And always remember that when you put your data out on the cloud, the entity running the cloud storage service can destroy it at will. And at the point where they can destroy your data regardless of your desire to preserve it, you don't own it; they do.
Particularly when the summary at the top cites China's National Intelligence Law and its intent -- do you think the Chinese government is going to permit, say, Huawei to say "That data's in the server farm at our datacenter in South Carolina; we don't have to give it to you" when they are 'requested' to provide it? The "Cloud Act" is precisely the same thing, only spelled out explicitly to minimize having the lawyers spin out legal machinations over the precise meaning of the grammar of the law for months or years.
If I'm remembering correctly, the issue that caused Westinghouse to pull out was that he asked Tesla how he would be able to charge the recipients of his broadcast power for their usage, and Tesla admitted that there would be no way to do so. With no prospect of profit from the endeavour, Westinghouse pulled his funding.
You must have never lived or been to SoCal and LA. Plenty of freeways, all of them huge, and all crowded. You can build and expand all you want and the traffic will fill it up to capacity.
It doesn't have to be SoCal; induced demand works anywhere -- you add more road capacity, you will get more drivers to fill it. An expansion to the I-405 in Los Angeles, for example, resulted in traffic moving slightly slower than before the expansion.
I must not have ethics. Ethics are the revenue-killer. Ethics are the little weakness that brings total bankruptcy. I will face my ethics. I will permit them to pass over me and through me. And when they have gone past I will alter my marketing to increase margins. Where my ethics have gone there will be nothing. Only profits will remain.
And the original report document, down under 'Survey Method', notes that the sample size was 1,114 respondents, fewer than in similar surveys Axios cconducted in March '18, October '17, May '17, November '16, March '16, October '15, March '15, and October '14; you have to go all the way back to April '14 to find a survey that didn't have more respondents. While the percentage of respondents who, according to the report, "believe global warming is harming them 'right now'" is up, they appear to be having more problems finding willing participants (or participants who care enough about the issue to participate when contacted). It would be interesting to see how many people were contacted with the offer to participate in the survey for each tranche of participants, so that a rough evaluation of the percentage of people who care enough about the issue to participate could be determined. But we aren't shown that data.
The problem with that is that allowing all of the preinstalled bloatware to be freely deleted opens the window for the carriers to receive the phones from the manufacturer, blow away the bloatware, and advertise that their phones have no pre-installed software except for [carrier's list of apps], and we'd see carriers competing with how much of the bloatware they remove for you -- which defeats the purpose of the companies cutting a deal with the manufacturer to preinstall their apps. There would need to be some mechanism to ensure that only the person registered to teh devlice would be able to remove the programs.
It didn't have the force of law until July 30, 1947 but 1 U.S.C. 1 states:
In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise--- the words "person" and "whoever" include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals.
The issues that have been thrashed out in the courts have been determining where the limits on treating corporations as individuals lie. For example, corporations don't have the franchise, and are not permitted to vote in elections. The Tillman Act of 1907 prohibited corporate contributions to national campaigns, and Chief Justice Rehnquist repeatedly criticized the Court's invention of corporate constitutional "rights", particularly in his dissent in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti in 1978, although he endorsed the right of corporations to spend in elections in his dissent in McConnell v. FEC in 2003.
In some sense, it's the opposite; the OS is, in fact, enhanced. Preinstalled apps are included in the system image.
"Enhancing" the OS is like Microsoft making the Windows help functionality use the IE rendering engine to display help files, making it necessary to have IE installed as part of the operating system. Nothing about Facebook is integrated into Android, such that removing Facebook breaks Android. It's a standalone app that is pre-installed on your device because Samsung made a deal with Facebook.
Reminds me of an article on theregister back in 2008 about an incredibly inefficient packing job -- HP shipping two large cardboard boxes taped together, containing sixteen smaller boxes, each of which contained -- in foam packing -- two sheets of A4 paper.
Well, if you want to get really technical, since meat grown in a lab neither chews its cud nor has cloven hooves, all lab-grown meat will, by definition, be trayf. It may be thrashed out that the lab-grown meat, because it is essentially nothing more than a remotely-grown part of the donor animal, inherits the status of the donor animal -- so lab-grown pig tissue is still trayf, because it's still from an unclean animal -- but I don't expect that pork will be determined to be parv just because it's no longer connected to the animal the original tissue came from.
