Give Bezos a little credit. He may have not been "the coder" but he was not just the one who envisioned online purchase markets, he was the one who got venture capital while taking years of quarterly losses. He was a successful entrepreneur who could properly marshal investment capital into correct investment decisions, while the loser CEOs at uber, lyft, and other internet era startups just suck money away from people "capable" of losing it.

Bezos is probably correct on some level that Blue Sky "failure" stemmed from being overly cautious assuming that it would be a "non-competitive" environment (which was how he was able to grow Amazon into prominence). Also, not being an engineer, Bezos kept choosing to defer technical decisions to overly cautious, eminently qualified engineering managers at companies like Raytheon and Lockheed who also had no "real" competitors. Bezos doesn't want to produce a perfectly serviceable rocket ten years from now, he wants to be able to show a return for his investors yesterday. Perhaps he needs to accept that he can't even get his company into the lift services industry at this point.

As for Elon, you talking about an entrepreneurial "genius" who's lost at least 44 billion dollars of his fortune for a bullshit text messaging company. One significant Elon generated "setback" at SpaceX could give Blue Origin the time it needs to put out a more competitive product.

1) The US owns AI on the corporate sector. Its already a gold rush where anyone with any AI relevant talent has already been wooed by every cutting edge company on earth.

2) What does the US taxpayer get when they throw billions of taxpayer dollars into academic AI research? Well, the idealists and mediocrities in the academic sector can get public funding.

3) There is already a worldwide race for AI. Its about the "power" of capitalizing on AI advancements. What does publicly funding AI research do? Muddy the patent waters and give away taxpayer dollar research to the company with the best lawyers, and nations like China and Russia just "take" whatever comes out of taxpayer subsidized research. And maybe poorer nations like Israel, Iran, and Russia get to more quickly implement AI robot Terminators. US taxpayers don't get squat.

Leave US taxpayer subsidies to basic research, whether its space or biology, or some other field which can advance "peaceful" technologies.

The guy is purportedly been with the company for over 26 years. Do you really think he still has new poll ideas, after the site is throwing up this one? Is Cowboy Neal even still working for Slashdot.org???

If hard drives are stored inert, in environmentally temperate conditions, away from electromagnetic sources and shielded, the data on a hard drive can last a hell of a lot longer than 5 years. I'm not quite as familiar with the longevity of SATA flash drives, but they don't degrade like a consumer write once optical disc. The data can probably last for decades. The real issue is being able to have accessible, working hardware that can be attached and interfaced to the storage devices. It will probably be equally as hard to devise a means to "read" the DNA sequencing, particularly if there is a biochemical medium needed to hold the DNA.

If you need a double "containment" dome for a reactor that "can't" meltdown, its effectively a 1970's design. America has only successfully built two nuclear reactors in the past 30? years. Current commercially used designs outside the US are still outdated because no one is "advancing" the technology.

Guaranteed? In what sense?

Solar is more "popular" because its a significantly cheaper kilowatt than a nuclear plant (but still much more expensive kilowatt to petroleum energy), but its only that "economical" to scale in southern sun regions, not in places like the north (east, west, or central). Southwest solar is not capable of powering the entire nation, and you still have to produce electricity at night. There's no reason for the US to be stupid like Germany or China.

Wrong. The reason why nuclear is so "expensive" is that its near impossible to build a nuclear power plant on a projected timetable because it gets litigated to death by anti-nuclear groups. This creates ridiculous delays which jeopardizes construction funding, because no capitalist enterprise can secure "cheap" lending without a ROI.

Furthermore, "expensive" safety comes from using 1970's nuclear plant designs, which are inherently costly. Start implementing modern nuclear plant designs using "molten salt" and make it a meltdown proof design (which can be done now), and diversify nuclear plants away from uranium/plutonium/breeder style designs to ones that reclaim "spent" 70% radioactive fuel, with more modular "small" plant designs (which we need to do anyway) and the redundant, unnecessary safety costs will go down as well.

The solution is for the federal gov't to "mandate" timely construction of nuke plants (subsidize lending, limit litigation timelines and state regulation of nuke plants), and rebuild the national electric grid to regulate electrical price rate charging. If a state wants to go nimby and prevent nuclear power plant construction in their state, fine. They can pay higher kilowatt rates (like 10x) from electricity from a nuke plant out of state. Or depend on cheaper solar energy from Arizona until "whoops" suddenly the state doesn't have power during the day. Its an infrastructure investment the US nation has to do, regardless whether the US "stays" with nuclear power.

Supposedly, the US currently generates 30% of its electric power from nuclear, but currently its doomed to go away as old plants decommission without replacement. Setup a (expensive) program to revamp nuclear plant construction (for the next 40 years) and rebuild the energy grid. The nation will have the ability to accelerate spending if the nation really goes electric transportation, and wants to move away from petroleum based energy production.

The studies are a bit misleading. Its based on the presumption that Germany will remain a primarily industrial economy. Demographically, it can't happen, even if they're able to find new, lucrative export markets, which they can't, as the West "deglobalizes" its manufacture away from China. You just don't need as much energy when you're not smelting metals like iron and aluminum. Germany doesn't control any petroleum regions. They really don't have a good strategic choice outside of renuclearizing its energy production. If northern Europe really wants to diversify to wind and solar, Europe should really look into recolonizing Libya, convert that region to a solar energy farm, and pipe that up back to the continent.

So, are you suggesting western nations are not capable of building really safe nuclear power reactors (we are human, no?) or are you suggesting if the Chinese are incapable of building really safe nuclear power reactors, then no one is?

Thanks! (I never have moderation points when I need them...)

Have you bothered trying to setup an end-to-end encrypted mail system (or at least encrypt your mail service relay)?

To point out of the "obvious", the founders of the companies that Elon bought had little hand in bringing in the ROI during Elon's ownership. Elon (or his boards) must be doing something right, when they hire C-suite executives that end up running the companies, rather than Elon.

The theaters should be able to compete, but they also can't overcome the negatives of any public setting (name noisy, inconsiderate customers). (But I hear good things the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain.) "Poor" people can't invest in a proper home theatre setup.

What "woke" stuff? Even considering feminist or black tropes, there was nothing about the movie that I would considered "woke". It was a good movie; stop shading it because it didn't reflect black people as criminals and women as clueless feminists.

I would be too, except the Highlander TV series had excellent casting, and good enough writers to make good (story) episodes. Without a superior vision from a new showrunner, its is going to be a wasted failed opportunity for a cash grab.

Frankly, I don't want a "new" Highlander sequel or reboot, particularly if there isn't an "investment" in quality (over a "woke" vehicle for bad writers/showrunners).

Probably the show should have wasted its time suggesting the cat was a partially trans-dimensional creature (a biological "TARDIS"), in which case, there "could" be the possibility of extracting its larger self out of its n-dimension, and seize the human and swallow it back into its n-dimension. But wouldn't it require a creative screen writer with a commanding understanding of science and science fiction to write that in? And wouldn't it sort of kill its entertainment value, as well as increase the show's run-time length, by expending time for that explanation?