Never mind that the booster is never in an orbit.
Sure it is! It just happens to be an orbit with a periapsis smaller than the Earth's radius.
There's an OSS variant (probably several) which aren't given due attention in the article.
The Mycroft project currently listens locally for the watch word, and aggregates ALL of the subsequent queries as audio through a single source to the online engines like Google, Wolfram or others. This anonymizes a lot of what the engines could learn about individual users.
Their next stage is to expand on the local processing even more, so they will only be sharing plain text to the online engine third parties. This version is due in the first half of this year.
For me, the benefit is simple local Linux-based Python-based skill development. When my kid was young I would make a family computer into a sort of daily-schedule-keeper, announcing the daily tasks like bathtime or bedtime. I would ssh into the machine when my kid started having "conversations" with the computer. So now I can rebuild a little bit of that in my own personalized smart speaker.
While this phrase was not bandied about in the press at the time, there is an example in PGP. The whole fight over encryption technology being exported centered on this distinction somewhat, as printed books had different regulation from encryption technology which was controlled like munitions. So they printed the source code to PGP in a book, published it, and used OCR in other parts of the globe to reconstitute it into computer software.
Published by The MIT Press, 1995. ISBN 0-262-24039-4.
(no longer in print)
Trying to recharge vehicle batteries wirelessly like a huge Qi charger is even more lossy. The inefficiencies would kill any such plan.
1. The airlines operate under a huge amount of regulatory oversight, and structure the development of avionics or engine control software accordingly. The terms ARP4754 and DO-178C are to aviation as ISO9002 is to business models. They provide guidelines on creating a rigorous development process, and regulators are keen to track how well companies develop logic and physical designs in line with best practices described by those guidelines.
2. If you summarize DO-178C in one sentence, it might be "document the rationale for every change, and the means you employed to ensure it is the right change." Most companies follow a V-shaped change model where you trace from high level requirements to lower level requirements to implementation details, and then verify the code does what is expected and then validate that the requirements are being met (and the requirements are even proper in the first place). Once you have that framework in place, you have to document every step of the chain of review.
3. For every change to a high level requirement, a low level requirement, an implementation, and sometimes even a change in a verification method, there typically has to be an independent review: you cannot trust the implementors to check that the change was appropriate and done correctly as it's easy to be blinded by your own thought process during development.
So in a case like this, the customer needs to inject several new top-level requirement (which shockingly may not have been there in the first place), "the system shall be hardened against unauthorized changes in configuration/operation/state" and that has to flow down to subsystems "the component XYZ shall be hardened..." and that has to flow down a few more tiers before you even identify the protocols or chips or attack vectors to be changed. Then you have to verify the code change works in each component. Then a system-level review. Then a regulatory review to have the updated design certified as safe for test flight and finally safe for revenue service.
Does this sound like a desktop software change control process? Sure, maybe you're really disciplined, but it's a matter of degree. It really can take fifty people or more, from regulators to systems engineers to coders to integration testers to work the process. And that all adds up in terms of time, opportunity costs, tools and tooling, lab test, systems test, hours and hours of live aircraft flight test, and so on.
I grew up in Arizona, and let me tell you, a couple decades ago it was HOT. Like, 122 F in Tucson and Phoenix was not unheard of. Now, it's fairly likely to hit that every year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti
Since the 1950s, people have thought that the cheap land could be tamed and "new ideas" would just blossom out of the goodness in people's hearts. Arcosanti is a great example, but not the only one. Last I saw the place, it had a gift shop where the hippy owners took money selling semi-erotic paintings and charcoal drawings, and invited the young folks to spend some quality time mixing concrete with desert sand... or pose for the artist. There's never going to be an Arcosanti the way it was originally envisioned, or even with a population over 10.
Thousands of Videogame-Playing Soldiers Could Shape the Future of War
There was a LOT of discussion about the "Nintendo Warriors" and the precision ordnance guided by soldiers with years of training in their parents' basements. Operation Desert Strike, and then later Desert Storm.
Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl. -- Mike Adams