From the reference in the article to submitting the paper at SIGGRAPH Asia, this announcement is an attempt to drum up interest in advance of the conference; releasing multimedia prior to the conference would dilute the interest -- "oh, I've already seen that; I'll go watch a _new_ presentation" -- and reduce the attendance at their presentation. Expect it to be flogged much more heavily, with extensive stills and video, after the conference.
And it's the layout that's part of the problem -- with booths and other divided seating, it's a lot easier to set up baffles that diffuse and contain sound, providing more acoustic isolation between seating clusters. If all you have are arrays of tables, there's no easy way to acoustically divide them, so you get the full effect of the sound from all the tables around you. But booths take up more space and are inherently less flexible -- you can't push two or three booths together for a larger party, so you're losing out on flexibility -- and therefore on profits -- so restaurant operators prefer open seating areas full of tables that can be rearranged to suit the needs of the moment. And, as the article describes, the rise in 'industrial' décor means that sound will carry from one end of the space to the other with little to break it up.
VR *HAS BEEN* (for decades) and always will be a niche.
And the VR headsets themselves are only part of the hardware needed for the application that -- while still heavily a niche target -- is probably best suited for VR as it currently stands: flight simulation and air combat MOBAs. Both of these really want a HOTAS and rudder pedal setup for best effect, but even the limited VR-oid functionality of, say, a TrackIR setup, which puts a sensor on top of your monitor and an emitter or reflector on your head to track your head movements and feed them into the game shows how much you gain by not having to control your view direction manually. Having that all happen automatically with the VR headset, so that you're actually looking around to look out of your plane, without your display still being straight in front of your seat (which makes the scaling of head movements to view movements an issue -- you can find yourself looking out of the right corner of your eye at the monitor when you turn your head left, which is inconvenient), would deepen the immersion that much more. And many of the hard-core fight-sim and air-combat MOBA enthusiasts already have all the other peripherals, so all that's needed is a light, high-resolution VR headset. Unfortunately, we're not there yet, but I expect that it's a matter of time, and if VR can get a solid foothold even in a niche market, that will give it the foundation it will need to expand to other markets.
The article doesn't claim that electric vehicles aren't cleaner in the long run. It categorizes electric vehicles according to the country of manufacture and the country of operation to compute when, in the life of the car, the total CO2 expenditure to build and power the electric vehicle begins to beat the total CO2 expenditure to build and power a high-efficiency diesel vehicle. In countries like Germany, where the primary power grid is still largely coal powered, building and operating an electric vehicle can take ten years before being a net CO2 reduction over a diesel vehicle. In countries with a higher percentage of renewable power, this point is going to be sooner. It's an unavoidable consequence of the production of the power system of an electric car being more energy-intensive than making an IC engine and drivetrain. It does raise another consideration regarding electric vehicles -- if the expected functional lifespan of the battery pack is less than the break-even point, it makes electric vehicles less competitive in this regard, because of the jump in CO2 'cost' for replacing the batteries. This points up the fact that the batteries are the critical design factor in EVs, and that making more efficient and longer-lasting batteries using more efficient production methods is going to be what brings the CO2 footprint of EVs down to a point that makes them clearly superior to IC vehicles at any point in their functional life.
TL;DR, it doesn't demonstrate that EVs are worse than IC vehicles, but that both the production methods and power generation for EVs are fundamental factor in making EVs a more 'environmentally friendly' vehicle -- just buying an EV and thinking that you're immediately doing your part to reduce CO2 emissions may not be true for quite a few years after the purchase, depending on what the power generation in your driving area looks like.
If the FCC has no authority to impose net neutrality regulations on telecommunication services, then it equally has no authority to prevent states from imposing their own net neutrality regulations, because their is no federal authority that they are usurping. This means that the fundamental premise behind the suit filed by the telecom companies to invalidate California's net neutrality legislation has no footing, since it requires the FCC to have the authority Mr. Pai just disclaimed it possessing.
And I've given up trying to make sense out of the items that appear in the 'Recommneded for you' categories. Rubbermaid storage container sets in the 'Office' category, Tamiya model masking tape in the 'Home Improvement Hardware' category, joysticks, mice, trackballs, and mouse pads in the 'Cell Phones & Accessories' category, or the fact that you will almost never see an actual physical book or DVD in 'New Releases', any 'xxxxx Books' category, or any 'xxxxx Video' category -- they're 99.99% Kindle e-books or Amazon Video streams. For e-books, it's usually possible to click on the link to the digital product and then use the 'alternate formats' choices to get a physical product, but even though I understand that Amazon wants to push its digital products to maximize its profit margin (no inventory, packaging, shipping, etc.), but you would think that with all of the datamining they do to detect your purchasing patterns so they can push things in front of you that you might like that they would recognize when someone has a strong preference for physical media and stop trying to push digital versions to the exclusion of all else.
