bad_alloc

> If a student does badly on a test it should be interpreted as that student needing more help.

This is not always true. Any of these can lead to bad grades:

* Min/maxing your study success. A passing grade can be totally sufficient and you are able to focus on a course threatening your graduation more.

* External factors (needing to work, personal issues) unrleated to the course make the student unable to put in the time.

* Student is simply not interested.

* Student is lazy.

* ...

In my experience they understand a lot more than we expect of them. However most of the time they do not care and that makes them seem dumb.

Hey, we have a vaccine at least. If you feel like this make use of the fact that you cannot do much by yourself to change the situation. Sit down, avoid the news and let the world do whatever :)

The critical info we are still missing: Effectiveness against long Covid.

This would be terrible since it means encountering a species with an aggressive first-contact approach and technological superiority.

We can run those inefficient machines on electricity from renewable sources. Reduce > Reuse > Recycle applies: Building a new computer will almost always be worse than keeping the old one, whose production cost has already been paid.

> But I'm almost equally concerned that there's an awful lot of people on the pro-science bandwagon who don't actually support science, but simply don't tolerate dissent or questioning, and that's unscientific and potentially harmful too.

Dissent to the dominant opinion in any scientific field is always tricky, but that is a self-defense mechanism. Over time opposing viewpoints are integrated into the body of knowledge and may or may not replace or amend it. HOWEVER when we consider anti-vax or flat earth people they are acting in bad faith and their nonsense steals bandwith. It does not reserve respect and kicking them out harshly is a very necessary defense mechanism. Call it a memetic immune response with inflammation.

> We humans have this weird concept, that there's "something", that makes us fundamentally different from the rest of the animal life on this planet. Yes, we've got the largest impact on the biosphere, we can reason about it. But if you were to track back on the coginitive abilities of our evolutionary ancestors, I'd say it would be very difficult to put a hard threshold in the phylogenetic tree, where suddenly a whole subset of means of communication discretly vanishes.

Agreed, there is no hard threshold (biology seems to avoid those anyways) but subjectively there is some sum of fuzzy attributes in humans which allows for us to achieve the highest complexity of lifestyle(?) of all lifeforms on the planet.

I just got a Renault Zoe 2020 last December and it's been great. Commuting to work and going to the shops is just as comfortable as with a combustion engine. No gas station visits and even with the high cost of electricity in Germany (0,3€/kWh) it's still worth it. Only when driving longer distances (>250km) you need to plan ahead for charging and trips take longer (1-3 hours).

Can you elaborate? Experience is preferred?

Whenever somebody argues having nothing to hide I ask:

1) Where were you last night?

2) How much money is in your bank account? Do you have any debt?

3) What is your Debit Card PIN/account password/...

4) What is your address? Your families address?

5) Can I see your key?

And so on. Everybody needs to proctect themselves and potentially others attached to them. There is a good reason for these questions being awkward and inappropriate.

Well, or a great one if we could get a brain out of a messed up body into a functioning one. Probably both?

Yeah. lets hope there is some support we cannot see behind it.

> If we can overcome the engineering challenges, this machine will perform as we predict

If?

Technology usually only sucks where there is no immediate consequence of this. For example I am currently working with some tools related to robot control and machine safety. Crashes are expensive and errors in safety can get you sued. That part of the software works perfectly. Similarly, your engine control unit, airplane avionics etc. all work well because if they did not, the producer would be punished monetarily.

User interface stuff is crappy because it does not matter in the sense that you can immediately break expensive things. Unless people raise a stink to the point where the producers are scared for theri bottom line, this will not change.

Well, most elements on this list would allow us to move beyond needing so many assumptions. Lots of cost could be saved if I didn't need to perfectly measure all my owrkoffsets or didn't have to spend lots of time on designing my workspace to avoid singularities. Also it would allow us to move from relatively narrow-purpose machines ("move this end effector to this position within +/-0.01mm") to much more general jobs, hence opening more to automation.

Haven't seen metalworking on that list. It's amazing how far you can get with a vise, saw, files, drill and pliers. And it's also amazing how quickly you feel then need for actual machines and order a lathe and mill :|

If you are space-constrained you can also make jewelry, which can be a lot like machining, just a lot smaller. Also it's amazing how your view of metal als "very solid" changed once you take a graver and move it around by hand.

Am I understanding this correctly?: A timer error caused the vehicle to use too much fuel? No error from the ULA rocket?

When threatened a regime will jam the signal, track transmitters, make them illegal, throw people into torture prisons for posession and/or kill owners. It will make it harder for the regime but a cornered totalitarian will do everything to control this. Maybe they could include a "stealth mode" for passive receiving, but that brings a new bag of problems with it.

I think the solution here is not more tech but killing the despots.

> I share your concern and anger. This particular phrasing could sound like reinforcing a historical perception of [indigenous people/black people/jews/...] as innately weak and needing protection. I prefer to think of it as people needing help due to circumstances, and the circumstances in this case perhaps due in part to such historical perceptions.

When the persecution of a certain group of humans is this direct and the consequences of capture so severe, I think the semantics of help are irrelevant until the danger is resolved.

Probably for the same reason many technical horrors arise: It seemed reasonable at the time, it was the simplest solution, somebody added it to the spec for some reason.

Then things like this get used in such a way.

> You can’t blame individuals

You can and you have to. Corporations are structuredi nsuch a way that there is always somebody who is in charge of a certain project or descision. Of course this might be hidden. in order to fight "Profit before people / product / planet", these individuals need to be punished. It cannot be allowed that blame diffuses in a corporation. Otherwise there will be no change.

If the EU is sued by itself and needs to pay a fine, does that fine count as income and does that need to be factored into the fine? This might be the first case of an infinite payment.

In my experience you stick with a certain version, even as new stuff comes up. My current work is in C++14 and will not move to newer versions.

If found in the current state, I'd speculate they'd conclude it's a planetary explorer:

* Lots of sensors

* Lots of communcation equipment

* No external controls

* Parts built without maitenance access

* Solar power

* Found on a mostly empty planet, with only a few other rovers around

* A planet next door littered with similar technology

The problem is that these 11000 objects are moving among the existing ones. Some are nearly stationary on a geostationary orbit, while the LEO objects tend to zip around on wildly different orbits. So they are not sitting there, waiting to be found, but each object has a certain chance each orbit to hit some other object. These probabilities go up the more we put in orbit.

I live in a small town in Germany and we have five of these in one year, with 20-30 devices coming in each time. We can fix most of them, even with fairly basic tools. Some observations:

* One of the worst things to repair are electric shavers. It feels like horology, but dirty.

* Sewing machines are suprisingly complex. The electrical issues are easy to fix, but the internal mechanical parts are really unfarmiliar.

* Outright hostile designs are rarely found in cheap products. The main problem is usually worn out platic threads or breaking clips.

* People almost never bring in smartphones or computers.

* Many visitors are very interested in what we are doing and often suprised how simple a repair can be.

A country that censors content will be very interested in obtaining these logs from Google. Since they seem to be willing to cooperate with state actors, users might set themselves up for reprecussions later on.

> When people demand affordable rent but do not get it, many still cry "injustice!".

Well, it can be interpreted as an injustice. If you have a society that can realistically provide housing and food for everybody, is it not injust to deny handing these things out? The answer depends on what society you're going for. The optimum path is probably neither the extreme of the state providing everybody with everything he needs , nor a dog-eat-dog world in which the idividual gets nothing, no matter his situation.

Structural components can be built from light wood, like Balsa [1]. This migh be possible for the rotors too. I'm not sure a ready-made drone exists, but you could build this yourself.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMWjhyCWBlk