Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Right. Which makes Kisai's dismissal of the problem a waste of breath.

Again, you were either eleven or you were living under a rock if you hadn't heard of the Transformers. Cuz if you had heard of it, you'd have known it was for kids and adolescents, and the female actress was there to keep the dads interested.

And that's exactly why we need to build more power infrastructure, particularly nuclear, and hand it all over to AI companies for free.

OK, so explain how you had supposedly never heard of the Transformers? They've been around since 1984.

I don't understand the nature of your comment. Are you confirming that you were 11 or 12 at the time?

Hint: Have you checked my /. ID?

And yet you'd never heard of the Transformers before you saw the Michael Bay movies. I guess you were 11 or 12 at the time?

I'm told she's had some well-liked stories.

Still, James Gunn seems to have this obsession with pulling up C-list characters from the comics and putting them in central roles in movies. For a lot of the running length of Superman, it was a movie about some guy named Mr. Terrific that nobody's ever heard of. I assume this is because he wants to tell new stories, rather than rehashing the same old origins and motives for characters that everybody's known about for years. But it's not the same as actually introducing new, appealing ideas; these characters are C-listers for a reason. Nobody cares.

Haven't seen the movie, but I've heard it's not just that ... she also apparently spends a lot of the movie not seeming to believe there's much urgency to the situation at all. That has a way of hamstringing the idea of a "ticking clock" plot.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

Two words: Government contracts.

"These things"? You mean the government shouldn't be drafting regulations for government, which is what we're talking about here? Instead, private industry should be telling the government what to do?

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

No, but HPE is. HPE does not sell printer ink.