China always aspired to be the world's undisputed leader in science and technology, and Trump is giving them what they want.

Oh, we can figure out a way easily enough. Figuring out a way to do it that doesn't quintuple food prices is the more difficult part.

A lot of people don't realize how valuable "environmental services" (like crop-friendly weather) are to the economy until suddenly they don't have them anymore, and have to start spending money to try to reproduce those same conditions artificially. Building air-conditioned indoor farms is going to be hell of a lot of capital-intensive than just essentially planting seeds in the ground and gathering the result food afterwards.

Hmm, sounds like you've caused an underflow on an unsigned value. I recommend restarting the simulation from the top and hoping it goes better on the next iteration.

What made the decision so difficult was that they decided they had to give refunds to everyone whose devices no longer functioned properly, because their customers were no longer getting the functionality they had paid for.

Right?

At some point they'll have AI-controlled robots going through the waste streams and the landfills and sorting all the useful materials out of them. Once you have robots capable of doing the tedious work, landfill becomes a valuable ore, full of useful materials.

Between Bitcoin and AI, "too much electricity" shouldn't be an insurmountable problem for anyone. Either of things will happily consume as much electricity as you can throw at it, and want more. Of course, if you think those things are a waste of power, you could start using excess power to synthesize fuel to sell.

No, it's more like "the government has to follow its own rules".

So tell me that's what's been happening over the past few months? Beautiful tariffs introduced and withdrawn on a whim, deportations by the US equivalent of the Gestapo (they tick most of the boxes) on a whim, DOGE destruction spearheaded by someone the anointed one is now considering deporting - that is just skimming the surface.

Slashdot subject-lines are a maximum of 50 characters long, if they exceed the limit they are truncated. "fiel" was a truncated "field".
Note that replies start with "Re:" so a further 3 characters were lopped off to compensate - "fiel" was reduced to "f".

Federalise the techs? (I think that's the expression)

You won't find lawyers prepared to disbar other ambulance chasers over such such a "triviality". I wonder if the other lawyer (or his/her paralegal) should have noticed, that would have killed the case then and there.

This is mostly about Donald and his tendency to unilaterally break conventions. Europeans are worried about backdoors mandated by His Highness on a whim, although that is also a problem with the British and the French.

I checked and it seems I had already disabled Gemini. I can't remember having done so but will presumably have done it as soon as I knew what it was - normal Luddite behaviour for me.

China's economy can always sell product to Chinese people. There are a lot of them. Not to mention the rest of the world, which is happy to trade with China, if only because China isn't constantly making unreasonable and incoherent demands on everyone.

"Mad Max" seems to have seriously underestimated the creativity of Australians regarding energy production :)

I think they expected that since they had paid to purchase the game, they would be able to play that game for as long as they cared to, i.e. same as the deal you get when you purchase a book or a DVD.

You can argue that they were wrong to expect that, but that's the usual way of thinking about items that you buy, so that's what people (who haven't yet thought through the implications of software shrink-wrap licensing agreements) naturally expect.

If being able to play the game perpetually isn't a viable business model, then perhaps the publisher should be required to specify up-front how long (at minimum) they will guarantee purchasers access to the game; that way nobody will be surprised when their access goes away, because they understood the time-limit on what they were purchasing before they made the purchase.