bad_alloc

This gives me DDR (East Germany) vibes: The rethoric, the symbolism and the motivation are all similar to how the DDR presented itself.

Thank you for this writeup, this was before my time on the internet.

> People remixed each other's work until the core DeCSS algorithm was only a single line of code. Gzipped, there was nearly nothing left

What was the actual number? Can you post it here?

IF the bug is present in all processors that use speculative execution AND Intel products use speculative execution THEN it is a bug in Intel products.

It would only be correct to say "This is not a bug or a flaw exclusive to Intel products"

At christmas we're all sitting on our asses at home and farting. So a lot of wind is actually being produced!

The A380 has two hydraulic systems. If the priamry fails, the aircraft is still fully flyable. Some extra things like slats don't work anymore but those aren't critical for flight and landing. If the secondary hydraulics fail, there are still extra electric actuators to move the control surfaces.

Source: http://www.roger-wilco.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Untitl...

* Publicity

* Human capability >> robotic capability

* Mars as a very long term "Backup Earth"

* If you can go to Mars with humans you can go to the Moon with humans as well.

* Human capable systems can also carry robots, the reverse is not always true.

Wikipedia says:

> Savonius turbines are used whenever cost or reliability is much more important than efficiency.

The German article is a bit more detailed and claims that Savonius tubines are effective at speeds as low as 2m/s and produce high torque even then. Maybe the high pressure on Venus increases this effect?

This is a great example of space exploration that could produce technology relevant for applications on Earth: If you have a complex machine that can do usefuk work on Venus, you can use a similar concept for ultra-durable equipment here. Stuff like this could be relevant for deep sea exploration, nuclear applications, mining and so on.

Unless it were possible for each objective function to converge to a next one that slightly extends the current one. However, what would the starting point be? Is this mathematically definable? What does the (im)possibility to define such a function tell us about AI?

WARNING: The page immediately shows you a picture of the affected man's hand. You might not want to see that, it's quite graphic.

Not only that. Friend-or-foe identification can boil down to "only targets shooting at me are hostile". That policy isn't any good for human soldiers but robots operating on that principle could avoid a lot of collateral damage.

> It’s one of the least threatening issues facing our country, the one with the lowest risk factors of any environmental threat. It’s safer to work at a nuclear site than to sit at a desk trading stocks

The relative safety is often brought up in this debate. It's technically correct, but fails to account for just how much damage a single incident can do. Chernobyl had 31 "direct" deaths and several hundred more due to radiation poisoning.

That looks good on paper, but does not account for the radioactive plume that has spread all over Europe. To this day I can find contaminated mushrooms and areas of increased radioactivity in Germany, about 1500km away from the reactor site. 30km around Pripyat are considered uninhabitable for 20000 years and cancer rates in Belarus and Ukraine are still way higher than elsewhere. The Dniepr is contaminated and the flow went all the way to the black sea.

It looks similar in Fukushima: Few direct deaths, a small exclusion zone, but the effects can be measured in the entire Pacific.

We must realize that even if nuclear power works out well w.r.t. Co2 and direct death count, it is fundamentally impossible to rule out the occurance of a catastrophe on par with Chernobyl or Fukushima. If something like that occurred in central Europe, mainland China or one of the US coasts, highly developped regions would be rendered partially uninhabitable and largely undesirable. This kind of damage is not accounted for in these kinds of articles.

> what if I'm tracking objects in interplanetary space?

I guess you'd just want to store the orbital information of that object, as it probably won't stay at a fixed position.

Thanks :)

    i  = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the fuck?

Indeed. I hope there's some omitted documentation for this. Does anybody know how this works?

Decency and foresight is highly subjective. Actually encoding what we understand as "decent human behaviour" into AI is a huge problem: If you create a system that decides about giving somebody a loan in the US based on a financial data set it might come up with any of these hypotheses:

* Don't give loans to people living in [poor area].

