There are no GPS repeaters like that. Due to the way the system works, they wouldn't actually accomplish anything. GPS depends on the difference in timing of the signal received from each of the satellties in its view. Based on these time differences, it can then calculate the exact position of the satellites, and also the distance to each of the satellites. If you had a repeater that worked, all the subsequent GPS receiver would get is the position of the repeater's antenna, not is own. There is no way that you could replicate the differences in the satellites and vary them properly through the tunnel.
What you're likely seeing is what amounts to dead reckoning. The map data the GPS has tells it that its going into a tunnel, so don't' show the signal lost warning. If it's integrated into your vehicle, it knows how fast you're going, and what you're doing with steering, so that it can predict where you are with a reasonable degree of accuracy. If it's an external unit, it might just be dumb like my garmin, which assumes you are going the speed you were when entering the tunnel, or it might use onboard accelerometers and the like to try and work it out.
Yes, and no... It's a combination of a lot of factors. Your typical transponder on a geostationary satellite has a nominal power of 100 watts or so, spread out over a 36MHz bandwidth. In the bad old days, especially when dealing with analog television, a typical transmission occupied the entire transponder, and could use the entire power output. In the modern era, transponders are usually sliced and diced into smaller segments (I buy 4MHz on SES-1 C-Band, for example). To prevent intermodulation between the different users, you need to apply about a 6dB multi-user backoff, so that 100 watts becomes 25 watts. (wattage numbers chosen for easy math, but correct order of magnitude).
Standard geostationary satellites are located roughly every 2 degrees along the equator. The earth station antennas are chosen so that they have a 1.5 degree beam width, and the links are carefully designed so that they will not interfere with the adjacent satellites (there's always some spill over). This gives you spectrum re-use between adjacent satellites. Due to the expense of launching/operating a satellite, the spectrum is doubly re-used through the use of polarization. My slot on SES-1 is 4MHz on Vertical polarization, there is someone else on the Horizontal.
Anyhow, your typical geostationary satellite is a very broadband beast, offering about 1GHz of bandwidth per frequency band (500Mhz on each polarization). The size of the antenna is dependent on the frequency (minimum 2.4m for C-Band, minimum 1m for Ku-Band). Also, spot beams are quite common in the geosync world (Viasat 1, for example, breaks up North America into a honeycomb of some 50+ spot beams).
Sirius/XM is a different beast entirely. They have a license for 12.5MHz in the S-band (down near 2.4GHz), and each of their transmissions is only about 4MHz wide. They can pump a whole lot more power into those transmissions, enabling reception with simple omni-directional patch antennas.
Iridium went to low orbit for a lot of reasons, not just spectrum re-use. The free space loss to a low orbit satellite is a heck of a lot lower than it is to geostationary, allowing lower powered transmitters, polar orbit provides truly global coverage, and the shorter distances mean you do not have the 500ms round-trip time you have when going through geostationary.
Sometimes efficiency isn't the point; not everything has to be super efficient.
Take the example I mentioned above; Edward R. Murrow's account of his visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Sure, the information could have been conveyed in a page or two of text, but it would not have anywhere near the impact of hearing directly from an eye witness. There is information conveyed in that report that goes beyond the mere words; the rawness, the emotion, the anger. Some of that just can't be conveyed on the printed page.
"I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words. If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry."
Every medium has its strengths and weaknesses. I'm still pretty partial to radio, myself. One of the most moving/informative moments I've ever heard was from CBC's "As it Happens." The show basically consists of the hosts phoning up relevant people all over the world, and interviewing them at length for the show. It tends to be a mix of light hearted fare (An interview with the guy who won the cheese rolling race in the UK) and more serious items, speaking with an elderly lady who's home was flooded in Houston last night.
I've only heard it in replay, but back in 1994, they interviewed a Hutu woman in Rwanda during the height of the genocide. They were on the phone with her as she hid in her home as the Tutsi militias knocked on her door. The terror, the descriptions, brought the whole tragedy to life, and was (imho) much more effective than video could be, as it didn't focus on the gore.
