The Weekly Weird - 2015-11-06

Skorgu

2015-11-06 11:00

Source

Well, uh, someone might have solved Graph Isomorphism in "just above P" time. No big deal.
Here's a nice little non-flying drone to deliver your packages.. I think, as always, that the concerns about theft and liability are vastly overblown and trivially solved by not being stupid and insurance, respectively. Remember, if you're running a fleet of these things you have super-accurate records of when you had a problem, where, and what was happening leading up to it. Oh look, this block has a 60% higher loss rate? Send drones in pairs for a while. Doesn't help? Route around it and email the cops.
Every so often people remember that this whole internet thing is literally a series of tubes and worry about the safety of those tubes. If that bothers you, just use satellite communication instead and eat the latency hit. Surely that's safe from this manner of interference.
That time I tried to buy a barrel of crude oil is entertaining as-is but the HN comments are horrifying. H2S is not to be fucked with.
That's where my short-throw dipstick goes. (Lots of bad language)
It looks like someone is finally taking the SABRE engine seriously. I don't think it should cost that much, since C-7 Aerospace has one for quite a lot less already.
Getting these things right is, after, all, rocket science.
Did the Chinese Military test an anti ballistic missile system?
I'm not 100% up on the state of the art of drone navigation but I think collision avoidance with onboard processing is pretty near the bleeding edge.
Ooops.
Any site called Avoid Humans is going to be right up my alley. [via]
I've seen those 'jet' ads on the subway and basically discounted them as foolish VCs and their money being parted. I don't necessarily think I was wrong but they do use F# on their backend.
"An increase in the mortality rate for any large demographic group in an advanced nation has been virtually unheard of in recent decades, with the exception of Russian men after the collapse of the Soviet Union." The full study is quite readable (and horrifying, etc).
In other 'scientific article' news, Man Dies After Tapeworm Inside Him Gets Cancer is...weird.
We've got all these cores that aren't getting any faster so what do we do with them all? One answer (Intel's) is to use them to poll the network to reduce latency and the next logical step from there is to use them to poll the disk to reduce latency. Note that all of this is in userspace.