Active sonar works fine as long as you're in deep water, far away from land, where you're suppose to be if you're an aircraft carrier.

Diesel subs are designed to wait in ambush near the bottom in shallow waters, where active sonar operator could easily mistake them for natural formations.

It does not seem likely that carriers and diesel subs would ever face one another, unless a sub managed to sneak across the Atlantic and into shallow US waters, near an aircraft carrier port... But then we're talking Hollywood/Clancy scenarios.

When the Singularity happens we will have such convincing VR gear at such low prices that an Afghan peasant will easily be able to afford it. So, when Talibans come around to his village to collect taxes and rape the women, they can all just put on VR gear and instantly be in London, or New York, or wherever they want.

It might be the xmas timing, but this gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I only wish they'd design the main.html page using tables for formatting.

FYI O(n^2) is called quadratic complexity/time, O(n^3) is cubic, O(n^1) is linear and O(n^0) = O(1) is constant.

Exponential complexity would be O(c^n), where c is a constant.

If you're worried about what'll happen to driving, look at what happened to horseback riding and sailing.

If self-driving cars become a reality, car driving enthusiasts will probably settle down in an area where there is at least one good racetrack that they can frequent and racetracks will probably have garage spaces for rent, much like marinas have dock spaces for rent. So you won't have to drive your race car to your regular race track.

Many towns will have a historic car day, say on a Saturday, when certain streets will be open to traffic with manually driven cars, with curious onlookers lining the streets to get a glimpse of the old machines.

But humans have a long history of having to work in order to get food, clothes, shelter and other essentials. We have at least a cultural instinct, possibly a genetic instinct, to think that people who work a lot deserve to have a lot of possessions and status, while people who work a little or don't work at all deserve nothing. It's not going to be easy to relearn that instinct.

Of course, there are already large swaths of people who do little to no useful work and have high social status...

Maybe the short-term solution to the problem is for more people to become politicians and lawyers, the former creating jobs for the latter by imposing more and more laws.

I had some programming background when I took CS101. I found that being good at writing spaghetti code (or even simple OO code) that works is not something that puts you ahead of other students in a computer science course, and that you actually have to learn the course material in order to pass. Who would have guessed!

If people like me don't have to take CS101 then we're slowly but surely going to end up with a community of programmers/engineers who don't have a firm enough grasp of basic concepts in computer science, and they'll be worse at their jobs for it.

A better solution is to have after-school workshops for high school kids where they can prepare for a degree in CS. They way it ought to work is that math teachers in poor neighborhoods should keep and eye out for kids who are talented at math and recommend them for the CS workshops.

Now, I imagine this sort of discrete sorting of students will probably get you sued in the US, but it would work in most other countries.

The Ariane 6 sounds like it would entail a lot of pointless duplication of work that SpaceX has already done. Skylon should be funded, but there is no guarantee that it'll work.

I think the best way to get the European space launch industry back on track might be to take a hint from how the Chinese go about things and buy something like 100 Falcon 9 launches at above the normal going rate, with a special requirement that the rockets must be built in Europe.

Then SpaceX could either turn down this giant deal that would give them financial security for years, or they could accept it and build a factory somewhere in Europe, which would then cause knowledge and technology to seep out into the European space industry.

What the hell is wrong with Millennials?!

Same goddamned thing that's "wrong" with every other generation ever. Greed, selfishness, etc. The difference in outcomes stems from things like cheap air travel, which makes it possible for local idiots to literally go global. I bet these Greenpeace activist could have never afforded to fly to Peru in say 1964.

Of course, the boomers and their Soviet counterparts came pretty close to inadvertently wiping out civilization during Able Archer, which no other generation has managed to repeat since then.

Yeah...

First they came for TPB, but you didn't say anything because you weren't running a piracy torrent tracker, then they came for, uh, TPB again. And yeah, next they'll probably raid Spotify.

Yeah, I got a similar price on a 256GB drive back in June/July.

I'm more irritated by the bringing price down-part of that sentence. SSD:s are already about $0.55 per GiB and have been at that price point for several months.

I hope the $0.55 price will turn out to be more like $.40 once production is in full swing.

Nah. It's in your interest to stay as much off the radar of the Dear Leader and his buddies radar as possible. The second one of them perceives you as a threat you and your family is up for disappearance.

They will go to great lengths to treat famous people well, because you can't disappear those discretely. Random nerds, not so much. One of these elite hackers will be killed the second the leaders perceive that person as a threat.

Maybe there'll be a conservative version too...

Google Search: gay marriage
Did you mean "may marriage"?

Google Search: abortion
Did you mean "adoption"?

Google Search: the big bang
Showing results for "Genesis 1":

Whether you use metric or Imperial measurements is really a minor side issue.

The important thing is that you use a good steel ruler and compasses. None of that plastic crap.