the vehicles start looking more like a wingless airplane than a car.

And what does the company's name mean? ;) (Hint: it's Greek)

It adds up to 40 miles per day, not 5. 5 would be a cloudy day.

I used to be anti-solar-panels-on-cars back when solar panels were expensive, and ones of reasonable efficiency were even more expensive - the argument was, "put it on your roof where it belongs". But that's just not the case any more. Adding solar is just not that much of a cost to the car. It adds some complexities, but mainly in the design / early manufacturing phase.

Also:

The average American drives 37 miles per day.

1) So if you're in a sunny climate, it covers all of said average-driver's driving. Otherwise, said average-driver has to plug in occasionally, but not nearly as often.

2) Most people drive less than the average (the average is skewed by a long-tail - small numbers of people who drive very far every year). What you actually should be meaning is the median US driver; the median drives 23 miles per day. Most Europeans, even less.

3) Even for said "average american", their daily average is skewed by long drives (e.g. road trips and similar). Wheren of course you're plugging in, you'd be plugging in even if the car was adding 80 miles a day. But when not on road trips, their daily average is lower.

4) Surely you can see the appeal of the tangential benefits, such as being unstrandable - where even if you run out in the middle of the desert 20 miles from the nearest town, you're still going to get there, just delayed (remember that EV ranges, if you drive very slowly, increase like 2x, so 40 miles a day becomes 80, so a 20 mile shortfall is only a ~4h delay on a sunny day).

5) Nobody is saying, "One car for everybody". Of course appeal varies by person and by location. Here in Iceland for example we have three problems. One, very little sun at all for a good chunk of the year. Two, even in the summer, when the days are long, the sun is mainly low and circles around you. Solar power just kinda sucks here in general. And three, the three-wheel config would mean that the centre wheel wouldn't align with tracks in the snow from other cars (although there is a slight advantage, in that it also wouldn't align with road ruts from studded tyres, which often fill with water in the rain and become hazardous).

But somewhere in the southern US, it's a great option.

Let's ask Michael Hastings. Oh, wait.

Just joking. Of course it's only a joke, but it's the obvious one I was looking for when the topic came up. I'm sure Obama's deep state never would have done such an unethical thing and you'd have to be a real conspiracy nut to blame someone left over from Dubya's time.

Oh, and I'm also sure that this is one of those problems that will just go away if we wait a bit longer. That's the other low-hanging joke I was looking for.

Probably a PROFIT! joke hanging around somewhere, too.

Not disagreeing, but on this line of approach, it seems better to just put the data centers in the dessert rather than transmit the power. I'm even trying to imagine a design where the solar panels are providing shade to help keep the data centers cool... What kind of air gap would you need to make that work? Kind of a jungle high canopy design?

Another option might be burying the computers, but I think that would lose out because of the cooling problems... But possibly convection powered cooling could be made to work?

Yup, there's also the time factor.

There's an important study of boys at age six being diagnosed with ADHD.

At 6 yrs 1 month the odds are 50% higher than at 6 yrs 11 months.

Because they're both "age 6" but in boys that year is huge in development and all metrics are against the age-appropriate standard.

If you're on WoW or Roblox all your waking hours you will have retarded development vs. somebody who is in the world.

So you'll be more ADHD for a 15 yr old if you mostly miss age 14.

"Trust the experts" and sheet.

I think you're quite optimistic. I'd go with "Security can be vastly strengthened", but even BSD has had bugs.

Nobody is that "stupid" in those departments.

The question should be what was the quid pro quo?

We can imagine what the PLA got out of it but what favor did Microsoft get?

And how high up the chain did it go? Who specifically approved the arrangement?

At least Microsoft probably has Windows 11 "backups" of the hard drives of anyone who might think of bringing charges.

Not sure if that strategy can be called stupid. Lots of other words apply.

"One Nation Under Blackmail" is a popular phrase.

For those who didn't follow it, it's not that it's a contact binary that is so neat in and of itself, it's that when they modeled it, they determined that, the collision that formed it was less than 5 meters per second (less than 11 mph / 18 kph). Like a parking lot fender bender, but with the cars being ~750 billion tonnes.

I think you're oversimplifying because the supply pattern for the renewable energy isn't that complicated. Depending on various factors, I'm thinking you could get relatively high usage numbers with relatively low expenditures on storage, but part of that optimization would involve idling some of the servers some of the time. However even in that case you would want to tweak the system to keep the best servers doing as much of the work as possible.

Eh? Now the spelling check has decided that videocide is problematic after all? Were my eyes napping before? Eh and double eh?

Currently you are overrating AI. There are circumstances where it's the right choice, and circumstances where it isn't. But the point keeps changing.

Sometimes I wake up and start doing new science. But usually I just roll over and go back to sleep.

Yeah, so if this is the cover story what other heat signatures might they be looking for?

It's not immediately obvious to me but something we should understand.

Detecting Zizians would help prevent these forest fires but it would be quite hard for a satellite to do that.

Well, yes. Because it enables people to take precautions against it. But it sure doesn't prove it won't happen.

Note: It doesn't even have to be done with malicious intent. Lots of people just write really unexpected prompts. The more you have doing that, the more edge cases you have.