Nothing like the AI disconnecting the controls from a pilot who is still trying to fly a plane. But the AI decided it knows better.
Ever tried to indent in Word when it has decided you don't want to do that?
No need for AI for something like this to happen, it already happened. See The untold story of QF72.
I think the very idea of an autonomous, civilian plane is ridiculous at this time. I only need to imagine one of those freighter 747s flying over here each and every day, manipulated into crashing into town. The damage could go much further than even 9/11. The only context in which the autonomous plane might make sense is in a military context - and I do believe drones are already close enough to this.
Why not sell the US parts to either the international partners or to potentially interested private companies? I'm quite sure some of the partners would be interested in keeping the station running, it is certainly a question of money though.
There's been talk about putting a station around the moon, I'm not sure if it would currently be feasible to push the ISS that far - or even to a lagrange point (e.g. L5 as proposed in The High Frontier).
I'd certainly prefer to see NASA just staying on with the ISS, but getting a higher budget - it certainly needs it much more than the seemingly utterly wasteful US military complex.
I'm wondering if it's really only about laptops, or more generally any electronic stuff larger than a smartphone, similar to the restrictions already put in place regarding the middle east.
I for one couldn't abide putting my expensive DSLR plus lenses into the hold, where you can be pretty sure they'll be exposed to rough handling - not counting the fact I actually want to use it during the flight - and no, quality of smartphone camera pictures doesn't come close.
As long as it's only the USA insisting on killing off scientific or business relations or tourism, so much for that, their security theatre insanity since 9/11 has made sure I don't want to visit anyway, even if I'd love to see the landscapes (national parks especially). I sure don't want to see such restrictions elsewhere.
And I do remember a time I even went to visit the White House with my swiss army knife in my pocket (summer of 1991), which wasn't even detected there (at Wall Street it was).
Good times indeed! My brother had bought one of these, no cassette tape though, and a floppy was just out there (price-wise). So when using it, I had to re-enter any and all code by hand. Oh, and the family TV was blocked for that whole time. The Dragon's handbook was good though, I learned my first English from it, as well as BASIC.
When I finally got around to buying my own first computer, I got myself an Atari 1040STF with monochrome screen. At last, I had storage - 3 1/4" floppies! And I got some decent software... including FlightSimulator II - spent lots of hours on there.
The following computer was my first PC, a 286 - from DEC, no less, with a harddrive of whopping 20MB, standard VGA graphics, 14" screen, 1MB RAM. Kids these days have no idea what kind of power they have at hand with even a lowly smartphone or an RPi...
I'm currently reading
* Gerard K. O'Neill - The High Frontier. A classic on space colonization (non-fiction), 3rd edition (c) 2000. Boy, have we missed out on possibilities...
* Robert J. Sawyer - Flashforward (c) 1999. This is the base from which the TV series was built. Quite good scifi. I've got several more scifi books in the pipeline, by Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Bear, Alastair Reynolds, Neal Asher, Peter F. Hamilton.
I also intend to read-read the classic sagas from ancient Rome and Greece, it's been somewhere between 25 to 30 years since I last did those...
Asymmetric warfare... just like the many small speedy boats used by the iranian navy vs. big cruisers, aircraft carriers etc. of the US Navy and allies in the persian gulf.
It seems that most commenters think about the scifi theme of thawing entire human bodies after cryo-preservation.
To me, it rather seems that a first application would concern transplants - more organs could be collected, and be kept around much longer than presently possible, to be transplanted later into patients really needing them (as opposed to being able to pay for them).
It could help with reducing waiting lists, enable more people in need to survive, with less crime revolving about collection of organs.
"Once you send out the manufacturing jobs, once you send out the service jobs, once you send out the research jobs, what's left? There's nothing left,"
Well, thank goodness people are beginning to wake up. If you're doing business (i.e.: taking money from people) in a country, especially THIS country, you have a moral obligation to employ people from the community, if possible. Adjust your profit expectations accordingly. We're all in this together, or at least, we should be. The H1-B scam has been going on long enough.
Umm... since when do morals get in the way of business? Go Ferengi style all the way.
On the other hand, I'm appalled that there's been no Snow Crash reference that I can see. There's still high-speed pizza delivery, lawyers and private prisons. But I guess no-one wants to listen to Reason.
I guess you misunderstood... it is not at all about sending stages to the Moon, to be assembled there, then launched. The point is to not have to launch great masses from Earth in the first place, but to build them on the Moon, from Moon materials, to fuel straight from there, and then launch. Or if it's not the Moon, then it will be asteroids.
