Does it really save that much gas, though? I know that the power required to overcome air resistance increases at the cube of the velocity, but transmission gearing and available engine horsepower influence fuel consumption at cruising speed more than aerodynamics.

It's not completely scientific, but I used to have to repeatedly drive a 100 mile trip in northern Colorado, where the speed limit is 75 mph. I tried an experiment, with n=3 of making the same trip at 55 mph (which really pissed everybody else off, but it's science!) and 80 mph. I used cruise control, changed my speed as little as possible, tried to control for as much as I could. Filled up the tank before I left, filled it up on arrival, and compared the total fuel consumed. I actually used less fuel overall at 80 mph than 55. My late 90s Honda Accord got 37 +/- 4 mpg at 55 mph and 45 +/- 2 mpg at 80 mpg. I was amazed at both the fuel economy in general at high speeds and the better economy at a higher speed.

A better, more controlled experiment could probably be done, and I'm only claiming that this seems to be true over a relatively small range of speeds ( 100 mph, maybe?), but it's not altogether surprising.

Not really because of technical reasons, either. If there's no speeding revenue to be collected, there's no reason to keep the speed limits absurdly low.

Speaking of RC and amateur devices, I'm surprised that they didn't just use APRS to keep track of the balloons. The power budget of a GPS and VHF transmitter are tiny and they can tie into the network (almost) no matter where, or how high, the balloon goes.

The transmissions aren't commercial in nature, so as long as there is a licensed ham there is should be all legal.

Probably, but Google's whole thing is always connected, cloud dependent appliances. Searching, streaming, and advertising/tracking wouldn't consistently work, which would make that whole market less interesting to them.

They don't really sell many physical products, like Apple, so there's no big push for Android on standalone devices. Then again, in the 2.x days they were still desperate for Android market penetration, so it is a little surprising that they didn't chase any market they could.

Utter bull, indeed.

You're referring to the entirely closed-source bundle that you download from the not-at-all-sketchy-sounding site, goo-inside.me, right? The one that's signed with a self-signed certificate?

The same Google Apps that increasingly contains closed source versions of what used to be open source OS components? Yeah, I'm not sure what "evil" spin you could put on this totally "open" behavior of Google's...

I thought we were talking Mad Max, not a full-blown war. Why would a modern army with artillery be attacking this guy's little farm?

Bands of marauders would have to find an isolated place in order to overrun it (the solar panels are probably fine, but the wind turbine and wood stove might attract people from afar). Nobody's going to travel hundreds of miles into the middle of nowhere in the hopes of finding supplies. Most of the rounds he's hoarding can be used for hunting, too.

In the medieval period, repelling multiple armed attackers required architectural defenses and a similar number of trained fighters. That hasn't really been the case since the invention of the firearm. A single person (or a few people) with a bunch of bullets in a reasonably well selected location could keep off a bunch of desperate marauders long enough to make them decide to move on.

Speaking of saving time, I find that most everything will cook well enough in some multiple of even minutes. The "minute plus" key is the only key I ever actually use on my microwave.

Also, for anything under 99 seconds, you can save a button press by entering seconds instead of minutes:seconds. It's obvious, but it annoys me enough to type this to see people hit 1-3-0, when 9-0 works just as well.

Not defending SMS, which is pretty horrible in many ways, but SMS does support delivery receipts. They are very handy for seeing if/when a message is delivered to the recipient's phone.

I'm with you until this:

But the concept has been co-opted and distorted by marketing, who have reduced the meaning of "cloud" to little more than a buzzword that applies to anything with online connectivity, even if that's not designed in a cloud-like way.

"Cloud" has always been a marketing driven buzzword and because of that there's no real definition of "cloud-like way". "The cloud" is derived from networking diagrams where stuff outside of the diagrammer's control and scope is handwavingly lumped into a nondescript cloud. It has never meant anything specific, on purpose. Though the various technologies that it may or may not refer to are real, the actual term "cloud" has been marketing bullshit from the first time any corporate exec spoke it.

That's my point. As long as the final stage has lifting engines mounted on it (and isn't big enough to be the only stage), stuff will have to be mounted next to it instead of beneath it and stuff will be more likely to fall off and cause it damage.

The solid fuel booster pedantry was just pointing out that foam wasn't encasing the boosters because they weren't cryogenically cooled. The ET was, and that's where the foam came from. The GP said that the foam came from the booster and I was correcting that.

The foam fell off of the tank, not one of the boosters. The boosters were solid fuel and didn't need to be cooled. Even without boosters, this would be a possible failure mode for any engines-on-shuttle design that can't hold all of its own fuel inside.

It's using TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256. That's not exactly a weak cipher, especially since AES256 is putatively not much stronger than AES128.

I think the issue you're seeing originates on your end.

The pixel addressing of a modern graphics system (GPU to LCD) is purely digital, which is what he meant by "purely digital". Of course there are analog components in the displays, but the signal path is digital.

It seems very inefficient to dump whole frames to the panel at a fixed (or even variable) interval. Why not just change individual pixels only when they are damaged?

There's no reason to go through grey between every frame. As you say, most pixels will remain the same color, and making every pixel grey at the V-sync frequency will just make the whole display strobe and look washed out.

Grey-to-grey is just an easy thing to test for benchmarking displays. You don't actually do that in normal operation.