It is illegal* to ask if candidates are married.

It is illegal* to ask if candidates have children.

It is illegal* to ask if candidates live with their parents.

* In America.

I agree with the last part in parethenses. Do you have citations for the rest?

Not for lack of trying. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/judge-blocks-rfk-jr-from-scaling-back-childhood-vaccine-recommendations.

Bwah? The article I linked to is on Harvard's news site. It is not just about Harvard. As that article notes there's been about 500 million dollars of contracts canceled. Note that even if that were all Harvard (which it isn't) that would be a sizable chunk even in their endowment. And this has on top of that had a major chilling effect causing corporations to stop doing mRNA treatment research in general.

The US does a lot less preventative medicine than peer European countries, so lower vaccination rates harm a lot more here. And aside from changing the vaccine schedules, they've done a lot else which I mentioned. Like cancelling all the mRNA research https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/slashing-of-funding-for-mrna-vaccine-development-raises-concern/ which is going to have massive long-term damaging consequences.

Minor note: Carter did not have solar cells in the sense of electrical production on the White House. Carter had solar water heating panels but they were not "solar cells" but just direct solar heating for water. See https://projectsolar.com/blogs/solar/white-house-solar-panels. Solar cells at the time were still very expensive and not very efficient.

A stopped clock is right twice a day is the old cliche. Concerns about microplastics are legitimate and are particularly linked to inflammation https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969723075757 and cardiovascular issues https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11009876 among other concerns. We don't know how serious this is, but it is at least a problem and should be looked at furhter. This is a good thing, and should be recognized as such. That the same government is refusing to deal with CO2 and is actively trying to hinder the development of solar and wind power still holds. And I'm sure the damage to vaccines and sabotaging any new vaccine research or mRNA treatments will kill far more people than are helped by this. But it is a problem when science is politicized, and that's what's caused them to be so bad on other issues. It would be a mistake to start associating legitimate concerns about microplastics with the right-wing. Unfortunately, these same people are obviously trying to do that by connecting this to "MAHA" which is really more about really dumb ideas about masculinity and anti-vax attitudes masquerading as science. Don't let the justified contempt for these people cause one to start thinking that microplastics aren't a real problem.

No, they're arguing there's ways to use their software to commit an illegal act, which is true of literally anything.

I can't imagine anyone making the argument that using AI tools to rewrite code in another language removes the copyright.

Not exactly, because the amount of stearates that came off the gloves would be fairly random, so there's no way to apply a general correction. You might not even know what kind of gloves they used in the experiment!

That doesn't mean you throw out the results, but you maybe mark those results and say there was potential factor unaccounted for and the results needs to be replicated.

In short, Java was invented for a reason, and while it has become a victim of legacy cruft as well, the underlying concept of truly portable apps, with a minimum of fuss to jump from platform to platform, still ought to be the preferable path. The problem is that that true platform neutrality/ambiguity pretty much kills Microsoft in all but a few niches, like gaming, but only because hardware vendors put less effort into drivers for other operating systems.

Yes, Office is still king, although I think that crown is beginning to slip, and it may end up being Excel, with its large list of features, that may last the longest. But it isn't 1990, or even 2000 anymore. Developers have multiple ways of developing portable applications, and while MS may (for the nth time) update or swap out its toolchains, the real question is will developers really care?

1) They don't need to turn the core on Earth. 2) Core's don't get straight from slightly enriched uranium to plutonium to highly radioactive in a few seconds. They take time for radioactivity to build up as there are more fission products.

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

In order to get numbers like 5 million gallons one has to be looking at the very largest data centers, counting all water use as single use, even though water used for cooling is often reusable, and counting all the water used not by the center directly but used for power plants also as discussed earlier. Typical data center consumption is much lower. For example, see https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-data-centers-and-water/ which has one of the high-end estimates for what a typical data center consumes. As for the idea that there's a lot of data centers being built in the Southwest, more are being built or planned to be built in California or on the East Coast. Northern Virgina is the fastest growing region for data centers. See map here https://usdatamap.com/ (This isn't a perfect map. The situation is in flux. And admittedly, this map doesn't show size of them. My impression is that at least some of the ones being built in Arizona are very large so the map here isn't showing everything.)

Yes, building some of the largest data centers, making them all near one city, would take up a lot of water. However, that would be silly; the people building these are not idiots and aren't going to go shove all their centers in a region they know they then won't have enough water for all of them. Moreover, in many jurisdictions, one has historical water rights to contend with. In many jurisdictions for major water resources, historical users get priority over new users, so farmers and others would get priority before data centers if it came down to that. (Yes, this does mean that in parts of California, golf courses get priority over some other uses.)

This is not remotely why AI systems are being used. ChatGPT is being used daily by hundreds of millions of people https://explodingtopics.com/blog/chatgpt-users. Right now, ChatGPT is the 5th most visited website in the world by some independent metrics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites. These systems are not being used just because some rich people want to not have to pay people or bother with civility. The regular, common people are using them. Understanding where this is going, the impacts it will have, both positive and negative, requires understanding the actual usage, not what one imagines it to be.

