Yes, and this statement:

Which I assume was meant to be reassuring, is the exact opposite. It tells me that it is very probable that whatever was actually in the test tube is something they don't even have the ability to test for or identify.

This doesn't make sense on the surface for a number of reasons. The Starship second phase cannot launch most of the things that Falcon 9 launches. I'm assuming they are going to have two large shuttle-like doors on a Starship eventually that can release larger payloads?

The next thing that doesn't make sense is simply payload size. Certainly it is not more economical to use the Starship stack to put something into orbit that is only a small fraction of its cargo capacity? And yes, I know it could carry multiple satellites / spacecraft at once, but it is very rare those things all need to be in the exact same orbit at the same time. So it seems Falcon 9 would be more economical for launching a single smaller thing?

Maybe the economics of the Falcon 9 second stage not being usable totally makes the case for Starship? It's estimated a second stage costs between $7 and $10 million. So perhaps right there economically it makes more sense to fly a 100% reusable Starship even for a small payload. I guess the liquid methane Starship burns is a relatively cheap, being derived from natural gas that the USA already has in abundant supply.

I live in a very rural area. We have no military bases within hundreds of miles, but we are on a military training flight route. We see all the fighter aircraft on a weekly basis flying over (very low), and a very small rural airport somehow got set up to refuel Osprey's on their flight routes. So we see Osprey's nearly every day flying over.

My point is that scheduling a plane to fly over a game at a specific time is pretty much inconsequential because these things are flying CONSTANTLY around the country for training. They have to rack up the hours one way or another.

Why in the world would anyone think that an LLM would know what products humans would want to buy? To the LLM, all the products are merely words. Just descriptions. It cannot perceive anything about these products, but only knows of them indirectly via words. Further, all the LLM knows about what things are appealing to humans is also from words.

The whole thing is absurd really. It reminds me of something like Futurama where Bender is trying to cook food for humans. Or Star Trek and Data is trying to do something human but failing at it. Just not nearly as entertaining to watch this store fail though.

Also took down the PACS server at our local hospital. The D drive didn't mount after this update.

What is happening is Flock's coverage density in existing areas is increasing, while other areas are losing coverage entirely. So instead of actually growing the network geographically it is now shrinking.

In my county and town there were 11. The county Sheriff had 4, the town Police had 4, and Lowe's Home Improvement has 3 on their private property. In the last week the Sheriff and Police both decided to remove their Flock cameras.So have most neighboring counties. This has caused a massive gap in the Flock geographic coverage in this entire region. 8 cameras doesn't sound like a lot, but when they are positioned on the major arteries coming in and out of the town at the access points to the interstates, the amount of coverage and vehicles being scanned is impacted tremendously.

Increasing their coverage density in existing areas just shows more details of the same vehicles. So instead of a vehicle being scanned three times while driving from point A to point B, it might be scanned four or five times while it moves around a city.

It's a vastly different thing completely losing the ability to scan vehicles at all in entire areas, and I argue that even though the raw number is increasing (if what you say is true), their overall capability is drastically decreasing.

More like "If any little disruption happens in the Middle East for any petty reason over the next several decades regardless of who the President of the USA is".

But hey, if you want to give Trump the credit for pushing the world away from burning Middle East oil and releasing all that carbon into the atmosphere then go right ahead. I'm sure he'd bask in the attention.

Well, it isn't as simple as that, and I don't know how much power either party has on the matter. It would take legislation at the state level to really block it state-wide, and there are probably too many other things that would be affected for them to blanket ban something like this. Of course legislation wouldn't say "Flock cameras are not allowed". It would have to ban ALPR in general, and then you get into things with private property and so on. If I have a business and a security camera sees the street in front of it, how can I not be allowed to record it or do whatever I want with the images I collect? That street is a public space, and there are myriad laws and court cases allowing that to be photographed or otherwise recorded.

Also, any commercial entity can order flock cameras. Lowes (a huge home improvement chain the USA) has them at all their locations if the state laws allow. The one in our town as three of them in a cluster covering not only their parking lot, but the streets beside it.

Our sheriff's department has a number of them throughout our town and county (maybe 5 or 6). I guess technically our sheriff can be voted out, but in actuality there isn't much competition running for that office in rural communities or people with the credentials to run for sheriff - they ten to hold office for a very long time, and have moved up through the local ranks. Pretty much everyone hates flock, but that is not nearly enough motivation to vote out a sheriff, and that is under the huge assumption someone would actually run using that as a platform (I will take down the 5 flock cameras in the county - vote for me!).

My point is that these things are paid for and placed across a very wide variety of locations and not just on public property.

So what do these things do if ingested by animals, like humans?

In other words they still have more labor and safety regulations in place than the average state. You know... "known to the State of California to cause cancer" stickers all over everything, etc.

Yeah we can always have an LLM discuss recycling based on the word soup it has ingested from the internet, maybe make a video defying all the laws of physics showing recycling of a mixed waste landfill, and consume a lot of electricity in the process.

That's the beauty of each state being allowed to have the governance model that its citizens want. Don't like it? You can exercise your freedom of speech and right to vote, or you can move to another state. In some states, like Ohio, governance is carved up into tiny pieces - State -> Counties -> Townships -> Cities / Villages.

You may have a village of 1,000 people, with its own tiny town hall for the mayor, its own fire department, 3 person police department, school system (that can pretty much make most all the education decisions they want), the ability for the residents to vote decide what tax rate they want levied against them to pay for their schools, on and on. It's often good, and sometimes bad, but it's about freedom and diversity and the ability to set up a system that the voters want.

Then you can go to another state where everything is hyper standardized (but still specific to that state). All of that is deeply ingrained into concepts of freedom and governance, checks and balances. Sure, it allows towns to do really stupid crap, and if citizens don't like it they can mobilize and vote people out, elect one of themselves to do things differently, etc. Happens ALL the time, and is happening in my small town right now actually, as a number of town council members are about to be shown to the exit in just a few months over some things they tried to pull that got the vast majority of citizens in an uproar.

Virginia does not own Dominion Energy. They just regulate it (set rates, etc). They would regulate the resulting corporate entity after a merger, whatever that is, just the same as they do now, as is their right to do so as a state.

I suspect this will get shot down, as Virginia does not have the right to control this (it is interstate / federal level for one thing).

Expect big chunks of the limited budgets of various terrorist orgs to divert into upskilling for hacking these vehicles and gaining the ability to take full remote control, at any time, for any desired operation.

This is simply using our amazing ability to spatially locate sounds. We can spatially locate sounds in front of us side-to-side with an accuracy of around 1 degree. That's pretty incredible. For comparison, cats and dogs cannot spatially locate sounds with nearly that accuracy (about 5 degrees for cats, 8 degrees for dogs), even though they can physically pan their ears around to focus sound collection where they want.

To give an idea of just how incredible that is, 1 degree accuracy means that a sound (or echo) from 20 feet away can be determined with 4 inches accuracy side to side (or in metric, an object 6 meters away can be located to 11 centimeters accuracy).

Using this innate ability for echolocation just makes sense.