Well sure. Ostensibly, all you need is a small fission reactor, and you could easily power an electric-powered "jet" design, but where's the fun in that?:-)
I don't know of anything nuclear powered that can replace jet engines.
Well, I do, but you won't like it. Basically, you put the fuselage of a plane on top of a tank filled with nuclear bombs, and you drop them one at a time into a combustion chamber, where they go off, and a big hunk of metal protects the passengers from radiation and directs the explosion to cause thrust. Then, at the right point in the ballistic trajectory, a parachute comes out, and the "airplane" lands somewhere within a few miles of the desired airport.
How does two fiber cuts take down something the size of Comcast? Two fiber cuts shouldn't even be enough to bring down your average college network, much less something that big. There should be hundreds of paths through their network, and the whole point of BGP is that single-digit numbers of failures shouldn't matter.
My guess is one of two things is the case:
Comcast, in an effort to cut costs, is deliberately throttling some of their more expensive backup links, so that when one main link fails, the others are unable to take up the slack due to artificial bandwidth scarcity.
Comcast is incompetently running so close to the limits of their bandwidth that a single failure brings them to their knees (in which case if I owned any of their stock, I'd be selling it right now).
Either one makes me wonder what the heck kind of two-bit operation they have going there.
I'll repeat - Remember when people were saying how safe these self driving cars were? After all, the software is not fallible as a human.
Nope. I remember folks saying that about Waymo/Google, but not Uber. Uber has always been a company that takes shortcuts and ignores rules/laws. Anybody expecting safe self-driving tech from them should have realized their mistake long before the first accident.
Self-driving tech will eventually be much safer than humans, because it will be able to learn from mistakes on a scale that humans can't hope to achieve. But none of that precludes a company from taking shortcuts and, as a result, creating a dangerous solution.
The problem is that they make the decision for you. As an ISP customer, I should have a 60 Mbps pipe. If I want to partition that into a pair of pipes at 50/10, I should be able to do so, but I should also be able to partition that into a pair of pipes at 10/50.
They scan the barcode at the point of delivery and use GPS to confirm the address is correct. I haven't has a misdelivery in years.
Unfortunately, that doesn't always work in practice. In my case, my street address is the same as the address where they were supposed to have delivered those packages. However, that street address is the address of a mobile home park with a thousand spaces, the space numbers are non-consecutive, and the space number they are trying to deliver to is half a mile away from where they actually delivered it.
In reality Amazon will not be taking bids. They will set a flat rate (which will be aggressively cheap) and conditions to ensure service quality and it's up to the delivery company to make a profit. Honestly I have trouble seeing this working out well with high quality service but maybe they'll figure it out.
They don't have high-quality service now, so I don't think they really care. I've ended up randomly with probably a hundred bucks of random stuff at my house that was misdelivered to me instead of to people with a similar house number half a mile away. Each time, I call or email Amazon and complain and tell them to pick it up and deliver it right by the end of the week or I'll dispose of the package. They used to say, "We'll take care of it" and then never show up. Now, they just say "dispose of it, donate it, do whatever you want with it; we've already reshipped." I think they got tired of me complaining.
If Amazon spent even just a little bit more effort, they would get much better results. I mean, the house number is written on the curb. All they have to do is look at it and see that it doesn't match, then go to a posted map a block away, find the right location, and go there. Instead, they drop twenty or thirty or fifty bucks worth of random crap on an unsuspecting person. To save five cents worth of gasoline, they burn a thousand times that much in lost goods. And this happens several times per year. That just can't be cost-effective.
You're assuming that the plastic burning will be limited only to situations where fossil fuels have to be used, as opposed to situations where the energy could come from a renewable source. I don't think that's a safe assumption.
