Rocket Lab announced on Monday that it is acquiring the satellite communications company Iridium. The deal, made for cash and shares of Rocket Lab stock, values Iridium at about $8 billion.
The deal pairs the launch company, founded and led by Peter Beck, with a decades-old profitable satellite company whose network of 80 satellites in low-Earth orbit provides telecommunications services.
“We believe this will be one of the most transformative deals in the space industry,” Beck said in a short promotional video announcing the deal. “It’s the ultimate combination for growth.” //
Beck said the deal provides a shortcut for Rocket Lab to enter the “space applications” business—that is, providing space-based services rather than launching the satellites that offer voice, Internet, and other communication services to customers on Earth. This is where the majority of revenue in the space industry lies.
“This is a deal where one plus one equals three,” he said.
Learn to get the most out of your ZFS filesystem in our new series on storage fundamentals. //
But before we get to the numbers—and they are coming, I promise!—for all the ways you can shape eight disks’ worth of ZFS, we need to talk about how ZFS stores your data on-disk in the first place.
Sony recently informed its PlayStation customers in the United Kingdom that they will no longer be able to watch previously purchased movies and shows from production and distribution company StudioCanal. As of September 1, affected customers will no longer be able to stream 551 titles from the PlayStation Store. //
Regardless, the incident is a reminder that we don’t own the stuff we purchase digitally . Instead, digital rentals and purchases are merely long-term licenses that are only valid for as long as the streaming service has the right to distribute said content. Often, that’s a finite amount of time.
Still, Sony’s announcement has frustrated some, including those who believe Sony should offer refunds or who think digital stores should stop using terms like “purchase” for long-term rentals. //
Resistance Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
5m
770
I have a proposal, if these companies want to offer a license for purchase, they should have to:
- Own a perpetual license to offer the content.
- Adequately fund a trust to maintain access to the content. //
C.M. Allen Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
9y
6,205
peachpuff said:
Yaaaar matey, downloading we shall go 🦜 🏴☠️
Well, if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
SCOTUS falls short of deeming geofence warrants unconstitutional, though. //
The Fourth Amendment protects a user’s “location history,” the Supreme Court ruled Monday.
The same logic already applied to a cellphone’s tracking, and the high court found “no good reason exists to reach a different result for Location History” collected by third parties like Google.
Split 6-3, the majority agreed that the government needs a warrant and must show reasonable cause to turn a phone’s location-tracking services into a government surveillance tool. //
According to Alito, the majority announced a “new rule” that will “unleash” “upheaval” in Fourth Amendment law, requiring that “the police must obtain a warrant every time they access any cell-phone location information from a third party, however brief the duration, however innocuous the request, and however voluntarily that information was disclosed by the user.” //
SirOmega Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
24y
6,246
Subscriptor++
Police officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they acquired Chatrie’s location data from Google because an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information.
The Fourth Amendment protects individuals’ reasonable expectations of privacy, and governmental “intrusion into that private sphere generally qualifies as a search.” Carpenter v. United States, 585 U. S. 296, 304. The Amendment’s “basic purpose” is “to safeguard the privacy and security of individuals against arbitrary invasions by governmental officials,” id., at 303, and it was designed “to place obstacles in the way of a too permeating police surveillance,” United States v. Di Re, 332 U. S. 581, 595. Pp. 10–29.
Click to expand...
On this same ground, can we determine that Flock's new cameras that ping your phone wifi, bluetooth, airpods, car, etc. are also a fourth amendment search since Flock is basically taking a digital inventory of what devices are inside a closed and locked vehicle when it drives by their camera? //
Tactical Finesse Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
4m
1,116
pondo said:
I think it only becomes a 4th amendment issue when the cops access that data. That's one of the things I really don't like about Flock, Palantir, etc; they are not the government so your "rights" are a bit limited. I suspect they'd be free to share that data with the extended car warranty folks.
They'll share the data to anyone with a credit card....and it is extremely cheap. I priced out a data set from one of these brokers for work.
Messenger users should note that:
- Legitimate CMA support services will not request verification codes within the application.
- CMA support services do not send users links to “verify” or “restore” accounts.
- They should never provide a verification code without confirming the request comes from a legitimate CMA communication channel.
As always, it’s a good idea to resist taking on the feeling of urgency that’s often conveyed in such messages. There is rarely a penalty for waiting an extra hour or two to act, even when responding to legitimate requests.
