MS & Oracle stop working with Russia
Just read this on Twitter (so may not be true) but what are the implications? Sounds quite a big deal.
37 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Dec 2017
I always thought the South China Sea was fairly shallow - and it is very shallow near the coastal regions, but some areas in the middle basin go down to +4,000m. That's some serious salvage operation to lift that back to the surface... assuming they can find it in the first place! I assume they glide quite well under water and travel a fair distance as it sinks. Maybe they should start fitting air bags!
In real life driving, you have to bend the rules slightly to actually make reasonable progress in certain situations... For example, edging out into the road to block one lane of traffic at a T junction. We've all done it - and it's necessary otherwise you'd wait forever... which is what an autonomous car would do - simply because its 'brain' will have rules regulated by lawyers and insurance companies.
Even in 20 years' time when someone manages to develop a viable fusion power plant, it won't be that green. Sure, it won't generate carbon (other than very minor amounts indirectly) but it will irradiate the hell out of the containment vessel walls. This material will be degraded by the intense radiation generated by the fusion reaction and becomes brittle and weakened. So it will be periodically replaced. The surprising outcome is that the 'green' fusion reactors will be burying radioactive waste for generations.
As someone that spends a fair bit of time on two wheels, I dread the thought of an 'autonomous' Tesla driven by someone with a completely false sense of trust in the vehicle's abilities... as in the basic ability not to plough through slower-moving cyclists during adverse environmental conditions.
Memrister technology could be applied to biological computing. As far as I understand it, these devices essentially combine logic and memory into a single device. And they can be very small.
Biological computing does seem like a logical evolution for processing capabilities. However, it may not lend itself to applications that require a high degree of assurance and repeatability. Would you trust a self driving car for example powered by a computing system that is inherently opque in how it reaches decisions?
Moore's Law was of course founded upon the physical nature of transistor sizes with a direct correlation into 'processing power'. But today, there is probably no agreed definition of 'processing power'. It means different things depending on your aims. And so, isn't it more useful to look at the chip architectures and how software is applied to result in 'processing power'. Maybe Moore's Law is dead - but only because it is effectively broken rather than any constraint around physical sizes?
I remember reading Stanford University's 2019 AI Index Report that claims the demands of AI is now out-pacing Moore's Law ability to keep up. Apparently every three months the speed of AI computation (demand) doubles...
Never regretted binning FB about 5 years ago. Close friends use Telegram, everyone else it was just either voyeurism or bragging (when did you ever put that photo up of your kids' melt-down!). I hugely objected to how extensive, invasive, and opaque the FB android App was on my phone. Just need more folk to break their addiction!
It's really just not worth the benefits any more.. Often find products from the original manufacturers cheaper.
Reviews - minefield:
1. Display all reviews (rather than the selected guff Amazon chose to show)
2. Filter for those that actually bought the item
3. Filter for the exact product rather than something else entirely that gets grouped in.
4. Sort by most recent
5. Ignore gushing reviews
There's no philosophical difference between this silicon fido and the tracked 'robotic' bomb disposal units used by various militaries. They have a camera and rifle mounted to kinetically disrupt a suspect device. Perhaps its the sheer anthropomorphising (if that's a word) because its a dog look alike. Or maybe it's because it's so flippin capable, creepy, and connected. OK, I've convinced myself it's nothing like the bomb disposal units!
Staying vaguely on-subject with trouncing future green energy dreams... is anyone else mildly perturbed by the knowledge that 30% of the UK's 'renewable' energy mix comes from burning "low carbon" wood-chip? Sounds very much like a cop-out to me. But don't worry, I'm sure someone in HMG has worked through all the life-cycle CO2 emissions (amongst other stuff) and figured out it all makes sense comparatively.
Work-around: just connect Garmin watch via USB to laptop, and navigate under activities folder to locate the latest "FIT" activity file and manually upload to Strava. Actually quicker than doing it via (the now kaput) Garmin Connect.
How many times will Strava's IT folk double-check their backup strategies this evening...
Apparently: "During the investigation, the German police successfully communicated with the alleged blackmailer multiple times via an email and succeeded in capturing his/her Motorola brand device's MAC address f8:e0:79:af:57:eb, which was allegedly connected to several public Wi-Fi networks in Berlin at different times"
really... how...
The fuzz did back-track on that statement (maybe under heavy leaning from Earl Grayling). Difficult to see how you could get to 93 witness statements from employees within the airport if it was all BS.
Equally - it's difficult to see how you could defend the entire approach/take-off air-space (not just the airport perimeter) in a reliable way in day/night/rain/fog etc. As many have said on here, it is reasonably easy for a determined technically competent person to make their own quad-copter with a 30 min battery life, with an autonomous GPS system that would take-off, route over an airfield approach, and then head back to a pre-determined location. No radio-traffic or comms involved - so nothing to detect or block/jam.
Assuming a radar-based detection system (mitigates rain/fog etc) could detect, then the challenge is applying kinetic energy to disable the device. Again assuming you don't care where it lands/crashes! Directed energy weapons might seem an obvious choice but not that clever with aircraft in the vicinity.
The Russians apparently are considering deploying their own counter-drones - presumably directed onto target by a separate detection/tracking system. But that would still mean significant disruption and diverted flights whilst drone-dog-fight takes place in the skies. And it wouldn't appear certain that it would take out another drone 100% of the time.
You mean the Galileo project that we're no longer part of because it's run by those beastly Europeans.
Back to the subject - according to Wiki (so it must be true etc) "part of Ordnance Survey has operated as Ordnance Survey Ltd since 2015"... it begs the question which part has been ring-fenced as its own legal entity and for what purpose? Maybe the team that has the worlds biggest collection of coloured pencils for all that shading work.
Also the Met Office was until recently MoD-'owned' but now an "Executive Agency" (such a lovely term) and a Trading Fund of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Even our war-fighters need to know whether to bring an umbrella to the battlefield.
"... the near-certain fact that in just a few years the enemy will be able to track those with one of their mass-produced robotic drones and so their locations while out on patrol will cease to be "totally undetectable..."
The ocean's still a big place... a very big place. Unless you put a nuclear reactor on board an underwater drone it won't be on station long enough to have any chance of searching - let alone travelling fast enough to keep up with a nuclear powered submarine. And I don't buy the Russian propaganda around nuke-powered drones. (I'm not talking about nuclear warheads - which I know they've also talked about - and I hope to god they would trust the thing not to go wrong). Why else would they mention a mother-ship concept to launch a nuclear drone as it would have the endurance and speed to traverse from a Russian base. Plus, if you realistically wanted to put develop a reactor small enough and autonomous/reliable enough to stick on board an underwater drone it would probably cost something approaching the costs of building another small SSN. So what's the point?
Physics ultimately gets in the way of making oceans 'transparent' - things will get incrementally better in terms of detection, but conversely folk will find ways of making things quieter and find better ways of countering. Classic definition of an arms-race :)
Large scale energy storage needs more investment as a solution for bridging those days of zero wind or darkness. Plenty of good (and not so good) ideas:
- pressurised air stored within disused salt mines.
- free-fall weights in disused coal mines (short term power peaks)
- molten salt (as a very high thermal storage density)
- electrolysis to generate O2 and H2.
- reverse hydro (as in Llanberis, Wales)
I'm sure there are more crackpot (i.e. interesting/novel) ideas out there!