Assuming we could get a way to manufacture large mirrors & lenses, the far side of the moon would probably be a great place to put Hubble's ultimate replacement. In fact, I'm pretty sure the construction of such a telescope will be fairly high on the "things to do ASAP" list once there ARE settlements of some kind on the moon, once the immediate infrastructure needs of the settlement itself have been taken care of.
In fact, I'm pretty sure that building and operating lunar observatories would be one of the first commercially successful business endeavors ON the Moon. With a local factory to build the parts that are too big to transport from Earth, and "boots on the ground" to build and maintain them, the Moon's surface would be a FANTASTIC place to build dozens, then hundreds, of observatories.
Obviously, the Moon isn't going to have semiconductor-manufacturing facilities rivaling those of Intel anytime soon... but that's fine. Chips, and even populated circuit boards, would be easy to manufacture on Earth and ship to the Moon for integration into locally-built structures, with locally-built lenses and mirrors.
A little further down the line, I believe the Moon might become an affordable place to do launches into near-Earth orbits. The Moon lies within Earth's own gravity well, so there's no real advantage to launching spacecraft heading beyond Earth's orbit from the Moon (especially if it's just a staging ground for supplies that first have to be transported there from Earth), but for launches into OTHER Earth orbits, it might make sense as long as the majority of components are produced on the Moon itself. Manufacturing a complete satellite on Earth, sending it to the Moon, then re-launching it into an Earth orbit would make about as much economic and logistical sense as buying a book that's available from amazon.co.uk at a Barnes & Noble store in Miami, mailing it to someone in London, and having THEM re-mail it to someone in Brighton. On the OTHER hand, manufacturing the electronics & sensors on Earth for a few DOZEN satellites, shipping them to the Moon, then integrating them into spaceframes built and launched from the Moon might make economic sense.
It's hard to explain without getting EXTREMELY technical, but here's a SOMEWHAT technical explanation:
Back in "the old days" (6502, 68000, 8086, etc), a specific machine language instruction took a precise, deterministic amount of time to execute... 1 cycle, 2 cycles, 3 cycles, whatever. Always, and without exception.
Sometime around the AMD K5 (late 90s), we got to a point where the combination of cache and execution-time optimizations used by processors (speculative & out of order execution, cache, etc) made it SEEM like the days of deterministic execution timing were over. You could predict best-case and worst-case execution times for a given block of code, but ACTUAL runtime execution times had become seemingly random when you tried to measure them on an operating system like Windows or Linux.
It turns out, we were wrong. Execution times were as deterministic as ever... it's just that making sense of their timing had become too complex for humans to understand, so it SEEMED random. Then, "big data" and "machine learning" became common, and people discovered that execution timings weren't nearly as random as humans had come to believe they were.
Problem #2: due to the state various performance optimizations leave the CPU and its cache in, the amount of time it takes an attempt to do something prohibited to fail varies in subtle ways depending upon the values being protected.
So... taking advantage of analytics, machine learning, and lots of brute-force hammering & observation, it's possible for attackers to gradually discover the likely values of protected ram and registers. They can't necessarily do it with a single hit... but if they hammer away at something a million times and discover that a particular bit's value seems to be '0' ~70% of the time, and '1' the other 30% of the time... well, the bit's value is probably 0.
Here's another roughly analogous example: suppose you're attempting to discover the combination to a safe. Suppose the lock is designed to frustrate attempts to listen for pins falling into place by ensuring that EVERY dial position results in the lowering of one pin and the rising of another. HOWEVER... someone discovers that certain unsuccessful combinations produce a slightly different sound than others. Using deep learning techniques, the algorithm predicts that sound #1 indicates a combination that's almost right, while sound #2 indicates a combination that's completely wrong. By rapidly performing a few million experiments with different combinations, the algorithm is able to eliminate 99% of possible combinations, and focus on the 1% it believes are likely to work... and as it continues to experiment, it discovers a THIRD sound variant that appears to exist whenever the third number is equal to 17. By successively setting aside unlikely combinations, it eventually stumbles upon the correct combination to open the safe.
In security, this kind of problem is well known, and has a solution that generally works well: limit the rate at which an attacker can attempt different combinations. The problem is, that solution goes completely at odds against everything modern CPUs have attempted to accomplish for the past 50 years -- achieve better performance.
Ultimately, Intel and others are probably going to start making CPUs with a security gradient:
* The high-performance no-security portion that is designed to maximize performance, but makes no guarantees about security. Basically, "gamer" oriented CPUs will dedicate most of their silicon to this portion.
* High-performance with minimal security... designed to avoid blatantly leaking data to other processes, but still totally vulnerable to Spectre-type attacks. CPUs targeted to enterprise users will probably dedicate most of their silicon to THIS mode.
* The slow, separate, secure fortress. Totally separate, with no cache or optimizations at all, designed to guarantee absolutely deterministic execution times from the perspective of an outside observer. Basically, an 80386
I've actually been working on an Android app like that on & off for the past couple of years. Some of the frustrations I've encountered:
1. Extraordinarily slow rendering performance compared to even a fairly OLD formerly high-end laptop or desktop PC (say, a 2009 Thinkpad T61p with 2.2GHz core2duo and 8 gigs, or ASUS P5A with 2.6GHz quadcore i7 and 8 gigs, both with 2010'ish SATA2 SSDs). I suspect much of the blame lies with poor eMMC flash performance, combined with open-source pdf-rendering libraries that are single-threaded and are compiled without optimizations for common-denominator ARM. This is one of the big reasons I keep throwing the project back on my "re-evaluate the situation next year" pile.
2. General unavailability of Android tablets with large (13.3"+) high-resolution (240+ PPI) displays. If there's an Android tablet out there somewhere with a 3:2 3840x2560 display larger than 13" diagonally, I haven't found it yet. I personally own a Chuwi Hi12, which has a 12.1" 2160x1440 display that's largely been a disappointment due to extraordinarily poor wi-fi compared to pretty much every other device in the house, slow charging, laggy touch performance, and a screen that's about 15-20% smaller than I really wanted it to be.
At one point, I experimented with pre-rendering pdf ebooks to various formats (JPG, PNG, WEBM), but I just couldn't get the "fetch from flash, instantiate into Bitmap, and display into View" fast enough to be imperceptible. It WAS fast enough if I kept multiple Views (containing the page's Bitmap) expanded, stored in an array, and ready to swap in on the spot... but you can only get away with doing THAT for a couple of pages... and meanwhile, attempting to pre-fetch predicted future pages from the filesystem in the background badly affected the touch-animation performance. Maybe I'm just too much of a perfectionist, but I want to create an experience where the performance is SO instantaneous, it stops feeling like the user is sloshing around underwater trying to scoop around laggy virtual pages, and instead feels like the user is flipping a real page that's quite firmly gripped by his fingers with no slippage or lag.
For shits & giggles, I even did an experiment & wrote two programs... one for Windows, one for Android. Using a different program, I pre-rendered a pdf O'Reilly ebook to bitmaps that were approximately 400% larger than the desired target size, then used ImageMagick to downsample them with Lanczos sharpening to fit within the desired target sizes for Android and Windows (incidentally, AFAIK, there is no known FOSS image library for Android that can do Lanczos... Android's API omits Lanczos, and nobody has ever bothered to implement it as a generic Java library because Java itself has Lanczos built-in. If you hand Android a large bitmap and tell it to downscale it, it just uses nearest-neighbor and looks like shit). I then wrote an Android app to display two Bitmaps side by side & flip through them using the volume buttons, and did the same thing in Windows with two monitors in portrait orientation and the left & right arrow keys. Windows could load the files from the SSD and flip through them at 60fps without breaking a sweat. Android wheezed and stumbled through approximately 15-20 pages/second, and hung for a few seconds to do garbage collection every 30-50 seconds. The only way I could sustain 60fps with Android was if I bypassed loading the image from flash & inflating the Bitmaps, and instead just kept four Bitmap objects in an array & cycled through them. That was basically the point when I said, "fuck it, Android's too slow to do it with current hardware" and threw in the towel until my next tablet... and so far, I haven't found a new tablet that looks like it would genuinely be a real improvement over what I already have.
The point to take home: contrary to what "the industry" seems to believe, ebook-rendering is absolutely NOT some "lightweight" task that can be adequately performed by cheap hardware. If you wa
Hyperlinks are DEATH to understanding many topics. I've seen WAY too many "web-based" instructional sites that put the equivalent of 4 or 5 sentences' worth of information on a page, then spray diarrhea-like hyperlinks at you with nearly every word. The reader gets sucked into a rabbit hole that ultimately leads to nowhere, and ends up learning almost nothing.
Single-column web design, compounded by the 16:9 monitors we've been stuck with for 15 years, just makes things worse.
There's a REASON why textbooks have generally followed a design pattern that could be called, "diagram on right page, descriptions of diagram on facing left page", and why technical books are so much harder to read on a slow e-reader that can only show one page at a time & takes a second or more to flip pages. The pattern exists because it works, and ebook readers break it.
Young people today are no less technically-savvy than we were at their age... it's just that NOW, we have non-technically-savvy people using technology they don't understand & subconsciously regard as 'magic', whereas when WE were their age, the dumb kids didn't use technology at all. Or if they were rich, their parents bought them a Macintosh.
Ignore the kids who spend their afternoons posting selfies with ice cream cones, and pay attention to the kids building robots and winning FIRST competitions. THEY'RE the smart kids who matter... and if anything, their numbers (as a percentage of their generation) are probably a bit HIGHER than the percentage of smart kids were in OUR generations, simply because when WE were their age, a kid who was poor had approximately zero chance of getting anywhere NEAR the resources he or she needed to thrive. We've gotten slightly better and finding those kids and giving them the resources they need to thrive... or at least, survive long enough to get to college.
Charging for an estimate isn't necessarily unethical. You can't always diagnose a problem without doing some degree of disassembly and inspection. Personally, I'd RATHER pay someone a fair price to give me an accurate, detailed, written diagnosis & do a good job of carefully putting my car back together than get a "free" estimate that ends up causing even MORE damage because the pissed-off mechanic did a sloppy job of reassembly after I decided to get another quote from someone else.
With an accurate, detailed diagnosis, you can get repair quotes from other mechanics without having to pay THEM to repeat the procedure (though obviously, their estimates will have a disclaimer that they're based upon the accuracy of the diagnosis presented to them... you can't expect a mechanic who agrees to perform {x} for ${y} based upon specific diagnosis {z} to eat the cost of doing {other things besides x} that weren't identified by diagnosis {z}.
That said, I'd absolutely object to paying someone to say, "your repair will cost ${y}, take it or leave it" without actually elaborating in writing about what the problem is and what specific work they intend to do for ${y}".
Put another way, performing a thorough diagnosis is a valuable service that's entirely deserving of fair payment.
> These businesses simply don't want to bother to establish, for instance, their own supply chains for spare parts.
And how, pray tell, is ANYONE supposed to establish "their own supply chain for spare parts" when the parts are built by a vertically-integrated company for themselves, to specs that aren't public, with DRM to make reverse-engineering any embedded software "problematic" at best (and quite possibly impossible, technically and/or legally)?
I honestly don't think Tesla (just to name one specific company) even genuinely WANTS to prevent independent mechanics from servicing their cars... they're just afraid that some yahoo who isn't qualified to work on a Tesla is going to make a bad repair & cause an accident, then Tesla will end up getting cross-claimed in a lawsuit against the mechanic, be found to be 0.1% at fault for failing to prevent the unqualified mechanic from performing the repair, and be on the hook for 100% of a $10 million judgment under the legal theory of joint & several liability (because the mechanic himself is broke, while Tesla has deep pockets).
