While I do agree with the sentiment that spyware like this should not only be regulated, but better yet, not be allowed to exist at all, this article seems to be terribly written.

It implies many things by cherry-picking quotes and implying the magnitude of numbers where none exist (see their point regarding the slice of the European budget of the worldwide spyware industry). It also seems odd to portray the US as a winning contender, when 70% of the US’ national intelligence budget goes to private companies. In fact, one of the companies criticized – the british BAE Systems – receives nearly $2 Billion in intelligence spending alone from the US (according to their own 2021 fiscal report). Here might a good time to highlight how ridiculous their pointed criticism of Europe’s lack of a “common regulatory framework” is, since here the US has even less regulatory power than the EU would have for it’s internal market.This article seems to be attacking what it can see, which are publicly visible European intelligence firms as opposed to the classified going-ons of their American counterparts.

TL;DR:

1. Am I stupid?
2. Is the author stupid?
3. Is this news outlet stupid?

Who wouldn’t? They are doing some of the most advanced rocket science on the planet. Of course, trusting corporations statements and research is an entire topic of it’s own. Taking Elon Musk seriously on the other hand…

Wenn es um Technologieoffenheit geht, dann müssten eben diese Initative und andere Branchen sich von der Raumfahrtbranche was abschauen. Ich sehe den Sinn in deiner Kritik nicht wirklich, weil es ja vor allem interessant ist was tatsächlich gemacht wird, als was auf dem Papier steht. Die Deutsche und Europäische Raumfahrt ist führend (im Vergleich zu anderen Industrien) wenn es darum geht Informationen, Forschung und eigene Ziele offen darzulegen. Auch aus eigener Erfahrung kann ich berichten dass ungefähr ~20% aller Forschungsarbeiten, die ich zitiere aus Europäischer Raumfahrt kommen. Das sind sogar eben die Paper ohne Paywall (vgl. siehe Medizin, EE, etc.).

Das ist mal wieder ein Fall davon, dass die Bundesregierung ihre Vorhaben inkompetent umsetzt. Aber die Technologieoffenheit ist durchaus gegeben.

And when someone says “dream job” they are referring to the semantically correct meaning of the word? I have my doubts. When people say they’re dream job consists of doing something, like “helping people”, I think it is the “work” that interests them, and not the financial details.

What you call sick is only sick if you take your awfully correct definition, which I honestly don’t think correlates well with what people mean with it.

Thats also why I would still tend to agree with you, because I dont believe in laboring for some bosses benefit either. But certainly not with the initial wording

Nah thats bullshit. And this is coming from somebody who would tend to agree with you, but you can’t always be so excruciatingly black and white. For example, my dream job is what I do in my free time, except in a non-profit organisation where I am not chained by an individual lack of resources. Some work furthers humanity. Some work is completely voluntary. Sometimes a dream job is that way to scratch the biological itch to keep our brains busy.

Additionally, this supports the bullshit capitalist argument that people wouldnt want to work anymore if not coerced into it. I believe people would still dream of doing important jobs that help humanity even out of their own free will.

Feeling pretty called out, ngl

From briefly having worked on a project where this was a relevant issue, and I had to throw good people of foreign nationality off the team due to higher up NASA decisions: ITAR also becomes relevant when you want to access data and hardware that is ITAR regulated for use in your mission. This is the case for all space missions – even for SpaceX, who likes to do things in-house – since the advanced electronics, alloys, etc. will come from elsewhere and fall under regulation.

Cool, didn’t think of that one. But it would still work, since you could consider that a constant in front of the f(x) not raised to the nth power (easier to imagine if we have a constant function, then its just (b-a)). The nth root will then normalise it to 1 for any real factor.

Dafuq? What do you take to a gun fight then?

I don’t know a single person who consumes milk because they think they require it. They just like the taste of dairy products.

The subsidization is an issue imo, but I don’t think people are as brainwashed regarding milk as you assume.

It should be fine for normal use cases when used with error correcting codes without any active scrubbing.

According error rates for ECC RAM (which should be at least by an order of magnitude comparable) of 1 bit error per gigabyte of RAM per 1.8 hours¹, we would assume ~5000 errors in a year. The average likelyhood of hitting an already affected byte is approx. (5000/2)/1e9=2e-6. So that probability * 5000 errors is about a 1.2 percent chance that two errors occur in one byte after a year. It grows exponentially once you start going a past a year. But in total, I would say that standard error correcting codes should be sufficient to catch all errors, even if in hibernation for a whole year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory

TMR (so the tripilicate method) wouldn’t be super suitable for this kind of application since it is a bit overkill in terms of redundancy. Just from an information theory perspective, you should only have enough parity suitable for the amount of corruption you are expecting (in this case, not a lot, maybe a handful of bits after a year or two). TMR is optimal for when you are expecting the whole result to be wrong or right, not just corrupted. ECC and periodic scrubbing should be suitable for this. That is what is done by space-grade processors and RAM.

The gold around satellites are actually very thin layers of mylar, aluminum foil and kapton (a type of golden, transparent plastic) which are used to keep heat inside the satellite inside, and heat outside, outside (See Multi-Layer Insulation). Radiation shielding usually comes from the aluminum structural elements of the spacecraft, or is close to the electronics so you do not waste too much mass on shielding material. Basically, shielding efficacy is most determined by its thickness, so it quickly becomes quite heavy.

Indeed, because those two things were only exemplary, meaning they would be indicative of your system having a bottleneck in almost all types workloads. Supported by the generally higher perforance in 64-bit mode.

Clearly you can address more bytes than your data bus width. But then why all the “hacks” on 32-bit architectures? Like the 36-bit address bus via memory mapping on SPARCv8 instead of using paired index registers ( or ARMv7 width LPAE). From a perfomance perspective using an address width that is not the native register width/ internal data bus width is an issue. For a significant subset of operations multiple instructions are required instead of one.

Also is your comment about turing completeness to be taken seriously? We are talking about performance and practicality. Go ahead and crunch on some 64-bit floats using purely 8-bit arithmetic operations (or even using vector registers). Of course you can, but the point is that a suitable word size is more effective for certain computational tasks. For operations that are done frequently, they should ideally be done at native data-bus width. Vectored operations will also cost performance.

I am unsure about the historical reasons for moving from 32-bit to 64-bit, but wouldnt the address space be a significantly larger factor? Like you said, CPUs have had vectoring instructions for a long time, and we wouldn’t move to 128-bit architectures just to be able to compute with numbers of those size. Memory bandwidth is, also as you say, limited by the bus widths and not the processor architecture. IMO, the most important reason that we transitioned to 64-bit is primarily for the larger address address space without having to use stupidly complex memory mapping schemes. There are also some types of numbers like timestamps and counters that profit from 64-bit, but even here I am not sure if the conplex architecture would yield a net slowdown or speedup.

To answer the original question: 128 bits would have no helpful benefit for the address space (already massive) and probably just slow everyday calculations down.

Wonderful picture, thanks for sharing :)

Rotary engines were never used for helicopters AFAIK. Maybe there are some niche designs

Yup, I know, it doesnt check out at all, you wouldn’t put a rotary on a helicoptor. But “rotary” engines were indeed used on aircraft, since they also refer to a radial cylinder configuration where the engine housing moves and the axis is fixed. So I think it’s likely they were referring to the common WWI plane engine. I didnt think of a wankel at all till you mentioned it! Interestingly enough, modern wankel engines are also sold for helicopters.

I’m a little confused, aren’t they just referring to aircraft rotary engines with the cylinders arranged radially? Or what’s the triggering part?