No wonder that external batteries are the main problem. They're large and tend to lie around for ages, mostly-discharged, when people don't travel.

The fix would be an USB charger port in front of your seat. Ideally USB-C; the airline can then sell overpriced cables to passengers who only brought their USB3 charger cable

by artificially inflating the stock price, while spending the company's assets on something that by definition is worth less after buying it; after all, shares which the company owns itself cannot contribute to its bottom line.

This is not a sustainable business model. In fact, anybody who even suggests such a scheme should be dismissed with prejudice. Unless, you know, the company no longer has any shareholders who believe in the long-term success and growth of the company, which is indicative of way worse problems.

Also batteries are a fine substitute for inertia. In fact, some German physics think tank (sorry I didn't save the reference) ran the numbers and found that a MW of battery gives you roughly as much inertia, or the effect thereof anyway, as 10MW of spinning hardware.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. A backdoor implies that these rogue commands can be sent over Bluetooth. We're not simply talking undocumented API calls here.

There's two reasons I can think of for this, (a) collect money from gullible people, (b) collect addreses of gullible people and then sell them even more impossible things.

Either way it's yet another scam along the lines of "save 90% of gasoline by installing this pair of otherwise-useless magnets. [Small Print] You also need to drive a lot less. [large print] Only $499,999! Supplies limited [Small Print] by the number of people who can't and/or don't want to understand basic physics [large print]!!!11!"

a company that's worth X pays, or rather is eventually expected to pay, 1.5X for something?

How the heck does that even work? The only reason for me, as a bank, to finance this thing seems to be that after acquiring Xerox when it finally goes belly-up, I can fillet it and sell off the pieces.

It doesn't really matter whether the bot came up with that on its own if it only takes one bored kid to start the robot revolution.

The world has no shortage of bored kids.

"The literature is full of robot uprisings".

Oh come on. The fact that LLMs confuse fact and fiction all the time is no justification for you to do the same thing.
(Even if you *are* an LLM, it's still wrong.)

*Corps of Engineers.

"each with a capacity of 3 MW" – well, no. 3 GW.

There are bidirectional inverters that can also charge batteries, so that's not a problem.

Could we please retire the "exploding batteries" nonsense?

Batteries don't explode. They may go up in flames, esp. when shorted – more or less violently and more or less unstoppably, both depending on cell chemistry – "less" when using LiFePo4 – but *that's it*. (As opposed to petrol cars. The right mix of air and petrol vapor does go "foom" rather spectacularly, if not as nicely as in most movies.)

"63 million kilowatt hours per day" -- oh boy. This suggests that the reactor can distribute those kWh energy parcels across the day as required. Surprise: it can't do that.

Also, 63/24 is 2.625, so one of these numbers is inaccurate.

Look around you. There's heaps of people out there who tout nuclear fusion as THE solution.

Care to explain why "this will never be cost effective compared to solar+wind+storage" is a "made up reason", given that ages-old and well-tested tech (fission reactors) have the exact same problem? The latest French reactor that went online cost about 100 times more than its solar+wind equivalent. You could have built that, bought a heap of batteries, and would still be way ahead, financially as well as environmentally.

This probably has pushed the projected break-even point from +30 to +15 years. So let's assume that in 15 years or so this idea will generate enough energy to be financially viable. You then need another 15 years to figure out how to built it at scale, deploy enough of them, and whatnot.
Surprise: we can't wait another 30 years before we *really* reduce CO2 output.
Also, even after these 30 years the tech will hardly be cost effective. Not when compared to building the same power output with a heap of solar arrays and/or wind turbines plus associated storage. That's already true for nuclear power today, and it definitely will be true for fusion power tomorrow.