Oh, but these are *preventative* wars. He gets a peace prize for every country he invades!

Venezuela was using fentanyl as a WMD. Iran was about to nuke us. Cuba might attack us with drones if someone provides them. Greenland might start a snowball fight, and make us look bad if we lose.

Presumably we've got all our best people on this, since they're obviously not on the UFO videos.

One of the "unidentifiable" objects in an earlier release (last year, I think) was obviously as hell two birds flying low over the ground.

I don't have a conspiracy theory to explain it, but this is all utter bullshit.

The UK was second country in the world to end slavery, following the US? I guess Parliament's Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, through some deep and mysterious time warp, didn't actually occur until after Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. And Upper Canada's 1793 Act Against Slavery, which banned the importation of slaves into Canada and freed the children of slaves upon reaching the age of 25 -- the first legislation in the British Empire freeing slaves -- didn't exist either?

I guess the NTSB is unaware of the fact that, since the development of "talkies" as sound-on-film recordings, the audio track of movies was recorded as an image of the audio waveform on the film alongside the movie images. In 1900, Ernst Ruhmer was able to record audio as an image on film and then recreate the original sound from the image. Other developments advanced the recording of sound on film, but sound recording and reproduction technology was not adequate until Lee De Forest was awarded patents in 1919 for recording audio as a track alongside the images of a moving picture recording, with the first commercial screening of a motion picture utiltizing sound-on-film taking place in 1923. So the NTSB, being 'unaware' that you can reconstruct sound from a pictorial representation, is more than a century behind current technology. And this is the organization that is responsible for keeping our transportation safe? Should we be seeing new buggy-whip safety regulations being released in the future?

Linux?

Funny how this directly salient fact is modded down.

You do understand that SpaceX is - by far - the cheapest orbital company?

SpaceX $2600-6000/kg
Others today: $20,000/kg
NASA (Space Shuttle) $54,000/kg.

Should NASA deliberately be spending more by choosing a more expensive company?

You end your comment with a non sequitur about government wasting money, yet SpaceX - who *does* make a lot from gov't launch contracts, you're not wrong - is CRUSHING the competition.

SpaceX - $2500-$6000/kg depending on mission profile.
Others: ~$20,000/kg
NASA (Space Shuttle era) $55,000/kg.

I'm DELIGHTED the US gov't uses SpaceX. They're saving a HUGE pile of my taxpayer dollars.

How do you complain about the gov't 'wasting money' and yet insist somehow they shouldn't use SpaceX as the cheapest-possible orbital service? How do those facts fit together?

I don't understand what the endgame is supposed to be for all of this. The numbers being thrown around don't make any sense at all--trillions of dollars in spending chasing billions of dollars in revenue looks insane and even worse than the dotcom era.

There's a meme out there that I can't help but agree with: "The reason RAM prices went up 4x is that a massive amount of not-yet-manufactured memory was bought with money that doesn't really exist to be put into GPUs that haven't been made yet, to be installed in data centers that haven't been built, powered by infrastructure that may never exist, to satisfy demand that isn't actually there, in order to generate profits that are mathematically impossible."

You can also put the AI-disabled search in your search engine list by defining a new search provider, say, "GoogleNoAI", with the URL for the search command being "https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s", then make it your default search engine; after that, when you use the search box in the browser, it will default to the AI-free results.

WHO is ostensibly a SCIENTIFIC organization.

Taiwan was a leader in COVID response practices, and whether they want to call it "Taiwan" or "Shangri-La" or "Brigadoon" IDGAF.

In fact, Taiwan expressed concern about human transmission of COVID 12/31/19 but WHO *refused* to acknowledge until China finally admitted it in late Jan 2020.

So fuck WHO: if we know that whatever they think/discover/recommend has to be run-by Xi before the rest of us can know?

And if establishing their own Linux distro enables them to integrate Copilot into the distro, so they can hook more people into paying for their service, that's just (to them) good business.

Short of simply outlawing the collection of this kind of data (which is problematic in the US), that genie is out of the bottle and is never going back in. You don't even need license plates, just access to enough cameras. It isn't exactly hard these days to track e.g. a blue 2008 Honda Civic through a well-covered area, and coverage is filling in by the day. Things like supermarket loyalty cards, credit card transactions, property tax records, etc, can answer the "who's doing the driving" part.

Ever growing automation is going to make for nice searchable databases. Which surely will never, ever, ever, be used inappropriately by those with access to them.

Is WHO willing to admit Taiwan is a place, yet?

A master's degree in my personal experience simply denotes someone who was willing to pay an exorbitant amount of $ for 2 more years of "school time" (I'm not going to say learning) in exchange for the ability to claim a "higher" degree.

Aside from my own experience, I know many people with masters degrees. None of us can point to anything meaningfully learned in those 2 (or more) years. It's a ticket punch for cash.

Setting aside my own knowledge from inside, I have worked with *many* MBAs over the years. I've generally found them to be highly talented at presenting themselves and their ideas as brilliant, no matter how intrinsically stupid either may be. I've yet to meet an MBA that was successful, that (in my opinion) wouldn't have been just as successful without the MBA. Most MBAs I've known are merely the business equivalent of highly polished turds.

Note I'm not hashing on academics; I wouldn't say this about PhD's who have to work fairly-to-incredibly hard and demonstrate meaningful knowledge to earn that degree. I generally admire PhDs.