Since there are trains that go over the rocky mountains, I think that argument fails. (But it might succeed if you argue practicality rather than possibility.)
FWIW, The SFBay Area BART system has high speed trains that move from elevated to underground. It's not a steep grade, of course, but it's done. (IIRC "high speed" for the BART system is around 70 mph, and is only obtained on the long straight sections. Of course, my knowledge is multiple decades old.)
There are also real problems with sparsely available origin and destination points. And the cost of building the lines through developed areas.
If you build a good system, it will be more efficient for the areas that it serves. But rail transit has fixed routes. This makes it inflexible. And you really need to multi-track the rails, because breakdowns will occasionally happen.
FWIW, I feel that streetcars are much more plausible/effective/significant per unit cost than are high speed rails. High speed rail is useful AFTER you solve the local distribution problems.
Most geothermal heat plants aren't long term without repair for various different reasons. IIRC, internal fouling is one of the main reasons. This sounds like it might be a different approach, though of course you need a volcano to make it work.
Well, when you extract the heat from the rock it becomes less fluid.
Agree about the meaning of "hallucinate" in this context, but...
You can't be sure your brain is deterministic. It may well have features that operate at the quantum level, with the implied genuine uncertainty. Transistors are normally scaled to avoid that problem. This isn't exactly "free will" in any normal sense, but it *is* non-deterministic behavior, at least as far as we can tell. (Yeah, superdeterminism is a valid interpretation of quantum theory, and so is the multi-world interpretation and a few others that take the entire universe as context. So in some sense it's still deterministic, but it's a really weird sense. And as far as the Copenhagen interpretation [i.e. "shut up and calculate"] goes even in that sense it's non-deterministic.)
I don't think treason could have been made to apply. It's defined in the Constitution, and the definition is a *LOT* stricter than colloquial use.
Ah, but who is the consumer of those resources. Perhaps Google is selling compute to other companies. That could be quite a profitable approach.
FWIW, Amazon lost money every quarter for nearly a decade. It hasn't been doing that recently.
Netflix and YouTube both use AV1, which is royalty free.
You're right about YouTube. I was thinking HEVC was one of their delivery formats, but apparently not.
Netflix definitely did use HEVC for delivery of some of its high-end content at one time. Whether they still do or not, I have no idea.
Either way, the fact that people are running into error messages suggests that there is some actual customer impact.
Smart. Instead of charging each customer an additional $0.04 per unit, or even eating those costs ($600k, in other word chump change), they use it as an excuse to upsell their product line.
Except that nobody who buys one of their machines is going to think, "I could pay an extra $100 and my machine would work better." They're going to think, "This piece of s**t can't even do things that my cell phone from eight years ago can do. Why did I buy this, and why should I ever buy anything from this manufacturer in the future?"
This level of penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior is a sure way to permanently lose customers.
Anyone who wants to do H.265 encoding
...or decoding...
will probably be looking at the higher end models anyway.
You mean like... anyone who wants to watch Netflix or YouTube or any other streaming service's high-res content?
They're hardware vendors, so it's likely disabled in either the hardware or the firmware.
1) "give me liberty or give me death" was always a minority position.
2) Things that work well when people live in rural areas with slow communication don't necessarily work well when people live in dense clusters (i.e. cities) and conversely.
3) It is always the job of the individual to assign weights to his Bayesian priors. The state may control the costs of your actions, but should not be allowed to control your beliefs.
I hope I've covered what you were asking, but it was a bit unclear.
When I see things like "facial age verification", I have major concerns, whether we're talking about a site like Roblox (whatever that is — I don't know, and don't really care), social media, porn, or any other site. How are you going to do it without violating the privacy of every person who creates an account? And how are you going to verify that the person using the account is the person who created it without causing an even bigger privacy violation?
We do need some sort of age verification system, but we need it to be designed in a way that protects privacy. I have less than zero faith in any individual website to come up with such a system, and approximately zero faith in any individual government to do so. There really needs to be an international age verification working group that spends the next five years coming up with a system, then pressures everyone to implement it.
Doing it the other way around, with companies or governments shoveling bad, partial, or even dangerous solutions to the problem down everyone's throats, can only result in greater levels of push-back by the general public towards a proper scheme if someone ever creates it.
That there is no evidence to support it does not mean it cannot be true. But it should inform your assessment of probabilities.
Why won't sharks eat lawyers? Professional courtesy.
