Copper oxidizes on both continents. All around the world, in fact. And the Statue of Liberty has an outer layer of (oxidized) copper. That's why she's green.

[I don't see an /s tag, though you have been modded Funny. I plead Poe's law.]

Any copper that is exposed to oxygen (even briefly) will oxidize. Presumably TFA is talking about ultra-pure copper that has not been contaminated by exposure to air.

It'll be a while before that has a chance of happening. Per TFA, the team at CERN transported 92 anti-protons. Ninety-two. If that many antiprotons annihilated with protons, they would produce an energy of 2.8 x 10^-8 J. Not enough energy to tickle a gnat.

Haven't seen that one in a while.

At any given moment in their history, AI companies have tried to get AI to do what it can do in its current state. These ideas may or may not appear to be "stupid" but they are waypoints in the development of the technology.

They have gone from games (chess, etc.) to machine-learning applications (autonomous planetary probes and online recommendation engines) to deep-learning applications (jeopardy, go, voice-recognition, image-analysis) to our current collection of human-like technologies (chatbots, LLMs, and autonomous street-vehicles).

And right now, AI might be able to close sales for retailers. At least that's what OpenAI and Walmart tried here. It wasn't "stupid" to try. It would have been stupid not to.

Does anyone really believe that Walmart will use this to lower prices overall and that this is only for markdowns. I saw that more than once in the summary from Walmart. Oh, no, it's really all good!

>Microsoft executives believed the approach was not feasible and would violate the spirit, if not the letter, of their agreement

Yeah, you can't get much money for violating what *you* consider the "spirit" of the agreement. It's the LETTTER of the agreement that counts. Lol.

I wouldn't get an Apple. It works until it doesn't. You can do everything right and still have your phone f*d up. I lost my entire backup, *after* backing it up per their directions and verifying it. Talked with Apple Support for over two hours and finally they said (basically) "Sucks to be you!" And since I did the backup to perform a factory reset on the phone, after I did that I lost *everything*.

I'm getting an Android next time I need a phone.

You raise some valid points about VC risks. However, Trevor Milton didn't just talk big and fail a lot. He engaged in out-and-out fraud, for which he was convicted and was facing jail time before he was pardoned.

A pardon may make his conviction go away, but it doesn't erase history. There may be different kinds of invstors, but any who still trust this guy are better known as fools.

With the next election cycle being 6 YEARS away - that's way too late. Massive data centers with polluting generators, massive noise pollution that literally sickens you, massive increases in electricity and water prices. Way too late. Oh, just vote them out! Yeah right, *after* everything is built.

So it *definitely* looks like it could be replicated within a year.

Pretty sure that given a year, an robust alternate to Bloomberg can be created.

As said, it's the proprietary data feeds that are the real issue.

There are other reasons to have energy-storage besides supporting diurnal or sporadic sources such as solar and wind. See my response below to Dragonslicer.

TL/DR: storage can be used as a buffer to handle momentary demands that exceed a system's current output, even if that system isn't powered by renewable sources. And all sources produce excess from time to time, so why not store it when you can?

And I'm confused about the "keep up" snark. I think you're better than that.

What other sources? Like I said, any other sources. They can (and must) all produce excess.

The load on a generating station goes up and down, as people turn their lights on and off. At any moment, a station will be producing excess in order to handle unexpected spikes in demand. The unused excess at any moment can be directed to storage.

Sure, you can anticipate daily demand-patterns and adjust what stations are online appropriately. But even with such planning, you'll still have -- in fact you'll need -- excess production to avoid brownouts when demand rises unexpectedly. In fact, storage could be used as a buffer in those very situations.

Excess energy stored in batteries could come from any source, not just solar or wind. The difference is that solar and wind need storage in order to be viable as a 24/7 source of energy.