In a similar vein, Edward R. Murrow's report on the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp was likely the most effective way to convey what happened. Print would have been dryer, more clinical and sanitized by editors. Film would have focused on the visuals. But Murrow's descriptions were raw, open, and unfiltered. Not only did he describe what he saw, but you could hear the emotion, the anger, in his voice.
I know you're trying to be facetious, but what you're saying is actually quite true. Assuming they deploy the enterprise management tools and so forth on these phones, they can lock them down so that only selected interfaces are available, white-listed applications, etc... I don't know enough about android to know whether the options are as locked down. You do not want your officer being able to install the latest, and compromised, version of a solitaire game in a unit that also has access to police records etc...
It was Captain Midnight, but no that wasn't me... And the HBO hack wasn't a "Hack" per se, it was just a guy with enough uplink power to override HBO's analogue feed at the time. With the way that modern digital transmissions work, the most you can expect to do is knock someone off the air.
Probably 6 years ago now, I was working at my desk when I got a call from SES Americom (one of the major satellite operators) asking for some assistance. They were getting a "wildcat" transmission on one of their satellites, and needed some help tracking it down. We had worked with them in the past, and they knew that we built stable/reliable VSAT terminals. What they needed from us was for us to uplink a powerful, narrow-band transmission from a known location to serve as a reference. They also needed it transmitted from an antenna that was small enough that it would have detectable (and known) side lobes on the adjacent satellites, which is why they called us.
Anyhow, we put up a narrow transmission over the weekend, and they proceeded to do their locating. By the end, they were able to track down the offending signal to an ellipse about 2miles by 1mile, located just out side of Detroit. The conclusion was that it was likely a malfunctioning transmitter on a gas station.
The point of all of this, though, is that if you transmit an interfering signal for long enough, the satellite operators can track you down. Antennas large enough to do real damage are pretty easy to spot, and in the case of war, a Tomahawk missile is an awfully effective denial of service attack.
Apple has been using force sensitive trackpads for a couple of years ago. The "click" of pressing down on it is now simulated using haptic feedback, same as it is with the home button on iPhones and what not. This bit I need to give them props for, the "Click" is, in my opinion, incredibly convincing. http://www.pocket-lint.com/new... for more info.
I could see it being marginally useful if they implemented the force based touch that they have on iPhones, and little nubs or something so that you could feel the divisions between the "Buttons" or a little nub or something just right on the center.. not sure which... basically make it so that for most things, it doesn't respond to just dragging a finger over it vs a reasonable press. Of course, that wouldn't make the whole slider thing work...
Of course, the current implementation of the touch bar is one of the many reasons why I still have a late 2011 MBP as my daily driver. 6 years old, still more than fast enough, and I've modified the hell out of it which you can't do with modern machines.
As someone who was in the satellite industry for nearly a decade... But the reality is that very little North American, or European traffic goes out over satellite. Yes, gas stations and so forth are all equipped with antennas (look for them sometime, you'll see a hughesnet dish). This is primarily backup these days.
However, the thing you need to know is that satellites have no security to them, they're just dumb bent-pipe repeaters. All that that someone needs to do to disrupt them is broadcast enough RF energy on the right frequency to drop the signal to noise ratio beyond what can be recovered.
How it made it is likely simple graph theory on the web of connections leading out from you. I don't know if you've played with the oracle of Bacon, but you can plug in two random actors, and see how many degrees of separation there are. I've had a hard time getting that above 3, even picking a long dead actor and one new in the industry. That said, the entertainment world is pretty small, but we're a lot more tightly connected than most people think.
Now as to why it showed that connection is a different matter. Maybe they had some sort of algorithm that figured out a slightly higher probability of connection, maybe it was just pure chance.
The same way two Administrations earlier we tried [nytimes.com] the same with North Korea? That played out beautifully [washingtonpost.com], didn't it?
