I am not sure if their strategy will work. Training a neural net requires massive compute resources, usually in the form of GPUs. But once the NN is trained, it doesn't require much computing to use it. For instance, a Go playing NN took 5 days to train, running on high end GPUs, but once trained, could consistently beat Gnu Go (which can consistently beat me) while using far less computing time.

These drones do not carry parachutes. That would make no sense. The parachute would add significant weight, and would do little good. The main structural material of these UAVs is Styrofoam, so they already have a low terminal velocity. Nearly all crashes occur during either takeoff or landing, and too close to the ground for a parachute to deploy.

Nonsense. There is no way that European countries (other than Britain, of course) are going to force their citizens to use devices that the American government can monitor. If they try that, Marine Le Pen will be the next president of France.

China is far less likely to agree to American backdoors than Europe is. It is not going to happen.

This is for express deliveries. The point is not to be "cheaper", but "faster".

The rotors are driven by brushless DC motors, which are extremely reliable. The drone is far more likely to crash due to weather, collision, software bug, etc. Which is likely to do more harm: A crash of a 4kg drone, or a crash of a 4000kg delivery truck?

They are very newsworthy. Now we get to find out where he disagrees with the administration and how influential he really was. He clearly disagrees strongly with the President on this issue and this will put pressure on him. He did not wait long to "step out of line".

But you can convince individuals that their privacy will not be protected, and you can convince companies that few will buy their products. The Clipper chip did not fail because the government was convinced, but because of a backlash from consumers that didn't want it, and from companies that threatened to move their production overseas. The current proposals will fail for the exact same reasons.

Man what a day to not have mod points! Hopefully mods will see your post and mod it to +5. Seems like most of these mistakes are made on purpose these days for some value of "because it's so cool." I see this happening all the time these days, particularly on web-based applications, even here on slashdot. Discoverability of UI functionality is at an all-time low and the removal of obvious functionality is happening all the time (the read more link, dice? Come on guys). We're just expected to already know what everything does even if its changing all the time. Read the fine manual... oh wait there is no documentation. I've seen plenty of horrid user interfaces made by engineers and people like me who think obscure command-line flags are intuitive, but now it seems like even the UI experts (no wait they aren't UI experts, they are user "experience" experts) are doing it. I wonder what will happen when all the current generation of UX experts hit their cognitive decline years later in life. I suspect that if the present trend continues, computers will be all but unusable for many people who can no longer keep up. Progress you know.

Exactly. Holder may be a smart, reasonable man but he is not able to act that way when in a position of "power". He may very well be more influential now in certain ways than he was while in office. We can't know how influential he was with Obama, but clearly we can see that he wasn't very influential as far as Snowden is concerned.

I am not Bill Cosby.

If you think that the people who hold office are the ones with the power, then I have a red and a blue pill for you to choose from.

Where are my mod points when I need them! This is exactly right. I've thought the same thing ever since the hipster term, "UX" was introduced in the last couple of years. It's not even a matter of introducing new functionality. It's change for the sake of change. It's like developers get together at the local coffee shop and brainstorm new strange ways of doing common tasks and then they foist them on the world without any usability research, or watching how people actually use their computers. Because everyone should be as cool as they are. I can think of no other explanation for changes that firefox made, for example. I don't think the present class of "user experience" thinking is going to stand the test of time. Had UX people been in charge of cars or airplanes, we'd still be messing with with function goes on what pedal, or what controls should be linked together on the yoke. Would be a nightmare. Rudder isn't that important so lets put it on a blue knob behind the pilot's head. We don't use it, so we doubt anyone does either.

Maybe the UX teams at places like Mozilla don't know that real people use Firefox as a tool to get their work done, and constantly messing with it interferes with our ability to do what we need to do. It's not that change can never be done, but that change has to be done in the context of understanding what the end users' purposes are. MS certainly understood that for years with Windows, only to forget it when introducing Windows 8.

In the case of Therac25, the bugs were triggered by a sequence of keystrokes that the UI programmer did not expect. The deaths were the result of a cascade of errors. The programmer was incompetent, and never should have been writing critical code. After the fatalities, the code was reviewed by experts, and they were horrified that such a mangled mess of spaghetti was controlling a lethal machine. The code was never reviewed by anyone, and there was no testing by anyone trained on QA, and no third party testing at all. Most importantly, the radiation shield and trigger were under full software control, with no mechanical interlocks. Even after the first reported deaths, they continued to insist that the software could not possibly be at fault, when an experienced engineer would consider a software bug to be the mostly likely explanation.

The Soviet Union allowed many of its citizens to own guns. There were restrictions on handguns, and private guns were banned in some urban areas. But most people could legally own a rifle or shotgun, and many people did. The same is true in Russia today. Gun ownership is common.

The homicide rate in Russia is far higher than America, but Russia does not report gun homicides separately, so a direct comparison is difficult.

In addition to being chemically inert, a good liquid coolant should have other properties:

1. Electrically insulating (duh).
2. Low viscosity, so it flows easily.
3. High thermal conductivity.
4. High thermal expansion, to increase natural convection.
5. Low vapor pressure.
6. Non-flammable.
7. Non-toxic.
8. Cheap.
Liquid fluorocarbons have often been used. But the fluid in this case is not a fluorocarbon. It is specially blended white mineral oil.