The article (and the Minesto website) quotes the wingspan as being 12m, but there are pictures of it surrounded by people which make it look about 6m across. The website says the turbine diameter is 3.5m, but there are women standing next to the turbine who can comfortably see over the top. Perhaps the Swedes are taller than I think...

I think a lot of the media out there is actually of the Dragon 4.

Clearly someone has confused 1/4/2024 with 2024/04/01.

Is it just me, or is 10^33 not even close to the number of atoms in the atmosphere, let alone the universe? A typo, surely.

This article from the company itself has some more well defined numbers:

So the power is 200MW, and the capacity is 2600kWh.

What I haven't understood is, if you want an AI to be named as the inventor on a patent, what the benefit of doing so would be?

It has already been noted that if the inventor is also the "owner" (patents are normally owned by the corporation that employed the inventor) then they get to decide how to license the patent and receive the fees from it, which raises some interesting questions if it is an AI.

I think if there is any litigation associated with the patent then the inventor would turn up in court to describe what they did. Similarly inventors have an ongoing duty of candor to communicate any prior art that they become aware of to the Patent Office. I'm not sure I see an AI (or at least the kinds of AIs we are currently talking about) doing that. J

The quote here on Slashdot seems rather negative, but if you RTFA, the authors do get on to making some comments about solutions at the bottom of the article. The message isn't "plastic recycling doesn't work so don't do it" but rather "plastic recycling doesn't work, so do something different".

Wouldn't it depend on whether the product being referred to is the restaurant's food, or the restaurant's food and delivery service. The food is the same thing (c.f. Coca Cola) but the delivery service is not being provided by the restaurant so it would be misleading to refer to it by the restaurant's name.

If I've read it correctly, the paper actually compares rooftop solar panels to the world's (2018) electricity demand. The world's total energy demand is considerably higher than this.

I suspect they are thinking about something other than water because it is pretty cold on the moon.

That was my thought too, though to be fair the original article quotes a scientist:

In other words, the confidence comes from the summarising and resummarising by journalists rather than the original paper.

Sorry.

Yes, of course names should provide useful information.

Yours sincerely,
John can-perform-basic-car-repairs sometimes-forgets-anniversaries can't-play-an-instrument digital-logic-design-expert not-very-sporty Smith MEng

That was my first thought, but I don't think it is an issue in urban areas. I looked up a local bus route: it is about seven miles long and is timetabled to take 40 minutes (including turn-around times at both ends). Over a 12-hour day that's about 130 miles. Proterra quote a 360 mile range on their top-of-the-range. Basically buses are slow, so they don't go very far even in the course of a whole day.

So, in an established market you can't succeed big unless and until you beat the big players. You either make a loss or small profit trying to beat them, or you carve out a niche and make a more reliable profit which will never be big (so long as it remains a niche).

People can become a security interest in other ways than simply grepping bulk data. It may be justified to track convicted criminals, suspected criminals, those with links to criminals or suspects because the likelihood of them being involved is higher than a random member of the public. Likewise if in the course of an investigation you confirm that someone you have collected data on really isn't linked, then you can delete the data.

Of course you are correct to note that if you know everything about everyone you can just (in theory at least) filter out anyone and everyone who has done anything wrong and prosecute them.

The flip side is that such a data set can be misused, either if it is leaked, or by corrupt elements within the state itself.

Thus we have a trade-off - as you collect more data you create opportunities for prosecuting more crime but also for abuse. What most people seem to accept is that surveillance be used when either the confidence of the suspicion is high, or the severity is high - i.e. for active investigation of known crimes, for investigation of suspects where there is some known reason for suspicion, and (potentially) for trying to detect and pre-empt terrorism and similar.

The world is full of cost/benefit trade offs and arguments about them which assume either the cost or the benefit is infinite - people struggle to actually balance them because they are difficult to quantify.