The fire moved *extremely* quickly. Winds up to 50mph (80km/h), and it's been a very dry summer and fall so things caught fire fast. 20,000 acres were ablaze within twelve hours, and it only spread from there.

AFAICT most of the casualties so far were people caught in their cars while evacuating. Lots of people got encircled by fire, no way out but through. Others were trapped in traffic and the fire caught up.

(As usual, you should ignore Trump's attempts to somehow blame this on Democrats, saying they weren't "managing" the forests properly. This is both incorrect - better forestry would at best have slowed the fire's spread by a small amount - and improper - most of the forests affected are on federal land. Weather conditions were so ripe for a wildfire that the power company considered shutting off power, since wind blowing down power lines can ignite fires. This wasn't done (shutting power off is itself dangerous to the public), and a downed power line is now the primary suspect for the immediate cause of the fire.)

Oh no, not again.

I mean, I've got a full DAW setup on mine, a tablet is certainly capable of being far more than a media consumption device. But that's not the way most people use them, and doesn't seem to be the way most tablet designers are designing them.

I'm fairly nearsighted - to be able to read normal-sized text, including subtitles, on a TV screen a decent ways away, I need to wear glasses. Not exactly something I want to wear to bed.

Also, a TV is, generally speaking, always going to be aligned with the horizon, but laying down in bed (as opposed to sitting up in it), that's not how I'm positioned to watch it. I'm most comfortable laying on my side, tablet rotated 90 degrees from vertical to align with me, so one short end is resting on the surface and the other is in the air.

A tablet is a pretty useful media-consumption device. If I'm sitting in bed watching movies, I'd rather have a 9" screen a foot away than a 40" screen twelve feet away - it gives me more flexibility in positioning (like with reading a book, much comfier to do while laying on your side since it rotates with you), and better UX than a TV and remote control. Especially given how slow most "smart TVs" are.

So maybe it's not a "need", but it is a pretty nice "want". It was definitely worth it for me - I got mine for a different reason, but I have to concede I mainly use it to watch Youtube and read tech articles.

The problem for tablet makers is, there's no upgrade cycle needed. As soon as we got to a point where tablets could stream Netflix, 99% of people never needed an upgrade afterward.

Yeah, I have definitely noticed an upsurge in troll/hatemob comments, and upvotes for same, here over the past year or so. It only affects political articles, and mostly happens in the first few hours after an article is posted. Moderation neutralizes a lot of it eventually but we're definitely under siege, and I feel like we're losing ground.

It's a term for people whose gender identity matches their biological sex, ie. males identifying as men and females identifying as women.

It was coined by analogy to chemistry, specifically geometric isomers, where "trans-" and "cis-" prefixes distinguish different configurations.

As I understand it, the problem under investigation is not "Tesla forecast they'd make X many but only made Y". Failure to predict the future is not illegal, and even being overly optimistic in your shareholder forecasts isn't a crime. As long as they weren't egregiously bullshitting when they made that public, they'd be good.

The area under investigation is the actual production numbers. Tesla shorts have latched onto a pretty bonkers theory that Tesla was somehow falsifying their production numbers - fake VINs, or delivering known-defective vehicles to count them as "delivered" even though they'd need to be replaced. Some of it is quibbling over the definition of "delivered" - is something sent to a dealer counted as a "delivery" or does that only count when someone buys it? - made worse by Tesla not using independent-ish dealerships, but rather their own stores.

I personally don't think there's a case here. Musk makes schedules he can't keep, and promises features he can't deliver, but he really doesn't lie about accomplishments. Especially not ones that are so easily verified - the FBI will have a pretty easy time finding out if VINs are being misallocated, so the investigation should be pretty short.

Do you *have* any personal problems that could use accommodation? If there's anything we can actually do, that doesn't conflict with existing ethical imperatives, I can raise the issue at the next SJW convocation.

Some code can't be compute-bound, no matter how well written. Stuff with very random memory access patterns, for example - 3D particle systems are notorious for this. While one thread is blocked on a LLC or RAM read, the other has full use of the core.

