Yeah, Marvin is a fictional character, but it's believable to me that true artificial intelligences will get bored, distracted, make mistakes, etc., just like people, making them perhaps not much better than people at many of the moderately mindless tasks we'd like them to take on. So we'll have to limit them to make them good at what we want them to do... which may make them not so good at what we want them to do.
You would need to implement emotions. Deep learning is still completely void of emotions, and that makes it better at what it does than humans.
Are modern engines as efficient at Mach 1.5 as they are at Mach 0.9?
No. The engine doesn't notice the speed, the intake takes care of that. But to create thrust, the exhaust flow must be faster than the intake flow, and making the exhaust flow faster lowers the overall efficiency of the engine. This is why subsonic engines have a high bypass ratio while for supersonic engines bypass ratio must be kept low.
Supersonic flight adds a new source of drag, called wave drag, which comes on top of all other drag. It depends on the slenderness of the plane, but can easily double the total amount of drag. Optimizing the design for less pronounced shock waves will increase drag yet again, so fuel consumption per mile flown will make the cost of supersonic travel prohibitive. After all, the travel speeds of modern airliners (Mach 0.78 to 0.855) is typically a bit lower than the design speed of early jet airliners like the Convair 990 (Mach 0.87) or the Vickers VC-10 (Mach 0.89). That was half a century ago!
But there is a pocket of aviation where progress has been made in flight speed: Business jets! While the first generation flew more slowly than airliners (Lockheed JetStar, Lear Jet 25), the latest designs are quite a bit faster (Cessna Citation X, Gulfstream V) at up to Mach 0.935. Why? There is a peeing contest going on among their owners who is the fastest. A very small segment of mankind is licking their fingers at a new chance for showing off. A supersonic business jet would be a sure sell to this crowd, even if the operating cost per mile doubles.
Well, see it this way: This is a chance for the other 99.9% of mankind to lower the Gini coefficient a bit.
Psychology studies show it's not the absolute material wealth that makes you happy and content but the relative, in comparison to others in your social group. That's why top executives have spiraled up their pay packages, and why the middle class never lowered their work time below what is filling your day.
When Volkswagen experimented with 4-workday weeks 20 years ago, local plumbers and carpenters fell on hard times because everyone now used the extra day to fix things themselves, or even work on the side on that extra day. While the unions keep telling you that workers would relax during the extra time resulting from reduced work, in reality everyone tries to make a little extra on the side.
Also, having a job gives meaning to your life. Being told that you will be needed less is like telling you that you are a burden - nobody wants to hear that. That is also why today both parents work, even though they could enjoy the standard of living of a single-earner household of 50 years ago. But to keep up with the Joneses and to feel better for themselves both are now working, and the downside of less parenting seems to be generally accepted.
Self-driving trains are here today where unions and passengers tolerate them. You are right, this is much simpler and, therefore, has long been solved.
how can that be science? By definition, experiments cannot be repeated and theories cannot be proven. As soon as somebody in economics comes up with a new theory, the subjects of his studies change their behavior to alter the dynamics of the economy, invalidating the theory in the process. It should be obvious that such a system cannot be the basis of science. If those self-styled scientists would try to include the behavior-altering effects of their work, the system in turn will find ways of exploiting the new finding and to circumvent it.
In the end, it is science-envy by a faculty which does interesting and valuable work, but which is not science. Economists, get over it already.
It seems that most US citizens have at least some intuitive feel of what is appropriate, even if they sometimes forget their manners.
Contrast that with China: My experience is that there it is totally normal in meetings to answer the cellphone when it rings, and if someone is tasked to contact someone else, they think nothing of dialing the other side right away. In the middle of the meeting. To appear eager seems to be more important than focussing on the meeting.
Uh, no autopilot has the ability to land a plane (intact) on water.
Only if the engines are running, driving the generators and hydraulic pumps. An autopilot set for cruise will maintain altitude as long as possible (read: Until all fuel is exhausted), and then run for some time on battery power. If the Ram Air Turbine is not deployed quickly (and the autopilot by itself is incapable of doing this), the hydraulics will soon fail to work and whatever commands the autopilot sends will be ignored by the control system. Bottom line: The plane will descend uncontrollably. Not land, but crash.
The inside of the flaperon is vented so that air pressure changes will not cause additional stress. There is no sealed inside volume, and full of water the flaperon should sink quickly. Somehow the venting holes must have been above the waterline most of the time. It is pure luck that it drifted so long, and most of the other stuff from the plane should since long rest at the bottom of the ocean.
