Whittaker is fine as the Doctor. She has the right mix of impertinence, condescension, and compassion to convey to you that this is in fact The Doctor. She just needs to develop some personality traits unique to her Doctor. My hats off to her.
What's killed this season are the plots. They continue the SJW proselytizing (enough so that a couple episodes are eminently predictable), and are quite frankly boring. I played the season on my TV last weekend while I played games on the computer. Only three times in 9 episodes did I pause the game and back up the video stream. And I have no desire to go back and watch any of the episodes again (unlike Blink which I must have watched 5 times now). Watching them out of the corner of my eye as I was doing something else was good enough.
It created by degrading the video in a process called unsharp masking. Basically you find the edges between light and dark objects, and exaggerate them. You make the light side lighter on that edge, and make the dark side darker. This adds no information, in fact it degrades video quality from the original unsharpened version (loses information).
But your brain has special cells which recognize transitions between light and dark, and identifies them as an edge. When the exaggerated transition from an unsharp masked edge hits those brain cells, they get more excited and signal the rest of your brain that this is a really strong edge. Thus creating the illusion that you are seeing a sharper image, when objectively it's a degraded image.
So any algorithm which detects "sharpness" as interpreted by the brain would actually rate inferior (heavily processed) video streams higher than video streams conveying the maximum amount of information possible. It's why unsharp masking is typically added by the TV or video player, rather than incorporated into the original video stream. (A slight amount of sharpening is done to counteract the blurring caused by the Bayer filter used in camera sensors, but that's another story.)
The Amiga was "better" in that it had dedicated video and audio processing hardware. This allowed it to do things like edit videos and music - things the PC couldn't simply because the CPU alone didn't have sufficient horsepower.
Which meant diddly squat to the vast majority of businesses. Most businesses needed a computer to help crunch financial numbers and to track inventory and sales. That means a spreadsheet and database. Both of which were available at a professional grade on the PC, but not on the Amiga. If they needed a TV commercial or radio jingle made, they'd hire an outside advertising company to do it for them (and that ad company would probably use an Amiga to make it).
Commodore's failure wasn't in how they marketed the Amiga. It was failing to entice Lotus into put out a version of 1-2-3 for the Amiga. The more interesting story from the time is how the PC supplanted the Apple II, seeing as Lotus 1-2-3 began as Visicalc for the Apple II. As best as I can tell, businesses didn't trust this funny little company with a colored fruit as its logo. But they trusted IBM.
The FCC's net neutrality repeal left the market for broadband internet access virtually lawless, giving ISPs an opening to control peoples' online activities at their discretion.
No it didn't. Awarding these ISPs local monopolies with insufficient guidelines and regulatory oversight is what caused that. The ISPs do not have natural monopolies. Their monopolies were granted to them by the local governments. This is a regulatory failure, not a market failure. If this regulated market for broadband internet access is virtually lawless, it's because the regulators made it that way.
Instead of Net Neutrality, why not just do it the easy way and fix the original regulation - rescind the ISPs' monopolies and allow competition. At this point, I'm beginning to suspect the politicians (both sides) don't want to do this. As long as the ISPs have a government-granted monopoly, they're beholden to the government. The ISPs will continue to donate to the parties to maintain those monopolies. Allowing competition would mean there's no more reason for the ISPs to stuff the politicians' wallets. So instead the politicians advocate Net Neutrality, which allows them to have their cake and to eat it too. The monopolies remain so the ISPs continue making campaign contributions, while the politicians appease the public by appearing to be against the "terrible ISPs and their monopolies" (never mind the politicians are the ones who gave them those monopolies).
Wait for someone else to develop it, then steal the plans.
But seriously, there's something to be said for waiting if the existing technology doesn't seem to be up to the task. Japan spent several decades working on and pouring billions of dollars into HDTV, determined to be the first country to have HDTV broadcasts and be in control of all the standards. The U.S. didn't do anything. But Japan built their HDTV standard on analog transmission because that was the only technology capable of doing TV broadcasts at the time. Then in the 1990s, the price/performance of digital signal processors (needed to compress/decompress a digital video stream) dropped so quickly that the U.S. was able to develop a digital HDTV standard in just a few years and at far less cost than Japan's effort.
None of the existing fusion reactor designs really instill me with confidence. They don't seem to instill the designers with confidence either as they're always talking about it being decades away. Maybe what we need is to wait for some breakthrough in superconductivity or materials science or quantum mechanics which suddenly makes fusion easy.
