You might be able to: my Logitech Mx518 (at least with the software I have installed) doesn't seem to allow rebinding the two primary buttons, though, so it's not a sure thing. The OP can do what you suggest, or just ask around (on Reddit, user reviews, even send a message to Logitech).

Aside from the fact that that wouldn't work anyways (intent to link to the illegal material would be required, and that certainly wouldn't meet that qualification), the hyperlinking charges were dropped. Yeah, the Slashdot summary is a bit deceptive (absolutely shocking, I know).

The FLRW metric (which is what the equation that governs the cosmological expansion of spacetime) has a cosmological constant term in it, initially placed there by Einstein to maintain a steady state universe, but which we now know drives an accelerating expansion of the universe. This constant term is exactly that: a constant (negative) energy per volume of space. More space means more total energy.

However, TFS and TFA (I've only scanned the referenced paper, but that looks much more reasonable) are absolutely wrong about why this is a problem. It is a problem, but only in the sense of figuring out where it comes from (i.e. what exact mechanism drives the creation of this energy). The fact that energy is not conserved violates no law of physics: in fact, general relativity doesn't conserve energy anyways, and the expansion of the universe certainly does not (even without the non-conservative nature of gravity).

See, the conservation of energy is a result of Noether's theorem, which states that for any differentiable symmetry of the action of a physical system, there is a corresponding paired conservation law. For time symmetry, this is the conservation of energy. However, time on the scales of the universe is not symmetric. There was a beginning to the universe (which alone breaks the symmetry: you can't shift backwards in time more than ~13 billion years), and the universe as it is now looks nothing like it did 10 billion years ago. So we don't expect energy to be conserved in the universe as a whole (even if it is on local scales).

Dunno what cables you're using, the HDMI cable hooked up to my monitor is only slightly thicker and stiffer than my mouse cable.

Absolutely impossible? No. But the problem is that we don't even know where to begin creating a true AI, which means we also know nothing about what threats it may or may not pose... so we also have no actual way to address those threats. All we have right now is pure, 100% complete speculation (no different from speculating about what would happen if we had FTL travel, or psykers, or met aliens). There are plenty of actual threats to humanity that really exist right now (or could be created with our current knowledge and technology), which makes worrying about something we know literally nothing about kind of silly.

Aye. Now try controlling the engine and fuel injection system, and achieving combustion, without using a spark plug. Because that's what the story is actually about. They're using compression-based ignition (like a diesel engine) rather than spark based ignition (like a conventional gasoline engine), which requires a detailed knowledge of the state of the engine at each cycle.

Nah, it's interesting because it's an application of machine learning algorithms applied to an actual physical problem that might have real-world practical use (the whole Rasberry Pi/Linux angle is a side note in the paper just to show that the algorithm is fast enough for real-world application). A possible 30% fuel efficiency increase in all/some new cars? Car makers would certainly be interested.

That depends. If you should have known the gun would have a significant chance of hitting someone, you could well be facing a full murder charge. Randomly shooting a gun in a field in the country? Probably manslaughter. Doing the same in a crowded shopping mall? Yep, that'd be murder. Likewise this bot was shopping randomly on a darknet that has a lot of illegal stuff for sale, and the creator would (absolutely should have, anyways) have known that, which means he would be legally liable for the purchases (if the government decided to press the issue).

The link the GP gave is to the paper linked directly to by the summary (the direct link to the abstract), so some confusion is understandable. In the future, maybe make submissions discuss one and only one paper (or make it obvious they're two papers)?

From TFA, it sounds like the functions in question (pow() and exp()) work by first looking at a look-up table/polynomial approximation technique to see if the function can use that to get an accurate-enough value, then running through a series of multiplications to calculate the result if the table/approximation method wouldn't be accurate enough. Since this work improved the actual calculation part, my guess is that it will improve quite a few cases. TFA does say the lookup table method works in the "majority of cases", though it doesn't say exactly how big a majority, so it's hard to say exactly.

Right, but we want to continue the "Moore's Law" speedup of processing year over year. And that simply can't happen with single core processing: clock speed is already near the physical limit (as in we would need to start violating the speed of light to increase it much further), and manufacturing process size can't continue shrinking indefinitely either, no matter how close we are to the actual physical limits there. So unless we invent entirely new computing systems (e.g. quantum computers), the only speed gains in the future will inevitably be from parallelization, and there are (for many cases) still massive speed gains to be made in that field, simply because the software was never designed for any parallelization at all. Granted, that'll hit a wall where you can't split tasks up anymore as well, but in many cases this process hasn't even started.

You're quite right about the graphics, though: the long-term future of graphics technology is probably ray-tracing, and that takes absolutely massive amounts of completely parallel CPU power.

That's just the kind of thing Hitler would have said!

Yeah. Physicists. The term "physics" in fact literally means "knowledge of nature", i.e. knowledge of those things in the natural world (this is an old definition, of course, from back when physics was considered a philosophical discipline, but while the methods used in physics have changed the subject matter has not). As opposed to supernatural objects, which would fall under the purview of metaphysics and/or theology.

Believe it or not, "observable and consistent" and "natural" mean almost literally the same thing (using the term "natural" to refer to "things in nature", not to natural vs. artificial: in any case, all artificial objects are at some level made up of natural stuff anyways). All natural objects are observable in some way (i.e. have observable properties: mass, volume, location, etc... something that can be quantified, in other words), and the word "nature" in one of it's oldest definitions in physics means "how something acts always or for the most part", i.e. it acts in a consistent fashion (not sure most modern physicists would even bother giving a definition of "nature", but when we speak of the "nature of an object", that definition is essentially what we mean). Supernatural objects, by definition, lack both (actually, having one generally (always?) means you have the other as well).

Make sense. I had to use Vim once, and it felt like I was in Hell.

I'd guess Snake Oil Monthly, peer reviewed by "homeopathic scientists". Obviously. Or (since Rossi is a tiny bit subtler than that... though only a tiny bit) the """Journal of Nuclear Physics"""*, which (in a startling coincidence) is "published" by Rossi himself (if posting something to a blog counts as published). It may well have been peer reviewed, but of course since Rossi is a fraudster, not a scientist, the peers in this case... well, lets just say they probably have more of a theoretical degree in physics than a degree in theoretical physics.

*As a side note, this is a good example of why simply because something was "published" in a respected-sounding journal does not mean it's actually trustworthy. I could form the American Journal of Renowned Physics Breakthroughs tomorrow and publish the flimsiest of flim-flam in it. Anyone could.

All ships of that class have been decommissioned/scrapped already, so any details of the interior are irrelevant, as it's no longer a design in service. Knowing where to hit to sink a ship that isn't being used anymore isn't exactly useful military knowledge.