Some code can also be very optimized for SMT. It's rare to have two threads using almost exclusively separate execution units of a core, but if your problem is naturally divisible in such a way, you can get a full 100% performance improvement. Think a Huffman decoder feeding data to some kind of SIMD floating-point number crunching - one thread's using mostly shifts and integer math, the other's using SSE, and SMT will let both run simultaneously.

Let's say they've got two X chromosomes AND a Y chromosome. I don't recall offhand if that genotype results in that physiology, but XXY chromosomes are surprisingly common.

You underestimate the number of people with such "issues". And why care about sex-segregated bathrooms at all? They're not even a fixture of classical Western society - they were mostly introduced post-Civil Rights era to keep the "good, noble" white women from being even potentially contaminated by contact with "black savages". Why not just have unisex bathrooms?

People are getting upset because this is a blatant prelude to an assault on people's freedom to do what they want in private. Pence in particular has been completely clear that the end-goal is to force everyone to behave in accordance with the gender norms that match their sex, and those noncompliant will be deemed sexual assaulters or pedophiles, and treated as criminals.

Nobody is asking for special protected treatment - they're asking for some kind of guarantee they won't be abducted and shipped away to a torture camp. Which yes, happens - overly-religious parents that see their children acting "faggy", find out about "outdoor programs" using "conversion therapy" to treat them. But rather than a fun summer camp, it consists more of forced marches, sleep deprivation and just general "make them suffer until they'll do anything to make it stop"... this has more than once resulted in deaths.

Our current Vice President describes himself as a firm advocate of these programs. If that doesn't sound faintly terrifying, I have no idea what more I can say.

I get it. You see yourself as an open-minded person, with strong libertarian ideals. You see a group that you would never really consider persecuting, out there making demands. And the only big mistake you're making is assuming that, because you would never consider persecuting someone for something like that, that nobody would - and so their demand for explicit protection comes across as a demand for special attention, which naturally rankles your minimal-government ethos.

a) That's sex, not gender. Sex is biological, gender is a social construct. Consider the "third gender" seen in some Southeast Asian cultures. It was only "really easy" a decade ago if you ignored anything except traditional post-medieval Western gender norms.

b) Sex is a bimodal distribution, not a boolean. You can get all kinds of weird things - XX phenotypes that are morphologically male, for instance. Or a whole spectrum of intersex types - how would you classify someone with a semi-functional penis, no testes, and ovaries?

The fact that it makes bookkeeping easier doesn't mean it's an accurate model of reality. Otherwise, we'd all be using 64-bit unsigned integers instead of names.

Of all the small-launch newspace companies, I could most believe that Rocket Lab is the one that's actually genuine about focusing on the small-launch market. Mostly because I don't think their engine design can scale up much past where it is - I think this is about the limit for battery-cycle rocket engines with current technology.

All rocket-launch markets are semi-protected. Nobody wants to launch a spy satellite on someone else's rocket - so there's a market that Landspace only has to compete with other Chinese startups and the Chinese state rocket corporations, and not SpaceX, Roscosmos, Arianespace or ULA. (Not that ULA can really compete with anyone these days). And every government tends to prefer flying their own payloads on home-grown rockets when possible, China certainly not less than others.

Blue Origin is very much not in stealth mode. They just aren't in Elon-Musk-crazy-stunts PR mode. You hear about them fairly regularly in the rocket press, just not the mainstream, same as with ULA or Arianespace.

Blue Origin's New Shepard (the suborbital tourist one) is still gearing up for crewed test flights - they're supposed to happen this year, not sure if that's officially slipped yet or not. They're also supplying the BE-4 engine to ULA for their upcoming Vulcan rocket, intended to replace Atlas V and Delta IV - and they beat out Aerojet Rocketdyne to do so. They've also secured at least eight civilian launch contracts and an Air Force grant for New Glenn, their heavy-lift rocket.