I read that as "landing *system* failure". If a plane's engines die it can glide; if its landing gear fails to deploy it can still perform a controlled belly landing; if it's approaching at a bad trajectory it can take another go-around.

Starship has redundant landing engines (at least one prototype landing test failure was because it wasn't prepared to *use* the redundant engines; lesson learned...), but unless they're keeping better ideas secret, the current backup plan if a trajectory goes bad is "fall in the ocean, tip over uncontrolled, and hope not to explode", and the backup plan if a tower catch fails (they're basically putting the landing gear on the *ground* rather than on the vehicle!) is "try again until a slim propellant margin runs dry, then fall onto concrete".

If Starship works at all, this shouldn't be a long-term problem, I think. They'll have loads of opportunities to iteratively improve the system once they're flying it unmanned every week. They may never get to 1-in-a-hundred-billion commercial aircraft risk levels, but they'll be under the 1-in-250 levels that astronauts tolerate in no time.

"I don't care about where they play, I just want people to have fun playing games because that's just better for the industry,"

sounds like it ought to mean

"We'll still support future Minecraft releases on Mac, Linux, and older Windows versions after all; sorry about the confusion at E3!"

but I'm guessing it actually means

"I'm lying. I'm lying right now. Isn't it fun that I can lie to your face, and you can't even call me on it or I'll just give someone else the "story"? Now type my lies for me, stenographer. Maybe tell your kids to take a few classes in economics rather than journalism, huh?"

I program by writing in text files too, but that's just important for interoperability with other tools, it's not the definition of coding. Everyone knows that our CPUs don't execute ASCII, right? If it's Turing-complete, then it can be interpreted or compiled (i.e. "decoded") to do anything you want to execute.

I ask, as my computer churns away deleting the millions of temp files that a buggy printer subsystem created.

Stupid software must have been doing what its programmer told it to do instead of doing what its programmer intended it to do. Is the alternative, perfectly bug-free software, almost here yet? If not, then it's not silly to worry about what happens when software has write access not only to /tmp but to the rest of the universe as well.

"Self-interest" is an instrumental goal toward any terminal goal whatsoever, because "I want X" implies "I want to help with X" for any goal set X the AI can positively affect, and "I want to help with X" entails "I want to exist". You can avoid this by creating software which isn't smart enough to independently identify such obvious subgoals, but then calling the result "AI" is a bit of a stretch.

What you're describing is what TV sets already do to display interlaced video. The reason why "1080p!" is an advertising point is because 1080i, even after interpolation, is inferior; that's why they weren't using that less-deceptive description to begin with.

I mean if you don't like the product you can return it.

If they don't like being sued for fraud they can stop committing fraud.

Or is there really nothing other than CO2 levels which correlates strongly with the use of portable classrooms and with absenteeism? Perhaps low socioeconomic status has nothing to do with which school districts have more trouble affording permanent buildings? Perhaps higher numbers of children per family are unrelated to which schools are overcrowded?

It's hard to tell, when the bibliography consists of "studies show".

What's sad is that this is still better-than-average science and science reporting. We got an actual transcript, and the correlation seems to be at least a step above the "people who wear parachutes are more likely to die in skydiving accidents!" level which is so good at grabbing headlines.

... I just didn't expect it to happen so soon. A mesh network is a natural step to take on the path to fully automating roads and all but eliminating the dangers of the road. Naturally the next step would be to mandate cars to participate in the network, to get the best data. I just wasn't predicting it would be in this decade. Mind you, the recent advances in automatic driving without mesh networking has also been surprising, so maybe I should have seen this coming.

I don't know what the submitter is so worried about. This is simply one of the final nails in the coffin of road fatalities.

You lose many babies, even when trying (even successfully) to conceive. That's not a problem; potential babies are a dime a dozen. We can always just manufacture more, with pleasure!

I can't say the same for potential sales. Once a sale is lost, it's very hard to get back, and impossible to fabricate.

What's your problem with a rape analogy? If you don't think copyright infringement and rape have common elements, why not argue like a man, instead of down-modding like a coward?

Something is *created* when copying something.

Indeed. Nothing new. Nothing helpful. Nothing that contributes to our culture or understanding of the world. Nothing that is any good to anyone, except the person who obtains it.

Nothing is *taken*

Ah, this is where you're wrong. The fact that there is a component of creation does not imply there is not a component of taking, or destruction.

I run a bittorrent client that downloads torrents at random

That's a helluvan algorithm when you want something specific!

I think their greed might be clouding their moral judgement.

Is there much of a moral distinction between copyright infringement and theft? Both involve acquiring something to which you have no right, at the quantifiable detriment to the owner. Is there some other moral dimension to theft of which I'm not aware?

Not just government-backed, but government-guaranteed. The entire time they were pouring their own money into making this stuff, they were doing so under the assumption that the law saying they would get a monopoly on their particular product would be upheld.

Of course they feel entitled to their monopolies. And, moreover, they are entitled to reparations to those of us who break the monopoly.