Brokkr

Market cap doesn’t say how much cash they have available. For that, look at cash on hand which publicaly traded companies need to report

MS has about 75B cash on hand, so they could afford this themselves. They will probably argue that it will bring jobs and expertise to the state. Also, it’s a loan, so the interest will generate funding for the state as well. nevermind, not a loan from the state, so no interest would go to the state.

Unfortunately, this is one of those fun ideas that simply won’t ever be possible. Even if we start with the easy one of just breaking chemical bonds, those bonds exist because it reduces the total energy of the system.

To “disrupt” those bonds, energy must be supplied, and to do it for even a small amount of material would require a tremendous amount of energy. Delivering that much energy over a distance just isn’t possible because atmosphere in between would also be “disrupted”. The disrupted material would also fly apart at high speeds and high temperatures. So any type of “ray” or “gun” would just turn into a bomb with a pistol grip trigger. I expect that the user experience testing would have lots of very negative reviews.

It is a loosing battle to try to make sense of the nonsensical. Only use their craziness as a source of humor and entertainment.

I think in their crazy world, the north pole is at the center of the earth disk and Antarctica is actually an ice wall around the perimeter that keeps the water on the disk. Therefore, Africa and Australia are on opposite sides of the disk (like left-right not heads-tails) or are near the out perimeter and no one would build a cable going across that long of a distance.

If that makes your brain hurt because of the stupidity, that’s because it is. Flat earthers are only good as the target of a joke because we can all agree that it’s stupid. There are some entertaining videos on YouTube of people making fun of them, or of themselves proving themselves wrong.

Sidebery is a great FF extension that provides vertical tabs, trees, and groups.

How is the X in xitter pronounced? Is it “sh” like in Xi? This seems to fit this time line, but it would be nice to have confirmation.

My kid’s doctor had service to transcribe the visits. Patients may opt out verbally. This is all through the hospital, so presumably it is HIPAA compliant.

Instead of creating your own solution that complies with HIPAA, it is probably easier to use one that already exists.

When a possible fraud department calls you, you shouldn’t need to verify any digits of the card. Answer only yes or no.

Call them back if you need to give additional information.

When a fraud department calls you, you don’t need to provide any more information than your name and yes/no answers. If they are asking for any additional information, tell them that you don’t trust their authenticity and that you’ll call the number on the credit card. A legitimate agent will politely end the conversation there.

Then you better call that number on the card quickly.

Patenting actual inventions is absolutely necessary for industrial research to be viable. Being a patent troll is the problem. The US patent office needs to be expanded, probably doubled, to address the issue. I don’t know how well equipped other nation’s patent offices are.

Patents require the disclosure of the invention so that it can be copied by others after 20 years.

Companies don’t have income, they have revenue and profits. Revenue minus Costs (which include salaries, investments, materials, etc) equals Profits. The costs get detailed into different buckets which tracks investments into the company itself versus expenses that the company needs to pay to continue operating. An important number is the return on investments (ROI). A high enough ROI means the company makes more from investing in itself than it would from using the money for any other purpose.

I wasn’t talking specifically about an AI company, but companies in general. The investment in AI discussed in the original article is not about immediately developing additional AI programs, but rather about expanding the production of semiconductor manufacturing to meet the needs of chips for AI. A reasonable argument could be made that this will eventually eliminate jobs. Counter arguments would likely point out that the nature of jobs would change. Personally, I think that AI is going to become a larger part of our society and we need to think about the ways that we need to react to that. It likely means investing in better education, because some of the first jobs to go will be jobs which require low intellectual contributions. I don’t think it will replace jobs which require a great degree of physical manipulation however, because robotics are simply not at that level yet.

Regarding your point about c-suite raises, I addressed this very point in the last paragraph of my prior comment.

I get the joke/point that you’re making, but usually a company’s investment into research, development, expansion, etc is tax exempt. Hopefully even the most serious critics of our current capatalist economy would agree that these types of investments should be tax exempt, because it means paying more salaries or purchasing goods and services from other companies, which again means more salaries. Generally, these aren’t c-level salaries either because usually the c-suite is not producing the goods and services required.

If those investments then net a huge profit that goes to a few individuals, then yes, those profits should be taxed, unavoidably and fairly.

Ok, maybe it’s possible that they aren’t using a very focused electron beam, but usually when scientists think about using an electron beam they mean something inside of a machine like an SEM or e-beam lithograph. These only operate on small areas.

If an unfocused beam (and therefore lower energy density) can be used, then this could likely be scaled more easily. Even if a focused beam is needed, scaling may still be possible, but will likely require additional developments to create that process.

Article states the use of an electron beam to enable this. So not currently scalable, but still a seemingly significant result.

While text based messages on usenet may be dieing, the file sharing is still quite popular. My radar and sonar still pick up plenty of signals.

Surely the warning is justified though? Yes it’s a hurdle, but it seems reasonable and other platforms also warn users about apps from unverified sources, so it is common within the industry. If the play store is determined to be a monopoly, and gets broken up or off, I think a warning would still be warranted.

The default install thing used to be an issue, i.e. MS Explorer, but people seem to have stopped caring since all OS’s now have pre-installed junk.

I guess the argument could be made thst the play store should allow downloading of other app stores? I’d be in favor of that, but I don’t know if the courts can force something like that.