The approach here seems "cheaty". That's not to say their technique is useless (and maybe it's more generalizable than I'm giving it credit for) - but from the vague overview of the article it seems like they're effectively juicing their performance.
One of the many ways that AI is nothing like intelligence is the absence of any representational model of the real world.
There are many kinds of AI. Neural nets don't construct a representational model of the world from visual input but other AI techniques do. The Soar framework used so successfully for the machine-controlled antagonists in Descent (among many other uses) supports chunking, reinforcement learning, episodic learning, and semantic learning. It is based on the unified theory of cognition. It has both a temporary and permanent representational memory. It's fundamentally rule-based, rather than a neural net.
There was at one time a neural net version of Soar called Neuro-Soar but it's not part of the mainstream Soar library.
Musk's Starlink program probably won't have satellites that far north either as the population is so low.
Musk's Starlink program will have huge numbers of satellites that far north, ideally located to provide even higher density service to northern Canada than they will to any part of the US apart from Alaska. Thousands of Starlink satellites will be in polar and near-polar orbits, criss-crossing Canada at every latitude. You don't put 12,000 satellites in low orbits without them covering a whole lot of the planet, since they have no choice but to go in circles all the way around the planet. If SpaceX doesn't hurry with the paperwork, they may have satellites flying over Canada with the radios turned off, because they don't have regulatory approval to turn them on yet.
One hope for rural broadband might come in the form of some kind of low orbit satellite endeavour, like SpaceX's Starlink service - if it ever gets off the ground and they can get the costs under control enough in order to get a return on the investment.
Get off the ground? Tintin A and Tintin B have been in orbit since February. Test satellites launched by SpaceX to prove Starlink systems. Get the costs under control? They were soliciting a $700 million loan recently, with the intention of building more than 12,000 satellites for Starlink. They're expecting to spend less than $60,000 per satellite. That's fantastically cheap for any satellite larger than a CubeSat, which these are. If you actually account for the time spent by faculty advisers and grad students at market rates for engineering, I bet they're going to be spending less than many CubeSat projects per satellite. That's unheard of for satellites in the smallsat weight class Starlink is aiming for.
Starlink is very likely the answer for Canadian rural broadband. It was, after all, specifically intended to be used in rural areas. I wouldn't be too surprised to hear SpaceX is filing the paperwork with CRTC (FCC-equivalent) next year.
SpaceX is so far ahead with recycling rockets (= lower launch cost & better margins) that the incumbent rocket contractors appear to have pulled some strings to attempt to slow them down or discount them from the running. Someone needs breathing space to catch up.
That sounds exactly right. "Oh we're auditing Boeing too!" Yeah, with 1/10th as many requests for interviews and documentation.
Did anybody notice the weasel-wording of the contract values?
SpaceX grabbed $2.6 billion from NASA for the program, while the remainder went to Boeing.
Sounds so much better than "Boeing got $1.6 billion more than SpaceX to do the same job SpaceX is doing, only slower."
The engineering community is full of whispers and rumors about how low the bar for safety and rigor is at Musk's companies. Everything they do seems to be hacked together on Elon's whims and never really proven.
Riiight. You're so full of shit your eyes are brown. SpaceX can't hide their failures and their successes are also a matter of public record, and there are vastly more successes than failures.
Corners were cut so hard that SpaceX launched their 18th rocket this year to complete mission success, their 63rd launch attempt overall, reusing a first stage for the second time, and recovered that first stage a second time. They've launched more rockets this year than their competitors launch in three years, for 1/5th as much money, while recovering first stages and reusing them, which their competitors have never done in the history of rocketry.
What the carriers are currently doing and what the FCC is proposing are both wrong. Everything wireless companies do is a telecommunications service, not an information service, so that covers why the FCC is wrong.