The water use for AI seems to be greatly exaggerated. Estimating water use complicated. Different data centers use different amounts of water. Also, systems need more water use for cooling when the weather is hot, so centers may use more water in summer. A data center will use more water when the center is at close to maximum usage, so data centers will use less water if they are handling queries when few users are using the system. Complicating things even further, some people are counting not just data cooling water but also counting the indirect water use from the needed electricity production (fossil fuel and nuclear plants use a fair bit of water for their steam turbines). There's a good article here discussing the difficulties in making water estimates https://theconversation.com/ai-has-a-hidden-water-cost-heres-how-to-calculate-yours-263252 However, all things considered. they estimate that all things considered it takes about 39 milliliters of water per a typical query. Now, for comparison, a high efficiency shower uses about 1.5 gallons of water a minute, which is about 95 ml of water a second. So making a query to an LLM AI system costs less than a second of water. If this estimate is off even by a factor of 3, this is equivalent to taking 1 second longer on a shower. The water use is just not hat high. The total water use is also not very high. If for example you use estimates for how much water is used by golf courses in the US https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%20Center/how-much-water-does-golf-use.pdf, the largest estimates of AI use put the water use as about a tenth of the water use by golf courses, and golf course water estimates put it at most about 1% of total US water use. So even if one is concerned, just getting rid of some of the gigantic water hungry golf courses in California and Arizona (seriously who the heck puts a golf course in Arizona) would largely offset this. Now, it is true that as data centers grow, more water will likely get used. But as we switch to more wind and solar power, the indirect water use will go down, and data center builders are working hard on reducing water use since it is such a hotbutton issue.

There are a lot of legitimate concerns about AI. Water use should not be high on the list.

These issues are all very minor. Submarines are cramped and people can remain incommunicado for months. Messages to Earth is essentially just means one will be relying on email equivalent. And vacuum packed food can keep for years. Drinking water that is reclaimed from pee isn't fun, but isn't a big deal.

Mechanical problems are a big issue. That's why for example even today submarines carry some replacement parts, and why big surface ships historically had machine shops. Some things will need to be carried. But others may need to be ready to be made on site. That's why there's now a 3D printer on the ISS, to get used to doing exactly this. The gravity issue isn't a large one: on a 90 to 120 day mission to Mars, the level of bodily deteriorating isn't that big. We don't have a lot of data for the exact "how bad is it" but I'd strongly suspect that 3 days in microgravity and then 2 years on the Moon is going to be much worse than 90 days in microgravity and then 2 years on Mars.

A 90 or 120 day trip just isn't that big an issue. People have spent far longer on the ISS and managed fine.

People don't go insane and murder each other nearly as much as they do in movies. Again, look at submarines. The degree to which there are psychological issues is drastically exaggerated.

One of the lessons from the ISS and Mir is how incredibly difficult and expensive in-orbit construction is. Now, we've learned from it but its still a big issue. If you want to send 12 people then the most pessimistic estimates give you around 250 tons of stuff for a 2 year mission. That's only slightly higher than the Starship design, which is capable of being built on Earth, and masses about 5000 tons. Serious on Earth-designs for rockets have been bigger than that. For example Sea Dragon was going to mass 18,000 tons. And you can also do things to reduce the difficulty by launching multiple rockets, say one with the humans and the stuff they need for the first few months, and then another just full of cargo.

AI systems are useful to many people. Most users aren't getting it as an investment engine itself. They are using them to do things like assist with programming, look over drafts of documents, do specific searches and other things. Don't mistake valuable to you personally as the sole form of relevant value.

A Mars settlement has the long-term ability of self-sustaining. And that same benefit means that it is much easier than the Moon to make it while not fully self-sustaining, involve a lot less maintenance and resource. One can likely more easily grow food, obtain water, and do many other things. The higher gravity also means that the health issues for humans in a low gravity environment are likely going to be lower.

Ok.. This is a reasonable list in part. The gravity well point is a pretty reasonable one; if one does want to build large structures in space, then having the much lower lunar gravity to start with is reasonable, and mining there doesn't come with the same environmental damage it does on Earth. The telescope point also makes sense, especially for radio telescopes which would be in the lunar shadow. I'm not at all convinced by your last point; it has a pre-existing fixed orbit which severely limits when observations and communications can occur, and that would require much larger systems for Earth observation since the moon is far away, and would add really not good latency for communications due to the moon being about a light second away from the Earth. But your point about resource extraction/processing and telescopes is enough to make a strong case that there's a reasonable goal set here. So, yeah, my statement there was wrong.

Seems like a suboptimal use from a military standpoint. Sure, it works in Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but in practice, the travel time from the moon to Earth means it will be a minimum even with very high acceleration of about 6 hours to hit a target on Earth. Much more effective to have satellite based weapons in closer orbits.