Of course, this requires bootstrapping an industrial base from as small an invest as doable, i.e. sending robotic craft to start bringing in raw materials, and getting stuff done with them.
The trick is of course to figure out the details. Many ideas were already written up by Gerard K O'Neill back in 1976 - read "The High Frontier". Technology has since advanced, and there have been many proposals since. Private companies are digging into the problem, there are government invests.
The goal also is not to get to Mars, but to get mankind into Space, not just on a few short excursions, but for good. Moving heavy industry up there might also solve some problems down here (think energy, pollution).
That's one point. There's quite some domains where it's illegal to send production data across a border, especially if the target country has lesser protections (think safe harbor). I can't see how that's magically not going to happen if Win10 is used with its spyware in place.
Let's not forget professionals with obligations of privacy, such as lawyers, attorneys, doctors etc. I don't know how e.g. hospitals can go down the Windows road, or how medical equipment can be run with this OS.
And let's not forget either that per EULA, MS Windows is not to be used in critical infrastructure - there's plenty of examples where it's used anyway, including US warships.
And here I thought IBM stood for "I Buy Macintosh"... of course, they've actually been migrating to Apple stuff, lately. The joke is getting old, as am I:-/
How about a nice little Dobson telescope plus sky chart? You might add in a sun filter. You're good for many hours of admiring celestial objects with your kids.
For kids of a certain age, a light equatorial mount plus 'scope may enable them to start taking their own pictures.
There's also lots of opportunities to make your own accessories, way cheaper than what you can buy.
Do you think the crazy people who deny the Holocaust will stop believing it just because you have a law against it? That is the problem with Europe in general: they pretend everything is fine but don't solve the root problems. It is better to identify the problem and come up with solutions.
You misunderstand. We're not banning the hate speech and pretend everything is fine, we actively educate our young so they know what happened and why, we show them, we make them understand that such a thing must never happen again. Everyone knows there's some nutcases that will still deny the Holocaust, but they are quite uniformly seen as misguided or sick, when not outright criminal. Unfortunately, young people also tend to be susceptible to "brainwashing" (e.g. political or religious), so education about these matters is not a totally failsafe proposition.
Populists (Le Pen in France, Wilders in the Netherlands, Trump in the US) often skirt the issues and are identified as dangerous by the educated, but fail to be understood by the less educated - as seen this weekend in Austria, where it is mostly the simple workers that voted for the (thankfully losing) far-right candidate. Note, I'm not bashing workers, simply pointing out insufficient knowledge about some things. Here, we also try to make people understand that anyone selling simple solutions is probably full of BS, and things are probably more complex.
... I have a hard time with the typical US notion of free speech and no censorship.
To those of us whose parents or grandparents had to live and suffer through WW2, I is pretty much unthinkable to allow someone to deny the horrors of the concentration camps and all things associated. That is very much what the rules on hate speech are about, preventing those very things to happen again. If you propagate that kind of world view, you're going to find yourself in front of a judge, and will be punished for spreading, or trying to spread, such a mindset. [btw, from what I read from your president-elect's tweets, chances are high he'd have found himself in front of a judge too]
On the other hand, many of you USians can't stand the view of naked nipples, which for us is very simply something utterly natural. Nipplegate just couldn't happen over here, we're by far not that puritanical. Isn't refusing a picture of a naked nipple (say, a breastfeeding picture) also "censorship"? Talk about hypocrisy.
>...and those appeals will follow the ones already pending in Luxembourg, where the EU is headquartered.
No it's not. Try Brussels in Belgium.
Umm... the EU Commission is in Brussels, Belgium, yes. The EU Parliament is in Strasbourg, France. And the EU Court, which this is about, is indeed in Luxembourg City, Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg.
The J5 is not super-thin (neither thick), and the battery is removable. Also, it features a microSD slot (which is needed, as internal memory is quite low).
The J5 was released back in April, if it was having the same issue as the Note 7 (August), I'm pretty sure there would have been a lot more news on this.
Yeah, this really isn't big news. The Note 7 was notable because it had 30 within 2 weeks of release, this is more of a random event and bad luck to the owner. While I would never buy this phone myself (it sounds like a cheap crap Android Samsung cranks out),,I wouldn't worry about more blowing up. Hell, even if a different model Samsung blew up tomorrow, I wouldn't deem Samsung dangerous. Samsung's shipped so many phones now so it's inevitable.
