It has already failed. People just refuse to see the truth. The voters are incompetent and corrupt so they get the government that reflects them. It's that simple.

Can it revert to functioning again? Possible but unlikely. Rome died over 300+ years. They don't die instantly.

NOTE- most Americans won't realize until it's so bad they can't deny it and some will never get it even if he does Musk's Nazi Salute because they are still in denial over that.

Modern despotism has a fake democratic element so the lower third of the bell curve don't participate in any resistance or help defend the despotic "democracy."

Aside from the constitution being flawed and totally not a religious document as some idiots believe, the Congress is the most powerful branch of government. This co-equal BS is like saying apples and oranges are equal.

The congress writes the laws; which is the greatest power and that is why so many people share that power. The "CEO" only can execute those laws; not rewrite them or interpret them. It's supposed to be a much weaker position and still a design flaw that other governments improved with ministers. The courts settle misinterpretations (2nd most powerful, split over multiple people;) especially, intentionally stupid interpretations - they can't invent new laws. If they do, congress can clarify with new law and if they get ridiculously corrupt, they get fired by congress. If the "CEO" gets out of line, they can fire the president too; being like the board of directors.

The "CEO" doesn't have invented powers beyond the rules or even the policies and it doesn't matter what a corrupt court says because the "board" can fire them all at will with only the "shareholders" to keep them in check at elections... when the system works and the voters are not too gullible. Which they are.

Trump may as well start firing congressional staffers too; since he ignores all the laws anyway. I bet the GOP won't even push back if he fires all their staff...

Irony? or gullible idiot? can you be so stupid and still manage to create an account and post something? This is so stupid, somebody must be helping or it's just a trolling for fun.

it's a Monday night. People can freak tomorrow. Though it is not a surprise they continue corrupt rulings.

Yes, the -gate habit comes from the Watergate scandal. Watergate was during Richard Nixon's second term as president, in 1972-4. He was a Republican, and resigned the presidency before he could be impeached. The name comes from an attempted break in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington DC that ended up uncovering a whole pile of shady stuff Nixon had been up to.

Are Americans actually this ignorant of their own history?

Why would you think that? Cameras a cheap, and LiDAR prices are coming down, too. As companies build them in larger and larger quantities, economies of scale and competition will drive the price down rather quickly. Best guess is that in five years, self-driving hardware will add about $15k to the price of the vehicle if they use LiDAR, or $6k if they don't. And that's including the cost of stuff that a lot of cars come with already, like the electric steering rack. I'd be shocked if it were significantly more than $20k.

So as drivers replace their cabs or semi tractors, they'll spend the extra $20k or whatever to buy versions that are self-driving. For that matter, once the tech is reliable enough, you'll likely see retrofit kits come on the market. There's no good reason you'd replace a working tractor unit when you can just swap out the steering rack, bolt on cameras, and add some electronics, and that's true whether you're an owner-operator or the manager of FedEx's fleet.

Oh, absolutely. Most local delivery uses people who already work at the business, and delivery is just a small part of that person's job. So that impact is likely to be close to zero. But that still leaves probably probably around 5 to 10 million taxi drivers and probably three or four million truck drivers.

But taxi and truck drivers won't be replaced overnight. Most taxi drivers and many truck drivers own their own rigs, and although they may eventually replace themselves with robot rigs, they would continue to earn the revenue after doing so. They certainly have no incentive to fire themselves.

Ultimately, somebody has to own the rigs. There's nothing that necessarily requires that robotaxis be fleet vehicles owned by some big company like Uber, no matter how much companies like Uber might prefer it to be that way. Replacing all of those taxis with robot cars costs money, and Uber isn't capitalized that well. Uber's cash on hand wouldn't even be enough to replace all of the taxis in the United States. So while this may shift things around some, I wouldn't expect a taxipocalypse.

Sorry, was thinking orders of magnitude, not orders of complexity. :-)

Aw, I'm disappointed there's no reply on Zuckerberg's origins.

Everything's an AI artifact. It's not like lazy people who slept through high school chemistry have been punching unit conversions into calculators for generations.

I'm not sure why he thinks it will be a problem for drivers. A study a few years ago showed that something like 96% of all Uber drivers quit within the first year. So worldwide, we're talking about only O(350,000) people who will have to find something else to do. The world economy can easily absorb such a tiny number.

That's no moon. It's a space station. :-D

You can use the UV light. You need different material with a different bandgap. Basically a whole other panel, stacked on the first. But before you go after that 5% UV you're going to want to go after the blue, and probably the red and some of the near IR.

They're called multijunction solar cells and they're used in places where you need maximum efficiency, like in space. For regular use, single junction cells are much more popular because a single bandgap panel absorbing at the maximum solar emission is going to be more efficient price-wise than a multijunction cell where the extra bandgaps are in lower emission ranges.

Having control is very different from allowing a third-party company to send down arbitrary definitions at any time that suddenly render arbitrary software nonfunctional. The whole concept of Crowdstrike can be summarized as "McAfee Antivirus on steroids". I mean, this sums it up.

This. The "someone says 'Hey Siri/Okay Google' on TV/radio/loudspeaker" problem is a well-known failure mode, and if they don't have reasonable mitigation in place by now, they don't know what they're doing, and their product shouldn't be taken seriously. Whether that mitigation is blocking it during meetings, doing handshaking to limit commands to the nearest device when multiple nearby devices detect the hot word at exactly the same time, making it recognize your voice and not other random people's voices, or any of dozens of other strategies for coping, having some mechanism in place to handle this should be considered a base requirement for any voice-based assistant.