Time to break out the box of bubblegum user-applied flexible sealant material and cover the fracture.
More seriously, if there's a crack, a fuller repair would likely involve evacuating the segment, then drilling a small hole at each end of the fracture to keep it from propagating before injecting a flexible resin sealant.
Allow me to condense Sen, Wyden's remarks; "We must infringe upon your freedom to prevent those we deem Nazis from infringing upon your freedom." -- Sen. Ron Wyden (D) 2018
Or, to paraphrase a much earlier statement:
"We had to destroy your freedom in order to save it." -- after a quote attributed to an unnamed major regarding the destruction of Ben Tre in 1968
It does, however, make an even earlier use of the metaphor, from the Atlanta Daily World in 1940 -- "We won't save democracy by killing it... and we won't make American democracy worth saving by destroying it in the so-called attempt to save it." -- a little ironic, seeing how the sentiment is inverted.
When will California adopt similar diversity quotas for State Senators?
And nurses? Firefighters? Garbage collectors? Strippers? Elementary school teachers? And...***insert long list of jobs where gender (sex?) discrimination is obvious because one sex or the other dominates***?
I am reminded of an editorial that appeared in Analog magazine some years ago talking about democracies and equality of opportunity, that described a 'hyperdemocracy' as a democracy where equality of opportunity was defined by equality of results, and also the California Confederacy from Robert Heinlein's novel Friday, where everyone was constitutionally mandated to be equal, and where, when it was discovered that individuals with a bachelor's degree had, on average, a higher income than individuals without such a degree, passed legislation that automatically awarded every citizen a bachelor's degree on their 18th birthday, eliminating the inequality.
Eucalypts. They have lots of oil in their leaves and burn really hot. Our gift to America...
More like Californians' idiotic gift to themselves; eucalypts were brought to California during the Gold Rush as a way to satisfy the demand for lumber with the fast-growing Australian trees. Then the tycoons who'd planted vast acreages of eucalypts discovered that, while the 75-100 year old trees in Australia provided good timber, the young trees they were growing didn't, being irregular in grain as well as cracking and shrinking when dried. The wood didn't even make good railroad ties or fence posts. Even the oil was poorer quality than what Australia produced, and the trees were increasingly sold for fuel until cheaper electricity and gas wiped out that market.
The system requirements for a spacecraft that doesn't have to keep one or more humans alive inside it for the duration of the mission are so orders of magnitude smaller, because you can send them in low-fuel orbits that take years to reach their target. We still haven't worked out the logistics of a life-support system that's closed enough to make long-duration trips without resupply viable, and we are still working on the issues of long-term exposure to microgravity and radiation. Working with transmisison lag ranging from minutes to hours requires more 'intelligence' built into the craft, but protecting that from damage is a procedural problem, which existing probes have demonstrated is a reasonably well-solved concern.It doesn't make them the perfect substitute -- the issues with Philae attaching itself to 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko resulting in its coming to rest in shadow where its solar panels were ineffective demonstrates this -- but we can put robotic probes out to distances far beyond where we could deploy and return a live crew.
Reading TFA makes me wonder, though, what happens if you supply the rice with additional nutrients to match the increased yield. The experiment demonstrated that when you grow rice under enhanced CO2 concentrations, keeping all other things equal, it produces more biomass, but the nutrient level per unit of biomass decreases -- thereby discovering that, if you have 30 items and distribute them among ten boxes, the boxes will each have more items in them than if you distribute the same 30 items among fifteen boxes.
Nikola Motors should be worried about prior-art claims, given examples, like the MAN Concept S that was exhibited at the IAA show in Hanover in 2010; both the Nikola and Tesla designs look significantly derivative of MAN's work. And that was just from a casual Google search. If there wasn't so much prior art out there already, I'd patent 'filing lawsuits for outrageous damages using questionable patents to attempt to extract funding from competitor or cripple them as a competitor' as a business-model patent.
