I'm curious how much of that tolerance uses up any earthquake dampening tolerances...

There is one thing that exists now that didn't during Munich's attempt...

VB is now open source, as are meaningful portions of VisualC / Visual Basic, and .NET

If it's really critical, it should now be possible for a development team to integrate VB into LibreOffice. Not saying it's a desirable thing for everyone, but...

Rail lines are maintained by the corporations that own the lines, not the US Govt. This is why truck transport is cost effective in the US--the cost of the interstate network is built by the US Govt and maintained by the state govts.

My guess is the rail companies would be happy to replace diesel electric locomotives with the electric-battery if the cost made sense, and would add a current diesel-electric locomotive(s) rewired to charge the battery if the battery car was insufficient to make a particular journey [ex: Instead of four electric locomotive cars and a battery car, three electric, one diesel-electric as a range extender, and one battery. Still "better" than four diesel electrics]

There are probably a few reasons. The one I can think of is IBM is a US Govt approved contractor, and as such they have to do certain things, some of which deal with mandatory diversity and non-discrimination requirements. If they want to keep selling billions of $ of nonfunctional AI and business management applications to US Govt, they must report back periodically on metrics showing they meet these requirements.

Not sure if the regulation covers all of a company or just their Government Services sector

No, because of the "if costs go up, price go up tomorrow, but if costs go down it takes months for them to go down" phenomena (gas / petrol is a good example)

I agree. The other item is that these handouts have to come from somewhere, which means labor budget for employers needs to increase or inflation should increase directly, which puts us back at square one, but with a devalued dollar.

[opinion]
The problem is the global creation of wealth has become linear with no new land areas being exploitable for raw resources (and it becoming more difficult to exploit downtrodden underpaid people for labor*) , so now everyone is gouging each other for services.

Increasing automation may help this for a while, however once those system are completely automated with 99.999% uptimes I believe the problem will resurface. I am bypassing the employment vs. robots debate which may not be accurate...

The only permanent way out of this that I see is gathering resources extra-terrestrially.
[/opinion]

Wouldn't that be more of a "China is a problem" than "Bitcoin is a problem"?

If we banned things because they could possibly be done in a hurtful way, even if there were non-hurtful ways of doing them, I'm not sure there would be many things left that are still legal...

I respectfully disagree

Now that solar power is straight-up cheaper than fired power plants, I would argue Musk is actually encouraging people to use his own products and services by encouraging bitcoin use.

I would ask what a "loss" is. The vehicle accessories powered by rotational energy (a/c, alternator, power steering, coolant pump, etc.) is energy that is also "lost" in the sense it is not being used to push the vehicle forward, but isn't lost as in entirely converted to waste heat as it is being used to do other functions.

While I agree with this statistic on personal and commercial vehicles, most power plants are much more efficient due to economies of scale (which also helps the electrification math)--even if they burn coal or natural gas--because the heat recovery systems can be implemented with more return on investment.

I would thus change the article narrative to read:

"Waste is highest from large numbers of smaller ignition-fuelled systems"

from

"Large-scale waste is unavoidable with a thermal energy system".

** Mental note--need to start project to run all car accessories from a sterling engine hooked to the exhaust and another hooked to the coolant before it enters the radiator..

Gaming hardware and AI hardware are similar. My guess is this puts the hardware in place and gives a use for it before the self driving AI/ML software (while will need that hardware) is finalized

No you won't for the reason UBI is a pipe dream

Once it's universal, every company is going to calculate what percentage of the prior average basic income the UBI represents, then increase prices by that percentage.

The only thing UBI will create is a single marked jump in inflation.

Also, all CMYK inkjet cartridges are in violation and must be pulled unless they have been co-licensed with SCO ^H^H^H Deutsche Telekom

Didn't RedHat offer the open source community some kind of inside deal on stock for their IPO? I remember something about it.

If true, it's not Red Hat's fault if you sold early

(Disclaimer, I work in DoD)

It will take longer than 10 years because the USAF / NASA cannot depend on a single contractor if multiple viable companies exist. US Govt is required to encourage competition with DoD having the most scrutiny due to having the biggest single chunk of the budget.

ULA had a monopoly prior to SpaceX because there weren't any other viable launch companies (also probably why DoD contractors created ULA as opposed to Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop / Raytheon competing), with Roscosmos "not counting" for security reasons. Once SpaceX came along with a viable platform that business plan went tits up and both Space X and the USAF (political appointees excluded) have been smiling uncontrollably since*.

I am not surprised that funding has been allocated to keep competition up, however it is (personally) concerning that the funding has been allocated so unequally to the various parties.

*-(based on limited personal discussions I have had with USAF personnel on this and the "Space Service")