But even within those limits, you're still using a refined product where a less refined product (e.g. diesel) would do, and giving up all the energy that went into refining it. So if the future recycling process is based on using heat to break down the plastic into shorter chains, then yes, it's probably approximately break-even, but if the future recycling process can take advantage of those longer polymer chains in any way, then you're wasting a considerable amount of energy. Admittedly, the assumption is that when oil becomes that scarce, the power to do the repolymerization would not come from oil, so I guess from an environmental harm perspective, it's still a break-even, but only if there is no environmental harm from that future energy source (either in the energy production itself or in building the equipment needed to produce it).
Haven't heard a better suggestion. Burning plastic is better than burying it. You get most of the fuel value of the feedstock back.
I would argue that unless you can't produce enough energy to power the world without burning it, burying the plastic is a better choice. If nothing else, in millions of years, high temperatures and pressure will turn them back into crude.
But the real advantage is that in a hundred years, when we start actually running out of oil, the cost of oil will be so high that it will be cheaper to build a machine that washes out the plastic bottles and melts them down than to find more crude in the ground. At that point, governments can dig up all those old landfills and make a fortune.
No, such a first step presumes the employee is at fault, and must suffer a reassignment to establish they aren't at fault.
No, such a first step presumes the employee is *not* at fault. If the employee is at fault, a reassignment won't change anything, and the employee will get canned. Reassignment as the first step presumes that the manager is the problem, and that the employee will thrive in a new environment, which is usually the case.
Intel has the most advanced chip fabrication technology and makes the fastest chips in the world. Full stop.
Intel had the most advanced fab technology. Right now, Intel is struggling to ship engineering samples of 10nm parts, and they aren't expected to go into volume production at 10nm until next year. Meanwhile, TSMC and Samsung have been doing volume production at 10nm for a year or more.
Worse, TSMC has already started volume production at 7nm, and is expected to be doing 5nm by next year. So barring unexpected leaps by Intel, in a year, TSMC will be mass-producing chips with up to 4x the areal feature density of what Intel will be able to mass-produce.
Which is what makes the entire concept hilarious. It's like doing an experiment in which you don't bother trying to control for outside variables, and when it fails, running it again just in case you might get different results the next time.
Moving the employee to a new team should really be the first step in the process. Then, and only then can you determine whether the performance problem is primarily the employee's fault or the environment's fault (manager, coworkers, project, etc.).
I wonder why only 30% keep their jobs. Do their coworkers just hate them, too? Are they getting fired because they're terrible at their jobs? Does the company misrepresent them?
One problem is that the same manager is responsible for the performance improvement plan who was responsible for the initial decision. So the odds of anyone surviving the performance improvement plan are likely fairly low. After all, if the person was underperforming, it is usually either because the person wasn't enjoying the job (and will continue to not enjoy it), was being mismanaged (and will continue to be mismanaged), or wasn't actually underperforming and is being targeted by the manager (and will continue to be targeted). The only edge case that this ostensibly solves would be giving people a chance to make up for a bad period caused by problems outside of work that impacted work, and even then, only if it doesn't overlap multiple review periods.
For this to actually reduce the number of firings significantly, it would need to be combined with automatically transferring the person to a different team under a different manager prior to starting the performance improvement plan.
I got too busy with my actual job. I wouldn't want to touch it with a ten meter pole now, since it's all fairly close to the metal Xlib from almost two decades back.
Or you can just leave your hands on the wheel and pay attention while the car does the heavy lifting.
And when you do that, the nags still happen about once every minute or two, and they still distract me from my driving. Did you even read my post before you replied?
Worse, because of the way Tesla detects hands on the wheel — by measuring the torque provided by your hands against the autosteer, the nags are actually more frequent when gripping the wheel tightly with two hands than when loosely hanging one hand on one side of the wheel.
Do not attempt to merely dismiss the asshole driver that ends up killing someone with their car because they want to bypass safety mechanisms.
They would still kill someone without being able to bypass the "safety" mechanisms, because as I said, the nags do NOT serve ANY safety function. Either someone is paying attention to the road or he/she isn't, and the nags don't change that behavior. They just annoy users.
