They'll be like autonomous trucks might be: 95% of the journey is GPS controlled, but the final approach and dropoff would be piloted by remote link. Making hundreds of landings a day will be mind-numbing and it will make the packing jobs at the warehouses seem like a day at the beach.

Think of Amazon 1-hour as your maintenance contract, except not one one that leeches operating funds off of you every fucking month while the maintenance guy does nothing. Why hire a person to keep track of your supplies, when Amazon 1-hour can be your supply cabinet and you can stop tying up operating revenue with a stock room? Why spend all your time as a party coordinator when you can press a button on your phone and go enjoy your own party?

If you're a maintenance guy, or a paid planner, or a stockroom attendant then Amazon is going to make you go get another job. Maybe it's time to go figure out how to make a nice espresso and become a barista somewhere. Better yet, learn to fix plumbing and make a real living. You can even use Amazon to deliver a replacement part so you can install it.

I'm kind of surprised they didn't buy into the radio shack storefronts to get every-town distribution locations - even if it's just a "pick up" site.

The presumption would be that someone holding a pilot's license would both understand the regulations and SOP which apply to aircraft, as well as have (their license) should they violate the agreement. Since, iirc, you need a medical to have a license, the summary (and likely the article) are playing up a non-issue.

The FAA wants to be in the loop, doesn't want anything unexpected to happen, and wants asses to kick (and a way to kick them) if it does.

All in all, this is a win for Amazon.

Yes, but unless GM decides to build all those stations - which would cost more than their entire net worth - there's no purpose in building cars for them.

Might as well start building cars with a mini reactor that use U/Pu/Th as fuel. That would be even more awesome. And just as practical for the end user.

Everybody started out producing electric cars that look like they were designed by a 1960's team predicting the future (except for Tesla). My question was going to be if GM is going to produce a fun, sporty car that happens to be an electric. And then I remembered - you're GM, you don't currently produce any fun, sporty cars. The closest you come is the redneck cruiser, the Camero, and the septuagenarian crowd pleaser, the Corvette.

Can GM produce a really enticing body, and will you put an electric drivetrain into it?

FTFS "companies with an annual turnover of £10m will have to tell HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) if they think their company structure could make them liable for diverted profit tax"

If you're diverting tax, wouldn't you choose a loophole that doesn't trigger this? Your accountants are either complying with tax law or their breaking it. It's a bit like asking if you have any firearms or explosives in your carry on luggage - if you're doing it on purpose, you're not going to tell the screener.

That 5 year old box kicks the ass of every stick, and most pucks, for UI responsiveness and wifi/streaming stability. The content may be mostly medieval but the box performance as a content viewer, from the user's perspective, is excellent.

Note: I use the ATV we have for two things: ESPN and Plex, neither of which are actually Apple (ESPN requires I have a package from Comcast, the only local cable provider, and Plex requires I hijack the DNS and Trailers app). And yet both work better/smoother on my n year old ATV3 than the Roku, Chromecast, Samsung SmartTV embedded, and FireTV stick I own - all of which are newer than the ATV.

Sling won't work for anyone with more than one household user, though. Apple will probably allow simultaneous streaming to any device in the "family."

And it's apple. Paying extra is part of the chic.

"We were at a left turn lane to get onto a feeder, not moving, and every 10 seconds or so the price was going up 20 cents."

Um, that's how cabs work. Time or distance; the meter switches automatically. You are buying the services of a car, and traffic is (generally) out of the driver's control. Note that they make a lot more when they bill mileage, so it's in their interest to get you to your destination faster.

The switch from 1" plate steel to 1/2" plate steel to improve transparency made a lot of sense in the design meetings...

Fuck the poor!

Not really anything regarding stereo, but how to digitally recreate a 3D space and provide the resultant acoustic signature to stereo headphones? So, you could digitally model Carnegie Hall, or a warehouse, or a coffee shop, and if you know the locations of your point sources of audio you can then create what the room would sound like based on a given listener location and orientation? It sounds (a bit like) raytracing for audio, with the format allowing a standardized way to define the space.

Yes? No? For once, I think we actually need an *article* to go with this abstract, or at least a Bennet Haselton-style rant* as the summary.

*except factual, useful, and correct.

I quoteth the GP:

The tip off that you misread was that 6,768 is nowhere near 1/5 of 423,000. This is the *low end* of their estimate.

This was exactly the problem I had with the "solar road" crowdfunding boondoggle. Their end game of covering all the asphalted surfaces with their road panels came out to nearly a quadrillion dollars. And that was assuming they lowered the cost of their system - concrete sub-base, road prep, installation, component manufacture, and infrastructure - to about $125 per module (i.e. about $1/lb, installed).

80 CRI is awful. Greenish, bluish, pinkish, yellowish - you can have a pastel disco party if you don't re-lamp all at the same time. Anything less than 80 is more industrial quality than residential. Especially give that they *can* make 95-98CRI lamps.

Sylvania used to make a PAR20 with a 95CRI and, I'll tell you, they're dead ringers for the incandescent they replace at full power. They don't make them anymore. Could be they were 10W (vs the 50W halogen they replace), or it could be they were $40 when bought at discount so they just didn't move them well enough. Then again, I've had a 25% failure rate of these 20,000h lamps in just 2 years (thank goodness for the 5 year warranty), so maybe that's part of the problem too.