If there were a federal "right to repair law" that REQUIRED Tesla to make parts, documentation, and software available to independent mechanics, Tesla would have a strong legal defense if it appealed the verdict and challenged the determination that it was anything besides 0% at fault, on the grounds that you can't use civil contract law to compel someone to commit a criminal offense.
If Tesla could persuasively argue that refusal to make the parts, documentation, and software available would have itself been a criminal offense, the plaintiff's legal case against them would fall apart unless they could come up with an alternate legal theory to explain how Tesla might have refused to make the parts, documentation, and software available without breaking the law. The $10 million judgment against the mechanic would still stand, but Tesla itself would be off the hook (and the plaintiff would be out of luck & unable to collect anything beyond what the mechanic was capable of paying). Going forward, anytime Tesla was cross-claimed in a lawsuit based upon "they were partially at fault because they didn't stop the mechanic from performing the repair", they'd cite the appellate court's decision & move to have the claim against them dismissed. Worst case, they might have to fight and appeal cases in every state or federal circuit until they racked up enough victories to establish binding precedent in most places, and convince lawyers in others that going against Tesla was likely to be an expensive act of futility.
Put another way, I suspect Elon Musk privately WANTS to see "Right to Repair" legislation, because it would give Tesla a clear path to a safe harbor instead of putting them into a "damned if we do, damned if we don't" situation.
There's actually a good technical reason why it took so long for 3D Blu-Ray to exist -- the first 3D-ready TVs weren't actually DESIGNED to be "3D". It was mostly a lucky accident.
Rewind back to the early 2000s, when DLP was the norm for large-screen HDTVs and LCDs were still small, expensive, and riddled with dead/stuck pixels. Someone at TI (or possibly one of TI's customers, like Samsung or Matsushita) figured out that with a more sophisticated DLP and faster video processor, you could take advantage of the way DLP micromirrors vibrated diagonally to double their effective resolution by taking an old idea (interlacing) and applying it in a new way.
Sometime later, it occurred to someone that since DLP TVs were now effectively "interlaced" (though in a checkerboard pattern, rather than as horizontal scanlines), you could use the technique NVidia had come up with in the late 90s (combining active LCD shutter glasses with interlaced video to get frame-sequential 3D by using one set of scanlines for the left eye, and one set for the right) to display half the pixels in the DLP checkerboard pattern to one eye, and half to the other.
Those engineers hooked up a PC with a DVI port to their TVs, and made some really cool demos. Then, they ran into a brick wall due to Hollywood.
DVD players existed and had Hollywood's blessing, but they didn't have sufficiently high resolution. A "720p" DLP needed an image with EXACTLY 1280x720 pixels in EXACTLY the right order in order for it to work with the glasses and display as "3D". Likewise, a "1080p" DLP needed an image with EXACTLY 1920x1080 pixels in EXACTLY the right checkerboard layout to display as 3D. That left... Blu-Ray.
Then came brick wall #2: there was no way to actually ENCODE 1280x720 or 1920x1080 video on a standards-compliant Blu-Ray disc that would permit the pixels in both checkerboard sets to have arbitrary colors. By definition, legacy Blu-Ray supported ONLY 4:2:0 chroma subsampling. Simplifying a bit, that means that every pair of pixels share the same Yellow (Pb) and Cyan (Pr) chroma data. And in any case, DCT compression doesn't take kindly to adjacent pixels with radical intensity changes... at best, you end up with video that's nearly impossible to compress. At worst, you end up with nasty, visible artifacts that make it look like a modem-optimized 1990s JPEG.
So... somehow, the manufacturers had to talk the Blu Ray people into making players that allowed 3D video to be ENCODED as if it were half-resolution interlaced video (with left and right stored as different fields), but have the player itself read & decompress both fields and use them to assemble a 1280x720 or 1920x1080 frame in the required checkerboard format.
Meanwhile, LCD happened. LCD TVs didn't need to have their video presented to them in checkerboard format, so they came up with alternate arrangements for encoding video that were within the already-existing Blu-Ray spec, so even a "stupid" player with no understanding of "3D" could output the video "as-is" & let the "smart" TV rip it apart and make the magic happen. Basically, they came up with 3 schemes:
* Side by Side. Each eye's frame gets half the horizontal resolution, and when viewed on a "normal" TV, it looks like two squashed images displayed side by side.
* Stacked. Same idea, but with this scheme, each eye gets half the vertical resolution, and when viewed on a "normal" TV, it looks like two squashed images stacked on top of each other. Most people agreed that most content looked better with the side-by-side scheme than this one.
* Sequential. Hollywood film is 24fps. Blu-Ray already had official schemes for 720p50 and 720p60. Normally, when transcoding movies, they'll encode 24 "real" frames, and 26 or 36 "repeat-flagged" fake frames. This scheme looks the best, but also has the most opportunities for things to Go Badly Wrong unless the player itself is aware of what you're trying to do and actively on board.
The main strength of the Blu-Ray format is that the format itself is fairly open-ended, and left the door open from the very start to multi-layer discs that exceeded the manufacturing capabilities available at the time the standard itself was defined. Older PLAYERS are constrained to specific codecs, bitrates, and formats... but as long as you have enough storage space, the standard gives itself wide latitude to add future interleaved streams that older players can simply ignore if they don't understand.
The biggest problem with 4k, and ESPECIALLY 3D, is the fact that it's hard to rent 4k discs, and damn-near IMPOSSIBLE to rent 3D discs... they're too niche for Redbox, and Redbox is just about the only place LEFT where you can cheaply rent discs in person without advance planning in most parts of the US.
As far as I'm concerned, "glasses" are a minor problem. LCD shutter glasses are practically FREE compared to the cost of the display, player, audio system, and content. I mean, seriously... we're talking $10-20 for a "shit" pair, and not a whole lot more for good ones. We aren't talking about high-tech items here... they're basically cheap sunglasses with a single-pixel LCD laminated onto each lens with a simple controller whose only job is to react to an external timing signal and hide one side or the other.
A larger problem is screen size and placement that comes down to consumer education. You need a screen that fills most of your field of view. A 52" TV hanging on the wall 10' away over a fireplace just isn't going to cut it. 3D on a 65" TV sitting 5-6 feet in front of the sofa looks fantastic.
Side note: if you have your TV more than 6 feet away or more than a foot off the floor, you're seriously compromising your viewing experience of ALL TV content whether you realize it or not. Seriously. The next time you have the house to yourself for a few days (and don't have to worry about spouse-acceptance-factor), put the TV on a cement block 5 feet in front of your chair, and try watching it in that position for a few days. Trust me... you'll never be satisfied with the TV hanging on a wall 10 feet away after that. It's a completely different viewing experience. If you're GenX or older, think about where YOU used to sit watching TV when your mom wasn't there to yell at you for sitting "too close". You're an adult now, it's your house, you aren't sitting in front of an electron-emitting vacuum tube, and the resolution is much better now. Try it... you'll like it.
Anyway, the biggest technical hurdle when 3D first came out was the fact that HDMI 1.2 didn't have enough bandwidth to gracefully deal with frame-packed 3D, so players had to package up 1080p48 as 1080p60 to send over HDMI, which the TV then ripped apart and used its own video processor to treat as 1080p48 that was internally displayed as 1080p120 or 1080p240. Now that HDMI 2.x can handle 1080p120 (and possibly 1080p240) directly, a sufficiently smart PLAYER could "bitbang" 3D on any TV capable of being directly driven at 120 or 240hz (with the player itself controlling the timing of the glasses). As far as the TV were concerned, it would just be blindly displaying 120fps video in "videogame mode" (with its own internal video processing and interpolation turned off). For a given sequence of two 24fps film frames "A" and "B", the player would simply send "AL AR AL AR AL BR BL BR BL BR" at 120fps (or at 240fps, "AL AR AL AR AL AR AL AR AL AR BL BR BL BR BL BR BL BR BL BR").
One solution might be to create a new combo format that could have a name like "Blu+UH3D" that contains two sets of interleaved streams: one that respects the bitrate limits of legacy Blu-Ray, and one that requires the faster bitrate provided by UHD Blu-Ray:
The first set of interleaved streams would be compatible with legacy Blu-Ray players.
1.1. The only stream legacy Blu-Ray players would pay attention to. It could be any video format supported by legacy Blu-Ray. The additional 1.2x streams would simply be ignored.
Please make Quadro cards a true, compromise-free superset of your best gaming cards that can, if desired, run gaming-tweaked firmware... or beat some sense into companies like Lenovo and Dell & convince them to NOT blindly force consumers into choosing between EITHER "shit integrated graphics" OR "Quadro that costs $2,000 and sucks for gaming".
For my past two laptop purchases, I've been forced to choose between either sacrificing a good tactile scissor-switch keyboard with pointer stick, settling for integrated graphics that suck, or paying a small fortune for a Quadro card with gaming performance that's only marginally better than a low-end gaming card.
At the very least, grow some balls and declare an official standard for mounting holes & heat-removal (and require manufacturers to both advertise and adhere to it), so we could buy a Thinkpad with the cheapest videocard option, then buy a thirdparty non-Quadro card on our own and stick it in if Lenovo won't sell us one directly.
Yeah, I really like Thinkpads. They have the best laptop keyboards bar none, and are one of the only brands that reliably comes with pointer sticks... but goddamn, I hate the way they're hellbent on always forcing buyers to choose between "Quadro, more expensive Quadro, Ungodly expensive Quadro, or integrated graphics".
LONG before daily tidal flooding becomes a serious problem, higher storm surge from hurricanes will wipe out low-lying neighborhoods. The land will get purchased by investors, who'll pile another 10 feet of crushed limestone on top & build expensive new homes (or skyscrapers) on top.
Meanwhile, rising sea levels will cause saltwater intrusion into groundwater, forcing South Florida to either process lake water or do full-on reverse osmosis. The higher water cost will drive farms to sell to developers, who'll proceed to build several million new homes, office parks, and shopping centers in extreme south Dade & inland. Miami-area retirees will cash in on the house they bought for $150k that's now worth $1.5 million & move to a cheaper inland exurb, developers will knock down their 3/2 house & replace it with a 6/4.5 McMansion (or a skyscraper) sitting on more crushed limestone, and sell it for $5 million to someone else. Stir, rinse, and repeat.
South Florida is 100% non-seismic. It's one of the few places in America where you genuinely CAN get away with piling on fill dirt & crushed limestone forever.
If any part of the US is likely to look like Coruscant 500 years from now... it's South Florida. We've been terraforming swampland into condos, office parks, retail stores, and golf courses from Day One. It's nothing new to us. Every 25-50 years, our building codes add a few feet to the minimum allowed amouna of fill dirt, older stuff gets destroyed by hurricanes, newer & more expensive stuff gets built to replace it, and life goes on. In South Florida, levees exist to keep yards and parking lots dry... AFAIK, it has NEVER been legal here to build habitable dwellings whose first floor is below sea level, and for at least the past 40-50 years, worst-case storm surge has to be taken into account as well.
Put another way, South Florida is probably better-equipped to deal with sea level rise than anywhere besides maybe the Netherlands & Singapore, because we've ALWAYS had to engineer around flooding right from the start. Every inch of urban coastline in Florida was engineered to be that way. Urbanized parts of Florida's east & west coasts haven't had anything that resembles a natural coastline for 50-100 years. Compare the coastline at Cape Canaveral to the rest of Florida's east coast to see just how terraformed most of our coastline IS.
So, no. Miami isn't going to be "under water" a few decades from now. It might very well be a 10-20 mile wide peninsula joined to Florida's west coast by causeways across what used to be the Everglades, but eco-fantasies about it being abandoned to nature just aren't going to happen.
Pro #1: Bezos went to high school in Miami, and presumably has family and/or social ties.
Pro #2: South Florida is New York's de-facto sixth borough. So in a way, opening an office in South Florida IS kind of/sort of like opening a New York office. Miami is where a lot of New Yorkers WANT to live, but can't, because they have to be in New York for the sake of their careers. Give them an excuse to move to Miami, and they'll be on the next flight.
