To my knowledge, Russia had no problem fulfilling the contract. What's more, they don't have the infrastructure to deliver the gas to anywhere else and have to burn it off.

What if the model orthogonalizes the training set and retains information of a few representative images to a high degree while discarding almost all information of other images that can be interpolated from the base?

The problem isn't the price. If QuestPro cost $50 it would still be a crap AR headset and incapable of replacing a monitor or TV, it's just not a good enough device for that task. Meanwhile if it cost $1500 and would actually be good, plenty of people would by it, there are lots of high end monitors, TVs and phones that cost just as much and they sell just fine. $1500 is very much in the realm of any other high end tech gadget and a good AR/VR headset would be capable of replacing a lot of those.

The problem Apple needs to solve is making a device that is good enough to fully replace a TV or monitor, along with enough additional features to make it worth the hassle of putting on the headset. QuestPro utterly fails at that, but it fails for avoidable reasons. There are other cheaper headsets on the market that already have better resolution and better passthrough than QuestPro. What they don't have is good software, which in turn renders them largely useless in the consumer market.

Apple has access to a full stack of desktop OS, mobile OS, along with music, games and movies. If they integrate that properly with their headset, it could easily be leaps and bounds above anything we have seen so far in the AR/VR space. The bar that Facebook/Meta put up so far is incredibly low and could easily be beat by anybody with some money and better management.

And yes, at $1500 or $3000 AppleVR won't sell like hotcakes, but that's not the goal here, the first version is supposed to be essentially a development kit from what I understand. What's important is that they manage to make AR/VR look desirable and interesting again. Meta so far made it look more boring the more years they spend on it.

QuestPro being a flop comes to nobodies surprise, that thing is just an overpriced Quest2 with face tracking and better optics (but not better resolution), for 5x the the Quest2's $300 launch price. Even calling that "Mixed Reality" is a stretch. The resolution and clarity of the passthrough cameras are garbage and the depth sensor, which is fundamental to any kind of AR that interacts with the real world, got removed a couple of months before launch. That thing was designed by a committee that didn't know what they want, they just threw whatever tech they had available into it, no matter if it made sense or not. Face tracking itself is a weird proposition, who wants a feature that they literally can't see unless they are standing in front of a mirror? That's a feature that would make sense once you solved everything else broken with modern VR, not when quintuples the price.

As for Apple headsets, all the problems the QuestPro has are fixable. Put in better cameras. Don't waste bandwidth and processing power with face tracking. Add in higher resolution screens. And most importantly, write actual software to make use of the new features the headset has. QuestPro didn't get that, it's almost all Quest2 software. There is room for a "monitor replacement" headset and headset resolution is approaching a point where that can become viable, see Nreal Air for ~$400, what's missing is putting it all together in a nice package and having software that integrates it all smoothly. There is plenty room for innovation here and Quest so far really is just scratching the surface of what's possible. The problem most current headsets face is that they make the VR and AR aspect the center points, while largely ignoring 2D content, that puts them into a barren wasteland where there is nothing to do. If Apple does this right and makes sure that all their software and entertainment is smoothly accessible from within VR, it could be a far more useful product than anything on the market right now.

And cars need them just as much. Practically everyone is going over the speed limit. Use geofencing to restrict the speed in towns.

The Funen district heating system do use a heat pump:
https://www.datacenterdynamics...

No mention of BYD? They're one of the largest producers of electric vehicles in China.

Actually people in Germany were forced to either fight at the front or to work as part of the war effort. Others were enslaved. In Germany that system was called Kriegssozialismus, which translates to war socialism - even if though it's not at all what is called socialism otherwise. You could argue that Anonymous Coward is technically correct on up to five out of six points. However, the way most of the terms are used is misleading and paints an entirely wrong picture. AC is repeating what can be called half-truths at best.

The Wehrmacht soldiers were on Pervitin (meth) and they certainly didn't respect national borders. Hitler also viewed smoking as decadent and became a vegetarian near the end of his life. But pro-workers rights and a socialist? No. Absolutely not. If the NSDAP actually had any socialist roots, it lost them quickly enough and just kept the name.

The passthrough of the Pico 4 isn't stereoscopic while the one on the Quest Pro is and apparently it features a depth sensor as well. But I agree, the Pico 4 is the more tempting offer.

Cool. You just solved the opioid crisis.

Since games became tailored to exploit addictive behavior and many people ruined their lives by spending thousands of dollars per month on those games.

This whole article is the best argument I have ever seen against using a specific phone service provider. I will never, ever purchase Google Fi or Google Fiber after having read this.

I agree entirely with your comment. Comparing a MacBook pro that can run windows with windows laptops makes sense, but apple has moved away from that compatible approach. While I bemoan the windows lock on much of business and engineering software, it's a reality many are constrained by. There are lots of Linux/Mac os options now, but it's still a very constrained ecosystem. It doesn't matter how fast my cell phone or M1 based MacBook air is, as I can't use it for a lot of my work. It doesn't make sense to directly compare in FLOPS, because I can't use the power at all under certain platforms.

So small developers from the US pay a 15% fee and small developers from outside the US pay a 30% fee? Did I get this right?