What the carriers are doing now is also wrong: the intelligence should be at the edges. Now that all cell phones, including flip phones, are pocket computers, it's time to leverage those smarts. The wireless companies need to deliver everything (and charge a flat rate for access, none of this per minute/per text/per gigabyte bullshit)[1], and let the endpoints decide what they want to see. The wireless companies can maybe run the equivalent of the Adblock lists for spam text, and maybe enable them by default for handsets they sell, but I bet most people would opt for third party block lists. Cell phones should come with trivially easy interfaces to block unwanted texts and calls, out of the box. Maybe going so far as having a white list mode. It's long past time for the edges to be making the decisions, and the telecom providers getting their grubby mits out of our data.
----
[1]If consumer flat rates can't pay for the network, charge the spammers more. They're business accounts anyway. Different rules.
You may be right, but not by as much as you think, because I said a small ship (meaning manned spacecraft), not just an empty ultra-efficient hypothetical rocket.
Falcon Heavy isn't theoretical, and Starman is out beyond the orbit of Mars as I write this. The Falcon Heavy test launch threw it so fast that it beat the typical low energy orbit by about a year.
Here's a more relevant ideal scenario estimate at $300m to send a potentially manned ship on an unmanned test landing mission:
The described mission was cancelled long before Falcon Heavy launched, and is so old it has an artist's conception of Falcon Heavy, rather than an image from the actual launch.
SpaceX has demonstrated repeatedly that they can do things more cheaply than anyone imagines (though not as cheaply as they imagine). And neither that estimate nor any similar estimate involving Falcon Super Heavy (it has a name now) is quite fair, as it is attributing the entire development cost of the booster to a single mission, which is obviously ridiculous. (Also, it was wrong. SpaceX ended up spending closer to $900 million developing Falcon Heavy.) That'd be like me attributing the entire cost of Russia's development of the nuclear icebreaker for my numbers in my original post.
I could easily see Falcon Super Heavy costing half a billion to develop, and a useful Mars payload another half billion, but Falcon Super Heavy will enjoy many launches, including launches for paying customers, amortizing the development cost over decades.
With more traditional options, the price could reach into the 11-digits for a one-way trip:
The Motley Fool article is obviously utterly irrelevant. Senate Launch System will never fly, no matter how much money NASA shovels into the voracious maw of Boeing and Lockheed, who will simply set it all on fire, right up until the whole thing is cancelled because Space Force gets authorized to pay Thiokol directly for new ICBMs, rather than having to hide it in some civilian excuse. Trump will happily withdraw the US from any treaty otherwise preventing it. It's a perfect fit for his image and his self-image. I'm astonished it hasn't been done already, come to think of it.
Regardless, all prior estimates of the cost of trips to Mars are broken. SpaceX doesn't work the way anyone has expected since the 60s, when the US thought it could do anything in space. Not since the dreams of O'Neil colonies has anyone thought this big, and not since the days of the Apollo launches has anyone built this big. Will it cost more than that tourist boat to the North Pole? Ultimately yes, but that's because there's actual land to land on at Mars, not an ice floe that you can spend 20 minutes on posing for photos, by which time it has already drifted well past the pole.
Personally, I expect there to be more human activity on Mars in my lifetime than there will be human activity at the North Pole in my lifetime, and that boat has a big head start.
As long as we're talking about having an ideal world, can you agree that it's simply not fair for 90% of the press to mostly be trying to dig up dirt on one party, and only 10% trying to dig up dirt on the other party?
This continued myth about the alleged domination by liberal media is a wonderful talking point. It's also a goddamned lie.
For every NPR radio station, there are literally 10 times as many hard right (and lunatic fringe right) radio stations broadcasting Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones and Glenn Beck. (In order of increasing lunacy.)
Fox News has the highest viewer ratings of all cable news channels and has since goddamn 2002. That's 65 straight quarters. And it's 1/3rd of the cable news channels. There are only 3 of any significance.
Local TV station ratings in major markets are mostly behind the Nielson paywall, but the Fox affiliate dominates the news hours in dozens and dozens of major markets. I can't find the comprehensive list, but leaks through the paywall make it pretty clear that if the Fox affiliate isn't the most watched in the majority of major markets, it's a close run thing.