Spike Aerospace is just a tiny outfit working out of an office in Boston with no track record in aircraft design or manufacturing. And the article has so obvious inaccuracies - Mach 1.8 at altitude is just 1900 km/h. No sensible design would try to fly supersonic at sea level, the only altitude where Mach 1.8 equals 2200 km/h.
"abject" means "sunk to or existing in a low state or condition." It does not mean "an extreme amount."
... which is appropriate, given the pelvis design of crocodiles. Humans can run much faster than this bipedal croc ever could. If it had been running on all four legs, it might have been faster, but upright - no way!
because they break down to tiny particles in sunlight, and if those end up in water, they will keep many toxins like insecticides and fungicides in the food chain for much longer. Normally that stuff sediments, but in the presence of tiny plastic flakes from ox-degradable foils those toxic molecules will attach themselves to the plastic and stay suspended in water, to be digested by all aquatic lifeforms. This is long known, and burying these plastics is actually the second-best you can do to them after incineration. Once they end up in the water, however, they become an ecological nightmare.
And there is nothing "bio" about this process. Those hoped-for microorganisms which are supposed to digest the plastic do not exist in nature.
There are real biodegradable plastics, but they are not made of polyethylene, but from polylactic acid, starch or cellulose. There are even synthetic, biodegradable plastics which decompose just as well as the biopolymer-based sort. But they cost more, so this oxo-degradable variation of polyethylene was invented.
I came to say the same. Glad to see you did it, and you did it well.
What I might add: If she has a sharp mind, she will have moments in her life where this will bring her in trouble with other, less bright people. Tell her that only the dimmest minds are sure of their opinion, and explain Dunning-Kruger to her. Tell her that people's opinions are made subconsciously, and that the mind will only put a veneer of reason on top. She should be aware of that, accept her doubts, and watch her own decision process. This took myself a while to learn, and I wished I had understood this earlier.
And tell her stories from your past. Funny or sad, they will give her a fuller picture of you.
This is part of patent law. If you read a patent and use the idea for your private amusement, you are free to do so. Only when you sell widgets based on a patent you will get in trouble. This is part of patent laws worldwide, so I wonder what this fuzz is all about.
Sure, there will always be some leeches who will try to get rich with MAFIAA methods, but if you fall for their cons, don't blame patent law for it.
I'm still reminded of what I've read about the Wright Brother's attempts at powered flight, up against dozens of other teams, some with national support.
What is that bullshit about "dozens of other teams"? You obviously spout misinformed nonsense - the only opponent with some national support was Langley. All others (Whitehead, Santos-Dumont, Ellehammer, whoever) paid their work out of their own pocket. But at least they laid all their results open and did not try to sue everyone else on the planet like these trolls from Dayton, OH.
It's the same reason why the A-380 did not become the A-350. 350 would have been the next number in the sequence.
The reason is Chinese superstition. 8 is a lucky number in Chinese, because the sign for 8 shows two triangles pointing up. By the way, 4 is considered an unlucky number in China because it sounds similar to the word for death. Since most customers for both Airbus and Boeing are assumed to be in East Asia, their marketing departments put eights into their newest products wherever they can. The newest version of the 747 is called 747-8.
on their way to China at the end of winter, the Tea Clippers would bring ice, insulated in straw, to India where it was stored in ice pits for the British to cool their food in summer. There were even recognized brands of ice from Scottish or Norwegian lakes with exceptionally clean water.
This would have been News for Nerds 180 years ago.
... or they couldn't be detectable. In order to measure muons, they need to interact with the instruments, which are clearly part of earth. This alone shows that most of the summary is bunk. Muons can very well damage the materials they pass through.
As usual, please do not use Slashdot summaries for your physics education.
If Germany had just grabbed their "lebensraum" and stopped they probably could have kept it.
Nonsense. From the start, Britain would accept nothing but unconditional surrender by Germany. They kept the flames burning by expanding the war to Norway and Greece, helped by the Italians who opened new fronts in Albania and North Africa. Germany and most likely Hitler, too, never wanted the big war which followed. In fact, Germany tried to negotiate for peace as early as late 1939. The flight of Rudolf Hess to Britain was one of many attempts at negotiations. They would have stopped if only the Allied had allowed them to stop.
