If a significant number of CEOs are departing and cashing out golden parachutes, the boards that hired them are at fault for (a) selecting the wrong person and (b) improperly incentivizing them.

Of course, no BoD can hold a card to the set of sycophants who gave away another large chunk of Telsa to Elon, only to watch him hose the company's reputation and revenue. At least for a while, there was some accountability in the Delaware courts for that. Of course, that's why Musk moved Tesla to Texas.

The latest Aggressor, Inc techno-military-thriller, Antarctica STORM, is all about antimatter, and what happens when you deliberately lose containment. Not my favorite in the series, but a fun read if you like those kinds of books.

So if you have a big-assed array of solar panels on one side and radiators on the other side, that would work (at least conceptually)?

Well, if I get to pick the -human for the comparison-, it's probably a safe bet....

"That's no moon, that's the heat sink for the AI server!"

Obviously I can't award moderator points for a comment on my own post, but this one certainly deserves +1 funny.

Both the production of that much electricity and the consumption of that much electrical power has to generate a shitload of heat. I guess a data center in space would not have quite the same cooling problems as one on Earth. BUT that would require careful design to make sure the heat radiates off the back of the solar panels. How big would those cooling fins have to be?

Actually, most of the contracts I saw for military/embedded applications had very strict language prohibiting any kind of licensing/key provisions. Now for commercial (including commercial cloud) applications, the rules may well be different.

And I remember when the Army got its own master image of MS Windows that had no activation code. (I thought using Windows in tactical systems was appalling, but those decisions were made well above my paygrade.)

There's several items in the Hegseth memo that will require Congressional action. Some of the intellectual property rights provisions are not DoD contract decisions, but legal mandates.

Personally, I've always argued that the Army should -own- the software it pays for. Instead, we get 'government purpose rights' which in theory means govt can do anything it wants, but in practice makes it really difficult for a 3rd party to take over software maintenance. The theory behind 'govt rights' rather than actual 'ownership' was that the contractor could make money and thereby reduce government maintenance costs. But I never saw much commercial market/software reuse for a lot of the stuff done on govt contracts. Usually, that's because the military-specific requirements made the result not particularly useful for commercial applications (such as communications packages designed for military radios.) Now some will tell you "govt should use more commercial", but damned if I know how replacing combat radios with cellular networks will work in combat, where there is not a guaranteed working cellular infrastructure. (And mobile cell towers, as centralized comms nodes, would be very juicy targets with nice electronic signatures....)

$10b here, $10b there. Soon you're talking real money. (With apologies to Everett Dirkson, https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikiquote.org%2Fwiki%2F...)

It is interesting that Microsoft reported significant revenues from AI will dialing back their investment. But since at least some of that was the force-fed CoPilot price increase for Office365, it's kinda hard to understand how much of that revenue increase was voluntary.

Many of those tools are enabled by declaring a "state of emergency" as authorized by laws passed by Congress. It's really important to understand this, much of what Trump is asserting as "Presidential powers" ONLY apply in an emergency. The problem, of course, is there's no check or balance on the President's unilateral declaration of "emergency", and that'll be an issue for SCOTUS to address. What SCOTUS should do is lay down very clear rules on when a President can declare a state of emergency and when and how that can be challenged. What SCOTUS probably will do is rule narrowly on individual emergencies and continue the Presidential assumption of otherwise Unconstitutional Powers. If Congress had any ethics or testicles, they would claw back the power they have delegated for unbounded declarations of emergency.

As Gibbs would say, "Gee, ya think?" Shoving "supposedly helpful" shit into people's faces doesn't end well.

BUT, Microsoft forced this to all users of Windows 11, so they can claim massive "user counts/popularity metrics." I guess this shows that, despite Nadella's refocusing of the company, you can't change Microsoft's core culture of "ramming mediocre junk down the user's throats and claiming success."

If AI wrote the translated code, maybe it can be used to maintain it. My experience with code translated by tools from one programming language to another is that much is lost and the result is very difficult to understand. In particular the "gestalt" of the actual written code, the semantics of the language used by the code, and the associated comments gets lost in machine translation.

But maybe this would work, because AI can either establish/maintain, or sufficiently reproduce, sufficient understanding. But of course, HOW WILL WE KNOW? Or do we just have to trust that the AI got it right?

In my experience teaching Ada to COBOL programmers (a long time ago), strong typing was easy for them to understand, they were used to reasoning about values and even the operations on those values. 'scope' was really difficult, pretty much everything is 'single global scope' in COBOL. Object Oriented was a bit of a stretch, some got it, others didn't. Concurrency was as difficult for them as it is for pretty much anyone who learned on a sequential programming language (one without concurrency primitives.) So it'll be interesting to think about how AI can 'grok' the code to add typing, scoping/object based modularity, and concurrency. (The latter is important since so much COBOL now is in transaction systems where performance is really important, and concurrency is a key part of achieving performance - the same way that modern DBMSs support concurrent access through locking, etc.)

YES, You are absolutely correct. I'm sorry I got them confused.

It might fit Google's narrative to define this as "US going after the best search engine", but if you actually read the ruling, it's clear the illegal monopoly is in how Google has set up mechanisms to sell, distribute and display ads, and they did so in a way that gave their own 'selling software' an advantage in the auctions. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.documentcloud.org%2F...

So no, this is not about "the success of Google search", despite what they want you to think. It's about how Google built the ad empire, laying it on top of Google Search and expanding it to most other commercial websites.

My structural geology prof said, "If you want to get a sense of how different viscosities work in the crust & mantle, look at how a Snickers bar breaks. The top layer stretches, the bottom layer crumbles, and peels." You can get varying viscosity effects by changing the temperature of the candy, it behaves differently when frozen than after it's sat in the Sun for an hour. And of course, when you're done studying, you eat it.

(But yeah, I thought the headline said "peeing" too....)