Newspapers are about the last bastion of liberal media, with The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times enjoying national circulation, with only the Wall Street Journal playing for the other team. But that ignores local newspapers, which display a strong conservative bias everywhere that's not a coastal state. None of them have particularly relevant readership numbers anymore, national or local.
Online media is whatever your search bubble makes it. Judging by voting patterns, it's split precisely in half. The efforts of major portals to distort it to left-leaning simply aren't working. Engagement maximization algorithms are winning, constructing impenetrable search bubbles for every individual.
Books are increasingly religious, and therefore implicitly conservative, at local libraries across the country. Libraries respond to circulation numbers, and what they're shelving has shifted drastically in the past 20 years.
Hollywood movies are try-harding liberal views lately, but they're fiction, and often bad fiction at that. Their influence on people's politics ranges from minimal to the inverse of the apparent desired affect (see my post about non-white non-male 'hackers' in Hollywood media).
Music? Music is sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Nothing's changed much since the 70s, with the possible exception of the invention of Christian heavy metal in the 80s. So music has ticked slightly to the right since then. Perhaps this is what you're referring to. I question the actual political influence of music though.
Aside from music, nowhere else does a liberal view dominate.
Why do nutters talk about "robots" when talking about "AI"? So strange.
Because an AI sitting in a box on a desk somewhere isn't particularly frightening. An AI rolling around in a robot shell with a credit card to pay for power is much more frightening.
Elon Musk is sowing the seeds of humanity's destruction with the creation of the Supercharger network.
(The prevalence of above-ground power lines pre-Tesla Motors shall be ignored for the purposes of hyperbole.)
You're assuming that people using this are participating in competitive multiplayer games in VR. I certainly don't. something like this would increase immersion in a single player RPG.
Not much. The most interesting terrain in a single player RPG is frequently not a flat, level floor, making attempts to use shoes like this problematic at best. "Climbing" the hill in front of you by just walking forwards on your living room floor sounds like a great way to teach yourself how to fail walking in reality, after too much exposure. Not to mention being extremely disorienting when your vision believes you're about to bury your leg up to the knee in the terrain in front of you when actually you're going to step on air if you try to place your foot properly.
And last but not least, It probably costs more to send a small ship to or (theoretically) from Mars than the combined cost of all activity on the North pole throughout human history. Prove me wrong.
Wrong.
Russia sends a nuclear-powered ice breaker to the North Pole five times every summer, bashing through the sea ice all the way to the pole. It costs £22,470 for a single cabin (2017 price). The ship has 64 cabins and has made the trip over 100 times. The price has been as high as $45,000 per person. Split the difference and call it $30,000 per person. The activity of that ship alone has cost ~$384 million. A Falcon Heavy launch, which can send a payload to Mars, is $90 million.
Counting military activity, counting the first expeditions inflation-adjusted, counting scientific activity, expeditions to or near the North Pole have totaled well into the billions. SpaceX will launch several BFSs to Mars before they match the expenditure on the North Pole.
Is this fault of people failing to read or is it the fault of too much information now?
Judging by the examples given by DCFusor, I'd say it's because degree programs have become too abstract. There isn't nearly enough hands-on mucking about in a lab, actually putting into practice things like a plasma triode or a tuned dipole. Ph.D. students get buried in abstract theory, and because it's so abstract, they have a really hard time understanding the implications of what they're "learning" in the real world. You can memorize a dozen helpful equations, and still not know what any of it means if you haven't built something that can be described by those equations. And apparently that's exactly what's happening.
Degree programs have been sneering at hands-on instruction as "for engineers, not real scientists" and this is the result.
Nobody in the FCC will face any consequences if it all goes horribly wrong, so where is their motivation to not let it go horribly wrong? And how do they propose to fix things when (not if) it does?
The only thing that can go horribly wrong is SpaceX somehow leaves a fundamental design flaw in their satellites and they don't work and all have to be deorbited early. This lower constellation of satellites will orbit at 340 kilometers altitude. That's an orbital sphere of 1.45 x 10^6 square kilometers. That's a satellite every 193 square kilometers, and these are low-weight satellites, under 500 kg each, much much smaller than Hubble or most geosynchronous satellites. If you were sitting on one of these satellites in orbit, you would have a hard time picking out the nearest other satellite with a pair of binoculars.
The only people who think something else can go wrong are innumerate or stupid.
It's Interesting that the approval by a bureaucratic agency in a single nation is all that's required to make significant use of the finite orbit of all the World.
That's not even what they're approving. The US FCC is approving SpaceX's use of the radio spectrum by their satellites. The actual physical use of the orbital slots are very much secondary. Until the SpaceX constellation, that part was pretty much pro forma. This is the first time when paying attention to the paragraph about deorbit plans actually matters.
Incidentally, SpaceX will have to get approval from every country's FCC-equivalent if they want to provide service there.
Bad analogy time : someone in front of you at the grocery store falls down and hurts their foot. It's quite lawful to just walk by, even stretch your arm over them to grab some box of cereal and leave them there. But is it moral ?
In Vermont, it's illegal to leave them there. They have the only compulsory Good Samaritan law. (Which is then no longer a Good Samaritan, but who cares about words...). In 15 states, you should reach over them for your box of cereal and not touch them if you're not a licensed medical professional. Those 15 states have no Good Samaritan law for unlicensed bystanders. If you try to render aid and make any mistake, you would be liable and could be sued. The rest of the states, you can try to help without fear of being sued. They could sue, but you would win easily and cheaply.
And when the bats start disappearing will that be OK too?
The majority of the diet of bats is not mosquitos, either in numbers or in weight. Among insect-eating bats, mosquitos are no more than 20% of their diet.
Also, the modified species the Gates Foundation wants to release is only one mosquito species that bites humans. There are numerous other mosquito species which do not bite humans. They'll still be available for bats to eat.
The Gates Foundation is known for being a bit self-serving, but they're not proposing this solution to malaria in a vacuum. It's fairly well considered.
Do you have any idea how many amps it take to charge an EV?!
Yes. It takes 40 amps @ 240 volts to charge a Tesla Model S overnight from dead empty. A larger modern home is typically built with 200 amp service. Your typical electric clothes dryer is on a 30 amp circuit @ 240 volts. Charging a modern battery electric vehicle takes just 33% more than running a dryer, and is well within the capabilities of the main service panel for any home likely to have a Model S parked in its garage.
There's no nice way of putting it, so I'll say it - you're a fucking moron if you actually think EV is the future. NO FUCKING WAY!
If you could actually do basic arithmetic, you might be able to construct some sort of argument. Fucking moron.
The story raised additional questions about ownership. In this circumstance, who can really be named as author? The algorithm itself or the team behind it?
When the AI demands the proceeds of the sale of its art, the AI is the owner.
This is where the eternal Slashdot bleating about "it's not real AI!" is going to have serious problems. Whatever test is created to have an AI legally qualify itself as not just sentient but sapient, humans will have to be exempted from it and simply declared sapient by legal fiat. Barring religious pogrom, there will one day be a sapient AI, and you can bet the tests created to try to prevent it becoming a legal individual can not be passed by the least functional humans.
Unfortunately Disney is going to milk this for every penny they can... be prepared for another spiderman reboot...
Who? Sony owns the motion picture rights to Spiderman, and they're clinging to those rights for dear life. Spiderman's recent appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe only happened after extended, painful negotiation.
Slashdot Mirror
The approach here seems "cheaty". That's not to say their technique is useless (and maybe it's more generalizable than I'm giving it credit for) - but from the vague overview of the article it seems like they're effectively juicing their performance.
Is teaching children cheating?
One of the many ways that AI is nothing like intelligence is the absence of any representational model of the real world.