Slashdot Mirror
And always remember that when you put your data out on the cloud, the entity running the cloud storage service can destroy it at will. And at the point where they can destroy your data regardless of your desire to preserve it, you don't own it; they do.
Particularly when the summary at the top cites China's National Intelligence Law and its intent -- do you think the Chinese government is going to permit, say, Huawei to say "That data's in the server farm at our datacenter in South Carolina; we don't have to give it to you" when they are 'requested' to provide it? The "Cloud Act" is precisely the same thing, only spelled out explicitly to minimize having the lawyers spin out legal machinations over the precise meaning of the grammar of the law for months or years.
If I'm remembering correctly, the issue that caused Westinghouse to pull out was that he asked Tesla how he would be able to charge the recipients of his broadcast power for their usage, and Tesla admitted that there would be no way to do so. With no prospect of profit from the endeavour, Westinghouse pulled his funding.
You must have never lived or been to SoCal and LA. Plenty of freeways, all of them huge, and all crowded. You can build and expand all you want and the traffic will fill it up to capacity.
It doesn't have to be SoCal; induced demand works anywhere -- you add more road capacity, you will get more drivers to fill it. An expansion to the I-405 in Los Angeles, for example, resulted in traffic moving slightly slower than before the expansion.
I must not have ethics. Ethics are the revenue-killer. Ethics are the little weakness that brings total bankruptcy. I will face my ethics. I will permit them to pass over me and through me. And when they have gone past I will alter my marketing to increase margins. Where my ethics have gone there will be nothing. Only profits will remain.
And the original report document, down under 'Survey Method', notes that the sample size was 1,114 respondents, fewer than in similar surveys Axios cconducted in March '18, October '17, May '17, November '16, March '16, October '15, March '15, and October '14; you have to go all the way back to April '14 to find a survey that didn't have more respondents. While the percentage of respondents who, according to the report, "believe global warming is harming them 'right now'" is up, they appear to be having more problems finding willing participants (or participants who care enough about the issue to participate when contacted). It would be interesting to see how many people were contacted with the offer to participate in the survey for each tranche of participants, so that a rough evaluation of the percentage of people who care enough about the issue to participate could be determined. But we aren't shown that data.
The problem with that is that allowing all of the preinstalled bloatware to be freely deleted opens the window for the carriers to receive the phones from the manufacturer, blow away the bloatware, and advertise that their phones have no pre-installed software except for [carrier's list of apps], and we'd see carriers competing with how much of the bloatware they remove for you -- which defeats the purpose of the companies cutting a deal with the manufacturer to preinstall their apps. There would need to be some mechanism to ensure that only the person registered to teh devlice would be able to remove the programs.
In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise---
the words "person" and "whoever" include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals.
The issues that have been thrashed out in the courts have been determining where the limits on treating corporations as individuals lie. For example, corporations don't have the franchise, and are not permitted to vote in elections. The Tillman Act of 1907 prohibited corporate contributions to national campaigns, and Chief Justice Rehnquist repeatedly criticized the Court's invention of corporate constitutional "rights", particularly in his dissent in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti in 1978, although he endorsed the right of corporations to spend in elections in his dissent in McConnell v. FEC in 2003.
In some sense, it's the opposite; the OS is, in fact, enhanced. Preinstalled apps are included in the system image.
"Enhancing" the OS is like Microsoft making the Windows help functionality use the IE rendering engine to display help files, making it necessary to have IE installed as part of the operating system. Nothing about Facebook is integrated into Android, such that removing Facebook breaks Android. It's a standalone app that is pre-installed on your device because Samsung made a deal with Facebook.
Reminds me of an article on theregister back in 2008 about an incredibly inefficient packing job -- HP shipping two large cardboard boxes taped together, containing sixteen smaller boxes, each of which contained -- in foam packing -- two sheets of A4 paper.
Well, if you want to get really technical, since meat grown in a lab neither chews its cud nor has cloven hooves, all lab-grown meat will, by definition, be trayf. It may be thrashed out that the lab-grown meat, because it is essentially nothing more than a remotely-grown part of the donor animal, inherits the status of the donor animal -- so lab-grown pig tissue is still trayf, because it's still from an unclean animal -- but I don't expect that pork will be determined to be parv just because it's no longer connected to the animal the original tissue came from.