CMA = commercial messaging application
“The Radiochemistry of Uranium” by James E. Gindler
Old school technical reference book on uranium chemistry.
Source ☢️: moltensalt.org/references/sta…
Old film rolls from flea markets, scanned and put online. Someone's vacations, birthdays, random Tuesdays — forgotten in a drawer for decades. I don't know where or when these were taken. Help me figure it out.
These are the photos nobody thought were worth keeping — and they're the most honest record of how people actually lived. A roll of Agfa from 1968 could only be from 1968. Putting these online is the only shot at getting a photo back to the people in it.
The world’s largest encyclopedia was overrun by bias and censorship—and pushed me out when I tried to fix it. //
Twenty-five years ago, I co-founded Wikipedia, arguably the most important encyclopedia in human history. On Monday, I was indefinitely banned from the site. The story of what happened to me is, in many ways, the story of our censorious times, in which independent thinking is seen as a threat rather than a virtue, and punished as such. //
How could this happen to a supposedly neutral encyclopedia that anybody can edit? It goes back to a fundamental problem with the site: Wikipedia has never developed a community charter. Instead, it operates under vague, collaboratively written rules that are interpreted by an all-powerful class of “admin” moderators beholden more to each other than to any constitutional framework. It is rule by an anonymous mob, and not even a large one; of about 800 administrator accounts, only about 400 are active. //
In one of life’s quirky ironies, two hours after I was kicked off the site I founded, I was at a gala dinner in lower Manhattan, accepting a Tablet magazine Sinai Award, which honors individuals who have acted courageously to promote freedom. What was the award for? Co-founding Wikipedia, and attempting to reform it.
In my acceptance speech, I told the story I have just told you. And as I said then, the last few days have been filled with a mixture of bemusement and shock. But my life has had a lot of controversies like this because, as a general rule, I stand on several principles, no matter who they bother:
- There is an objective truth.
- Knowledge is one of the most important things in life, and it ought to be made available for free, if at all possible.
- Knowledge projects must absolutely be neutral.
Wikipedia changed the world. But its tragedy is that it grew so large that it sucked most of the air out of competing projects and, even as it grew to dominance, it was taken over by ideologues and shills who co-opted it for propaganda purposes. For those people, the temerity to try to recruit people from outside their weird clique was an unpardonable sin.
Unfortunately for them, I don’t particularly care.
Over the past year, I have fought tirelessly to reform Wikipedia because its founding mission is more important today than ever before. Information is the most valuable currency in any society, and the ability of citizens to access, evaluate, and learn from a diversity of viewpoints is essential to a free civilization. Yet Wikipedia’s yearslong shift away from that principle—toward ideological gatekeeping and narrative control—undermines the very purpose for which it was created. //
In the long term, I’d like to archive all the world’s free encyclopedias, to make them available in a single format and share them across a truly decentralized network, like the old-fashioned internet. Wikipedia needs a competitor—or, perhaps, a system of competitors.
The company I created may no longer uphold its own founding principles, but people still want and need the kind of knowledge Wikipedia was built to provide. They deserve more than one place to look for it.
Old Glory: The History of Our Nation’s Flag is an illustrated American flag history poster that follows the growth of the United States through the changing designs of its national and colonial banners. This educational poster presents notable flags from the 13 Colonies through the present 50-star U.S. flag.
Yay: The Supreme Court just embraced science and sense over hysteria and trial-lawyer greed, slapping down an entire class of lawsuits that aimed to suck hundreds of billions of dollars out of US businesses just because (as bank robber Willie Sutton once put it) “that’s where the money is.”
In the case at hand, the junk-science claim was that Roundup, the widely used weedkiller, caused a Missouri man’s cancer — so the company that makes it owed him (and his lawyers!) $1.25 million because it never put a warning to that effect on the label.
The problem is, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has repeatedly tested that claim about glyphosate (the herbicide’s key ingredient) and found no such effect, and so refuses to require a warning.
By 7-2, the justices ruled that state courts can’t create their own standards for such warnings when the feds have already acted.
FIFRA (the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act) established a single national labeling system specifically to avoid a proliferation of state requirements.
This ruling nixes thousands of similar suits against Bayer (which bought Roundup’s maker, Monsanto, in 2019), and countless more efforts to sue other companies with similar theories.
