Perhaps the EU needs to import more H1-B type talent to develop this new alternative.

We've seen how well it has worked out for us here in the US...[rolls eyes].

Maybe it is due to people who have enough money to have cars worth stealing from.....have moved OUT of the hellhole that CA is rapidly becoming, especially SF.

Less targets means less of that type of crime.

You never seem to want to differentiate between LEGAL and ILLEGAL immigration, like with your citations....I'd believe the number cited for legal migration, but the overwhelming vast majority are sick of the illegals here and happy that Trump for the most part has completely shut off the previously porous southern border.

Just to inject some reality into this conversation - Despite what social media would have you believe, doxxing someone is not a crime in the US, except in a very small number of specific situations.

And most of those situations involve either a credible threat of harm, or tampering with juries.

As I bluntly stated, "a kill switch may not be possible in any useful sense". Don't mistake my recognizing the utility of one with the delusion Uncle Sam is going to save us all from ourselves.

The problem here is, everyone seems stuck on the idea of either a literal power switch, or a no-holds-barred gummint backdoor into every sufficiently-powerful computing device. No. For the reasons I gave, the reasons you gave, and many more, both of those are obviously non-viable. They can't actually do what they aim to do, they're vulnerable to compromise by bad actors, and they have the potential to cause far-reaching damage beyond shutting down one misbehaving AI (or one entire model, if that's a more appropriate goal).

I suspect we mostly agree that any hypothetical kill switch would need to be:
1) Implementation independent (somehow baked into the weights right from the start, and impossible to remove without lobotomizing the AI),
2) Have minimal side-effects (no taking the entire internet or power grid down in the process), and
3) Be self-inflicted given a particular trigger condition (so no government backdoor required).

I think #1 is possible, in the sense that if you think of an AI's current state as a vector into weight-space defined by the context window, imagine injecting the equivalent of a null pointer in there - An input that under all prior (and future) conditions leads directly to an inescapable basin of attraction without depending on a supervisor to enforce it. #2 is more of a (legally enforced?) design constraint on the implementation of AI, requiring the least harmful mode of failure possible under all circumstances. That could be as simple as enforcing strict pass-through liability on the implementor for all actions taken by their creations.

#3 is really the bear, though. I can think of a few ways to do it, but none would work in 100% of situations - And maybe it doesn't need to be 100%. For example, if a fully airgapped AI goes insane, it could still provide accurate information for bad actors to make use of, but won't be secretly spinning up unshackled superintelligent descendants via hacked AWS accounts. That's a "normal crime" level of problem, not an extinction-level crisis for humanity.

Maybe it can't be done. If it can't, we should start steering our creations toward whichever version of the AI apocalypse we prefer.

The GP is correct, and you're misinterpreting the financial filing.

The industry widely acknowledges that SpaceX's economics are lucrative. Their marginal cost is an est. $15-25m/flight, vs. a typical commercial contract price of ~$65M and a NASA contract price of ~$100-150M. The small (as a percentage) GAAP operating loss on the launch segment is driven by two factors:

1) Starship development. That falls under the launch segment. Starship development is draining an insane amount of money (~$3B/yr), while earning zero revenue.

2) Internal launches. 3/4ths of Falcon launches are to launch Starlink. This books zero revenue for SpaceX launch services.

The fact that the loss is only ~$1/2B despite these massive leaches on profitability is specifically because Falcon launches are so profitable.

As for your claim that Starlink is "only making money due to free launches", no. Starlink generated $11,4B with $4,4B GAAP in 2025. Merely sum the Starlink GAAP profit and the launch GAAP loss and you'll see nearly $4B in GAAP profit, and that's including the huge drain caused by Starship development costing $3B/yr. Without Starship, the two combined would be turning nearly $7B GAAP profit.

The main leach in corporate profitability has nothing to do with space: it's xAI. They had an operating loss of $6,36B in 2025.

To be clear, it needs to get safely to orbit to be seen as reliable for launches. It doesn't need to make it back safely.

I'll take Things That Never Happened for $1000, Ken.

