"Act of God" is a legal term of art. You should be blaming lawyers and governments.

Jensen Huang to college grads: "Run. Don't walk" toward AI

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/...

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told graduates at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh yesterday that demand for AI infrastructure is creating a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to reindustrialize America and restore the nation's capacity to build."

Why it matters: With many college grads fearing AI could obliterate their career dreams, Huang pointed to boundless opportunity as a "new industry is being born. A new era of science and discovery is beginning ... I cannot imagine a more exciting time to begin your life's work."

Nvidia, which makes AI chips, is the world's most valuable company. Huang told 5,800 recipients of undergraduate and graduate degrees that the AI buildout will require plumbers, electricians, ironworkers, and builders for chip factories, data centers and advanced manufacturing facilities.

"No generation has entered the world with more powerful tools â" or greater opportunities â" than you," he said. "We are all standing at the same starting line. This is your moment to help shape what comes next. So run. Don't walk."

"Every major technological revolution in history created fear alongside opportunity," Huang added. "When society engages technology openly, responsibly, and optimistically, we expand human potential far more than we diminish it."

Full speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Got me curioser, so I googled it. One source said what I thought:

https://www.scientificamerican...

"Because gravity is necessary for density differences to arise, neither buoyancy nor convection occur in a zero-gravity environment such as space. Consequently, the combustion products accumulate around the flame, preventing sufficient oxygen from reaching it and sustaining the combustion reaction. Ultimately the flame goes out."

and

"Researchers learned that flames extinguish themselves."

and

"Oxygen could still reach a flame in a gravity-free environment if someone blew the gas into the flame or let it "diffuse" in. It is the diffusion process that spreads the scent of a perfume in a room without air circulation: the perfume slowly mixes with the air to try to achieve a uniform distribution. This process, however, is too slow to sustain a flame."

Other sites don't directly contradict this, but say fires in the ISS are dangerous because smoke doesn't rise and set off smoke detectors on ceilings like in homes, so they install smoke detectors in the ventilation ducts. Also that fires on the ISS can survive on lower levels of oxygen than humans, and thus are much more dangerous if they linger on. That's confusing; if the smoke doesn't rise, then wouldn't it smother the fire like the first site says? But if the ISS has moving air from ventilation ducts, maybe that is what feeds oxygen to the fires.

Thanks for tricking me into not being so lazy :-) But all I learned is that I don't know.

Doesn't weightlessness make fires much less dangerous, since heat no longer rises and can't suck in the oxygen they need?

...like "Tell me about Tiananmen Square" or "Tell me about Xinjiang".

Is this what you want for the future?

My thoughts back when R1 came out:

https://www.afcea.org/signal-m...

Airlines can add more flights and bigger planes for more seats. Try doing that with a pop star.

I was responding to saloomy, who said "just make a law...".

That ain't retail. It's the futures wholesale market.

The fact that you don't list them doesn't prove their existence.

I'm aware of wholesale auctions and small exceptions. If you want, consider TicketMaster as a wholesaler.

Why would concert tickets need an auction any more than almost everything else? No auction for beans, none for gasoline, or haircuts. If they price them too high, they don't sell enough. If they price them too low, they sell out fast and learn to charge more next time, just as any other limited commodity does. If they can get more, they do, and raise the price next time. If they can't, well, that's life.

I don't think TicketMaster is making a fortune, because if they were, competitors would want some of the action. That's how markets work. If artists actually cared, they would sign up with alternative sellers and pull the rug out from under TicketMaster. They don't. Artists either don't care, or don't know. From the noise they make, they are hypocrites either way.

The actual real value of concert tickets for established artists is well-known by now. But artists want to pretend they support the little people, so they refuse to charge realistic prices, and act all miffed when the market establishes the real value people place on their tickets.

The simple fact is that more people want tickets than tickets are available. The only realistic alternative is long long lines and make people pay in time and hassle. But then others will charge high prices to stand in line as placeholders. Price caps are no more useful than Richard Nixon's gas price controls in 1973. People pay in dollars or time or barter of some sort. The market will always establish a more realistic price.

Or one could just let the market handle it. You can't stop scalping any more than Custer could. Prohibition doesn't work, it just creates black markets.

There were two theaters in San Francisco, the Richilieu? (Geary near Van Ness) and a second near the TransAmerica Pyramid. Great selection of old movies, mostly b/w, and great trailers for old movies. They eventually decided the second one just wasn't profitable enough, early 1980s, and had a final night of nothing but previews, several hours of them, the trashiest exploitation movies from the 1950s, glorious stuff. Then they interrupted it, lights came on to announce someone with a private copy of Vertigo had brought it in and did we want to see it? Apparently it was locked up in some copyright ownership dispute and could not be seen commercially, but since we hadn't paid for it ...

A fantastic night. I'd gladly do it again, nothing but hours of trashy ancient B and C movie trailers.

Because OCT 31 == DEC 25.

I have never been so disappointed. Slashdot is going to the dregs.

I remember noticing a huge speedup at some point, seemed like only 5-10 seconds to get the login prompt. This was 20(?) years ago when I was still building my own towers. Then something happened, I'll guess 10-15 years ago ... my next laptop took that long just to ask for the full disk decryption key. My latest laptop sometimes takes 30 seconds just to ask for the decryption key. No messages, nothing. After that, it's still only 5-10 seconds to get the login prompt.

Of course, this is all from memory, not logs or anything. I'm sure the timeframes are off. But the general trend is right ... slow, then much faster, then slow asking for decryption keys.

More taxes. of course. Or they could rely on SpaceX, but that contradicts their insistence on autarkey.