Not in the US. Finders keepers hasn't been law here in a long time. It really started getting strict in the early ATM error when people started getting charged for trying to keep money from accidental dispenser errors. There were also some cases of trucks losing money on highways where people were prosecuted for picking it up. Found money is supposed to be turned in.

$200 million / 30,000 = $6666.67 * 12 = $80,000!!!! Dang. City workers are getting some respect in Zurich!

Some parents turn it on for their children from birth. Their theory is that the constant exposure to text matching the speech will provide early stimulation to the visual processing centers that will eventually be trained to read. For adults, turning on foreign subtitles can also help in learning a language.

Exactly. Many of the other responders are so stuck in the digital world their bringing "switching" into every comment. This processor is massively parallel analog where the functions are expressed with optical components. Such computers calculate at the speed of light through the prisms and other components. The speed limitations are found in injecting the data, interpreting the answer, and the biggest one, adjusting the optical path to solve a new problem. They have been in use for very specialized real-time applications where fixed mathematical functions need to be solved at speeds surpassing current supercomputers for much longer than 25 years. Think things like advanced, highly compact radar processors. The change here seems to be in making it reprogrammable and perhaps bringing it out of the black world though maybe this is an independent development that wasn't surpressed.

Some rural transformer is probably taken out by gun fire every day in the South. Seen them doing it. The only thing that I could imagine would make them think that this is more than some teenagers out cutting up is if they only hit some specific transformers that were guaranteed to take out an area for a while due to replacement time or something without hitting others at the same sites. I'm sure the electric companies in the region have a pretty large budget for replacing equipment hit by gunfire.

You're almost certainly right that the Chinese can get there on their own. They have more engineers than any other country in the world and the most of the top 100 universities. I believe we're being really stupid to harp about China buying the machines like we do. As long as they can buy them eventually, they'll probably be OK with being a couple of gens behind. But, if they have to make the investment by themselves unlike anyone else in the world, they'll probably do it right and use their mass to feed their own machine and move ahead of the rest of us.

China has plenty that isn't the latest and the greatest. Last I looked, there chip production measured in silicon was greater than ours. The whole battle over keeping chips out of China's hands right now is all about the latest and the greatest - things like processors for supercomputers.

This book ended with laws requiring everybody who looked to much like a highly public figure or star being required to have surgery to change their image in order to not violate the image copyright.

They aren't stupid. They are the longest term thinkers in the world. Even if they could make the fab work, the industry advances so fast that in just a couple of years it is no longer state of the art. There is no way to invade Taiwan and get a long term pay off on chip production. In their best dreams, it would be a boost for a few years but destroy any further chances to keep up for many decades afterwards.

I'm not saying entirely that they wouldn't invade Taiwan - just not for that reason. Quite the opposite perhaps. If we disconnect them entirely and give them no chance to keep up, then we back them into a corner. They can't hope to survive with the rest of the world advancing and them not. At that point, the argument that invading Taiwan precisely to destroy most of the world's top chip production would come into play. Setting back an enemy who is actively trying to destroy you could be a worthwhile goal.

It's not that it can't be run by the Chinese. It is that Taiwan can't make chips without machines that they buy from other countries that won't sell their best machines to China. If China invaded Taiwan, they'd gain absolutely no new chip making capacity. If the existing machines weren't destroyed during the invasion, they'd quickly die from inability to maintain them without the manufacturer's support. And invading Taiwan would not magically result in Europe starting to sell their best machines to China.

If life begins at conception and a state bans aborting a fetus older than some age, I guess all IVF embryos are considered to have been conceived and can never be thrown away if they pass the state's abortion age. The legal definition of conception does not include implantation. So they'll have to keep them till implantation regardless of cost. To dispose of them prior would put a medical professional in prison in some of these states.

It will also allow a woman who lost her ovaries to have a child to have a child with a man or a man with no sperm to have a child with a woman. So it will be developed. Of course, it is already in process with animals. That is a big market. Once developed for humans for any reason, it will allow all of those other cases. Just the way things work. If some state then bans it, go to another.

In addition, there is a direct cost to Mercedes that at least some of this fee would be compensating for... the cost of increased warranty repairs. They could probably make that more clear. For example, they could make it a setting that becomes owner controlled at the expiration of the warranty, when a pro-rated warranty add-on is purchased, or after signing papers to give up all remaining warranty benefits.

Oh, I totally agree. It is my engineering approach. Trying to escape it instead of embracing it is the problem. To embrace it, you must test early, test often, and test with full scale articles. That requires an approach that places the article cost above virtually any other consideration because article cost must be an order of magnitude or more less to test in this way. The good news is that can usually be achieved easily because engineers aren't driven to excess when they can test freely.

You're right. Same old same old. Though they indicate their over-engineering is required to prevent things like this, we know it can't. The recording for this one is basically, "whoopsies, there was more damage than expected. We'll need some more money and time to fix this one. We'll also need to have a bit more money and time for the next version because, obviously, we didn't spend enough or work carefully enough on this one."