Let's say that Elon is right and the economics of space-based solar energy make the expense of launching into orbit worthwhile. Let's also say that we manage to avoid the Kessler Syndrome that Elon's companies have largely helped to make more dire.

Compute generates heat. Lots and lots of heat. And heat is difficult to dump in space. How does he plan to get around that not insignificant engineering problem?

I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying it's not going to happen in three years.

That's fine, but have they simulated multiple disasters happening at once? That's what messed up the Fukushima plant - earthquake, tsunami, flood, power outage, all at once.

This is strictly anecdotal, but in my 28 years of working in tech, two of the best network engineers I've worked with both majored in English. One of them ran a guerilla poetry group and has a deeper grasp of Active Directory than anyone else in the shop.

Our messaging security is from the Nineteenth Century
And so my time and place became well known to their artillery
My staff and I with haste were made demonic or angelical
I was the very model of a Russian Major General

Media trends come, media trends go. Meanwhile the young are putting their best stuff on Tiktok and YouTube.

ALICE: Crypto means FREEDOM!
BOB: YES! Here's to cryptography!
ALICE: Here's to cryptocurrency!
BOB: Wait, what?
ALICE: What?

If you read the fine print, some of the bricked Macs are 2019 models (2). Yikes!

Mine is from 2020 and I'm not going to upgrade for a while.

I came to say exactly this. The editors of this site should know their audience. Their audience is the tech sector, not the financial sector. The White House trying to "oversee crypto" in the sense of the financial sector -- that is, overseeing cryptocurrencies -- is great news. There's a lot of BS in cryptocurrency and it really needs oversight. On the other hand, the White House trying to "oversee crypto" to the tech audience comes across as trying to oversee cryptography, which smacks of the kind of BS the Clinton Administration tried to pull with key-escrow and the Clipper Chip - all of which was really, really bad.

This isn't news; this is opinion, and I really wish The Guardian did a better job of labeling it as such (although it is in fact labeled opinion).

Preprint, not peer-reviewed, and not yet repeated by other similar studies. The results are concerning but we shouldn't act on them yet.

Unfortunately Darwin won't select just for being anti-vax. In areas with a lot of anti-vax sentiment, many hospitals are being overwhelmed by COVID-denying patients who treat the medical staff like shit. Consequently medical staff are getting overworked and burning out. Consequently hospitals are closing to new patients that don't have COVID. Consequently people are dying of other things that a hospital would be able to treat if they had the beds and the staff bandwidth.

This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and your best chance of surviving what's coming is to get vaccinated and move to an area that voted for center-left parties (since there seems to be a correlation between conservative sentiment and COVID denialism).

What do we think this means? Organized crime? Fanboys of other crypto? People who stalk rich people?

That's called marketing. Let's see what an independent review says.

I wonder how many devices Linux runs on now?

Apparently the phone that the Dutch authorities showed was produced by SKYECC.EU, which Sky ECC claims is an imposter group selling counterfeit phones.. Quoting:

“This ‘EU’ phone is not one of ours and is not sold by us,” says Jean-François Eap, CEO of SKY ECC. “We know that someone has been passing themselves off as an official reseller of SKY ECC for some time and we have been trying to shut it down through legal channels for almost two years.” SKY ECC points out that the SKYECC.EU reseller is an imposter and not authorized to sell SKY ECC phones. We have reason to believe the website www.skyecc.eu is operated by a disgruntled former SKY ECC reseller whose reseller rights were terminated in September 2019 after repeated violations of SKY ECC reseller policies. SKY ECC recently became aware, through its authorized distributors in Belgium and the Netherlands, of a fake phishing application looking similar to SKY ECC but sold on phones without standard SKY ECC security features. “The Belgian police’s claim that they sent bank accounts details to SKY ECC to claim our “5 Million Dollar Hack” prize is entirely false,” says Eap.

Note: I'm not sure what to make of this claim, other than that the proof is in whether the Dutch authorities were able to compromise the encryption of actual Sky ECC phones. We'll know that from court filings I suppose.