The responses it provides are "the right responses, most of the time", so it comes with the same risks.

Like when you're working in the kitchen and swing your elbow and bump the handle of a knife and it flips off the counter and starts to fall. And you "instinctively" reach out to grab it, only just stopping yourself in time to avoid cutting your hand.

Your cerebellum said "I got this!", and it took your brain a split second longer to "countermand" the order to grab the knife. It took a little longer to process all the context of the situation, so it wasn't just looking at the "catch falling thing before it hits the floor". Your brain realized that on this specific occasion (when the falling item has been identified as a knife, and previously learned knowledge says it's dangerous to carelessly grab it) that was not a good idea. The cerebellum lacks the "memory" of the cerebral cortex, or the "processing power" to identify the falling object, so it's doing the best it can with the information it's got. In MOST cases it's a good response, so the CT provides a fast, strong response to reach out and grab it.

Computers that try shortcuts run into essentially the same problem. As a rule, computers are good at coming up with quick solutions to either very general OR very specific problems. They struggle in the middle-ground where analysis of context and history can change the desired response.

iirc that's entirely the job of the Cerebellum. It monitors stimulus on the way in and responses on the way out, and when it's seen it enough it creates "shortcuts" that allow for both faster and more automatic responses.

Indeed, the first one we learn is walking. (balance without a cerebellum is very hard) There's a rare defect where the cerebellum fails to form / fully form, and those people have a really hard time living all their lives on "manual mode".

Riding a bicycle is a good extension from walking, your cerebellum gets to go back into intense learning mode all over again.

I really don't see why any of this is "news", we've known about the concept for centuries, and the mechanisms behind it for decades.

or better yet, use previously established / tested / used bank routing numbers.

Regardless of how you do it, a method you've used in the past is more trustworthy than a new method, especially if the new method requires a lot of "weak links" (people doing things manually)

I'm a bit surprised they're not using Space-X for all of that by now? Maybe they need to periodically "refresh" the escape Soyuz docked at the station?

The EU is a Republic. The American Republican party is a Kleptocracy, currently led by the world's biggest grifter.

I immediately notice an issue. This "survival mode de-tuning" does nothing to make the buoy less buoyant. And they showed it just staying (vertically) stationary in high waves. That'll reduce power output of course, but the problem is it'll also generate enormous forces on the anchor.

"survival mode" on a wind turbine involves pitching the blades so that less or no energy is being transferred to the blades by the wind, which slows or stops the blades. (that reduces the "interaction" between the wind and the blades) Turbines have a "maintenance brake" that can hold the blade still but it's nowhere near strong enough to hold it in a high wind without pitching the blades, and the wind will tear the brake apart if you try to use just that to slow or stop the blades..

The buoy appears to be trying to use a brake to stop movement, instead of doing something to reduce or stop energy collection, and all that energy you're collecting has to go somewhere. If all you've got is a brake, the energy will go into whatever the brake is holding onto, or start mechanically deforming the brake. It'd be like jamming a stick in the spokes of your bicycle wheel to stop the bike.

They're setting themselves up for a "if it doesn't bend, it will break" sort of situation.

The most obvious response would be to reduce magnetic coupling at the generator, which would allow the buoy to move up and down more easily and thus extract less power from the water. Sort of like adjusting power to the field winding on a generator to regulate the energy being produced. (that's not as easy to do with a wind turbine because the blades just go faster and faster until centrifugal force shatters the blades)

Or pump water into the buoy to make it less buoyant, thus reducing the interaction between the waves and the buoy which would reduce the energy being transferred to it.

But the animation is clearly showing the buoy stopping the arms (braking) and somehow not bobbing up and down as the waves interact with it, so there's a whole lot of energy being stacked up on the internal braking and the anchor as the waves apply a huge up-and-down force on a stationary buoy. Nothing's bending, and something's gonna break.

