EOM

I don't think those charts show BTM supplies (e.g. rooftop solar).

For something to be a major milestone towards opening up new opportunities, there is a need for various influential people and powerful people to say that it's not possible. If a large group of influential and powerful people already agree that something will probably work, then it's probably just an incremental improvement, and one of those influential people would have already made it happen, or be working on it.

Breakthroughs are usually first seen as fallacies and follies. If they are not initially seen that way, it's probably not a breakthrough.

I'm not saying that all fallacies and follies are breakthroughs, but it's a necessary phase for it to be considered that way. All breakthroughs were first broadly considered to be fallacies and follies at one time.

People can't fly, they aren't meant to, flying is for the birds. Starting a car company in the 20th century, and having it make electric cars is doomed from the start. A rocket company startup is doomed when it's trying to make rockets that come back and land vertically, and will never lift payloads cheaper and more reliably than the incumbents. All those things had been broadly considered proven to be bad ideas that will fail. People tend to have short memories and have forgotten how negatively those ideas were perceived originally.

Yet, they happened and changed everything.

Specifically, the 80386 was the first 32-bit processor. The 80286 was a 16-bit processor, with a way to actually address up to 16MByte of memory, which went into the IBM PC AT.

IANAL, nor a politician, but IMHO the furloughs are not about saving money.

They are a result of the federal government not having authorization to spend any money.

It's like a company in bankruptcy proceedings, the curator takes over and protects the assets while working to get the best outcome for the creditors.

"these are facilities that don't have any services being discontinued"

If that were true, nobody would be unhappy with their closure, and those places wouldn't be a very safe place to be even before the government shutdown (no maintained roads and trails, no and safety equipment, no animal control/fire/law enforcement/first aid service, etc).

What it's about is both preventing damage to assets and preventing spending of any money not deemed absolutely essential, which they have been instructed to do from the top down.

If a website needs a security update for a zero-day exploit, or gets hacked or vandalized during the furlough, the IT guys are not allowed to do anything about it because they are on furlough. They are not deemed essential employees and therefore they can not do work, any work, including volunteering to support the website (nothing they can do about that, in fact they can get in trouble for breaking those rules). We should be lucky that there is a webpage with a notice: They could have simply powered the machines (cloud, whatnot) off. What if the air conditioning turns off and the server room overheats, or there is some kind of water leak in the room, damaging the running server(s)? If I was responsible for an Internet-exposed website, and I was instructed to protect the assets with only absolutely essential expenditures, and I would be guaranteed not to be able to do anything for it for an indefinite amount of time and there was nobody willing and able to take on the responsibility during my absence, I would shut it down too, to prevent being faulted for anything happening to it in my absence.

If inside a national park an accident or crime happens that needs for example a road closure, a rescue, a fire department t respond, or an arrest (for example, for damaging public property, public intoxication, etc), then the government can't help and can't control the damage because there is no authorization to spend any money to pay for the work and materials of the rescue, fire control, etc. So the best way to prevent damage in the park is to completely close access to it.

Bill Gates might have made his money in a company that now competes with Google, but he really is comparing apples and oranges.

The big difference between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google is that one organization is a publicly traded Internet company that does things to make money, and the other is a privately held charitable organization that has received lots of money and is looking for a way to spend it.

So, for one of the two it makes sense to try to cure malaria, for the other it makes more sense to get more people access to the Internet. Both things will be good for the world.

While I understand pragmatism vs perfection, quite probably your code (or your os/libraries/api definitions) still had actual bugs, they simply didn't result in the same (language correct but unintended) behaviour or they didn't get triggered (as easily) in debug compiles. Even simple oob access bugs could still exist.

I personally don't feel fully comfortable releasing programs/firmware with bugs that I know are dependent on compiler optimization or instrumentation flags, unless I understand exactly how the compiler flag makes that happen for each specific bug. Actually, when possible I like to compile and test a program with varying flags, and for varying ABI's and platforms for the sole purpose of identifying and fixing those bugs. It can be a good help for locating bugs, similar to running a program in valgrind, with libefence, etc.

Remember, the drones flying now are the first ones of their kind, all made on their deadlines with their priorities.

I'm not in this industry, but for drones that can fly multi-day missions with thousands of miles range, can cruise at high altitude, and given the many large stretches of non-hostile airspace around the globe, even I can come up with various navigation solutions for drones that keeps the hardware safe from gps blocking or faking, and will probably often allow the mission to continue uninterrupted. Especially if you're thinking about squadrons of drones with varying configurations... Those would probably be able to take out the gps jammer as an automatic side-mission.

It will cost more than a $25 gps receiver module, but it's not for navigating your girlfriend to the beach and back either.

You will be able to trick some of my drones to land on your secret base, but that will be the kind that has not much more than a beacon that starts transmitting when the flying stops. Perhaps also a countdown clock that goes beep with a red, white, and blue wire coming out of it.

"Rather than running in the same CPU ring level of protection and potentially crashing the OS when you have a driver bug."

It's nothing but theory that the microkernel controlled computer would function just fine with buggy drivers, as there is no complete enough microkernel OS to even compare that with the rest of the real-world's top OSs.

Actually, we here have an example of a microkernel OS that 'they say' has had the opportunity to be fantastic with a buggy USB or SATA driver for years, yet somehow those drivers took forever to be mature enough to be available.

Perhaps it's not such a great ideas to allow bugs by design in something as fundamental as a driver.

Or perhaps that bug in the SATA driver will still corrupt your data on disk, or that USB driver will still abort your printjob, even if the driver gets reloaded right after that and the computer pretends nothing is wrong.

The whole 'will not crash with buggy drivers' or 'more secure because of how the drivers are' is not only not proven in the real world, it's also exactly the where the microkernel is the solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist.

Nice for some people, but... there is always a 'but'... Here one 'but' is that straight talk doesn't allow tethering. The only way to do that (legally) on the AT&T network is with AT&T's 'mobile share' contract that includes paying for the phone subsidy...

What you're saying is that it's impossible to truly fully simulate a human brain, based on the observation that fully simulating a biological cell hasn't been done yet.

But If they could make progress and do that, they could be simulating a brain that is a live. Then how would they be certain that that hasn't happened yet and it wasn't alive?

And beyond that, how would they actually be certain that an incomplete simulation of a human brain is not alive? What if it's equivalent to a brain of a cat?

At what time does it become ethically wrong to terminate the simulation?

Not knowing that it's not alive doesn't mean that you're not killing it if you do something that would kill it if it were...

Shooting the box with schroedinger's cat might kill the cat, if it (still) were alive, so perhaps you should refrain from that.

"We understand weather enough to simulate it."
"We don't understand how the human brain works enough to simulate it."

Simulations allow numerical verification of models & theories.
Simulations are part of the scientific process to 'understand' things better.

A lot of that weather knowledge came from trying to simulate it and seeing where it was wrong and where it was right.

It most definitely was not a situation where the weather scientists said, 'hey now that we know the weather, let's put it in a computer simulation' and then good weather forecasts magically came out of the machine. The process is highly iterative. 'measure real world -> maybe it works like this -> simulate model -> nope or yup, repeat'.

And actually, afaics, state of the art weather simulation has gotten so far that it seems mostly a sparse data problem these days, but that doesn't mean we should stop trying to improve the simulation algorithms and focus solely on increasing the data volume and accuracy. For one, we may not be using the data we have completely correct yet.

Similarly, we'll learn more about how brains work the more we try to mimic it in simulations.

As soon as you truly fully simulate a human brain, wouldn't it be murder to turn the machine off?