You might be assuming dramatic will be better.
You might also be assuming harmonization will mean everyone should use the same technology.

Perhaps you are misinterpreting this statement? They might be technically correct in their statement yet the technology will be a total fail, no? ;^)

At least in the USA for 4G, there was/is a lot of dramatic overhaul of the network after WiMax's demise and harmonization of the spectrum means the commercial availability of a penta-band phone...

I don't think you understand the economics of container shipping. First of all, they used the worst possible polluting fuel (aka bunker fuel) because it is unregulated internationally. Secondly, at 15 knots, these ship consume less than 50 tons/day. However at 25 knots, fuel consumption rises to about 300 tons/day. It's all about speed, not the moving with the ships.

(also cars and powerplants can't really use bunker fuel even if it's reprocessed, it won't be economical).

Not as "advanced" in image recognition as advertised.

Basically they took the output of a common object classifier and instead of just picking the most likely object (which is what a typical object classifier looks for), it leaves in in a form where multiple objects are detected in various parts of the scene. Then they train a neural network to create captions (by giving it training pictures with associated captions).

According to the paper, it sometimes apparently generates a reasonable description. Other times it reads in picture of a street sign covered with stickers and emits a caption like "refrigerator filled with lots of food and drink".

Actually the most interesting thing about it is the LSTM-based Sentence Generator that is used to generate the caption from the objects. LSTM's are notoriously hard to train and they apparently they borrow some results from language translation techniques to attempt to form intelligible sentences.

This is all very googly-researchy in that they want to see what the limits of pure data driven machine learning are (w/o human tuning). This is not a however much of an advance in image recognition as it is an advance in the language for caption construction.

FWIW, NASA has used radio-isotope-thermoelectric generators (aka RTG) in several space missions. RTGs are basically nuclear "batteries". The most high-profile have been Voyager, Cassini, and Curiosity...

The radio-isotopes inside RTGs give off radiation, but it's generally pretty low and all the radio-active parts are sealed inside the "battery" so that even if they blow up, the battery is generally still intact.

The problem with using batteries for propulsion is efficiency. These batteries are heavy vs the amount of power (energy over a short period of time) they can deliver, so you need to use a different way of extracting the energy from the radioactive material which generally is less safe (and more "bomb-like"). That is not allowed.

Thus the RTGs are only used to power the electrical sub-systems and the waste heat is used to keep the electronics at a reasonable temperature in a cold depths of space... kinda like a big battery...

Unfortunately, these RTGs are hard to come by (they are generally powered by a radioactive isotope of plutonium), and the European Space Agency (which launched the probe) doesn't have the ability to make them. Nasa has some, but apparently none were usable for this mission (e.g., if you need AAA and you have only C batteries, you are kinda SOL)

Except for the small fact that they don't expect the probe to operate as it approaches the sun (it's a comet they are on and they tend to "activate" when they approach the sun).

And if they actually did expect the probe to survive the approach to the sun, as it is a comet, it would have definitely gone far-far away from the sun...

AFAIK, one of the main reasons they didn't use and RTG is that no usable ones were available from NASA and the ESA didn't yet have the expertise to make them themselves. Not to say that they still wouldn't have gone solar because of other mission parameters (e.g., mass), but the reasons you give don't really add up.

FWIW, once RTGs are assembled, you don't get to "hibernate" them, they start to decay immediately (kind of like a battery). If you don't have the capability to make them yourself, there might be one on the shelf you can buy from someone else, but it's probably not designed with your power budget in mind and it still has it's original weight, but the amount of power it will put out is reduced by sitting on the shelf. It took 10 years to get to the comet, so that's really puts a lot of constraints on using a pre-existing RTG, perhaps too many for the mission, but if they had the technically ability to make a custom one that matched the mission criteria, I'd bet they would have strongly considered it.

Sub-critical chain reactions in RTG are pretty much minimal. The mass and configuration of the radioactive source is selected so that it is essentially a textbook half-life source (from fission cross-section).

The whole point of an RTG is that it doesn't need things like control rods or have failure modes associated with moving parts. Unfortunately, they are generally thermodynamically less efficient generating electricity/energy (relative to waste heat). They also tend to use very heavy encasements for launch safety reasons reducing their weight-to-power efficiency vs solar.

