Can you remember when the laser was "a solution looking for a problem to solve"? (And actually AI is already addressing a wide number of consumer problems with highly varying successes. Sometimes it works quite well.)

Yeah, but the last time they were in real trouble they were only kept going by two things:
1) Microsoft wanted to avoid monopoly prosecution.
2) They finally brought Steve Jobs back.

Well, they aren't in that kind of trouble yet, but I don't think either of those two "saviors" are likely to help again.

This is an attempt at reversing the course of (some of the water from) a river... but not using nuclear explosives.

If we're just talking about reversing a river, the Chicago River is a case in point.

I think this is true only if you are comparing the LCOE of natural gas to solar *with storage* in the US. A plain solar farm without storage is going to be cheaper. We really should look at both with and without storage, because they're both valid comparisons for different purposes, although PV + storage is probably the best for an apples-to-apples comparison.

The cost of solar has come down year after year for the last thirty years, to the point that *internationally*, at least, the LCOE for solar PV plus storage is now just a little bit less than the LCOE for natural gas, and is expected to become *dramatically* cheaper by the end of this decade, according to IEA. Even if they are calculating somewhat optimistically, if solar costs continue to drop it's only a matter or time before solar PV plus storage becomes cheaper than natural gas, even in the US with its cheaper gas.

The wild card here is any political actions taken to change the direction this situation is going. Internationally, low PV prices are driven by cheap Chinese suppliers, and it doesn't seem likely we'll see large scale US domestic solar production in the next five years. In the meantime we have an unstable situation with respect to tariffs on PV components and lithium for batteries. Until sufficient domestic sources of lithium come on line, uncertainty about tariffs will create financial problems for US manufacturers and projects.

Poor form. They and their families might object and make trouble for you. What you do is convince them to throw *themselves* into the furnace, in fact to feel rather smug about it up until the actual burning happens.

There are good arguments that the nuclear industry in the US was both over-regulated and incompetently regulated. But that sure doesn't mean it shouldn't be carefully regulated. And the real problem is recycling spent fuel...which should NOT be stored on-site unless the system is designed for that.

At least an AI's impression of C64 programming won't kill you if you take it at face value...

They'll approach zero cost, much like breathable air. That doesn't mean zero value, any more than breathable air has zero value.

Back in the mid-90's, the Hot New Thing was the "set-top box", a.k.a. a little dedicated box that would sit on top of your TV set and let it stream content from the Internet. That's the "digital device" that the Java developers were targeting (as opposed to traditional computers with a mouse and keyboard attached to them) -- today we'd call that "embedded hardware", or maybe just "Roku".

OTOH one of the things I dislike most about exceptions in C++ (to the extent that I simply avoid using them whenever possible) is that there is no way to determine what exceptions might be thrown from any given function you might want to call, and therefore no way to determine if your code will handle all exceptions correctly when it runs. Your options are either to manually grovel through every line of code in all of your codebases and their dependencies, or just catch(...) somewhere and hope for the best -- neither of which is satisfactory for code where correct error-handling is important.

That's the problem that Java tried to solve, and I don't think they were successful, but I understand the motivation.

I think a good example of nuclear power done right is the US Navy. They've been running nuclear reactors on ships(!), 24/7/365, with no safety incidents since 1954.

Their secret? They aren't trying to "maximize sharedholder value", so they don't have any incentive to cut corners on safety. Also, they have excellent training programs and hundreds of nuclear experts with decades of expertise and the authority to exercise it.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration just hires random people straight from Fox News or the WWE, plops them down into a job they know literally nothing about, and says "knock yourself out". Occasionally they let a rogue CEO run around with a chain saw (literally or metaphorically) firing people en masse as a way of finding out which employees were necessary and which weren't.

Therefore, even if the nuclear plan is a good one on paper, the fact that it being proposed by those bozos makes it a bad bet. I wouldn't trust them to walk my dog, never mind to handle nuclear regulation adequately.

Trump keeps claiming he will run for a third term, and I have no reasons left to doubt him about that. If something removes Trump from office, it will be his arteries, rather than any of the suggestions (no longer rules) written into the Constitution.

They're nanosecond pulses. The instantaneous power is 8 kW but the power on average is around 5W, and that's only when it actively ranges, which happens for only a short time at each cycle.

And then if it's been asked to range too many times within a few seconds and the number of joules per second delivered exceeds the eye safety limit - some ISO standard I don't recall - the device refuses to range until the eye safety counter "cools off" so-to-speak.

With infrared, it's all about limiting the average power to avoid cooking the eyeball like egg white. The thermal inertia of an eyeball full of water is such that you can deliver quite a lot of power in one sitting for a short time, then stop, and it's perfectly safe.

The most powerful devices range up to 32 km and can actually damage their own sensor when ranging something close and reflective. They use 1550nm pumped IR lasers and each pulse pumps out 8 kW. They're eye-safe but they certainly aren't camera safe.

I'm talking cross-platform.

A Python v2 or v3 file will usually run equally well on Windows, Linux, whatever... in the same version of the interpreter.

Python does break stuff on a regular basis and create headaches because they still don't give a very big shit about backward compatibility. But my point is, whatever works or breaks on one platform with work or break more or less the same on another.

Java on the other hand is a complete crapshoot, depending on platform, which JVM and which version you use, whether the moon was blue the night before...