“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Scale is really hard for our meat brains to understand. Here's a fun video that can help a bit to understand, via a medium of printer paper standards.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUF5esTscZI

Never look up the lives and opinions of most of the classic sci-fi and fantasy authors. They were an overwhelmingly shit group, it's like every person who was a terrible person fucked off to write sci-fi. Just read their books and be happily ignorant.

If someone starts a conversation about boycotting books due to the views of the author and a bunch of people start sidling for the exit, they're probably sci-fi fans.

Some of them were just incredibly fucked up as people. H.P. Lovecraft in particular was basically a walking bundle of neurosis, fear, and hatred of just about everyone and everything, with a special emphasis on Blacks, Irish, Italian, and Jews.

The Rats in the Walls was the first story I ever read to genuinely scare me. Peak cosmic horror right there. Highly recommended as long as you don't mind a nightmare or two.

Again, no, it doesn't work that way. You don't have any sort of general copyright to your personal appearance, and so someone creating a deepfake of you isn't violating copyright unless (and this is a maybe because it hasn't been litigated) they used material that did have a valid copyright in the generation of the deepfake. And then they would be violating the copyright of the person that holds the rights to the initial material, not necessarily the person being deepfaked.https://www.upcounsel.com/can-i-trademark-my-face

Copyright isn't a magic wand you can wave around just go "Oh it's a deepfake of me so I'll sue them for copyright." You have to meet very specific standards to have a copyright and other for it to be infringed.https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-authorship.pdf

For example:Works created unknowingly can't receive a copyright: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJX_83mswFA

Pictures taken by nonhuman actors can't receive copyright: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute

AI generated art currently isn't eligible for copywrite (this may change): https://www.intellectualproperty.law/2022/05/copyright-office-denies-registration-of-computer-generated-art/

No, copywrite doesn't work that way.

Copywrite protects the product of creative works. If you didn't make something, you don't have a copywrite to it. If someone makes a knockoff Pokemon game using Pokemon characters they get sued for using a creative work under copywrite without permissions.

So the person being deepfaked can't sue for copywrite infringement, the only person who could arguably do so would be the photographer who took the video or image used in the deepfake generation. The person getting photographed only owns the copywrite for the image if the copywrite had been explicitly transferred or sold to them by the person who previously owned it (by default the creator of the creative work).

There are other laws that might be applicable for the situation, but they're not copywrite laws.

1: Control issues. Missing significant vertical stabilizers makes stability an issue along multiple axis.

2: Central engine placement causes issues with cargo. Not a huge deal if all you needed was under slung bomb bays and fuel tanks in the wings, but a significant issue if you need to fill the plane with people or parcels.

3: Maintenance. Current commercial airplanes have easy access to the engines for inspection and maintenance. It's relatively simple to take off an entire engine and just swap in another if needed when your engine is bolted to the underside of your wing. When it's built into the place chassis? Not so much.

4: $$$$$$. Flying wing designs are more expensive in production because you can't manufacture different sections of the plane separately and basically lego things together at the end. Development would be pricey. Testing would be pricey. Getting approval to take passengers would be pricey. Construction is pricey. Maintenance is pricey. About the only thing less expensive for a flying wing design compared to a conventional plane is the fuel.

There are good reasons we didn't adopt these designs 80 years ago, and the same reasons are still true. Flying wing designs have some advantages, but a lot of disadvantages to go with them.

There's a very large difference between using batteries as an intermediate point and temporary storage point for input into the grid, and using them as a primary power source for datacenters, which are one of the most energy intensive operations around. The longer you need to store power, the less economically viable battery use is. Even if you had enough perfectly consistent (hah!) solar/wind generation nearby to power your facility, the battery levels required to keep the facility powered would be prohibitive.

I am a network engineer who works in both larger datacenters and smaller network closets/hubs, and even the battery backup required to keep a single crowded vertical network rack running for a few hours in the event of a power outage is hundreds of pounds and waist high. Scaling that out to large datacenter levels of power consumption and overnight capacity and you're talking completely absurd levels of expensive power storage capability.

And again, if there's a good location for a cheap and green new power installation, it's not really to Microsoft's benefit to get into the power business. It's 100% going to be cheaper for Microsoft to let someone else build and run a power plant that feeds into the general grid and just take advantage of the lower aggregate power cost.

And there are many reasons why they are not used on a large scale.

"Lets heavily invest in power sources that don't provide consistent power, so that we can power our datacenters that requires 100% power uptime with absolutely no downtime" is a bit of a ridiculous take.

They're not idiots, which unsurprisingly means that they're just continuing to buy power from existing power suppliers instead of dumping what would a decade of work and tens of billions of dollars of construction into getting a slightly better power rate in Europe.

There is no magic handwaving solution to energy prices that's going to take effect quickly, because if there were, people would already be doing them. There's no reason for Microsoft to get into the power business when any economically feasible plan can be done by another party. The slightly better power rate isn't worth the massive cost, financial risk, and regulatory exposure across multiple countries that would be required.

....Prices are up for Microsoft primarily because in Europe the input cost of gas and coal fired power stations is going up due to major increases in the cost of fuel, and the increased cost of generating power is getting passed on to the consumers. This is not something that changes just because you own the power station.

Real life isn't Simcity, you don't buy a power plant for 500k, slap it down, and get 200,000MW at a fixed cost indefinitely.

Enormous amounts of time and money go into making datacenters more energy efficient, both in the design of computing equipment and in the physical design of heat control within them. If there was a solution that could fix energy issues for a measly 800 million , it would have been done years ago.

Unfortunately, due to the need to have datacenters around the world to service various regions (over 200 geographically separate datacenters just for Azure), there is no easy solution that's just going to resolve the issue.