My first thought after reading the summary was "That means it would take very little delta-V to stabilize the orbit and make it permanent! Are there any asteroid capture contracts available?".

I don't think there's any question to be resolved there. I know Waymo has stated that they accept all liability, just as a human driving the vehicle would, and I believe others have agreed to that as well. And, really, there's no other possible allocation of liability, at least for level 4/5 systems where the system is fully in control with no human backup.

I don't trust anyone to manage it. We're human. We make mistakes. On a sufficiently-small task, a highly-skilled and very methodical person willing to commit lots of time can do it, sometimes. When they also get lucky.

Got any examples? There have been lots of fads, but few of them had meaningful uptake lasting more than five years, plus uptake in major software development corporations. I can't think of any.

Obviously. Emacs has everything.

Also, what are the odds that a VP at Wal-mart's bank account is riding so close to zero that buying some groceries might cause an overdraft? Using "I" there is pretty disingenuous. Unless, well, I guess if he's really bad at budgeting... okay, it makes sense now.

Exactly. In the US we have the Hatch Act, which explicitly bars government employees from using government resources to campaign. This gets a little tricky at the level of the president, so POTUS and VPOTUS are exempted from it... but it still applies to their staff, and most administrations are pretty careful to separate the governance and campaign work of presidential staff, taking care that all campaign-related work is off the clock and does not use government facilities or resources.

There has been one glaring exception of late, of course, one administration that almost completely ignored the strictures of the Hatch Act. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which, and to contemplate the implications of said administration's position on upholding the constitution, the rule of law, and the values underlying our democratic republic.

Sometimes it's about creating a "memory" of the event you wish you'd had, I guess. Not my thing, but I'm not going to tell people that what they want is wrong.

I've been using a Pixel 9 XL Pro for about six months, and I've been very happy with it. But frankly they've all gotten incredibly good, so I can't honestly say I've noticed huge improvement. I haven't really focused on it though. If I want a really great photo I reach for my DSLR and put in the work to create it; my phone camera is for "memories", and I don't think I've had any disappointing shots for years.

Well, they've already gone up by quite a bit. Mine is up 20% this year even before the rate cut, which would be an outstanding year even if it ended right now.

It's really not. All the economic indicators that the Fed looks for to show that it's time to loosen rates have been showing for some time. Many economists think that the Fed is acting too slowly, and should have begun lowering rates months ago. Other central banks around the world did as early as the spring. The Fed beginning to cut rates in September means that the full economic impact won't be felt until after the election. If Powell wanted to help the Democrats with rate cuts, he needed to start no later than June.

You'd be better off putting that money into the market, anyway. Massively higher returns, even with a well-diversified, low-risk investment strategy.

Sounds to me like Apple is worried that they're losing the photography war, that Google is doing a better job of giving people the photos they want.

Personally, I really like the fact that my Pixel gives me a group photo with everyone's eyes open, even if there was no single millisecond in which no one was blinking[*], just for one example. My family with iPhones all take several shots of each group photo in attempt to increase the odds that one of them is good. I get one shot and know it will be good -- and that's what I want from a phone camera.

This is a really interesting debate to me because I'm a photographer. Not a pro, but a moderately-serious amateur, good enough that I semi-regularly do portrait work, weddings, etc., (though what I really enjoy is wildlife and landscape photography), and people are very happy with the results. And photographers never talk about "taking" photos, but about "creating" photos. Angle, composition, lighting, exposure, depth of field... there's a lot that goes into creating the image that you want even if without any post-processing. After the shoot comes the editing, and every photo is edited, even if the editing is nothing more than tweaking the color balance and cropping. Usually it's quite a bit more than that, sometimes even full-on "photoshopping". Even journalistic photography includes a lot of editing (though it shouldn't include photoshopping).

What Google is doing is automating much of this, so that non-photographers can create nice-looking photographs without the effort. Of course, sometimes the automation will get it wrong... but my experience is that my Pixel phones are incredibly good at giving me good results. They don't have the versatility of my DSLRs, thousands of dollars of lenses, filters, lights, and significant time in post-processing, but for creating memories of family events, vacations, etc., Google's phones do a great job, and I often don't bother with the DSLR any more.

[*] The way this works is that the phone actually grabs a few dozen images, before and after the shutter button is pressed, then the software picks the best one and swaps faces in from others as needed.

Cite?

That depends heavily on what the image is claiming to convey. If the image appears to convey "This is a photo of a thing that happened", then it being AI-generated rather than a photograph (even if edited somewhat) is a very important distinction. For allegedly journalistic photos or videos, what we really want is a complete description of how the image was created, starting with what type of film/sensor it was captured with, and covering all of the editing steps leading to the final image. But "this was AI generated and isn't a photo at all" is a very useful start.