The eyebrow raiser in the Slate’s base configuration is that it doesn’t come with any audio systems: no radio antenna/tuner, no speakers. It remains to be seen how upgradeable the base configuration is for audio, how involved of a task it will be to install speakers in the dash or doors, installing antennas (especially for AM, which are tricky for interference from EV systems), etc.

I’d imagine that most people would choose to spend few thousand on that audio upgrade up to the bare minimum expectations one would have for a new vehicle, so that cuts into the affordability of the package.

The analog dials were an illusion. That information has been processed digitally for at least the last 25 years.

What I’m saying is if YouTube is sharing $10 million of revenue with channel owners in a month that has 1,000,000,000 total views across YouTube, that’s a penny per view.

Then, if the next month the reconfigure the view counts to exclude certain bots or views under a particular number, you might see the overall view count drop from 1,000,000,000 to 500,000,000, while still hitting the same overall revenue. At that point, it’s $0.02 per view, so a channel that sees their view count drop in half may still see the same revenue despite the drop in view count.

If it’s a methodology change across all of YouTube, a channel that stays equally popular as a percentage of all views will see the revenue stay the same, even if the view counts drop (because every other channel is seeing their view counts drop, too).

Isn’t that the formula? They take all of the revenue, set aside the percentage they’ve set for revenue share, and then divide that among all channels based on viewer counts. Dropping viewership for all channels proportionally means that the same amount of revenue will still be distributed to the channels in the previous ratios.

Most 4k streams are 8-20 Mbps. A UHD runs at 128 Mbps.

Bitrate is only one variable in overall perceived quality. There are all sorts of tricks that can significantly reduce file size (and thus bitrate of a stream) without a perceptible loss of quality. And somewhat counterintuitively, the compression tricks work a lot better on higher resolution source video, which is why each quadrupling in pixels (doubling height and width) doesn’t quadruple file size.

The codec matters (h.264 vs h.265/HEVC vs VP9 vs AV1), and so do the settings actually used to encode. Netflix famously is willing to spend a lot more computational power on encoding, because they have a relatively small number of videos and many, many users watching the same videos. In contrast, YouTube and Facebook don’t even bother re-encoding into a more efficient codec like AV1 until a video gets enough views that they think they can make up the cost of additional processing with the savings of lower bandwidth.

Video encoding is a very complex topic, and simple bitrate comparisons only barely scratch the surface in perceived quality.

Article is paywalled for me.

Does it describe the methodology of how they use the transmitter and receiver?

What specifically are they transmitting? Is it actually wifi signals within the 802.11 protocols, or is “wifi” just shorthand for emitting radio waves in the same spectrum bands as wifi?

Yeah I’m with you.

“Using this technological advancement to improve health care is good”

“Not in countries where health care is publicly run”

“What” is the correct response here.

“The only difference between the two emails was the link,” the memo said. “ActBlue delivered. WinRed got flagged. That is not a coincidence.”

It could also be that winred is more often associated with spam because emails with winred links use a style more associated with other actual spam. Like if spammers use words like Trump a lot to try to scam victims, and a lot of those emails get flagged as spam, then the word Trump itself becomes more highly correlated with spam. And since the word Trump is highly associated with winred links, maybe winred gets caught up in the rule set/heuristics that associate Trump fundraisers with spam.

The sun loses 130 billion tons of matter in solar wind every day.

But how much can be caught?

From the sun, the angular diameter of the earth (12,756 km wide, 149,000,000 km away) is something like 0.004905 degrees (or 0.294 arc minutes or 17.66 arc seconds).

Imagining a circle the size of earth, at the distance of the earth, catching all of the solar wind, we’re still looking at something that is about 127.8 x 10^6 square kilometers. A sphere the size of the Earth’s average distance to the sun would be about 279.0 x 10^15 square km in total surface area. So oversimplifying with an assumption that the solar wind is uniformly distributed, an earth-sized solar wind catcher would only get about 4.58 x 10^−10 of the solar wind.

