The article does not say the infection came from USB *drives*, it says it comes through USB *ports*.

Now look at your computer. How many things are plugged into USB ports? Keyboard, mouse, camera, microphone, etc. Any of these can carry malware--malware "apps" don't need to be large to call home and download whatever else they need. And where did these things come from? I'll bet most came from China.

Hacker in prison for a decade or so.

That sounds like by the time they get the helicopter to the place the drone was seen from, the drone is long gone.

And what do you know, no government entity did!

Don't worry, Trump will soon deport them.

The Philistines might have agreed with that estimate of the Earth's age.

"Hard drives in 1999 were, what, 30-40GB at most?" I was about to say you were wrong, since I bought my first 40GB drive in 1988. Then I remembered--it was a 40 MEGAbyte drive...

There are only a few methods that have actually been proven to last millennia: stone (rock engravings, but it has to be the right kind of stone--many cemetery headstones are unreadable, see also Ozymandias) and fired clay tablets are the best. Paper (at least in the form of papyrus) can last a couple millennia if stored in the right conditions, but degrades much faster in the presence of moisture; the ink is also important. Some pigments on rock (cave paintings) have lasted even longer, but again the conditions need to be right: darkness, and no flowing water.

Glad you mentioned the issue of software no longer being usable, a point that sometimes gets missed. Awhile back we were writing grammars of languages that we wanted to be usable in a thousand years. Word (at least the older versions), Writer, Wordstar, etc. are examples of binary formats that may not be readable then.
  We used XML, with a documented tagset. Of course paper may be even more readable in a millennium.

You may already know this, but the way to test a medium for longevity is to subject it to environmental conditions that accelerate degradation. Then you have some model that says if it lasts one year under this condition, it will last 100 years under STP (or something like STP). The problem is the model may be wrong.

I think you grasped his point.

"Do you really think the US informs China if they gave a big piece of garbage drifting there" (I assume you mean in orbit) Yes. And not only the Chinese, we tell the Russians too, and anyone else who puts stuff in orbit.

"Do you really think all launches by the US (defense) are without (debris) problems or junk?" No, but we're talking orders of magnitude difference here. Furthermore, we at least *try* to clean up after ourselves, e.g. by de-orbiting upper stages. China clearly doesn't.

ChatGPT says, "I see you're trying to write a scientific paper entitled Photons of Bill. I can help you with that!"

The Christian Old Testament of the Bible is *not* a translation of the Septuagint. There are many translations of the Old Testament, but all in use today (including the venerable Authorized Version (AV), aka the King James Version) make more use of the Hebrew (and Aramaic--part of Daniel was written in Aramaic, and there are short pieces of Aramaic elsewhere) OT scriptures than they do of the Septuagint. Here for your edification is part of the title page of the 1611 AV: "THE HOLY BIBLE, Conteyning the Old Testament, and the New: Newly Translated out of the Originall tongues: & with the former Translations diligently compared and revised..."

Also, the Septuagint contains 51 books, vs. the Hebrew Bible's 39. Guess how many the AV contains? Yes, 39! (Catholic Bibles do contain some, but not all, of the "extra" books in the Septuagint.)

"...there's many accounts of how battles of armies numbering in the 10s-100s of thousands were killed by a few 'angels' carrying what sounds like energy weapons not dissimilar to phasers on Star Trek." Not sure what book you were reading, but it wasn't the Bible.

Besides, if angels did carry phasers, they'd set to stun.