What gets me is that this is critical national infrastructure - it cannot fail through one fault, or have the redundancy located such that a single failure can take that out at the same time, like backing up your data to another partition on the same hard drive.

The terminals that went dark AFAIK use power in the 20-30MW range which you can fit on a standby basis in a handful of shipping containers onsite at a cost that would be a rounding error compared with BAA turnover and profits. I can see a new 3MW one for sale for less than $100k which is peanuts even when you take into account the integration costs.

A typical datacenter uses this kind of power and I bet their redundancy is a lot better.

Very early 80s. Computer room was unlocked at 8am, so if you skipped breakfast you could get a whole hour in until lessons started at 9.

I remember the spring mornings, the cursor on the Commodore PET fading up as the CRT warmed and the feeling of anticipation before the first line of BASIC or assembly went in using the still-cool keyboard. With 8KB of RAM (32 on the special machine) the possibilities were limitless...

I think one of the more telling things is that Apple declined to invest in them. It was not because they (Apple) were short of cash so it must have been because they just did not see anything remarkable in the product, or anything they could not do at least as well or better themselves. $6B or whatever it was buys a lot of custom silicon AI hardware and electricity...

We used to have this in the UK up until the 1990s, called Motorail. You could drive your car on in London then wake up in Inverness in Scotland the next morning, which is a good 10-11hrs with no traffic or stops by car even today.

Ultimately, is what Bill Gates is doing on the whole beneficial to mankind? Would we be better off if he spent his money on superyachts or space rides?

What he appears to be about is applying a ruthless business brain to the business of charity, which is absolutely necessary to provide focus and get the money to where it is most needed, be it research, production, distribution or even education.

Most governments seem to be incapable of making long-term benefit-of-all investments and decisions and it seems to be left to philanthropists or even more commercial interests to do this. In that light it looks like Mr Gates is doing more good than bad...

This must affect, well, the 10 people who bought the thing...

I can assure you having been in Kolkata and Dhaka during the monsoon, glaciers are are minor part of the equation. In Meghalaya State they measure the annual rainfall in metres, not cm.

Like food, there is enough water for everyone if it is distributed fairly and used economically.

I think it is a clue that, at the moment, AI implementations are not living up to the hype.

In theory it looks fine: bit of speech recognition, very limited menu options, not much variation, no need to interpret anything other than food and drink and humans are in the loop as a sanity check because they have to prepare and serve the items. Around the level of a Uni project, really.

The fact that it appears to be unsatisfactory in some respects (and joke about IBM but this is not the most demanding thing they have ever done) does make you wonder about practical applications of AI-with-everything...

That was one of my thoughts too. Just guide the Terminator warhead from the Lifeseeker (reads like dystopian technology, now I look at it) and BAM! No more life...

Exactly what I thought. Seems like Thiel has funded a grifter academy. I am bitter because no-one invested in my sustainable blockchain yoghurt with AI...

Actually, you can. Modern IRS are much more accurate than they are assumed to be by the aircraft systems. I have compared the actual IRS position after a transatlantic flight to the GPS position quite a few times and it is often less than a mile out. The type I fly initialises the IRS from GPS or manual position on the ground and does not update it during the flight. What it does do is have a separate working position which a blend of all the inputs: GPS, IRS, VOR/DME, LOC, etc. This is vulnerable to GPS jamming/spoofing but you can turn off the GPS input and let it navigate using other means.

That assumes that the apps you need/want are still available from the App Store. If a company/developer thinks they can monetise their app in ways that would fall foul of the Store rules, they might try making it side load exclusive.

The attraction of the App Store for many is a) one shopfront, b) one secure payment method, c) curation, d) some sort of initial/ongoing screening for malware and e) remote deletion for a discovered bad actor. A particular software package is unlikely to become cheaper after leaving the Store, as hosting, payment processing, etc. are not free to obtain and the object is to make as much money as possible, so how does the consumer actually benefit?

That said, I think it will probably turn out to be a bit of a nothingburger, given the stats from the Android side. I am sure that side loading on iOS will default off and require acceptance of some pretty frightening (to non-techies) possibilities, so the overwhelming majority will likely not bother. For developers, the loss of customers who would have discovered their product in the App Store will have to be set against any possible savings from the 30%, assuming they can actually do it significantly cheaper anyway.

I was firmly in the gas camp, even going so far as to install gas bottles at a previous house. Since then I have moved to induction and prefer it in almost all scenarios.

Modern hobs are powerful, controllable, generate far less water vapour (and no CO2, benzene or whatever), plus they are incredibly easy to keep clean.

OK, I am an amateur home cook but on a recent treat at a 3* restaurant, I toured the kitchen and was very surprised to see all electric ovens and mostly electric hobs, a mixture of hotplates and induction. The few remaining gas devices were for searing, and even they were scheduled for electric replacement. Made the whole environment much more pleasant to work in.

Compared to most naming conventions, I think the Apple one makes sense in terms of product and linguistics. Ultra means beyond or on the other side of, so Ultra > Max is not hard to grasp: beyond the maximum. It is also what you get when you physically couple two Max chips, which are the most potent single pieces of silicon they make, to produce an Ultra. The Max is still as far as they can take it in one monolithic die.

Anyway, Mx, Mx Pro, Mx Max and Mx Ultra is not the most difficult progression to remember?

We can observe this happening while a human brain develops from one embryonic cell. Eventually it gets to the point where it is large/connected enough to support what we call consciousness. Maybe there is a threshold in computational power and storage beyond which any substrate has the potential to host recognisable cognition? IDK.