The JPL projects were highly likely to be launched by SpaceX boosters. You seem to be confused about whose budget is being cut.
I agree the pork project of the other booster, carefully distributed to many states to get support from as many congress as possible, should be cancelled. But JPL has nothing to do with that.
Weren't there a whole host of problems with that contract?
https://www.sacbee.com/news/in...
"The span opened last September after years of concerns about the quality of its welds, foundations, anchor bolts and steel tendons that support its skyway viaduct. Testing, evaluation and repair of some of those items continue as traffic flows over the structure that connects Oakland to Yerba Buena Island in the San Francisco Bay.
Chinese weld defects
Jim Merrill, formerly a top manager with MacTec Engineering and Consulting Inc., oversaw Bay Bridge quality control work in China from 2006 through 2008 and was a key source for the report. In 2008 he warned Caltrans officials that parts produced by Zhenhua Port Machinery Co. contained âoehundreds of cracks,â prohibited by the contract and by welding codes.
The work took place on Changxing Island near Shanghai, where most of the steel for the suspension span tower and roadway was assembled. "
https://www.sacbee.com/news/in...
"As concerns about workmanship mounted, the ZPMC began to resist even standard quality assurance. According to a nonconformance report at the time, Caltrans employees came to the jobsite to test a box girder for possible cracks on heavily corroded welds. A ZPMC supervisor obstructed efforts to take photos, wiped away key markings from the test area and shouted âoeno UT,â a reference to ultrasonic testing. The inspectors withdrew. Caltrans later agreed to conduct its quality checks on a schedule agreed to by ZPMC."
Apple is just throwing a bone to the 3rd party ecosystem.
Now there's an opportunity to:
1. 3d print a button extension
2. Sell a dock that moves the on/off button somewhere visible (using an extension)
3. Offer a service to disassemble your mac mini and rehome the innards into a different case form factor, that puts the on/off button somewhere visible (using an extension)
4. Sell furniture or a plinth with a cutout for the button for easy access, or a button located on the desk that presses the button for you (using an extension)
The problem is such security is much more expensive than the inventory loss. Almost all of the expense is liability and health coverage. This is also why they tell their employees to not stop shoplifters: if the employee gets injured doing this the store is on the hook for all the medical coverage.
They will be recording the numbers of each sold item. Yes this likely means they will be able to tell that you are wearing something you bought previously from the store. More insidiously they probably can get your name from this. They may even be able to tell if you are wearing products bought at different stores.
I don't think it will be deactivated, instead the store will record the serial number of each sold item. The alarm will go off if the serial number of the RFID device matches the stores unsold inventory.
I anticipate the growth of data centers outside of the USA, powered by cheap solar, geothermal, nuclear, wind, etc. Intermittent availability will be buffered by batteries/standby storage (gravity sleds, air storage, etc.), and possibly by standby generators.
Things will shift such that the constraint will then be bandwidth, but data transmission infrastructure is a lot cheaper than power transmission infrastructure.
Or... they could do what Elon has been doing, and just run craptons of portable generators until they get permitted to build more power plants?
I'm assuming what they've done is pitch a terrestrial application for sabatier reactors (or the functional equivalent) in order to get the benefit of volume production and a diversified customer base (no more waiting for the next Congressional budget fight to find out if your project has been cut or has continued funding).
That one of their customers might be SpaceX at some point (for terrestrial/mars usage of Starship/Heavy Booster) is incidental.
This might make an interesting alternative to building power line infrastructure for solar farms (or nuclear plants) - build a methane plant instead and feed it directly to a feedstock manufacturing plant colocated with the solar farm.
If you then co-locate a natural gas storage/liquefaction plant, plus a conventional gas fired electrical plant (the CO2 output of which becomes an input for the methane reactor...), that gives you quite a bit of redundancy. Can't wait to try and set this combo up in the next iteration of Sim City...