Fission reactors can't suffer nuclear detonation either (that's right, the climax of Pacific Rim wouldn't work in real life). You need specific isotopes of uranium or plutonium to make a bomb; isotopes which actually impede the functionality of the reactor as an energy source.
Chernobyl suffered a thermal explosion. So much energy built up so quickly the reactor fuel vaporized and blew apart the building. It was not a nuclear explosion. And it should be noted that Western nuclear reactors cannot blow up as Chernobyl did because they're designed with a negative void coefficient. They're designed so if the cooling water starts to boil, it slows down the nuclear reaction. Chernobyl's design used a positive void coefficient - boiling water sped up the nuclear reaction. The moment its coolant started to boil, the reactor was doomed. Positive void coefficient reactor designs were never used in the West because of this inherent instability. The Soviets were more interested in building something cheap, rather than safe.
Even the right isotope of uranium or plutonium, building a bomb is very hard to do. The materials will not blow up in a nuclear explosion by themselves.. There were two supercriticality accidents with a plutonium core during the Manhattan Project. The two halves were accidentally put together close enough where the nuclear reaction became self-sustaining. All that happened was it gave off a bunch of radiation killing the nearest scientist. It did not blow up.
To make it blow up in a nuclear explosion, you have to crush the uranium or plutonium far beyond its normal state. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima used a gun. A uranium bullet was fired at another uranium mass, briefly increasing the density beyond that needed for the supercriticality to cause a nuclear explosion. The atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki used explosives to implode a shell of plutonium (this is the method used in modern nuclear weapons). When the shell pieces collided in the center, their density briefly exceeded what was needed for a nuclear explosion. if they don't all meet in the center at the exact same time, then either there's no nuclear explosion, or you get a small nuclear explosion (this is why the yields in North Korea's nuclear tests were so small as to almost not register on monitoring equipment)..Getting all those explosives to go off at the exact same time with the right force in the right direction is really, really hard.
Incidentally, fusion is so much harder to achieve that a fission nuclear bomb is used to create the pressures and temperatures needed to get hydrogen to begin to fuse, causing a fusion explosion. That's where the term "thermonuclear" comes from.
If you're OK with only a 77% chance of landing successfully. (Counting the ones which tipped over after landing as successes, even if they blew up after falling over.)
It's about on par with the damage you see from bird strikes, and they weigh about the same. The difference being that birds are mostly soft pieces of meat which compress to absorb energy and bounce off, while drones are made of hard components which concentrate their energy into a smaller surface area and can thus penetrate further.
Odds are it's a bird strike, not a drone strike. There are something like a hundred billion birds aloft at any give time, while there are probably only a few tens of thousand of drones aloft at any given time. And there have been bird strikes before which left little to no organic matter. Not saying a drone strike can't happen, just that a plane is much more likely to hit a bird.
If everyone adopts your reasoning, employees will quit without giving notice. Employers will let employees go without severance or adequate notice.
For the best outcome, everyone has to be considerate of each other. Employers have to give employees adequate notice, and provide severance to help carry the ex-employee through while they find another job. Employees have to give their employers adequate notice, and wrap up their projects and help train their replacement employee before they leave.
Also, being a jerk to a company you work at just because another company screwed you over, is no different from a company being a jerk to an employee just because another employee screwed them over. Again, that sort of behavior just creates a race to the bottom, and is in fact the basis of all discrimination. Retribution needs to target the company or individual who wronged you, not someone else who just happens to belong to the same class, type, race, gender, etc.
As cool as the metric system is, one of the advantages of Imperial units is that they're based on intuitive measures. You just have to tell the Japanese person one time, "a foot is about the length of your foot with your shoes on," and they will forever know how long a foot is.
Unfortunately, going the other way (imperial to metric) is not so intuitive, which is one of the reasons why Americans have thus far resisted the metric system. I was taught the metric system in the 1970s when the U.S. was attempting to switch. About the only measures which i thought were intuitive were your finger being about 1 cm wide, and your hand about 1 dm wide (not that anyone uses decimeters). Alas, it's called a centimeter and not a fingermeter, and decimeter instead of handmeter. So the only way to learn it is through brute memorization. Unlike a foot being the length of a foot.
c.f. teaspoon vs milliliter, horsepower vs Watt, atmosphere vs Pascals, grain vs gram. The only cool relationship I think the metric system has is that 1 liter of water weighs 1 kg.
