This is the blandest, most watered-down way to say "lost their job" yet. Quite nauseating.

The only way you can lose heat in space is through radiation. But radiation carries momentum. Not much per photon, but it was enough to cause the Pioneer probes to move in unexpected ways. This means you have to emit equal amounts of heat towards Earth and towards space. If your resultant is zero, then you're fine. You can even direct some of the heat backwards. It won't do a huge amount, but every bit of atmospheric drag you overcome, the less fuel you need to use to stay in orbit.

So you basically need absolutely gigantic radiators behind the space-based data centre, located inside a parabolic dish that will generate drag of its own (not to mention a potential difference betwen the lower and upper sections).

This is an insane level of complexity. You're better off parking it in a stable orbit between the Earth and the moon, so it's absolutely clear of atmospheric effects. You're still going to need radiators, but it's marginally better as you don't have to do quite so much directing of it. The latency would be horrible, maintenance would be next to impossible, and there's all kinds of other issues to consider.

No, I don't think you can make this workable.

However, space might be useful. This very same issue of heat only being radiated means that you can make wafers with much more even loss of temperature, no dust, bacteria, or dirt, and much lower gravity. If you were to make extremely high quality wafers (silicon or gallium arsonide) in space, then you should be able to make WSI processors, which should in turn reduce the demands that datacentres make.

The time it would take to set all this up would be about the same time as it took for IBM to perfect its stacked transistor topology. Intel was talking 90 cores per wafer-scale CPU a few years back - the shrinkage in transistors since then plus the x10 density IBM proposes might push you to 1800 cores per wafer, provided you can get the quality high enough. Which, in space, is quite possible.

You wouldn't need your datacentres in space. Your wafer-scale CPU plus packaging would be about the same size as a CD drive. You could pretty much dispense with datacentres at that point. A typical tower will have two spare bays. "Cartridge datacentres" could simply be plugged in as needed. A regular CPU-based cartridge for heavy general-purpose computing, a GPU-based cartridge for LLMs. Yes, home users would have power usage through the roof, but then it's no longer your problem.

This, though for the most part, you don't need the whole rover — only its brain (and perhaps its communications electronics). The situations where you need the whole rover involve figuring out how to get it unstuck. And the more experience they have at running the things around on Mars, the less likely that becomes.

As long as China does not introduce retaliatory sanctions for something Chaotically Stupid.

Now imagine saying this about, say, Japan.

I've noted the comments here about how this is old news: that's true. But it will be novel to some people who didn't live through it, and even for those who did, it's a necessary reminder. Japan is ruthless, unscrupulous, and unethical: they will do anything. They're not the only ones, of course, but they're arguably the most dangerous because of their size, wealth, and longevity. They're the enemy of open standards. They're the enemy of open source. They're the enemy of open protocols. They're the enemy of America. They're the enemy of The West. They're the enemy of security. They're the enemy of privacy. They've always been the enemy and they always will be, because it's in their DNA: it's impossible for them to change.

So any time -- ANY TIME -- there's some statement or initiative or announcement that they're going to support freedom/democracy/etc., any of the things I listed -- the first things that should come to mind are these wise words of Ash: "It's a trick -- get an axe."

What a weird ... hey, wait, I think I figured it out!

You're looking at it from the point of view of the bank robber, aren't you? (Instead of from the point of view of all the people who didn't rob the bank but still somehow had their locations leaked to the government.)

Did I guess right?

If you have to go back 26 years to find something to complain about, you really don't have a basis to complain.

I can't remember having read about it either, but I'm pretty sure that Caldera was later taken over by SCO and anyone who can't remember SCO's attempt to sink Linux is either very young or has been living underneath a rock for several years. SCO had their own Linux distribution at the time, and that distribution was a rebranded Caldera.

If a hundred million employees are effected, we're talking $5 per employee. This program is starting woefully underfunded.

I suspect Kim Jong Un got better grades in college than our dear leader

Of course he did, but maybe not for the reasons you're implying.
Kim Jong Un's daddy (Kim Jong Il) was the Supreme Leader before him.
Kim Jong Un's granddaddy (Kim Il Sung) was the Supreme Leader before him.

There was another site his administration shuttered in his first presidency, one which carried medical data in the form of symptoms and possible causes. Afaik the content was simply lost, Slashdot reported on this at the time.

That data is based on a 2025 report from the EU, the actual report says it is based on data from the years up to and including 2024.
Something I don't understand is why the report's figures diverge from those it is supposedly based on.

Country Worldodometers EU Report
China 33.12% 29.2%
USA 11.69% 11.1%
India 7.96% 8.2%
EU27 see note 5.9%
Russia 5.07% 4.8%
Those figures purport to be the percentage of global emissions attributable to each country.
note: Wordodometers carries the emissions for the EU countries individually (Germany has the highest, then Italy, Poland, France and Spain in that order), the EU report bundles them all together.

I'm imagining devices going by a conveyor belt, and a worker with a wirecutter is making a brief snip on each of the devices as it travels by.

The boss walks up, and the snipper guy asks "Is it true? Is the customer canceling?"

The boss briefly nods but then shakes his head. "Yeah, they're canc--no, I mean they still want the devices. They just don't want the snipping anymore. They say go ahead and leave the warrant-detection-and-lookup circuit live."

"Good. I never really understood what I was doing here. They're still weren't required to check the sensor anyway, so why disable it?"

The boss explained, "so we could charge them for the snipping."

There's no way to interpret these costs, that nobody is ever going to be willing to pay, as a reminder that soon these companies are going to be bankrupt.

Every time I see an AI story like this, it makes me realize I really have no idea what the AI bubble hardware is actually like, and how it might be used after auction.

A few months from now you might find yourself at an auction where 4TB of faster-than-anything-you-have RAM might be for sale for $80, but of course it won't be in the usual DIMMs that any of your existing mobos can use, will it? What will it be, and how do we best exploit it?

These can be published or accessed, but never both at the same time.