Since judgments in Roundup cases have hit the billions, the lawsuits were never going to stop until the Supremes shut the racket down.
985,841 passport scans (including mine), and the private messages of every member it ever served on a server with no authentication //
1,020,457 members 94% of the total are classified by the software as medicinal cannabis users. Whether they used the PuffPal app or not. Whether they had ever heard of PuffPal or not.
Under GDPR Article 9, health data is the most protected category of personal information. It cannot be processed without explicit consent and adequate safeguards. A breach of health data triggers the highest tier of regulatory penalties up to €20 million or 4% of global annual turnover. The standard notification obligations under Article 33 apply within 72 hours of discovery.
The irony is architectural. The clubs collect all this information, apply a medical classification to every member, store that classification alongside passport scans and home addresses and then left all of it accessible via an unauthenticated HTTP endpoint that accepted any integer from 1 to however many members the club had.
The physical bouncer at the door checks your member card. The digital one wasn't there.
The ferry broke down at exactly the wrong moment for everyone except Henry Ford.
On June 8, 1909, two stripped-down Ford Model Ts rolled onto a little wooden ferry at Glasgow, Mo., and crossed the Missouri River. The cars were filthy, the men inside them were running on fumes, and a Boston-built Shawmut was closing fast behind them in a cross-country race.
Then the ferry quit. The boat that’d just carried the Fords to the western bank suddenly couldn’t return for the Shawmut or the Acme, another trailing car. The official explanation was mechanical failure, but the timing looked almost theatrical. //
The Shawmut crew, stranded on the wrong side of the river, had a choice. They could lose hours searching for another crossing. Or they could aim the car toward the railroad bridge looming above the water, a half-mile of ties, gaps and terror, with no guarantee a train wouldn’t come roaring through. They chose the bridge.
Quick Summary: The right charging current for NiMH batteries is crucial for their health and longevity. Generally, aim for a charge current between 0.1C and 0.5C, where ‘C’ is the battery’s capacity. A slow charge (0.1C) prolongs battery life, while a fast charge (0.5C) is quicker but can generate more heat. Always check your battery and charger specifications for exact recommendations to ensure safe and effective charging.
Microsoft ended official support for Windows 10 in 2025, but the company may have a harder time than expected putting the operating system out to pasture. After promising a year of optional extended update support, Microsoft has changed its policy, tacking on another year to its Extended Security Updates (ESU) program. If you are still clinging to Windows 10, you don’t have to do anything but enjoy that extra year. //
That program was set to end on October 12, 2026, but Microsoft has updated its policy with hardly a whisper, pushing back the end of extended updates to October 12, 2027. The ESU support page was updated with that date, and Microsoft’s blog post on the program has a new editor’s note confirming the change.
Earlier this month, a German court ruled that Google is liable for its AI search summaries. Rejecting defenses like “users can check for themselves,” and that they generally know “that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted,” the court held that the AI’s summaries are reflections of the company and “above all an expression of Google’s business activities.” //
AI agents are agents of the person or organization that deploys them—and should be treated by the law as such. If a company hired human writers to write its summaries, that company would be liable for inaccuracies in those summaries. If a company’s human agent signed contracts in the company’s name, that company would be bound by those contracts. And if a doctor gave dangerously wrong medical advice, they would be liable for malpractice.
To allow businesses to hide behind the excuse of faulty AI in those same circumstances would be a massive handout to companies, and would introduce disastrous incentives for corporate misbehavior. Why hire human writers, lawyers or doctors when AIs are not only cheaper, but also absolve employers whenever they make a mistake?
We are rapidly moving to a world where AI-powered chatbots will be at the other end of all sorts of corporate communications channels. It makes no sense for a company to be able to honor its statements when it wants to and disavow them when it doesn’t. //
If the German ruling holds, it could be devastating for Google’s AI Overview feature. Tests from earlier this year found that it had mistakes about 10% percent of the time. At more than 5tn searches per year, that’s 16,000 erroneous summaries every second. And while most of those errors are benign, some of them will cause harm, be defamatory, or otherwise trigger liability.
Earlier this year, Google’s AI summary falsely identified the Canadian fiddler Ashley MacIsaac of being a sex offender. His lawsuit, filed in Ontario, is ongoing. If Google is forced to invest in improving its AI system until those kinds of errors are exceedingly rare, that seems like a good outcome for users, as well as the subjects of search, like MacIsaac.