2) The reclassification of X-15 pilots as astronauts wasn't done until 2005, long after the X-15 program ended (and most of the pilots were dead). So no, it wasn't factor in the decision to classify space as beginning at 80 km.
The USAF used 80 km because that's 50 miles. And that sounded like a nice, round, easy-to-remember number to set as the boundary. Simple as that.
That's not what "the customer is always right" means. What it originally meant was that what the customer wants is always right. i.e. You need to figure out what your customers want if you want to increase sales. Or put another way, even if you think the customer should get something different, sell them what they want. In a battle between what you think the customer should get and what the customer thinks s/he should get, the customer is always right.
The phrase has since been twisted by greedy customers who willfully misinterpret it as justification for getting more than they're paying for (i.e. stealing from the seller).
I bought a "new" mouse from Amazon (yes they were the seller) with their "frustration free packaging" option. The mouse I got was obviously used - the plastic foot pads had scuff marks worn into them from use, and the top had fingerprints all over it. I don't have an issue with used items - I buy refurb stuff all the time. But the principle being broken by selling used goods as new required me to return it for a refund. As much as it galls me to add retail plastic blister packaging to the waste stream, I don't trust Amazon enough to get "frustration free packaging" again.
The Macbooks are (currently) made by Quanta. They're an ODM - original design manufacturer. That's like an OEM, except they also design the product. They're the ones who came up with such innovations like hogging a unibody laptop chassis out of a single solid piece of aluminum, not Apple. Slashdot had an article describing how they bought the CNC milling machinery, were playing around with hogging out aluminum billets, and pitched the idea to Apple. Quanta also makes laptops for pretty much every other laptop brand out there, so no, Apple doesn't have a monopoly on quality. I always tell buyers that about the only thing the brand name tells you is what sort of aftermarket support you'll get.
Asus also started off as an ODM too. They made the old Powerbooks and the plastic Macbooks, as well as a few other Apple devices. They spun off their ODM division as Pegatron (the company founder likes Pegasus - both company names are derived from it) a decade ago due to complaints from their customers about conflict of interest (they also sold laptops under the Asus brand). Likewise, the iPhones are made by Foxconn, which is probably more widely known due to PR managers at Apple dumping blame for all the bad things that happen to iPhones onto Foxconn in order to preserve the Apple brand name.
The only hardware Apple makes is their processor. Everything else is made by other companies. Memory by Samsung and SK Hynix. Flash storage by Samsung and Toshiba. Screen by Samsung and LG, camera by Sony, etc. Apple just hires an ODM and gives them the general design specs they want it to meet. The ODM makes the product, buying parts that are available to all other brand names, and packages them together into a whole. Just like every other brand name. There is no magic unicorn dust inside. Sorry to burst your bubble.
What Apple figured out is the Gucci effect. If you develop a strong brand name, people will pay extra to buy it regardless of features or quality.
While I appreciate that's their long-term goal, 3.5 hours from New York to London/Paris was already tried with the Concorde. There's not enough demand to make it economically sustainable. So it'll be primarily rich people on vacation joyriding this, not people who need to get between New York and Hong Kong in 2 hours for business reasons (i.e. spending money to make money).
Of course if they can get their cost per mile below that of Concorde (New York to London cost about $10,000 without discounts), that will be a breakthrough.
A new-build dry bulk ship was delayed from sailing for several days because its ECDIS was infected by a virus. The ship was designed for paperless navigation and was not carrying paper charts.
Not foreseeing malware problems can be kinda forgiven if you're ignorant of IT. But not having paper charts on board? That's utter stupidity. You're going to risk the ship and the life of everyone on board because you don't want to pay about $100 for a set of waterproof charts? Never mind malware. What happens if a generator glitch sends a power surge through the onboard power system? Or a rogue wave smashes in a bridge window dumping salt water on all the electronics?
So it makes more sense compare them that way vs. France vs the US. because it would be closer to compare France against New York.
I'd say it doesn't make sense to even compare them in the first place. "Most AI papers published" is just a penis measuring contest. Usually promulgated by people who don't work in AI, and are just looking for any way to use other people's accomplishments to stoke their own egos.
