Good point. An army that sees all others as subhuman and sees only the next death is one that has to keep fighting. It has no choice. It's the only thing it knows. It can keep conquering more territory outwards, or it can slaughter its own government inwards. History shows those are your two options.

Whether or not Russia conquers Ukraine, it will attack other countries - vast numbers of bored, underpaid soldiers would seek entertainment elsewhere if they didn't.

This is what I'm going by:

The report said that in December 2018, the US Federal Aviation Administration issued a special airworthiness information bulletin based on reports from operators of model 737 planes that the fuel control switches were installed with the locking feature disengaged.

The airworthiness concern was not considered an unsafe condition that would warrant an airworthiness directive – a legally enforceable regulation to correct unsafe conditions.

The same switch design is used in Boeing 787-8 aircraft, including Air India’s VT-ANB, which crashed. The report added: “As per the information from Air India, the suggested inspections were not carried out as the SAIB was advisory and not mandatory.”

https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

1. Were the safety guards, which were optional, installed?

2. We know investigators are looking into the computer system, does this mean the computer can also set the switch settings?

If the answers are "no" and "no" respectively, it was likely an accidental bump.

If the answers are "yes" and "no", then one of the pilots lied.

If the answer to the second one is yes, then regardless of the answer to the first, I'd hope the investigation thoroughly checks whether the software can be triggered into doing so through faulty data or the existence of software defects.

Agree with all your points.

It's possible I might have missed these, but they're also major considerations with COVID:

1. It causes scarring of tissue, especially heart tissue. That's why COVID sufferers often had severe blood clots in their bloodstream. Scarring of the heart increases risk of heart attacks, but there's obviously not much data on by how much, from COVID. Yet.

2. It causes brain damage in all who have been infected. Again, we have very little idea of how much, but from what I've read, there may be an increased risk of strokes in later life.

3. Viral load is known to cause fossil viruses in DNA to reactivate silenced portions. This can lead to cancer. Viral load has also been linked to multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue, but it's possible COVID was the wrong sort of virus. These things can take decades to develop.

I would expect a drop in life expectancy, sometimes in the 2040-2050 timeframe, from life-shortening damage from COVID, but the probability depends on how much damage even mild sufferers sustained and what medicine can do to mitigate it by then. The first, as far as I know, has not been looked at nearly as much as long COVID has - which is fair. The second is obviously unknowable.

I'm hoping I'm being overly anxious, my worry is that I might not be anxious enough.

My latest vaccine shots had the 6G upgrade, to take advantage of the higher-speed web access when the networks upgrade, but if they're selling those frequencies to high-power carriers, then I won't be able to walk into any area that handles AT&T or Verizon. :P

Seriously, this will totally wreck the 6G/WiFi6 specification, utterly ruin the planned 7G/WiFi7 update, and cause no end of problems to those already using WiFi6 equipment - basically, people with working gear may well find their hardware simply no longer operates, which is really NOT what no vendor or customer wants to hear. Vendors with existing gear will need to do a recall, which won't be popular, and the replacement products simply aren't going to do even a fraction as well as the customers were promised - which, again, won't go down well. And it won't be the politicians who get the blame, despite it being the politicians who are at fault.

I agree. The same thing happened with hardware engineering through the 2000s. You used to be able to have an incredible career designing fun products and earning good money if you could do the hardware and embedded software. Then they started outsourcing everything. Over that time I looked at the situation in Shenzhen and sometimes wish I'd been born in China - they got what we used to have. Malls full of electronics part manufacturers and a rapidly developing eco-system able to crank out amazing products.

It was way more exciting than doing yet another iPhone app, but at least the app stuff was pretty easy and paid well. Now the writing is on the wall for app stuff as well. The whole tech thing is a mess.

One thing I have learnt though, is that there is very little connection between how hard you work or how difficult your job is vs the pay. You can still work as an electronics engineer in the west, but you'll work at least twice as hard as you would have back 20 years ago, for the same pay without inflation adjustment. You'll also be the lone voice at the company lamenting corner cutting and duck taped solutions for everything, yet be blamed and have to pull the weekend shift when the product starts catching fire because of the dodgy temu batteries. It's not worth it when a good EE can do pretty much anything else.

Ultimately I don't know what the advice will be for my kids. I think we're just moving to a new sort of feudalism, where pretty much all jobs won't pay enough to have much of a life, so it will all come down to your family's wealth. I see that I have an opportunity to provide them with a bit of a financial base, though I think the window is closing. So really the key is have rich parents and then just do whatever you want since none of the jobs are really going to pay very much unless you have the right connections.