Pro #3: Miami will move heaven and earth to get Bezos a site where he can legally build the tallest skyscraper in America. Miami wants to have the tallest skyscraper in America so badly it hurts, and there's no limit to what Miami will do to make it happen. In the past, Dade County has overruled Miami's attempts to grant building permits exceeding Dade County's airport-imposed (for fuel economy, not absolute FAA limit) height limit, but Amazon is a big enough prize that even Dade County will fall in line for them.
Pro #4: Thanks to Virgin-Brightline, downtown Miami is now easily (albeit expensively) accessible to commuters who'd rather live near downtown Fort Lauderdale, and by the time Amazon's first building is ready, Tri-Rail will be running directly to downtown Miami as well.
Pro #5: In addition to being New York's unofficial sixth borough, it's also the de-facto capital of Latin America. If Amazon wants to poach the top talent from Latin American countries & have them come work for Amazon, Miami is definitely the place to do it from.
Con: Aspirations aside, Miami isn't New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Washington DC. Most of its potential IS still "potential".
Mitigation: Miami is big enough to be useful to Amazon, but small enough that Amazon could utterly and completely dominate it (the way it now dominates Seattle, and would NEVER be able to dominate Washington DC or New York). And if Miami starts resisting Amazon's future demands, there are two other big-city downtowns (and a couple of smaller cities that have more and taller skyscrapers than 44 or 45 entire states) within the "Miami" megalopolis... plus another completely separate megalopolis spanning the width of Central Florida just ~250 miles away.
Contrary to official dogma, leopards & jaguars CAN "sort of" purr... they just can't do it while exhaling due to their hyoid bone. If they exhale, the same muscular movements make it come out as a sound resembling a muffled snarl. So it's like, "purr (inhale)", "muffled-snarl (exhale)", "purr (inhale)", "muffled-snarl (exhale)".
Sometimes, the snarls are almost silent, and it just sounds like, "purr" (pause) "purr" (pause) etc.
You didn't notice my point that, in downtown Miami at least, every new building HAS most of its first floor set aside for retail... and most of those retail spaces are perpetually vacant. They're WAY too expensive for small businesses to afford, not big enough for large corporate retailers to bother with, don't have enough free parking (or even sanely-priced short-term parking) to attract customers who don't live within walking distance, and don't have enough customers within walking distance because even the people who LIVE within walking distance have cars and just drive to Target, Walmart, or Best Buy in Midtown 2 miles north. So buildings end up with mostly-vacant first floors occupied by a few high-end realtors and yoga studios, and little else.
The HSR tracks between Bakersfield won't JUST be usable by HSR running between the two cities... it'll also be usable by Amtrak (and almost beyond doubt, Virgin Trains... I think it's safe to say they've been meeting with officials on a regular basis for quite a while now).
Most people don't realize that every single railcar in active use by Amtrak is ALREADY capable of 110mph operation. Most of Amtrak's existing rolling stock COULD be upgraded and recertified to at least 125mph, and ALL of Amtrak's NEW railcars are required to be certified for at least 125mph.
Acela trains RUN at 150mph (max) right now... but they were actually DESIGNED for 220mph. The main limit back then was regulatory... there were literally no rules allowing trains over 150mph, and Amtrak didn't want to delay Acela by 5-10 years waiting for the regulations to get updated, so it just took 150mph at face value and went with it. That said, the current Acela rolling stock would be prohibitively expensive to run in the NEC at 200-220mph because the tracks are too curvy. Acela railcars are basically rolling bank vaults because they have to be capable of surviving a head-on collision at max speed with a mile-long train carrying coal or limestone. They can tilt to keep drinks and laptops from flying off tray tables on curves, but the wheels themselves are still grinding horizontally AND vertically when it races through curves at high speeds, causing EXTREME wear and tear on both the tracks and wheels. They'd also need to increase the number of powerheads on each train... and AFAIK, they don't actually HAVE enough powerheads to do it.
On the plus side, because CalHSR's new tracks through the central valley are being built for HSR, they're straight & relatively flat, so running Acela-type railcars at 180-220mph wouldn't destroy them and the tracks the way it would in the NEC.
The main catch with Acela in California is electrification. The central valley HSR tracks will be electrified... the tracks into LA and SF (AFAIK) aren't. So, to run Acela, they'd have to either electrify all the way, or get Bombardier to build them a few "JetTrain" powerheads that were originally designed for Florida HSR 15 years ago. They could probably even tweak the design so that it could run from overhead catenary power where available, and only fire up the turbines when leaving the electrified stretch through the central valley. The main drawback of JetTrain is that turbine engines aren't very efficient for anything besides long rural stretches... acceleration is poor, and fuel consumption is relatively constant, so they'd have to be designed to provide enough power for acceleration AND would burn that amount of fuel the whole time the turbine was running.
All things considered, it would probably be cheaper to just electrify the tracks all the way into SF and LA. In theory, they could probably get someone to build them hybrid diesel-catenary locomotives that could run from overhead power where available, and conventional diesel power at both ends. I believe LIRR actually HAS dual-mode locomotives that run from diesel and third-rail power, but I'm pretty sure there's no current source for NEW ones, and LIRR itself is in a race to finish electrification before its current fleet wears out.
Either way, the new tracks will probably cut Amtrak's LA-to-Oakland travel time in half, even if no improvements at all are made south of Bakersfield or west of Merced, simply because the current UP tracks between LA and Oakland are so congested.
The realities of 21st-century retail, if you want to compete against Amazon & Walmart without going broke.
Fifty years ago, if you wanted to buy a TV, you'd go to a small store downtown that sold nothing but TVs... often, a single brand of TVs. Distributors bought TVs from the manufacturer for $n, marked them up 100%, and sold them to local dealers for 2 x $n. Those local dealers marked them up another 100%, and sold them to consumers for 4 x $n.
Today, you go to Walmart or Best Buy. They're their own vertically-integrated distributor. They buy a TV from Samsung for $n, then turn around and sell it at a price that makes them a net profit of about $5 per TV... after turning the screws on Samsung and getting them to shave a few more dollars from the price Samsung wanted to charge in the first place. Half the time, a TV on sale at Walmart or Best Buy costs less than someone attempting to emulate the old dealer model would have paid the equivalent of to purchase the TV wholesale in the first place. Instead of trying to make a few hundred dollars from the sale of a TV, Walmart & Best Buy try to make the money by getting you to pay $75 for a 24-cent HDMI cable, buy a service contract you're unlikely to ever use, or purchase $2,000 worth of videogames, Blu-Ray discs, and whatever else they sell over the next few months. You're also spared having to deal with high-pressure salespeople who'd otherwise be trying to sell sand to Bedouins. You'll still have to swat down their attempts to sell you accessories, but at least they won't waste your time trying to talk you into buying an inferior TV just because it's what they were told to sell that week.
I personally *prefer* ambivalent salespeople who don't care what I buy, or even whether I buy it from them... when they aren't clueless, they tend to be fairly honest about pointing out things that aren't necessarily obvious from the marketing materials (like, "oh, you want a TV that can do 720p120 over HDMI? You'll want one of these three... but not this one, because the manufacturer fucked up its HDMI audio passthrough & DD+7.1 doesn't actually work properly... or this one, because their motion-interpolation algorithm sucks for 1080i60 live-action content"). As a practical matter, the salespeople at a store like Best Buy aren't "salespeople", so much as "bright high school and college students who are into whatever department they're working in, and will happily point out the flaws and warts of every TV in stock if you're nice to them".
Plus, every store you shop at involves standing in a different line to pay. It's a lot more convenient to shop at a 500,000 square foot Publix whose meat department is bigger than a typical grocery store was 50 years ago & where nearly every permutation of size and meat I might want is already packed, priced, and laid out for me to grab myself instead of having to wait in line. Plus a "chips" aisle with every permutation of type and flavor known to exist today, in a half-dozen sizes ranging from "individual single-serving package" to "multi-pack" to "normal bag" to "jesus god, where do I get one of the mini-forklifts to load it into my SUV?". Ditto for pasta sauce, breakfast cereal, and everything else. Corner grocery stores might be OK for buying a gallon of milk, but they simply can't offer the sheer breadth and depth of products as a modern suburban grocery store the size of an entire 1960s-era mall.
Hell, even though the dining room sizes have gotten smaller, have you seen just how HUGE an average new McDonalds is behind the counter? Or a busy Pizza Hut or Domino's? The Pizza Hut take out/delivery store by my house has literally four separate ovens and assembly lines, and averages 10-20 people waiting to pick up online on almost any random weekend evening. Sure, they could probably run four smaller locations... but being huge like that gives them the headroom they need to absorb random orders for 24 large pizzas for a bowling league, softball team, or o
Keep in mind that highway construction costs count the land & pavement, but little else. Rail projects count rolling stock purchases & station construction in the costs as well. If a highway's cost estimates included budgeting for the prorated purchase, insurance, maintenance, and operation of the cars that run on it, plus the cost to build & maintain the parking facilities, the per-mile costs would be quite a bit higher.
That's not saying rail construction costs in the US aren't worse than anywhere else on earth... China builds 5 miles of elevated tracks on viaducts for less than we spend adding a second track with grade crossings to an existing corridor.
Part of the reason is that in other countries, you have "railroad builders" who are cross-trained in a variety of construction disciplines. In the US, where every rail project is a one-off once in a lifetime project for the region, we instead hire armies of general contractors with workers who have narrow trade expertise & spend most of their time waiting for OTHER trades to do their thing so THEY can continue. In China or Europe, workers are cross-trained to minimize downtime.
They also tend to combine projects, like building a new freeway with retained-earth foundation that's wide enough to just add the tracks later, with geometry that's appropriate for HSR & bridge spans that are wide enough for the tracks to pass under without having to tear down & rebuild 40 bridge spans to make room for the tracks someday.
This is one reason why Virgin Trains/Brightline is so willing to extend its Miami-Orlando route to Tampa at its own expense. Back when FDOT rebuilt I-4 10 years ago, it made a point of leaving room for HSR everywhere that they had to rebuild everything ANYWAY. It added little to the reconstruction cost, and MASSIVELY reduced the cost to add HSR later, because NOW, Virgin just needs to finish the job & lay track instead of effectively rebuilding I-4 in addition to building its new track.
That's also why CalHSR's budget costs appear so high... they're combining it with simultaneous freeway improvements they wanted to make anyway & lumping the costs of BOTH under "HSR construction budget". That's why an audit is REALLY needed... to properly itemize the costs & make it clear that it's not "$100 billion for hsr", it's ~ $x billion for track infrastructure, $y billion for road improvements incidental to the track that would have eventually gotten done anyway, $z billion for rolling stock, $w billion for station improvements benefitting multiple projects (eg, transbay terminal), etc.
A good example was the cost of extending Metrorail to Miami International Airport. Detractors claimed it cost "a billion dollars". Supporters claim it's more like $150 million. The truth is, it depends how you count it. If you count land already owned by governmental entities at its highest plausible market value, the entire construction cost of Miami Intermodal Center, and its peoplemover... it's about a billion, give or take. If you factor out the percentage of MIC used by the rental car center, Tri-Rail, and Amtrak, count gov't-owned ROW as a long-sunk cost already accounted for by the airport expressway, and factor out the reconfiguration cost of LeJeune Road as something FDOT & Miami had planned for decades ANYWAY, it's more like $200 million.
New York stores ALSO generally don't have to COMPETE with stores like Target & Walmart, because you'd have to travel 45 minutes & cross at least one expensive bridge or tunnel to get to one.
That's NOT the case in most big cities. A retail store in downtown Miami isn't competing with other retail stores in downtown Miami, it's competing with at least 4 or 5 multi-million foot regional malls and a few "vertical power centers" with big box stores stacked on top of each other within 10-15 miles, including two malls (Dadeland & Merrick Park) & two VPCs (Dadeland Station & Merrick Park) that are adjacent to Metrorail stations, plus a huge outlet mall (Dolphin Mall) across the street from an equally-large regional mall (International Mall) within a mile of the biggest Ikea store I've seen in my entire life & the usual assortment of big-box stores. And there's still Aventura Mall (the #2 or #3 largest mall in America by actual retail space, the Falls (a large outdoor "Lifestyle" mall), and someday... American Dream Mall (yeah, malls are quite non-dead in South Florida... 11 months of steamy rain is a major factor).
My point is, in a city like Miami, the only way ground-floor retail in a skyscraper district can economically compete with that is by collectively BECOMING "an urban de-facto mall with skyscrapers over the anchor stores". And that's exactly what Brickell City Centre is attempting to do... transform a ~6 square block area into a hybrid regional lifestyle power center with skyscrapers. And part of the reason WHY Miami agreed to vacate so many city streets and radically re-design the surrounding road network was the observed failure of traditional ground-floor retail to thrive (or even subsist) in surrounding buildings. The city figured it had nothing to lose by facilitating BCC's 5.4 million square foot urban experiment. Ultimately, we'll see who was right.
The governor is hoping this will put an end to the seemingly intractable squabbling among San Jose's leaders by causing them to panic & rapidly coalesce behind a station location and route to connect Caltrain to Merced.
Once that's done, the governor will announce a deal with Virgin Trains whereby California builds the tracks connecting Caltrain @ SJ to Merced, while Virgin procures its own trains, builds the stations, and operates them along existing tracks into LA and SF at current speeds, and runs along the new tracks at high speed. By offloading the station construction and rolling stock onto Virgin, and initially scrapping the service to Sacramento and San Diego, CalHSR's official cost will be reduced to something that the plurality of Californians who live in LA or the Bay Area can stomach.
Virgin will limp at 50-79mph from Union Station to northeastern LA, 110mph to Bakersfield, 150-225mph between Bakersfield and Merced, and Merced and San Jose, then jog at 79-110mph along Caltrain's tracks into SF itself.
The HUGE battle will come 15-20 years from now, when there's public demand to improve the last 50 miles into LA, the last ~80 miles into SF, extend the route to San Diego, and extend the route to Sacramento... but not enough money to do all of them. My guess is that the tracks into L.A. Union Station will "mostly" get upgraded to allow 79-110mph all the way through the city, lots of band-aids will get applied to the existing tracks between San Diego and LA to allow 79-110mph, and HSR from Modesto to a station at the outskirts of Sacramento (with plans to someday finish it as HSR all the way to within a few blocks of the Capitol that will never actually happen unless the state manages to acquire and preserve the corridor BEFORE so many years and so much new development has occurred, the whole thing would have to go in a bored tunnel and be UNFATHOMABLY expensive), but nothing will ever solve the Bay Area's NIMBY problem enough to permit 180+mph all the way into SF.
The main problem with "first floor retail" is that most downtown areas don't have blocks that are large enough. The next time you go to Best Buy, Target, or Walmart, note just how HUGE the store's footprint is... then compare that to the size of an average square block downtown. In most cities, you'd need at least two square blocks... three, after you add in the loading docks, ramps to the parking garage, required means of egress, at least some minimal first-floor lobby for the residential floors above, and service areas for things like trash. And most of the streetscape you end up with will be utterly and completely dead. At BEST, you'll end up with a streetscape that's 95% glass window with stuff behind it, but someone on the wrong side of the building might easily have to walk the equivalent of 2 or 3 current blocks just to get to the store's actual entrance. Retail stores, especially big-box stores, HATE having to deal with multiple entrances and exits... they want to funnel everyone through a single point, because it makes it easier to prevent shoplifting and reduces the cashier staffing demands.
For stores like Target and Walmart, spanning multiple floors is something they try to avoid at all costs. For a store like Walgreens or CVS, the second floor is where they stick the prescriptions and ostomy supplies. Even in mall anchor stores, you usually end up with a situation where the floors that open directly onto a major floor of the mall concourse get lots of foot traffic, and the remaining floors end up looking like a ghost town. In the US, at least, VERY few malls -- even in dense urban areas -- can pull off more than 3 stories before the additional floors look more like virtual ghost towns where they put the bridal stores, tuxedo rental places, movie theater lobby, storefront churches, and other places where people go as an intentional destination instead of casually walking by end up.
Downtown Miami illustrates this problem perfectly. As a matter of law and zoning, every single new skyscraper that's gotten built over the past 25 years has first-floor empty... most of which is in a state of perpetual vacancy because the spaces are too small, or the parking is too inadequate or expensive. In Chicago, there are skyscrapers with big-box stores occupying the basements... but even then, most of those buildings have at least one or two sides that are dead to pedestrians.
In Miami, you'd have a HELL of a time trying to convince a retailer like Walmart to build a store in a skyscraper's basement in downtown Miami, because their insurance costs would KILL them. No, it's not due to the water table... groundwater is a fact of life in almost EVERY big city. Dig a large 25 foot deep hole in London or lower Manhattan, and you'll find at LEAST as much groundwater as you'll encounter in Miami. The REAL problem is storm surge and/or storm-drain failure that leaves the street under a few inches of water for hours or days at a time. It might cause minimal damage to a flooded underground garage that's mostly just bare concrete that needs to drain and dry out, but would cause literally MILLIONS of dollars in damage to a flooded-out store like Walmart full of merchandise. Miami's storm drains fail ALL THE GODDAMN TIME, and half the time it's not even due to a "real" storm... it's because the county doesn't do proper storm-drain maintenance, so the storm drains get clogged with rotting vegetation & trash until we get a week or two of downpours that leave a random square mile with the streets and sidewalks under at least an inch or two of water. The problem is, it might only be an inch of water at the sidewalk, but that inch of water is enough to leave a basement retail store under literally 16-25 feet of water (because once the water gets high enough to pour into an opening, it's going to KEEP pouring in until the water level inside matches the water level outside).
Actually, the problem is even bigger than determining what's "sleazy". When you're talking about a large, publicly-traded corporation that has to worry about shareholder lawsuits if the board does something that causes share prices to (even temporarily) dip, they become UNBELIEVABLY risk-averse and institutionally-allergic to anything that might be even SLIGHTLY controversial unless the government either gives them a clear, unambiguous safe harbor or outright requires that they do something.
Large corporations aren't just sociopathic... they're also blindly puritanical, even when their own customers neither demand nor WANT them to be puritanical, simply because in America, anything that involves sex is guaranteed to be 'controversial' SOMEWHERE, and a large public corporation with legal exposure to every jurisdiction in America simply can't risk getting dragged into an obscenity lawsuit by some bible-thumping sheriff or prosecuting attorney in B.F.E. fly-over country looking to score political points with the local electorate.
Apple painted itself into a corner... it decided that all IOS content must flow through it, but by doing that, it made itself legally liable for that content. In contrast, Google can be as puritanical as it likes (and the norms of American corporate governance demand) with Google Play, while freely allowing the existence of alternate marketplaces like MiKandi Market.
Making things even more complicated, Apple demands that all payment processing be done through Apple as well. In the US, most credit card merchant banks won't approve or allow businesses that are "adult oriented" (being intentionally vague, and have been known to throw their ban hammers at companies selling breast pumps to nursing mothers because... well, in America, breasts are bad, unless you're cutting off the nipple with a rusty knife, in which case the violence adequately cleanses it of any prurient sexual overtones and makes it OK). So if Apple DID allow porn, there's no way someone could have paid content without violating Apple's terms unless Apple went out of its way to find payment processing companies that will handle adult content... and then, Apple would risk having some merchant bank pull a ban-hammer on THEM if the bank determined that the mere existence of adult content tainted EVERYTHING on Apple's store.
Long story short, in America, there's exactly one way for a platform owned & operated by a large corporation to openly allow adult content... allow users to install content from anywhere, and keep them at arm's length from anything officially associated with the large corporation itself.
A bag can fly without its passenger, but ONLY if it's INTENSIVELY searched by hand (and X-ray, bomb-sniffers, etc) beforehand, or the passenger is on board A flight & had no reason to suspect his bag(s) wouldn't be on the same plane.
Otherwise, it would be impossible to send mishandled bags on the next flight to their proper destination. You'd have to wait for a cargo flight or FedEx to take it.
Airlines try to avoid doing it because they have to REALLY examine & repack baggage that gets sent this way, but they do have official procedures for it.
The main thing the baggage rules killed was the former ability of airlines to run mostly-empty early-morning flights that made their money carrying unrelated cargo for small businesses. In the past, businesses still had to have a token passenger on the flight, but they could hire one-flight "air couriers" willing to travel with only a small carry-on bag & had no real connection to the shipping company. NOW, the courier him/herself has to attest that they personally packed their baggage, it has never been out of sight, etc. So traveling AS a courier would risk getting you thrown in jail unless you could prove you personally satisfied the requirements, and could expose a shipper or airline to unlimited civil and criminal liability, so airlines generally don't allow it at all anymore.
Just to add... AFAIK, the ONLY regularly-scheduled passenger service between the US & Europe is The Queen Mary. I think it averages a round trip between NY and Southhampton every 3-4 weeks, is ASTRONOMICALLY expensive, and takes 8-10 days each way.
Cruise ships make similar trips as repositioning cruises, but usually just once per year each way (ex: NCL moves a few ships from Florida to Europe in the spring, and brings them back in the fall). THOSE cruises are cheap per-day... but long & boring. Minimal live entertainment, lots of maintenance work during the crossing, and generally no/poor internet access. In the Caribbean, they have a combination of terrestrial LTE and satellite spot-beam service... mid-atlantic, they have the equivalent of one 64kbps dialup line to share among ALL the passengers.
Side note about slow connectivity in general: anything that involves https, SSH, or a VPN is unlikely to work unless you use it in the middle of the night when nobody else is using it, because TLS handshaking enforces timeouts for MITM protection that are only slightly longer than the time required to transmit the handshake at ~19.2kbps. (TLS basically enforces a timeout that's long enough to permit handshaking over a direct point-to-point 9600 baud connection between a credit card terminal & server, but even tcp/ip + wifi overhead is enough to cause a timeout at 14.4kbps, or a single retransmitted packet at 19.2kbps).
It's not your imagination that web sites that USED to crawl on congested phone networks now don't work AT ALL under the same conditions. 10 years ago, almost nothing used https. Now, nearly everything does. So it's easy for a congested, shared network to get itself into a state where nobody can do ANYTHING. It's a use case that wasn't unforeseen, but whose consequences were underestimated 20 years ago because back then, nobody envisioned using https for literally everything. Also, a single ad-funded web page can EASILY initiate dozens of https handshakes, because every affiliate link & ad requires its own separately-negotiated connection. Google tried to mitigate the problem with SPDY, but I think someone discovered a major exploit in the protocol a year or two ago, forcing them to scrap the whole thing and go back to the drawing board.
One idea I've had for a while... have software attempt to group users by 'tribe' based upon their own past like/dislike patterns, then show people review scores weighed against their own tribe's voting patterns. So, if militant feminists go out and downvote anything with an actor they dislike, only militant feminists will see the overwhelming hate. Ditto, if dudebros go around upvoting videos feminists tend to hate... the score THEY see will be high. Likewise, for ardent fundamenalists, Greens, libertarians, Bernie Bros, etc.
In the long run, participating in organized voting will just get you lumped into a tribe & screw up the review scores YOU see.
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Assuming we could get a way to manufacture large mirrors & lenses, the far side of the moon would probably be a great place to put Hubble's ultimate replacement. In fact, I'm pretty sure the construction of such a telescope will be fairly high on the "things to do ASAP" list once there ARE settlements of some kind on the moon, once the immediate infrastructure needs of the settlement itself have been taken care of.
In fact, I'm pretty sure that building and operating lunar observatories would be one of the first commercially successful business endeavors ON the Moon. With a local factory to build the parts that are too big to transport from Earth, and "boots on the ground" to build and maintain them, the Moon's surface would be a FANTASTIC place to build dozens, then hundreds, of observatories.
Obviously, the Moon isn't going to have semiconductor-manufacturing facilities rivaling those of Intel anytime soon... but that's fine. Chips, and even populated circuit boards, would be easy to manufacture on Earth and ship to the Moon for integration into locally-built structures, with locally-built lenses and mirrors.
A little further down the line, I believe the Moon might become an affordable place to do launches into near-Earth orbits. The Moon lies within Earth's own gravity well, so there's no real advantage to launching spacecraft heading beyond Earth's orbit from the Moon (especially if it's just a staging ground for supplies that first have to be transported there from Earth), but for launches into OTHER Earth orbits, it might make sense as long as the majority of components are produced on the Moon itself. Manufacturing a complete satellite on Earth, sending it to the Moon, then re-launching it into an Earth orbit would make about as much economic and logistical sense as buying a book that's available from amazon.co.uk at a Barnes & Noble store in Miami, mailing it to someone in London, and having THEM re-mail it to someone in Brighton. On the OTHER hand, manufacturing the electronics & sensors on Earth for a few DOZEN satellites, shipping them to the Moon, then integrating them into spaceframes built and launched from the Moon might make economic sense.
It's hard to explain without getting EXTREMELY technical, but here's a SOMEWHAT technical explanation:
Back in "the old days" (6502, 68000, 8086, etc), a specific machine language instruction took a precise, deterministic amount of time to execute... 1 cycle, 2 cycles, 3 cycles, whatever. Always, and without exception.
Sometime around the AMD K5 (late 90s), we got to a point where the combination of cache and execution-time optimizations used by processors (speculative & out of order execution, cache, etc) made it SEEM like the days of deterministic execution timing were over. You could predict best-case and worst-case execution times for a given block of code, but ACTUAL runtime execution times had become seemingly random when you tried to measure them on an operating system like Windows or Linux.
It turns out, we were wrong. Execution times were as deterministic as ever... it's just that making sense of their timing had become too complex for humans to understand, so it SEEMED random. Then, "big data" and "machine learning" became common, and people discovered that execution timings weren't nearly as random as humans had come to believe they were.
Problem #2: due to the state various performance optimizations leave the CPU and its cache in, the amount of time it takes an attempt to do something prohibited to fail varies in subtle ways depending upon the values being protected.
So... taking advantage of analytics, machine learning, and lots of brute-force hammering & observation, it's possible for attackers to gradually discover the likely values of protected ram and registers. They can't necessarily do it with a single hit... but if they hammer away at something a million times and discover that a particular bit's value seems to be '0' ~70% of the time, and '1' the other 30% of the time... well, the bit's value is probably 0.
Here's another roughly analogous example: suppose you're attempting to discover the combination to a safe. Suppose the lock is designed to frustrate attempts to listen for pins falling into place by ensuring that EVERY dial position results in the lowering of one pin and the rising of another. HOWEVER... someone discovers that certain unsuccessful combinations produce a slightly different sound than others. Using deep learning techniques, the algorithm predicts that sound #1 indicates a combination that's almost right, while sound #2 indicates a combination that's completely wrong. By rapidly performing a few million experiments with different combinations, the algorithm is able to eliminate 99% of possible combinations, and focus on the 1% it believes are likely to work... and as it continues to experiment, it discovers a THIRD sound variant that appears to exist whenever the third number is equal to 17. By successively setting aside unlikely combinations, it eventually stumbles upon the correct combination to open the safe.
In security, this kind of problem is well known, and has a solution that generally works well: limit the rate at which an attacker can attempt different combinations. The problem is, that solution goes completely at odds against everything modern CPUs have attempted to accomplish for the past 50 years -- achieve better performance.
Ultimately, Intel and others are probably going to start making CPUs with a security gradient:
* The high-performance no-security portion that is designed to maximize performance, but makes no guarantees about security. Basically, "gamer" oriented CPUs will dedicate most of their silicon to this portion.
* High-performance with minimal security... designed to avoid blatantly leaking data to other processes, but still totally vulnerable to Spectre-type attacks. CPUs targeted to enterprise users will probably dedicate most of their silicon to THIS mode.
* The slow, separate, secure fortress. Totally separate, with no cache or optimizations at all, designed to guarantee absolutely deterministic execution times from the perspective of an outside observer. Basically, an 80386
I've actually been working on an Android app like that on & off for the past couple of years. Some of the frustrations I've encountered:
1. Extraordinarily slow rendering performance compared to even a fairly OLD formerly high-end laptop or desktop PC (say, a 2009 Thinkpad T61p with 2.2GHz core2duo and 8 gigs, or ASUS P5A with 2.6GHz quadcore i7 and 8 gigs, both with 2010'ish SATA2 SSDs). I suspect much of the blame lies with poor eMMC flash performance, combined with open-source pdf-rendering libraries that are single-threaded and are compiled without optimizations for common-denominator ARM. This is one of the big reasons I keep throwing the project back on my "re-evaluate the situation next year" pile.
2. General unavailability of Android tablets with large (13.3"+) high-resolution (240+ PPI) displays. If there's an Android tablet out there somewhere with a 3:2 3840x2560 display larger than 13" diagonally, I haven't found it yet. I personally own a Chuwi Hi12, which has a 12.1" 2160x1440 display that's largely been a disappointment due to extraordinarily poor wi-fi compared to pretty much every other device in the house, slow charging, laggy touch performance, and a screen that's about 15-20% smaller than I really wanted it to be.
At one point, I experimented with pre-rendering pdf ebooks to various formats (JPG, PNG, WEBM), but I just couldn't get the "fetch from flash, instantiate into Bitmap, and display into View" fast enough to be imperceptible. It WAS fast enough if I kept multiple Views (containing the page's Bitmap) expanded, stored in an array, and ready to swap in on the spot... but you can only get away with doing THAT for a couple of pages... and meanwhile, attempting to pre-fetch predicted future pages from the filesystem in the background badly affected the touch-animation performance. Maybe I'm just too much of a perfectionist, but I want to create an experience where the performance is SO instantaneous, it stops feeling like the user is sloshing around underwater trying to scoop around laggy virtual pages, and instead feels like the user is flipping a real page that's quite firmly gripped by his fingers with no slippage or lag.
For shits & giggles, I even did an experiment & wrote two programs... one for Windows, one for Android. Using a different program, I pre-rendered a pdf O'Reilly ebook to bitmaps that were approximately 400% larger than the desired target size, then used ImageMagick to downsample them with Lanczos sharpening to fit within the desired target sizes for Android and Windows (incidentally, AFAIK, there is no known FOSS image library for Android that can do Lanczos... Android's API omits Lanczos, and nobody has ever bothered to implement it as a generic Java library because Java itself has Lanczos built-in. If you hand Android a large bitmap and tell it to downscale it, it just uses nearest-neighbor and looks like shit). I then wrote an Android app to display two Bitmaps side by side & flip through them using the volume buttons, and did the same thing in Windows with two monitors in portrait orientation and the left & right arrow keys. Windows could load the files from the SSD and flip through them at 60fps without breaking a sweat. Android wheezed and stumbled through approximately 15-20 pages/second, and hung for a few seconds to do garbage collection every 30-50 seconds. The only way I could sustain 60fps with Android was if I bypassed loading the image from flash & inflating the Bitmaps, and instead just kept four Bitmap objects in an array & cycled through them. That was basically the point when I said, "fuck it, Android's too slow to do it with current hardware" and threw in the towel until my next tablet... and so far, I haven't found a new tablet that looks like it would genuinely be a real improvement over what I already have.
The point to take home: contrary to what "the industry" seems to believe, ebook-rendering is absolutely NOT some "lightweight" task that can be adequately performed by cheap hardware. If you wa
Hyperlinks are DEATH to understanding many topics. I've seen WAY too many "web-based" instructional sites that put the equivalent of 4 or 5 sentences' worth of information on a page, then spray diarrhea-like hyperlinks at you with nearly every word. The reader gets sucked into a rabbit hole that ultimately leads to nowhere, and ends up learning almost nothing.
Single-column web design, compounded by the 16:9 monitors we've been stuck with for 15 years, just makes things worse.
There's a REASON why textbooks have generally followed a design pattern that could be called, "diagram on right page, descriptions of diagram on facing left page", and why technical books are so much harder to read on a slow e-reader that can only show one page at a time & takes a second or more to flip pages. The pattern exists because it works, and ebook readers break it.
Young people today are no less technically-savvy than we were at their age... it's just that NOW, we have non-technically-savvy people using technology they don't understand & subconsciously regard as 'magic', whereas when WE were their age, the dumb kids didn't use technology at all. Or if they were rich, their parents bought them a Macintosh.
Ignore the kids who spend their afternoons posting selfies with ice cream cones, and pay attention to the kids building robots and winning FIRST competitions. THEY'RE the smart kids who matter... and if anything, their numbers (as a percentage of their generation) are probably a bit HIGHER than the percentage of smart kids were in OUR generations, simply because when WE were their age, a kid who was poor had approximately zero chance of getting anywhere NEAR the resources he or she needed to thrive. We've gotten slightly better and finding those kids and giving them the resources they need to thrive... or at least, survive long enough to get to college.
Charging for an estimate isn't necessarily unethical. You can't always diagnose a problem without doing some degree of disassembly and inspection. Personally, I'd RATHER pay someone a fair price to give me an accurate, detailed, written diagnosis & do a good job of carefully putting my car back together than get a "free" estimate that ends up causing even MORE damage because the pissed-off mechanic did a sloppy job of reassembly after I decided to get another quote from someone else.
With an accurate, detailed diagnosis, you can get repair quotes from other mechanics without having to pay THEM to repeat the procedure (though obviously, their estimates will have a disclaimer that they're based upon the accuracy of the diagnosis presented to them... you can't expect a mechanic who agrees to perform {x} for ${y} based upon specific diagnosis {z} to eat the cost of doing {other things besides x} that weren't identified by diagnosis {z}.
That said, I'd absolutely object to paying someone to say, "your repair will cost ${y}, take it or leave it" without actually elaborating in writing about what the problem is and what specific work they intend to do for ${y}".
Put another way, performing a thorough diagnosis is a valuable service that's entirely deserving of fair payment.
> These businesses simply don't want to bother to establish, for instance, their own supply chains for spare parts.
And how, pray tell, is ANYONE supposed to establish "their own supply chain for spare parts" when the parts are built by a vertically-integrated company for themselves, to specs that aren't public, with DRM to make reverse-engineering any embedded software "problematic" at best (and quite possibly impossible, technically and/or legally)?
I honestly don't think Tesla (just to name one specific company) even genuinely WANTS to prevent independent mechanics from servicing their cars... they're just afraid that some yahoo who isn't qualified to work on a Tesla is going to make a bad repair & cause an accident, then Tesla will end up getting cross-claimed in a lawsuit against the mechanic, be found to be 0.1% at fault for failing to prevent the unqualified mechanic from performing the repair, and be on the hook for 100% of a $10 million judgment under the legal theory of joint & several liability (because the mechanic himself is broke, while Tesla has deep pockets).
If there were a federal "right to repair law" that REQUIRED Tesla to make parts, documentation, and software available to independent mechanics, Tesla would have a strong legal defense if it appealed the verdict and challenged the determination that it was anything besides 0% at fault, on the grounds that you can't use civil contract law to compel someone to commit a criminal offense.
If Tesla could persuasively argue that refusal to make the parts, documentation, and software available would have itself been a criminal offense, the plaintiff's legal case against them would fall apart unless they could come up with an alternate legal theory to explain how Tesla might have refused to make the parts, documentation, and software available without breaking the law. The $10 million judgment against the mechanic would still stand, but Tesla itself would be off the hook (and the plaintiff would be out of luck & unable to collect anything beyond what the mechanic was capable of paying). Going forward, anytime Tesla was cross-claimed in a lawsuit based upon "they were partially at fault because they didn't stop the mechanic from performing the repair", they'd cite the appellate court's decision & move to have the claim against them dismissed. Worst case, they might have to fight and appeal cases in every state or federal circuit until they racked up enough victories to establish binding precedent in most places, and convince lawyers in others that going against Tesla was likely to be an expensive act of futility.
Put another way, I suspect Elon Musk privately WANTS to see "Right to Repair" legislation, because it would give Tesla a clear path to a safe harbor instead of putting them into a "damned if we do, damned if we don't" situation.
^^^ Side note about legacy 3D encoding.
There's actually a good technical reason why it took so long for 3D Blu-Ray to exist -- the first 3D-ready TVs weren't actually DESIGNED to be "3D". It was mostly a lucky accident.
Rewind back to the early 2000s, when DLP was the norm for large-screen HDTVs and LCDs were still small, expensive, and riddled with dead/stuck pixels. Someone at TI (or possibly one of TI's customers, like Samsung or Matsushita) figured out that with a more sophisticated DLP and faster video processor, you could take advantage of the way DLP micromirrors vibrated diagonally to double their effective resolution by taking an old idea (interlacing) and applying it in a new way.
Sometime later, it occurred to someone that since DLP TVs were now effectively "interlaced" (though in a checkerboard pattern, rather than as horizontal scanlines), you could use the technique NVidia had come up with in the late 90s (combining active LCD shutter glasses with interlaced video to get frame-sequential 3D by using one set of scanlines for the left eye, and one set for the right) to display half the pixels in the DLP checkerboard pattern to one eye, and half to the other.
Those engineers hooked up a PC with a DVI port to their TVs, and made some really cool demos. Then, they ran into a brick wall due to Hollywood.
DVD players existed and had Hollywood's blessing, but they didn't have sufficiently high resolution. A "720p" DLP needed an image with EXACTLY 1280x720 pixels in EXACTLY the right order in order for it to work with the glasses and display as "3D". Likewise, a "1080p" DLP needed an image with EXACTLY 1920x1080 pixels in EXACTLY the right checkerboard layout to display as 3D. That left... Blu-Ray.
Then came brick wall #2: there was no way to actually ENCODE 1280x720 or 1920x1080 video on a standards-compliant Blu-Ray disc that would permit the pixels in both checkerboard sets to have arbitrary colors. By definition, legacy Blu-Ray supported ONLY 4:2:0 chroma subsampling. Simplifying a bit, that means that every pair of pixels share the same Yellow (Pb) and Cyan (Pr) chroma data. And in any case, DCT compression doesn't take kindly to adjacent pixels with radical intensity changes... at best, you end up with video that's nearly impossible to compress. At worst, you end up with nasty, visible artifacts that make it look like a modem-optimized 1990s JPEG.
So... somehow, the manufacturers had to talk the Blu Ray people into making players that allowed 3D video to be ENCODED as if it were half-resolution interlaced video (with left and right stored as different fields), but have the player itself read & decompress both fields and use them to assemble a 1280x720 or 1920x1080 frame in the required checkerboard format.
Meanwhile, LCD happened. LCD TVs didn't need to have their video presented to them in checkerboard format, so they came up with alternate arrangements for encoding video that were within the already-existing Blu-Ray spec, so even a "stupid" player with no understanding of "3D" could output the video "as-is" & let the "smart" TV rip it apart and make the magic happen. Basically, they came up with 3 schemes:
* Side by Side. Each eye's frame gets half the horizontal resolution, and when viewed on a "normal" TV, it looks like two squashed images displayed side by side.
* Stacked. Same idea, but with this scheme, each eye gets half the vertical resolution, and when viewed on a "normal" TV, it looks like two squashed images stacked on top of each other. Most people agreed that most content looked better with the side-by-side scheme than this one.
* Sequential. Hollywood film is 24fps. Blu-Ray already had official schemes for 720p50 and 720p60. Normally, when transcoding movies, they'll encode 24 "real" frames, and 26 or 36 "repeat-flagged" fake frames. This scheme looks the best, but also has the most opportunities for things to Go Badly Wrong unless the player itself is aware of what you're trying to do and actively on board.
The
The main strength of the Blu-Ray format is that the format itself is fairly open-ended, and left the door open from the very start to multi-layer discs that exceeded the manufacturing capabilities available at the time the standard itself was defined. Older PLAYERS are constrained to specific codecs, bitrates, and formats... but as long as you have enough storage space, the standard gives itself wide latitude to add future interleaved streams that older players can simply ignore if they don't understand.
The biggest problem with 4k, and ESPECIALLY 3D, is the fact that it's hard to rent 4k discs, and damn-near IMPOSSIBLE to rent 3D discs... they're too niche for Redbox, and Redbox is just about the only place LEFT where you can cheaply rent discs in person without advance planning in most parts of the US.
As far as I'm concerned, "glasses" are a minor problem. LCD shutter glasses are practically FREE compared to the cost of the display, player, audio system, and content. I mean, seriously... we're talking $10-20 for a "shit" pair, and not a whole lot more for good ones. We aren't talking about high-tech items here... they're basically cheap sunglasses with a single-pixel LCD laminated onto each lens with a simple controller whose only job is to react to an external timing signal and hide one side or the other.
A larger problem is screen size and placement that comes down to consumer education. You need a screen that fills most of your field of view. A 52" TV hanging on the wall 10' away over a fireplace just isn't going to cut it. 3D on a 65" TV sitting 5-6 feet in front of the sofa looks fantastic.
Side note: if you have your TV more than 6 feet away or more than a foot off the floor, you're seriously compromising your viewing experience of ALL TV content whether you realize it or not. Seriously. The next time you have the house to yourself for a few days (and don't have to worry about spouse-acceptance-factor), put the TV on a cement block 5 feet in front of your chair, and try watching it in that position for a few days. Trust me... you'll never be satisfied with the TV hanging on a wall 10 feet away after that. It's a completely different viewing experience. If you're GenX or older, think about where YOU used to sit watching TV when your mom wasn't there to yell at you for sitting "too close". You're an adult now, it's your house, you aren't sitting in front of an electron-emitting vacuum tube, and the resolution is much better now. Try it... you'll like it.
Anyway, the biggest technical hurdle when 3D first came out was the fact that HDMI 1.2 didn't have enough bandwidth to gracefully deal with frame-packed 3D, so players had to package up 1080p48 as 1080p60 to send over HDMI, which the TV then ripped apart and used its own video processor to treat as 1080p48 that was internally displayed as 1080p120 or 1080p240. Now that HDMI 2.x can handle 1080p120 (and possibly 1080p240) directly, a sufficiently smart PLAYER could "bitbang" 3D on any TV capable of being directly driven at 120 or 240hz (with the player itself controlling the timing of the glasses). As far as the TV were concerned, it would just be blindly displaying 120fps video in "videogame mode" (with its own internal video processing and interpolation turned off). For a given sequence of two 24fps film frames "A" and "B", the player would simply send "AL AR AL AR AL BR BL BR BL BR" at 120fps (or at 240fps, "AL AR AL AR AL AR AL AR AL AR BL BR BL BR BL BR BL BR BL BR").
One solution might be to create a new combo format that could have a name like "Blu+UH3D" that contains two sets of interleaved streams: one that respects the bitrate limits of legacy Blu-Ray, and one that requires the faster bitrate provided by UHD Blu-Ray:
The first set of interleaved streams would be compatible with legacy Blu-Ray players.
1.1. The only stream legacy Blu-Ray players would pay attention to. It could be any video format supported by legacy Blu-Ray. The additional 1.2x streams would simply be ignored.
1.2a. A variable-bitra
Dear Nvidia:
Please make Quadro cards a true, compromise-free superset of your best gaming cards that can, if desired, run gaming-tweaked firmware... or beat some sense into companies like Lenovo and Dell & convince them to NOT blindly force consumers into choosing between EITHER "shit integrated graphics" OR "Quadro that costs $2,000 and sucks for gaming".
For my past two laptop purchases, I've been forced to choose between either sacrificing a good tactile scissor-switch keyboard with pointer stick, settling for integrated graphics that suck, or paying a small fortune for a Quadro card with gaming performance that's only marginally better than a low-end gaming card.
At the very least, grow some balls and declare an official standard for mounting holes & heat-removal (and require manufacturers to both advertise and adhere to it), so we could buy a Thinkpad with the cheapest videocard option, then buy a thirdparty non-Quadro card on our own and stick it in if Lenovo won't sell us one directly.
Yeah, I really like Thinkpads. They have the best laptop keyboards bar none, and are one of the only brands that reliably comes with pointer sticks... but goddamn, I hate the way they're hellbent on always forcing buyers to choose between "Quadro, more expensive Quadro, Ungodly expensive Quadro, or integrated graphics".
No, it won't.
LONG before daily tidal flooding becomes a serious problem, higher storm surge from hurricanes will wipe out low-lying neighborhoods. The land will get purchased by investors, who'll pile another 10 feet of crushed limestone on top & build expensive new homes (or skyscrapers) on top.
Meanwhile, rising sea levels will cause saltwater intrusion into groundwater, forcing South Florida to either process lake water or do full-on reverse osmosis. The higher water cost will drive farms to sell to developers, who'll proceed to build several million new homes, office parks, and shopping centers in extreme south Dade & inland. Miami-area retirees will cash in on the house they bought for $150k that's now worth $1.5 million & move to a cheaper inland exurb, developers will knock down their 3/2 house & replace it with a 6/4.5 McMansion (or a skyscraper) sitting on more crushed limestone, and sell it for $5 million to someone else. Stir, rinse, and repeat.
South Florida is 100% non-seismic. It's one of the few places in America where you genuinely CAN get away with piling on fill dirt & crushed limestone forever.
If any part of the US is likely to look like Coruscant 500 years from now... it's South Florida. We've been terraforming swampland into condos, office parks, retail stores, and golf courses from Day One. It's nothing new to us. Every 25-50 years, our building codes add a few feet to the minimum allowed amouna of fill dirt, older stuff gets destroyed by hurricanes, newer & more expensive stuff gets built to replace it, and life goes on. In South Florida, levees exist to keep yards and parking lots dry... AFAIK, it has NEVER been legal here to build habitable dwellings whose first floor is below sea level, and for at least the past 40-50 years, worst-case storm surge has to be taken into account as well.
Put another way, South Florida is probably better-equipped to deal with sea level rise than anywhere besides maybe the Netherlands & Singapore, because we've ALWAYS had to engineer around flooding right from the start. Every inch of urban coastline in Florida was engineered to be that way. Urbanized parts of Florida's east & west coasts haven't had anything that resembles a natural coastline for 50-100 years. Compare the coastline at Cape Canaveral to the rest of Florida's east coast to see just how terraformed most of our coastline IS.
So, no. Miami isn't going to be "under water" a few decades from now. It might very well be a 10-20 mile wide peninsula joined to Florida's west coast by causeways across what used to be the Everglades, but eco-fantasies about it being abandoned to nature just aren't going to happen.
Key phrase: "people with high exposures to the popular pesticides"
On a related note, inhaled dihydrogen monoxide can be fatal and cause death within minutes without prompt medical assistance.
Pro #1: Bezos went to high school in Miami, and presumably has family and/or social ties.