There are many kinds of AI. Neural nets don't construct a representational model of the world from visual input but other AI techniques do. The Soar framework used so successfully for the machine-controlled antagonists in Descent (among many other uses) supports chunking, reinforcement learning, episodic learning, and semantic learning. It is based on the unified theory of cognition. It has both a temporary and permanent representational memory. It's fundamentally rule-based, rather than a neural net.
There was at one time a neural net version of Soar called Neuro-Soar but it's not part of the mainstream Soar library.
* the previous scene had a car in it, so here's a car commercial *
* the previous scene had a car in it, so here's a car commercial *
ad infinitum
Sooo... nothing changes then?
Musk's Starlink program probably won't have satellites that far north either as the population is so low.
Musk's Starlink program will have huge numbers of satellites that far north, ideally located to provide even higher density service to northern Canada than they will to any part of the US apart from Alaska. Thousands of Starlink satellites will be in polar and near-polar orbits, criss-crossing Canada at every latitude. You don't put 12,000 satellites in low orbits without them covering a whole lot of the planet, since they have no choice but to go in circles all the way around the planet. If SpaceX doesn't hurry with the paperwork, they may have satellites flying over Canada with the radios turned off, because they don't have regulatory approval to turn them on yet.
One hope for rural broadband might come in the form of some kind of low orbit satellite endeavour, like SpaceX's Starlink service - if it ever gets off the ground and they can get the costs under control enough in order to get a return on the investment.
Get off the ground? Tintin A and Tintin B have been in orbit since February. Test satellites launched by SpaceX to prove Starlink systems. Get the costs under control? They were soliciting a $700 million loan recently, with the intention of building more than 12,000 satellites for Starlink. They're expecting to spend less than $60,000 per satellite. That's fantastically cheap for any satellite larger than a CubeSat, which these are. If you actually account for the time spent by faculty advisers and grad students at market rates for engineering, I bet they're going to be spending less than many CubeSat projects per satellite. That's unheard of for satellites in the smallsat weight class Starlink is aiming for.
Starlink is very likely the answer for Canadian rural broadband. It was, after all, specifically intended to be used in rural areas. I wouldn't be too surprised to hear SpaceX is filing the paperwork with CRTC (FCC-equivalent) next year.
SpaceX is so far ahead with recycling rockets (= lower launch cost & better margins) that the incumbent rocket contractors appear to have pulled some strings to attempt to slow them down or discount them from the running. Someone needs breathing space to catch up.
That sounds exactly right. "Oh we're auditing Boeing too!" Yeah, with 1/10th as many requests for interviews and documentation.
Did anybody notice the weasel-wording of the contract values?
SpaceX grabbed $2.6 billion from NASA for the program, while the remainder went to Boeing.
Sounds so much better than "Boeing got $1.6 billion more than SpaceX to do the same job SpaceX is doing, only slower."
I must have been a dog in a past life.
In a past life? Yeah right. You can't fool me!
The engineering community is full of whispers and rumors about how low the bar for safety and rigor is at Musk's companies. Everything they do seems to be hacked together on Elon's whims and never really proven.
Riiight. You're so full of shit your eyes are brown. SpaceX can't hide their failures and their successes are also a matter of public record, and there are vastly more successes than failures.
Corners were cut so hard that SpaceX launched their 18th rocket this year to complete mission success, their 63rd launch attempt overall, reusing a first stage for the second time, and recovered that first stage a second time. They've launched more rockets this year than their competitors launch in three years, for 1/5th as much money, while recovering first stages and reusing them, which their competitors have never done in the history of rocketry.
Oh noes. Muh corners.
What the carriers are currently doing and what the FCC is proposing are both wrong. Everything wireless companies do is a telecommunications service, not an information service, so that covers why the FCC is wrong.