Yeah, it's so fucking awesome to have a single choice of broadband provider, one which now has carte blanche to implement whatever means they deem necessary to squeeze more profit out of a market they've monopolized.
There's no need for national legislation to solve that problem. You just have to convince your local city council not to award a cable monopoly. From what I've seen, the vast majority of these monopolies are granted by well-meaning liberal politicians. They grant them in exchange for a guarantee from the cable provider to provide service to low income areas. They simply don't trust the market to provide service to those areas.
For some reason people seem to rail against the cable monopolies as a failure of the free market. It's got nothing to do with the free market. It's actually a perfect example of failed government regulation. Your local government thought it could pick and choose a cable service better than the citizens could, and awarded a monopoly in exchange for certain concessions. Completely missing all the other problems that come about from granting a monopoly.
And now because one government regulation has failed, rather than rescind and modify that failed regulation, people dream up a different government regulation (Net Neutrality) to try to fix it while keeping the original failed regulation in place. Who's to say the new regulation won't have unforeseen consequences as bad as or worse than what we got from granting cable monopolies in exchange for coverage guarantees?
When I lived in a Boston suburb, the city council voted to allow a second cable company. The day before the second cable company was scheduled to begin offering service, the original cable company announced 50% speed upgrades and a $10 price cut to all service plans. Competition works. The only reason Comcast can throttle Netflix is because they know their customers can't flee to a different ISP due to the poor Netflix experience on their service. Give customers the opportunity to flee, and any ISP throttling Netflix would just be driving their own customers away.
However the apps for the device, I download for the most part usually work well, and are not malware.
The same is true for Android. The apps I download for my Android device, for the most part usually work well and are not malware. I think we're just seeing the effect of Android's 88% market share vs iOS's 12%. Even if there's the same amount of malware for each OS, it has 7x the impact on Android so there are 7x as many news stories about it. And malware authors get 7x the return on investment attacking Android than they do iOS, so even if all other things are equal they're more likely to target it.
It's mandated by law. CARB (California Air Resources Board) runs a ZEV mandate. Each year, automakers have to sell a certain percentage of zero emissions vehicles. The formula is a bit complex (it also includes partial ZEVs like hybrids and plug-in hybrids). But the quota for 2018 is 2.5% ZEVs. For 2025, it will be 8%.
Every automaker has to sell this percentage of ZEVs. If they fail, they have to buy credits from an automaker who exceeded their quota. If they fail that, they are banned from selling cars in California. And since about a half dozen states representing nearly a third of the U.S. population automatically adopt CARB's guidelines, the automaker would be banned from selling cars to a third of the U.S.
No automaker wants to be cut off from a third of the U.S. market. So they will do whatever it takes to meet the mandated ZEV percentage for the year. If that means running crazy sales and incentives (VW offered a 3 year/30,000 mile lease on an eGolf for $49/mo $1500 down, or $79/mo zero down a few years back), then so be it. In other words, the sales numbers do not represent true market demand. The ZEV mandate means if not enough EVs are being sold to meet the quota, automakers will discount EV prices until it does. (This is also why the best EV deals are in California - only EVs sold or leased in California count towards the ZEV mandate.)
That said, real demand seems to be meeting or exceeding the mandated percentage the last couple years, since I haven't seen a repeat of the crazy year-end sales and incentives. But this isn't a metric you can reliably use to gauge real demand. As the mandated ZEV percentage gets higher, it becomes harder for automakers to subsidize their prices to meet the mandate if there's insufficient demand (the discount for each EV has to be amortized over fewer ICE vehicles). So if the mandated percentage outstrips demand by too much, it'll create a situation where it'll be cheaper for Californians to buy an ICE vehicle out-of-state and bring it in, rather than buy it in California. Thus skewing the official sales figures further from real demand.
People love to blame companies or executives for things like this, when it's their own damn fault. Top-level executives may make the decision to try out ideas like this, but whether the idea succeeds ultimately depends on what the customers do.
If customers predominantly value conversing with the people preparing their food as you theorize, then this idea will flop.
OTOH if customers would rather have a burger which costs 10 cents less, then this idea will take off and the human burger flippers will lose their jobs.
