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Comment Re:Hmm (Score 1) 81

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.

Comment Re:Why not push toward collapse? (Score 1) 435

Well, Iraq was pushed to collapse. That did not go so well.

What do you mean? The country was then conquered within months by us. Saddam Hussein himself was then captured, tried publicly, and executed deservingly.

There were over a million deaths by some estimates caused by the invasion. A million! Even if the estimates are off by half, that's an incredible number of people.

Iraq is still in chaos many years later. IS has taken over a lot of the country. The Middle East as a whole was destabilised and has yet to recover.

I'd hate to know what your definition of a catastrophe is.

Comment Re:Should Allah be translated to God? (Score 1) 880

This isn't about etymology. It's irrelevant how God and Allah were derived. What's relevant is how they're used today.

You will find as much consistency in the Islamic world as in the Christian or Jewish worlds. If you look at the Monotheistic Abrahamic faiths, it is the Christian sects that, by and large, are the most deviated from the Old Testament norms; in particular as far as the Trinity goes. The Jewish and Muslim view of God is far closer to a pure monotheism.

Louis in German is Louis, obviously.

It's Ludwig, not Louis. Both names have their origins in Old Franconian; in which the name was Chlodowig. They are equivalent, but with various pronunciation changes over the last 1500 or so years. You see, a funny thing happens to words, they evolve in pronunciation and in meaning.

But the word "allah" is merely the Arabic word for "god", and etymologically is related to similar words in other Semitic languages, including the Hebrew "el". If you're an Arabic Christian, you will use the word "allah" for the same reason. For goodness sakes, mate, the Aramaic word for God is "elah".

Comment Re:seems a lot like human vision to me (Score 1) 130

I think it was fairly clear what was going on, the neural networks latch on to conditions that are necessary but not sufficient because they found common characteristics of real images but never got any negative feedback. Like in the peacock photo the colors and pattern are similar, but clearly not in the shape of a bird but if it's never seen any non-bird peacock colored items how's the algorithm supposed to know? At any rate, it seems like the neural network is excessively focusing on one thing, maybe it would perform better if you divided up the work so one factor didn't become dominant. For example you send outlines to one network, textures to a second network and colors to a third network then using a fourth network to try learning which of the other three to listen to. After all, the brain has very clear centers too, it's not just one big chunk of goo.

Comment Re:Wildly premature question (Score 1) 81

If we look at jet aircraft, wear depends on the airframe and the engines, and the airframe seems to be the number of pressurize/depressurize cycles as well as the running hours. Engines get swapped out routinely but when the airframe has enough stress it's time to retire the aircraft lest it suffer catastrophic failure. Rockets are different in scale (much greater stresses) but we can expect the failure points due to age to be those two, with the addition of one main rocket-specific failure point: cryogenic tanks.

How long each will be reliable can be established using ground-based environmental testing. Nobody has the numbers for Falcon 9R yet.

Weight vs. reusable life will become a design decision in rocket design.

Submission + - Marissa Mayer's reinvention of Yahoo! stumbles

schnell writes: The New York Times Magazine has an in-depth profile of Marissa Mayer's time at the helm of Yahoo!, detailing her bold plans to reinvent the company and spark a Jobs-ian turnaround through building great new products. But some investors are saying that her product focus (to the point of micromanaging) hasn't generated results, and that the company should give up on trying to create the next iPod, merge with AOL to cut costs and focus on the unglamorous core business that it has. Is it time for Yahoo! to "grow up" and set its sights lower?

Comment Re:Pretty sad (Score 1) 156

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.

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