Sometimes we forget how medieval the US banking system is. Then something like this comes around.

Every major bank in South Africa has offered cardless ATM services for so long I can't even say for sure when the last one came online. But the first seems to have been by 2008 at the latest.

I use it at least once a month to pay a casual worker who has no bank account. It has also saved my bacon when I forgot my wallet (but not cellphone with banking app) at home. And I've employed it twice when I suspected card skimmers had been attached to the ATM I wanted to use.

Never had any hassle with it. Never heard of any either.

Apparently so. There's a reference here to KaXu Solar One, 1km square made up of 120 parabolic troughs "delivering up to 100MW". And it seems that storage after sunset is baked in, with the promise that rocks will do it cheaper than molten salt.

More detail at the (South African) Mail & Guardian, published a couple of days before that Guardian piece, which confirms the intelligence is built into each unit.

"The heliostats are effectively smart robots that 'know the angle between the sun and the tower, depending on the time of day, and know where the sun is with respect to the tower. They each know this independently'".

Sorry, spaceman, Aishwarya Rai isn't for sale, not even in return for FTL or access to the galactic data net. But if you're in the market for a slightly used Britney Spears mebbe we can talk...