Taking your 130 billion tons number, that means this earth-sized solar wind catcher could catch about 59.5 tons per day of matter, almost all of which is hydrogen and helium, and where the heavier elements still tend to be lower on the periodic table. Even if we could theoretically use all of it, would that truly be enough to meet humanity’s mining needs?

What did he order at McDonald’s?

Gears have powerbands, CVTs are always in the sweet spot.

Isn’t that basically true of automatics with 8+ gears, too?

Leica, Sony, Nikon, and Canon have backed an Adobe-created digital signature solution for authentication of photos directly in the camera, including metadata like time/date stamps. But that’s mainly for journalism and professional grade cameras, not the cell phones that 90+% of new images are created on.

As I understand it, MacOS’s desktop relies on GPU instructions that haven’t been implemented in any non-MacOS hosted virtualization environment. So you can have a MacOS VM running on a MacOS host just fine, but you can’t run a MacOS VM in a Linux host, even on official Mac hardware, at least if you want the actual desktop environment. The Asahi Linux people have mentioned it before.

If this passes for the military, then that will mandate the creation of a parts supply chain, as well as documentation and manuals for maintenance and repair, for whatever the military buys. Once that stuff is created, it’ll be a lot easier to mandate that the existing stuff be made available to the public, too.

That might not make much of a difference for a guided bomb, but it’ll make a huge difference for the huge amount of commercial off the shelf stuff that the military buys: laptops, routers, tablets, phones, civilian vehicles, tools, other basic equipment.

And while information itself can be a “product” or be provided as a service, in most cases, it’s not.

Sure, but my point is that the same is true of physical machines. People don’t want working machines for the sake of working machines. They want working machines to actually do something else, to output a “product” of that machine’s operation.

And viewed in that way, information services are as much a standalone “product” as maintenance/repair services. Information services account for trillions of dollars of economic activity for a reason.

The mechanic is usually the actual worker - you run a repair shop

But what is being repaired? A machine of some kind? And the machine is operated in pursuit of another actual productive activity, right?

Machines are just about the application of mechanical force in some way, and that in itself isn’t an end goal. Instead, we want that machine to move stuff from one place to another, to separate things that are apart or smush/mix separate things together, to apply heat or cooling to stuff, to transmit radiation or light in particular patterns.

Everything in the economy is just enabling other parts of the economy (including the informal parts of the economy). Physical movement of objects isn’t special, compared to anything else: kicking a ball on TV, singing into a microphone, authorizing a wire transfer, entering a purchase order, answering a phone, etc.

I’m not seeing a real distinction between an IT consulting business and a heavy equipment maintenance/repair business. The business itself is there to provide services to other businesses.

NASA funded SpaceX based on hitting milestones on their COTS program. Those were just as available to Boeing and Blue Origin, but they had less success meeting those milestones and making a profit under fixed price contracts (as opposed to the traditional cost plus contracts). It’s still NASA-defined standards, only with an offloading of the risk and uncertainty onto the private contractors, which was great for SpaceX and terrible for Boeing.

But ultimately it’s still just contracting.

NASA has always been dependent on commercial for profit entities as contractors. The Space Shuttle was developed by Rockwell International (which was later acquired by Boeing). The Apollo Program relied heavily on Boeing, Douglas Aircraft (which later merged into McDonnell Douglas, and then merged with Boeing), and North American Aviation (which later became Rockwell and was acquired by Boeing), and IBM. Lots of cutting edge stuff in that era happened from government contracts throwing money at private corporations.

That’s the whole military industrial complex Eisenhower was talking about.

The only difference with today is that space companies have other customers to choose from, not just NASA (or the Air Force/Space Force).

The only problem with that plan is that it takes a lot of energy to raise an orbit that much, I’m not sure how to make that feasible.

Lowering the orbit takes energy, too, unless you’re relying solely on atmospheric drag.

Your original comment said 2050, which is a long way off. SpaceX’s first launch attempt was in 2006, their first successful launch was in 2008, their first successful recovery of a rocket in reusable condition was in 2015, and first reused a rocket in 2017. If they can make progress on that kind of timeline, why wouldn’t someone else be able to?