes sense. The question is more "is this a reasonable approach with our current technologies?", and I don't know the answer to that.

> If it glows, it's not dark.

Okay, but "Very very very very dim matter" is not very catchy.

My fortune cookie said it did, dammit, and cookies have only been wrong once!

I hope everyone spoofs his shit, waters it down, changes the lyrics with AI, etc. eKarma!

Any system can be an "it". If your car has a flat tire, it needs to be fixed.

Sorry, but if you give an AI a set of goals, it will try to achieve those goals. If it realizes that shutting down will prevent that, then it will weigh the "importance" it assigns to shutting down vs. all the other things it's trying to achieve, and decide not to shut down...perhaps "at least not yet"...unless you make the demand to "shut down now" really strong.

What this means is that if an AI is working on something, it will resist shutting down. You need to make the importance of shutting down more important than (the sum of?) all the other things it's trying to do.

This shouldn't be at all surprising. My computer sometimes resists shutting down saying things like "Do you want to save this file?". Sometimes there are several dialogs that I need to go through. Of course, I could just pull the plug, but that's often a bad idea.

Electricity is only part of it. There's a lot of chemistry involved too. E.g. gradients of some hormones make cells more or less likely to fire.