How carefully do y'all think they have tested for metal fatigue at the bends created by these big presses?

Old expert systems guy here. In the old days of 1980s, "AI" meant rule-based "if-then" technology. Then came model-based technology, then case-based reasoning. Now neural networks are all the rage because they can accomplish tasks that the earlier systems could not albeit at the cost of opacity and extensive required training. However, the earlier technologies were designed to be, and were, hand-crafted to incorporate human expertise. The starting values of various options were hand-crafted but obviously could be adjusted based on performance. Who is to say that the simulation in question did not use hybrid technology including, for example, a model that included all the elements of the system including the operator, the communication channel, the drone, its weapon systems, the effects of the weapons, and its targets? Then, the "AI" would "understand" these relationships and could take action based on that understanding. It is hard to understand why the simulation did not have a bright red line dividing the good guys from the bad guys. That might be hard to do with a pure neural network but would be trivially easy with any of the earlier technologies. So if we are dealing with fake news here, which is fake: the initial report or the later retraction?

Here's an example: while applying for a job, I was required to use docusign.net. This site carefully offered the option to use paper for all communications, while explaining that doing so would increase processing time considerably. I elected to fill out the application, which contained plenty of highly confidential personal information, electronically. However, when I signed it, docusign.net then EMAILED ME COPIES OF THE DOCUMENTS IN PLAIN TEXT.
Nowhere on the site was there a warning that this would occur, an option for using encryption for email communications, or an option to download completed documents rather than having them emailed.
From this I inferred that the customers of docusign.net are their client entities, and the people who fill out the documents are [fill in your favorite term].
My response? I questioned the integrity of the organization to which I was applying, and vowed never to do anything through docusign.net again.

If the issue is unwanted public *wireless* access, would the following work (note: I am not familiar with this modem)? Wrap the entire box inside aluminum foil to create a Faraday cage. Optionally remove the antennas first. This works great with cell phones. Try wrapping yours up and then call it. Nothing happens until you unwrap enough to expose the phone's antenna. Of course, wIth the modem, there are wires exiting that might disrupt the cage effect. Dunno whether that would prevent this method from working well enough to be useful.

Paper losses like this are not tax deductible. I work with a medical office, and that is one of the first tax-related truths they discovered.

On the other hand, taking advantage of people is unfortunately part of human nature. The nice part about paying cash is you can say, "I will pay you in full now. If you bill the insurance company, you have to submit a claim and pray that they pay and not recoup the payment in the future. And, please give me your best price now because I am going to three of your competitors who are conveniently located in this same neighborhood and will ask them their best price. Then I will choose, and I won't be back if your office is not the winner."

This is called capitalism: make it work for you!

The leadless pacemaker is indeed a real advance, but the summary needs a few corrections, and a comment can be made. I would not want a reader who needs a standard pacemaker to be frightened unnecessarily by the summary as written.
"surgeons sliced open their patients' shoulders and inserted the pulse-generating devices in the flesh near the heart, then attached tiny wires to the heart muscle ... through the femoral artery."

• 1. The incision is made in the skin, not a joint. The implant location is usually the left or right prepectoral region, which is an inch or two lower than the collar bone on the stated side. The pacemaker itself is placed in a "pocket" formed by separating the skin and its attached fat from the underlying muscle. If you have ever eaten chicken, you know that the skin and fat can be separated from muscle. In the uncooked human, of course, separation requires a bit of effort but not much, and a good surgeon will have the area complete numbed up so the patient doesn't feel anything. Thus, the pacemaker is not near the heart: it's outside the rib cage. There are variations on the implant location, but none of them is inside the rib cage.
• 2. The tiny wires (well, pretty tiny) are long, and extend from the area where the pacemaker is through a vein (not an artery, hopefully!) to the heart. The method by which the wires are put in the vein is simple but outside the scope of this post.
• 3. The access is always through a vein (femoral vein, in the case of the new device), not an artery. Blood clots (thrombi, when inside the body) will form on most foreign bodies. From the veins, they can spread only into the lungs, which is relatively safe. From the arteries, even tiny thrombi can cause trouble when they go the brain (strokes), heart (heart attack), gut (ischemic gut), limbs (ischemic arm, leg, etc). Not good.
• 4. The new device can still get infected and still can run out of battery power. What I haven't yet understood is how it can easily be extracted if it gets infected, which is necessary because life-threatening infection can (and usually does) result if an infected foreign body remains in the patient. I guess it's small enough that a new one can be inserted without removing the old one when the battery runs out. There are more technical limitations too that will likely be overcome as the technology improves.

Some physical processes are random, and hardware random number generators based on them can be constructed. Does this report create a larger market opportunity for manufacturers of this type of device? And, competing such devices can be compared, assayed, validated, and combined, all apart from and much more cheaply than CPUs.