The administration is spending at least $67 million worth of fees paid by visitors to national parks on fixing D.C. fountains and the Reflecting Pool.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: There is a certain wildness in the tech industry these days that both mimics previous eras of large changes, like cloud computing (runaway costs in the early days), and is like nothing we've ever seen before (record revenues accompanied by mass layoffs). One possible explanation: tech executives, especially CEOs, are collectively suffering from delusions of AI grandeur. And at least one tech CEO has said as much out loud: Box founder Aaron Levie. "CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they're sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI," Levie wrote on X. CEOs "play with AI," develop a prototype, or generate a contract, to use Levie's examples, and then make the leap to believing agents can do the work. But these top-level executives aren't the people who have to review code, discover bugs, and identify calls to hallucinated libraries before software is deployed. They aren't responsible for training AI models on a company's idiosyncratic contract terms, nor do they have to spend days combing through contracts to find sneaky terms, as Levie indicates. In other words, Levie's theory posits, CEOs don't really understand processes well enough to know what really can and can't be automated. But that lack of knowledge doesn't stop them from acting on their beliefs. [...] So what are CEOs to do instead? Levie advises CEOs to use AI "a ton" to really see what it can and can't do, "and come out the other side with an appreciation for both the upside and the real work."

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Dropbox founder Drew Houston is stepping down as CEO after 19 years and will become executive chairman, with product chief Ashraf Alkarmi set to take over after a co-CEO transition period. CNBC reports: Drew Houston founded Dropbox nearly two decades ago at age 24, eventually becoming a household name in Silicon Valley and the first tech entrepreneur to take a company from the Y Combinator incubator program all the way to the public market. Now, at 43, Houston is ready to do something else. [...] By almost any measure, Houston has had a great run at Dropbox, helping pioneer the cloud storage market, competing head-to-head with Google and Apple and building a net worth of more than $2 billion, thanks to substantial ownership in his company. But in the land of outsized expectations, Houston has overseen a company that peaked too soon and never became a generation-defining brand. Dropbox's current market cap of just over $6 billion is down by half from the high price on its first day of trading in 2018, and is below the $10 billion valuation it was ascribed by private market investors in 2014. [...] In its latest quarterly earnings report, Dropbox said it has more than 18 million paying users, and the service remains popular with media professionals, graphic designers, architects, and others who share files and photos as part of their daily work. "Part of me has always thought, oh yeah, I'll be the CEO of Dropbox until my last gasp of my career," he said. "There's never a perfect time, there was no part of me where I was like, 'oh, this date is the date where it's going to happen.'" Since Alkarmi joined Dropbox from Vimeo in late 2024, the company has "become a lot more responsive to our customers and is taking bigger swings on innovation," Houston said. "I trust the right leader," he said. "The company's in the right place."

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joshuark writes: BusPatrol, a company that has installed AI-powered cameras in tens of thousands of school buses around the U.S., now plans to turn those cameras into automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), capturing the location of every vehicle the buses drive past, and give that data to law enforcement, 404 Media has learned. BusPatrol has already taken steps to share the collected data with law enforcement contracting giant Axon, according to leaked BusPatrol documents and a source with knowledge of the plans. BusPatrol has acknowledged how controversial its plan to collect and share this data is, pointing specifically to concerns about ICE using license plate data, but emphasizes the likely success of selling the angle of protecting children. "Who would have thought that school buses would be turned into the mass surveillance state?," Michael Soyfer, an attorney from the Institute for Justice, which has various ongoing ALPR-related lawsuits The Institute for Justice argues that warrantless use of ALPR systems is unconstitutional, describing similar systems as a "dragnet." Kate Spree, senior manager of brand communications at BusPatrol, said in an email "This inquiry is based on a false premise and inaccurate information. BusPatrol does not pool or sell data across communities; student safety program data is used only to support the BusPatrol program in the community where that data was created." When 404 Media asked clarifying questions and said that the reporting is based on leaked BusPatrol material, Spree stopped replying to text messages and emails. This plan gives new meaning to the animated cartoon series "The Magic School Bus"... Further reading: FBI Wants to Buy Nationwide Access to License Plate Readers

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Elon Musk's Starlink and Amazon's low-earth-orbit satellite business may be able to acquire some European mobile satellite spectrum next year, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said on Tuesday. But they said two-thirds of the satellite spectrum that allows mobile devices and vehicles to communicate seamlessly even in remote locations, would be reserved for European companies. U.S. companies Viasat and EchoStar hold licenses that are due to expire in May 2027 and the European Commission has been considering how to allocate future spectrum at the same time as the bloc pushes to reduce reliance on U.S. tech. The European Union's IRIS2 multi-orbit array of 290 satellites, a response to Starlink, will be among the European companies to receive some spectrum, the sources said. British and Norwegian companies can also bid for a license, the people said. Details of the proposal, set to be announced on Wednesday, could still change at a meeting of commissioners on the day, one of the sources. Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier said EU-wide satellite connectivity was "synonymous with resilience, security, and capability" given the current geopolitical context. "Satellite connectivity is a key piece of our technological sovereignty, our security, and our defense, as also highlighted by IRIS2," he added.

