Back in the 20th century some power companies would put your hot water heater on a "controllable" meter that could be turned off during periods of high demand. The rate on that meter was lower than the rate for the rest of the house.
Industrial customers who are willing to be "turned off" can also get cheaper rates from many utility companies.
The work this agency is or will be doing has probably been done for decades. This may just be a re-organization to bring people together under one agency.
... that wetware has vulnerabilities too?
Or to put it another way: "Oops, I didn't mean to do that, sorry."
The use case I envisioned is experts who COULD do the work by hand use AI as a tool to be more efficient. This assumes they are expert-enough that will recognize if their AI of choice is giving a false-positive rate that makes their work harder, not easier. It also assumes that since they are being paid for their time (but perhaps only a pittance or not at all if they are students), they will be paid by their employers or funders as much for reviewing the AI's output as they are for the other parts of their research.
... the usual caveats apply: An expert human, or team of humans, needs to look at what the AI is suggesting, understand what it is suggesting, test it with the same or more rigor they would give to the same suggestion if a human had come up with it, and not "sign off" on it until they are satisfied that it is what they say it is.
It's the humans who are putting their professional reputation and, in some cases, their professional licenses on the line if they get it wrong. The AI is incapable of caring if it's correct or not.
I remember the old days when you had to setup TCP on machines just to access an internet with no pictures.
You are young. I remember the older days when you had to set up an external modem to connect to a university mainframe that MIGHT have internet. With no pictures.
No ftp or telnet from your actual home computer. If you wanted to download files, kermit, xmodem, and the mainframe's equivalent of 'cat' were your friend.
An AI that can parse my query and give me a useful result faster than me reading through several pages of documentation is a good thing. But this means the AI and its training data have to be suited for the task. There also needs to be two "escape hatches" - one to give me the pre-AI way of doing things and another that will get me to a human being, at least during business hours.
As for how Google runs its support pages, I don't have enough experience to comment. If the existing documentation is poor, I wouldn't expect better from an AI.
In the long term - 5+ years down the road - big projects like these will want on-site or near-site power or at least on-site battery storage so they can buy power when it's the cheapest.
On-site power should also be attractive to investors: If the data center flops, you still have a power plant that can sell power back to the grid.
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By the mid-'30s, on-site base-load power may mean small nuclear plants. There are logistical, regulatory, and political/NIMBY reasons why that's not a good solution for the 2020s.
How much of this data needed to be "live" and how much of it should've been in "near-line" storage or in offline storage to reduce the risk of bulk-exfiltration?
You do know that you wouldn't have to sign up for such a scheme, right? There's no gun to your head?
Yes, this is understood...however, that's an indictment against the category. Games are optional entertainment products, so the problem is that *any* legislation of entertainment products can come under the guise of "it's optional, you can just not-buy it". Agreed; it's not food or medicine, so the industry benefits from a lower level of necessity in that respect.
However, "it's optional" doesn't mean it's not worth regulating. Gambling is "optional", yet slot machines have such strict regulatory compliance requirements to meet, that they commonly exceed the level of scrutiny given to voting machines and MRI hardware. The gun-to-head argument would stipulate that since casinos are way easier to avoid than hospitals or banks, slot machines don't need regulation.
When video games started running into areas that consumer protection laws typically cover, we started needing to assess the appropriate level of regulation. For decades, games were one-time, permanent purchases - people with Nintendo cartridges and Playstation games on disc can play them today, 20-40 years after release, and neither Nintendo nor Sony have a practical means of saying "...you can't play that anymore". Over time, games got tied to accounts, and there were some consumer benefits - no more scratched discs or lost media or shelf space issues, plus additional content and bug fixes after release.
These were great, until they weren't. Those accused of cheating saw account bans, which meant they couldn't play *other, paid-for games* anymore, irrespective of whether the accusations were true. Companies would take money for games, but then shut down the servers needed to play them saying "it costs us too much", but then would sue fans who said, "...we'll take it from here, then". Of course, there was the whole "surprise mechanics" thing, where games were literally-gambling and they tried to argue that it wasn't.
So yes, there's no gun-to-head requirement for people to sign up for these services. Stadia proved that. However, the problem is when such systems are implemented as a requirement, for artificial means. If GTA6 was "Stadia Exclusive", it's not like GTA6 can't run on consoles or PCs, it's purely a predatory business model for a game that inherently doesn't require it. It's "pay us the same amount as before, but we can claw your access to the game back, but you can't claw your money back, because this benefits us". Now sure, purely rational human beings would refuse to buy it until they released it with traditional distribution mechanisms, but 'vote with your wallet' is exceedingly difficult to make work at scale.
Even if you want to argue this is acceptable for video games, it's a short hop to business software, where such a model has harmed many small businesses with things like Quickbooks pulling this crap and forcing businesses to go from $300 every few years to $2500 annually. "It's optional!! they can print out 20 years of financial data and use paper and a pencil!!11" - how far does that argument go, exactly? that's the problem with the gun-to-head argument - if *only* unavoidable needs receive regulation, then everything that is "optional" becomes a potential means of exploitation. There needs to be a balance, of course, but somehow I don't think that video game publishers are unreasonably impacted because the government tells them "you have to remove DRM from your products if you're not selling them anymore, and you can't sue your customers for fixing things in your products if they paid for it, either".
If selling becomes economically less viable than leasing or renting or a library-subscription, then selling will no longer be offered by vendors.
you will not.
OS/2 Warp 3.0 could technically run in I think 4MB, yes MB. "Run" being a euphemism for "boot and get to a desktop in less than 72 hours."
... so their advertisements play smoother.
...if I need to connect it to an account, and/or it needs internet access to function, then it's a guarantee that 1.) the conversations will be stored in Amazon's meat grinder, 2.) the user won't be able to delete them (just make them invisible for themselves), and 3.) it's going to turn into a subscription fee.
It is not best to swap horses while crossing the river. -- Abraham Lincoln
