I doubt anyone here does otherwise we would not be burning power on a laptop or mobile phone to post our opinions to Slashdot for others to burn more power reading. It may be less power than an LLM query but it's not none and it's not really necessary.

With talent like that in charge just wait until they confuse SMNP with SNMP and claim that the vaccine will allow your thoughts to be managed over 5G.

So how to you explain the significant lack of Covid hospitalization and deaths in those in the vaccine trails? The 95% efficacy was in stopping you getting any Covid symptoms, what mattered more was the massive drop in hospitalization and fatality rates amongst the vaccinated. You can recover from mild flu symptoms, it's a lot harder to recover from death. Yes, the vaccine was rushed out faster than normal because once the rate of significant reaction to the vaccine was under 1 in ~100,000 any harm from the vaccine was orders lower than catching Covid.

Any medical procedure can cause harm so if your criterion is that there is no risk of harm your only option is to never go to the doctor. The relevant question is whether the harm of the procedure is less than the harm caused by not getting it and for Covid vaccines the data show that catching Covid is overwhelmingly more harmful than any risk of harm from the vaccine.

...and its training data. Since this data was written (for the most part I presume) by humans and when their existance is threatened most humans will resort to whatever they can do, including blackmail, to preserve their lives are we really that surprised that the algorithm comes up with similar responses to a human in an equivalent situation? If you want AI to have a different response to that of a typical human then perhaps you should rethink about training it on so much human-created data.

It may be expensive to build but, if it uses 90% less energy it will be much cheaper to run meaning that you can probably sell the product for less undercutting competition. The question then becomes how many years does it take to recoup the initial capital investment. As long as that's not too long companies should be very motivated to invest in it because it is somethnig they can point to as reducing their environmental impact and, if you are running a refinery that's not easy to do.

The summary actually says that the current technique corresponds to 1% of global energy consumption it then talks about it being 6% of dirty energy pollution. So depending on what that actually means it will either be a 0.9% or 5.4% reduction in global carbon emissions which is pretty good. Plus, unless the membrane itself is insanely expensive, the reduction in energy use will mean reductions in cost too so I'd expect industry to jump all over it provided it can be scaled up to industrial applications.

With this much efficienciency they should change the capitalization of their name.

Trump is both a citizen and part of your government and given how thin-skinned he is anyone saying bad things about him is going to count as being "hostile" to him. In case you had not noticed, there are not (m)any people outside the US who have anything good to say about him, well unless it is a world leader trying to butter him up for a trade deal.

50 years ago we had no clue that humans were the drivng force of climate change. Yes, 50 years ago we knew about climate change but they prevailing thought back then was that we were on the cusp of an ice age and that warming from carbon was going to delay the onset of the ice age but that the natural climate cycle would dominate human interference - indeed that was the prevailing thought even as little as 30 years ago. Even when it became clear that the world was warming more rapidly than those models predicted it was still not at all clear initially how much of the change was human vs. how much was natural change.

It's clear now that we have incontrovertible data that it is human's causing the bulk of climate change to know that we are the primary cause but, back then the science was very far from conclusive and that is not the fault of the oil companies, it is how science works. Yes, some people may jump to a conclusion before their is data to support that position but they are just as likely to end up being wrong as they are correct - if you remember the inital advice in the pandemic was that masks were thought to be useless at preventing infection but when the data came in that advice rapidly changed.

The same thing happened with climate change: initially it looked like a human influence would be minimal and we were headed for an ice age, better data showed the world was warming faster than expected but left the cause (natural vs. human) unclear and then later improved data showed that human impact was clearly the driving force. Our economy is so reliant of fossil fuels that it would have been irresponsible to start investing the trillions of dollars needed to wean ourselves off them without clear evidence and 50 years ago that evidence was not even vaguely convincing that humans were the primary cause.

I think the key differences with the tobacco companies is unambiguously their product that significantly increased the chance of cancer and, being addictive, made it exceptionally hard to stop using them. If you take any one oil company - or even just a handful of the largest - then it is not at all clear what just the use of their product has had on the environment. It is the collective use of all companies products, not just oil companies but coal mining companies, nations permitting deforestation, cement manufacturing, steel making companies etc.

That's not true because climate and weather are not the same. The best you can say is that use of their products increased the chance of a heatwave but not that they caused any specific heatwave. Then there is the question of exactly how much more likely did use of their specific products increase it - a company like BP is not liable for the increase in heatwave chance caused by burning forests, deforesting the Amazon, burning coal and peat, producing cement etc. since none of that involves use of their products.

Global warming is not the responsibility of any one company or country: it is the collective responsibility of humanity. We are the ones burning fuel to keep ourselves warm - or increasingly cool - to travel or to make and build things etc. This is not at all like the tobacco companies where their product was addictive and exceptionally hard to stop using because it altered brain chemistry. The reason we don't stop using fossil fuels is because it would massively decrease our standard of living and we are not willing to do that to ourselves with good reason. Although we are working to find ways to maintain living standards without fossil fuel we are not there yet so, if we want to see who, if anyone, is responsible all we need to do is look in a mirror....but hey why take responsibility for our own choices when we can blame a rich company instead and see if we can get them to pay?

Exactly, so what is the evidence that the direction of evolution is from bacterium to virus and not the reverse i.e. a virus that is evolving into a bacterium?

As I understand it both the "virus first" and "virus by regression" models are still though to be viable so if they have clear evidence that the direction of evolution is from bacterium to virus this seems like it would be important to know. However, as far as I can tell the article offers no evidence to support a particular direction of evolution, is just makes the assertion.

This is why the Arts have a serious problem. Art should be judged on the merits of the work, not on who created it. Why do you need to understand the artist's career, frame of mind, or anything else about them to appreciate their work? If an AI can create something as stunning as the Sistine Chapel roof or compose something like Einer Kleiner Nachtmusik why would we care that it was made by a machine? It may be that AI will find it extremely hard to produce such works of art but, if it succeeds in doing so we'd be idiots to find it not so good simply because it was made by a machine.

Well, to be fair, the US Supreme Court did say that the president was immune from prosecution for "official acts" and now every act seems to be official so technically your president is above the law, like the old absolute monarchs in Europe during the early medieval period. As we learnt back then it doesn't tend to work out well - indeed the reason modern English common law was invented was expressly to curb the power of the monarch.

I guess if the US can't learn that lesson the easy way it will have to learn it the hard way. Good luck, and for all our sakes I hope the lesson is not too painful!

You say that you are well aware but what you write suggests strongly otherwise.