What the carriers are doing now is also wrong: the intelligence should be at the edges. Now that all cell phones, including flip phones, are pocket computers, it's time to leverage those smarts. The wireless companies need to deliver everything (and charge a flat rate for access, none of this per minute/per text/per gigabyte bullshit)[1], and let the endpoints decide what they want to see. The wireless companies can maybe run the equivalent of the Adblock lists for spam text, and maybe enable them by default for handsets they sell, but I bet most people would opt for third party block lists. Cell phones should come with trivially easy interfaces to block unwanted texts and calls, out of the box. Maybe going so far as having a white list mode. It's long past time for the edges to be making the decisions, and the telecom providers getting their grubby mits out of our data.
----
[1]If consumer flat rates can't pay for the network, charge the spammers more. They're business accounts anyway. Different rules.
You may be right, but not by as much as you think, because I said a small ship (meaning manned spacecraft), not just an empty ultra-efficient hypothetical rocket.
Falcon Heavy isn't theoretical, and Starman is out beyond the orbit of Mars as I write this. The Falcon Heavy test launch threw it so fast that it beat the typical low energy orbit by about a year.
Here's a more relevant ideal scenario estimate at $300m to send a potentially manned ship on an unmanned test landing mission:
The described mission was cancelled long before Falcon Heavy launched, and is so old it has an artist's conception of Falcon Heavy, rather than an image from the actual launch.
SpaceX has demonstrated repeatedly that they can do things more cheaply than anyone imagines (though not as cheaply as they imagine). And neither that estimate nor any similar estimate involving Falcon Super Heavy (it has a name now) is quite fair, as it is attributing the entire development cost of the booster to a single mission, which is obviously ridiculous. (Also, it was wrong. SpaceX ended up spending closer to $900 million developing Falcon Heavy.) That'd be like me attributing the entire cost of Russia's development of the nuclear icebreaker for my numbers in my original post.
I could easily see Falcon Super Heavy costing half a billion to develop, and a useful Mars payload another half billion, but Falcon Super Heavy will enjoy many launches, including launches for paying customers, amortizing the development cost over decades.
With more traditional options, the price could reach into the 11-digits for a one-way trip:
The Motley Fool article is obviously utterly irrelevant. Senate Launch System will never fly, no matter how much money NASA shovels into the voracious maw of Boeing and Lockheed, who will simply set it all on fire, right up until the whole thing is cancelled because Space Force gets authorized to pay Thiokol directly for new ICBMs, rather than having to hide it in some civilian excuse. Trump will happily withdraw the US from any treaty otherwise preventing it. It's a perfect fit for his image and his self-image. I'm astonished it hasn't been done already, come to think of it.
Regardless, all prior estimates of the cost of trips to Mars are broken. SpaceX doesn't work the way anyone has expected since the 60s, when the US thought it could do anything in space. Not since the dreams of O'Neil colonies has anyone thought this big, and not since the days of the Apollo launches has anyone built this big. Will it cost more than that tourist boat to the North Pole? Ultimately yes, but that's because there's actual land to land on at Mars, not an ice floe that you can spend 20 minutes on posing for photos, by which time it has already drifted well past the pole.
Personally, I expect there to be more human activity on Mars in my lifetime than there will be human activity at the North Pole in my lifetime, and that boat has a big head start.
As long as we're talking about having an ideal world, can you agree that it's simply not fair for 90% of the press to mostly be trying to dig up dirt on one party, and only 10% trying to dig up dirt on the other party?
This continued myth about the alleged domination by liberal media is a wonderful talking point. It's also a goddamned lie.
For every NPR radio station, there are literally 10 times as many hard right (and lunatic fringe right) radio stations broadcasting Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones and Glenn Beck. (In order of increasing lunacy.)
Fox News has the highest viewer ratings of all cable news channels and has since goddamn 2002. That's 65 straight quarters. And it's 1/3rd of the cable news channels. There are only 3 of any significance.
Local TV station ratings in major markets are mostly behind the Nielson paywall, but the Fox affiliate dominates the news hours in dozens and dozens of major markets. I can't find the comprehensive list, but leaks through the paywall make it pretty clear that if the Fox affiliate isn't the most watched in the majority of major markets, it's a close run thing.