More generally, liability concerns could mean that many current use cases for agents won’t be commercially viable. Companies may not be able to profitably operate AI lawyers, doctors and media influencers if they are held responsible for what they say and do.
On Wednesday, NASA’s Office of the Inspector General prepared a memorandum on the elements of the Artemis Program that NASA was canceling as its focus shifted to the Moon’s surface. These were:
Exploration Upper Stage, an upgrade for the Space Launch System rocket
Universal Stage Adapter, which links the Orion spacecraft to the Exploration Upper Stage
Mobile Launcher 2, a larger launch tower for the upgraded Space Launch System rocket
Habitation and Logistics Outpost, a habitation module for the Lunar Gateway
The memorandum notes that each of these projects has experienced substantial cost increases and numerous delays over the last decade.
“Over the course of their life cycles, the combined contract values for these efforts ballooned from nearly $2.8 billion to $5.9 billion and NASA extended their contracted delivery dates by up to seven years,” states the report by the inspector general. “However, our projections indicate that if NASA allowed work to continue to completion, the systems would have cost more and taken longer than what was on contract.”
There’s an enormous amount of liquidity in growth stocks, which means that you can use growth stocks to grow. You can buy other companies with shares, and shares are an endogenous substance that you make on the premises by typing zeros into a spreadsheet. Firms with growth stocks can grow by typing zeros, whereas firms that are mature, they have to use money if they want to grow, and you’re not allowed to make money on the premises. If you do, the Treasury Department shows up and takes you away in handcuffs. So you can see why firms would be very anxious to maintain the perception that they have room for growth even after they have 90 percent market shares.
That’s why those firms started promoting stories about how they were going to conquer imaginary markets. Imaginary markets have no agreed-upon valuation because you just made them up. Unless you can turn an imaginary market into a real market pretty quickly, you need to come up with another imaginary market and announce that this is the new imaginary market you’re going to conquer. It’s easier than you’d think because the capital markets have the object permanence of a toddler, and they would lose a game of peekaboo if they were drafted to play in the league. So you can say, “Oh, actually, it’s not metaverse. It’s crypto. It’s not crypto. It’s Web3. It’s not Web3. It’s something else.” And the markets will forgive you, provided you do it quickly enough. //
AI really appeals to a fantasy that I think all of us have to some extent but that powerful people really have, of a world without people in it—because hell really is other people. You can’t get stuff done without other people helping you. You can’t have romance without a romantic partner. You can’t have social media without people to socialize with. You can’t play a board game, or do a startup, or build a bridge, or build a house, or do politics without other people. And other people stubbornly refuse to organize everything they do to make you happy.
Particularly if you’re rich and powerful, it’s very galling. So AI is very attractive. //
If you combine those two things—the material necessity to have a growth narrative and the ideological attractiveness of a world without people—you get $1.4 trillion in CapEx for a sector that is turning over $50 billion a year and has to replace all of its assets every 24 to 30 months. //
Whereas the workers who hate it are workers who are being asked to produce more with AI at the expense of quality, at a higher speed, at the expense of their own wellbeing, and who understand that they’re being recruited to be what Dan Davies calls accountability sinks—to take the blame when the AI screws up their job. //
We hear plenty about the negative aspects of AI. What do you like about it?
Cory Doctorow: I have a couple of local models on my computer, which is just a framework laptop running Ubuntu. It doesn’t even have a GPU. I use Whisper to transcribe audio. I will sometimes want to cite something I’ve heard in a podcast and not remember where I heard it. One time, I just threw the last 30 hours of audio I’d listened to at Whisper, and it shot out verbatim logs that were good enough that when I searched the full text, I could find it. And it gave me time codes so I could check the transcript. That’s amazing.
The idea that I might someday have a computer full of audio and video files with full text indexing is great.
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Name
Henry Willard Ortlip
Sex
Male
Event Type
Birth
Event Date
28 Mar 1886
Event Place
Norristown, Montgomery, Pennsylvania, United States
Event Place (Original)
Morristown, Montgomery, Pennsylvania
"Pennsylvania, Delayed Birth Records, 1780-1977", FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:877Q-TZPZ : Tue Jul 16 05:05:19 UTC 2024), Entry for Henry Willard Ortlip and William Henry Ortlip, 28 Mar 1886.
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