Since communism is, by definition, classless, you cannot both be classist and communist.

Racism is, again by definition, incompatible with abstraction.

My conclusion is that you're pretty shaky on definitions.

They'd disclosed it but the first one hadn't finished testifying under oath about it. And that matters. The latter has status as evidence in court.

Because if they're explaining to non-scientists, they might as well be explaining to babies. The foundational knowledge taught in schools simply isn't up to the standard needed.

If you can't make useful predictions within the parameters of your model, you can't test the ideas. Ergo, the shut up and calculate side does have a good argument.

Previously, in physics, there has been a three-way dance between theorists who develop the mathematical description, theorists who develop the mechanical description, and practical physicists who carry out observations both to test the theories and to apply them in practical terms. This dance kept everything moving.

This may or may not be the correct way to approach quantum mechanics. The rules are very different in that domain.

On the other hand, it's easy to spot the hostility between the groups and it's obvious that the anticipated new physics isn't getting found. New models are rare and are struggling. The dance hasn't completely stopped, but it is definitely in trouble.

But, of course, that might equally be down to the increased competition, the need to publish trivial results quickly rather than do anything profound, and the greatly reduced investment in blue sky science.

I'm going to suggest it's a mix of stuff. We need a lot more funding, a lot less aggro, and we either need to get the mechanical description partner back on their feet or we need to find an alternative to them if that sort of description just doesn't work in this arena.

But I think the science dance needs three sides. I think we're going to find that the calculate lobby can't advance a whole lot further on their own, and that they cannot produce a theory of everything without some idea of what an everything is.

If a manufacturer knows that a system has a specific defect that makes it dangerous to use in certain contexts, it is usually obliged by law to report those circumstances. The license agreement is not necessarily considered legally binding or protective where there is a case of wilful neglect. Deliberate actions are not treated the same as lack of awareness or even negligence. But even negligence may be treated unsympathetically by the courts, no matter what customers sign up to.

Given that this defect could have left exposed critical infrastructure, banks, and businesses whose work is in the national interest, one might even be able to argue a case that this gave succour to hostile powers.

The most probable outcome is nothing happening. Companies are risk-averse and Microsoft has expensive lawyers. But a class action suit for wilful endangerment isn't wholly impossible, and I could see the DOJ investigating whether laws were broken, but only after the election.

https://greekreporter.com/2024...
https://arkeonews.net/italian-...
https://www.heritagedaily.com/...
https://www.sciencetimes.com/a...

Fiction:

12 books from the Deverry series
The Three Body Problem trilogy
Monkey
Treacle Walker
Various books on Powershell

Non-Fiction:
Linux Administrator's Guide
Linux Network Administrator's Guide
Both OpenZFS books
Ansible
Terraform
Various books on Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL optimisation
C++ manuals
Various Cisco manuals
OpenPF manual

The conservation laws are statistical, at least to a degree. Local apparent violations can be OK, provided the system as a whole absolutely complies.

There's no question that if the claim was as appears that the conservation laws would be violated system-wide, which is a big no-no.

So we need to look for alternative explanations.

The most obvious one is that the results aren't being honestly presented, that there's so much wishful thinking that the researchers are forcing the facts to fit their theory. (A tendency so well known, that it's even been used as the basis for fictional detectives.)

Never trust results that are issued in a PR statement before a paper. But these days, it's increasingly concerning that you can't trust the journals.

The next possibility is an unconsidered source of propulsion. At the top of the atmosphere, there are a few candidates, but whether they'd impart enough energy is unclear to me.

The third possibility is that the rocket imparted more energy than considered, so the initial velocity was incorrectly given.

The fourth possibility is that Earth's gravity (which is non-uniform) is lower than given in the calculations, so the acceleration calculations are off.

When dealing with tiny quantities that can be swamped by experimental error, then you need to determine if it has been. At least, after you've determined there's a quantity to examine.

It's a cool idea and they stand for a lot of great ideals, but laptops are incredibly hard to get right, drivers are hard to get right, and they are a small team trying to support a large number of possible configurations. Hardware gets more complicated by the year: forget the CPU and various GPUs, just look at how many other devices in a modern computer have a full-on processor, e.g. fancy touchbars, displays, even hard drives! Hell, your CPU probably has its own secondary general-purpose processors for things like security, and our CPUs themselves get firmware updates now to change how their instructions function. They are doing great work, but the deck is so stacked against them that it's not funny.

Here's the lyrics to a fairly typical, average kinda tune:

We used to swim the same moonlight waters
Oceans away from the wakeful day

My fall will be for you - My fall will be for you My love will be in you If you be the one to cut me I will bleed forever
Scent of the sea before the waking of the world
Brings me to thee
Into the blue memory

My fall will be for you - My fall will be for you My love will be in you If you be the one to cut me I will bleed forever
Into the blue memory

A siren from the deep came to me
Sang my name my longing
Still I write my songs about that dream of mine
Worth everything I may ever be

The Child will be born again
That siren carried him to me
First of them true loves
Singing on the shoulders of an angel
Without care for love ‘n loss

Bring me home or leave me be
My love in the dark heart of the night
I have lost the path before me
The one behind will lead me

Take me
Cure me
Kill me
Bring me home
Every way
Every day
Just another loop in the hangman’s noose

Take me, cure me, kill me, bring me home
Every way, every day
I keep on watching us sleep

Relive the old sin of Adam and Eve
Of you and me
Forgive the adoring beast

Redeem me into childhood
Show me myself without the shell
Like the advent of May
I’ll be there when you say
Time to never hold our love
-------

But there's next to no repetition in it.

In the case of Ukraine, the success rate is very high because anybody in range is likely an enemy soldier.

Israel's success rate may be as low as 0.1%. That tells us that robots can't tell civilians from military. A large enough stockpile of human shields would be a serious problem.

And we know drones et al are vulnerable to GPS spoof attacks, making such an attack risky against a technologically advanced enemy with intellectuals and engineers forming a scientific take on special forces.

Why bother with a missile? You're here, so a geek. You know GPS jamming is effective, as is GPS spoofing. All you need is a parabolic dish and a high power transmitter. There's simply no possibility of a wide-angle transmitter on a satellite matching a narrow beam that's broadcast from a hundredth of the distance. Sure, there'll be authentication keys. And social engineers have compromised most of the world's governments, which means the keys will be for sale somewhere.

The only way I can the robot army being effective is if they flatten everything at long range, indiscriminately. And that is going to cause its own problems. Especially if the software gets hacked prior to install. Which will happen, because hiring and training an army of hackers in Mitnick-style social engineering tactics costs a tiny, tiny fraction of the expense of maintaining a wall of tactical nukes that can EMP the robot forces.

The robots work OK, but the AI doesn't. Israel is using AI extensively to target Hamas at the moment, with the very best AI that exists and the very best military minds the world can produce. The success rate is somewhere between 1% and 0.1%.