When their greed trumps even the most basic tact and professionalism, how can anyone in their right mind expect us to believe that the best thing for everyone is to let them run amok unchallenged and unregulated with a virtual monopoly? It boggles the mind.
It's the army of lobbyists in DC, these are the ones who want to make our elected representatives believe that. And they are quite good at it. What you and me believe is completely irrelevant.
for those who know 3D printing well. The new aspect is the precision of the printer, which allows to make those structures on a micro scale, but the basic technique has been used for over a decade to save material in big-volume articles.
Fruth Innovative Technologien has developed an algorithm to fill large volumes with such a scaffolding quickly. This speeds up building time and saves on the precious sinter powder, and yes, the scaffolding is very strong for its weight. They do this for more than a decade now. And now a MIT professor comes up with the same idea, and it is presented as a breakthrough. MIT marketing at work.
the biggest hiccups were very localized and unpredictable.
What a surprise.
The things you anticipate are those that you predicted and prepared for. It is always the unpredicted ones which cause hiccups.
In the end, you cannot prepare for all eventualities, but you must budget for a number of them that will hit you, even when you cannot say precisely in advance what or when they will be. If you don't, your project will come in late and over budget.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Marvin is a fictional character, but it's believable to me that true artificial intelligences will get bored, distracted, make mistakes, etc., just like people, making them perhaps not much better than people at many of the moderately mindless tasks we'd like them to take on. So we'll have to limit them to make them good at what we want them to do... which may make them not so good at what we want them to do.
You would need to implement emotions. Deep learning is still completely void of emotions, and that makes it better at what it does than humans.
Are modern engines as efficient at Mach 1.5 as they are at Mach 0.9?
No. The engine doesn't notice the speed, the intake takes care of that. But to create thrust, the exhaust flow must be faster than the intake flow, and making the exhaust flow faster lowers the overall efficiency of the engine. This is why subsonic engines have a high bypass ratio while for supersonic engines bypass ratio must be kept low.
But there is a pocket of aviation where progress has been made in flight speed: Business jets! While the first generation flew more slowly than airliners (Lockheed JetStar, Lear Jet 25), the latest designs are quite a bit faster (Cessna Citation X, Gulfstream V) at up to Mach 0.935. Why? There is a peeing contest going on among their owners who is the fastest. A very small segment of mankind is licking their fingers at a new chance for showing off. A supersonic business jet would be a sure sell to this crowd, even if the operating cost per mile doubles.
Well, see it this way: This is a chance for the other 99.9% of mankind to lower the Gini coefficient a bit.
When Volkswagen experimented with 4-workday weeks 20 years ago, local plumbers and carpenters fell on hard times because everyone now used the extra day to fix things themselves, or even work on the side on that extra day. While the unions keep telling you that workers would relax during the extra time resulting from reduced work, in reality everyone tries to make a little extra on the side.
Also, having a job gives meaning to your life. Being told that you will be needed less is like telling you that you are a burden - nobody wants to hear that. That is also why today both parents work, even though they could enjoy the standard of living of a single-earner household of 50 years ago. But to keep up with the Joneses and to feel better for themselves both are now working, and the downside of less parenting seems to be generally accepted.
Self-driving trains are here today where unions and passengers tolerate them. You are right, this is much simpler and, therefore, has long been solved.
In the end, it is science-envy by a faculty which does interesting and valuable work, but which is not science. Economists, get over it already.
Their intention is to make us think the NSA doesn't already enjoy first-class access though their custom backdoors. Don't be fooled!
Contrast that with China: My experience is that there it is totally normal in meetings to answer the cellphone when it rings, and if someone is tasked to contact someone else, they think nothing of dialing the other side right away. In the middle of the meeting. To appear eager seems to be more important than focussing on the meeting.
Uh, no autopilot has the ability to land a plane (intact) on water.
Only if the engines are running, driving the generators and hydraulic pumps. An autopilot set for cruise will maintain altitude as long as possible (read: Until all fuel is exhausted), and then run for some time on battery power. If the Ram Air Turbine is not deployed quickly (and the autopilot by itself is incapable of doing this), the hydraulics will soon fail to work and whatever commands the autopilot sends will be ignored by the control system. Bottom line: The plane will descend uncontrollably. Not land, but crash.
The inside of the flaperon is vented so that air pressure changes will not cause additional stress. There is no sealed inside volume, and full of water the flaperon should sink quickly. Somehow the venting holes must have been above the waterline most of the time. It is pure luck that it drifted so long, and most of the other stuff from the plane should since long rest at the bottom of the ocean.