You don't just vote in elections. Every time you buy something, you're voting with your dollars. Businesses just chase your dollars. Ultimately it's you who determines what direction companies and executives take. It just doesn't feel like you're in control because like with elections, nearly half the people lose almost half the time. Walmart grew into the behemoth it is because people preferred to buy cheap Chinese products rather than more expensive American-made products. If you think Americans are buying Chinese-made goods because Walmart opted to carry them instead of American-made goods, you have cause and effect reversed.
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Whittaker is fine as the Doctor. She has the right mix of impertinence, condescension, and compassion to convey to you that this is in fact The Doctor. She just needs to develop some personality traits unique to her Doctor. My hats off to her.
What's killed this season are the plots. They continue the SJW proselytizing (enough so that a couple episodes are eminently predictable), and are quite frankly boring. I played the season on my TV last weekend while I played games on the computer. Only three times in 9 episodes did I pause the game and back up the video stream. And I have no desire to go back and watch any of the episodes again (unlike Blink which I must have watched 5 times now). Watching them out of the corner of my eye as I was doing something else was good enough.
It created by degrading the video in a process called unsharp masking. Basically you find the edges between light and dark objects, and exaggerate them. You make the light side lighter on that edge, and make the dark side darker. This adds no information, in fact it degrades video quality from the original unsharpened version (loses information).
But your brain has special cells which recognize transitions between light and dark, and identifies them as an edge. When the exaggerated transition from an unsharp masked edge hits those brain cells, they get more excited and signal the rest of your brain that this is a really strong edge. Thus creating the illusion that you are seeing a sharper image, when objectively it's a degraded image.
So any algorithm which detects "sharpness" as interpreted by the brain would actually rate inferior (heavily processed) video streams higher than video streams conveying the maximum amount of information possible. It's why unsharp masking is typically added by the TV or video player, rather than incorporated into the original video stream. (A slight amount of sharpening is done to counteract the blurring caused by the Bayer filter used in camera sensors, but that's another story.)
The Amiga was "better" in that it had dedicated video and audio processing hardware. This allowed it to do things like edit videos and music - things the PC couldn't simply because the CPU alone didn't have sufficient horsepower.
Which meant diddly squat to the vast majority of businesses. Most businesses needed a computer to help crunch financial numbers and to track inventory and sales. That means a spreadsheet and database. Both of which were available at a professional grade on the PC, but not on the Amiga. If they needed a TV commercial or radio jingle made, they'd hire an outside advertising company to do it for them (and that ad company would probably use an Amiga to make it).
Commodore's failure wasn't in how they marketed the Amiga. It was failing to entice Lotus into put out a version of 1-2-3 for the Amiga. The more interesting story from the time is how the PC supplanted the Apple II, seeing as Lotus 1-2-3 began as Visicalc for the Apple II. As best as I can tell, businesses didn't trust this funny little company with a colored fruit as its logo. But they trusted IBM.
No it didn't. Awarding these ISPs local monopolies with insufficient guidelines and regulatory oversight is what caused that. The ISPs do not have natural monopolies. Their monopolies were granted to them by the local governments. This is a regulatory failure, not a market failure. If this regulated market for broadband internet access is virtually lawless, it's because the regulators made it that way.
Instead of Net Neutrality, why not just do it the easy way and fix the original regulation - rescind the ISPs' monopolies and allow competition. At this point, I'm beginning to suspect the politicians (both sides) don't want to do this. As long as the ISPs have a government-granted monopoly, they're beholden to the government. The ISPs will continue to donate to the parties to maintain those monopolies. Allowing competition would mean there's no more reason for the ISPs to stuff the politicians' wallets. So instead the politicians advocate Net Neutrality, which allows them to have their cake and to eat it too. The monopolies remain so the ISPs continue making campaign contributions, while the politicians appease the public by appearing to be against the "terrible ISPs and their monopolies" (never mind the politicians are the ones who gave them those monopolies).
If it bugs you that much, just install an extension. Problem solved. Unless of course your real goal is just to complain about anything American.
Wait for someone else to develop it, then steal the plans.
But seriously, there's something to be said for waiting if the existing technology doesn't seem to be up to the task. Japan spent several decades working on and pouring billions of dollars into HDTV, determined to be the first country to have HDTV broadcasts and be in control of all the standards. The U.S. didn't do anything. But Japan built their HDTV standard on analog transmission because that was the only technology capable of doing TV broadcasts at the time. Then in the 1990s, the price/performance of digital signal processors (needed to compress/decompress a digital video stream) dropped so quickly that the U.S. was able to develop a digital HDTV standard in just a few years and at far less cost than Japan's effort.
