More significantly, if you see left-to-right motion and say "forward", what percentage do you get right? I suspect there's a bias in videos towards left-to-right motion of subjects (or conversely, right-to-left motion of backgrounds), and I don't see anything in the paper about controlling for it.

Would it have changed the course of warfare? A bouncing bomb that worked at sea would have rendered virtually all navies obsolete.

You know what else can lift a ship and break its back? A torpedo with a magnetic fuse. Oddly enough, torpedo bombers don't appear to have rendered the world's navies obsolete.

I'm sure the NSA has copies. Perhaps someone should request them?

Another candidate is the filling of the Persian Gulf: it wouldn't have been as abrupt as the proposed Black Sea deluge (taking years rather than days), but during the last Ice Age, the Gulf would have been prime agricultural land, at least as good if not better than Mesopotamia. There's a decent chance that there was a civilization there, where the Black Sea would likely have been nomadic tribes.

Sorta important - there's not much popular software that uses GNUTLS, but wget is one of them. Since it's almost always used as a client, it's probably wise to use curl -O against unknown servers, until they get this straightened out.

wget can be built against OpenSSL, and curl can be used with GnuTLS.

How much did it cost to setup their infrastructure to produce these cars? It seems like it would be a loss if they don't sell any at all. Why wouldn't they raise the price?

The electric Fiat shares probably 90% of its parts and most of an assembly line with the gas-powered Fiat 500; it's the remaining 10% (particularly the batteries) that make the 500e so expensive to produce. California clean-air laws require Fiat to sell a certain number of electric cars if they want to do business in California and restrict how much Fiat can mark up the price of the electric version. If Fiat can't get the parts needed for less than the permissible markup, they're required to sell the cars at a loss.

I don't know about this balloon, but the ones I've been tracking on FlightRadar are solidly *above* controlled airspace. Airliners tend to hang out around 30,000-40,000 feet, business jets are typically 35,000-45,000 feet, and Google's balloons are at 60,000 feet and above.

That aside, both the passenger and the driver are aware of the optimal route

The passenger is aware of what his smartphone thinks is the optimal route.

Consider going from the Spokane airport to the Lakeside area: Google Maps routes you via I-90 and the Maple Street Bridge, but during rush hour, this is a wonderful place to run up the meter, with delays of 10-30 minutes on a 30-minute trip. Going via the Sunset Highway instead avoids much of the traffic (and cuts a quarter-mile off the meter), but to someone who's not a local, it looks like you're being dragged off into the middle of nowhere to be mugged, or at least ripped off on the taxi fare.

Now, as someone from out of town, how are you going to judge if the driver is telling you the truth about why he's going somewhere your smartphone doesn't want him to?

what is it you think is the problem? what do you think will surface? please no snark, I'm genuinely curious.

1) Drivers deliberately taking sub-optimal routes to run up the meter.
2) Drivers putting in too many hours a day, leading to an increased accident rate.
3) Drivers using the cheapest cars they can buy/skimping on maintenance to keep their costs down.
4) Drivers extorting passengers to pad their income ("An extra $20 off the books, and I won't take the scenic route").
5) Drivers refusing to take people to low-profit destinations ("Take you out there? The hour I'd spend getting back to the city for my next fare would eat my profits for the week")

Criminal record check is completely unnecessary. How are convicted felons ever going to find work if we put background checks on everything?

You make the background check appropriate for the job. For example, I don't want a taxi driver who's been convicted of mugging or drunk driving, but I don't care if he's got a past as an embezzler. Conversely, I don't care if my accountant spent his teenage years knocking over convenience stores for drug money, but a history of embezzlement is unacceptable.

That's only if you've got a pump lifting the water out, leaving 860 feet of empty pipe -- and if you're doing that, the energy cost is the same as if you put the membrane on the surface and used a high-pressure pump to simulate 860 feet of depth.

If you want to get away from needing pumps to filter the water, you need to base your calculations on the density difference between fresh water and salt water, not the difference between salt water and air.

The natural osmotic pressure of sea water is 390 pounds per square inch. You'd need to stick your filter deep enough that the pressure difference between your column of fresh water and the surrounding sea water exceeds that, which a back-of-the-envelope calculation says occurs at a depth of 6.6 miles. The Mariana Trench is 6.8 miles deep, so yes, it'll work, but just barely.

I don't know about GPS units, but I've had Google Maps send me on a complicated route through the alleys of a small town because someone forgot to enter a permitted turn at the intersection of two major highways. I've had it tell me to drive through a concrete barrier because someone recorded the intersection as a cross intersection rather than back-to-back "T" intersections. I've had it give me a route four hours longer than necessary, because it thought part of the short route was still closed for the winter. And most recently, it give me a route that ended twenty miles short of my destination because it picked the park administrative headquarters in a nearby city as the location of the park, rather than somewhere actually, you know, *in* the park.

20 kilotons is probably the upper limit of what their detector can handle. ">20 kilotons" is simply a way of expressing "off the scale".