Yes?

As for the one in New York, I'll give you three guesses where La Liberté éclairant le monde was made.

Aaak. I think it was. That'll teach me to work off of decade old memories...

Well, it probably won't teach me.

Damn science believers, always messing up people's fantasies.

Have you ever seen a shiny new penny versus an old tarnished one? Or the Statue of Liberty? Or an old building with one of those weird green roofs?

They're all copper, with varying amounts of oxygen. Oxygen free copper is expensive copper that's specially made to get rid of as much of the oxygen as possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

If the article got something so simple as THIS completely wrong, one can easily presume that the REST of the article is incorrect gibberish.

"oXyGEn-fREE cOppER", lmao

Indeed.

You can of course have it delivered to your door as well. If you can't receive it at home, as is the case being discussed in this thread, then you can have something delivered to a locker. When you go to pick it up you tell Amazon you're there and they pop open the correct door.

It's interesting how practically everything is "the most convincing proof we have."

The Moon is target practice. We need to get away from innovative bespoke engineering, into industrial mass production with continuous improvement. To do that we need to fly often. Mars just doesn't have the launch window availability. The biggest part of the challenge is that we were born in the bottom of a deep well. To toss enough stuff out of the well for a long journey is critical. Boosters that reliably fly on time often and cheaply enough to get ships and fuel out of the well. Ships that carry fuel into orbit and return over and over since the vast majority of the material we need to send out of the well isn't payloads or ships, it's fuel. Kilotons of fuel. Once the factories and processes are set up for that going far beyond the Moon is fairly easy. But with a narrow opportunity every two years that's not going to happen in a human lifespan. It's not enough refinement cycles per year.

I see this accelerating the Mars objective, not deferring it.

Are you crying? There's certainly some starting, but probably a ways to go yet.

Do you not already have this? Amazon has local lockers here in drug stores, gas stations and convenience stores, most of which are open 24 hours. Most of the postal locations are also in drug stores.

100%. The point of learning-based AI is that it's faster and cheaper to develop than conventional engineered algorithms. It also tends to execute faster with fewer resources than conventional algorithms. Apple, Nvidia and other companies already do this locally pretty extensively: DLSS, background segmentation and other processing in videoconferencing, audio processing, photo processing including object and person recognition, text to speech and speech recognition, information extraction from e-mails, etc.

You probably actually mean large language models. Those too. Language models are so compelling because they seem to have personalities and the can interact with us like people. People are going to want theirs personalized. The current approach is to shove context into hidden background for every prompt but that's expensive and very limited. In future you'll have a local version that learns and adapts to you: what you like for breakfast, what time you get up, what kind of jokes you like, if you're a furry. These things are all over sci fi, from Niven and Heinlein to Star Wars, Star Trek and Marvel.

No reason why it can't be open either. The ridiculous amounts of power put into training language models today is because it's an arms race. Six months behind the behemoths it's all enthusiasts reenacting the early days of PCs in their basements.

Both yours and the OPs numbers have a certain... fragrance.

They did. If you don't think military contractors build things as cheaply as they can, or that there's something magical about "military-grade" you're dreaming. They charge as much as they can because they don't have any proper competition.

Iron Dome interceptors, the Tamir missile, cost about $40-50k. Patriots are around $4 million, SM3s $10-30 million. The Tamir works fine and is that cheap because Israel is a small country with limited resources and lots of demands on those resources. Patriots and SM3s are that expensive because the US is a big country with lots of resources, not nearly as many demands on them, and you guys didn't listen to Eisenhower.

Are they the same ones they put in vaccines?

Probably not. If the Chinese had their own pre-installed backdoors in Cisco gear they could just use those instead of exploiting the Cisco and US government ones in order to install their own.