None of the existing fusion reactor designs really instill me with confidence. They don't seem to instill the designers with confidence either as they're always talking about it being decades away. Maybe what we need is to wait for some breakthrough in superconductivity or materials science or quantum mechanics which suddenly makes fusion easy.
Fission reactors can't suffer nuclear detonation either (that's right, the climax of Pacific Rim wouldn't work in real life). You need specific isotopes of uranium or plutonium to make a bomb; isotopes which actually impede the functionality of the reactor as an energy source.
Chernobyl suffered a thermal explosion. So much energy built up so quickly the reactor fuel vaporized and blew apart the building. It was not a nuclear explosion. And it should be noted that Western nuclear reactors cannot blow up as Chernobyl did because they're designed with a negative void coefficient. They're designed so if the cooling water starts to boil, it slows down the nuclear reaction. Chernobyl's design used a positive void coefficient - boiling water sped up the nuclear reaction. The moment its coolant started to boil, the reactor was doomed. Positive void coefficient reactor designs were never used in the West because of this inherent instability. The Soviets were more interested in building something cheap, rather than safe.
Even the right isotope of uranium or plutonium, building a bomb is very hard to do. The materials will not blow up in a nuclear explosion by themselves.. There were two supercriticality accidents with a plutonium core during the Manhattan Project. The two halves were accidentally put together close enough where the nuclear reaction became self-sustaining. All that happened was it gave off a bunch of radiation killing the nearest scientist. It did not blow up.
To make it blow up in a nuclear explosion, you have to crush the uranium or plutonium far beyond its normal state. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima used a gun. A uranium bullet was fired at another uranium mass, briefly increasing the density beyond that needed for the supercriticality to cause a nuclear explosion. The atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki used explosives to implode a shell of plutonium (this is the method used in modern nuclear weapons). When the shell pieces collided in the center, their density briefly exceeded what was needed for a nuclear explosion. if they don't all meet in the center at the exact same time, then either there's no nuclear explosion, or you get a small nuclear explosion (this is why the yields in North Korea's nuclear tests were so small as to almost not register on monitoring equipment)..Getting all those explosives to go off at the exact same time with the right force in the right direction is really, really hard.
Incidentally, fusion is so much harder to achieve that a fission nuclear bomb is used to create the pressures and temperatures needed to get hydrogen to begin to fuse, causing a fusion explosion. That's where the term "thermonuclear" comes from.
If you're OK with only a 77% chance of landing successfully. (Counting the ones which tipped over after landing as successes, even if they blew up after falling over.)
It's about on par with the damage you see from bird strikes, and they weigh about the same. The difference being that birds are mostly soft pieces of meat which compress to absorb energy and bounce off, while drones are made of hard components which concentrate their energy into a smaller surface area and can thus penetrate further.
Odds are it's a bird strike, not a drone strike. There are something like a hundred billion birds aloft at any give time, while there are probably only a few tens of thousand of drones aloft at any given time. And there have been bird strikes before which left little to no organic matter. Not saying a drone strike can't happen, just that a plane is much more likely to hit a bird.
If everyone adopts your reasoning, employees will quit without giving notice. Employers will let employees go without severance or adequate notice.
For the best outcome, everyone has to be considerate of each other. Employers have to give employees adequate notice, and provide severance to help carry the ex-employee through while they find another job. Employees have to give their employers adequate notice, and wrap up their projects and help train their replacement employee before they leave.
Also, being a jerk to a company you work at just because another company screwed you over, is no different from a company being a jerk to an employee just because another employee screwed them over. Again, that sort of behavior just creates a race to the bottom, and is in fact the basis of all discrimination. Retribution needs to target the company or individual who wronged you, not someone else who just happens to belong to the same class, type, race, gender, etc.
As cool as the metric system is, one of the advantages of Imperial units is that they're based on intuitive measures. You just have to tell the Japanese person one time, "a foot is about the length of your foot with your shoes on," and they will forever know how long a foot is.
