Posts by Pascal Monett 16728 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Well, Humanity could plausibly have built a swarm of space umbrellas to control the amount of radiation that reaches Earth, and could plausibly have built an asteroid deflection facility on the Moon by then, so if we can avoid scorching the Earth ourselves in the meantime, we might have a fighting chance to still be on Earth.
Not to mention that, in half a billion years, there's plenty of time for scores of generation ships to carry excess population to viable destinations while they slowly go crazy and forget why they're in space in the first place . . .
I'd argue that Man in this context is supposed to be the general human being and not the human male, but first I'm sure that if they were intelligent enough to infer that they wouldn't have put that in a replacement list and second, it seems that Humanity is going to the dogs anyway, so why bother ?
Maybe it shouldn't be white US males handling this project. I think there should be some European, South American, Asian and African input as well. I don't feel part of the KKK when I say that a process is hung, or that I'm killing it.
But they still offer commercial trips.
Am I supposed to be surprised that something may have gone wrong ?
I would have thought that offering a commercial service would be surrounded by guarantees that are a bit beyond "We designed the sub with NASA". I would have supposed that there would be a clear trail of paperwork pointing to all the tests that have been done and approved by some authority that is not an employee of the company.
Apparently not.
And if the answer is "nobody would be foolish enough to certify", then the response should be "Well I'm not going".
They went, and I'm guessing they'll stay.
Frankly, throwing yourself out of a plane with just a few meters of cloth to keep you alive seems positively reasonable in comparison.
Well done.
Shame that you can't have the same attitude towards the dinofuel industry.
Or maybe Musk should buy a few politicians, like they did ? Ah no, there's the whole "cutting costs" thing.
Oh well, nothing lasts forever.
All required because someone, at the specification stage, wrote "local currency" when discussing currencies and everybody just went along with it.
After all, you're only setting up a cloudy thingy on a communications network that goes around the world, it's not like you should actually take into account any specific financial considerations, such as accounting departments in multinational corporations having to deal with multiple currencies, right ?
Right.
Pretty much confirmed what I thought : there is no legal possibility of preventing Big Money to merge. However, there is definitely the legal possibility of making a company split in two, if you're willing to go the distance, spend decades in legal wrangling and make hay for scores of lawyers.
In the meantime, apparently the only thing possible is basically banning the results of the merger in the countries that don't like it, which will do squat as far as consumer interest is concerned.
Yay capitalism.
I'm sure that they'll happily turn themselves to Cisco, right ?
Cisco, a company based in a country that has all the laws required to force it to reveal information to its Goverment.
While being forbidden to reveal publicly that it is doing so.
Yeah, much more secure than Beijing.
Intel : Full year 2022 results ? $63.1 billion
NVidia 2022 : $26.91 billion
HP 2022 : $63 billion
Raytheon : 2022 income at $5.2 billion (for some reason, Raytheon prefers to officially talk about its sales and share price instead of its revenue)
So, tell me why these companies needed a few piddling millions of government money to do that research.
That money should have been awarded to startups that had a good idea (okay, have to find some, but still).
"when we move to the Star Trek phase," it will allow the "technology to be our friend."
Well that clears a lot of things up as far as UK Gov is concerned. They're waiting for Captain Kirk (Pickard ?) to beam down and solve all their problems.
Now I understand NHS better.
Notionally. From the citizen point of view.
From the view of Boris Johnson, you're only good to be knifed in the back, tortured until you give up your banking details, then have your body stuffed under teh sofa while Johnson and his ilk empty your accounts and go party with some Russian oligarchs.
But, apart from that, yeah, you're right.
Um, where's the problem ?
So you have a pseudo-AI-controlled missile launcher. Let's say that they're not nukes. You'll still have a screen to monitor the status, with a pair of eyes checking that screen, and I fail to see why there shouldn't be a Big Red Button (with a plastic cover) or similar to shut down or prevent any unscheduled launch.
Like, the fuel ignition is connected to a wire that leads to a switch on the control panel (ok, not a button). Flip the switch and ignition is impossible, no matter how many orders the AI sends.
Obviously, the switch will be set to Allow when all is normal, because if there is an alert and the system needs to launch in the next twenty seconds, then there might not be enough time to engage ignition, but then I'm supposing the entire system is doing its job.
It's when all is clear, no issue is at hand, then suddenly the panel goes rogue, red lights strobe and THAT is when you need to know : should this be shut down or not ?
Then again, if we're talking AI-controlled hardware that should react in less-than-human time (and 20 seconds is pretty short if you're not already on DEFCON 3), then go ahead and install all the backdoors you want. First, Beijing will thank you for giving them access and time to plan and second, you will need another AI to use said backdoors in time if it is called for.
So, which lobby group won that round ?
Because let's be honest here, this is not a courageous political decision. Avoiding entanglements with Beijing is par for course, but apparently some big purses were still pushing for inclusion.
So what money bag was the big factor ?
Um, it's very likely that it would have been regarded as genuine anyway.
Just this week I got an email posing as from Amazon Prime, nicely alerting me to the fact that my automatic renewal had not gone through and click here to allow us to take care, or I would incur some additional renewal fee of €59.
Initially, the only thing that bugged me was the "additional" renewal fee. I thought to myself : huh ? There is no renewal fee on Prime ! Then my brain kicked into gear and I checked the link and, sure enough, it did not go to any domain registered by Amazon.
Finally, I logged onto my Amazon account and checked : my Prime subscription is in December.
Nice try, guys. For a tenth of a second, you caught me compliant. But that link would have given you away anyway.
But that's only because I always check the link. 90% of people don't (and that's more like 99.9% probably).
So good on Google for correcting the issue. Now someone tell me that changes anything in the Luserverse.
Who and in what government agency is going to have a use for a babbling "generative content" toy that can't actually bring itself to define anything specifically ?
Are there that many government employees that will ask how long it takes for a tank cannon to cool down ?
ChatGPT is not a reference tool, nor an encyclopaedia. It seems like just yesterday ChatGPT was but a toy for university types to play with, and today it is being monetized like crazy.
Hey Borkzilla ? Have you checked that its output is reliable and accurate ?
Don't think so.
Oh, a multimillionnaire is going to get slightly less millions for doing what already ? Laying people off and parading in front of news cameras ?
Excuse me while I am not duly impressed.
I did not know that China's National Security was so fragile as to be put in danger by a song.
That Beijing wishes to have Google correct the fact that the song is not the national anthem is fine and perfectly justifiable, but to forbid it is just nuts.
But it's China, so nuts it is . . .
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