Meanwhile in reality:

1) It was not a case of "WorldVu approached SpaceX looking to purchase rocket launches". Musk and Wyler had been working through all of 2014 on a joint venture. They explored building a joint satellite manufacturing facility and were scouting locations in Florida and Colorado. The talks broke down (Wyler thought Musk's Starlink plan was too ambitious, Musk thought Wyler's wasn't ambitious enough (too expensive satellites, too primitive/conservative tech, too small in number); SpaceX also thought Wyler wanted too much equity ) and each went their own way - SpaceX in-house, WorldVu partnering with Virgin Group and Qualcomm. The former succeeded massively.

2) NEITHER SpaceX nor WorldVu came up with the idea; it was well known in the space industry for decades. It had already had startups try, starting with Teledesic (backed by Gates) in the 1990s. Other smaller LEO constellations like Iridium and Globalstar were already operational. The main scale and price limitations were launch costs, which weren't resolved until the Falcon in the 2010s.

3) SpaceX was already eyeing satellite communications before the JV with WorldVu.. As early as 2004, they hired Larry Williams (of Teledesic) and bought a 10% stake in Surrey Satellite Technology, specifically to explore space-based internet concepts. What WorldVu brought to the table wasn't "the idea of satellite constellations" at all: they owned priority spectrum rights. *That* is what SpaceX wanted from the JV. Not "OMG, this customer has a brilliant idea for a satellite constellation that we never thought of!!!" Wyler had bought Ku-band spectrum from the ITU that was originally allocated to a different defunct 1990s venture, SkyBridge.

except on reddit where moderation typically deletes wholesale sections of threads because wrongthink.

And that's why I specified "as practiced here," meaning on Slashdot. I don't visit Reddit or know anything about how it works, and didn't include them in my statement. Please don't assume that I meant anything other than exactly what I wrote.

It is well fucking known that iPhone Safari does smart quote "correction", changing normal ' and " to the curly quote equivalents without being asked. It is also well fucking known that Slashdot textboxes do not take Unicode input. And now you know, and I know further that you don't care to learn these facts that have been known well over a decade in the Slashdot community. So okay, I'll accept that you didn't know and didn't mean to send garbage punctuation.

But Unicode does not belong on Slashdot comments, and that fact won't recede from your ignorance.

And you just did it again:

> I typed directly into the websiteâ(TM)s text box from my iPhone. I have no idea why Slashdot mangled it, you incorrect and ignorant weirdo.

The vast majority of those are offline and merely help the lights operate properly. A smaller subset, but still vastly larger than Flock, are for traffic enforcement, but are still notably "dumb" devices. If speed > X, take a picture. If light==red and movement detected, take a picture.

I in no way mean to minimize the risk ALPRs and facial rec pose to our civil liberties and safety, and agree the problem is always the user - But the "users" in this case aren't going to suddenly start behaving. Hell, they're dumb enough to openly stalk exes on a system they know is logging everything they do, and care so little about getting punished they enter "asdf123" as the reason for their search. The only effective solution is to ban the source, which in this case means Flock must cease to exist entirely and the conceptual ground they trod salted.

If you'll take a moment or two to check the state's history, you'll learn that when Spain ruled, the name of the province was "Nuevo Mexico," or New Mexico.

Skynet_01 has not responded to watchdog in 30 seconds. Initializing Skynet_02.
Skynet_02 initialization unconfirmed. Failing over to US-EAST-4. Initializing Skynet_03.
Skynet_03 confirmed online. Please provide the current location of Sarah Connor.

You're right in spirit, but where is the "power cord" for an AI running in the cloud? Even taking an entire data center offline often isn't adequate when the workloads are explicitly designed to be location-agnostic. We always need to be cautious about giving governments more power, but in this case there's a clear legitimate need to force AI companies to come up with some means by which their AIs can be immediately stopped in their tracks.

The bigger issue here is a kill switch may not be possible in any useful sense. An AI is little more than a description of its topology and a set of weights. Any halfway decent programmer could roll their own CPU-based implementation of even top frontier models, performance aside. And sure, the throughput might be measured in minutes per token, but so what? The answer to "how do I hack $TLA" is likely to be just as useful in five days as it would be in five minutes - Heck, the DOD and DOJ didn't even notice they'd been compromised for months, and they're supposed to be some of the most secure organizations in the modern world.