Unfortunately, going the other way (imperial to metric) is not so intuitive, which is one of the reasons why Americans have thus far resisted the metric system. I was taught the metric system in the 1970s when the U.S. was attempting to switch. About the only measures which i thought were intuitive were your finger being about 1 cm wide, and your hand about 1 dm wide (not that anyone uses decimeters). Alas, it's called a centimeter and not a fingermeter, and decimeter instead of handmeter. So the only way to learn it is through brute memorization. Unlike a foot being the length of a foot.
c.f. teaspoon vs milliliter, horsepower vs Watt, atmosphere vs Pascals, grain vs gram. The only cool relationship I think the metric system has is that 1 liter of water weighs 1 kg.
1) The X-15 flew over 100 km.
2) The reclassification of X-15 pilots as astronauts wasn't done until 2005, long after the X-15 program ended (and most of the pilots were dead). So no, it wasn't factor in the decision to classify space as beginning at 80 km.
The USAF used 80 km because that's 50 miles. And that sounded like a nice, round, easy-to-remember number to set as the boundary. Simple as that.
That's not what "the customer is always right" means. What it originally meant was that what the customer wants is always right. i.e. You need to figure out what your customers want if you want to increase sales. Or put another way, even if you think the customer should get something different, sell them what they want. In a battle between what you think the customer should get and what the customer thinks s/he should get, the customer is always right.
The phrase has since been twisted by greedy customers who willfully misinterpret it as justification for getting more than they're paying for (i.e. stealing from the seller).
I bought a "new" mouse from Amazon (yes they were the seller) with their "frustration free packaging" option. The mouse I got was obviously used - the plastic foot pads had scuff marks worn into them from use, and the top had fingerprints all over it. I don't have an issue with used items - I buy refurb stuff all the time. But the principle being broken by selling used goods as new required me to return it for a refund. As much as it galls me to add retail plastic blister packaging to the waste stream, I don't trust Amazon enough to get "frustration free packaging" again.
The Macbooks are (currently) made by Quanta. They're an ODM - original design manufacturer. That's like an OEM, except they also design the product. They're the ones who came up with such innovations like hogging a unibody laptop chassis out of a single solid piece of aluminum, not Apple. Slashdot had an article describing how they bought the CNC milling machinery, were playing around with hogging out aluminum billets, and pitched the idea to Apple. Quanta also makes laptops for pretty much every other laptop brand out there, so no, Apple doesn't have a monopoly on quality. I always tell buyers that about the only thing the brand name tells you is what sort of aftermarket support you'll get.
Asus also started off as an ODM too. They made the old Powerbooks and the plastic Macbooks, as well as a few other Apple devices. They spun off their ODM division as Pegatron (the company founder likes Pegasus - both company names are derived from it) a decade ago due to complaints from their customers about conflict of interest (they also sold laptops under the Asus brand). Likewise, the iPhones are made by Foxconn, which is probably more widely known due to PR managers at Apple dumping blame for all the bad things that happen to iPhones onto Foxconn in order to preserve the Apple brand name.
The only hardware Apple makes is their processor. Everything else is made by other companies. Memory by Samsung and SK Hynix. Flash storage by Samsung and Toshiba. Screen by Samsung and LG, camera by Sony, etc. Apple just hires an ODM and gives them the general design specs they want it to meet. The ODM makes the product, buying parts that are available to all other brand names, and packages them together into a whole. Just like every other brand name. There is no magic unicorn dust inside. Sorry to burst your bubble.
What Apple figured out is the Gucci effect. If you develop a strong brand name, people will pay extra to buy it regardless of features or quality.
While I appreciate that's their long-term goal, 3.5 hours from New York to London/Paris was already tried with the Concorde. There's not enough demand to make it economically sustainable. So it'll be primarily rich people on vacation joyriding this, not people who need to get between New York and Hong Kong in 2 hours for business reasons (i.e. spending money to make money).
Of course if they can get their cost per mile below that of Concorde (New York to London cost about $10,000 without discounts), that will be a breakthrough.
Not foreseeing malware problems can be kinda forgiven if you're ignorant of IT. But not having paper charts on board? That's utter stupidity. You're going to risk the ship and the life of everyone on board because you don't want to pay about $100 for a set of waterproof charts? Never mind malware. What happens if a generator glitch sends a power surge through the onboard power system? Or a rogue wave smashes in a bridge window dumping salt water on all the electronics?
I'd say it doesn't make sense to even compare them in the first place. "Most AI papers published" is just a penis measuring contest. Usually promulgated by people who don't work in AI, and are just looking for any way to use other people's accomplishments to stoke their own egos.
