Totally not a gimmick. Totally not incredibly easy to bypass. Totally not a bunch more e-Waste in the making. /s

But someone expects to earn good money with it, so...

This. An occasional app crashes, but the OS? Never.

NASA has sent up several nuclear powered craft. The Voyagers, for example, and they were certainly interplanetary.

And stop calling ii "Generative" -- it doesn't generate anything -- at best, it's "reflective" in that it reflects back whatever was put into it. It's still GIGO.

You ask: "And how does *also* allowing non fossil-fuel energy, like wind and solar, hurt any of that?"

Answer: intermittency. Adding wind and solar to the generating system just adds cost for no benefit.

If you want detailed case histories of this look at the UK, the usual canary. You will find that the useless intermittent supply from wind and solar comes in, on the bids, far higher than conventional. Regulation is needed to force utilities to buy it. And that is for an intermittent supply. There is no way to deliver dispatchable power from wind and solar at a cost which is competitive with conventional, ie gas or coal.

You doubt it? Go through the UK wind bids and add up the total cost of the UK electricity Net Zero push. Adding wind and solar to a conventional generation system just pushes up costs. Among the costs it adds are constraint payments. There are wind farms in the UK which are making a majority of their income from being paid not to generate, because the wind is supplying when there is no demand.

By the time you factor in the increase in gas consumption consequent on having to rely on open cycle rapid start gas to cover calms and nights its doubtful you even save any emissions either.

Its a great mystery why people who are persuaded of a climate crisis from CO2 emissions have this blind faith in wind and solar generation. Whether or not there is a climate crisis, wind and solar are not a viable generating technology and are not any kind of solution to it.

Paul Homewood has covered the UK wind constracting process in detail if you want that. Most advocates of wind do not. But here he is, as a for example, on constraint payments:
              https://notalotofpeopleknowtha...

and here he is on the recent AR7 auction
              https://notalotofpeopleknowtha...

Lots more on costs, subsidies and constraint if you explore the site. The political consensus in the UK seems to be turning against the so called energy transition. The situation in the Gulf is clarifying minds. The absurdity of the idea that moving to intermittent wind and solar is either possible or is going to increase energy security or reduce energy prices is becoming obvious.

Raise your hand if you have programming in machine language - entering binary directly into memory. Raise your hand if you have programmed in assembly. Raise your hand if you have programming low-level stuff in C.

The first question will have the fewest takers, because there is almost no reason to do that anymore. Assembly will have a few more takers, low-level C a few more. Technology has progressed, our compilers, optimizers and linkers have gotten better.

Historically, there have been numerous attempts to replace source code with some kind of language of specifications. They have all failed...until now. AI may finally achieve that.

Technology advances. Jobs shift. It is absolutely not comfortable for those affected. I knew a guy who started out as a typesetter (putting little metal letters into rows), then he made a huge effort to re-school and learn software for printing. Then printers mostly died out and he became...a gardener.

Regardless of what happens, we will still need some human programmers, just as there are still a few assembly language wizards.

There have been several "fireballs" over various parts of the world, just in the past couple of weeks. Some wandering asteroid came apart?

And left with a brand new gun!

buying information on Americans without obtaining a warrant was an "outrageous end-run around the Fourth Amendment"

Exactly. If law enforcement has reason to investigate you, they can and should get a warrant. If they have no reason to investigate you, WTF are they doing, buying data about you?

It's like the continual attempts at "chat control" in Europe: Law enforcement sees themselves as the caped heroes who do not need to respect individual rights or due process. It would be so much easier if they could just keep everyone under surveillance 24/7.

Apparently, once you are in the VC crowd, you can get investors by hawking any kind of snake oil. I'm sure this guy will soon be rolling in the dough again. In a few years, his employees and investors will be left with nothing (again), but Milton will be doing just fine.

Never really understood these suits. They ask for damages, but does this mean they envisage Exxon (just as a for instance) carrying on extracting and selling fossil fuels? Because that is where the money would have to come from to pay the damages if they won.

Or do they want Exxon to close down and stop extracting and selling? At which point the company would be worthless, so it would have little prospect of paying any damages to (for instance) the residents of Colorado (just as a for instance) or anyone else.

And then you have the problems of scale and attribution. Take the problem of scale first. If you look at the percentage of total global emissions that are due to Exxon, they are rather small. Chinese emissions from coal, for instance, will dwarf them. So there is a real problem proving that Exxon has caused significant amounts of the current warming. But it gets worse, the current warming is not itself very large, Globally its around 1C. Very hard to prove that this much warming has caused significant damage, and even harder to prove that anything Exxon has done has caused significant amounts of it.

This would be the first defense. But the second defense would be attribution. Colorado, for instance, is suing because of the damage done to its residents. How do you prove it was Exxon's emissions, as opposed to the Chinese emissions from burning coal? And if the remedy requested is to close down Exxon, how much effect will that have on global emissions, global temps and local weather?

They seem to be suing people for unproven damage which may have been caused (though you'd have to prove this) by a global phenomenon to which Exxon has been a minor contributor. And requesting remedies which will be either ineffective or impossible to obtain.

Its completely different from a case where a company pollutes a bay with mercury, it enters the local food chain and poisons the locals who eat the local fish. And then sue for being poisoned. Or asbestos, where the companies can be sued by people who worked with the stuff and got asbestosis. Or tobacco, where the product has harmed those who used it, and they can sue. Or a state government can sue based on damage to its citizens. The harm done by the habit to the damaged is provable.

Here we have Colorado trying to sue for damage which may or may not have been caused by global emissions, which have only been contributed to minorly by Exxon, and where there is no provable connexion between the damage and the Exxon emissions and where an award of remedy will either be impossible to pay or will have no effect on the problem..

Simply do not understand either how they are goiing to prove what they need, or what remedy they can obtain.

Sue China, maybe. China is mining and burning more coal than the rest of the world put together, and is accounting for more than one third of global emissions. China stops emitting, global emissions really do fall by an amount which will have an effect. Exxon,,,?

...are essentially impossible to establish. Suits for "climate change" would be nothing but a way for ambulance-chasing lawyers to enrich themselves.

Yeah, I feel the same way. Also, it's not only people wanting lies to be true. People will start manipulating real-world events. Just imaging: Someone bets on a terrorist attack in a certain place, at a certain time, and then arranges for it to happen.

Bizarre journalism. The NY Times really isn't what it used to be. Cables as "round as cantaloupes"? We assume they meant to describe the thickness. A structure as heavy as a "small humpback whale"? I have no idea how big (or small) that might be. Some actual, useful facts would be nice. Voltage? Watts? It's probably a fascinating engineering project, but someone needs to go back to journalism school.

For anyone curious, the CHPE site (the first link) does have some better info: 1250MW, 339 miles of cable.

How much storage/batteries would we need? Way more than we can build. And the wind does stop blowing. It occurs so often the Germans gave it a name --Dunkelflaute.