Pro #2: South Florida is New York's de-facto sixth borough. So in a way, opening an office in South Florida IS kind of/sort of like opening a New York office. Miami is where a lot of New Yorkers WANT to live, but can't, because they have to be in New York for the sake of their careers. Give them an excuse to move to Miami, and they'll be on the next flight.
Pro #3: Miami will move heaven and earth to get Bezos a site where he can legally build the tallest skyscraper in America. Miami wants to have the tallest skyscraper in America so badly it hurts, and there's no limit to what Miami will do to make it happen. In the past, Dade County has overruled Miami's attempts to grant building permits exceeding Dade County's airport-imposed (for fuel economy, not absolute FAA limit) height limit, but Amazon is a big enough prize that even Dade County will fall in line for them.
Pro #4: Thanks to Virgin-Brightline, downtown Miami is now easily (albeit expensively) accessible to commuters who'd rather live near downtown Fort Lauderdale, and by the time Amazon's first building is ready, Tri-Rail will be running directly to downtown Miami as well.
Pro #5: In addition to being New York's unofficial sixth borough, it's also the de-facto capital of Latin America. If Amazon wants to poach the top talent from Latin American countries & have them come work for Amazon, Miami is definitely the place to do it from.
Con: Aspirations aside, Miami isn't New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Washington DC. Most of its potential IS still "potential".
Mitigation: Miami is big enough to be useful to Amazon, but small enough that Amazon could utterly and completely dominate it (the way it now dominates Seattle, and would NEVER be able to dominate Washington DC or New York). And if Miami starts resisting Amazon's future demands, there are two other big-city downtowns (and a couple of smaller cities that have more and taller skyscrapers than 44 or 45 entire states) within the "Miami" megalopolis... plus another completely separate megalopolis spanning the width of Central Florida just ~250 miles away.
Contrary to official dogma, leopards & jaguars CAN "sort of" purr... they just can't do it while exhaling due to their hyoid bone. If they exhale, the same muscular movements make it come out as a sound resembling a muffled snarl. So it's like, "purr (inhale)", "muffled-snarl (exhale)", "purr (inhale)", "muffled-snarl (exhale)".
Sometimes, the snarls are almost silent, and it just sounds like, "purr" (pause) "purr" (pause) etc.
You didn't notice my point that, in downtown Miami at least, every new building HAS most of its first floor set aside for retail... and most of those retail spaces are perpetually vacant. They're WAY too expensive for small businesses to afford, not big enough for large corporate retailers to bother with, don't have enough free parking (or even sanely-priced short-term parking) to attract customers who don't live within walking distance, and don't have enough customers within walking distance because even the people who LIVE within walking distance have cars and just drive to Target, Walmart, or Best Buy in Midtown 2 miles north. So buildings end up with mostly-vacant first floors occupied by a few high-end realtors and yoga studios, and little else.
The HSR tracks between Bakersfield won't JUST be usable by HSR running between the two cities... it'll also be usable by Amtrak (and almost beyond doubt, Virgin Trains... I think it's safe to say they've been meeting with officials on a regular basis for quite a while now).
Most people don't realize that every single railcar in active use by Amtrak is ALREADY capable of 110mph operation. Most of Amtrak's existing rolling stock COULD be upgraded and recertified to at least 125mph, and ALL of Amtrak's NEW railcars are required to be certified for at least 125mph.
Acela trains RUN at 150mph (max) right now... but they were actually DESIGNED for 220mph. The main limit back then was regulatory... there were literally no rules allowing trains over 150mph, and Amtrak didn't want to delay Acela by 5-10 years waiting for the regulations to get updated, so it just took 150mph at face value and went with it. That said, the current Acela rolling stock would be prohibitively expensive to run in the NEC at 200-220mph because the tracks are too curvy. Acela railcars are basically rolling bank vaults because they have to be capable of surviving a head-on collision at max speed with a mile-long train carrying coal or limestone. They can tilt to keep drinks and laptops from flying off tray tables on curves, but the wheels themselves are still grinding horizontally AND vertically when it races through curves at high speeds, causing EXTREME wear and tear on both the tracks and wheels. They'd also need to increase the number of powerheads on each train... and AFAIK, they don't actually HAVE enough powerheads to do it.
On the plus side, because CalHSR's new tracks through the central valley are being built for HSR, they're straight & relatively flat, so running Acela-type railcars at 180-220mph wouldn't destroy them and the tracks the way it would in the NEC.
The main catch with Acela in California is electrification. The central valley HSR tracks will be electrified... the tracks into LA and SF (AFAIK) aren't. So, to run Acela, they'd have to either electrify all the way, or get Bombardier to build them a few "JetTrain" powerheads that were originally designed for Florida HSR 15 years ago. They could probably even tweak the design so that it could run from overhead catenary power where available, and only fire up the turbines when leaving the electrified stretch through the central valley. The main drawback of JetTrain is that turbine engines aren't very efficient for anything besides long rural stretches... acceleration is poor, and fuel consumption is relatively constant, so they'd have to be designed to provide enough power for acceleration AND would burn that amount of fuel the whole time the turbine was running.
All things considered, it would probably be cheaper to just electrify the tracks all the way into SF and LA. In theory, they could probably get someone to build them hybrid diesel-catenary locomotives that could run from overhead power where available, and conventional diesel power at both ends. I believe LIRR actually HAS dual-mode locomotives that run from diesel and third-rail power, but I'm pretty sure there's no current source for NEW ones, and LIRR itself is in a race to finish electrification before its current fleet wears out.
Either way, the new tracks will probably cut Amtrak's LA-to-Oakland travel time in half, even if no improvements at all are made south of Bakersfield or west of Merced, simply because the current UP tracks between LA and Oakland are so congested.
> Why do the stores need to be so big?
The realities of 21st-century retail, if you want to compete against Amazon & Walmart without going broke.
Fifty years ago, if you wanted to buy a TV, you'd go to a small store downtown that sold nothing but TVs... often, a single brand of TVs. Distributors bought TVs from the manufacturer for $n, marked them up 100%, and sold them to local dealers for 2 x $n. Those local dealers marked them up another 100%, and sold them to consumers for 4 x $n.
Today, you go to Walmart or Best Buy. They're their own vertically-integrated distributor. They buy a TV from Samsung for $n, then turn around and sell it at a price that makes them a net profit of about $5 per TV... after turning the screws on Samsung and getting them to shave a few more dollars from the price Samsung wanted to charge in the first place. Half the time, a TV on sale at Walmart or Best Buy costs less than someone attempting to emulate the old dealer model would have paid the equivalent of to purchase the TV wholesale in the first place. Instead of trying to make a few hundred dollars from the sale of a TV, Walmart & Best Buy try to make the money by getting you to pay $75 for a 24-cent HDMI cable, buy a service contract you're unlikely to ever use, or purchase $2,000 worth of videogames, Blu-Ray discs, and whatever else they sell over the next few months. You're also spared having to deal with high-pressure salespeople who'd otherwise be trying to sell sand to Bedouins. You'll still have to swat down their attempts to sell you accessories, but at least they won't waste your time trying to talk you into buying an inferior TV just because it's what they were told to sell that week.
I personally *prefer* ambivalent salespeople who don't care what I buy, or even whether I buy it from them... when they aren't clueless, they tend to be fairly honest about pointing out things that aren't necessarily obvious from the marketing materials (like, "oh, you want a TV that can do 720p120 over HDMI? You'll want one of these three... but not this one, because the manufacturer fucked up its HDMI audio passthrough & DD+7.1 doesn't actually work properly... or this one, because their motion-interpolation algorithm sucks for 1080i60 live-action content"). As a practical matter, the salespeople at a store like Best Buy aren't "salespeople", so much as "bright high school and college students who are into whatever department they're working in, and will happily point out the flaws and warts of every TV in stock if you're nice to them".
Plus, every store you shop at involves standing in a different line to pay. It's a lot more convenient to shop at a 500,000 square foot Publix whose meat department is bigger than a typical grocery store was 50 years ago & where nearly every permutation of size and meat I might want is already packed, priced, and laid out for me to grab myself instead of having to wait in line. Plus a "chips" aisle with every permutation of type and flavor known to exist today, in a half-dozen sizes ranging from "individual single-serving package" to "multi-pack" to "normal bag" to "jesus god, where do I get one of the mini-forklifts to load it into my SUV?". Ditto for pasta sauce, breakfast cereal, and everything else. Corner grocery stores might be OK for buying a gallon of milk, but they simply can't offer the sheer breadth and depth of products as a modern suburban grocery store the size of an entire 1960s-era mall.
Hell, even though the dining room sizes have gotten smaller, have you seen just how HUGE an average new McDonalds is behind the counter? Or a busy Pizza Hut or Domino's? The Pizza Hut take out/delivery store by my house has literally four separate ovens and assembly lines, and averages 10-20 people waiting to pick up online on almost any random weekend evening. Sure, they could probably run four smaller locations... but being huge like that gives them the headroom they need to absorb random orders for 24 large pizzas for a bowling league, softball team, or o
Keep in mind that highway construction costs count the land & pavement, but little else. Rail projects count rolling stock purchases & station construction in the costs as well. If a highway's cost estimates included budgeting for the prorated purchase, insurance, maintenance, and operation of the cars that run on it, plus the cost to build & maintain the parking facilities, the per-mile costs would be quite a bit higher.
That's not saying rail construction costs in the US aren't worse than anywhere else on earth... China builds 5 miles of elevated tracks on viaducts for less than we spend adding a second track with grade crossings to an existing corridor.
Part of the reason is that in other countries, you have "railroad builders" who are cross-trained in a variety of construction disciplines. In the US, where every rail project is a one-off once in a lifetime project for the region, we instead hire armies of general contractors with workers who have narrow trade expertise & spend most of their time waiting for OTHER trades to do their thing so THEY can continue. In China or Europe, workers are cross-trained to minimize downtime.
They also tend to combine projects, like building a new freeway with retained-earth foundation that's wide enough to just add the tracks later, with geometry that's appropriate for HSR & bridge spans that are wide enough for the tracks to pass under without having to tear down & rebuild 40 bridge spans to make room for the tracks someday.
This is one reason why Virgin Trains/Brightline is so willing to extend its Miami-Orlando route to Tampa at its own expense. Back when FDOT rebuilt I-4 10 years ago, it made a point of leaving room for HSR everywhere that they had to rebuild everything ANYWAY. It added little to the reconstruction cost, and MASSIVELY reduced the cost to add HSR later, because NOW, Virgin just needs to finish the job & lay track instead of effectively rebuilding I-4 in addition to building its new track.
That's also why CalHSR's budget costs appear so high... they're combining it with simultaneous freeway improvements they wanted to make anyway & lumping the costs of BOTH under "HSR construction budget". That's why an audit is REALLY needed... to properly itemize the costs & make it clear that it's not "$100 billion for hsr", it's ~
$x billion for track infrastructure, $y billion for road improvements incidental to the track that would have eventually gotten done anyway, $z billion for rolling stock, $w billion for station improvements benefitting multiple projects (eg, transbay terminal), etc.
A good example was the cost of extending Metrorail to Miami International Airport. Detractors claimed it cost "a billion dollars". Supporters claim it's more like $150 million. The truth is, it depends how you count it. If you count land already owned by governmental entities at its highest plausible market value, the entire construction cost of Miami Intermodal Center, and its peoplemover... it's about a billion, give or take. If you factor out the percentage of MIC used by the rental car center, Tri-Rail, and Amtrak, count gov't-owned ROW as a long-sunk cost already accounted for by the airport expressway, and factor out the reconfiguration cost of LeJeune Road as something FDOT & Miami had planned for decades ANYWAY, it's more like $200 million.
New York stores ALSO generally don't have to COMPETE with stores like Target & Walmart, because you'd have to travel 45 minutes & cross at least one expensive bridge or tunnel to get to one.
