The point is exactly that they’re trying. Despite the parade being attacked, the democratically elected government, and the police as an institution are supporting them. That is the essence of working towards freedom of expression and progress: The fact that the people in the parade are permitted by the government to express themselves, and protected by the government when they do so, even if popular opinion may be against them.
I have to admit: If you (semi-)regularly use floating point comparisons in programming, I don’t know why you would ever expect 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 to return true. It’s common practice to check abs(a - b) < tol, where tol is some small number, to the point that common unit-testing libraries have built-in methods like assertEqual(a, b, tol) specifically for checking whether floats are “equal”.
You should pick up a history book and talk to some real breathing people for a change.
Long range artillery has pretty hard limits, and once you approach the 100km range, time to target becomes a real issue, even for missiles that can be shot down.
Modern anti-air hat a range of several hundred km, and has been combat tested. More short-range systems (< 50 km) are in use (with huge success) every day in Ukraine. Of course bombers have also improved, but I wouldn’t put money on the bombers having improved relative to the AA.
Ps. I’m not the person downvoting you, I think you make a decent point, I just disagree :)
I specified “a reasonable distance from shore” because an important part of the point of a carrier is exactly that it can stay easily 100 km from shore and still strike far inland. If a carrier is in range of shore-based torpedoes, they’ve likely messed up long ago.
As for bombers: They’re historically the major threat to carriers, but I don’t see any modern developments that make modern bombers any more of a threat to modern carriers than WW2 era bombers were to WW2 era carriers.
Saying they were always more trouble than they were worth is a bit of a miss though: They completely dominated for a period, to the point where entire columns would be redirected or kept in port if intelligence arrived saying that a certain battleship had left port and was on the hunt.
As for the “modern” aircraft carrier: I think it will remain viable until we see a fundamental paradigm shift in how naval warfare is conducted. A carrier is at the centre of a carrier strike group, and is probably one of the most well protected places on the planet at any time, and can move at over 40 knots. I have a hard time imagining what could locate and take out an alert carrier in reasonable distance from shore, other than another carrier group.
To be fair: Europe spent 20 years and massive resources trying to improve the situation in Afghanistan, failed spectacularly, and were told very clearly by the Afghans that they should leave. I wouldn’t judge them for taking that message to heart and finally leaving Afghanistan alone.
In addition to cost (which I don’t have numbers for) there’s a question of efficiency: Geothermal heat it typically relatively “low temperature” heat, which makes for very inefficient power plants, especially in southern places like Italy and Greece, where there is little or no easy access to cold reservoirs (like the sea around Iceland).
Geothermal energy is the perfect source for heating cold places in winter, or otherwise heating places you want warm, but you need quite specific geological conditions for it to be an efficient means of producing electricity.
I really struggle to comprehend how you can debug hardware that is several light-hours away, let alone how you would proceed to split an OS (or whatever Voyager is running) into separate parts and then upload those parts to separate hunks of memory to make a functioning machine…
Also: What would they do if the code they uploaded was corrupted “in transmission”?
If we’re able to make hydrocarbon-synthesis from CO2 efficient… we’re still going to need to source the hydrogen somewhere.
But if we do that using electrolysis (with renewables), and are able to create more energy efficient CO2 capturing processes, I could see synthetic hydrocarbons as a viable fuel option in the future. The thing is: They’re stupidly good at being stable, energy dense, energy carriers. We also have a lot of infrastructure in place to handle hydrocarbons already.
In principle, synthetic hydrocarbons could be part of a zero-emission cycle, where we capture CO2 and electrolyse hydrogen with renewable energy, and use the hydrocarbons as an energy carrier. But if we go that way, we’re definitely going to have to research efficient hydrogen production, and probably storage as well.
One of the advantages of hydrogen is that tanks and fuel cells can withstand a large number of “charging cycles” much better than batteries. Additionally, for ships, the amount of energy needed to move is so enormous that I fear we’ll have a hard time creating batteries that are feasible for long-distance shipping.
For short distance ferrying (including large, car carrying ferries) on the other hand, Norway has already implemented quite a few electric stretches. The major issue there is building the infrastructure to charge the ferries.
There’s a comment on another post with this article doing the math on this, and it seems like the net emissions (when you account for efficiencies) actually favour steam-reforming + fuel cells.
The Spanish Inquisition
I would argue that it is not the work produced by the AI, but the trained model itself, which infringes on copyright.
The model cannot be regarded as an artist, but as a product, commercial or otherwise, that has been created by stealing copyrighted work.
Of course, once the AI is trained, you can’t look at some arbitrary output and determine whether that specific output came due to some specific training data set. In principle, if some of your training data is found to violate copyrights you either have to compensate the copyright holder or re-train the model without that data set.
Finding out whether a copyrighted work is part of the training data is a matter of going through it, and should be the responsibility of the people training the model. I would like to see a case where it has been shown that a copyrighted dataset has been used to train a model, and those violating the copyright by doing so are held responsible.
I’ve thought about this regarding code as well: An AI is nothing without a training data set, if someone uses licensed code to train an AI, they should definitely be bound by the license. For example: If an AI is trained using copyleft licensed code, the resulting model should also be regarded as copyleft bound. As of now, I suspect this is to a very large degree being ignored.
Removed by mod
In addition to battery designs that scale better than Li-ion (e.g. redox-flow batteries), I’ve heard some places are looking at options for “mechanical” storage: When you have energy surplus, pump water back into reservoirs, and generate hydropower when you have a deficit.
The amount of energy that can be stored in existing reservoirs is massive, so this could make hydropower function as the “buffer” for other renewable energy sources. I think the idea sounds promising, the major issue is that it’s less viable (or not viable) for places with flat topology.
At first I was wondering why you were downvoted, then I read your second paragraph.
I’ve been missing an alternative to Facebook that I can use for non-anonymous planning of events and communication in hobby groups etc. and I had never heard of any of the “Facebook-type” federated stuff before!
Now I just need to convince a bunch of people that this is viable to use without being the annoying guy…