If anything, the nags have nearly caused a couple of accidents for me when I deliberately torqued the wheel to force it to recognize that I was holding the wheel and inadvertently torqued it hard enough to kick out autosteer entirely. And they have distracted me at critical moments when I needed to take control away from AutoSteer. The nags are DANGEROUS. They are NOT a safety feature. They are the exact OPPOSITE of a safety feature.
Nothing about the nags improves safety. Every single aspect of them makes safety measurably worse or at best is a no-op. And even if you don't believe that (which would pretty much require you never having used AutoSteer), a single "keep hands on wheel when driving" message when you start the car would have exactly the same effect without increasing the risk of driver mistakes by distracting the driver with an unnecessary message on the screen that draws their attention away from the road that they're supposed to be watching.
But please, be my guest and explain to me why you think that having something needlessly flashing on your dashboard while you're trying to drive makes us safer.
They sure didn't seem to have a problem finding events to send a nastygram to. Just because the law allows it, they don't have to be inflamed assholes. Let's not forget that without Harry Potter fans, Warner wouldn't have made a dime on the movies.
This. And they need to remember that every sad kid who finds out that his or her favorite fan festival got canceled because of a threat of a lawsuit by the studio that shall not be named is going to wear that scar for the rest of his/her life, and will eventually come back to cause grief for the studio that shall not be named, thwarting its wicked plans. In other words, they're creating metaphorical Harry Potters.
It is far from "free" when your inaction to defend your trademarks results in their recission. Warner Brothers is working through the legal system to maintain the Harry Potter universe for future generations. I do not see anything wrong with the creator/owner/licensees of a franchise wanting to hold on to control against dilution.
Trademarks do not work that way. For something to become generic, it has to be used to describe something other than the original product. For example, if I create a series of books about a ceramic maker with excessive body hair and call it "Hairy Potter", there might be an argument that this dilutes the trademark by having a character that is not actually Harry Potter called "Hairy Potter". And if people started using "Harry Potter" when talking about any wizard in any story, that would clearly risk making the mark generic. But to using descriptively to talk about the actual character, even in a fanfic or roleplay context, cannot realistically weaken the mark in any meaningful way.
Either way, the solution is clear. If they don't want people to use their marks descriptively, that's fine. We won't. Including the name of the studio itself. Henceforth, they shall be known as either "the studio that shall not be named" or "the studio named after Jack".
The real problem is that instead of warning people to pay attention to the road around them, Tesla felt it necessary to treat their customers like children with a useless nag that is annoying as heck even when users are using the product precisely as intended. As a result, folks have come up with creative ways to work around the lack of a "Stop nagging me already" switch in the settings. If they ban this, folks will come up with something else. It won't stop until Tesla cars either have true FSD capability or Tesla gives us a way to turn off the nags.
And no, I don't own one, but I'm sorely tempted to rig up something similar. I'm really getting tired of all the nags while sitting there with both hands on the wheel simply because the car didn't turn the wheel enough to notice that my hands were providing resistance. The entire concept of using wheel torque to control nags is fundamentally and irredeemably flawed. Then again, the entire concept of nagging the driver and hoping that it will somehow do something other than annoy the driver into being angry at your product is equally flawed.
This product didn't kill anyone. It can only do one of two things:
Keep the Tesla from falsely nagging someone who does have both hands on the wheel.
Keep the Tesla from uselessly nagging someone who isn't going to pay attention anyway, and at best will just tap the wheel when the nags happen.
Neither of these has any meaningful effect on driver or vehicle safety. The odds against a device like this causing a fatal accident are astronomical, because for the car's autosteer to shut down, the driver has to be so completely oblivious that he/she fails to respond to three nags WITH SOUND within a one-hour period. This is a relatively rare occurrence, short of someone dying behind the wheel....
More importantly, any claim of reduced safety relies on the assumption that the nags somehow make the car safer, when in my experience, the precise opposite is true. The nag system takes an insane amount of time to detect when the driver doesn't have his/her hands on the wheel, most of the time, but constantly nags at highly inappropriate times (such as during acceleration) when the driver *does* have both hands on the wheel.