The J5 may be cheap, but it saves money and offers features in the right places, definitely is not crap. The battery is removable, there's a microSD slot to extend the low built-in memory. The CPU is quite fast, and the screen is absolutely sufficient for me, even if its resolution is much lower than on high-end models. I got mine (a dual-sim model at that) as a bargain for 150EUR (no contract), where a top-of-the-line model would have cost at least 3x that. The only thing I'm missing so far is better sensors (i.e. better precision of the GPS when I go jogging, or acceleration sensors for use with e.g. planetarium apps). I certainly don't feel much of a difference compared to my wife's previous S5Active or my previous Nexus5.
In the news articles, I didn't see whether the battery used here was the original provided with the device. Given the model's quite recent, I don't suppose the battery to have been replaced yet though.
A propos exploding batteries, anyone left here who remembers Sony's laptop batteries exploding on-flight? The problem isn't exactly new...
Why only 24h? Back in the ol' days, our "feature phones" (think Nokia N95) easily held out several days, if not an entire week. Simpler phones remained usable for a couple of weeks, on a single charge.
Having to charge every other day, when you have multiple such devices (think phone, tablet, fitness band/watch, etc.) that you have to do it for a whole batch of stuff, every night! No thanks! I can't even stand cordless keyboard/mouse as they'll crap out at the worst possible times...
...Word and excel will 'auto-correct' anything that starts with two capital letters and de-capitalize the second character./It's so secure even YOU won't know your passwords!
Also, leaking of metadata, version tracking etc.
It can be done, if everyone touching the file exactly know what they are doing, but Murphy's Law applies. An office suite just is not the best tool for this job.
Modern fighter jets are not rated solely on speed and manoeuvrability. Range, ceiling, avionics, weapons and all the rest are what make it a proper piece of kit. Dogfighting is low on the list of priorities in 2016.
Just like a few decades back - think F-4 Phantom II. High-power, low maneuvrability, only missiles... and then they had to identify their targets first. Oops. Those cannons were quickly added on again, proper dog-fighting capabilities were introduced back with other models.
There's also a reason why the A-1 Skyraider was kept on so long, much later replaced by the A-10.
I still think USAF would be much better off financially if they had a few more specialized planes instead of this jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none F-35. I guess the real reason for this boondoggle is to funnel money to black projects, and of course pure and simple corruption.
Slashdot Mirror
"Clean coal" sounds about as appropriate a term as "clean diesel", i.e. all wrong, a lie.
They should call it a Turbolift. Yes, as in Star Trek. Just don't give it an AI, please.
Nothing like the AI disconnecting the controls from a pilot who is still trying to fly a plane. But the AI decided it knows better.
Ever tried to indent in Word when it has decided you don't want to do that?
No need for AI for something like this to happen, it already happened. See The untold story of QF72.
I think the very idea of an autonomous, civilian plane is ridiculous at this time. I only need to imagine one of those freighter 747s flying over here each and every day, manipulated into crashing into town. The damage could go much further than even 9/11. The only context in which the autonomous plane might make sense is in a military context - and I do believe drones are already close enough to this.
Why not sell the US parts to either the international partners or to potentially interested private companies? I'm quite sure some of the partners would be interested in keeping the station running, it is certainly a question of money though.
There's been talk about putting a station around the moon, I'm not sure if it would currently be feasible to push the ISS that far - or even to a lagrange point (e.g. L5 as proposed in The High Frontier).
I'd certainly prefer to see NASA just staying on with the ISS, but getting a higher budget - it certainly needs it much more than the seemingly utterly wasteful US military complex.
I'm wondering if it's really only about laptops, or more generally any electronic stuff larger than a smartphone, similar to the restrictions already put in place regarding the middle east.
I for one couldn't abide putting my expensive DSLR plus lenses into the hold, where you can be pretty sure they'll be exposed to rough handling - not counting the fact I actually want to use it during the flight - and no, quality of smartphone camera pictures doesn't come close.
As long as it's only the USA insisting on killing off scientific or business relations or tourism, so much for that, their security theatre insanity since 9/11 has made sure I don't want to visit anyway, even if I'd love to see the landscapes (national parks especially). I sure don't want to see such restrictions elsewhere.
And I do remember a time I even went to visit the White House with my swiss army knife in my pocket (summer of 1991), which wasn't even detected there (at Wall Street it was).
Good times indeed! My brother had bought one of these, no cassette tape though, and a floppy was just out there (price-wise). So when using it, I had to re-enter any and all code by hand. Oh, and the family TV was blocked for that whole time. The Dragon's handbook was good though, I learned my first English from it, as well as BASIC.
When I finally got around to buying my own first computer, I got myself an Atari 1040STF with monochrome screen. At last, I had storage - 3 1/4" floppies! And I got some decent software... including FlightSimulator II - spent lots of hours on there.
