If a bot-car can be held up by a gangster simply stepping in front of it in a situation where you'd actually like to rather plow through, how safe is that car for the people in it? Given, cars are more dangerous for their environment most of the time, but sometimes its the environment that is more dangerous for the car and the people in it.

Also driving through a rising river that is a meter deep may usually be a bad idea, but if the flood is rising it might be well worth the risk and a very reasonable decision to attempt it. You want to be able to actively make your car do that in those situations.

... wether a dumb command or AI deletes everything makes no difference.

I hope he had it in place or learnt his lesson.

No need for AI or other fancy stuff. Just redo your constitutional setup. Multi-party representative system, 5% barrier to entry for parliament, President becomes (largely) a ceremonial role, coalition government, independent non-private federal bank, independent default subsidized media, any member of a government that exceed 3% of debt per legislative period may not be re-elected ever again and a few more details and you're good for the next 250 years.

This isn't rocket-science. We all know what's broken and needs to be fixed and contrary to what some USians like to think, you can have a total revolution with not a single bullet fired. It's not that the vast majority of people in the US ain't noticing that fundamentals of the US system have to change. You got this.

After all, you guys already helped build a (quite well) working prototype of USA 2.0. It's called "modern Germany".

Given, the Soviet-Russian style of space technology has always been more pragmatic. But this looks rickety and somewhat ghetto-style, like deterioration by neglegt. Or they used chinesium for the structure and it failed before EOL.

However, it could also very well be that they've been using those exact same folding gantries for decades beyond EOL now and the finally simply failed due to wear and tear, no matter how rugged they initially were built.

It's probably a combination of both.

It would be absolutely hilarious if they can repair this russian-Soyuz style with a crew of welders and junk from a scrapyard in two weeks or so, spec-ing be damned. I wouldn't be surprised if exactly that happens. LOL!

... has to be just about undisputed #1 of nightmare material. Think Warhammer 40k but IRL.Basically the exact opposite of the Ian Banks culture. Imagine a fanatic revengeful god the l00nies can actually talk to and get new mayhem instructions from. Really malicious ones at that.

Yippee, nice times ahead.

No wonder the experts are warning us left, right and center.

Investment is a tricky one.

I'd say that learning how to learn is probably the single-most valuable part of any degree, and anything that has any business calling itself a degree will make this a key aspect. And that, alone, makes a degree a good investment, as most people simply don't know how. They don't know where to look, how to look, how to tell what's useful, how to connect disparate research into something that could be used in a specific application, etc.

The actual specifics tend to be less important, as degree courses are well-behind the cutting edge and are necessarily grossly simplified because it's still really only crude foundational knowledge at this point. Students at undergraduate level simply don't know enough to know the truly interesting stuff.

And this is where it gets tricky. Because an undergraduate 4-year degree is aimed at producing thinkers. Those who want to do just the truly depressingly stupid stuff can get away with the 2 year courses. You do 4 years if you are actually serious about understanding. And, in all honesty, very few companies want entry-level who are competent at the craft, they want people who are fast and mindless. Nobody puts in four years of network theory or (Valhalla forbid) statistics for the purpose of being mindless. Not unless the stats destroyed their brain - which, to be honest, does happen.

Humanities does not make things easier. There would be a LOT of benefit in technical documentation to be written by folk who had some sort of command of the language they were using. Half the time, I'd accept stuff written by people who are merely passing acquaintances of the language. Vague awareness of there being a language would sometimes be an improvement. But that requires that people take a 2x4 to the usual cultural bias that you cannot be good at STEM and arts at the same time. (It's a particularly odd cultural bias, too, given how much Leonardo is held in high esteem and how neoclassical universities are either top or near-top in every country.)

So, yes, I'll agree a lot of degrees are useless for gaining employment and a lot of degrees for actually doing the work, but the overlap between these two is vague at times.

Conflating education with academic rank.

Both are not the same. A detail politics likes to ignore because that enables noise-making.

The degree isn't about "getting a high-paid job", it's about knowing what the hell you're doing once you get a job. Although, fair enough, it's quite plausible that not many degrees would meet that standard either.

There is a possibility of a short-circuit causing an engine shutdown. Apparently, there is a known fault whereby a short can result in the FADEC "fail-safing" to engine shutdown, and this is one of the competing theories as the wiring apparently runs near a number of points in the aircraft with water (which is a really odd design choice).

Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that (a) the wiring actually runs there (the wiring block diagrams are easy to find, but block diagrams don't show actual wiring paths), (b) that there is anything to indicate that water could reach such wiring in a way that could cause a short, or (c) that it actually did so. I don't have that kind of information.

All I can tell you, at this point, is that aviation experts are saying that a short at such a location would cause an engine shutdown and that Boeing was aware of this risk.

I will leave it to the experts to debate why they're using electrical signalling (it's slower than fibre, heavier than fibre, can corrode, and can short) and whether the FADEC fail-safes are all that safe or just plain stupid. For a start, they get paid to shout at each other, and they actually know what specifics to shout at each other about.

But, if the claims are remotely accurate, then there were a number of well-known flaws in the design and I'm sure Boeing will just love to answer questions on why these weren't addressed. The problem being, of course, is that none of us know which of said claims are indeed remotely accurate, and that makes it easy for air crash investigators to go easy on manufacturers.

It's far from indisputable. Indeed, it's hotly disputed within the aviation industry. That does NOT mean that it was a short-circuit (although that is a theory that is under investigation), it merely means that "indisputable" is not the correct term to use here. You can argue probabilities or reasonableness, but you CANNOT argue "indisputable" when specialists in the field in question say that it is, in fact, disputed.

If you were to argue that the most probable cause was manual, then I think I could accept that. If you were to argue that Occam's Razor required that this be considered H0 and therefore a theory that must be falsified before others are considered, I'd not be quite so comfortable but would accept that you've got to have some sort of rigorous methodology and that's probably the sensible one.

But "indisputable"? No, we are not at that stage yet. We might reach that stage, but we're not there yet.

Or at least it's used as one.

And that does have it's advantages, believe it or not.

Any untrained office worker can open an Excel sheet and run the app that's built with it without any extra training or security and privilege stuff getting in the way. Office workers can build their own logic without having to shop around for some developer to take care of their problem and the ERP budget doesn't have to be touched. And it's even modern purely functional programming. ... That's how you eventually get Shadow IT that often becomes mission critical.

What SQL used to be in the 70ies Excel & VBA is today. Wether that's an improvement I couldn't really say für sure, but that's the way it is.

... and should've closed with "Would you like a more concise or more elaborate version of this article?". 8-)

Disclaimer: European here.

There are well over a thousand food additives that are banned and illegal in Europe, some of which are classified as effing prime-grade toxic waste(!) - meaning they cannot even be legally disposed of in a drain or a regular landfill - that are "legal" food additives in the US.

It is proven beyond any doubt that forever chemicals accumulate in liver and other vital mammalian (read: also human) organs and cause chronic diseases beyond low threshholds and now they're supposed to be legal food additives?

This is insane. No wonder your cancer rates are through the roof.

I suggest you people raise a stink and write some letters to congress. And ramp up subsidies for organic farming and natural produce. And limit them for processed foods. US health is deteriorating at a measurable pace and you guys should want to change that.

Just sayin'.

Two thumbs up and good luck!

... on board this could eventually be the next big thing, like Blender for 3D stuff. I might even actually buy a Smartwatch some day.