Iran and North Korea are not comparable in this instance. North Korea is a military dictatorship, controlled either by the Kim family, or a small cadre of folks using the Kims as figureheads. It is incredibly closed and repressive, and who's average citizens are kept in a state of deprivation, with little to no access to outside world views. The military in NK knows that the only way they can hold on to power, and their lifestyles, is by making the idea of attacking them so unpalatable that the rest of the world will just let them go on.
Iran, on the other hand, is a large country (some 80 million people), with a large and growing middle class. Due to the various wars, and other demographic shifts, it's also a very young country with an above average number of young people, all of whom were born close to, or after, the revolution against the Shaw. These people generally enjoy a decent standard of living, are relatively worldly, and for the most part are quite moderate. Despite being a theocracy, the Ayatollahs know they serve at the pleasure of their population, if they go too far, we would likely see another revolution.
The simple fact is that Iran already has nuclear breakout capability. If they choose to run a crash program to build a warhead, there is little that anyone can do to stop them. All isolating them, and the 50+ million young people who live there, will do is make them more resentful of the west, increasing the danger.
In all seriousness... Given the billion plus people on Facebook, and the many multiples of that potential contacts it shows, it's entirely possible that this is just a coincidence. I would wager it's a lot like the birthday paradox, that is, to have a 50% chance of two people in a group to share a birth date, you only need 21 people in the group. Between that, and degrees of separation and so forth, it's entirely possible for some weird distant link through many unconnected people to wind up linking you back to someone you know.
I've noticed connections between people I know from opposite ends of the continent, that to my knowledge would have no people in common, yet they have one connector, or two, or whatever. Basically she could have been your brother's friend's uncles's boss's neighbour's gardener, and if she was showed as a potential link, you'd have no idea about the connection.
True story: worked on satcom gear for military public affairs. At one point, we added a small mixer to the unit to support IFB audio so they could more easily do live interviews and what not. When we made up the labels for the mixer, I made sure our graphics designer had the markings going from 1 to 11... about 10% of my students caught the reference.
The (actual) Engineer in me always thought that an audio editing/realtime effects software styled on LabView would work quite well... Drop effects controls onto a workspace, then wire them up by running links between the boxes. Don't know if that's what modern stuff is like (I haven't done audio work since 2002 or so), but it's one of those things that always stuck with me as a sensible way of doing things.
Oddly, I don't remember much of this from Protools back in the 2003 timeframe when I used it. That said, I was a Computer Engineer taking an audio editing course for my arts credit, and mostly stuck to the analog gear because it was my one time when I didn't have to use a computer. Besides, when else would I have been able to lay my hands on a real Lexicon DDL, Fairchild Reverbatron, or a Bode Ring Modulator (designed by Henry Bode himself)? Totally not practical in the modern era, but an absolute blast to do. Laying down my pieces really became performance art, as I was going between multiple 1/4" reel to reel machines, a huge mixing board, and layering in the other boxes as required.
And when compared to equally sturdy cardboard boxes, they're also _expensive_ as _FUCK_.
So you put a reasonable deposit on them, and exchange them. We still use refillable beer bottles here, with a $0.10 deposit per bottle. The system is managed by a consortium of the breweries in the area, and any licensed brewer can buy into the system. On average, a typical beer bottle will make it through the system 10 times before it gets lost/broken or otherwise doesn't survive the washing/QC process.
It's the same thing with a lot of pallets in the commercial world. Pallets are stored and returned for the deposit, rather than being thrown out or burned.
So anyway, what you do is come up with some sort of delivery crate, and put, say, a $2 deposit on it. You get the food delivered in the crate, pay your $2, and then when it's returned, you get that back. I can't be arsed to figure out what the actual numbers would be, but it might make sense.
Depending on what you did with it, yes, especially if doing an A:B comparision. yeah, if you loaded it up with sugar and vanilla, it would be harder to tell, but if you're running it minimalist, it's pretty easy.
