Only idiots think that China is able to do all of this due to cheap labor, especially when labor is becoming a vanishingly small portion of the cost of anything,

China graduates roughly 1.3 million to 1.5 million engineers each year. This drastically outpaces the United States, which produces about 130,000 engineering graduates annually. This creates roughly a 10-to-one gap in raw engineering degree output between the two nations.

Ah, no.... it will be decades before enough lift exists to move even the smallest chip fab to the moon. Not to mention resource extraction, mining, etc..

Have you ever been a hiring official for any medium- or large- organization?

Yes I have.....and for entry jobs....GPA has been a consideration where there is no experience.

Is it the only consideration? No....but when you don't have experience it is one component to weed applicants down.

False. It is still indefensible, because it is a problem of Apple's own creation. If Apple wants to charge for it, that's fine, but only if they also allow their devices to download apps from somewhere other than Apple.

For in-app purchases of content, it already works that way, of course, but I'm assuming this isn't what is being discussed here, because it would be particularly heinous of Apple to want to charge up to a 15% tax on content that it had no involvement either in payment for or distribution of.

College GPAs are just meaningless and it's time we just forget about them.

That GPA is what gets you in the door, over other applicants on those first jobs...

Hell, when I think about it....if "I" were a child today, and my parents raised me like they did back in the day....they'd be under the jail, with child protective services taking me away LONG ago....

No cell phones...and during the summers starting when I was a teenager....my mom started work again....so I'd be home alone all day, running around the neighborhood with my friends, playing all day.

We rode bikes and skateboards miles....played in the woods near our subdivision that hadnt' been developed yet....built forts, built skateboard ramps (the local house constructions "donated materials").....neighborhood pool, etc.

When I was very young, I had to call home about every 2 hours from a friends house....but other than that, I'd leave at sunrise and my folks generally didn't see me again till dusk and dinner, where we all ate together.

I got a job at 16yrs....I've been working ever since. With a little help, early graduation, I bought my own car my senior year in high school....a '78 280Z....fun!!

But yeah, no supervision was how we grew up, my friends and I are all older adults now, many with kids....we got into trouble and mischief, sure, but nothing that stopped the world and we learned how to deal with people and the world.

Legally or morally.

I'm really surprised how many people around here think it does. It doesn't require consent when a human does it, and it doesn't require consent when a computer does it.

My university did the opposite, and to this day I think it was good.

At the end of the first semester, you were given a test in the three most important subjects for your field. If you failed, you could re-take it after the summer break, before next semester starts. If you failed it again, you could repeat the first semester and try a third and final time. Fail that, you're out.

It was hard, too. In my class, we were just over a hundred when we started. We were 28 in the 2nd semester. But of those 28, almost everyone made it to the end. Everyone who would've failed somewhere along the way had already been weeded out.

It was brutal, it was stressful - but IMHO it was the best way to do it and be respectful of both student time and university resources.

We had that in 1st grade. Not university, school. So students starting university have now regressed to the level of 6-year-olds ?

I get that it's stressful. I don't get how "managing stress" has vanished from the requirements of getting a degree.

Sounds like they're going for the Amazon model — sell at a loss for years until the competition withers, then stop selling at a loss.

Ground effect requires being at lower altitude than the wingspan. Unless that plane is a quarter mile wide, ground effect doesn't play into it. And if it is a quarter mile wide, you'd better hope it doesn't fly into any populated areas. :-)

As others have pointed out, gaining altitude requires some extra energy, but over the duration of the flight, you use less fuel because the air is thinner, resulting in less drag. (This assumes that your propulsion doesn't lose efficiency to match, of course, but I think you can compensate for some of that by changing the blade angle. This is way outside my area of expertise, though, so I'm not entirely certain about any of this.)

One reason not to go to higher altitudes is that it has a range of only 125 miles. The hybrid drivetrain (500-mile range) doesn't exist yet, I don't think. With such a short range, you'd use up half your battery power on the ascent, so the benefit from more efficient travel at altitude would be lost, and you'd likely end up with even lower total mileage.

But 2,000 feet still seems awfully low to me by a factor of four or five. Dunno.

Just wait until it starts training on porn that people managed to upload to Twitch in violation of the terms and conditions. Then your use of the word "rape" in that comment will take on a whole new meaning.

Real-world flight times are likely to be miserable for most purposes. Currently, this plane has a maximum altitude of 2,000 feet. Not sure why. But the plane has a maximum airspeed of 140 knots. For context, a 737 has a cruising speed of 450 knots.

In practice, this means that this plane is only suitable for very-short-distance flights where a jet would not achieve normal cruising altitudes or speeds.

A nonstop flight from SJC to DFW takes about 3 hours and 35 minutes, give or take, for 1440 miles. At cruising speed, it would take 2 hours and 46 minutes. So an additional 50 minutes or so is spent on taxi time and landing at a much slower speed (maybe 140 to 150 knots). Of that, landing takes 20 to 30 minutes and drops the speed to a third, so I'm going to ballpark that as about 15 minutes of added time, leaving 35 minutes for taxi time. So the total flight time is probably about 30 hours at 450 knots.

Assuming that landing speed for the X1 is proportional to the difference in cruising speed (which may not be accurate, but won't make a huge difference), this means that same flight would take 35 minutes plus about 3.2x the flight time, or about 10 hours and 11 minutes.

On the flip side, the low landing speed means that it can fly into much smaller airports, and because it carries a much smaller number of passengers affordably, it could make much more direct flights economically feasible. Combine that with autonomous piloting, and if it actually had enough range to do medium-range flights, such a design would have potential.

When I fly from SJC to my mom's house in West TN, it takes me about 14 hours to fly commercially, thanks to 3.5 hours of driving, an hour of TSA time, and an hour or more of layover, and an extra takeoff and an extra landing. If I could get rid of all of that extra time and fly general aviation rules, then an automated flight with a single passenger to the nearest tiny little air strip would involve only half an hour of driving (3 hours savings), no TSA time (1 hour savings), no layover (1 hour savings), and no extra takeoff and landing (30 minutes savings), reducing the trip to about 13 hours and 15 minutes (12.5 hours in flight, 30 minutes of driving, and maybe 15 extra minutes for landing).

But that all assumes adequate range. With a hybrid range of only 500 miles and an all-electric range of only 125 miles, the X1 would have to make a minimum of four stops to reach Tennessee from California. So this plane, while a great demonstration of the potential for electric flight, still has very little practical use other than ultra-short-range flights. I suppose with this, I could fly into Nashville or Little Rock or Memphis and take a tiny plane to that airstrip if such a flight existed and were cheap, and that might be worth doing if it existed and were cheap, but I'm not holding my breath unless it is entirely automated.

I can't remember the last time I witnessed a hospital demonstrating general competence

Where do you live where it is so bad there?

Unfortunately in the past 2 years...ive had to make a number of visits to the ER and one major surgrery....and I could NOT be happier with the doctors, nurses and general staff of the hospitals I've been too....

And my insurance covered most of all of it...didn't put me in the poor house like so many seem to claim will happen in the US if you get some much as a hang nail....this is private medicine I'm talking about with me, not VA.

It is 12000 days into September, 1993: Usenet is long since an artifact in the memory of greybeards; the internet belongs to the monkey cage. Yet on Slashdot, we still get physics puns. Here, the golden age lives on.