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A sure way to see an exploding anything is to hit it lightning.

Yeah, after reading through a few more articles I found the same thing. It sounds very similar to an earlier crash in which case the pilots got erroneous airspeed readings and did exactly that. Throttles back and nose up until the plane fell out of the sky. In that case, however, it just shortly after take-off, I think. It's surprising that the plane came down from cruising altitude without the pilots correcting the stall.

It sounds like the plane was flown into the ocean. It was 12.7 km high at cruising altitude, so the rate of descent was 217 km/h. The cruising speed of an A330 is 871 km/h, so the pitch of the aircraft was roughly 14 degrees below the horizon.

In heavy turbulence it might be very difficult to tell if accelerations up and down balance out over the course of a few minutes, allowing a nose attitude to go unnoticed. The downward acceleration may well have begun in the minutes leading up to the "3 and a half minute" descent, and was simply glossed over for a short press release.

I don't think that's an answer to the same problem. The problem is that it simply isn't possible to make a general purpose processor arbitrarily small due to power dissipation. You can parallelize all you want, you still might not hit the same performance for specific tasks that optimizing the processor architecture itself will. Quite clever if chips customized to particular phones can be cost effective.

The magic age is when they can vote. People who are under 18 don't get their hands counted at election time so politicians don't need to keep them happy. The parents, on the other hand, do vote and many are persuaded by "think of the children".

That's absolutely right. A lead researcher needs a variety of skills, many pertaining to the science, many to team management and many to grant writing. As a doctoral student working in a mid-sized lab, I can say that a good PI is essential, but if your PI is good, then the system works. My supervisor rarely makes it down to the lab, but he provides necessary direction to the research and is extremely active in securing new sources of funding and new students. He's able to get others excited about ideas that he has and listens to feedback very carefully. That's how it's supposed to work and it gets a lot of good research done.

Bringing good people together and explaining the research to a wider audience (always helps to secure funding) are skills that are as necessary as research direction in a good PI. The system works great most of the time (although the success rate may depend on the field), but, as with any other line of work, it comes down to the people who are involved.

I guess that the primary reason that such duct-tape-and-cardboard methods are necessary is that people simply can't go into the reactor building due to high radiation levels. All the hardware required to cool the reactor is in place, it just needs repairs. It would surely be easier to perform those repairs than build a new cooling system, provided that access to the systems was possible.

I can't imagine that flooding the containment buildings was their first (or even second) choice but they must be restricted in terms of what systems they have access to from outside the most heavily contaminated areas.

The rules got put on hold and will be subject to better (not necessarily good, just better) transparency before they're enacted. The government has a tenuous grip on a majority in parliament right now; I don't think they're likely to try to bring up contentious issues for a little while.

Lasers don't tend to burn through dirt on their focusing optics. They usually heat the dirt up enough that it starts burning the optics themselves.

Yes, you're right. Let's give up on investigating compelling new directions in technology because there are hard problems associated with them. That's the way forward ;-)

I'm quite certain that if the foundations for exploiting a larger computational basis are laid, the algorithms will follow.

The trouble is that no truly scalable proposal for QC has been developed yet. The hope would be that once a suitable system was found, it wouldn't be exponentially more difficult to add qbits. Photonic qbits have very different problems from trapped ions, for example. Not many research groups are attempting to build large systems because the potential for more extensive scaling isn't there, instead they're trying to develop systems that are scalable, then we'll see a push for large systems.

It'll probably still be decades before all the hard problems are solved, but the promise of an exponentially larger computation basis for a given number of bits is too compelling to ignore.

As a Canadian who recently moved to Australia, I can say that Australians are getting fucked by regional pricing. I guess it's partly due to the recent increase in the AUD, but there's nearly a 30% premium on most content in Australia. I refuse to pay $100 for a game when I could get the same game for $60 in the U.S.. Luckily, I have a region 1 console that I brought with me :-)

I know, -1 offtopic, but fuck regional pricing.

"Buy out"? I think you mean fork.