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This is obviously incorrect. Latency is not the same as bandwidth. EME hobbyists will bounce voice signals off the moon.

20 to 30 years would ensure that abandoned media that was formative to a person growing up will enter the public domain within their lifetimes which would be a nice thing to have in my opinion. It would also ensure that any work done by an artist during the early phase of their career (the phase where artists are most likely to agree to lopsided contract terms) would stand a chance of reverting back to the public domain before the end of that artist's career. Very very few works are making any significant revenue after 30 years. I think a system where initial copyright is free for 20 years, with the option of renewing for an additional 10 years for some fee, and then the option to renew annually after that would be fair. For the very small number of works that are still commercially viable after 30 years, the publishers can figure out how long it makes sense to keep renewing the copyright. Otherwise it really is in the public's best interest to have a robust public domain. Many fewer works would go missing that way.

The way the copyright is structured right now is the result of regulatory capture. The cost of these long terms of copyright is the loss of books, movies, music, games, etc. Millions upon millions of hours of creative labor have been lost. These costs are born by everybody that will never have to chance to have access to that media. The benefits of these long copyright terms are only the publishers. Having an annual renewal fee for copyrighted works published 30 or more years ago would be something that would be a visible cost in the books of large publishers. As it is it is too easy for them to ignore the downsides of long terms of copyright. I am not claiming that no media would be lost if we had no copyright, but the efforts of archivists are difficult enough as it is. Media that is no longer being copied is destroyed eventually. Obviously making it a felony to copy something will reduce the number of people making copies of it. That's the whole point after all.

Sure the SLS is a total mess, but from what I understand, there wasn't ever really a concrete plan on how to use SpaceX rockets to actually get to the moon. The following video is a presentation given at a NASA meeting explaining the issue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU

Wait a minute, that doesn't sound right.

For what it's worth, the entire Lichess corpus of puzzles (over five million positions with solutions and theming tags) is available for download in CSV format at https://database.lichess.org/#puzzles

That's a nice ideal. I honestly kind of agree with you in the sense that I wish that was how things were. But in my view, it's easier to think about the police as a force whose primary purpose is to enforce the property rights of the capital holding class. In the United States there have been court rulings clarifying that police officers are never obligated to risk their lives.

If you look at the actual numbers, at least in the US, policing can really only be viewed as a risky profession from a white-collar point of view. According to OSHA, construction workers, truck drivers, farmers, and even pilots all have a greater likelihood of dying on the job.

What about ignoring due process while doing so? Is that, in your view, in line with the constitution? If it is, what recourse does a US citizen detained by ICE (either accidentally or not) have? Also, how do you view Trump's efforts to end birthright citizenship via Executive Order? Birthright citizenship is in the 14th Amendment. If the president is allowed to arbitrarily redefine who is and is not a citizen, are constitutional protections anything more than ink on paper?

Reading this comment thread was a fun way to start my day. Always funny to see people react to satire about them.

Things started getting tricky at level 7. I can see that level 8 is solvable, but I'm not going to have time to solve it before leaving for work. Neat little puzzle.

Even if it turns out not to be the perfect solution, it might turn out that this kind of measurement might be useful for things like estimating the effectiveness of medication and other medical interventions, or even lifestyle changes. Imagine if this kind of thing could be turned into a medical device. Many people who end up committing suicide have had previous suicidal episodes. Being able to have a technology that people with known suicidal tendencies can use to help keep tabs on their own mental health could potentially be as useful to them as blood sugar monitoring is to diabetics.

That one take on it. The other is that it could potentially save literally tens of thousands of lives. Immediately classifying a potentially life-saving medical technology is a threat to the second amendment might not be the best look for 2A advocates.

I think more caution is warranted here. That argument seems to rely on our experience of reality being an accurate representation of objective reality. There are some ideas that are surprisingly difficult to dismiss that essentially state that our perceptions of reality do not have this property, and that in fact that any organism that is the result of an evolutionary process is really only ever incentivized to evolve a perception system that presents them with what is essentially a user interface. Spacetime itself may just be a data structure generated in the mind as a simplification of some much more complex and informationally overwhelming reality.

But that is actually a fairly accurate description of the paper you asked it to summarize for you. It's not the models fault that you don't like the argument of the paper.

Another way to look at it is that the fact that the rocket moved at all was due to the rockets. The fact that those rockets propelled the spacecraft into lunar orbit and then back to the landing zone on earth was due to the math.

Maybe the strategy here is to just not make any blunders.

In case you didn't know, this was the correct answer. Nice troubleshooting!

