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Comment Re:Self-driving cars (Score 2) 76

In theory yes... in practice the ESA moves much slower than SpaceX... so most likely the lead of SpaceX will increase with time.

When they decided that the Ariane 5 was too expensive because of SpaceX they should have set aside a billion Euro or two for building something similar to SpaceX Falcon 9... instead they spent billions for the Ariane 6, which will fly in a few years and will be more expensive than SpaceX is today.

Comment Re: good (Score 1) 170

It is anonymous for people using the app who do NOT report their numbers because they have been infected.

It is a random number per day (I think the paper says one random number per 15 minutes)... unless someone grabs your phone to get the numbers you app rolled up and stored locally, they don't have much chance to know that these numbers were from you if they have the list of numbers from a different phone.

Comment Re:Easy solution. (Score 2) 231

Fire it into the Sun. Ain't nobody living there.

Unfortunately we don't have the technology to do this with the large quantities of nuclear waste(you need at least 2-3 times the energy to put something into the sun than put it on the surface of the moon). And even for small quantities it would be costly beyond measure. And if one in a hundred rockets go wrong (BANG!) it would be BAD.

Comment Re:Latency (Score 2) 82

"SpaceX expects its own latencies to be between 25 and 35ms, similar to the latencies measured for wired Internet services. Current satellite ISPs have latencies of 600ms or more, " https://arstechnica.com/inform.... Possibly dated information. But one has to wonder, even if you've fixed a latency issue, how is packet collision handled when ground stations can't hear each other? There's only so much bandwidth allocated. Should be interesting.

Just the same as satellite phones and other "internet over satellite" (with uplink) providers... Time-division multiple access.

Ground stations have to allocate some time/frequency space over a "management slot" before they are allowed to transmit their normal data.

Comment Re:Beware, anyone can make those drones, anywhere (Score 2) 183

A lot of people are criticising how cheaply made these drones were, but simplicity is genius...
The amount spent by the Russians to shoot these drones down must have vastly exceeded the cost to build and launch the drones, not to mention the cost of repairing/replacing anything that the drones managed to hit. If you can spend $50 and cause your enemy to waste $500 repelling your attack then you've achieved a successful result.

Only if you have at least 10% of the resources of your enemy available... otherwise you will run out of steam before the enemy, which is not a successful result.

Comment Re:Very "asymmetric" threat (Score 1) 252

Is it asymmetric? If they have a whole cloud of drones, you can defend against it with your own cloud of drones. And if you build your own cloud of drones, that cloud can also be used for offense. Asymmetric, as I understand it, is when you have to spend a lot on defense and it doesn't buy you any offense. This is more symmetric because it is really just like equalizing soldiers on a battlefield. If they have 10 drones and you have 10 drones, you can fight them to a standstill. But if you have 100 drones, you can overpower their numbers. Defense is achieved by spending the same amount of money that your opponent spent... that's symmetry.

if you don't have a "front line" with well defined "battle zones" an attacker with an easy to transport weapon system has always an advantage. Defending against swarms as in the video would require the defender to have "defense swarms" everywhere... while the attacker can drive his swarm close to the destination to launch a concentrated attack.

Comment Re:Devil's advocate (Score 1) 221

Yes. In addition to this, this might even be a good step towards getting rid of DRM.

Currently everyone who wants DRM use DRM... they either use flash/silverlight (turing-complete stuff that can mess up your whole browser) or deploy special Apps (which lock out browsers completely).

Now the move goes into using a standardized API with their DRM behind, an API that can ONLY be used for media decoding.

This makes it much easier to sandbox the DRM and make sure it doesn't do things beyond handling the video/audio content. It also moves the infrastructure of the content distributors much closer to a "non-DRM" HTML5-based delivery... which means the economic incentive to drop DRM (more customers versus costs to reach this customers) gets better.

Comment Re: Golden age of remakes maybe (Score 1) 1222

The other band-aid is that the potatoes which would have been on the ship would have been treated with a chemical (chlorpropham or maleic hydrazide) to prevent them from budding.

The potatoes were of the botanic experiments planned for Mars (remember, Mark was a Botanist), so it is very unlikely they would not be ably to bud.

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