Now, yes, there are predictions that you could get a supermassive black hole launched into space, especially during a galaxy merger if the velocity of the smaller black hole exceeds the escape velocity of the combined galaxy.

But I'd be wary of assuming that it's a launched black hole, unless we can find the merger it comes from. There may be ways for such a black hole to form that cause the stars to be launched away rather than the black hole being flung, and if a galaxy isn't rotating fast enough to be stable, one could imagine that a sufficiently small galaxy was simply consumed by its central black hole. Both of these would seem to produce exactly the same outcome, if all we have is the black hole itself and a velocity.

I'm not going to say either of these is likely in this case, or that astronomers haven't examine them (they almost certainly have), but rather that we should be cautious until we've a clearer idea of what the astronomers have actually been able to determine or rule out.

I love ICE wannabees. Show me your papers, DamnOregonian, or are you really in Myanmar?

Dystopian look? Do you ignore what's around you?

Malpractice is more civil in action, and when you're a soulless corp, is the direct route. When people die as a result of stupidity, that's called manslaughter. Is manslaughter a criminal offense? Yes.

Our dependency on connectivity and working platforms follows the rubric surrounding the laws concerning utilities, but Section 230 provides the line in the sand of responsibility for culpability, and the sense of common carrier status provides a metric for service level.

The sense of what is justice should prevail. No one falls on their sword when hundreds of thousands of travelers are grounded when an API causes massive flight cancellations.

Just like train wrecks, outages have consequences. Justice also speaks to injury, even death, with consequences. The sense that the world gets is that US Tech Bros face no consequences. By many metrics, this lack of consequences is real and provable.

The resistance to AI is just another symptom of the problem of trust, and its violation in the tech world, and its immunity from consequences of injurious actions on the part of tech infrastructure holders.

It's a matter of trust, and the trust relationship between the US and EU, as well as the UK, is breaking fast.

Worse, all of US cloud vendors have shown a lack of safety, outages, missteps, and uptime in 2025. As these entities are largely immune from prosecution in the US, it's better to have someone close at hand, whose neck you can wring with actual authority.

I'm an American, and I don't trust these jokers, either. Big does not make better. The bleeding edge requires bandages, especially with AI infections becoming prominent.

No, the executive tells the civil service what it needs to do, but the civil service is wholly independent.

This guy either socially engineered his way through a line, analyzed a weakness in the line, or time-traveled from the '90's not realizing we've set up an incompetent but totalizing police-state control grid to interpose every tiny aspect of our lives.

To be fair, "pay on board" is less applicable to airplanes than trains because seatbelts are important in turbulence.

That said, the lack of capacity is widely acknowledged to be a feature of wildly incompetent management.

We just heard they've started a new project to rewrite the air traffic control system for the umpteenth time (and billions and billions later) to hopefully allow for more frequent landings and departures. I fear it won't be specified for AI-assist takeoffs and landings and will be obsolete before it's done.

Better make some more 8" floppies.

You do not appear to understand what a republic or a democracy is, so I'll ignore the last sentence.

"Independent" does not mean unaccountable to the people. The President is independent of Congress, and vice versa, but both are accountable to the people. Well, the current president doesn't seem to think so, but legally he is.

The civil service is not a part of the executive but is a co-equal branch.

You are correct. In principle, presidents have no authority whatsoever to dictate how an agency runs. The executive branch should have zero authority over the civil service, which is intended to constitute a fourth co-equal branch of government.

In the US, in principle, the status of the civil service as co-equal to, and independent of, the executive should be added to the Constitution and enshrined in law for good measure. Not that that would help much with the current SCOTUS, but a Constitutional change might possibly persuade the current government that absolute authoritatian control is not as popular as Trump thinks.

That is the idea that, in Britain, entities like the NHS and the BBC have operated under. Charters specify the responsibilties and duties, and guarantee the funding needed to provide these, but the organisation is (supposed) to carry these out wholly independently of the government of the day.

It actually worked quite well for some time, but has been under increasing pressure and subject to increasing government sabotage over the past 20-25 years.

It's also the idea behind science/engineering research funding bodies the world over. These should direct funding for grant proposals not on political whim or popularity but on the basis of what is actually needed. Again, though, it does get sabotaged a fair bit.

Exactly how you'd mitigate this is unclear, many governments have - after all - the leading talent in manipulation, corruption, and kickbacks. But presumably, strategies can be devised to weaken political influence.

Or the money Meta has burned off trying to be something that they aren't, the ashes of failed products needing to be brushed under the rug with fresh revenues.

It's good to have a second engine but it sure sounds like Gecko isn't long for this world.

I use LibreWolf on a couple of machines. It's OK, but it evolves slowly. They deserve the money I donated to Mozilla. But the distros don't include the LibreWolf version; Ubuntu as an example, puts in a godforsaken package island.

If the LibreOffice folks could somehow hug the LibreWolf people, distros could take a turn for the better.

As we watch CoPilot failures, AI browsers no one wants, a change for Firefox users to AI would be plainly a solution looking for a problem.

If Firefox can be successfully forked to a non-AI version, I'll go with that. Libre-stuff would get a great boost by navigating around the inevitable wasteland that Firefox will become.

Strangely, products taking an anti-AI stance are starting to thrive again. I hope their board notices and changes direction towards optimizing Firefox, getting rid of their new mercenary telemetry stance, and gets back to the basics of just doing an open good job.

Do you live in a city?

There are those lacking even a nanogram of altruism, and won't experience it ever, through their lifetime. They may have grandiose masks for the actions they take, but they're as empty as the AI they pimp.

We're in an era where empathy is taught to be hidden, that Darwinism must rule, kleptocracy is good, and inclusiveness is a bad idea.

Each of us can adopt this attitude, or reject it. Today is a first step in either direction.