Due to the diet, the grass fed whipping cream will be more cream coloured rather than white. It also has a more pronounced flavour. This latter bit is obviously going to be masked if you add a bunch of Vanilla or other flavourings, but is detectable otherwise. When doing something simple like strawberry shortcake, the flavour is quite important.
The second difference I mentioned is due to the stabilizers. The stabilizers make it harder to over-whip the cream, and also help it hold its consistency longer. However, you can't get it quite as stiff, and it's just a different texture. This is even more important when using the cream to make other stuff, say Ice Cream or anything else that calls for heavy cream. The stabilizers muck with the chemistry and can radically affect the consistency of what you're making.
Anyhow, for a $0.50 price difference, for most things I'll take the good stuff.
I think what he is referring to is car sharing systems, rather than ride hailing. Things like Car2Go, zipcar, etc... Doesn't solve the problem of getting home from the airport, but if you live in a small town, this kind of thing can make sense for those times when you need to run to the neighboring town for supplies/doctor's appointment, or whatever. The first car sharing system in BC was established in the 1940s, in a rural town, by the folks that lived there.
Edge case my ass, that's a daily drive for millions of rural Americans.
That doesn't change the fact that it's an edge case. However of those millions of rural Americans, how many are actually living in truly rugged/dirt/rough road conditions? I've driven a lot through rural areas over the years, and if anything the road system there is almost probably ideal for automation. Long straight roads, few other vehicles, the most you need to deal with is an errant cow. The number of people living at the end of a rough, winding, hilly unmarked gravel road can't be that high. That's pretty much the definition of an edge case.
Anyhow, I think that we're arguing over semantics while agreeing on the underlying issue. Automation is unlikely to ever be able to handle getting into these remote areas.
The road system is much more than just the city. I just got back from a road trip to watch the eclipse, and sure, an automated vehicle probably could have done the majority of the driving, the last 35 miles into our selected spot was over rough forest service roads, and the last 500 feet over nothing more than a slightly mowed track in the sage brush. Yes, stuff like this is an edge case, but it's also not uncommon.
I work with a charity that runs a camp in an isolated location. We're mostly staffed by volunteers, who are usually college age. One of our greatest difficulties this year was finding enough licensed drivers to do the various jobs at our site. We need people to drive the luggage truck, service vehicles, construction vehicles, and so forth. More and more of our volunteers have never learned to drive, nevermind having their CDLs. Knowing how to drive a vehicle is going to be a needed skill for decades to come, even if it's not required for the daily commute.
'Whole Paycheck' was for those people who like to impress each other with how much the overpay (for the same stuff).
Yes and no. While I don't shop at Whole Paycheque on a regular basis, their pricing for staples wasn't that far out of line from the other grocery stores in my area. The big thing for me is that they are a reliable source for less common, high quality ingredients. My most common purchase there is organic whipping cream from one of our local dairies. Their cows are grass fed, and the cream itself is just straight heavy cream, rather than containing the usual stabilizers (Guar gum, carrageenan, locust bean gum) in your typical whipped cream. I'm not chemophobic or any of that crap, it's that it just whips up differently, and in my opinion, better than the commercial stuff. it just takes more skill to get there, and if you fuck up you wind up with butter.
Until Afghanistan turns back into a failed state like what happened after the Soviets left, or what happened in Iraq after the US left. The only thing that abhors a vacuum more than nature is power. If the US reduces its influence in the area, then someone else will fill that void, and we probably won't like the results.
That's due to the underlying infrastructure, not the technology itself. In Canada, and most of the developed world, chip+pin transactions are virtually instantaneous. For small amounts, the NFC/touch pay is also pretty much instantaneous. It boggles my mind that transactions are so slow in the US... hell, when I travel to Europe, my Canadian chip card is no slower than it is in Canada, so it shouldn't take that long to process.