As best I can tell, the main purpose of the nags seems to be to make the autosteer feature more annoying than driving by hand so that folks will spend more money for the self-driving package when it finally comes out. The nags have gotten so annoying that I'm finding myself using autosteer less and less frequently as the nag rate increases. In other words, assuming autosteer really is improving safety, then statistically speaking, the nags are making the car LESS safe, not more.
Worse, because of the way Tesla detects hands on the wheel — by measuring the torque provided by your hands against the autosteer, the nags are actually more frequent when gripping the wheel tightly with two hands than when loosely hanging one hand on one side of the wheel. So the nags actively encourage drivers to do the exact opposite of what it claims to be doing. Again, the nags make the car LESS safe.
So I don't know what NHTSA is smoking, but I'd like some of that. Obviously nobody involved in that C&D has ever actually driven a Tesla, or else they would not have sent it. The nags should die in a fire. They make the vehicle less safe, and any technology that can be used to render them harmless makes Tesla vehicles safer to drive, not less safe.
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Well sure. Ostensibly, all you need is a small fission reactor, and you could easily power an electric-powered "jet" design, but where's the fun in that? :-)
Well, I do, but you won't like it. Basically, you put the fuselage of a plane on top of a tank filled with nuclear bombs, and you drop them one at a time into a combustion chamber, where they go off, and a big hunk of metal protects the passengers from radiation and directs the explosion to cause thrust. Then, at the right point in the ballistic trajectory, a parachute comes out, and the "airplane" lands somewhere within a few miles of the desired airport.
How does two fiber cuts take down something the size of Comcast? Two fiber cuts shouldn't even be enough to bring down your average college network, much less something that big. There should be hundreds of paths through their network, and the whole point of BGP is that single-digit numbers of failures shouldn't matter.
My guess is one of two things is the case:
Either one makes me wonder what the heck kind of two-bit operation they have going there.
Nope. I remember folks saying that about Waymo/Google, but not Uber. Uber has always been a company that takes shortcuts and ignores rules/laws. Anybody expecting safe self-driving tech from them should have realized their mistake long before the first accident.
Self-driving tech will eventually be much safer than humans, because it will be able to learn from mistakes on a scale that humans can't hope to achieve. But none of that precludes a company from taking shortcuts and, as a result, creating a dangerous solution.
The problem is that they make the decision for you. As an ISP customer, I should have a 60 Mbps pipe. If I want to partition that into a pair of pipes at 50/10, I should be able to do so, but I should also be able to partition that into a pair of pipes at 10/50.
Unfortunately, that doesn't always work in practice. In my case, my street address is the same as the address where they were supposed to have delivered those packages. However, that street address is the address of a mobile home park with a thousand spaces, the space numbers are non-consecutive, and the space number they are trying to deliver to is half a mile away from where they actually delivered it.
They don't have high-quality service now, so I don't think they really care. I've ended up randomly with probably a hundred bucks of random stuff at my house that was misdelivered to me instead of to people with a similar house number half a mile away. Each time, I call or email Amazon and complain and tell them to pick it up and deliver it right by the end of the week or I'll dispose of the package. They used to say, "We'll take care of it" and then never show up. Now, they just say "dispose of it, donate it, do whatever you want with it; we've already reshipped." I think they got tired of me complaining.
If Amazon spent even just a little bit more effort, they would get much better results. I mean, the house number is written on the curb. All they have to do is look at it and see that it doesn't match, then go to a posted map a block away, find the right location, and go there. Instead, they drop twenty or thirty or fifty bucks worth of random crap on an unsuspecting person. To save five cents worth of gasoline, they burn a thousand times that much in lost goods. And this happens several times per year. That just can't be cost-effective.
You're assuming that the plastic burning will be limited only to situations where fossil fuels have to be used, as opposed to situations where the energy could come from a renewable source. I don't think that's a safe assumption.
