Are they machines? Are they capable of deliberate movement? Do they have any decision-making of their own?

From TFA:

The externally generated [emphasis mine] magnetic fields made the robots spin and tumble through the liquid and squeeze through tiny water-filled gaps in the soil.

So, why are they referred to as robots? If I mulch my bushes — is each chip a "robot" fighting the weeds around the plant? When a brick wall is sanded, is each grain of sand a "robot"?

I gave you the link with all the data citations if you'd like to check the margin of error.

Translation: you don't know the margin of error either.

eclipsing the Dust Bowl's July 1936 by an eighth of a degree

What is the margin of error? Asking for a friend...

You're assuming they'll lose tax revenue and that they aren't spending more money on Paramount than they get back. Given this country's penchant for corporate welfare, I wouldn't assume that Paramount leaving would be tax-flow-negative. More specifically, after all of the incentives, tax credits, etc. are taken into account, I wouldn't assume that the loss from Paramount leaving would be greater than the loss from Warner Brothers largely ceasing to exist except as an IP licensing subsidiary of Paramount.

Yes, of course. I'm not saying it relieves them of responsibility. It just doesn't preclude that other people could *also* be held responsible. :-)

If they were monitoring the Coast Guard VTS channel and the boat that came to help was monitoring channel 16, the latter could easily have arrived before the Coast Guard forwarded the request to the VTS channel.

So I would say it is at least somewhat plausible, but only if his yacht falls into that larger vessel category.

That's true... unless either:

• The captain called the boat's owner and asked for permission and was told "No."
• The boat's owner had given specific instructions not to assist other boats.

Unfortunately, both of those has a small but nonzero chance of being the case. Oral instructions like "Say nothing so you have plausible deniability" would be hard to prove, of course.

Also, this is about the risk of dying from Alzheimer's. Depending on when we're talking about, it could be that they die from something else first, like secondhand smoke.

If only that was cheaper than hiring a human to do it..

I purchased a used Radeon Instinct MI50 with 32Gb VRAM on eBay for $360 — in December. it is quite usable with llama.cpp under FreeBSD inside an older (DDR3) workstation. I use it to filter incoming email (with a plugin to SpamAssassin).

That same model is now being sold for over $500. On the one hand, this is the first time in my life a witnessing a piece of computer hardware costing more seven month later.

But on the other limb, it is still cheaper than simply providing a Western developer with coffee for a few months — much less than actually hiring him...

The incident raises questions [emphasis mine] about supply chains, audits, and cybersecurity in the British armed forces

Raises questions? No, boys and girls — who slept through the journalist lecturer's implorations against cliches — it does not raise questions. It provides clear and obvious answers...

Heat pumps do not use any water at all; they use refrigerant. Similarly, immersion cooling uses oil or some other non-water coolant. Of the three things I listed, only one (closed-loop water cooling) uses water at all, and not on an ongoing basis unless you have a leak.

Water in a sealed pipe most certainly does not evaporate, as there is no air for it to evaporate into. Other than leaks, you would not expect losses of water.

A mistake was still made

Yep, it happens. And it was not even a mistake by Flock, apparently — not that it matters. Mistakes will continue to be made — they don't mean, Flock is doing anything wrong, or that police has to be "defunded", or Capitalism overthrown. But Slashdot is running multiple anti-Flock articles every day, it seems — like they did against Walmart some 15-20 years ago.

Can't shake off the feeling, this is a part of a propaganda campaign...

Also, low-water-use plants tend to also be slow-growing. That's why they use so little water.

Hesperaloe produces 1.5 kg per cubic meter of water. This is comparable to the water use efficiency of forests used for paper, which is between 1.5 and 4 or so. So this actually requires as much water as trees, if not more. The only advantage, if you can call it that, is being able to plant it in places were trees won't grow.

But the problem is that this also means you'll be cultivating plants grown far apart, none of which produce very much mass per plant without taking so much that you kill the plant (whose roots are likely the only thing keeping the topsoil from eroding). That means you need an order of magnitude more land per unit of crop mass, and probably closer to two orders of magnitude. (Trees get tens of feet tall. Hesperaloe is a pile of long leaves that gets maybe a foot tall.) So the energy consumption involved in harvesting it is likely to also be one to two orders of magnitude greater because you might have to harvest an entire acre worth of red false yucca to get as much biomass as you'd get from cutting down one fully grown coniferous tree in a few minutes.

So you've gotten a little bit more crop land that nobody asked for, and/or saved a bunch of trees that were planted specifically to turn into paper, and in exchange, you've introduced a massively energy-intensive harvesting process followed by some other probably massively energy-intensive conversion process. This doesn't seem like a net improvement to me.

Either that or you harvest it including the root system, and yeah, you've gotten a lot of raw material, but now your topsoil erodes, and you can't plant anything there for a thousand years.

The process itself might be useful in some other context, of course, but it seems like a solution in search of a problem.

The argument against it was in the summary.

The argument, that participants can influence the outcome — if financially motivated by the betting — is but a tertiary afterthought. That may have some merits, but it is not new — regular financial markets have learned to deal with insider trading, and we have criminal laws against such activity. It is not a reason to ban the betting outright.

But the original journalist, the submitter, and BeauHD obviously emphasise the "ghastly" aspect... And this appeal to emotion is, what I find contemptible.