It *could* come out of thin air, using solar cells or wind power. And it's inefficient enough (i.e. 1 gallon/day) that you might as well. It might be useful in a remote cabin with a motor/generator set that you rarely needed.

Actually, gasoline *is* just the short chain hydrocarbons. But you need the other stuff to make it a fuel for modern cars. (The "s" is on "hydrocarbons" because it's a mix of different molecules.)

At 1 gallon/day it doesn't seem like it would justify itself much of anywhere. Perhaps the same principles could be applied to a different design, This looks like a lab curiosity.

No. Apple was less open with it's documentation that the preceding personal computers. (The S100 bus computers.) I'll admit that I believe the Tarbell interface was portable (I never tried), but that wasn't invented by Apple. The floppy disk format was proprietary.

That's lousy reasoning. Being wealthy is not, in and of itself, sufficient grounds to justify an attack. Come up with a better reason. (There are a few that I could think of, and probably several that I haven't.)

OTOH, extortion is really difficult to justify. If they want to be justified, they should just release the data publicly, possibly after sanitizing it a bit.

If this is the case I remember from a few months ago, then no, it didn't do what he told it to do. One of the basic instructions was "don't change anything in my folders". (That's an extreme paraphrase, as I read about it several months ago. I think on Slashdot. But it's the essence of the original instructions.)

OTOH, I read about it several months ago, and it had happened several months previous to that. So it was one of the really early LLM chatBots. And notice that he wasn't a computer technologist, so one shouldn't have really expected him to have made his own proper backups. (But perhaps his department should have.)

Not this year. He's nearly 90, and short term memory declines as you approach that old.

That's what they say publically, but just how true is it? I don't think anyone knows. (And "true" doesn't imply that the AI could actually replace the folk, merely that management really thought that it could.)

Apple has always tried to create a "walled garden", at least since the Apple ][+. (I wasn't aware of it before then.) Under Jobs the justification was generally "our approach is technically superior", but while that was often true, it wasn't the real motivation.

Yes, but those "follow up studies" are extremely important. If they weren't done, the original finding would stand.

Interesting. If "respect" means "accept", then for a long time they didn't. I remember reading, over the years, several stories about drugs that were accepted in Europe, but not in the US.

FWIW, measles rarely killed people of European ancestry. Mutilated them, perhaps. But if your ancestors weren't winnowed by it...

(OTOH, I could be wrong. The song "The Irish Rover" indicates that measles was a sever killer.) (The statistics I found talked about deaths in a global context...and it damn well WAS deadly among those with non-European ancestry. There's probably more details involved, but I don't know them.)

Well, you're correct that sanitation is more important than vaccines. That doesn't make vaccines unimportant.

The US doesn't recognize trials conducted for foreign health agencies. If that were to change, the "pay for everyone else" might change, too.

Actually, the costs of the trials are high enough that I'm not sure they CAN make a profit without US Govt support. And the FDA was never willing to really recognize trials done by foreign health agencies. (Sometimes reasonably. Other times, not.)