From the reference in the article to submitting the paper at SIGGRAPH Asia, this announcement is an attempt to drum up interest in advance of the conference; releasing multimedia prior to the conference would dilute the interest -- "oh, I've already seen that; I'll go watch a _new_ presentation" -- and reduce the attendance at their presentation. Expect it to be flogged much more heavily, with extensive stills and video, after the conference.
And it's the layout that's part of the problem -- with booths and other divided seating, it's a lot easier to set up baffles that diffuse and contain sound, providing more acoustic isolation between seating clusters. If all you have are arrays of tables, there's no easy way to acoustically divide them, so you get the full effect of the sound from all the tables around you. But booths take up more space and are inherently less flexible -- you can't push two or three booths together for a larger party, so you're losing out on flexibility -- and therefore on profits -- so restaurant operators prefer open seating areas full of tables that can be rearranged to suit the needs of the moment. And, as the article describes, the rise in 'industrial' décor means that sound will carry from one end of the space to the other with little to break it up.
And you can switch between genres just by changing out the noun tables -- one-button swap between sci-fi, westerns, and action novels.
VR *HAS BEEN* (for decades) and always will be a niche.
And the VR headsets themselves are only part of the hardware needed for the application that -- while still heavily a niche target -- is probably best suited for VR as it currently stands: flight simulation and air combat MOBAs. Both of these really want a HOTAS and rudder pedal setup for best effect, but even the limited VR-oid functionality of, say, a TrackIR setup, which puts a sensor on top of your monitor and an emitter or reflector on your head to track your head movements and feed them into the game shows how much you gain by not having to control your view direction manually. Having that all happen automatically with the VR headset, so that you're actually looking around to look out of your plane, without your display still being straight in front of your seat (which makes the scaling of head movements to view movements an issue -- you can find yourself looking out of the right corner of your eye at the monitor when you turn your head left, which is inconvenient), would deepen the immersion that much more. And many of the hard-core fight-sim and air-combat MOBA enthusiasts already have all the other peripherals, so all that's needed is a light, high-resolution VR headset. Unfortunately, we're not there yet, but I expect that it's a matter of time, and if VR can get a solid foothold even in a niche market, that will give it the foundation it will need to expand to other markets.
The article doesn't claim that electric vehicles aren't cleaner in the long run. It categorizes electric vehicles according to the country of manufacture and the country of operation to compute when, in the life of the car, the total CO2 expenditure to build and power the electric vehicle begins to beat the total CO2 expenditure to build and power a high-efficiency diesel vehicle. In countries like Germany, where the primary power grid is still largely coal powered, building and operating an electric vehicle can take ten years before being a net CO2 reduction over a diesel vehicle. In countries with a higher percentage of renewable power, this point is going to be sooner. It's an unavoidable consequence of the production of the power system of an electric car being more energy-intensive than making an IC engine and drivetrain. It does raise another consideration regarding electric vehicles -- if the expected functional lifespan of the battery pack is less than the break-even point, it makes electric vehicles less competitive in this regard, because of the jump in CO2 'cost' for replacing the batteries. This points up the fact that the batteries are the critical design factor in EVs, and that making more efficient and longer-lasting batteries using more efficient production methods is going to be what brings the CO2 footprint of EVs down to a point that makes them clearly superior to IC vehicles at any point in their functional life.
TL;DR, it doesn't demonstrate that EVs are worse than IC vehicles, but that both the production methods and power generation for EVs are fundamental factor in making EVs a more 'environmentally friendly' vehicle -- just buying an EV and thinking that you're immediately doing your part to reduce CO2 emissions may not be true for quite a few years after the purchase, depending on what the power generation in your driving area looks like.
If the FCC has no authority to impose net neutrality regulations on telecommunication services, then it equally has no authority to prevent states from imposing their own net neutrality regulations, because their is no federal authority that they are usurping. This means that the fundamental premise behind the suit filed by the telecom companies to invalidate California's net neutrality legislation has no footing, since it requires the FCC to have the authority Mr. Pai just disclaimed it possessing.
And I've given up trying to make sense out of the items that appear in the 'Recommneded for you' categories. Rubbermaid storage container sets in the 'Office' category, Tamiya model masking tape in the 'Home Improvement Hardware' category, joysticks, mice, trackballs, and mouse pads in the 'Cell Phones & Accessories' category, or the fact that you will almost never see an actual physical book or DVD in 'New Releases', any 'xxxxx Books' category, or any 'xxxxx Video' category -- they're 99.99% Kindle e-books or Amazon Video streams. For e-books, it's usually possible to click on the link to the digital product and then use the 'alternate formats' choices to get a physical product, but even though I understand that Amazon wants to push its digital products to maximize its profit margin (no inventory, packaging, shipping, etc.), but you would think that with all of the datamining they do to detect your purchasing patterns so they can push things in front of you that you might like that they would recognize when someone has a strong preference for physical media and stop trying to push digital versions to the exclusion of all else.
