Exactly what I thought. Seems like Thiel has funded a grifter academy. I am bitter because no-one invested in my sustainable blockchain yoghurt with AI...

Actually, you can. Modern IRS are much more accurate than they are assumed to be by the aircraft systems. I have compared the actual IRS position after a transatlantic flight to the GPS position quite a few times and it is often less than a mile out. The type I fly initialises the IRS from GPS or manual position on the ground and does not update it during the flight. What it does do is have a separate working position which a blend of all the inputs: GPS, IRS, VOR/DME, LOC, etc. This is vulnerable to GPS jamming/spoofing but you can turn off the GPS input and let it navigate using other means.

That assumes that the apps you need/want are still available from the App Store. If a company/developer thinks they can monetise their app in ways that would fall foul of the Store rules, they might try making it side load exclusive.

The attraction of the App Store for many is a) one shopfront, b) one secure payment method, c) curation, d) some sort of initial/ongoing screening for malware and e) remote deletion for a discovered bad actor. A particular software package is unlikely to become cheaper after leaving the Store, as hosting, payment processing, etc. are not free to obtain and the object is to make as much money as possible, so how does the consumer actually benefit?

That said, I think it will probably turn out to be a bit of a nothingburger, given the stats from the Android side. I am sure that side loading on iOS will default off and require acceptance of some pretty frightening (to non-techies) possibilities, so the overwhelming majority will likely not bother. For developers, the loss of customers who would have discovered their product in the App Store will have to be set against any possible savings from the 30%, assuming they can actually do it significantly cheaper anyway.

I was firmly in the gas camp, even going so far as to install gas bottles at a previous house. Since then I have moved to induction and prefer it in almost all scenarios.

Modern hobs are powerful, controllable, generate far less water vapour (and no CO2, benzene or whatever), plus they are incredibly easy to keep clean.

OK, I am an amateur home cook but on a recent treat at a 3* restaurant, I toured the kitchen and was very surprised to see all electric ovens and mostly electric hobs, a mixture of hotplates and induction. The few remaining gas devices were for searing, and even they were scheduled for electric replacement. Made the whole environment much more pleasant to work in.

Compared to most naming conventions, I think the Apple one makes sense in terms of product and linguistics. Ultra means beyond or on the other side of, so Ultra > Max is not hard to grasp: beyond the maximum. It is also what you get when you physically couple two Max chips, which are the most potent single pieces of silicon they make, to produce an Ultra. The Max is still as far as they can take it in one monolithic die.

Anyway, Mx, Mx Pro, Mx Max and Mx Ultra is not the most difficult progression to remember?

We can observe this happening while a human brain develops from one embryonic cell. Eventually it gets to the point where it is large/connected enough to support what we call consciousness. Maybe there is a threshold in computational power and storage beyond which any substrate has the potential to host recognisable cognition? IDK.

I did not get the impression that the advances in this field are going to generate immortality any time soon, just that you could spend more of your life in an active and healthy state? That would solve a lot of problems, rather than create them as we may be living longer than our ancestors but increasing resources are required to keep us in that state due infirmity.

If you could only live to 100 but the last 30 years were like teenage ones, that would be a good start!

Actually, it is quite a long and involved decay chain: Xeon -> i9 -> i7 -> 2 x i5 + i3 + Celeron.

Some of these products are quite long lived.

I found it a very mixed bag. Great visually, except some of the props were a bit obvious. Character wise, the Elves, especially Elrond and his ilk, are decently portrayed as immortals interfacing with a mortal world. Dwarves reliably stocky and grumpy, but why do they all speak like Victorian mill owners from the north of England?

Galadriel I did not get. She is >5,000 years old at this point but often behaves like a grumpy teenager. She is also one of the most powerful magical beings in Middle Earth but gives no hint of that capability, even in life-and-death situations. This is the same elf that refuses the One Ring in the LoTR because it would enhance her innate power to ludicrous levels, possibly even greater than Saurons.

The less said about the Harfoots, the better.

Also, if you are using a cellular network, the carrier *has* to track and record your movements otherwise the phone would not work. If you are going as far as replacing the hardware manufacturers OS with one of your choice, unless you a) wrote it yourself and b) have exact knowledge of the hardware underneath to the transistor level, you should be still uncertain as to whether you have more privacy, or even less than you had before.

As far as actual privacy goes, I think Apple make a pretty good stab at it, especially as it is one of their USPs which they make a big deal about. It is not really part of their business model to sell your data either.

IMO you are more likely to fall victim to a social engineering hack than you are to have private data exfiltrated from your iPhone (or any other reasonably secure handset).

I agree, it is an appallingly bad way of trying to get a point across, and if taken literally would have vaporised the Earth and anything nearby in pretty short order when they turned it on.

I assume they meant: concentrate the power from the sun so it is 2,500x more intense in this area than from direct sunlight. Why did they not just say that?

So true. XKCD has a classic strip on that as well: https://xkcd.com/882/

I always thought that 1/20 was a rather low bar, considering the ~1/3,500,000 for a discovery.

Pilot here. AFAIK there are no civil aircraft that require augmentation to be controllable.

The problem for Boeing is that the 737 is a 1960s design that has had a succession of bigger engines, longer fuselages, wider wings, etc. grafted on it. These have not made it unflyable, just that the handling characteristics are different enough between the MAX and the others (in the view of the Authorities) that extra training would be needed to familiarise pilots with said differences.

Boeing had already promoted the MAX as not requiring any extra training for a 737-rated pilot, so they chose to fudge it by adding a system that overrode the natural tendencies of the airframe under certain conditions. Unfortunately, they appear to have given this job to an unsupervised intern because the result was something that took an input from a single sensor with no range checking or sanitisation and used it to move the horizontal stabiliser autonomously, which is the most powerful flying control on the aircraft. There was also no mention of this system, MCAS, in the manuals. The rest is history...

From what I understand, the vast majority of NFT transactions are wash trades, i.e. the money is going round in a circle in an effort to inflate the perceived value of NFTs in general. Or they are money laundering. Or both...

What has that got to do with gov.uk? Having had to use a large selection of other countries government web portals as I travelled a lot during the pandemic, the UK one stood out as being the easiest to use and most responsive by a long way. It provides a consistent interface for virtually everything a UK citizen needs to do online, which is more than I can say for the USA, for example, and is set up for maximum accessibility and speed.

There are lots of things wrong in GB but gov.uk is not one of them, IMO.