You have not truly experienced the BSD is dying meme until you have read it in the original Klingon.

I wish I were rich and had a huge cock. I got over it. I didn't get upset at every display of ludicrous wealth and every guy with a bulge in his pants running down his leg.

Well, uh, you're clearly... sane.

There are lots of non-pretty people who dislike that more-pretty people can make an easy living by marrying wealthy partners.

There are lots of non-athletic people who dislike that more-athletic people can make an easy and wealthy living playing sports. Should we then ban the use of photos of athlete's faces?

There are lots of people who can't act and/or aren't good-looking that dislike that actors can make an easy and wealthy living playing roles. Should we then ban the use of photos of actor's faces? Should I go on? Models? Politicians? Firemen? Cats ?

Who will protect our feline friends from the outrageous exploitation of the fact that they are cuter than almost any human who ever lived?

I mean, honey, you may be cute, but cats have you beaten like a grievously dusty rug in that department.

The entire trend of "oh no, can't see / say / look at / admire / leverage" [a photo of a face] is absurd, and would actually be funny if it wasn't so outrageously wrongheaded.

Imagine a big lab where male researchers put playboy pictures on the wall.

That's not even a remotely reasonable take or example for what's happening here. This is a woman's face . It's a "Playboy picture" only in the sense that yes, it appeared in Playboy. It's not a nude. Pictures of, just for instance, Peter Sellers and Steve Martin have also appeared in Playboy. Should we now ban crops of these gentlemen's faces from those photos from appearing in an image processing example? I mean, seriously. It's puerile. Stupid. Regressive. Ridiculous.

Do you think that is professional ?

If a person's face, even, OMG, a handsome man or beautiful woman or other, should be used for an image processing example? Yes. Absolutely. 100%. Is it professional? Yes. Absolutely. 100%. I'm not in the least offended by the idea, nor should I be. It's a picture of a face. As for beauty, again, not offended regardless: male, female, trans, androgynous.

Do you think female researchers would feel comfortable working there ?

With pictures of people's faces on the wall? Even, OMG, women's faces? Well, if they don't, they need some therapy. What they don't need is for the walls to be sanitized so they can pretend that good-looking people don't exist, aren't interesting to others, and are somehow offensive in and of themselves.

What about people who fear cats? Should we then ban all pictures of cat's faces from lab walls and studies? How far do you want to take this? What about agoraphobics? Would you have us ban pictures of the outdoors from lab walls and studies? What about amathophobics? Should all labs have privacy walls so no one sees powders on the bench? What about, OMG, a picture of a pile of powder on the wall? JFC, call the Powder Police immediately.

Look, if you — or whomever — don't want to appear in Playboy or some other publication, I'm 100% behind you. Don't. Don't sign a contract that gives them rights to any photos. As for what other consenting adults have chosen to do, just fuck off, please. The only one in need of your take is you. As soon as you start telling me what I can do with a picture of someone's face, presuming copyright issues are squared away, I'm going tell you to fuck right off.

And what is triggering you ? Are you afraid they're going to come for your porn ?

Quite aside from the neurotic absurdity of the anti-adult-porn movement, no, this is something else entirely. This is moving normal things into the realm of moral panics. It's a bad thing. Entirely. On its own.

Trump and his american taliban allies are the ones you should be afraid of.

I am about as anti-regressive and anti-Trump as you can get. Lefter-than-left in almost all social and economic aspects, conservative only where it seems to me to be logical to conserve already-achieved progress. An outlook that includes conserving the achievements of separating personal liberties from absurd moralizations insofar as we have managed that thus far.

The problem here, what makes it worthy of comment, is that this particular moral panic in-a-teacup is straight-up regressive.

The thing is there is a moral panic

A perfect storm of toxic feminism and neurosis.

The copyright holder is okay with it, and they own the rights to the image. The researchers using it are okay with it. The only "offensive" thing [cough] about this image is that she is beautiful, and that is what is actually triggering these people.

You forget that Boeing (and Lockheed) both got quite a way down the path of designing supersonic passenger aircraft to rival Concorde, only stopping when government money dried up.

Of course, the American alternative needed to be better, so it started iff as a swing wing mach 3 design which vastly increased costs and complexity - ultimately, the final Boeing design looked surprisingly similar as Concorde and had pretty much identical operating specs.

Concorde was designed for a purpose, and so was the 747 - as such, you cant really compare the two without taking the design considerations into account. No supersonic aircraft is going to be as efficient as a subsonic one, thats just basic physics.

Sure, theres a lot of info about it, but...

How much of that info is both:

1. Cutting edge technology, and
2. Detailed enough to actually help assist in reproducing the design

Next time you fly, take a look at the engine on the commercial jet aircraft you are about to board. Look hard at the intake, Its just a round hole, right? Wrong - lots of cutting edge design and engineering goes into each generation of jet engine aircraft around the intakes, as its one of the key areas where you can gain or lose performance in the engine.

Often when an aircraft manufacturer offers two engine options for a commercial aircraft, both engines will use the same intake design, and there are differences when it comes to who designs the intake - if the aircraft manufacturer designs it, the efficiency is midpoint between both engines, but sometimes one of the engine manufacturers gets to design it. When that happens, the efficiency is always skewed toward that manufacturers engines, and the other engine option is slightly less efficient as a result.