They initially slowed the leak with Kapton tape and are working on a more comprehensive repair, according to NASA
Time to break out the box of bubblegum user-applied flexible sealant material and cover the fracture.
More seriously, if there's a crack, a fuller repair would likely involve evacuating the segment, then drilling a small hole at each end of the fracture to keep it from propagating before injecting a flexible resin sealant.
Allow me to condense Sen, Wyden's remarks;
"We must infringe upon your freedom to prevent those we deem Nazis from infringing upon your freedom." -- Sen. Ron Wyden (D) 2018
Or, to paraphrase a much earlier statement:
"We had to destroy your freedom in order to save it." -- after a quote attributed to an unnamed major regarding the destruction of Ben Tre in 1968
It does, however, make an even earlier use of the metaphor, from the Atlanta Daily World in 1940 -- "We won't save democracy by killing it ... and we won't make American democracy worth saving by destroying it in the so-called attempt to save it." -- a little ironic, seeing how the sentiment is inverted.
And nurses? Firefighters? Garbage collectors? Strippers? Elementary school teachers?
And...***insert long list of jobs where gender (sex?) discrimination is obvious because one sex or the other dominates***?
I am reminded of an editorial that appeared in Analog magazine some years ago talking about democracies and equality of opportunity, that described a 'hyperdemocracy' as a democracy where equality of opportunity was defined by equality of results, and also the California Confederacy from Robert Heinlein's novel Friday, where everyone was constitutionally mandated to be equal, and where, when it was discovered that individuals with a bachelor's degree had, on average, a higher income than individuals without such a degree, passed legislation that automatically awarded every citizen a bachelor's degree on their 18th birthday, eliminating the inequality.
Eucalypts. They have lots of oil in their leaves and burn really hot. Our gift to America...
More like Californians' idiotic gift to themselves; eucalypts were brought to California during the Gold Rush as a way to satisfy the demand for lumber with the fast-growing Australian trees. Then the tycoons who'd planted vast acreages of eucalypts discovered that, while the 75-100 year old trees in Australia provided good timber, the young trees they were growing didn't, being irregular in grain as well as cracking and shrinking when dried. The wood didn't even make good railroad ties or fence posts. Even the oil was poorer quality than what Australia produced, and the trees were increasingly sold for fuel until cheaper electricity and gas wiped out that market.
The system requirements for a spacecraft that doesn't have to keep one or more humans alive inside it for the duration of the mission are so orders of magnitude smaller, because you can send them in low-fuel orbits that take years to reach their target. We still haven't worked out the logistics of a life-support system that's closed enough to make long-duration trips without resupply viable, and we are still working on the issues of long-term exposure to microgravity and radiation. Working with transmisison lag ranging from minutes to hours requires more 'intelligence' built into the craft, but protecting that from damage is a procedural problem, which existing probes have demonstrated is a reasonably well-solved concern.It doesn't make them the perfect substitute -- the issues with Philae attaching itself to 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko resulting in its coming to rest in shadow where its solar panels were ineffective demonstrates this -- but we can put robotic probes out to distances far beyond where we could deploy and return a live crew.
Reading TFA makes me wonder, though, what happens if you supply the rice with additional nutrients to match the increased yield. The experiment demonstrated that when you grow rice under enhanced CO2 concentrations, keeping all other things equal, it produces more biomass, but the nutrient level per unit of biomass decreases -- thereby discovering that, if you have 30 items and distribute them among ten boxes, the boxes will each have more items in them than if you distribute the same 30 items among fifteen boxes.
Nikola Motors should be worried about prior-art claims, given examples, like the MAN Concept S that was exhibited at the IAA show in Hanover in 2010; both the Nikola and Tesla designs look significantly derivative of MAN's work. And that was just from a casual Google search. If there wasn't so much prior art out there already, I'd patent 'filing lawsuits for outrageous damages using questionable patents to attempt to extract funding from competitor or cripple them as a competitor' as a business-model patent.