@dtg11 Presumably depends on whether the race is long enough for the Alfa to break down?

@milky Even beyond the inflation, there's also of course the cost of storing the car, and more importantly the cost of not investing that money in something more productive.

@pyroholtz I don't know, these make for more exciting videos when the root ball comes free and then launches into the rear window of the pulling vehicle.

@ttyymmnn

@ttyymmnn Better for everyone! And it will give them a leg up in college:

@highlander

NASA has released footage from Perseverance's Mars landing last week:

As a bonus, here's a picture of the descent taken from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite, 435 miles away:

@pip-bip The Automation Challenge is actually secret crowd-sourced car design.

Our weekly post is up at Backtalk, so head on over to check it out, and let us see your own fur faces!

https://backtalkvillage.blogspot.com/2021/03/fur-face-friday.html

@skyfire77 That's a pretty impressive kit.

Still my childhood tells me that this is what a Lego Space Shuttle should look like:

(though if they were to re-release it they need an orange tank instead of that grey)

@looseonexit Saw an article with a little more info. Apparently the Arkansas DOT inspects the bridge themselves every year in the fall. The guy they fired lead those teams (so it's not quite picking on the lowest people). The claim is that his teams missed this for at least two years because they were not following procedure and not actually visually verifying the integrity of all these components. The upper structure of the bridge is inspected every two years by the private contractor who noticed the break this time. Unlike the DOT inspection teams they have a drone, and so briefly caught the above image, but weren't carefully checking that area since their responsibilities were the arches and ties. I guess this time around it was too big to miss despite not being in the area they were checking.

Definitely an improvement. I've got some plastic strips on the side of the windshield that are all toothy like that, but they are part of big pieces that run from the hood all the way to the rear window and apparently can't be replaced without breaking every single clip, so I just leave them. Don't really seem to do anything anyway.

@looseonexit said in I-40 Bridge Fracture Follow Up - Inspector Fired:

I still wonder if it's a % or they alternate inspections, or just say screw it and inspect on their own intervals and then overlap.

What I've read is that Arkansas is responsible for inspections and Tennessee handles maintenance. Not sure that that's fair, but it at least in theory avoids pressure to ignore things to keep costs down.

@smallbear Should be more than twice the battery weight to get twice the range, since you also need to move the weight of the new batteries.

This is of course one reason why people are less enthusiastic about electric semis, unless you tolerate way shorter ranges (not impossible, it's easy to imagine self-driving semis that just hand off their trailer every few hundred miles), you are going to be spending a lot of weight on batteries. Though personally I think we should install trolley wiring on the interstates and let electric trucks (and even passenger cars) use that.

@barnie This one washed up in Australia a few weeks ago after being missing for two years:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-27/research-sail-drone-washed-up-on-gippsland-beach/100099328

@wbizarre Pillarless Mercedes but you totally missed the chance to compare these Remarkable Achievements:

@krustywantout Autonomous trucks make sense to me, but autonomous ships not so much. Just seems like you'd want people on the ship in any event for maintenance, piracy deterrence, etc.

Though I suppose that without crews, sail-powered might end up viable for non-time-critical goods.

@jminer Seems a bit silly to ban species that are already well established in the ecosystem though.

@musashi66 Obviously the answer is to eat you banana peels. For example:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CGiFy6Qpetn/
(I haven't tried that but I have my doubts it is actually good)

@davesaddiction I think it's unavoidable. A fully autonomous system is going to be able to react faster than one with a human in the loop, which means that as soon as someone does it, other countries will need to as well, or be left behind. There might be some room to say that some ground attacks need human authorization, but other scenarios are too time critical for that.

Of course we've had some systems that take humans out of the loop already. Point defense/C-RAM systems are designed to autonomously identify and destroy threats. Granted those are generally going to be missiles or the like as opposed to manned weapons. I don't know if longer range air defense systems are designed to be able function with the same level autonomy when targeting aircraft. It seems like it should be easy enough to do, but we probably don't want computers causing a Vincennes incident (though the flip side is that the computer might be less subject to the cognitive biases that led to the shootdown).