If you mean that you drove up to one, got out and found it not working then I'd agree with you. But I find it hard to believe that you have never been to a petrol station in the past 10 years that did not have at least one pump that was down for maintenance or refilling the underground tank. The difference is that you probably saw that the pump was blocked off and just went to another without thinking about it like most of us do.

Good point - nobody has a petrol pump at home!

The parent did not say "mass distribution", they said "mass availability" and that is not the same thing. Nor did they say anything about electronic distribution so narrowing the definition to only those media you outline has no basis in anything they said.

....is clearly "mass availability" before electronic communication,

No, but it is available for everyone to see so it is definitely "mass availability" of art.

Not really, because they were itinerant which meant most of the time they were off touring so unless by "friends and family" you mean those touring with them they were not available. Even the aristocracy would generally only host artists for small periods of time meaning that even they did not regularly have access either. Then there were the larger cities, like London that had the Globe Theatre back in Elizabethan times where plays were regularly available for the masses.

It's probably not far from that - it is not uncommon to find a petrol station with one or two pumps that for whatever reason are not working. The difference is that most petrol stations have ~12 pumps and you only need one for 5 minutes at most so when one is not working you just go to another that's available and think nothing of it.

The problem with EVs is that they need the "pump" for at least 30 minutes if not more so you need at least six times more recharging stations as petrol pumps to handle the same throughput of cars. Then, because the time is so long, the owner is likely to have gone off to get a coffee, snack etc. and make not return exactly when the charging is done potentially making them take up even more time at the charger.

Capitalism is like democracy - it's the worst form of economic system except for every other economic system that has every been tried.

Hardly. Perhaps for some media but go to Europe and you'll see statues in towns and cities that everyone has been able to see for centuries although every so often some to get torn down and replaced due to chaing political foibles. Itinerant troupes of both actors and musicians were also common in earlier times - not much of it was high quality though...and arguably that is still the case. So no, mass artistic availability is not a new thing but the media and manner of what it looked like has certainly changed over the centuries.

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.