Don't trust a company with "spin" in their name.

I'm sure the EVs the Chinese are currently selling in the EU would pass NHSTA certification. Are those the $10K Chinese EVs? Nope, those are absolutely death traps that have no chance of getting certified. However, the ~$30K Chinese EVs, those have a shot of passing NHSTA certification. Honestly, I hope Ford and GM stop being distracted with hybrids and commit, but I think it will take a systemic shock like the Chinese EVs arriving to break the grip of their ICE agenda and parts revenue stream. Same thing happened with fuel efficient Japanese imports in the 80s, the old guard poo pooed them and lost that market to the imports.

There is no such thing as "extra electricity", only wasted electricity. Bitcoin's energy usage produces absolutely nothing positive for society.

Watch this documentary on the subject.

It's funny that they use really messed up, third world countries as some sort of crypto "use case." These are societies that will try anything and have very lax regulation and environmental standards. Bitcoin doesn't solve any of their real problems. It's just more exploitation.

Well, they got stuck with a few things that were awkward.
-Can't really "lock" the screen if a context menu is open. Due to limitations in how keyboard/pointer grab work and that being the only mechanism for screen locking to work
-Scaling is a bit limited, technically you don't have fractional scaling or per-monitor scaling in Xorg.
-X11 implementations struggle with strategies to avoid tearing.
-X11 model allows easy surreptitious screen scraping and keylogging.
-The X11 model for compositing basically made window managers responsible for rendering *anyway*, so the X11 server imposes some formality and still makes the compositor do the real work.

Now they likely could have fixed some of this (and patches exist for some of it), however given that as of the COMPOSITE extension, they basically made the window managers have to do more of the work anyway, it is understandable why they would pitch a scheme where the "mostly does nothing" X server is no longer a key part of the stack. Not merely new for the sake of being new, but being new in the face of an 'almost good enough' existing graphics stack has really caused it to fail to get the development that it sorely needed to be good on a reasonable time scale.

Ford and GM have been crowing that consumers don't want EVs. So what harm can possibly come from letting China flood the market with EVs nobody wants? If Ford and GM are right, the Chinese makers will be shooting their own foot. However, I have a feeling Ford and GM are being a little disengenous and the issue might be that people don't want Ford and GM base EVs at $65K a pop.

More to the point, if they don't collect personally identifiable information, how do they know that you've paid.

Well, this summary is based on a story from someone quoting a story in The Guardian. Not the best way to get accurate news on science.

Sometimes a hypothesis has potentially observable implications, even if a mad scientist can't reproduce everything in their lab.

I think it has been decades since cosmologists believed the universe is expanding at a constant rate.

That's an extreme formulation. It does imply that certain efficiencies would be equivalent to perpetual motion, but if the amount of energy required were sufficient to offset the gain in relativistic mass & potential energy I don't believe the argument fails. And it might be able to use half that energy, as the contradiction doesn't occur until it returns to the origin. And there's no thermodynamic reason that staying stable in a gravitational field should require any energy. (Anything in orbit is an example of that.)

I don't believe that this device will work, but I believe that your argument doesn't work either.

IANAPhysicist, but isn't a thrust of 1g specific to the mass you are accelerating? Same device pushing heavier mass gives less acceleration?

Is a claim that you can create a thrust of 1g even meaningful without additional details?

It's not a term for which there is a "generally accepted" definition. It's slang, which is widely variable between sub-populations.

The general idea of "drone" is usually someone who's useless.
The general idea of "suit" is someone who dresses excessively formally.
These are both judgements based on the perceptions of the one doing the describing.

It's certainly categorically new and will have some applications, but there have been some rather persistent "oddities" that seem to limit the potential. Meanwhile some impossibly large amounts of money are being thrown as if the age of the artificial super intelligence is now a few months away.

Fully expect one of a few ways the scenario ends poorly for the big spenders:
-Turns out that our current approaches with any vaguely possible amount of resources will not provide qualitative experience significantly better than Copilot/ChatGPT today. It suddenly became an amazing demo from humble hilarious beginnings, but has kind of plateaued despite the massive spend, so this scenario wouldn't surprise me.
-A breakthrough will happen that gets to "magic" but with a totally different sort of compute resource than folks have been pouring money into, making all the spending to date pointless.
-The "ASI" breakthrough happens and completely upends the way the economy works and renders all the big spending moot.

As an employee, or as a believer in their cause? If they are a believer in their cause, given the circumstances, this seems exactly what they SHOULD do as a human being. Their employer is, in their view, being immoral in a way they cannot abide. This sort of protest is exactly a reasonable course.

Losing their jobs should be considered a likely outcome, but given what Google is doing then they should be willing to pay that price for the sake of their cause. They might have preferred an outcome where Google mends its ways, but at least everyone knows about the situation in the media and the protester is no longer a party to something their conscious doesn't like.

I mean, if they were *vaguely* protesting Israel's actions with respect to the Palestinians, maybe you have a point, though it's a good way to have your protests be utterly ignored and just be a "make yourself feel better" behavior rather than trying to encourage change.

But in this case, they were specifically protesting Google's direct involvement. So being deliberately disruptive at work would be pretty on point for such a protest. Now is Google within their reasonable rights to dismiss them? Sure, and if the cause means anything to the protesters, then the dismissal is a price that is worth it. It was disruptive in the short term, and google's chosen reaction brings the protest national coverage and makes clear what Google was doing and how they plan to continue doing things.

I'd say this is about as quality as a protest gets. They have the exposure (which a "tuck away and privately whine about Israel" would never do), they didn't vilify themselves by being wantonly disrespectful or violent jerks, and they didn't engage in self-harm that may trigger a mental health discussion to take things off point.