There's no need for national legislation to solve that problem. You just have to convince your local city council not to award a cable monopoly. From what I've seen, the vast majority of these monopolies are granted by well-meaning liberal politicians. They grant them in exchange for a guarantee from the cable provider to provide service to low income areas. They simply don't trust the market to provide service to those areas.
For some reason people seem to rail against the cable monopolies as a failure of the free market. It's got nothing to do with the free market. It's actually a perfect example of failed government regulation. Your local government thought it could pick and choose a cable service better than the citizens could, and awarded a monopoly in exchange for certain concessions. Completely missing all the other problems that come about from granting a monopoly.
And now because one government regulation has failed, rather than rescind and modify that failed regulation, people dream up a different government regulation (Net Neutrality) to try to fix it while keeping the original failed regulation in place. Who's to say the new regulation won't have unforeseen consequences as bad as or worse than what we got from granting cable monopolies in exchange for coverage guarantees?
When I lived in a Boston suburb, the city council voted to allow a second cable company. The day before the second cable company was scheduled to begin offering service, the original cable company announced 50% speed upgrades and a $10 price cut to all service plans. Competition works. The only reason Comcast can throttle Netflix is because they know their customers can't flee to a different ISP due to the poor Netflix experience on their service. Give customers the opportunity to flee, and any ISP throttling Netflix would just be driving their own customers away.
The same is true for Android. The apps I download for my Android device, for the most part usually work well and are not malware. I think we're just seeing the effect of Android's 88% market share vs iOS's 12%. Even if there's the same amount of malware for each OS, it has 7x the impact on Android so there are 7x as many news stories about it. And malware authors get 7x the return on investment attacking Android than they do iOS, so even if all other things are equal they're more likely to target it.
Obscurity is not security.
Backup your data frequently. Stop worrying. Is that so hard?
It's mandated by law. CARB (California Air Resources Board) runs a ZEV mandate. Each year, automakers have to sell a certain percentage of zero emissions vehicles. The formula is a bit complex (it also includes partial ZEVs like hybrids and plug-in hybrids). But the quota for 2018 is 2.5% ZEVs. For 2025, it will be 8%.
Every automaker has to sell this percentage of ZEVs. If they fail, they have to buy credits from an automaker who exceeded their quota. If they fail that, they are banned from selling cars in California. And since about a half dozen states representing nearly a third of the U.S. population automatically adopt CARB's guidelines, the automaker would be banned from selling cars to a third of the U.S.
No automaker wants to be cut off from a third of the U.S. market. So they will do whatever it takes to meet the mandated ZEV percentage for the year. If that means running crazy sales and incentives (VW offered a 3 year/30,000 mile lease on an eGolf for $49/mo $1500 down, or $79/mo zero down a few years back), then so be it. In other words, the sales numbers do not represent true market demand. The ZEV mandate means if not enough EVs are being sold to meet the quota, automakers will discount EV prices until it does. (This is also why the best EV deals are in California - only EVs sold or leased in California count towards the ZEV mandate.)
That said, real demand seems to be meeting or exceeding the mandated percentage the last couple years, since I haven't seen a repeat of the crazy year-end sales and incentives. But this isn't a metric you can reliably use to gauge real demand. As the mandated ZEV percentage gets higher, it becomes harder for automakers to subsidize their prices to meet the mandate if there's insufficient demand (the discount for each EV has to be amortized over fewer ICE vehicles). So if the mandated percentage outstrips demand by too much, it'll create a situation where it'll be cheaper for Californians to buy an ICE vehicle out-of-state and bring it in, rather than buy it in California. Thus skewing the official sales figures further from real demand.
If an investigation found that a carrier's coverage maps were accurate, now *that* would be a news story.
I suppose that's one metric you can use. Another is the level of corruption in the country. And Mexico is worse than China by that measure.
Ideally companies would be moving production away from corrupt countries as punishment, to less-corrupt countries as a reward.
You don't just vote in elections. Every time you buy something, you're voting with your dollars. Businesses just chase your dollars. Ultimately it's you who determines what direction companies and executives take. It just doesn't feel like you're in control because like with elections, nearly half the people lose almost half the time. Walmart grew into the behemoth it is because people preferred to buy cheap Chinese products rather than more expensive American-made products. If you think Americans are buying Chinese-made goods because Walmart opted to carry them instead of American-made goods, you have cause and effect reversed.