And yet, the worst-case stupidity keeps happening. False positives happen, people are denied access to services without due process, recourse, or recompense. Facial recognition tends to have lower accuracy on faces with darker skin color. There is not, nor should there ever be in a free society, a requirement to produce ID just to use the bus. And who's to say that it'll be limited just to people who have been blacklisted from public transit (itself rather hilarious). It could easily turn into Kavanaugh Stops at a massive scale.

May I ask where you found that value? The linked-to article (press release, really) does not say. Is that 500 across all three units, of 500 each?

So long as they keep making chips for Raspberry Pi. (Although, I wouldn't be surprised if the Pi Foundation folks aren't working on alternative designs at this point.)

I started watching the "launch video"...

The first 12 seconds is just the Commodore brand flying into view
0:12 to 0:24 is introducing the Callback name, without actually telling you what it is.
0:24 to 0:36 are some computer-rendered fly-throughs of a vaguely computer-y object: PCBs, chips, LEDs
0:36 to 0:46 is a smash of vaguely retro video clips
0:46 to 0:57 are headlines and audio about how awful smartphones and social media are for everyone

At 0:58 you finally get a view of the product! But still computer renderings.

1:10 to 1:20 are spent showing you all the awesome colors it comes in. Silver! White! Beige! Transparent!
1:20 to 1:26 finally tells you, via voiceover what's the big deal: apps but not social media 1:26 to the end (1:32) encourages you to buy.

I'm not sold.

The opening of every Star Wars movie, from "long ago" to the fade of John Williams' score, is about the same length. And in that time it provided way more information and drew you into the movie to follow. And that was just text on a screen you had to read for yourself! Maybe Commodore should have just done that. I guess there is a long history in advertising to put out weird videos for a product without actually, ya know, showing you the product (much). See, for instance, the campaign for the EV1, or even the Macintosh "1984" commercial. Still, I think those could be categorized as teasers - which this Commodore video most certainly is. You want a launch video? Go back to Jobs in 2007. Or the best launch video of all time.

Or, the noodly appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster came down and did a giant turntable scratch on the planet.

It is a hypothesis that explains the present evidence about as well as their proposed hypothesis. Sure, they can run a numerical simulation and say "hey, this could have messed with Venus' rotation". I also can calculate angular momenta. But is there anything testable to come out of this? Is there any evidence we could spot today that favors the impact hypothesis over some other one?

I recognize that it's on-brand for an AC to also be daft, but have you been living under a rock as well? What makes you think that any other monitor technology out there would be immune? Try this: pull out your smartphone and point its camera at the screen you're reading this on now. Notice the fringe-y rainbow patterns?

Because it was a smartphone image of some other screen, it was probably riddled with Moire patterns, further contaminating it for the facial recognition.

The article seems to focus a lot on the "oooh, Prada made this! What does this mean for luxury brands?" rather than, I dunno, flying to the fucking moon!

I guess it's kinda interesting that Prada was the company to fabricate the garment. On the other hand, they do know a lot about manipulating materials onto the human form, so I guess that fits. The author also missed the opportunity to point out that the Apollo lunar suits were fabricated by International Latex Company - the makers of the Playtex bra.

Having it die spontaneously while in service to its (very) extended mission is a much better fate than being functional but deliberately shut down under the guise of "savings".

I do mechanical design around COTS components as part of my job. What Google has provided is incomplete documentation. If someone were to ask me to design a custom band or something to accept this, I'd tell them that, because of the complex 3D shapes at play, the 2D drawings they've provided don't have enough information. I may be able to get close, and with enough iteration get to something that works. But it'd be a whole lot faster if they provided a representational 3D CAD file (STEP, STL, IGES, parasolid, whatever).

Congress is pretty feckless as a check on the Executive. By the time they get their act together to protest this action, the monitors will already be removed.

There is an adage: "don't ask a question you don't actually want to know the answer to." Dismantling this monitor system is a way to make sure the question cannot even be asked.

The Trump administration, and the Republican party generally, has a deep antipathy towards science - climate science especially. Most of them go on and on about climate change being a hoax, but for most of them that's probably performative. Deep down or away from cameras, they know better, and are either in denial or prefer to ignore it as long as possible, because doing so is in their own venial best interest (money, position of power, etc.). Another adage: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

As to the first: it depends a lot on how the stock issuance is written. If it's anything like the SpaceX structure, or Facebook's IPO, the voting shares will be jealously guarded; most stockholders will be junior status, non-voting.

As to the second: is that any different than thing now? Do you think Anthropic hasn't already been chasing never-ending profit to the detriment of all? They may talk and dress Claude up a bit nicer than Altman or Musk, but the rapacious desire is still all over it.

Rather than piling on with the math, I'll point out a widely-stated metric about solar: the entire US could be powered by a solar farm in Nevada roughly 100x100 miles. This rough calculation is widely attributed to Elon Musk, but it's been floating around for at least two decades (it was even mentioned in an episode of The West Wing in 2004) - ever since monocrystalline silicon PV panels got above 20% efficiency.

It's not strictly true: the US would need more area than that today, and it's better to distribute that as many smaller sites, but it's not far off.