Right, and it will have extremely good days because of seasonal variation. If we size our systems to provide most of the winter load, there will be a lot of excess power in the summer, and while batteries will continue to get cheaper, I don't think they'll get cheap enough to timeshift from summer to winter. Long-distance power transmission also doesn't do much to address that problem, unless it's really long distance.

I didn't say they didn't. Those missiles were very effective. Much more effective than ten times as many drones would have been.

Both missiles and drones are of limited use when you're not willing to send infantry to take and hold territory. Cheap light drones much more so than Tomahawks and GBU-57s.

This, though for the most part, you don't need the whole rover — only its brain (and perhaps its communications electronics). The situations where you need the whole rover involve figuring out how to get it unstuck. And the more experience they have at running the things around on Mars, the less likely that becomes.

Maybe, but if there's a useful place to put excess production it can definitely be more cost-effective to do that... and carbon recapture is definitely something worth doing, and could probably be done intermittently. We just need a way to pay people to do it, pay them enough that it's worthwhile. Note that it doesn't have to be worthwhile now, we can new tech that makes it more efficient, but the pay on offer has to be high enough that people think there might be some path to profitability.

Yep. What would more likely happen is that a small developer is selling their game for 3 months at $30, half price for 6 months, 75% off for 3 months, and then fail as a company and have to shut shop. They would then be responsible for refunding $30 to EVERYONE who paid ANYTHING.

That's just untenable.

There is no age verification requirement. It's an age declaration *with no validation* so that vendors know to exclude access or content based on that self-declaration. This was necessary to placate the part of the population that wants actual validation/verification.

I agree with your analysis.

It seems like this bill is a symptom of grievances that people have with federal IP protections, hoping that California might go out on a limb and carve out a weird, one-state exception that might "force" the rest of the nation to follow.

The US didn't fail in the Iran war due to a lack of offensive air power, and its offensive air power definitely wouldn't have been improved by packing the Bush, Lincoln and the Burkes with cheap drones. It failed because it was a half assed effort organized by clowns who apparently don't know any military history and decdied to disregard all their advisors who do.

You can theoretically win a war with air strikes alone but it depends entirely on your enemy. If they fail to surrender then you lose, and there's a strong incentive to dig in when some foreign invader starts dropping bombs on you. That's why no real war has ever been won that way.

Using projected military power in general has always been hazardous. It's expensive, unpopular, and depends on either a quick victory or local allies, preferably both, or it will fail. "Local allies" are part of the soft power that Hegseth is so disdainful of, and the US has lately been lighting on fire just to watch the pretty flames.

Datacentres are coveted by lots of local governments. Lots of construction jobs, high paying jobs in operation and maintenance, no on-site pollution. It's like tourism without the tourists.

The locality in this story, along with the state of Virginia, offer a lot of incentives for datacentres to site there, which is why they have so many. Meanwhile, the electricity price today is just slightly higher than it was in 2000, corrected for inflation, and lower than it was in 2010.

Also, turning off the lights in empty rooms is something we learned to do as soon as we were tall enough to reach a light switch. The fact that adults have to be told to do this suggests electricity is still too cheap in Henrico County.

We definitely need to start pursuing it, at least researching it. We'll never solve the climate change problem with emissions reduction alone, recapture and sequestration will be essential.

There are some strategies which are pretty cheap, such as planting forests. But the numbers don't add up on that; we'll need more. I think carbon recapture systems may pair fairly naturally with renewable energy generation, though. Renewable variability means that in many cases it makes sense to overprovision. For example, in order to get sufficient power generation from a solar plant on cloudy days, you may install 2X-3X as many panels as you'd need for a sunny day... but that means that on sunny days you have lots of excess production that might be hard to use (I experience that with my rooftop solar; last month I generated just over 1 MWh that I couldn't use and the grid wouldn't pay me for). Using that excess to power carbon recapture would be a good idea.

For that to work, though, we need to arrange some financial reason for people to build and operate carbon recapture systems. That's a big missing piece which only government can solve. The obvious solution (to the entire climate change problem, actually!) is refundable carbon taxes plus carbon tariffs.

If your concern is that a product you use might be discontinued, there are some simple rules that you can apply to decide whether a given Google product is safe from being discontinued:

(1) Is it used by 100M+ people? If it is, it's safe. If the number is 10M+ it's probably good, but there's a risk. If it's less than 10M, it probably won't last. Unless...
(2) Is it a paid service? Paid services rarely get shut down, and if they do Google bends over backwards to make t right.

If it's free and has a small (for Google) userbase? It's all but guaranteed to get shut down. Google is a business. They make a lot of products that are free to use, but only because they can bundle ads with them or otherwise profit from them, but free-to-use products require a large user base to generate much revenue.

Typical. Modded down for making a simple, incontrovertible statement of fact.

Yep.

Even without the ownership issue it would almost certainly have failed because TSG (to distinguish them from SCO) discovered to their shock and amazement that Linux had not, in fact, kifed code from Unix. They clearly went into it assuming that a bunch of volunteer hackers couldn't possibly have built a fully-functional kernel, expecting they could easily prove lots of copyright infringement. Failing to find infringement they hoped they could bluster IBM into settling, but IBM was determined to fight it out and had much better lawyers (heh, we used to call them the Nazgul).

Many of us were disappointed when the ownership issue was revealed. We really wanted Linux to get its day in court. As it turned out that didn't matter; no one else was ever dumb enough to try. Today, of course, the biggest tech companies in the world -- which means the biggest companies in the world! -- almost all use Linux extensively. Even Microsoft would probably stand up to defend Linux these days.

From the SENATE COMMITTEE ON BUSINESS, PROFESSIONS AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billAnalysisClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1921):

That implies a bit more burden than the bill actually requires. From AB-1921 digest (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1921):

From the bill language:

The committee analysis greatly exaggerates the requirements, but the objections are still at least somewhat valid. If a company (imagine a developer-owner, one-man show) stops hosting the only live server for a game because he's taking care of an ill spouse, why should he be obligated to make significant software modifications, host those patches, or create documentation instructing how to create and host a the game via a private server. And if he doesn't do so, then he has to refund everyone at the HIGHEST PRICE for which the game has sold in the last 12 months?

This bill was written like it was intended to stick it to EA or Blizzard, so that didn't help.

Lastly, and certainly not least, the part authorizing the State Attorney General to take legal action on violating developers was just ill-advised in this legislative session. You see, the California Legislature has a rule that no bill that could cost the State more than $100,000 should move through the process without exceptional circumstance. The cost for the State Attorney General to take on dozens of "dead video game cases" would put the bill's price tag way over that threshold.

The bill was asking too much in today's modern financial contexts and might have been asking for too much to start with.

A BETTER bill would have been simple: "The IP-holder of a video game that ceases distribution/hosting ALSO relinquishes both liability and control over software replication and hosting." Basically, if you abandon something, it goes into a special licensing phase wherein other people can replicate it and re-distribute it, but they're not authorized to draw a profit from those actions.

This isn't a new thing. Soviet doctrine for dealing with carriers was to fire as many missiles as they could at them to overwhelm their defences.

The US focus on expensive, highly capable weapons isn't baseless. The US military is designed to project power, and projecting power is expensive. If you're going to ship equipment halfway around the world and support it there, it might as well be the best you can make. That is very different from Ukraine or South Korea where they are, or expect to, fight in their literal back yards.

Expensive invading armies have always been vulnerable to the defending swarm, from hoplites and knights to empires getting their asses kicked in Afghanistan, Vietnam or Iran.