But even within those limits, you're still using a refined product where a less refined product (e.g. diesel) would do, and giving up all the energy that went into refining it. So if the future recycling process is based on using heat to break down the plastic into shorter chains, then yes, it's probably approximately break-even, but if the future recycling process can take advantage of those longer polymer chains in any way, then you're wasting a considerable amount of energy. Admittedly, the assumption is that when oil becomes that scarce, the power to do the repolymerization would not come from oil, so I guess from an environmental harm perspective, it's still a break-even, but only if there is no environmental harm from that future energy source (either in the energy production itself or in building the equipment needed to produce it).
Why bother? Add enough heat, and they all turn back into short hydrocarbon chains that you can reform into whatever kind of plastic you want. :-)
I would argue that unless you can't produce enough energy to power the world without burning it, burying the plastic is a better choice. If nothing else, in millions of years, high temperatures and pressure will turn them back into crude.
But the real advantage is that in a hundred years, when we start actually running out of oil, the cost of oil will be so high that it will be cheaper to build a machine that washes out the plastic bottles and melts them down than to find more crude in the ground. At that point, governments can dig up all those old landfills and make a fortune.
No, such a first step presumes the employee is *not* at fault. If the employee is at fault, a reassignment won't change anything, and the employee will get canned. Reassignment as the first step presumes that the manager is the problem, and that the employee will thrive in a new environment, which is usually the case.
The reason is that it might have been possible, back when track width was much wider and head positioning accuracy was much lower.
Intel had the most advanced fab technology. Right now, Intel is struggling to ship engineering samples of 10nm parts, and they aren't expected to go into volume production at 10nm until next year. Meanwhile, TSMC and Samsung have been doing volume production at 10nm for a year or more.
Worse, TSMC has already started volume production at 7nm, and is expected to be doing 5nm by next year. So barring unexpected leaps by Intel, in a year, TSMC will be mass-producing chips with up to 4x the areal feature density of what Intel will be able to mass-produce.
Which is what makes the entire concept hilarious. It's like doing an experiment in which you don't bother trying to control for outside variables, and when it fails, running it again just in case you might get different results the next time.
Moving the employee to a new team should really be the first step in the process. Then, and only then can you determine whether the performance problem is primarily the employee's fault or the environment's fault (manager, coworkers, project, etc.).
Because your unemployment insurance rate is related to how many people you fire.
One problem is that the same manager is responsible for the performance improvement plan who was responsible for the initial decision. So the odds of anyone surviving the performance improvement plan are likely fairly low. After all, if the person was underperforming, it is usually either because the person wasn't enjoying the job (and will continue to not enjoy it), was being mismanaged (and will continue to be mismanaged), or wasn't actually underperforming and is being targeted by the manager (and will continue to be targeted). The only edge case that this ostensibly solves would be giving people a chance to make up for a bad period caused by problems outside of work that impacted work, and even then, only if it doesn't overlap multiple review periods.
For this to actually reduce the number of firings significantly, it would need to be combined with automatically transferring the person to a different team under a different manager prior to starting the performance improvement plan.
I got too busy with my actual job. I wouldn't want to touch it with a ten meter pole now, since it's all fairly close to the metal Xlib from almost two decades back.
Having a warning message flash on your dashboard does not keep you alert. It distracts you from the road.
And when you do that, the nags still happen about once every minute or two, and they still distract me from my driving. Did you even read my post before you replied?
They would still kill someone without being able to bypass the "safety" mechanisms, because as I said, the nags do NOT serve ANY safety function. Either someone is paying attention to the road or he/she isn't, and the nags don't change that behavior. They just annoy users.
If anything, the nags have nearly caused a couple of accidents for me when I deliberately torqued the wheel to force it to recognize that I was holding the wheel and inadvertently torqued it hard enough to kick out autosteer entirely. And they have distracted me at critical moments when I needed to take control away from AutoSteer. The nags are DANGEROUS. They are NOT a safety feature. They are the exact OPPOSITE of a safety feature.