I don't deny that the financial sector has important uses, but a large part of it now is just a make for work scheme funded by government bailouts. Outside of things like keeping your money safe, facilitating trade, and insurance etc, its main purpose is supposed to be the efficient allocation of capital, and this dominates the sector. Yet we repeatedly see situations such as the GFC where it essentially just perpetuated a gigantic ponzi scheme, and rather ironically, it was so bad at allocating capital to growth that even when the price of capital was negative (zero interest rates) for over a decade, it still kept trying to feed money into various ponzi scheme, rather than invest in actual real economic output.

It is laughable in how useless all the modern derivative, high-frequency-trading and other innovations are at generating real economic growth. The victorians built the first industrial society with log tables and quill pens.

Anyway, my point is that we already know that we don't need much of the financial system, yet it continues to propagate and grow like a cancer, so I have no doubt that the good folks at Goldman Sachs will find yet more ways to harness the talents of our best and brightest in the pursuit of pointless financial innovations, even if this AI replaces a lot of their existing work.

For the engineers out there - small gas turbines are fundamentally inefficient because the boundary layer (the layer of air next to the blades/stators that is not moving) does not scale down as you make the machine smaller. So the boundary layer becomes a larger percentage of the flow cross section through the engine. The boundary layer is a large loss component, so this means that the smaller you go the more losses you get as a percentage of mass flow rate.

There is no way around this problem. It is why all attempts at making small but efficient gas turbines have not been commercially viable.

Turbochargers work because they capture waste heat energy from the exhaust. But the additional losses they introduce mean that they rarely result in a net efficiency gain for the engine (just more power from a smaller engine).

For efficient range extending you want something like a normally aspirated engine running the Atkinson cycle which is what the Priuses uses. The Prius has about the most efficient range extender you could come up with, and the power splitter gives a slight reduction (I think it's about 30-40%) in electrical machine size compared to a pure series hybrid. In other words, the people who designed the Prius did a good job, and that is really where you end up with you want an optimal hybrid design right now. I'm sure if it could be done better with a gas turbine, the people at Toyota would have looked into this.

They wanted to use Model E but that was already copyrighted by Ford (now used for the Mach-E). Hence the Model 3.

do any of your three new members understand percentages?

On exactly what the detector is capable of detecting. If they're looking, at any point, for radio waves, then I'd start there. Do the radio waves correspond to the absorption (and therefore emission) band for any molecule or chemical bond that is likely to arise in the ice?

This is so basic that I'm thinking that if this was remotely plausible, they'd have already thought of it. This is too junior to miss. Ergo, the detector isn't looking for radio waves (which seems the most likely, given it's a particle detector, not a radio telescope), or nothing obvious exists at that frequency (which is only a meaningful answer if, indeed, it is a radio telescope).

So, the question is, what precisely does the detector actually detect?

There was a survivor from the plane who described a loud bang before the plane crashed.

This places an absolute upper size on the alien battlefleet seeking to use Earth as a food source.

Trump's abandoned The Wall, as he found that the album doesn't mention Mexico even once, although he found the marching hammers very inspiring.

Back in the days of the Rainbow series, the Orange Book required that data that was marked as secure could not be transferred to any location or user who was (a) not authorised to access it or (b) did not have the security permissions regardless of any other authorisation. There was an additional protocol, though, listed in those manuals - I don't know if it was ever applied though - which stated that data could not be transferred to any device or any network that did not enforce the same security rules or was not authorised to access that data.

Regardless, in more modern times, these protocols were all abolished.

Had they not been, and had all protocols been put in place and enforced, then you could install all the unsecured connections and unsecured servers you liked, without limit. It wouldn't have made the slightest difference to actual security, because the full set of protocols would have required the system as a whole to not place sensitive data on such systems.

After the Clinton email server scandal, the Manning leaks, and the Snowden leaks, I'm astonished this wasn't done. I am dubious the Clinton scandal was actually anything like as bad as the claimants said, but it doesn't really matter. If these protocols were all in place, then it would be absolutely impossible for secure data to be transferred to unsecured devices, and absolutely impossible for secure data to be copied to machines that had no "need to know", regardless of any passwords obtained and any clearance obtained.

If people are using unsecured phones, unsecured protocols, unsecured satellite links, etc, it is not because we don't know how to enforce good policy, the documents on how to do this are old and could do with being updated but do in fact exist, as does the software that is capable of enforcing those rules. It is because a choice has been made, by some idiot or other, to consider the risks and consequences perfectly reasonable costs of doing business with companies like Microsoft, because companies like Microsoft simply aren't capable of producing systems that can achieve that kind of level of security and everyone knows it.