They do work at the User Data Extraction Factory, after all...

Remington settled. They didn't admit liability.

The Cypress Street Viaduct (the major double-decker that collapsed in the Loma Prieta quake) was built in 1957 by US contractors. Embarcadero was similarly built by US contractors in the 1960s. Russians had nothing to do with it. The only thing Russian about any of it is Embarcadero running near Russian Hill, which was named for a Russian cemetery near its peak.

Most of the deaths are explainable.

• Amy Catherine Eskridge died by suicide in 2022. The cause of death was a single gunshot to the head. Her activities leading up to her death are suggestive of mental health struggles, though they're used by some people as evidence of a conspiracy leading to her death.
• Michael David Hicks died in June 2023, age 59. He worked at JPL on comet and asteroid missions. No cause of death was released.
• Frank Maiwald died in July 2024, age 61. He worked at JPL on planetary missions. No cause of death was released.
• Anthony Chavez has been missing since May 2025. He was 78 when he disappeared. He left his wallet, keys, and cigarettes on a table at home, a common action right before a suicide.
• Melissa Casias has been missing since June 2025. She was an administrative worker at Los Alamos and held no security clearance. She was last seen walking down a street. She had left her keys, wallet, purse, and both work and personal phones at home after telling colleagues that she was going to work from home. Shoes similar to those she was wearing were recently found in a nearby forest. This also lines up with a possible suicide.
• Monica Reza has been missing since June 2025. She worked at JPL in California, and went missing during a hiking trip. Her hiking companion said she was there one minute and gone the next. A fall is a much more likely event than an abduction.
• Steven Garcia has been missing since August 2025. He worked at the Kansas City National Security Campus in Albuquerque. He was last seen walking away from his phone carrying a gun and had left behind his wallet, phone, and keys. As with others above, this is a common behavior of suicidal people.
• Nuno Lureiro was killed on his doorstep by the Brown University shooter in December 2025. Motive hasn't been established, but the shooter left a recording that he had planned both shootings for years.
• Jason Thomas went missing in December 2025 for three months before his body was found in March 2026. He was last seen walking along railroad tracks, another frequent precursor for suicides. A cause of death doesn't seem to have been released so far, but law enforcement said that they don't suspect foul play.
• Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Neil McCasland has been missing since February 2026. He was last seen on a neighborhood surveillance camera with hiking boots and a .38 revolver. He had left behind his wallet, phone, and wearable devices. Many suicides start the same way.
• Carl Johann Grillmair was killed at his home in February 2026. He was a prominent astronomer and astrophysicist. A suspect has been arrested and has been charged in his murder, which may have happened after an argument.

One suicide (Eskridge), one likely suicide (McCasland), four possible suicides (Chavez, Casias, Garcia, and Thomas), two murders (Lureiro and Grillmair), two other deaths (Hicks and Maiwald), and one missing (Reza). Neither of the murders are linked. Reza may have simply fallen while hiking and been severely injured or killed. The two other deaths were both in the age range where sudden deaths start to become unfortunately common.

Stage 3 smog alerts were year-round when I was a kid in the 1980s. They were more common in the summer, but they could happen any time the temperatures rose, and they were a fact of life at school in the spring and fall. I spent a lot of recess and PE time indoors for Stage 2 and 3 alerts. This page shows the number of days at different air qualities for Los Angeles going back to 1980. The highest number of good air quality days was 11 in 1983. For all but two of the remaining years, it was in single digits. The combined number of unhealthy, very unhealthy, and dangerous days usually covered a cumulative six months or so out of the year.

You can see the numbers shifting to the left starting in 1989. Both Republicans and Democrats in the state government (which was run by Republicans at the time) had authorized various government agencies to make changes that would affect smog levels. Since 2002, the number of moderate or good air days has covered at least half of the year, a huge reversal from the 1980s. The number of very unhealthy or dangerous air days has been in the single digits every year (bar one) since 2007, even reaching zero in 2010 and 2013 and only one in six of the other years.

They know exactly what I've bought from them and when, so computing the tariffs I've paid through them is a matter of database queries.

They know how to give the money back to me - they send me a credit based on my executive membership every year, and that would be an acceptable and minimally painful way to refund the tariff windfall. They could give Costco store credit cards to non-executive members.

Science doesn't "show us" what you claim. The article you linked is an editorial that is long on vague words like "some" and "many", but the only place it makes the claim you do is in a bit that is clearly presented as the author's opinion, with no evidence or study supporting the conclusion.

You're conflating concerns. Most government systems are required to log the hell out of their inputs and outputs. Making decisions to destroy something based on ephemeral data could happen just as easily on the ground as it could in orbit -- it has nothing to do with what kind of system (large neural network, traditional ML, human decision, or something else) makes the decision or where the decision happens.

I'm not sure what you mean. Do your eyes count as "long range sensors"? Mine can see stars that are many light-years away, and eyes are not a new invention.

They claim to have realized (invented) a better quantum magnetometer and a way to process the data to do a pretty amazing kind of detection. That's one very specific kind of long range sensor, with improvements over previous long range sensors but also limitations of its own. It's presumably not a magic device that Pareto dominates other long range sensors.

What's the differential latency of running a strong model for several turns (or the equivalent) on a spacecraft's power budget compared to a data center's power budget, especially once you factor in redundancy to manage single-event upsets in the huge RAM array needed for that model?

I use Claude rather than a local model because I don't want to wait all afternoon for the quality of results I can fit into 128 GB RAM.

"away from densely populated areas" is both subjective and not the same as "away from other development".

This kind of article should wait until the study has been peer-reviewed, not flood the zone with unreviewed slop.

I understood the question to be whether the study controlled for other changes in land use in the surrounding area. For example, northern Virginia has built a ton of new data centers close together over the last decade -- in many cases, replacing pastures. Attributing the results of the whole set to individual data centers would be a methodological error.

They have working software: OCX is intended to replace the current ground system, Operational Control System (OCS). They have launched a lot more than 30 satellites -- in fact, most of them have been decommissioned, although the currently operational set have mostly outlived their design lifetimes by a lot. The oldest active satellites are Block IIR satellites, with a design life of 7.5 years ... and launched between 1997 and 2004 (so the youngest of them would be old enough to drink alcohol in the US).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

That doesn't at all answer the question that was asked.

Parents have extremely broad rights to manage their children's upbringings. Kids have no right to use end-to-end encryption without parental consent, although I don't think a court has held that parental consent is necessary.