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American Airlines plans to install SpaceX's Starlink Wi-Fi on more than 500 narrow-body Airbus aircraft starting early next year. It does not, however, have any immediate plans to change providers on its Boeing fleet, which currently uses a mix of Viasat and Panasonic. CNBC reports: American in January rolled out free in-flight Wi-Fi for members of its frequent flyer program, following United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and others. Delta in March said it would use Amazon Leo for in-flight Wi-Fi for hundreds of jets starting in 2028. United, Southwest Airlines and Alaska Airlines, which merged with Hawaiian Airlines in 2024, have selected Starlink. The move is a big win for SpaceX as it prepares for a potentially massive IPO next month. SpaceX said Starlink and its connectivity business generated $11.39 billion in revenue last year, accounting for 61% of the company's total sales.

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In Lebanon, each new cease-fire is met with blind optimism — as if it hails the end of a conflict instead of what it actually is: an admission ticket to the next war.

The risk of an explosion or spill has fallen significantly, the authorities said late Tuesday, and all evacuated residents can now go home. Some have begun to ask who should be held accountable.

In a three-hour meeting, members of the grocery cooperative voted by a margin of more than 2 to 1 in favor of a boycott.

Nigel Farage’s anti-immigrant, populist agenda has helped his Reform U.K. Party emerge from the fringe of British politics. But it faces an uphill climb to win power.

President Trump is said to be considering the appearance after his hometown team, the Knicks, clinched a championship spot.

China’s tobacco monopoly has become so financially vital to the government that even its powerful leader has failed to curb the country’s smoking habit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Aerodynamic drag is a major "barrier" in high-speed airplanes, automobiles, and bullet trains. This is because a design with less aerodynamic drag allows the aircraft to move at higher speeds with less energy. When an aircraft or car body moves at high speed, a thin layer of air called the "boundary layer" is formed on its surface. This boundary layer has two states: laminar flow, in which air flows in an orderly fashion, and turbulent flow, which involves turbulence. The longer the air stays in the laminar flow state with low friction, the smaller the air resistance becomes, but as the air speed increases, it transitions to turbulent flow. The key to reducing aerodynamic drag is how to delay this transition to turbulence. For more than 80 years, the principle of "the surface of an object must be smooth" has been the basic premise of aeronautical engineering throughout the world in order to suppress the transition to turbulence and reduce aerodynamic drag. This premise was based on the results of a 1940 study by Ichiro Tani, a Japanese aerodynamicist who quantitatively demonstrated the relationship between "surface roughness" (an indicator of the state of the machined surface) and turbulent transition, arguing that surface roughness, which was unavoidable with the manufacturing technology of the time, prevented laminar flow from being realized. However, in 1989 Tani reinterpreted the experimental data on rough-surface pipes obtained by fluid engineer Johann Nikulase in the 1930s, bringing a new perspective that "roughness may not necessarily only promote turbulent transition and increase fluid resistance." Inheriting this idea, a research group led by Yasuaki Kohama of Tohoku University experimentally demonstrated in the 1990s that fibrous rough surfaces, which have fine fibrous irregularities on their surface, have the effect of delaying transition under certain conditions. The same Tohoku University research team recently announced a discovery that significantly advances this trend. Aiko Yakino, associate professor at Tohoku University's Institute of Fluid Science, and her research group were the first in the world to demonstrate that aerodynamic drag can be reduced by up to 43.6 percent simply by applying distributed micro-roughness (DMR), a surface roughness so fine and irregular that it cannot be distinguished by the naked eye. This technology is fundamentally different from the "rivulet (shark skin) process," which is known as a typical aerodynamic drag reduction technology. The rivulet process mimics the fine longitudinal grooves in shark skin, and by carving grooves approximately 0.1 mm wide along the direction of airflow, it aligns the vortices that occur near the wall surface of turbulent airflow areas. DMR, on the other hand, delays the switch from laminar to turbulent flow by means of random and minute irregularities. The flow zones it affects and the mechanisms it employs are based on completely different concepts.

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President Trump’s record of ousting those he sees as disloyal continued apace with Senator John Cornyn’s defeat. Whether his relationship with Senate Republicans can be repaired is another question.

Mr. Allred beat the incumbent, Representative Julie Johnson, and is now favored to win the general election in a heavily Democratic Dallas-based district.

Alabama is likely to appeal the ruling, which stops an effort to use a new congressional map that would likely cost Democrats a majority-Black district.

The chief, Brian O’Hara, began leading the department in 2022 as it reeled in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd.

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, overcame scandals and a significant fund-raising disadvantage to win. His victory sets up the general-election clash that Democrats had hoped for.

The director of Britain’s electronic surveillance agency warns that Russia is only getting more brazen as battlefield losses in Ukraine mount.

The health secretary wrangled two nonvenomous snakes while visiting Florida in a video that drew widespread attention.