Absolutely correct. But the silver lining is that the procrastination led NASA to approve a quick, cheap, and risky attempt to save it.

* If it works, it's a model that might get applied to others in the future.

* If it fails, well it was just $30 million, and the telescope was basically considered lost anyway.

Exactly. NVDA is up 75% from one year ago - not exactly the stock market laggard the article makes it out ot be. Even though a few other stocks did better.

> Well, on the other hand, if it was an actual "religion" rather than a sci-fi writer's spoof

I'm not sure how one defines an "actual religion" in a way that's distinguishable from a spoof. This seems like a distinction without a difference.

The two slashdot posts after this one are:
* A rural newspaper finds AI automation saves reporters one day of work per week (20% productivity boost.)
* An EU survey shows AI boosts productivity an average of 4%.

The AI changes are coming slowly. Like past historical innovations, jobs are being lost, producivity is being boosted, and new jobs are being created. The sky is not falling.

Yang's UBI is a cure in search of a disease. He needs to greatly exaggerate the dangers of AI in order to sell his "cure". Whether or not it would work even in his hypotheitcal scenario is another story, but is irrelevant because his scenario is not happening.

They list a lot of reasons why nuclear nations are at odds with each other, but then throw in:

> unregulated AI integration into military systems

Uh, yeah, that's certainly an interesting general military concern, but adding that note to this press release seems more designed to be trendy or pick up clicks. I don't think anyone's considering putting AI's finger on the nuclear button.

Yes, parents should take some responsibility and limit their kids' screen time if they want to raise responsible humans.

Interestingly I suspect the Naval pilots who released those three videos a decade or so ago understood the science very well.

* They named one video "Gofast", because their plane was going fast while imaging something slow, but knew on the video the object looked fast.

* They named another video "Gimbal", because it showed the gimbal of a camera spinning quickly, which gives the illusion of the object jumping quickly.

* They named the last video "Flir" because that's the type of infrared camera that was used, which most people don't know how to interpret as it looks so different from visible camera images.

It was not the pilots, but the media who didn't get the joke, and paraded "expert" after "expert" to say that these videos clearly depicted physics-violating advanced alien technology.

Those smart Navy pilots are probably still laughing it up, knowing they helped kick-start the most recent, every-other-decade alien panic!

I saw a great talk on PBS by Burt Rutan where someone from Florida asked him that very question. Sadly I can't find it on YouTube. He said he could never operate out of a government-run spaceport because the red tape and bureaucracy would never let him get anything done. He has tried it before at Vandenburg in California and he finds it cheaper to build a brand new private spaceport from scratch than to try to operate at a government-run facility.