I am a CDL holder who used to do long haul trucking. I haven't had a chance to get behind the wheel of these vehicles yet, but the only criticism that I feel holds weight here is the one about not being able to get the light levels on the tablets to a non-distracting level during night driving. Hopefully that can be addressed with further development. The door being behind the driver's seat is a bit odd, and I anticipate it causing some confusion during traffic stops, but if these vehicles attain any decent market share, people will get used to it.

Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist. I'm just some random internet dude who likes learning things. My understanding is that a single photon wouldn't count as an observer. It doesn't even experience time (from the point of view of the photon, admission and absorption are simultaneous). Now if that photon is entangled with another photon, that can then be considered an observer. Someone please correct me if this is not accurate.

If you want an educated and informed populace (the kind you need for democracy to be worth a damn), then access to information for as many people as possible is a necessary but not sufficient condition. I don't buy that people are dumber today than they were a century ago. People did some pretty dumb things then as well. If you think things are bad now, presumably you would like the situation to improve. I don't see how the situation improves if most people would need to take out a loan to read academic papers.

Something that is worth noting, is that what these kinds of sites are doing is fundamentally the same as what local libraries do. Local libraries get a pass only because there was a precedent for their existence before copyright and IP law got out of hand. Would you have as blase an attitude if this were the big five trying to shutdown all the public libraries?

You just need one piston. Load the robot up with some rock ballast if you want, but even without, a thumper style compacter would still work in 1/6 g.

The raw transcripts are linked to from the article.

It is an interesting design problem for sure. I'm not expert on this stuff, but the first thing that comes to mind is gravel roads. Plenty of moon rocks would be available to be crushed into gravel. You might not even have to do that. Robots might be able to rake up enough material of suitable size.

Once you have your gravel, use robots to make a path and compact the regolith. Put down the gravel over the compacted regolith, and there's your road. I have no idea if that would actually work or not, but it's interesting to think about.

Yeah. After reading the article, I have to agree. But I'm no expert in this area. It seems like it could certainly help. If I had to guess, things like ECRAM and reconfigurable analog computing chips will have more of an effect than this (assuming they can be made to work).

I think the point here is that the people performing the actual experiments think that the amount of animal testing is inappropriate. If you do an experiment and it ends up killing the animal, that is one result. One data point. If you do the experiment 100 times and it kills 100 animals, that may be a signal that you need to work out some theory and not a signal that you need to go ahead and kill another 100 animals. If this were just PETA or something, it would be pretty easy to ignore, but when the employees performing the experiments are complaining, I think it's pretty reasonable to pay attention. These are people that signed up to work for the company. They knew that animal testing would be involved. Many of them had probably already worked on experiments that utilized animal test subjects. And these are the people saying that the level of animal testing is not appropriate.

My partner of the last six years is trans. Your post doesn't strike me as hate speech, but what Hacker News commenters seem not to understand is that making overly general statements about entire groups of people can often lead to an oversimplified view of the situation (see what I did there).

Let's start with the assumption that people can and do learn to "want" to be a particular gender. I am not an anthropologist, but I feel like this is a pretty uncontroversial take, and is the mechanism for how cis-gendered people learn to follow the gender norms of the culture they find themselves in. This is the key difference between gender and sex. Gender norms seem to be a cultural universal, but the form those norms take is dependent on time and place.

What this means is that in any society there are two sets of behavioral norms, one for perceived men, and one for perceived women. If a person in this society has a strong preference about which set of norms they prefer, and if the set of norms they prefer doesn't line up with their sex, you have the potential for that person to identify with the other gender. The term "transgender" is new, but behaviors associated with the term go back as far as you care to look.

So you have this potential tension where a person might prefer the gender norms of the other sex, but you also have the fact that questioning norms of any kind in a society is always somewhat taboo. A few very dedicated people would live their lives as the other gender. Many more probably would have liked to if they were aware that it was an option, but were not (in other words, even questioning a social norm can be difficult if there isn't already public discussion about it).

So if the sudden perceived increase in trans people seems like a sociogenic disease to you, I can see how you might think that. I can also see how hurtful it is to many people to frame it in those terms. If we take a closer look at the linked paper, they hypothesize that one of the drivers of the tourettes-like disease is attention seeking behavior. Are there people who decide to transition ultimately because they believe they will get more attention? I'm sure some do. But thinking that is the motivation for most trans people is a very hurtful overgeneralization and is unhelpful because it is just wrong. The trans people that I am personally acquainted with don't want more attention. They want less of it. If you even glance at common discussion topics in trans discussion forums, you will see that there is a lot of discussion about "passing". Passing doesn't seem like attention-seeking behavior to me, it seems like the exact opposite.