The following computer was my first PC, a 286 - from DEC, no less, with a harddrive of whopping 20MB, standard VGA graphics, 14" screen, 1MB RAM. Kids these days have no idea what kind of power they have at hand with even a lowly smartphone or an RPi...
I'm currently reading
* Gerard K. O'Neill - The High Frontier. A classic on space colonization (non-fiction), 3rd edition (c) 2000. Boy, have we missed out on possibilities...
* Robert J. Sawyer - Flashforward (c) 1999. This is the base from which the TV series was built. Quite good scifi.
I've got several more scifi books in the pipeline, by Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Bear, Alastair Reynolds, Neal Asher, Peter F. Hamilton.
I also intend to read-read the classic sagas from ancient Rome and Greece, it's been somewhere between 25 to 30 years since I last did those...
Asymmetric warfare... just like the many small speedy boats used by the iranian navy vs. big cruisers, aircraft carriers etc. of the US Navy and allies in the persian gulf.
It seems that most commenters think about the scifi theme of thawing entire human bodies after cryo-preservation.
To me, it rather seems that a first application would concern transplants - more organs could be collected, and be kept around much longer than presently possible, to be transplanted later into patients really needing them (as opposed to being able to pay for them).
It could help with reducing waiting lists, enable more people in need to survive, with less crime revolving about collection of organs.
"Once you send out the manufacturing jobs, once you send out the service jobs, once you send out the research jobs, what's left? There's nothing left,"
Well, thank goodness people are beginning to wake up. If you're doing business (i.e.: taking money from people) in a country, especially THIS country, you have a moral obligation to employ people from the community, if possible. Adjust your profit expectations accordingly. We're all in this together, or at least, we should be.
The H1-B scam has been going on long enough.
Umm... since when do morals get in the way of business? Go Ferengi style all the way.
On the other hand, I'm appalled that there's been no Snow Crash reference that I can see. There's still high-speed pizza delivery, lawyers and private prisons. But I guess no-one wants to listen to Reason.
I guess you misunderstood... it is not at all about sending stages to the Moon, to be assembled there, then launched. The point is to not have to launch great masses from Earth in the first place, but to build them on the Moon, from Moon materials, to fuel straight from there, and then launch. Or if it's not the Moon, then it will be asteroids.
Of course, this requires bootstrapping an industrial base from as small an invest as doable, i.e. sending robotic craft to start bringing in raw materials, and getting stuff done with them.
The trick is of course to figure out the details. Many ideas were already written up by Gerard K O'Neill back in 1976 - read "The High Frontier". Technology has since advanced, and there have been many proposals since. Private companies are digging into the problem, there are government invests.
The goal also is not to get to Mars, but to get mankind into Space, not just on a few short excursions, but for good. Moving heavy industry up there might also solve some problems down here (think energy, pollution).
That's one point. There's quite some domains where it's illegal to send production data across a border, especially if the target country has lesser protections (think safe harbor). I can't see how that's magically not going to happen if Win10 is used with its spyware in place.
Let's not forget professionals with obligations of privacy, such as lawyers, attorneys, doctors etc. I don't know how e.g. hospitals can go down the Windows road, or how medical equipment can be run with this OS.
And let's not forget either that per EULA, MS Windows is not to be used in critical infrastructure - there's plenty of examples where it's used anyway, including US warships.
And here I thought IBM stood for "I Buy Macintosh"... of course, they've actually been migrating to Apple stuff, lately. The joke is getting old, as am I :-/
Clinton lost. Just as all the rest of the US of A. And the western world.
I googled for "highest cpu clock speed" and got e.g. http://valid.x86.fr/records.html
It seems this is a far cry from what's been done elsewhere, with numbers there showing over 8.5GHz.
Anyway, my criteria are rather low-energy, low-noise computers than extreme clock frequencies, even if I can make use of them.
How about a nice little Dobson telescope plus sky chart? You might add in a sun filter. You're good for many hours of admiring celestial objects with your kids.
For kids of a certain age, a light equatorial mount plus 'scope may enable them to start taking their own pictures.
There's also lots of opportunities to make your own accessories, way cheaper than what you can buy.
Do you think the crazy people who deny the Holocaust will stop believing it just because you have a law against it? That is the problem with Europe in general: they pretend everything is fine but don't solve the root problems. It is better to identify the problem and come up with solutions.