Newspapers are about the last bastion of liberal media, with The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times enjoying national circulation, with only the Wall Street Journal playing for the other team. But that ignores local newspapers, which display a strong conservative bias everywhere that's not a coastal state. None of them have particularly relevant readership numbers anymore, national or local.
Online media is whatever your search bubble makes it. Judging by voting patterns, it's split precisely in half. The efforts of major portals to distort it to left-leaning simply aren't working. Engagement maximization algorithms are winning, constructing impenetrable search bubbles for every individual.
Books are increasingly religious, and therefore implicitly conservative, at local libraries across the country. Libraries respond to circulation numbers, and what they're shelving has shifted drastically in the past 20 years.
Hollywood movies are try-harding liberal views lately, but they're fiction, and often bad fiction at that. Their influence on people's politics ranges from minimal to the inverse of the apparent desired affect (see my post about non-white non-male 'hackers' in Hollywood media).
Music? Music is sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Nothing's changed much since the 70s, with the possible exception of the invention of Christian heavy metal in the 80s. So music has ticked slightly to the right since then. Perhaps this is what you're referring to. I question the actual political influence of music though.
Aside from music, nowhere else does a liberal view dominate.
Why do nutters talk about "robots" when talking about "AI"? So strange.
Because an AI sitting in a box on a desk somewhere isn't particularly frightening. An AI rolling around in a robot shell with a credit card to pay for power is much more frightening.
Elon Musk is sowing the seeds of humanity's destruction with the creation of the Supercharger network.
(The prevalence of above-ground power lines pre-Tesla Motors shall be ignored for the purposes of hyperbole.)
Angle of Attack? That's a pop star name?
It's southeast Asia. Anything is possible.
You're assuming that people using this are participating in competitive multiplayer games in VR. I certainly don't. something like this would increase immersion in a single player RPG.
Not much. The most interesting terrain in a single player RPG is frequently not a flat, level floor, making attempts to use shoes like this problematic at best. "Climbing" the hill in front of you by just walking forwards on your living room floor sounds like a great way to teach yourself how to fail walking in reality, after too much exposure. Not to mention being extremely disorienting when your vision believes you're about to bury your leg up to the knee in the terrain in front of you when actually you're going to step on air if you try to place your foot properly.
And last but not least, It probably costs more to send a small ship to or (theoretically) from Mars than the combined cost of all activity on the North pole throughout human history. Prove me wrong.
Wrong.
Russia sends a nuclear-powered ice breaker to the North Pole five times every summer, bashing through the sea ice all the way to the pole. It costs £22,470 for a single cabin (2017 price). The ship has 64 cabins and has made the trip over 100 times. The price has been as high as $45,000 per person. Split the difference and call it $30,000 per person. The activity of that ship alone has cost ~$384 million. A Falcon Heavy launch, which can send a payload to Mars, is $90 million.
Counting military activity, counting the first expeditions inflation-adjusted, counting scientific activity, expeditions to or near the North Pole have totaled well into the billions. SpaceX will launch several BFSs to Mars before they match the expenditure on the North Pole.
Being ridiculously large is not an excuse for having crappy infrastructure.
When the cost of said infrastructure scales linearly with distance, being ridiculously large may not be an excuse, but it certainly is a reason.
Is this fault of people failing to read or is it the fault of too much information now?
Judging by the examples given by DCFusor, I'd say it's because degree programs have become too abstract. There isn't nearly enough hands-on mucking about in a lab, actually putting into practice things like a plasma triode or a tuned dipole. Ph.D. students get buried in abstract theory, and because it's so abstract, they have a really hard time understanding the implications of what they're "learning" in the real world. You can memorize a dozen helpful equations, and still not know what any of it means if you haven't built something that can be described by those equations. And apparently that's exactly what's happening.
Degree programs have been sneering at hands-on instruction as "for engineers, not real scientists" and this is the result.
Nobody in the FCC will face any consequences if it all goes horribly wrong, so where is their motivation to not let it go horribly wrong? And how do they propose to fix things when (not if) it does?