That's NOT the case in most big cities. A retail store in downtown Miami isn't competing with other retail stores in downtown Miami, it's competing with at least 4 or 5 multi-million foot regional malls and a few "vertical power centers" with big box stores stacked on top of each other within 10-15 miles, including two malls (Dadeland & Merrick Park) & two VPCs (Dadeland Station & Merrick Park) that are adjacent to Metrorail stations, plus a huge outlet mall (Dolphin Mall) across the street from an equally-large regional mall (International Mall) within a mile of the biggest Ikea store I've seen in my entire life & the usual assortment of big-box stores. And there's still Aventura Mall (the #2 or #3 largest mall in America by actual retail space, the Falls (a large outdoor "Lifestyle" mall), and someday... American Dream Mall (yeah, malls are quite non-dead in South Florida... 11 months of steamy rain is a major factor).
My point is, in a city like Miami, the only way ground-floor retail in a skyscraper district can economically compete with that is by collectively BECOMING "an urban de-facto mall with skyscrapers over the anchor stores". And that's exactly what Brickell City Centre is attempting to do... transform a ~6 square block area into a hybrid regional lifestyle power center with skyscrapers. And part of the reason WHY Miami agreed to vacate so many city streets and radically re-design the surrounding road network was the observed failure of traditional ground-floor retail to thrive (or even subsist) in surrounding buildings. The city figured it had nothing to lose by facilitating BCC's 5.4 million square foot urban experiment. Ultimately, we'll see who was right.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
This is just posturing and political chess.
The governor is hoping this will put an end to the seemingly intractable squabbling among San Jose's leaders by causing them to panic & rapidly coalesce behind a station location and route to connect Caltrain to Merced.
Once that's done, the governor will announce a deal with Virgin Trains whereby California builds the tracks connecting Caltrain @ SJ to Merced, while Virgin procures its own trains, builds the stations, and operates them along existing tracks into LA and SF at current speeds, and runs along the new tracks at high speed. By offloading the station construction and rolling stock onto Virgin, and initially scrapping the service to Sacramento and San Diego, CalHSR's official cost will be reduced to something that the plurality of Californians who live in LA or the Bay Area can stomach.
Virgin will limp at 50-79mph from Union Station to northeastern LA, 110mph to Bakersfield, 150-225mph between Bakersfield and Merced, and Merced and San Jose, then jog at 79-110mph along Caltrain's tracks into SF itself.
The HUGE battle will come 15-20 years from now, when there's public demand to improve the last 50 miles into LA, the last ~80 miles into SF, extend the route to San Diego, and extend the route to Sacramento... but not enough money to do all of them. My guess is that the tracks into L.A. Union Station will "mostly" get upgraded to allow 79-110mph all the way through the city, lots of band-aids will get applied to the existing tracks between San Diego and LA to allow 79-110mph, and HSR from Modesto to a station at the outskirts of Sacramento (with plans to someday finish it as HSR all the way to within a few blocks of the Capitol that will never actually happen unless the state manages to acquire and preserve the corridor BEFORE so many years and so much new development has occurred, the whole thing would have to go in a bored tunnel and be UNFATHOMABLY expensive), but nothing will ever solve the Bay Area's NIMBY problem enough to permit 180+mph all the way into SF.
The main problem with "first floor retail" is that most downtown areas don't have blocks that are large enough. The next time you go to Best Buy, Target, or Walmart, note just how HUGE the store's footprint is... then compare that to the size of an average square block downtown. In most cities, you'd need at least two square blocks... three, after you add in the loading docks, ramps to the parking garage, required means of egress, at least some minimal first-floor lobby for the residential floors above, and service areas for things like trash. And most of the streetscape you end up with will be utterly and completely dead. At BEST, you'll end up with a streetscape that's 95% glass window with stuff behind it, but someone on the wrong side of the building might easily have to walk the equivalent of 2 or 3 current blocks just to get to the store's actual entrance. Retail stores, especially big-box stores, HATE having to deal with multiple entrances and exits... they want to funnel everyone through a single point, because it makes it easier to prevent shoplifting and reduces the cashier staffing demands.
For stores like Target and Walmart, spanning multiple floors is something they try to avoid at all costs. For a store like Walgreens or CVS, the second floor is where they stick the prescriptions and ostomy supplies. Even in mall anchor stores, you usually end up with a situation where the floors that open directly onto a major floor of the mall concourse get lots of foot traffic, and the remaining floors end up looking like a ghost town. In the US, at least, VERY few malls -- even in dense urban areas -- can pull off more than 3 stories before the additional floors look more like virtual ghost towns where they put the bridal stores, tuxedo rental places, movie theater lobby, storefront churches, and other places where people go as an intentional destination instead of casually walking by end up.
Downtown Miami illustrates this problem perfectly. As a matter of law and zoning, every single new skyscraper that's gotten built over the past 25 years has first-floor empty... most of which is in a state of perpetual vacancy because the spaces are too small, or the parking is too inadequate or expensive. In Chicago, there are skyscrapers with big-box stores occupying the basements... but even then, most of those buildings have at least one or two sides that are dead to pedestrians.
In Miami, you'd have a HELL of a time trying to convince a retailer like Walmart to build a store in a skyscraper's basement in downtown Miami, because their insurance costs would KILL them. No, it's not due to the water table... groundwater is a fact of life in almost EVERY big city. Dig a large 25 foot deep hole in London or lower Manhattan, and you'll find at LEAST as much groundwater as you'll encounter in Miami. The REAL problem is storm surge and/or storm-drain failure that leaves the street under a few inches of water for hours or days at a time. It might cause minimal damage to a flooded underground garage that's mostly just bare concrete that needs to drain and dry out, but would cause literally MILLIONS of dollars in damage to a flooded-out store like Walmart full of merchandise. Miami's storm drains fail ALL THE GODDAMN TIME, and half the time it's not even due to a "real" storm... it's because the county doesn't do proper storm-drain maintenance, so the storm drains get clogged with rotting vegetation & trash until we get a week or two of downpours that leave a random square mile with the streets and sidewalks under at least an inch or two of water. The problem is, it might only be an inch of water at the sidewalk, but that inch of water is enough to leave a basement retail store under literally 16-25 feet of water (because once the water gets high enough to pour into an opening, it's going to KEEP pouring in until the water level inside matches the water level outside).
Actually, the problem is even bigger than determining what's "sleazy". When you're talking about a large, publicly-traded corporation that has to worry about shareholder lawsuits if the board does something that causes share prices to (even temporarily) dip, they become UNBELIEVABLY risk-averse and institutionally-allergic to anything that might be even SLIGHTLY controversial unless the government either gives them a clear, unambiguous safe harbor or outright requires that they do something.
Large corporations aren't just sociopathic... they're also blindly puritanical, even when their own customers neither demand nor WANT them to be puritanical, simply because in America, anything that involves sex is guaranteed to be 'controversial' SOMEWHERE, and a large public corporation with legal exposure to every jurisdiction in America simply can't risk getting dragged into an obscenity lawsuit by some bible-thumping sheriff or prosecuting attorney in B.F.E. fly-over country looking to score political points with the local electorate.
Apple painted itself into a corner... it decided that all IOS content must flow through it, but by doing that, it made itself legally liable for that content. In contrast, Google can be as puritanical as it likes (and the norms of American corporate governance demand) with Google Play, while freely allowing the existence of alternate marketplaces like MiKandi Market.
Making things even more complicated, Apple demands that all payment processing be done through Apple as well. In the US, most credit card merchant banks won't approve or allow businesses that are "adult oriented" (being intentionally vague, and have been known to throw their ban hammers at companies selling breast pumps to nursing mothers because... well, in America, breasts are bad, unless you're cutting off the nipple with a rusty knife, in which case the violence adequately cleanses it of any prurient sexual overtones and makes it OK). So if Apple DID allow porn, there's no way someone could have paid content without violating Apple's terms unless Apple went out of its way to find payment processing companies that will handle adult content... and then, Apple would risk having some merchant bank pull a ban-hammer on THEM if the bank determined that the mere existence of adult content tainted EVERYTHING on Apple's store.
Long story short, in America, there's exactly one way for a platform owned & operated by a large corporation to openly allow adult content... allow users to install content from anywhere, and keep them at arm's length from anything officially associated with the large corporation itself.
A bag can fly without its passenger, but ONLY if it's INTENSIVELY searched by hand (and X-ray, bomb-sniffers, etc) beforehand, or the passenger is on board A flight & had no reason to suspect his bag(s) wouldn't be on the same plane.
Otherwise, it would be impossible to send mishandled bags on the next flight to their proper destination. You'd have to wait for a cargo flight or FedEx to take it.
Airlines try to avoid doing it because they have to REALLY examine & repack baggage that gets sent this way, but they do have official procedures for it.
The main thing the baggage rules killed was the former ability of airlines to run mostly-empty early-morning flights that made their money carrying unrelated cargo for small businesses. In the past, businesses still had to have a token passenger on the flight, but they could hire one-flight "air couriers" willing to travel with only a small carry-on bag & had no real connection to the shipping company. NOW, the courier him/herself has to attest that they personally packed their baggage, it has never been out of sight, etc. So traveling AS a courier would risk getting you thrown in jail unless you could prove you personally satisfied the requirements, and could expose a shipper or airline to unlimited civil and criminal liability, so airlines generally don't allow it at all anymore.
Just to add... AFAIK, the ONLY regularly-scheduled passenger service between the US & Europe is The Queen Mary. I think it averages a round trip between NY and Southhampton every 3-4 weeks, is ASTRONOMICALLY expensive, and takes 8-10 days each way.
Cruise ships make similar trips as repositioning cruises, but usually just once per year each way (ex: NCL moves a few ships from Florida to Europe in the spring, and brings them back in the fall). THOSE cruises are cheap per-day... but long & boring. Minimal live entertainment, lots of maintenance work during the crossing, and generally no/poor internet access. In the Caribbean, they have a combination of terrestrial LTE and satellite spot-beam service... mid-atlantic, they have the equivalent of one 64kbps dialup line to share among ALL the passengers.
Side note about slow connectivity in general: anything that involves https, SSH, or a VPN is unlikely to work unless you use it in the middle of the night when nobody else is using it, because TLS handshaking enforces timeouts for MITM protection that are only slightly longer than the time required to transmit the handshake at ~19.2kbps. (TLS basically enforces a timeout that's long enough to permit handshaking over a direct point-to-point 9600 baud connection between a credit card terminal & server, but even tcp/ip + wifi overhead is enough to cause a timeout at 14.4kbps, or a single retransmitted packet at 19.2kbps).
It's not your imagination that web sites that USED to crawl on congested phone networks now don't work AT ALL under the same conditions. 10 years ago, almost nothing used https. Now, nearly everything does. So it's easy for a congested, shared network to get itself into a state where nobody can do ANYTHING. It's a use case that wasn't unforeseen, but whose consequences were underestimated 20 years ago because back then, nobody envisioned using https for literally everything. Also, a single ad-funded web page can EASILY initiate dozens of https handshakes, because every affiliate link & ad requires its own separately-negotiated connection. Google tried to mitigate the problem with SPDY, but I think someone discovered a major exploit in the protocol a year or two ago, forcing them to scrap the whole thing and go back to the drawing board.
One idea I've had for a while... have software attempt to group users by 'tribe' based upon their own past like/dislike patterns, then show people review scores weighed against their own tribe's voting patterns. So, if militant feminists go out and downvote anything with an actor they dislike, only militant feminists will see the overwhelming hate. Ditto, if dudebros go around upvoting videos feminists tend to hate... the score THEY see will be high. Likewise, for ardent fundamenalists, Greens, libertarians, Bernie Bros, etc.
In the long run, participating in organized voting will just get you lumped into a tribe & screw up the review scores YOU see.