During its day, Concordes intakes were actually cutting edge - to the point where the Tu-144 didnt have intakes anywhere near as good and as such the Soviets tried several times to steal the plans. So yeah, Concordes intake design was a closely guarded secret for many years during its early service.

No ones really that worried about China having 1970s tech, its China getting hold of 2020s tech which is the issue.

Not all jets, just supersonic ones, which tends to be military so these sort of things tend to be restricted as a result.

The difficulty for subsonic flight is different to that of supersonic - with commercial subsonic, you want a smooth flow of air into your fan and compressor stages, where its actually accelerated in order to compress it, and it needs a wide open intake to accomplish that for high efficiency . With supersonic, the engine still has to do its thing, but it cant do it with supersonic airflow, so it needs to slow it down in such a way that the airflow isn’t turbulent by the time it reaches the fan and compressors.

So the issue here is to do what is done on military aircraft, without being able to lean on a lot of the practical and up to date knowledge that those military aircraft use, because you also dont want China to have that knowledge.

Will be interesting to see how the US government handles this as an export.

You are spouting the same bullshit that Boeing was back when the accidents occurred.

The same arguments that were proven false by the ENTIRE FUCKING FLEET BEING GROUNDED and the subsequent FAA and NTSB reports into the crash. If it was just a training issue, an Air Worthiness Directive would have been issued to that effect. But no, it wasnt, the FAA and civil aviation authorities around the world GROUNDED THE ENTIRE FLEET until Boeing fixed it.

You are the same vile sort of person that decided at Boeing to implement this system in the first place, blaming the pilots and the airlines.

There's no problem with control if you don't give it too much power.

The not-very-subtle issue is that regardless of the limits put on hardware, the people using the hardware may not be subject to effective limits. Which is how we got Putin, Hitler, Trump, Pol Pot, McCarthy, McConnell, Stalin, Mao, etc.

People have a disturbing habit of taking up crazy and harmful ideas regardless of the source. All an AI really has to do is source the ideas. There will be people who will be delighted to take it from there.

Major Pain would like a word.

The point is, that there is no sound scientific basis for claiming "it is all just known Physics" at this time

Since everything, literally everything, we think we understand today has fallen squarely into "100% just known physics", yes, we can have pretty high confidence that the things we learn tomorrow will do the same. I do agree it is (vaguely, hand-wavingly, extremely low-order probability) possible we might need some new physics, but given the physical constraints of our fleshy machinery, (a) it seems really, really unlikely and (b) without discovering a mechanism that requires same, there's little point in claiming that is the case.

At various points in time we didn't understand X, but later on, we did understand X, and every time that threshold is crossed, the answer has been "100% known physics." To say that because we don't understand Y yet means "might not be known physics" seems to slyly imply that it might not be physics at all, which our experience with reality does not support. Just in case you were leaning that way.

While it would be magnificently interesting to find something that does not fall into that classification, no one has done that yet, and there's no particular reason to expect anyone to, either. Because it has never happened.

We don't know how the brain works or what consciousness even is. Until we figure those out there will not be any real progress towards strong AI

It's worth noting that some developments come from somewhat randomly throwing things at the wall to see if they stick. Often, those doing the throwing are just as surprised as the rest of us when something does stick.

Consider: To have a machine (a robot, more or less) formed as human arm throw a baseball well, the usual approach takes some really heavy math. We, on the other hand, do it without understanding that math at all. There are a lot of folks working on various approaches to what we can loosely call "computational intelligence", and it is possible (not saying likely, just possible) that this will result in an intelligence.

After all, that's how nature did it. Multiple times. In multiple ways. Without knowing how intelligence worked.

Oh more anti-Airbus bollocks.

No, an Airbus aircraft did not override a pilot at an airshow - you are talking about the Mulhouse–Habsheim Airfield crash in 1988, and that was entirely pilot induced. Too low, power at or near idle, below surrounding structures and applied power too late - no jet aircraft is going to go from lower power to high power quickly, it takes time for the engines to spool up.

That pilot was an idiot. That crash was not caused by Airbuses flight envelope protection.

And your understanding of Airbuses software is pretty darn well off track - there are multiple levels of protection, and there are plenty of procedures for putting the aircraft into direct mode where the pilot has the final say.

People need to stop with this bullshit that Airbus is as bad as Boeing - stop trying to make a false equivalency.

The ones that crashed... the airlines just didn't bother to train the pilots.

Ok, this right here, this has been proven to be false many many times since those crashes - the MCAS debacle had NOTHING to do with pilot training, and everything to do with there being a system which isnt even mentioned in the training manuals, nor was there a procedure to disconnect it and keep it disconnected.

In addition to that, the amount of force that the pilots would have had to apply to the trim wheels to counter the MCAS inputs is something you cannot do with one hand while seated - and the time in which you needed to make those adjustments was extremely short, in the manner of a few seconds, before the MCAS induced oscillations were fatal.

You are doing nothing but spouting pro-Boeing bullshit that has been disproven over and over.