Why?

Discoveries and technologies don't care about national borders. A discovery one place will help (or hurt) people everywhere. Where the discovery was made makes little difference. I also don't see any reason to put people in my country above people in other countries. I care about people, not lines on a map. If something helps people, that's great. Whether those people live in the same country I do makes little difference.

I suppose there's the purely selfish argument that I should want work to be done in a way that benefits me personally, regardless of how it affects other people. But somehow I can't get very worked up about that argument.

They actually are thinking of manned missions. From the article:

However, the article is vague and this might be an unrelated application of the technology. For an unmanned mission, you generate thrust by pushing against the Earth's and sun's magnetic fields. For a manned mission, you use the magnets to protect the people. But the manned mission would probably include conventional thrusters, because the magnets wouldn't generate enough thrust on that short a timeframe. (Just guessing here. I haven't done the math.)

By buying studios left and right. According to Wikipedia Xbox includes over 30 studios in 17 countries. Now consider that each studio is usually developing multiple games at once, and a single AAA game can involve hundreds of people.

They couldn't convince developers to make games exclusive to Xbox, so they threw money at the problem and bought the companies. They hoped this would make Xbox the dominant gaming platform. It didn't work.

It's pure AI washing. Xbox is struggling because they made a lot of mistakes over many years. None of them had anything to do with AI. After two decades of trying and failing to buy their way to the top of the gaming industry, they finally decided to stop throwing money at it and require the business to support itself. That means cutting a lot of people in the studios they acquired over the years.

So how do they justify the cuts to the public? It's because "AI is changing how work gets done." It's all because of AI, even though it really has nothing to do with AI. That sounds better than admitting their strategy for the last 15 years has been a failure.

Because the current president opposes all renewable energy on principle. Under Biden, there was a 30% tax credit for adding solar to your home. Within months of taking office, Trump pushed through a bill that ended it.

Maybe you were hoping for a better answer, but that's why. I can't tell you why Trump opposes all renewable energy. Maybe it's just that liberals support it, and he automatically opposes anything they support. I really don't know. Whatever the reason is, he does.

When a node breaks in a conventional datacenter, you replace the node. You don't replace the entire building, along with the power plant generating electricity to power it. In space, once the GPUs and SSDs start to fail you have to junk the entire datacenter: solar arrays, cooling system, batteries, propulsion system, everything.

The only credible argument I've heard for space datacenters is that solar panels produce 6x more power in space than on Earth. But the lifespan of a solar panel on Earth is likely to be more than 6x longer than if you attach it to a space datacenter, so even that comes out as a loss.

This seems like a perfect example of what RMS calls treacherous computing. There is absolutely no reason for the device to turn off a feature after three hours, except that the manufacturer has programmed it to. You buy a device, but you don't control it. It doesn't do what you want or what's best for you. It does what's best for someone else, even though it's actively harmful to you, the owner of the device.

Treacherous indeed.

A court could absolutely order them to throw out a model. Perhaps you don't think it's likely to happen, but the law doesn't depend on what you think is likely. The court could also issue an injunction barring them from training future models on copyrighted material without permission. They also could grant damages.

Consider that Anthropic settled a similar case for $1.5 billion, which shows they thought they might lose a lot more if the case went to trial.

No it isn't. There are huge differences. The inputs are different, the process is different, and the outcome is different.

Why would you say something that's so obviously false?

The temperatures in your home town this month are weather, not climate. I suspect you really do understand the difference, and are just pretending not to.

That's kind of the point about climate change: the climate is changing. Infrastructure built for the old climate isn't sufficient anymore. 30 years ago no one had AC in Paris because you didn't need it. Today it's becoming hard to survive without it.

Europe is the fastest warming continent on Earth. That's why they're hitting this sooner than some other places. You'll see the same thing in Arizona soon enough. Think of blackouts during heat waves because there isn't enough power to run the air conditioners. Or people getting heat stroke even with AC, because it couldn't bring the temperature down enough. Either you'll spend a lot of money to update your infrastructure, or really bad things will happen.

I think you have that backward. A river flows. If you dump hot water into it, the river carries it away. You can rely on the river to spread out the heat and keep it from concentrating.

A lake doesn't flow. The heat gets concentrated in one place. You're relying on diffusion to spread it out, a much slower process.

If they need more power within two years, nuclear isn't going to help them. Since the goal is to "start construction" on two reactors by 2035, and have five more "planned or under development" by 2040, this is a very long term project. It will probably be 15 years before any power from it gets to the grid.

Solar can quite easily be built in under two years, but Canada isn't a great place for solar. A sensible approach would be to build solar farms further south and transmit the power north, except Canada probably wants to reduce their dependence on the US. Canada is also a great place for wind and geothermal. Those take longer to build than solar, but not as long as nuclear.

When someone has created a successful product, they usually think it's because they're smarter than other people, and they're usually wrong.

Facebook is the only really successful product Zuckerberg has ever created. It succeeded because he was in the right place at the right time, and that doesn't happen very often. All of Meta's other major products are things they bought instead of building themselves. His attempts to build other things from scratch have mostly failed.

He decided "the metaverse" was the future of computing, just as everyone else was embracing AI as the future of computing. If he weren't the founder and single largest shareholder, that would have gotten him fired.

Ironically, Quest is actually the most popular platform for VR gaming. If he'd been content just to create a gaming platform, it would be considered a success. Instead he blew $80 billion trying to turn it into the future of computing, making it a massive failure.

On the contrary, lots of companies have created electric aircraft. It's clear to everyone in the industry that they're going to be important in the future. A few have already moved into production, and many many more are at the prototype stage.

All the existing ones use conventional lithium ion batteries, and yes, low energy density is the main thing holding them back. Which is why this story is such a big deal: 60% higher energy density than the batteries in existing electric aircraft. Somehow you flipped that around in your mind and said "no one else" has used batteries with much higher energy density than what everyone else is using because... the energy density is too low??