That itty-bitty asterisk is carrying a lot of weight.

I wonder if any betting sites have set up a pool for this project?

FYI, it would be wonderful if true. I just do not believe it, being of the generation that knew "fusion is only 30 years away and always will be".

A large number of Very Smart Committed People Motivated To Do So have been trying to do exactly that for more than half a century, without success. And now my electric bills have an essentially permanent upcharge to pay for the failed nuc plants here in Ohio.

I agree mostly with the comment you are responding to, and believe you are missing the critical point of their comment. They were a bit loose with language "you cand as you see fit", which you note. That said, their comment is directly on point with respect to the fact that increasingly, access to acquired media can be revoked remotely, which I consider to be a major loss for non-owners.

Way back in the days of physical media including print, vinyl, magnetic and optical media, the buyer purchased durable license to content and ownership of the physical media. The license included the ability to play it back (or read it) as many times as they wished, and to sell the the media to another buyer. That license did not include public performance or duplication.

The arrival of digital (but still physical) media made enforcement of the non-copy provision of the law more difficult to enforce.

The arrival of The Internet has produced a new regime in which ownership of a perpetual license to read/play has diminished significantly (too much streaming, increasingly hard to buy media), and the impossibility of resale. My favorite commercial lie: "Own it on digital!"

I am very much concerned that conceptually, "ownership" is being hoarded by owners and cartels, restricting commoners to "rentership". This connects with right-to-repair, and to the new hotness of software as a service.

During the last 12 or so years, the company I work for has used and become dependent on Atlassian Confluence and JIRA, both of which have converted to Cloud service only (we are not large enough for the "enterprise" license). The result is that our family jewels are stored on someone else's computer out on the internet. We are hoping that Atlassian is secure. More than every single other provider of cloud services in the world. They all get hacked, and now our stuff is out there to be grabbed by the first asshole creative enough to get past Atlassian security.

Bottom line: The original conception of ownership of media and license to content is increasingly under control of someone else, such that continued access to content is no longer a trustworthy assumption. Rented rather than owned.

"It's just life" is a nearly perfect analogy of how products and projects based on the techniqes we call "generative AI" will affect the ways we live.

Generative AI systems are evolving under control of their owners. The problem is that these systems evolve at a far far faster rate than anything we have seen before, and I believe we (humans) are not ready.

The arrival of information automation eliminated lots of drudge jobs: Data entry, clerical work, secretarial pools, etc. The arrival of powered excavators eliminated lots of drudge jobs: Ditch diggers are a thing of the past. Those whose jobs went the way of the dodo had very very difficult adjustment periods, often ending very unpleasantly for the former workers and their families.

I believe that the rapid rate of evolution will continue or accelerate with the result that more types of jobs that have been "safe" will be eliminated. The cuts will be deeper and far more difficult to adjust to. Automation has pushed the required IQ/creativity bar upward, leaving many formerly functional worker without a way to compete. These transitions took decades and even at that rate of change, a huge number of people were left behind.

Generative AI systems will raise that IQ/creativity bar upward so quickly that many more people with what are currently good job skills will be left behind.

Returning to the question of "owners": The people who own these systems will never volunteer to support "the lazy others who refused to adapt", with serious consequences that we cannot foresee.

I was responding to "groobly" whose message has zero analysis but plenty of emotional political bullshit.

You are correct on the $86.14 round trip between and La Mans. I used "trainline" just now to price a round trip for Monday May 15, 10:00 outbound, 18:00 return. My first search produced fake-cheap fares and I should have looked further.

I wrote that high speed rail works best for trips up to about 300 miles, at which distance reduced flight time balances the various wait times and inconvenience of air travel. (...And I realize fully that my "fantasized" Chicago trip is about that far...)

1.5 hour through security and waiting to load
20 minutes loading, passenger seating
15 minutes taxiing
45 minutes flight time
15 minutes taxiing
15 minutes unloading
-- No luggage, I (hope to be able to) carry-on a weekend bag. If forced to check it,
35 minutes waiting for luggage
Without baggage wait time, that's 3 hours and 20 minutes.

Train is far far more comfortable. I no longer fly voluntarily. Seat pitch and seat width are too short and narrow respectively. (I am 6"4", 200lb). You are welcome to fly. On the rare occasions when I cannot avoid flying, I need to get to the airport at least 1.5 hours ahead of scheduled departure time.There was a time when flying wasn't a giant pain in the ass but those days are gone.