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There are no GPS repeaters like that. Due to the way the system works, they wouldn't actually accomplish anything. GPS depends on the difference in timing of the signal received from each of the satellties in its view. Based on these time differences, it can then calculate the exact position of the satellites, and also the distance to each of the satellites. If you had a repeater that worked, all the subsequent GPS receiver would get is the position of the repeater's antenna, not is own. There is no way that you could replicate the differences in the satellites and vary them properly through the tunnel.
What you're likely seeing is what amounts to dead reckoning. The map data the GPS has tells it that its going into a tunnel, so don't' show the signal lost warning. If it's integrated into your vehicle, it knows how fast you're going, and what you're doing with steering, so that it can predict where you are with a reasonable degree of accuracy. If it's an external unit, it might just be dumb like my garmin, which assumes you are going the speed you were when entering the tunnel, or it might use onboard accelerometers and the like to try and work it out.
Yes, and no... It's a combination of a lot of factors. Your typical transponder on a geostationary satellite has a nominal power of 100 watts or so, spread out over a 36MHz bandwidth. In the bad old days, especially when dealing with analog television, a typical transmission occupied the entire transponder, and could use the entire power output. In the modern era, transponders are usually sliced and diced into smaller segments (I buy 4MHz on SES-1 C-Band, for example). To prevent intermodulation between the different users, you need to apply about a 6dB multi-user backoff, so that 100 watts becomes 25 watts. (wattage numbers chosen for easy math, but correct order of magnitude).
Standard geostationary satellites are located roughly every 2 degrees along the equator. The earth station antennas are chosen so that they have a 1.5 degree beam width, and the links are carefully designed so that they will not interfere with the adjacent satellites (there's always some spill over). This gives you spectrum re-use between adjacent satellites. Due to the expense of launching/operating a satellite, the spectrum is doubly re-used through the use of polarization. My slot on SES-1 is 4MHz on Vertical polarization, there is someone else on the Horizontal.
Anyhow, your typical geostationary satellite is a very broadband beast, offering about 1GHz of bandwidth per frequency band (500Mhz on each polarization). The size of the antenna is dependent on the frequency (minimum 2.4m for C-Band, minimum 1m for Ku-Band). Also, spot beams are quite common in the geosync world (Viasat 1, for example, breaks up North America into a honeycomb of some 50+ spot beams).
Sirius/XM is a different beast entirely. They have a license for 12.5MHz in the S-band (down near 2.4GHz), and each of their transmissions is only about 4MHz wide. They can pump a whole lot more power into those transmissions, enabling reception with simple omni-directional patch antennas.
Iridium went to low orbit for a lot of reasons, not just spectrum re-use. The free space loss to a low orbit satellite is a heck of a lot lower than it is to geostationary, allowing lower powered transmitters, polar orbit provides truly global coverage, and the shorter distances mean you do not have the 500ms round-trip time you have when going through geostationary.
I remember it taking several hours, but that was 2.0.3x running on a 386dx40 with 8MB of RAM... now get off my lawn...
Sometimes efficiency isn't the point; not everything has to be super efficient.
Take the example I mentioned above; Edward R. Murrow's account of his visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Sure, the information could have been conveyed in a page or two of text, but it would not have anywhere near the impact of hearing directly from an eye witness. There is information conveyed in that report that goes beyond the mere words; the rawness, the emotion, the anger. Some of that just can't be conveyed on the printed page.
"I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words. If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry."
Every medium has its strengths and weaknesses. I'm still pretty partial to radio, myself. One of the most moving/informative moments I've ever heard was from CBC's "As it Happens." The show basically consists of the hosts phoning up relevant people all over the world, and interviewing them at length for the show. It tends to be a mix of light hearted fare (An interview with the guy who won the cheese rolling race in the UK) and more serious items, speaking with an elderly lady who's home was flooded in Houston last night.
I've only heard it in replay, but back in 1994, they interviewed a Hutu woman in Rwanda during the height of the genocide. They were on the phone with her as she hid in her home as the Tutsi militias knocked on her door. The terror, the descriptions, brought the whole tragedy to life, and was (imho) much more effective than video could be, as it didn't focus on the gore.
