Did I say you did?

The ESA even famously poo-poo'd the idea, exactly like you guys are doing here.

Sure, and SpaceX is going to cure cancer and let us all live forever for free. The fact that they once did something that somebody somewhere thought they couldn't do doesn't mean they can automatically do anything. Note that SpaceX themselves say they don't really have any idea whether datacentres in space will work.

unlike you and apparently most others on slashdot, I'm not going to try to stop it,

I didn't say anything about stopping it. There are good arguments for proceeding carefully though. A million satellites in one of our most valuable orbits comes with a bunch of problems.

Besides, I'm not seeing the argument for fraud, which is what GP asserted

I didn't reply to the OP, I replied to you:

If that was the intent, it wouldn't really work due to Elon himself having more downside exposure than anybody,

Elon doesn't have any downside. He's never going to sell his shares unless he absolutely has to. He wants to go to Mars, which means SpaceX wants to go to Mars. SpaceX made $75 billion dollars off the IPO, possibly at quite an inflated price. He also gets his Twitter investors off his back as they can now cash out their formerly underwater shares at a significant gain.

Whether any of it is fraud or not is for lawyers to figure out. Every company is going to hype their stock before an IPO. SpaceX says, buried deep in the prospectus, that they really have no idea whether datacentres in space are going to work or not, and they have a few very compelling reasons to push highly speculative, AI-related ideas even if they don't think they're going to work.

Don't judge a book by it's cover. The "top" journals have always been mostly hype. Even more so now that they can charge $13,000 to publish an article in them.

Right. And Starfish Prime was launched into an orbit where it remained for days before it was detona....

Oh wait no, it was a regular old ICBM that was set to detonate early.

That's a very nice classless society you have there.

Coca-cola contains Kola nut extract.

Does it? You seem very sure considering the recipe is a famous secret. And the Internet disagrees:

https://www.bbc.com/future/art...

https://fox8.com/news/it-used-...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/...

Joe Consumer doesn't really care about disabling the LED on his funny glasses. Joe Creep does, and is pretty highly motivated to do so. He might not have the gumption to follow an Internet How-To that involves a soldering iron, but he's clearly got too much money and can pay someone like the shops mentioned in the summary to do it for him.

Hm....

https://www.reddit.com/r/Const...

They do issue recalls. Quite a few. And we all carefully monitor recall notices for our screwdrivers, right?

Well, not if you're using it as a photodetector, or detecting the light it produces, as suggested by the GP.

Most science people don't have time to care what random people think. Grant committees are a little more important. Ethics committees even more so. Unfortunately non-scientists and scientists from other fields sit on both.

I had a project that got automatically referred by ethics to the "AI committee" because it proposed to use "AI", i.e. a fairly small neural network, to do something. The "AI committee" is a pain in the ass populated by non-scientists, and rejected the project on privacy grounds. Resubmit replacing "AI model" with "hierarchy of general linear models" and no problems.

Oh, wait, yes, you have heard of them, because they put their names on your screwdriver.

That would be quite the trick. They've been dead over 70 years.

Alberta has a fair amount of wind power, and has for decades. It has to compete with natural gas though, and lots of places in Alberta natural gas is a waste product that's flared off.

Funny, I'm from there. I was home recently and there were an awful lot of Canadian flags and signs around. My mother told me everyone thought it was the southerners who were separatists until some people went down there for a meeting and the southerners told them they thought it was the northerners who were pushing independence.

The combination of anonymous social media accounts from around the world, a corrupt premier who's desperate for any distraction and a few useful loudmouths can give everyone a completely false impression.

they could put a photodetector next to the LED

Which you could replace with a resistor connected to where the LED used to be.

use the LED itself as a light detector.

Ditto.

It's difficult to defeat someone who's moderately competent and has access to the hardware.

That sounds like the journalist getting confused. The "supertorquer" seems to be a magnetorquer that uses superconducting coils. You can get propellant-free orientation control that way, but not propulsion. It's right in the name: "torquer."

You can get propulsion, sort of, from a magnetic device like an electrodynamic tether, but it's a different thing, and would be very, very hard to make superconducting. If you wanted to go to Mars using magnets you'd use them to build something like a magnetohydrodynamic drive, which aren't propellantless but can be enormously efficient and are likely to be one of the many things that benefit from the new high temperature superconductor ribbon.