You misunderstand. We're not banning the hate speech and pretend everything is fine, we actively educate our young so they know what happened and why, we show them, we make them understand that such a thing must never happen again. Everyone knows there's some nutcases that will still deny the Holocaust, but they are quite uniformly seen as misguided or sick, when not outright criminal. Unfortunately, young people also tend to be susceptible to "brainwashing" (e.g. political or religious), so education about these matters is not a totally failsafe proposition.
Populists (Le Pen in France, Wilders in the Netherlands, Trump in the US) often skirt the issues and are identified as dangerous by the educated, but fail to be understood by the less educated - as seen this weekend in Austria, where it is mostly the simple workers that voted for the (thankfully losing) far-right candidate. Note, I'm not bashing workers, simply pointing out insufficient knowledge about some things.
Here, we also try to make people understand that anyone selling simple solutions is probably full of BS, and things are probably more complex.
... I have a hard time with the typical US notion of free speech and no censorship.
To those of us whose parents or grandparents had to live and suffer through WW2, I is pretty much unthinkable to allow someone to deny the horrors of the concentration camps and all things associated. That is very much what the rules on hate speech are about, preventing those very things to happen again. If you propagate that kind of world view, you're going to find yourself in front of a judge, and will be punished for spreading, or trying to spread, such a mindset. [btw, from what I read from your president-elect's tweets, chances are high he'd have found himself in front of a judge too]
On the other hand, many of you USians can't stand the view of naked nipples, which for us is very simply something utterly natural. Nipplegate just couldn't happen over here, we're by far not that puritanical. Isn't refusing a picture of a naked nipple (say, a breastfeeding picture) also "censorship"? Talk about hypocrisy.
FTA:
No it's not. Try Brussels in Belgium.
Umm... the EU Commission is in Brussels, Belgium, yes. The EU Parliament is in Strasbourg, France. And the EU Court, which this is about, is indeed in Luxembourg City, Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg.
The J5 is not super-thin (neither thick), and the battery is removable. Also, it features a microSD slot (which is needed, as internal memory is quite low).
Yeah, this really isn't big news. The Note 7 was notable because it had 30 within 2 weeks of release, this is more of a random event and bad luck to the owner. While I would never buy this phone myself (it sounds like a cheap crap Android Samsung cranks out),,I wouldn't worry about more blowing up. Hell, even if a different model Samsung blew up tomorrow, I wouldn't deem Samsung dangerous. Samsung's shipped so many phones now so it's inevitable.
The J5 may be cheap, but it saves money and offers features in the right places, definitely is not crap. The battery is removable, there's a microSD slot to extend the low built-in memory. The CPU is quite fast, and the screen is absolutely sufficient for me, even if its resolution is much lower than on high-end models. I got mine (a dual-sim model at that) as a bargain for 150EUR (no contract), where a top-of-the-line model would have cost at least 3x that. The only thing I'm missing so far is better sensors (i.e. better precision of the GPS when I go jogging, or acceleration sensors for use with e.g. planetarium apps). I certainly don't feel much of a difference compared to my wife's previous S5Active or my previous Nexus5.
In the news articles, I didn't see whether the battery used here was the original provided with the device. Given the model's quite recent, I don't suppose the battery to have been replaced yet though.
A propos exploding batteries, anyone left here who remembers Sony's laptop batteries exploding on-flight? The problem isn't exactly new...
Why only 24h? Back in the ol' days, our "feature phones" (think Nokia N95) easily held out several days, if not an entire week. Simpler phones remained usable for a couple of weeks, on a single charge.
Having to charge every other day, when you have multiple such devices (think phone, tablet, fitness band/watch, etc.) that you have to do it for a whole batch of stuff, every night! No thanks! I can't even stand cordless keyboard/mouse as they'll crap out at the worst possible times...
...Word and excel will 'auto-correct' anything that starts with two capital letters and de-capitalize the second character. /It's so secure even YOU won't know your passwords!
Also, leaking of metadata, version tracking etc.
It can be done, if everyone touching the file exactly know what they are doing, but Murphy's Law applies. An office suite just is not the best tool for this job.
Just like a few decades back - think F-4 Phantom II. High-power, low maneuvrability, only missiles... and then they had to identify their targets first. Oops. Those cannons were quickly added on again, proper dog-fighting capabilities were introduced back with other models.
There's also a reason why the A-1 Skyraider was kept on so long, much later replaced by the A-10.
I still think USAF would be much better off financially if they had a few more specialized planes instead of this jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none F-35.
I guess the real reason for this boondoggle is to funnel money to black projects, and of course pure and simple corruption.
Kosh? Naaah, the Koch brothers are much more likely to be Shadows rather than Vorlons...
S,cnr.