"means"

"A day after the office released the report, President Donald Trump fired its director, Shira Perlmutter,

Which mean the report could soon flip 180.

Maybe 4 years ago.

Just because your company might do it right doesn't mean others do. Most probably pick the bargain product, and get bargain results.

I thought that leaks were unintentional, by definition. i.e. if Apple did it intentionally, it's not a leak, it's stealth marketing.

> If I want a larger screen I'll buy a tablet.

Hard to fit a tablet in one's pocket.

And don't forget Lazarus, an OSS semi-clone of Delphi. Great for cross-platform GUI's.

1. Energy requirements to keep a car sized object airborne is totally handleable. I mean, just about every commercial jet is a lot bigger than a car.
2. Noise pollution - can be handled

The real problems is, as you mentioned, training, as you'd need a pilot's license for it, and that development has continued for both planes and cars - such that a hybrid between the two is going to be very lousy at both. It's not going to be crash resistant like a car, nor fly as well as a dedicated plane. The engineering for that is too much at odds with each other.

That said, have you seen the development stuff for drone taxis? Basically, there are places looking to sell flying taxi services using upscaled quadcopters.

We actually passed break even a number of years ago, so "never going to get more out than you put in" is already proven false.

Now we need sustainability, and a much better than break-even such that we can generate more electricity, enough to justify the plant.

I'm still not convinced that it wouldn't end up being like the scifi back in the '50s or so where the power plant ended up being on Antarctica and shipping power to the entire world because, well, it's a system that scales UP well, down not so much, so the practical plant design ended up being darn near terawatts.

experts weighing in with the projected operating costs to operate and maintain a commercial fusion power plant... would be similar, if not slightly higher [than fission].

But many feel the potential to be cheaper is high as we get more experience with fusion. Stellarator is probably the most cost effective design if they can solve the tricky confinement. The first commercial models indeed would be roughly equivalent to fission plants economically because that's the starting level at which it would be economically viable. Thus, that statement is arguably a tautology.

It would be like saying the first profitable robo-big-rigs will be roughly just as economical as human-driven rigs. Of course, because at or slightly better than the old way is the break-even point where commercial introduction of bots makes sense.

Most grass prefers indirect sun.

There's an idea: name it Trumpfusion and then Don will fund it.

TFA: "This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy."

= We're fucked.

Hot take: when AI really gets rolling, it won't just write code, it will analyze all the existing code out there and figure out what the designers of those coding languages were really trying to accomplish with all of those half-baked or almost-but-not-quite-optimal language features that went into each programming language, and use that to generate the language spec for The One True Programming Language That Finally Gets Everything Exactly Right.

Or not. But it would be interesting to see it try; at the very least, human language designers might glean some insights from its attempt.

There's code where you have proven (to your own satisfaction) that a memory leak doesn't exist or doesn't matter, via a manual analysis of how your program works... and then there's code where you don't have to do any whole-program-analysis to prove that, because you can see via trivial keyhole inspection that a memory leak isn't possible, regardless of what the rest of the program does or doesn't do.

Replacing a bare use of the new operator with a smart/unique pointer (or stack allocation or static variable or vector or etc) transforms an instance of the former into an instance of the latter, and spares every future reviewer of the codebase from having to re-perform that same code-analysis to verify to their own satisfaction that no memory leak is possible. So even if the change isn't necessary from a code-execution perspective, it's still beneficial from a code-maintenance perspective. Nobody likes a codebase full of "this might be okay but is it really?"