In a similar vein, Edward R. Murrow's report on the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp was likely the most effective way to convey what happened. Print would have been dryer, more clinical and sanitized by editors. Film would have focused on the visuals. But Murrow's descriptions were raw, open, and unfiltered. Not only did he describe what he saw, but you could hear the emotion, the anger, in his voice.
I know you're trying to be facetious, but what you're saying is actually quite true. Assuming they deploy the enterprise management tools and so forth on these phones, they can lock them down so that only selected interfaces are available, white-listed applications, etc... I don't know enough about android to know whether the options are as locked down. You do not want your officer being able to install the latest, and compromised, version of a solitaire game in a unit that also has access to police records etc...
It was Captain Midnight, but no that wasn't me... And the HBO hack wasn't a "Hack" per se, it was just a guy with enough uplink power to override HBO's analogue feed at the time. With the way that modern digital transmissions work, the most you can expect to do is knock someone off the air.
Probably 6 years ago now, I was working at my desk when I got a call from SES Americom (one of the major satellite operators) asking for some assistance. They were getting a "wildcat" transmission on one of their satellites, and needed some help tracking it down. We had worked with them in the past, and they knew that we built stable/reliable VSAT terminals. What they needed from us was for us to uplink a powerful, narrow-band transmission from a known location to serve as a reference. They also needed it transmitted from an antenna that was small enough that it would have detectable (and known) side lobes on the adjacent satellites, which is why they called us.
Anyhow, we put up a narrow transmission over the weekend, and they proceeded to do their locating. By the end, they were able to track down the offending signal to an ellipse about 2miles by 1mile, located just out side of Detroit. The conclusion was that it was likely a malfunctioning transmitter on a gas station.
The point of all of this, though, is that if you transmit an interfering signal for long enough, the satellite operators can track you down. Antennas large enough to do real damage are pretty easy to spot, and in the case of war, a Tomahawk missile is an awfully effective denial of service attack.
Apple has been using force sensitive trackpads for a couple of years ago. The "click" of pressing down on it is now simulated using haptic feedback, same as it is with the home button on iPhones and what not. This bit I need to give them props for, the "Click" is, in my opinion, incredibly convincing. http://www.pocket-lint.com/new... for more info.
I could see it being marginally useful if they implemented the force based touch that they have on iPhones, and little nubs or something so that you could feel the divisions between the "Buttons" or a little nub or something just right on the center.. not sure which... basically make it so that for most things, it doesn't respond to just dragging a finger over it vs a reasonable press. Of course, that wouldn't make the whole slider thing work...
Of course, the current implementation of the touch bar is one of the many reasons why I still have a late 2011 MBP as my daily driver. 6 years old, still more than fast enough, and I've modified the hell out of it which you can't do with modern machines.
As someone who was in the satellite industry for nearly a decade... But the reality is that very little North American, or European traffic goes out over satellite. Yes, gas stations and so forth are all equipped with antennas (look for them sometime, you'll see a hughesnet dish). This is primarily backup these days.
However, the thing you need to know is that satellites have no security to them, they're just dumb bent-pipe repeaters. All that that someone needs to do to disrupt them is broadcast enough RF energy on the right frequency to drop the signal to noise ratio beyond what can be recovered.
Can you say the same thing about all your friends and family?
How it made it is likely simple graph theory on the web of connections leading out from you. I don't know if you've played with the oracle of Bacon, but you can plug in two random actors, and see how many degrees of separation there are. I've had a hard time getting that above 3, even picking a long dead actor and one new in the industry. That said, the entertainment world is pretty small, but we're a lot more tightly connected than most people think.
Now as to why it showed that connection is a different matter. Maybe they had some sort of algorithm that figured out a slightly higher probability of connection, maybe it was just pure chance.