We have seen many proposals for supersonic business jets, and none of them was viable. Why should it be different this time?
So...not very much terror?
"abject" means "sunk to or existing in a low state or condition." It does not mean "an extreme amount."
... which is appropriate, given the pelvis design of crocodiles. Humans can run much faster than this bipedal croc ever could. If it had been running on all four legs, it might have been faster, but upright - no way!
And there is nothing "bio" about this process. Those hoped-for microorganisms which are supposed to digest the plastic do not exist in nature.
There are real biodegradable plastics, but they are not made of polyethylene, but from polylactic acid, starch or cellulose. There are even synthetic, biodegradable plastics which decompose just as well as the biopolymer-based sort. But they cost more, so this oxo-degradable variation of polyethylene was invented.
What I might add: If she has a sharp mind, she will have moments in her life where this will bring her in trouble with other, less bright people. Tell her that only the dimmest minds are sure of their opinion, and explain Dunning-Kruger to her. Tell her that people's opinions are made subconsciously, and that the mind will only put a veneer of reason on top. She should be aware of that, accept her doubts, and watch her own decision process. This took myself a while to learn, and I wished I had understood this earlier.
And tell her stories from your past. Funny or sad, they will give her a fuller picture of you.
Sure, there will always be some leeches who will try to get rich with MAFIAA methods, but if you fall for their cons, don't blame patent law for it.
one that protects non-commercial printing of spare parts or widgets for home use as "fair use".
Funny that you say this. This is part of existing IP law. If it's not commercial, it is not infringing. Plain and simple.
This won't keep some crooks from using MAFIAA techniques, but they have no legal base to stand on.
I'm still reminded of what I've read about the Wright Brother's attempts at powered flight, up against dozens of other teams, some with national support.
What is that bullshit about "dozens of other teams"? You obviously spout misinformed nonsense - the only opponent with some national support was Langley. All others (Whitehead, Santos-Dumont, Ellehammer, whoever) paid their work out of their own pocket. But at least they laid all their results open and did not try to sue everyone else on the planet like these trolls from Dayton, OH.
For example, in programming, most languages simply don't allow me to use Icelandic characters in variable and function names.
Try Swift. You can even use emoticons as variables, if you so desire. I wouldn't be sure if that is an improvement, though.
The reason is Chinese superstition. 8 is a lucky number in Chinese, because the sign for 8 shows two triangles pointing up. By the way, 4 is considered an unlucky number in China because it sounds similar to the word for death. Since most customers for both Airbus and Boeing are assumed to be in East Asia, their marketing departments put eights into their newest products wherever they can. The newest version of the 747 is called 747-8.
Do you spot a pattern?
This would have been News for Nerds 180 years ago.
As usual, please do not use Slashdot summaries for your physics education.
If Germany had just grabbed their "lebensraum" and stopped they probably could have kept it.
Nonsense. From the start, Britain would accept nothing but unconditional surrender by Germany. They kept the flames burning by expanding the war to Norway and Greece, helped by the Italians who opened new fronts in Albania and North Africa. Germany and most likely Hitler, too, never wanted the big war which followed. In fact, Germany tried to negotiate for peace as early as late 1939. The flight of Rudolf Hess to Britain was one of many attempts at negotiations. They would have stopped if only the Allied had allowed them to stop.
When their greed trumps even the most basic tact and professionalism, how can anyone in their right mind expect us to believe that the best thing for everyone is to let them run amok unchallenged and unregulated with a virtual monopoly? It boggles the mind.
It's the army of lobbyists in DC, these are the ones who want to make our elected representatives believe that. And they are quite good at it. What you and me believe is completely irrelevant.
Fruth Innovative Technologien has developed an algorithm to fill large volumes with such a scaffolding quickly. This speeds up building time and saves on the precious sinter powder, and yes, the scaffolding is very strong for its weight. They do this for more than a decade now. And now a MIT professor comes up with the same idea, and it is presented as a breakthrough. MIT marketing at work.
the biggest hiccups were very localized and unpredictable.
What a surprise.
The things you anticipate are those that you predicted and prepared for. It is always the unpredicted ones which cause hiccups.
In the end, you cannot prepare for all eventualities, but you must budget for a number of them that will hit you, even when you cannot say precisely in advance what or when they will be. If you don't, your project will come in late and over budget.