courts using AI to judge cases isn't a thing (and hopefully will never be a thing).

Banning the plaintiff from filing electronic documents suggests that the judge is worried that it's already a thing.

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 think the answer to grade inflation/grade pressure and first semester culture shock is to grade not just on mastery of the material but also the percentile in case everyone has a bad semester. With that in place, make the tests harder so even the best students know where their knowledge gaps are, because a perfect score won't tell you that.

You're assuming they'll lose tax revenue and that they aren't spending more money on Paramount than they get back. Given this country's penchant for corporate welfare, I wouldn't assume that Paramount leaving would be tax-flow-negative. More specifically, after all of the incentives, tax credits, etc. are taken into account, I wouldn't assume that the loss from Paramount leaving would be greater than the loss from Warner Brothers largely ceasing to exist except as an IP licensing subsidiary of Paramount.

Yes, of course. I'm not saying it relieves them of responsibility. It just doesn't preclude that other people could *also* be held responsible. :-)

If they were monitoring the Coast Guard VTS channel and the boat that came to help was monitoring channel 16, the latter could easily have arrived before the Coast Guard forwarded the request to the VTS channel.

So I would say it is at least somewhat plausible, but only if his yacht falls into that larger vessel category.

That's true... unless either:

• The captain called the boat's owner and asked for permission and was told "No."
• The boat's owner had given specific instructions not to assist other boats.

Unfortunately, both of those has a small but nonzero chance of being the case. Oral instructions like "Say nothing so you have plausible deniability" would be hard to prove, of course.

I geoblock many European countries on my websites.

As could Reddit, Google, Apple, Facebook and so on. But they prefer the occasional fines to pulling out of Europe. That's their choice and I think we should respect it.

I'm just a dumb 'Murrican, but maybe Europeans aren't going to stop until they have total government control of every single aspect of their people

Not people, companies. The EU does not have an equivalent to the U.S. Citizens United ruling that declares that companies are people.

Do you think they should?

Moreover, the more you post on Reddit, the chance of getting banned in one or more subs approaches 100%, and the only way around it, at least outside of the EU, is to create a new account.

Also, this is about the risk of dying from Alzheimer's. Depending on when we're talking about, it could be that they die from something else first, like secondhand smoke.

Or rather knowing that he could cheat if he chose to.

The conventional method of booking a coveted timeslot is to refresh like crazy at the right time, or use a scalper bot. If there's anything virtuous to be said about the AI's solution, it's that it places a much lighter load on the server!