The same way two Administrations earlier we tried [nytimes.com] the same with North Korea? That played out beautifully [washingtonpost.com], didn't it?
Iran and North Korea are not comparable in this instance. North Korea is a military dictatorship, controlled either by the Kim family, or a small cadre of folks using the Kims as figureheads. It is incredibly closed and repressive, and who's average citizens are kept in a state of deprivation, with little to no access to outside world views. The military in NK knows that the only way they can hold on to power, and their lifestyles, is by making the idea of attacking them so unpalatable that the rest of the world will just let them go on.
Iran, on the other hand, is a large country (some 80 million people), with a large and growing middle class. Due to the various wars, and other demographic shifts, it's also a very young country with an above average number of young people, all of whom were born close to, or after, the revolution against the Shaw. These people generally enjoy a decent standard of living, are relatively worldly, and for the most part are quite moderate. Despite being a theocracy, the Ayatollahs know they serve at the pleasure of their population, if they go too far, we would likely see another revolution.
The simple fact is that Iran already has nuclear breakout capability. If they choose to run a crash program to build a warhead, there is little that anyone can do to stop them. All isolating them, and the 50+ million young people who live there, will do is make them more resentful of the west, increasing the danger.
In all seriousness... Given the billion plus people on Facebook, and the many multiples of that potential contacts it shows, it's entirely possible that this is just a coincidence. I would wager it's a lot like the birthday paradox, that is, to have a 50% chance of two people in a group to share a birth date, you only need 21 people in the group. Between that, and degrees of separation and so forth, it's entirely possible for some weird distant link through many unconnected people to wind up linking you back to someone you know.
I've noticed connections between people I know from opposite ends of the continent, that to my knowledge would have no people in common, yet they have one connector, or two, or whatever. Basically she could have been your brother's friend's uncles's boss's neighbour's gardener, and if she was showed as a potential link, you'd have no idea about the connection.
True story: worked on satcom gear for military public affairs. At one point, we added a small mixer to the unit to support IFB audio so they could more easily do live interviews and what not. When we made up the labels for the mixer, I made sure our graphics designer had the markings going from 1 to 11... about 10% of my students caught the reference.
The (actual) Engineer in me always thought that an audio editing/realtime effects software styled on LabView would work quite well... Drop effects controls onto a workspace, then wire them up by running links between the boxes. Don't know if that's what modern stuff is like (I haven't done audio work since 2002 or so), but it's one of those things that always stuck with me as a sensible way of doing things.
Oddly, I don't remember much of this from Protools back in the 2003 timeframe when I used it. That said, I was a Computer Engineer taking an audio editing course for my arts credit, and mostly stuck to the analog gear because it was my one time when I didn't have to use a computer. Besides, when else would I have been able to lay my hands on a real Lexicon DDL, Fairchild Reverbatron, or a Bode Ring Modulator (designed by Henry Bode himself)? Totally not practical in the modern era, but an absolute blast to do. Laying down my pieces really became performance art, as I was going between multiple 1/4" reel to reel machines, a huge mixing board, and layering in the other boxes as required.
And when compared to equally sturdy cardboard boxes, they're also _expensive_ as _FUCK_.
So you put a reasonable deposit on them, and exchange them. We still use refillable beer bottles here, with a $0.10 deposit per bottle. The system is managed by a consortium of the breweries in the area, and any licensed brewer can buy into the system. On average, a typical beer bottle will make it through the system 10 times before it gets lost/broken or otherwise doesn't survive the washing/QC process.
It's the same thing with a lot of pallets in the commercial world. Pallets are stored and returned for the deposit, rather than being thrown out or burned.
So anyway, what you do is come up with some sort of delivery crate, and put, say, a $2 deposit on it. You get the food delivered in the crate, pay your $2, and then when it's returned, you get that back. I can't be arsed to figure out what the actual numbers would be, but it might make sense.