Does social media have no role to play in explaining the increase in people who identify as trans? It probably does have some role there. But its only accelerating and amplifying trends that already existed. LGBT+ issues in general have been getting less and less taboo to talk about for the last several decades. The internet and communications technology more generally is exposing people to more cultures and norms. My hypothesis is that there were many preexisting people who were unsatisfied with the gender roles that they were expected to fulfill, and that growing acceptance and discussion of LGBT+ issues made them realize that there was no reason to keep putting up with them anymore.

Third field down after simulating the impact.

I'm curious what kind of loyalty you think employees owe their employers in these kinds of extreme circumstances. We are talking about a radical change in direction and working style. Whatever deal these employees thought they were signing up for when hired was presumably pretty different than what they were presented with once Elon took over. One of his demands was in increase in working hours. This is a life-changing commitment that many people simply cannot make. A job is important, but it's not the only thing people need to spend time on. That's just one of the changes he is demanding.

Elon seems to be used to treating employees as interchangeable parts. If he is going to operate like that, it doesn't occur to me that his employees owe him any kind of loyalty at all.

A lot of the top comments seem to be saying no. I'll go ahead and make the argument that, yes, this technology will eventually pretty much end most programmers jobs. I'm not talking about tomorrow. Even if the technology was perfect right now (which it is not), it takes time for organizations to adapt to change. I am also not talking about something as far away as 20 years in the future either. I think in as little as five years, we will see a very measurable decrease in paid programmers due to automation. In the short term many of them may be shunted over to code review and QA workflows, but the idea that the programming industry is somehow special, and will be the exception to the rule that increasing automation in a field decreases the number of people employed in that field seems a bit groundless to me. Someone used the example of heavy equipment and shoveling dirt. Yes. There are still people employed in the business of moving around dirt. But the percentage of the population that is so employed definitely went down with the invention of things like backhoes. Take it from a guy who was actually employed at a job that involved moving around a lot of dirt. I used to work for a water utility company. Hearing the old timers talk, you realized that the work crews used to be a whole lot bigger. Backhoes existed, but they were very expensive weren't yet ubiquitous. The backhoes would be reserved for the most complex or deep dig sites. Otherwise it was shovel time. The crews had to be bigger. Now every dig crew has a backhoe; the standard dig crew is four guys, but you can totally get a dig done with just three, if one of them called out. That being said, people do still get paid to move dirt around. You still need somebody to operate the machinery. But if a magical backhoe was released tomorrow that could reliably and safely dig on its own, it would without a doubt be adopted as soon as the organization had the money for it. Digging is a huge source of liability; the monetary incentive would be quite high.

Now earth-moving is one industry. Let's talk for a minute about another industry. Ice cutting. The ice trade was a huge industry in the 19th century. At its peak it employed 90,000 people in the United States alone. It was ended almost overnight by the invention of the refrigerator. Hardly anybody even remembers that it was a thing. The world went on without a thought. That is another possible outcome of automation. And as scary as it is, I'd still rather have my refrigerator.

So maybe the programming industry survives, and just employees fewer people, or maybe it goes the way of the ice trade, and in a century or two it will just be a footnote of history that people used to have to manually program computers.

If anyone is interested in the opinion of an actual CDL holder, I think the technology has amazing promise and will eventually be adopted for many kind of CDL driving. I used to work for a public utility company (water/waster water), and we had a fleet of about a dozen or so dump trucks then we used whenever we had to dig something up. These were big machines, full size tractors with a dump bed instead of a fifth wheel (the mechanism that semi tractors normally have installed to tow trailers). They also served to tow flatbed trailers loaded with a backhoe, out to the dig site.

Now these machines never left our service area. They were always parked in the same lot every night. Putting in charging infrastructure in that lot would be trivial, and would almost certainly cost less than maintaining our own diesel storage and pumping infrastructure (which we did do because it saved us so much of our working day to be able to fuel everything up in the morning instead of having to drive to a truck stop before starting the work day).

A lot of trucking is local or regional. Those will be the markets that EV makes the most sense for. Where the trucks normally go back to the same lot every night, and the owners can cheaply put in slow charge infrastructure. Could we get EV trucking working for long-haul (a kind of trucking I've also done in the past)? Sure. It will require fast charge infrastructure though. 500 miles is a lot of range, but in long haul trucking, very often you operate in two driver teams, and your truck is always moving. Fast charging could solve that too, but perhaps the solution is to reduce the number of miles that freight spends on the road. Multi-modal shipping could be expanded. Use trains to cover large distance, and try to keep road transportation of freight to the regional level and local level. This is already an option that exists. Multi-modal is already a sub-industry in trucking. This seems like the most logical option to me, but I'm not an expert. Just somebody who has lived the industry for a few years.