This kind of reminds me of "solar frickin roadways", where there were obvious design issues that somehow got ignored all the way to large-scale testing. I'd LIKE to see this work, but they need to address this design problem before they do large scale testing and find out the hard way that it won't survive as designed. It looks like right now they haven't done any testing in locations that pushed their "survival mode" anywhere near the level it's going to need to well... survive.

one thing I missed, since they're "merving" the jet packs, I'd bet the idea is for the main service robot to remain in orbit after running around and attaching the packs, and then sit there waiting for more packs to be launched, and attach those to additional satellites. Makes sense, saves costs not having to launch another heavy and expensive servicing robot for each refueling, you just need to launch semi-autonomous fueled jet packs and let the "mechanic" waiting in orbit attach them.

pretty much all modern satellites carry de-orbiting or disposal-orbit capability. They either take themselves down into the atmosphere (aiming for "point nemo", google it) or go to one of the stable lagrange points to die.

The 1st amendment was added to protect citizens' freedom for political speech and other government "retaliation". It's not a free pass to say anything you want. It doesn't protect slander, incitement to violence, defamation, or the classic "crying FIRE in a crowded theatre".

This case seems to be pretty similar to USRDA labels, where "people have a right to know" certain things about what's being sold to them. And placing a recycling symbol (and even some with a number) when they know the packaging or product wasn't designed to be easy to recycle and is being thrown away by almost every recycling facility is pretty clearly "false or deceptive advertising". It's not so different from placing a "made in USA" sticker over the Made in China mark. I don't see how any court has concluded that they have ANY chance of winning this case, and that's usually part of the bar to meet for an injunction.

Lies and deception come with consequences, and this is one lie that the public is sick of seeing.

Funny how if it's someone we like, they used it. But if it's someone we don't like, they abused it.

Wasn't there a scene in Minority Report where the star was trying to run away from the authorities he kept getting his iris scanned by electronic billboards and signs as he ran through the crowded shopping plaza?

IIRC the advertisements and announcements that played started customizing themselves indicating they'd identified a criminal and showing is face and profile?

it always annoys me to see announcements of a correlation being described as a cause-and-effect.

Whenever I see cause-and-effect stated without them being clearly distinguished, I always ask myself "could they have the cause and effect flipped around?"

Maybe people that have "younger brains" are much more likely to be in the group that has learned another language recently?"

That seems to be much more likely than the stated order, since people with more youthful minds would be more likely to be learning new languages than others with older, less-flexible minds?

Or stated another way, "younger minds encourage multi-lingual" rather than "multi-lingual encourages younger minds".

I have seen satellite dishes at the base of isolated cell towers, though I have no idea what they were being used for.

One big drawback for satellite networking is the delay it adds to the transmissions, to travel up to the satellite and get sent back down to a ground station. This delay probably wouldn't be tolerated by a cell phone user, especially if they were talking to another cell phone which would double the delay a second time.

There's also a bandwidth issue at the satellite, if you want to do that with hundreds of thousands of towers there's just no way to have that amount of bandwidth even from a cluster of satellites. The bandwidth problem isn't one of data rate, its one of needing to be able to communicate with the ground on so many different channels because of all the towers, and having satellites at many different geostationary locations. (that's what Musk is trying to do with launching this absurd number of starlink satellites)

High data rate meshing requires directional antennas pointed at other nodes, unlike the more broad-beamed bay antennas the towers use for cellular access. Adding several dishes and a bunch of expensive hardware to each tower would dramatically increase tower cost and maintenance.

It's much cheaper to just run a network drop off a nearby pole or trench a line to the nearest fiber vault. Even the towers out along the open highways tend to get fiber trenched to them rather than dishes networking them together over the air.

Here in the USA anyway, cellular service has been considered "critical infrastructure" for quite some time now, mostly due to the decline of landlines. 9-1-1 having high availability has been legally required for a long time, and those requirements shifted to the cellular network as people ditched their land-lines for cell phones at home. So all the towers have short-term (15+ minute) UPS's and a gas generator that auto starts, with requirements to run periodic tests.

The other part of it though is the towers nowadays require internet access to function. We had a massive storm system move through the area a few years ago with close to tornado-speed "straight-line winds" that took out a huge amount of above-ground internet infrastructure, rendering cell towers functionally disabled despite giving out full bars. There were a few lines still up but everyone's home internet was either down or spotty, and it was hard to get a cell call to connect. Was llke that for 2-3 weeks, really annoying.

So, power's not the only thing that needs to be protected to keep cellular service working.