Germany was spending far more on their military during that time than Britain was. If Britain and France had stepped in earlier, Germany would have been totally unprepared and the war would have ended quickly. Not to mention all of the horrors of the Holocaust that would have been prevented.

If Britain and France had managed to delay the war to "prepare" even more, say a few years, the Luftwaffe would have been dominated by jets, German ballistic missiles would have been longer range and more precise, and they might even have become a nuclear power. I really don't think this is the analogy you're looking for.

This speech translator is trés cool.

For a while I've been bugging techies with my conception of 'subtitle sunglasses'. These would be 'ordinary' glasses that would have microphones and nano-technology CPUs inside the frame. The microphones would hear the speech of the person that you are looking at (who is speaking a foreign language), translate that speech into English, and display the text of the translation onto the bottom of the user's frame. Like subtitles in a foreign movie for those of you who have ever seen a subtitled foreign movie. Many Germans haven't. The power to operate these 'subtitle sunglasses' would come from the generators creating electricity from the movement's of the user's head.

I challenge teckies to approximate how long in the future it will be before this kind of product is available for purchase in the $500 range.

One unusually aspect of Moore's Law is that we can project when a product like this will be actually available. We take the cost of making any science fiction concept using today's technology and use future-value calculations of accounting to project a future price time-frame given that the price of the technology will fall by half every 18 months.

Another trick is to use this example as a crude intelligence IQ test. Claim that the Japanese have actually developed 'subtitle sunglasses' but they only translate English into Japanese. Claim that you have been able to obtain a secret advanced prototype of such glasses. Give an ordinary pair of reading glasses to a person and claim that these are actual real 'subtitle sunglasses' that have tiny speakers that create synthetic spoken sound inside the ears. Invite them to try them on. When they put on the glasses, start speaking in Japanese (learn a few phrases well beforehand). The time that it takes them to realize that you are completely bulllshitting them is an indication of how intelligent they are. Hope that they don't get violent.

By now would be surprised if they don't have at least a couple Taepodong 2s that have at least a fair chance of a successful flight. They're not impressive as far as ICBMs go, but they are ICBMs.

Oh, it definitely sounds like the majority of humanity the majority of the time. I just don't think it's one of our more admirable traits.

In our case, it's necessary, because we evolved with mediocre brains. I'd like to see our successors do better. They aren't yet, which is what this article is pointing out. This promising system isn't ready yet. It's just not wrong for the reasons that the GGP post thought.

Propaganda campaign by who? I think Singer needs to check his haughtiness at the door:

the ability to steal gossipy emails from a not-so-great protected computer network is not the same thing as being able to carry out physical, 9/11-style attacks in 18,000 locations simultaneously. I can't believe I'm saying this. I can't believe I have to say this."

Except, of course, for the fact that the prime suspect is the hand-picked hacker squad of the Hollywood-obsessed leader of a nuclear armed state with ICBMs, whose family's Hollywood obsession has gone to such extremes in the past as kidnapping filmmakers and forcing at them at gunpoint to make movies for them. I can't believe I'm saying this. I can't believe I have to say this.

Well, at least Russians won't freeze to death this winter. They can use wheelbarrows full of rubles to insulate their homes. ;)

Or at least, makes more sense than throwing up a giant red "WARNING: THIS SITE IS INSECURE!" page for HTTPS self-signed, but *not* for every other HTTP-only site.

A very negative point of view.

Only in the eyes of the completely clueless or the drooling fanboy (not there's much effective difference between the two) are facts "negative".
 

If you get it back in one or a few bits then it is a win over just just chucking it up there and knowing you have lost it (as most rockets do)

Since the goal is to recover it whole, no, getting back in 'a few bits' is not a win. It's a failure. That things can and will be learned from such a failure does not change this.

Yeah, I imagine they were going to hack AMC and rig the film projector to overheat and explode, setting off the thermonuclear warhead it was attached to by the secret CIA program to hide nukes under film projectors.

Well, they did specifically say they were going to blow up every theater, not hack them. Almost certainly an idle threat unless North Korea has planted thousands of sleeper agents and activates them to do such a strike.

As for having unencrypted docs all over, I've seen that, even at corp levels - once you're behind the firewall, everything is unencrypted unless sending between sites or sending a secure mail such as to HR (our HR system requires it).

That's not all that different from how he got started with Tesla. He had no intention of starting a car company (he already had SpaceX), he just wanted AC Propulsion to build him a copy of their t-zero - but they had no interest, even for a small fortune. But then they pointed him to this guy named Martin Eberhard who had this wild idea to commercialize the t-zero's tech base on a Lotus Elise body and was looking for funding... and thus Tesla was born.

It's not just returning a matched image, though. It's also returning a confidence level, and in the cases they've discovered, it's returning 100% confidence. That's clearly wrong.

Not to mention the stuff Obama is lifting is already so easy to circumvent it is relatively pointless. I've met numerous divers that have gone to Cuba via Mexico or Canada and Cozumel is filled with shops selling Cuban cigars, probably exclusively targeting Americans. Even during the Cold War I had a friend that visited Russia to study Russian architecture and brought back Cuban cigars (and they didn't bother to check where the cigars came from because he visited Russia... also they were much better back then - the subsidies helped immensely).

g++ supports it with __restrict__. And if you're writing high performance code but not having support for the features of modern compilers, you're an idiot. In appropriate situations, the performance difference for using restrict or not is huge. Array-heavy tasks like image processing often get a 2-fold or more benefit with using restrict. There's very few places in the coding word where a single keyword can raise your performance that much.

And examples of these which could plausibly be on Titan are....?

There's not much in nature that's that light.

So you think massive yachts, ridiculous-priced art/jewelry purchases, palatial estates, gold-plated toilets and the like are a better use of money?

Trust me, I'd have a LOT more fun with a giant rocket than I would with a gold toilet.