If China had "no regulations" and was building out 100% coal, no one would be worrying that China industry would have an advantage due to low electricity cost vs rest of world.
So I haven't looked through the comments, and assume this has been discussed, but the simple solution is to limit contracts to, say, $4M, and pay only on successful completion. Then build a large project through a series of smaller steps.
He brought ESP up in his paper about the Turing Test. My understanding is that it is possible counter argument to his proposed machine intelligence.
Belief in ESP back then is more understandable since they didn't have the experiments that disproved it, or the knowledge of biology that doesn't show a mechanism.
> Belief in ESP back then is more understandable since they didn't have the experiments that disproved it, or the knowledge of biology that doesn't show a mechanism.
IMO, quite the opposite. They had more than sufficient knowledge about biology to entertain hypotheses about how it could work in theory, e.g. electrical signals leaking from the brain, etc. And there was plenty of "science" purporting to show an effect, if not the mechanism. OTOH, every generation since before time immemorial[1] has been burned by people making and profiting from these and similar claims. So just paying attention to what the old timers tell you, and keeping tabs on claims as you age, remembering how they pan out, can go a long way to honing one's B.S. detector. (This current ESP fad and the "tests" used to prove it seems to mirror identically a similar wave of claims I remember hearing about on the news and TV talk shows as a kid in the 1980s.) But some generations get carried away more than others, perhaps because of excessive optimism during periods of rapid technological advancement. Even stone cold geniuses can be too credulous; being optimistically credulous may even positively correlate with success in advancing fields of endeavor.
It will be interesting to see who owns all the compute hardware in a few years, that cost billions now, and what becomes of it. With an expected useful lifetime so short the depreciation rate is insane.
I find the article unconvincing, although I'm open to being convinced. With historical hindsight, it should be easy to see if the Lamarr et al patent seems novel. Just because an examiner doesn't allow a claim, I don't see that as strong evidence it wasn't novel at the time. They always are rejecting claims, sometime for good reason, sometimes not.
A more convincing article would focus on purported prior art patents, and let the reader judge if really anticipated frequency hopping.
One of the key requirements for getting a patent is that the invention must be novel. So indeed, their work is novel; it's just not of any importance at all. It is a Rub Goldberg mechanical mechanism. To understand this, you need to focus on the invention as defined by the granted claims, not on whatever prior art may be disclosed in the patent's specification (the wordy bulk of most patents).
To me, the interesting question is, were they the first to come up with the concept of communicating while jumping around on a random-like sequence of frequencies. What was the prior art?
I can think of a few reasons. People tend to overorder pizza more than other stuff. Pizza is also more robust than other foods, so it survives being thrown away more than other things. It's also very satiating, comprising bread, dairy and meat.
Right, but I'd expect it to be the same with fancy pizzas. I just don't get the point to target cheap pizza place in particular if you're going to dumpster dive
You mention "brain fart". There is certainly a long history of pilots selecting the wrong lever, or wrong switch. So, it is possible the pilot who denied switching the fuel off thought he had switched something else.
My understanding is that after several incidents of pilots shutting off the wrong engine, the training was overhauled so that from day one they treat fuel switches as sacred. I heard that it’s required to ask for confirmation before toggling the switch, just to be absolutely certain. It’s not really something that can be done by muscle memory during flight, and especially not during takeoff.
If he was trying to do something else, he would have called it out. E.g. an audible “gear up.”
Also, it took 10 and 14 seconds to switch them back on. If it was an accidental switch, you would think it would have been quicker to switch them back.
I have a couple of those type of switches, though smaller, in my parts bin. They were from some piece of surplus equipment that got junked. Where I've seen them used is in a crowded control panel where they might just get bumped. The two red plastic levers to the left are another type of safety switch: The lever is spring loaded, and covers the handle of a toggle switch.
In my view it would be quite hard to move them by accident, and probably not possible to move at once.
It would be interesting to know if the plane has any other switches of the same type, that are routinely activated.
