This, though for the most part, you don't need the whole rover — only its brain (and perhaps its communications electronics). The situations where you need the whole rover involve figuring out how to get it unstuck. And the more experience they have at running the things around on Mars, the less likely that becomes.

My parents' retirement home was on the flight path that the shuttle used to land at Edwards, and I remember hearing the double BOOM as they went over. Not the loudest thing I've heard. That was my ship's 5"/54 doing shore bombardment while I was topside back in '72. Yes, I was wearing hearing protection but I still have a notch in my hearing range because of it. I also heard the Newport News firing a full broadside of 8" guns one night but that wasn't as loud, both because it was several miles away and because it was firing away from us. It also wasn't using flashless powder, giving us a nice fireworks display as a side effect.

Are you sure that the telescope isn't named after a sandwich?

I already have a mommy. I don't need another one.

>the company said its new chips will deliver up to 50% higher performance at the same power, or up to 70% lower power for the same performance.

>IBM's VP of silicon technology R&D says the new innovation "can improve performance by 50% compared to the best available chip today, and at the same time can reduce power by 70%."

One of these things is not like the other.

... I really liked the first Superman they did.

So you managed to find and watch the Superman serial that Columbia put out in 1948. And if you liked that so much, did you hunt down its sequel, Atom Man vs. Superman that came out in 1950? If not, you really should as they used footage of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsing as part of the first chapter's cliffhanger.

The *average* blackout duration for Madrid (CAIDI) is 1.6 hours. While you wouldn't expect a large percentage of outages to exceed four hours if the average is just under half of that, infrequent isn't zero, and when you're talking about critical emergency infrastructure like telephones, you really should want the outage durations for those services to be zero.

And even if the average really were just 30 minutes, the point remains that this was done in response to an outage that lasted way more than 4 hours, so the proposed fix wouldn't have prevented the events that triggered the legislation.

I do wonder how much of the bloatware needs to be disabled to actually realize that, though.

There's a very simple way to find out. Just type this one command into a terminal:
systemd-analyze blame

Definitely. Standards shouldn't specify what kind of backup, just the duration. If they want to use batteries, fine. Generators, fine. Flywheel storage, fine. Compressed air storage, fine. If you can get more than 24 hours of storage, add some solar, and you now have basically an unlimited duration. This is, of course, the ideal answer, where practical.

There are two types of outages. Widespread outages at the transmission level are fairly rare (almost everywhere). Outages at the local level, like substation failures, overhead line damage from car accidents/wind/ice, etc. are not. It doesn't take a massive regional outage to make cell phones unavailable. In urban areas, cell towers cover a radius of only a couple of miles, typically, with lots of dead spots when even a single tower goes down. One bad traffic accident, and thousands of people could lose cell coverage. And those localized localized outages can take way more than four hours to repair.

For cellular phones, you either have the same system or you don't have any way for people to call an ambulance in an emergency. So that argument really doesn't hold water. And for urban towers, it could take you more than four hours to reach the owner of the business whose roof has the tower on it so that you can get access to the premises to connect a generator. So that's also not an entirely safe alternative.

Okay, the news article I read said that it took days to fully restore everything, but that may have been a few fringe places or something.

Either way, mandating 4 hours of backup in response to an event that lasted 15+ hours still seems more than a bit shortsighted.

That may be what sg_oneill meant, but that's not what I meant in the post that sg_oneill was replying to. NotRobot is talking about exactly what I'm talking about — using a tablet for reading sheet music while I sing or play music on an actual physical instrument.

The best part of the Android tablet experience is that MobileSheets lets you have two tablets side-by-side and sync them with Bluetooth so that you can turn two pages at once, so that you get to the spot where the publisher (hopefully) left time to turn before having to deal with it. That costs $320 with basic Android tablets, or $1500 with iPads (or $1660 for iPads with cases to match the Android tablets).

To be fair, I *do* compose music, record music, etc., but I do all of that on my Mac, not on a tablet. Tablets are simply the wrong tool for the job.

For recording, iPads don't have nearly enough storage for recording, and don't provide an easy way to back up locally, which makes giant audio files a no-go.

For composing, I can't imagine doing it without a physical keyboard, because keyboard shortcuts are what make that survivable. And Apple's keyboard for the 13-inch Air is a $280 add-on. Worse, even if you do that, you'll still have a tiny 13-inch screen, which IMO is undesirable. And if you can tolerate a 13-inch screen, a MacBook Neo would still be $400 cheaper than a Wi-Fi Air with keyboard and is vastly more capable.

Also, even though I'm slowly starting to get used to non-discontinued score editing software, 100% of my existing compositions were done in Finale, which has no iPad version at all. So for working with all of that content, an iPad would be basically useless. Given that it was one of the most popular music editing apps for a very long time, I'm not alone in that problem.

On a stone or anything else non-flat, sure, though that's just shy of 50% of the outer surface area of an iPad, and you're keeping it on a music stand with feet that stick out, so I don't exactly like those odds. You might get some protection from the case, but did I mention that the $160 tablet comes with a magnetic folio case, whereas Apple's folio case for the iPad is an $80 add-on? If you add the cost of the case to the cost of AppleCare+, the things you would typically do to make a bad accidental drop not be horribly expensive for the iPad add up to more than the total cost of a basic Android tablet. Ponder that for a moment.

No big deal. Most of the sheet music reader apps offer cloud syncing, etc. And even if I had to redownload them from IMSLP or some publisher/distributor website, re-downloading the dozen or so pieces of music that I'm actively rehearsing at any given moment isn't exactly a huge burden. Or I could buy two, sync them every few weeks when I add new music, and keep them both in my car except when I'm charging one of them. With that approach, I'd be all but guaranteed to have a working one with me at all times even if I drop one and break it, and I'd still pay just a third the cost of the cheapest equivalent 13-inch iPad.

Even if they provide security patches for only three years, you'd still get 18 years out of it and its successors for the price of one iPad. Having to throw it away to install a new major version of Android really isn't a big deal when you're talking about hardware at disposable prices. Also, the likelihood of it actually mattering when I'm using it exclusively as a sheet music reader is basically zero. :-)

And four hours is nowhere near enough. That's less than the average power outage duration in California, for example (4 hours, 16 minutes). And the fact that this was in response to a blackout that lasted days makes me really wonder what they are thinking, unless the assumption is that they will then scramble to bring generators online to provide continuous service. Four hours might work for landline service, where you have one central office per city, but with cell towers spread out everywhere, that doesn't seem nearly as practical.

In an actual emergency, having only four hours of backup could be grim. Mind you, other countries generally aren't any better, but four hours is still woefully inadequate, IMO.