Your comment about ROI is worth considering given that most major cities have airports and much of the initial capital has been amortized, while preparing high speed rail is "new". Ongoing maintenance of airport infrastructure continues to be a fair spend though, not only in the airport itself but in the various upgrades to support traffic flows (and to the best of my knowledge, all of that road construction is "normal budget", not categorized as a cost of site preparation). Finally, the air fleet also requires maintenance, upgrades, etc. I do not have time to go into all that additional detail, but I believe your analysis is a bit rosy for air travel and cynical W.R.T. rail.

Oh no! we are so triggered! Identity politics nonsense!

I'm guessing you don't have a clue who invented identity politics. It was written into our constitution, ratified in 1787. It took 3/4 of a century to get to the 13th and 14th amendments to weaken the original "identity politics" structure of this nation, and an additional near 3/4 of a century beyond that to grant the franchise to women.

The bottom line is that many of us know exactly where "identity politics" came from, and we know that was not libruls who invented that nonsense.

Have you taken a ride on French TGV?

In 1998 on a marketing trip, a small group of us stepped onto the TGV at a station about 4 minute cab ride from our hotel in Paris. No security hassle, no waiting for gates, no standing in line loading/unloading. 1.5 hours later, we were in Le Mans meeting with customers. Back again to Paris that afternoon.

Current price is about 10 euro.

Air travel the way we do it here is is nowhere near competitive with the convenience of high speed rail for any trip less than 250 miles and is just great for weekend trips up to 450 or so. I live in central Ohio and wish for high speed rail to Chicago or points east.

Your bullshit, emotionally loaded comments about "leftism" leave out easy, fast, inexpensive and effective.

In response to a similarly uninformed comment here on slashdot many years ago, I recall studying this question.

Most of Obama's land, and in particular the location of the mansion and its surrounding yard, is at or above 52 feet above sea level. There are paths down to the shore so it's not exactly 100 percent.

The point being that unlike the assholes who expect to be protected after buying property on barrier islands in the carolinas and other areas that are well known to be hurricane and flood targets, the Obamas have no expectation of being protected from flooding by anyone.

Agreed on all counts. The issue with all the streaming services has been mentioned multiple times but it bears repeating: We have interest in maybe one movie every other month from any given studio, we are mostly into "indies", and cannot justify paying every damn streaming service monthly for such infrequently used content.

We are still in Columbus.

As far as I am concerned, the CCP screwed over their own people and the world by delaying action that could have limited the spread of the virus. I don't think it matters whether it was a lab leak or species jump, they tried to hide the fact that a new virus was spreading and they let it happen.

This is how authoritarian, unaccountable, concentrated-power works. In all places and for all time. Anyone seeking minority rule, or permanent power, promising to use their power "for good" is lying.

Corruption kills.

My father, a company controller (the enforcer of end-of-month and end-of-year financial reporting :-) ), swore by PICK. I was bragging to him once about 20 years ago about SQL being an excellent toolkit for data management. His response was a problem statement essentially requiring a recursive tree walk of a parts/component hierarchy.

I could not answer properly at the time. A few years later I learned about common table expressions....

I would never work in business (E.E. doing data acquisition/control), and even more would not have been interested in such a small niche system as PICK, but it did have its proponents.

Atmospheric CO2 would best be considered as an "investment", and we should have been measuring industrial processes by their return on that investment. Sometimes a product or result is worth a given expenditure, oftentimes not.

One serious problem with CO2 production is basically the same as many externalities: The failure to require those who induce these externalities and profit from them, to pay for them.

The Romans were nutball-level crazy about record keeping. I imagine that even without modern chemistry, their records of what worked better versus what did not would produce improvement in their processes over time.

Reading the comments in the Ars Technica erticle, someone mentioned "basalt rebar", so I googled it.

The basalt rebar manufacturer heats their mined basalt raw material to either a paste or fully liquid, then extrudes it to form reinforcing bar ("rebar").

They claim that the extrusion process causes formation of microscopic fibers (sizes measured in microns, I think) that give the resulting rebar its tensile strength. It's not steel so there's no problem with rust.

We need competently constructed and operated nuclear. Full stop.

It's too bad the corruption runs so deep that cheap wins over correct every time the question comes up.

Building is hard, and the dipshits we "hire" are chosen for their loyalty to the current assholes in power.

I've been paying extra in my electric service bill for nonfunctional nuc plant construction costs for a few years now and every time I am forced to think about it I get more pissed off.

You want nuclear? We would love to see actually running plants and a plan for lifecycle management. Show your work.