Depending on what you did with it, yes, especially if doing an A:B comparision. yeah, if you loaded it up with sugar and vanilla, it would be harder to tell, but if you're running it minimalist, it's pretty easy.
Due to the diet, the grass fed whipping cream will be more cream coloured rather than white. It also has a more pronounced flavour. This latter bit is obviously going to be masked if you add a bunch of Vanilla or other flavourings, but is detectable otherwise. When doing something simple like strawberry shortcake, the flavour is quite important.
The second difference I mentioned is due to the stabilizers. The stabilizers make it harder to over-whip the cream, and also help it hold its consistency longer. However, you can't get it quite as stiff, and it's just a different texture. This is even more important when using the cream to make other stuff, say Ice Cream or anything else that calls for heavy cream. The stabilizers muck with the chemistry and can radically affect the consistency of what you're making.
Anyhow, for a $0.50 price difference, for most things I'll take the good stuff.
I think what he is referring to is car sharing systems, rather than ride hailing. Things like Car2Go, zipcar, etc... Doesn't solve the problem of getting home from the airport, but if you live in a small town, this kind of thing can make sense for those times when you need to run to the neighboring town for supplies/doctor's appointment, or whatever. The first car sharing system in BC was established in the 1940s, in a rural town, by the folks that lived there.
Edge case my ass, that's a daily drive for millions of rural Americans.
That doesn't change the fact that it's an edge case. However of those millions of rural Americans, how many are actually living in truly rugged/dirt/rough road conditions? I've driven a lot through rural areas over the years, and if anything the road system there is almost probably ideal for automation. Long straight roads, few other vehicles, the most you need to deal with is an errant cow. The number of people living at the end of a rough, winding, hilly unmarked gravel road can't be that high. That's pretty much the definition of an edge case.
Anyhow, I think that we're arguing over semantics while agreeing on the underlying issue. Automation is unlikely to ever be able to handle getting into these remote areas.
The road system is much more than just the city. I just got back from a road trip to watch the eclipse, and sure, an automated vehicle probably could have done the majority of the driving, the last 35 miles into our selected spot was over rough forest service roads, and the last 500 feet over nothing more than a slightly mowed track in the sage brush. Yes, stuff like this is an edge case, but it's also not uncommon.
I work with a charity that runs a camp in an isolated location. We're mostly staffed by volunteers, who are usually college age. One of our greatest difficulties this year was finding enough licensed drivers to do the various jobs at our site. We need people to drive the luggage truck, service vehicles, construction vehicles, and so forth. More and more of our volunteers have never learned to drive, nevermind having their CDLs. Knowing how to drive a vehicle is going to be a needed skill for decades to come, even if it's not required for the daily commute.
'Whole Paycheck' was for those people who like to impress each other with how much the overpay (for the same stuff).
Yes and no. While I don't shop at Whole Paycheque on a regular basis, their pricing for staples wasn't that far out of line from the other grocery stores in my area. The big thing for me is that they are a reliable source for less common, high quality ingredients. My most common purchase there is organic whipping cream from one of our local dairies. Their cows are grass fed, and the cream itself is just straight heavy cream, rather than containing the usual stabilizers (Guar gum, carrageenan, locust bean gum) in your typical whipped cream. I'm not chemophobic or any of that crap, it's that it just whips up differently, and in my opinion, better than the commercial stuff. it just takes more skill to get there, and if you fuck up you wind up with butter.
Until Afghanistan turns back into a failed state like what happened after the Soviets left, or what happened in Iraq after the US left. The only thing that abhors a vacuum more than nature is power. If the US reduces its influence in the area, then someone else will fill that void, and we probably won't like the results.
That's due to the underlying infrastructure, not the technology itself. In Canada, and most of the developed world, chip+pin transactions are virtually instantaneous. For small amounts, the NFC/touch pay is also pretty much instantaneous. It boggles my mind that transactions are so slow in the US... hell, when I travel to Europe, my Canadian chip card is no slower than it is in Canada, so it shouldn't take that long to process.