Nothing about the nags improves safety. Every single aspect of them makes safety measurably worse or at best is a no-op. And even if you don't believe that (which would pretty much require you never having used AutoSteer), a single "keep hands on wheel when driving" message when you start the car would have exactly the same effect without increasing the risk of driver mistakes by distracting the driver with an unnecessary message on the screen that draws their attention away from the road that they're supposed to be watching.
But please, be my guest and explain to me why you think that having something needlessly flashing on your dashboard while you're trying to drive makes us safer.
This. And they need to remember that every sad kid who finds out that his or her favorite fan festival got canceled because of a threat of a lawsuit by the studio that shall not be named is going to wear that scar for the rest of his/her life, and will eventually come back to cause grief for the studio that shall not be named, thwarting its wicked plans. In other words, they're creating metaphorical Harry Potters.
Trademarks do not work that way. For something to become generic, it has to be used to describe something other than the original product. For example, if I create a series of books about a ceramic maker with excessive body hair and call it "Hairy Potter", there might be an argument that this dilutes the trademark by having a character that is not actually Harry Potter called "Hairy Potter". And if people started using "Harry Potter" when talking about any wizard in any story, that would clearly risk making the mark generic. But to using descriptively to talk about the actual character, even in a fanfic or roleplay context, cannot realistically weaken the mark in any meaningful way.
Either way, the solution is clear. If they don't want people to use their marks descriptively, that's fine. We won't. Including the name of the studio itself. Henceforth, they shall be known as either "the studio that shall not be named" or "the studio named after Jack".
The article suggests that it might, but that would involve a separate study (and more grant money :-).
The real problem is that instead of warning people to pay attention to the road around them, Tesla felt it necessary to treat their customers like children with a useless nag that is annoying as heck even when users are using the product precisely as intended. As a result, folks have come up with creative ways to work around the lack of a "Stop nagging me already" switch in the settings. If they ban this, folks will come up with something else. It won't stop until Tesla cars either have true FSD capability or Tesla gives us a way to turn off the nags.
And no, I don't own one, but I'm sorely tempted to rig up something similar. I'm really getting tired of all the nags while sitting there with both hands on the wheel simply because the car didn't turn the wheel enough to notice that my hands were providing resistance. The entire concept of using wheel torque to control nags is fundamentally and irredeemably flawed. Then again, the entire concept of nagging the driver and hoping that it will somehow do something other than annoy the driver into being angry at your product is equally flawed.
This product didn't kill anyone. It can only do one of two things:
Neither of these has any meaningful effect on driver or vehicle safety. The odds against a device like this causing a fatal accident are astronomical, because for the car's autosteer to shut down, the driver has to be so completely oblivious that he/she fails to respond to three nags WITH SOUND within a one-hour period. This is a relatively rare occurrence, short of someone dying behind the wheel....
More importantly, any claim of reduced safety relies on the assumption that the nags somehow make the car safer, when in my experience, the precise opposite is true. The nag system takes an insane amount of time to detect when the driver doesn't have his/her hands on the wheel, most of the time, but constantly nags at highly inappropriate times (such as during acceleration) when the driver *does* have both hands on the wheel.
As best I can tell, the main purpose of the nags seems to be to make the autosteer feature more annoying than driving by hand so that folks will spend more money for the self-driving package when it finally comes out. The nags have gotten so annoying that I'm finding myself using autosteer less and less frequently as the nag rate increases. In other words, assuming autosteer really is improving safety, then statistically speaking, the nags are making the car LESS safe, not more.
Worse, because of the way Tesla detects hands on the wheel — by measuring the torque provided by your hands against the autosteer, the nags are actually more frequent when gripping the wheel tightly with two hands than when loosely hanging one hand on one side of the wheel. So the nags actively encourage drivers to do the exact opposite of what it claims to be doing. Again, the nags make the car LESS safe.
So I don't know what NHTSA is smoking, but I'd like some of that. Obviously nobody involved in that C&D has ever actually driven a Tesla, or else they would not have sent it. The nags should die in a fire. They make the vehicle less safe, and any technology that can be used to render them harmless makes Tesla vehicles safer to drive, not less safe.