On the more leading edge of RTG research is combining a thermo-electric (e.g., seebeck style) and photo-electric to convert more of the infrared energy that is currently wasted in an RTG to useable electricity. There is also some research into finding so-called high zT materials (ones that have higher conversion efficiency), but results so far have been disappointing (this might be because this research is more niche and thus less lucrative than high temperature superconductors which has occupied researchers for a while). Sadly RTG have very little commercial or military value (Pu is hard to obtain in scale and the it's a niche market to begin with and cannot get bigger) and as a result likely aren't going to get much more attention from researchers.

Mass != weight

Auto wasn't evil, he was just doing what he was programmed for directive A113...
As often is the case, it's likely that PEBKAC at fault. Usually, nobody ever thinks about spec-ing out the error cases enough...

As a first order effect, no, but since executive pay is often tied to the company profitability (either through stock options or bonus plans, or both), a CEO has quite a bit of incentive to massively increase the profitability of the enterprise so he/she (okay, I think they are all he) will reap the percentage rewards (along with all the other stock holders) without regard to the cost of the customers bottom line. This second order effect is simply a natural consequence of how things are set up...

If you think about it, this second order effect would likely a bigger effect than the first order effect... ;^)

Oh yeah, a typical pharma company might actually really need to make insane profit on the home run products in order to cover up for all the crash and burn products they will probably produce, but that doesn't take away from the first argument...

But of course an industrial shredder won't be able to collect and sort 80's memorabilia as efficiently as a Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth-class...

Unfortunately mechanical damping of the inductor vibration isn't as effective as simply reducing the amplitude of driving frequency in the audio bands. Remember this is a sub-harmonic that is being excited by a non-linear coupling to the audio frequency. Basically the energy in a higher frequency is being converted into a lower audible mechanical frequency.

Theoretically, simply changing the mass of the physical oscillation (e.g. cementing it to something heavier) only slightly modifies the frequency of the oscillation (potentially creating more audible noise) and it still doesn't change the energy much. Viscous damping of the mechanical frequency might help a little bit more. Unfortunately, in practice, surrounding things like solder joints in potting compounds is risky as they have a different thermal expansion coefficients and it can cause additional mechanical stress (resulting in reduced mechanical reliability).

In the end, mechanical means are still not going to be as effective as changing the circuit to reduce the amount of switching energy frequencies which are coupled to the audio frequency bands. Probably even from a total system cost point of view...

Now that the video game industry has passed the movie industry, why is it surprising that they use the same entertainment industry tactics?
The more things change... ;^)

This is the next frontier/competitor...

I wonder how many Uber/Lyft customers know about the chinatown bus transportation options...

Uber and Lyft haven't seen real competition like this before... They may not know what hit them if they manage to show these guys a profitable new business...

Fraud is an intentional tort. If they never intend to give the rebate for all eligible people, then it is fraud if they then do not actually do it (even if you don't complain). If not enough money is allocated up front, and if they run out of money to pay all the eligible rebates they receive, then it seems to me to be fraud (although IANAL)...

There are cases that companies when it comes down to the bad publicity and/or the threat of fraud ruling, eventually pony up. But the FTC doesn't really look kindly on that in the US. Even if people eventually get their money, if they don't get it within 30 days, I believe it's considered fraud. Of course you never hear about the cases where there are only a few people defrauded and they don't complain loudly.

As an interesting aside, one famous rebate disaster happened in the UK with Hoover. The cost of complying with the rebate eventually cost the job of the CEO and the company was sold off... Which goes to show, you can defraud a few folks, but when there are too many, you eventually have to pay the piper...

Rebates are often fraudulent by design. Many companies that offer rebates outsource the rebate to external marketing firms. First, these external marketing firms don't have the same customer privacy code as the original company. Also, marketing companies often buy the rebates on a pooled money basis, they are given a pool of money to distribute to multiple rebate programs and are incentivized to maximize the surplus.

Outsourcing and incentivizing itself isn't fraudulent (just shady), but the reason that it's often fraudulent is that the allocated pool of money to the external marketing firm is never enough to cover the worst case, so they are effectively going into the promotion with the deliberate intent to defraud customers of the rebate and the original company doesn't indemnify the external company for worst-case shortfall (because they don't trust these shady rebate companies enough to think they won't just claim/pocket the money).

Often these small marketing firms often do not have the financial resources to cover the difference (margins are small because they bid down the pool and they don't take out insurance) and often have co-agreements with shady marketing companies that abuse your information. The original companies know this, but generally just look the other way thinking unless it's a total public relations disaster, they will just wipe their hands clean and enlist one of the other available marketing companies in future campaigns.