To quote the Onion themselves:
No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.
Because novelty is all it has. As soon as it stops improving in a way that makes people say "oh that's neat", it has to stand on the practical merits of its capabilities, which is, well, not much.
We could have had that. Now, we might not even have an FTC.
Strictly speaking, the energy it consumes is the gravitational potential energy of the ore they're mining, which would be consumed anyway in the form of, well, gravity, acting on the ore on the way down. They're just using it productively instead of dissipating it as heat from the brakes. Using only energy that ordinarily would have been wasted is of course very neat, but it's not breaking any laws of physics.
Not too long ago, this would be a career-ending display of corruption.
Sure. Let's just apply that consistently then. Atoms are binary, the vast majority (with fewer than 1% of atoms being exceptions) can be accurately identified as one of two distinct elements, hydrogen or helium.
Yep. Same software, same hardware, just different config files.
I think it's because it's stupid looking enough that the brain doesn't even classify it as a vehicle, it's just some weird contraption that isn't supposed to act like a vehicle does, so it's an uncanny valley effect.
The worrying part is the implications of what they're claiming to sell. They're selling an imagined future in which there exists a class of sapient beings with no legal rights that corporations can freely enslave. How far that is from the reality of the tech doesn't matter, it's absolutely horrifying that this is something the ruling class wants enough to invest billions of dollars just for the chance of fantasizing about it.
Privacy regulations are to the left of the Overton window. The idea that corporations don't have some divinely ordained ownership of our personal data is unthinkably radical.
It's also creating a patent minefield that stifles any game development by people who can't afford the lawyers necessary to navigate it.
"Guess what! I've named a boil on my ass after you. It, too, bothers me every time I sit down."
-Gheed, Diablo 2.