The only thing that can go horribly wrong is SpaceX somehow leaves a fundamental design flaw in their satellites and they don't work and all have to be deorbited early. This lower constellation of satellites will orbit at 340 kilometers altitude. That's an orbital sphere of 1.45 x 10^6 square kilometers. That's a satellite every 193 square kilometers, and these are low-weight satellites, under 500 kg each, much much smaller than Hubble or most geosynchronous satellites. If you were sitting on one of these satellites in orbit, you would have a hard time picking out the nearest other satellite with a pair of binoculars.
The only people who think something else can go wrong are innumerate or stupid.
It's Interesting that the approval by a bureaucratic agency in a single nation is all that's required to make significant use of the finite orbit of all the World.
That's not even what they're approving. The US FCC is approving SpaceX's use of the radio spectrum by their satellites. The actual physical use of the orbital slots are very much secondary. Until the SpaceX constellation, that part was pretty much pro forma. This is the first time when paying attention to the paragraph about deorbit plans actually matters.
Incidentally, SpaceX will have to get approval from every country's FCC-equivalent if they want to provide service there.
Whoever wrote the Slashdot summary should have taken the few seconds
Dang, with that low ID I can't make the "new around here" jokes ...
Oh you can. When it's that low of an ID, you can make it ironically.
Bad analogy time : someone in front of you at the grocery store falls down and hurts their foot. It's quite lawful to just walk by, even stretch your arm over them to grab some box of cereal and leave them there. But is it moral ?
In Vermont, it's illegal to leave them there. They have the only compulsory Good Samaritan law. (Which is then no longer a Good Samaritan, but who cares about words...). In 15 states, you should reach over them for your box of cereal and not touch them if you're not a licensed medical professional. Those 15 states have no Good Samaritan law for unlicensed bystanders. If you try to render aid and make any mistake, you would be liable and could be sued. The rest of the states, you can try to help without fear of being sued. They could sue, but you would win easily and cheaply.
And when the bats start disappearing will that be OK too?
The majority of the diet of bats is not mosquitos, either in numbers or in weight. Among insect-eating bats, mosquitos are no more than 20% of their diet.
Also, the modified species the Gates Foundation wants to release is only one mosquito species that bites humans. There are numerous other mosquito species which do not bite humans. They'll still be available for bats to eat.
The Gates Foundation is known for being a bit self-serving, but they're not proposing this solution to malaria in a vacuum. It's fairly well considered.
Do you have any idea how many amps it take to charge an EV?!
Yes. It takes 40 amps @ 240 volts to charge a Tesla Model S overnight from dead empty. A larger modern home is typically built with 200 amp service. Your typical electric clothes dryer is on a 30 amp circuit @ 240 volts. Charging a modern battery electric vehicle takes just 33% more than running a dryer, and is well within the capabilities of the main service panel for any home likely to have a Model S parked in its garage.
There's no nice way of putting it, so I'll say it - you're a fucking moron if you actually think EV is the future. NO FUCKING WAY!
If you could actually do basic arithmetic, you might be able to construct some sort of argument. Fucking moron.
The story raised additional questions about ownership. In this circumstance, who can really be named as author? The algorithm itself or the team behind it?
When the AI demands the proceeds of the sale of its art, the AI is the owner.
This is where the eternal Slashdot bleating about "it's not real AI!" is going to have serious problems. Whatever test is created to have an AI legally qualify itself as not just sentient but sapient, humans will have to be exempted from it and simply declared sapient by legal fiat. Barring religious pogrom, there will one day be a sapient AI, and you can bet the tests created to try to prevent it becoming a legal individual can not be passed by the least functional humans.
Unfortunately Disney is going to milk this for every penny they can... be prepared for another spiderman reboot...
Who? Sony owns the motion picture rights to Spiderman, and they're clinging to those rights for dear life. Spiderman's recent appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe only happened after extended, painful negotiation.