* Avoid people with names that aren't similar to the most common ones in the database (i.e. foreign ones)

* When linking the customer data to their social media and you see the picture is dissimilar to [preferred ethnicity], do not give a loan.

Now without any malice from the developer, the system has become racist: It saw the correlation that in the US blacks and hispanics live in poverty more often that others [1]. It knows that poor people pay back loans less frequently and makes the rational decision to not give a loan to that group. This of course reinforces the problem.

But how are we to solve this? Introduce an additional column "race" to the data and bias the results with it? Would that not be just as racist? How do we give the system an awareness not to discriminate against ethnic groups, if the data contains implicit clues? This comes down to giving such an AI human intuition about such questions.

[1] http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/irpweb/faqs/faq3/Figure1.png

Can confirm. We've been waiting half a year for one arm. It's not only production, training courses are packed and support technicians are hard to get hold of.

> I am saddened by this.

> House fires were doing a great job of partitioning houses from people that should never have been owning them in the first place. I was really hoping that a significant portion of my house had been burnt to the ground.

WannaCry damaged heathcare systems and caused real suffering for many people. This is way beyond people deserving a nuisance for being incompetent. Creating it was a dangerous and criminal act that should be seen on par with physical sabotage of important systems. Should derailing a train be ok because the tracks are "just lying there in the open"?

> What a bubble. We can't even get clean water to all of the citizens in the wealthiest country on the planet.

You can be space faring while ignoring people. It won't help and it's unethical, but not a showstopper. Still, having people in need is not an argument against space exploration: If we figure out for example how to provide cheap water on Mars, we'll probably be able to convert undrinkable water on Earth to drinkable water much more easily.

Pillows help to keep the head elevated when lying on the back or on the shoulder. Since the astronauts are in zero-G, there's probably no real need for that.

Yes. Math is an universal language. Programming languages are either domain-specific by design or you extend them until they become maths again.

Looking at the makeup of CO2 emissions [1] (ignoring methane and other factors) it seems that it makes the most sense to avoid unneccessary heating and electricity consumption (which most people will already do because it's good for your wallet) and cut back on driving (which most people don't). For agriculture and industry, the two big other factors, you're probably right: There's not much a single person can do.

[1]: https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-05/global_em...

10500€ for 7 degrees of freedom is awesome. Usually you get small 6 axis bots for 20k - 40k, without collision detection. Not to mention user friendly software.

Especially if you pursue a degree in a technical field, German quickly gets wierd. You encounter a lot of long, composite words ("Doppelkupplungsgetriebe" or "Motorsteuerungseinheit") for which the language is already famous for. Then there also are old terms like "Krampe", "Tülle" or "Flansch" (staple, sleeve and a widened section of a pipe), which are just standing terms for a certain part but are absolutely nonobvious and hard to find in dictionaries. I'm a native German speaker and only recently learned about Tüllen.

Add regional dialects to that which often contain grammatical shifts and even more obscure synonyms for high German words and you'll get a lot of cunfused foreign students.

This is wierd, ZF primarily builds gearboxes and car parts. What can they do with a keyboard company?

Machines fall flat in many aspects: They don't heal, reproduce or "survive" well without human help in any way. Then again, they do things that are impossible with organic systems, like going to space, travelling at supersonic speeds or lifting hundreds of tonnes in one go. That's why technology has always been an extension of ourselves, but now we're taking the first steps to bring these different lines together. That will of course lead to some awkward in-betweens, which nature has produced as well (see the tully monster for example).

Thanks for the clarification :)

What do you mean by "black consumers"? Are those supposed to be people who want to discredit the company or actual black people?

Not in this case: The galactic arm we're in is longer than expected. So it just extends further into intergalactic space than previously thought.

Sorry to throw rocks at your idea, but you apparently haven't experienced an angry kid: I would not hand them a 800$ - 1000$ device while they're throwing a tantrum. ;)