Strange that none of the answers mentions energy supply. Since the 18th century the fundamental factor that drives economic growth has been cheap energy. When Germany shut down the worldâ(TM)s best and safest nuclear power industry Germany went into recession, and Europe followed.

You are asymptotically approaching a key issue in science and incidentally on Slashdot. The reason for the existence of Slashdot is that most media are designed for the masses and have a low signal to noise ratio, in other words , although the subject matter is real and serious, the treatment is for entertainment, and the underlying subject is trivialised, because its real purpose is to sell advertising. A publisher cant make money pitching to a tiny minority. If you are reading this you are either lost, or you are on the right hand side of the bell curve. Science is not a popular sport. It is inherently elitist. The media farrago of pseudo science around the COVID crisis, is no different to what happened to Galileo, or Darwin. Science has advanced, but society is still essentially unchanged, and without a massive genetic redesign it probably canâ(TM)t change, which is probably a good thing. A lot of space in Slashdot is wasted on pointing out that the commenters are not very bright. The silence of the others is significant.

The question is naive because the purpose of the internet, search engines, LLM, âoeAI,â etc is to make money for the provider, by trading a trivial service that cost nothing at scale, in exchange for massive amounts of personal data, which is the most valuable commodity in the world, which people have been trained to believe is âoefree.â The more of this data you give away, the richer they get, and the poorer you get. This discussion is between highly skilled people who are working as beta testers, for free, using software that no one would pay for. When it starts to actually work, you will have to pay for it. At this point adults are bribing children with candy.

People whose phones were stolen have been begging for this function for decades, but we were told it was not possible. Now it turns out it is available for Apple but not for the customers. Are we really surprised? In Lebanon the phones would have exploded.

The only reason we are reading this is because the infrastructure is provided for "free". Free means that the owners of the infrastructure get the data for free.

Nuclear weapons are banned. Chemical weapons are banned. Biological weapons are banned. Now robot weapons will be banned. Can you see a pattern here?

There is no real comparison between fibre and satellite connections. Fibre is the real deal because it has no upper limit on the bandwidth, but it is not available short term and the world has been waiting decades for it to be available outside major urban centres. Satellite is available at much smaller bandwidth as fast as a courier can deliver the equipment. You plug it in and in 10 minutes you are connected. There is almost no overlap between the two systems, so they dont compete except in some edge cases. The Inflation Reduction Act was designed to expand fibre outside urban centres to improve national productivity. It was never going to be an overnight success. The problem was that Musk was ruining his own reputation with Democrats. People who need a satellite connection are a small minority whose interests were trampled on because of the fake politicisation of an engineering program that was never going to help them anyway. Musk doesn’t actually have anything to do with that. People who think that cars, or rockets, or network connections, are political, are suffering from hysteria.

There is one thing and that is spending taxpayers dollars to stop someone spending their own money to dig up the dump. This is just reflexive authoritarianism. They should have just asked him to clean up after himself and pay a deposit.

Before the lynch mob comes for Cory Doctorow they should read John Brunner and Philip K Dick who were predicting these events in the 1960s. Sic semper tyrannis!

The comment compared a landmine, which is a very simple computing device that is already in use on a massive scale, and which is programmed to kill indiscriminately, with an AI device which can be programmed to kill in a selective way. It clearly implies that the AI device would be a morally superior alternative. The article completely failed to show that the current debate that proposes that all AI weapons are evil and should be banned, would be worse than the current situation. This is about comprehension of logical statements and fails completely as journalism. Read it again. As it stands it is propaganda and has no place on Slashdot.

He aught to know! Everyone in the world is less safe because of Edward Snowden.

This is at least 50% true, but look at the spin. If you rewrite the article and substitute the word Euro, or any other currency, for Tether, it is still equally true. People use any currency to good things and bad things. Like wise spinners complain about the energy use of coin mining, without mentioning that the official credit system uses huge amounts of energy, that is somehow not worth consideration. Every day the USD is used to pay bribes, buy drugs, guns, and CSA. The government should ban it obviously.

The business of selling an OS is the candy that they give the children in exchange for their data. Forget crypto, data is the new money, the only money that really matters. The reason that the OS is so crappy is that customer satisfaction doesn’t matter once the “customer/addict” is locked in. They must have your data to feed their AI project and they will get it any way they can.

The judge has made it obvious that the sentence will be appealed. The prosecution lost the standing to lay a charge for theft because the money isnâ(TM)t actually missing. The whole sensational trial is an ad hominem attack on a clueless autistic to cover up the fact that the court exceeded itâ(TM)s authority, and is trying to steal the money.

This is not even wrong, it is stupid and misleading. On a sunny and windy day the cost of solar and wind power is below zero, except for all the stranded capital cost of the machinery sitting idle, so comparisons based on it are meaningless. However on a windless night there is no renewable power of any sort. Even hydro power fails during a drought. That is why baseload power is essential. So none of the pseudo scientific so called âoemathsâ in these fake comparisons is true. Wake up Slashdot, this is not up to your standards! Nuclear is base load power. You cant compare it to intermittent power, they are apples and oranges. The only other sort of baseload power that is always available is carbon power. Carbon power is not actually cheap unless you ignore the cost of CO2 pollution. So all the comparisons in this article are actually false. The reason we are having this discussion on Slashdot is because the readers are meant to educated and intelligent. How dare you shovel this crap at your faithful readers! The TFA brushes over âoesocialâ questions, which actually means false propaganda about nuclear, which is all that this âoereportâ is about. There is a whole industry of fake news about nuclear. That is why Russia has been funding the âoeGreenâ movement while selling carbon to the suckers, but actually using nuclear themselves. Nuclear waste is feedstock for recycling into more nuclear fuel, so calling it waste is misleading, it is worth billions of dollars. Burying it in the ground is only necessary when you have been refusing to recycle it for decades and preventing proper funding for it using political scare stories in main stream media. More fuel waste = more recycled fuel. That stranded asset will reduce the cost of switching on more nuclear power stations. It is great that we have so much of it on hand to help the energy transition. Finally the point of SMRs is that construction of larger more efficient nuclear power plants is being prevented in developed countries because of propaganda by nut groups masquerading as environmentalists. There is no such problem in China so clearly it is a political issue that has nothing to do with actual engineering problems. The technology has been proved for decades, there is no problem with zero carbon nuclear base load power and the fools who are repeating lies about it should be ignored before they drive us to extinction. The whole point of SMRs is that the power grid needs to expand about 500% over the next few decades to cope with widely dispersed solar and wind power generation. It will cost trillions of dollars. In the mean time MSRs will provide base load at the edges of the network. Thorium SMRs will be temporary installations that will be delivered on the back of a truck and recycled every 10 to 15 years. There will be zero nuclear waste once a proper fuel cycle is established, as it should have been decades ago.