We can't maintain replacement capacity. We discarded it earlier, so now we'd need to build it from scratch. That will take awhile and be expensive.

Just about nobody looks at the cost of decommissioning, and when they do they lie. E.g. "How do you reprocess discarded wind turbine blades?", "Who pays to decommission a nuclear reactor?", "How do you recover the carbon from burned coal?", et multitudinous cetera. (In at least one case the company that promised to clean up after decommissioning it's nuclear reactor used the money for other purposes and then went bankrupt.)

Actually, many studies that I looked at several decades ago only counted the cost of the solar installation. They assumed that the electric network would act as the storage. And they were correct.

Now the fraction that's based around intermittent power sources is large enough that that needs to be taken into consideration. I assume it is, but I haven't checked.

But if you're looking at old studies, they generally don't list the complete cost.

You're assuming all AIs are equal. This is false.
We have no real idea of how accurate this Aardvark thing is going to be. It's hard to see how it could understand intended use, but there are lots of common and hard to notice bugs that it might do a very good job of detecting. "Use after free" should be automatically detectable, for example.

I'm not so sure about automated correction, but automated suggestion of a correction sounds quite plausible.

Hidden access points aren't bugs if they're intentional.

Not 100%. Much of our government is still rules based. (Also, it's never been 100/% rules based...it's just that that used to be the generally accepted goal.)

That depends on the reason you think they should go out of business. That they sued an honest person over a true statement seems to me a good reason that they should go out of business. (Not that I think they will.)

Getting it to land on the Moon is relatively trivial. Getting it to land safely is as hard as reusable space craft, but different in many ways.
OTOH, its been done several times, so the expertise exists. (OTTH, remember that some have landed and tipped over.)

I wouldn't count it a safe trip, Not the first few times he does it. And presumably it needs to be a round-trip to count as a success.

No. You could record the original "seed" and reuse it. Since that would produce the same results, the results aren't random, even if you never actually record the original parameters. Unpredictable and random aren't quite the same concept.

Actually that's sort of true. Algorithms can't generate actually random results...but the results can be so nearly random that there's no way to tell. But it's not really random because if you compute the exact same algorithm a second time with the exact same parameters you get the same result. AFAIK, meaning in this context isn't well defined.

More to the point, with regard to 4, if you only simulate a small portion of the (apparent) universe you don't need to simulate anything outside the lightcone. And most of what you simulate will be empty space.

Of course, the longer the period simulated, the larger a lightcone you'll need to simulate.

Open source does not imply free access to the application. The concepts are related, but far from identical. I once bought a commercial compiler where the source code was included with the purchase. That's open source, but not libre-free. (You can argue about whether the source was gratis-free, because the price was the same whether you got the source or not.)

I don't know about default, but I don't have GNOME desktop installed, though I have a few of their tools. I use Mate and a few KDE tools, though the integration between those two has gotten worse recently.

And it's a reasonable thing to worry about. And effective ways to address the worry have been mentioned in several prior posts. But the problem with corrupt government is that it's unreasonable to trust it, even when it's being honest.

It wouldn't shut the government up, but it would undercut them with anyone who wasn't a "true believer".