1. Firm handling legal compliance for employee records associated with one of multiple employee lawsuits against Amazon.
2. Firm doing HR/Payroll.
3. Firm doing layoff compliance filing with states (WARN notice)
To clarify, I meant the only "required" school-measurement standardized test at the K-12 level should be that graduation test.
The APs/IBs are a different matter, as you choose to take those for college credit (and in California, depending on where you are, you can just enroll in community college as a K-12 student, with a dual enrollment form:
example:
https://catalog.mccd.edu/getti...
"How to enroll as a K-12/Dual Enrollment Student
Students in K-12 (Kindergarten through 12 grade in High School) must complete Four Easy Steps.
1. Complete your Application for Admission online through the California Community Colleges website.
2. Complete the appropriate forms:
A. Dual Enrollment Parent Consent Form
B. Permit for Special 9-12 Students
OR
Permit for Special K-8 Students
Students must complete the Special K-12 Permit with his/her/their K-12 counselor who will help select classes that meet his/her educational needs. Students are only permitted to register for classes that his/her/their counselor and administrator approve. Each form needs to be signed by the K-12 Principal and/or designee and Merced College counselor. Grades 8 and below must meet with the appropriate Dean of Instruction to gain additional approval."
)
I wish I had known about the community college loophole when it mattered. I would have spent 5-6 years of that K-12 period much happier.
Research, critical thinking, communications, and debate, along with basic accounting and economics, would be on my wish list of nice to haves for K-12. Also, bring back the vocational classes - wood shop and auto shop, drafting, etc. I would love to see CAD being taught in conjunction with the use of additive and subtractive manufacturing.
My impression is that K-12 lags badly in terms of teaching the basics you listed of reading, writing, and arithmetic - and given these are foundational skills, it is not surprising that an increasing amount of post K-12 education is now focused on remedial coursework: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2016/2...
This is a problem not only for post-secondary education and the needs of a modern workforce - this is also a problem for a modern military:
https://apnews.com/article/arm...
Covid-related issues aside, I don't know why things have gotten so bad. Supposedly the whole point of standardized testing was to enforce a minimum standard for each cohort as they progressed through K-12... but there are apparently a number of issues with that:
https://ascd.org/blogs/15-reas...
My take on why standardized testing as a metric for minimum standards is problematic:
* Infrequent - you wouldn't wait until your project was ready to be delivered before running the tests, right? Big bang tests that are administered at the end of the year provide less value to the student/teacher (no correctable feedback because of the delay between when the test is administered and when the score is received).
* Artificial - in order to generate a "normal" distribution, the questions are designed for average students. Pick the "best" answer. They also take a lot of effort to generate, which then creates the need for secrecy to avoid invalidating your existing test question pool.
* Curriculum is tailored specifically to the test, crowding out information that is applicable in real life in favor of items that will pass the test ( https://www.washingtonpost.com... )
* Students cheat ( https://www.edutopia.org/artic... )
* Teachers cheat ( https://www.newyorker.com/maga... )
Personally I think the only test that should be administered is a graduation test, and that should be optional. As in - you're allowed to take the graduation test at any point before you graduate, and if you pass, you are no longer subject to compulsory K-12 education and can leave.
It would be great if educators could just fork a standard open source github version of a textbook for their course, and if you wanted a dead tree copy, you could then get it printed out.
What I find interesting is the resale of cheaper versions of textbooks (still official as far as I know, but paperback instead of hardback, on thinner paper) from places like India, into the US. If you look on Amazon for something like Russell and Norvig's Artificial Intelligence (4th ed), you'll see the "International Economy Edition" for $30. These editions aren't supposed to be exported outside the regions they're targeting, but apparently arbitrage and Amazon go hand in hand...
"Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign conducted a study in the spring last year to see how ChatGPT had influenced cheating in an introductory programming course. They found students had overwhelmingly moved to ChatGPT from what the researchers called âoeplagiarism hubsâ such as Chegg.
âoeIt appeared that they completely shifted over from trying to find online solutions and copying them to just going to ChatGPT and having it generate solutions for them,â said Craig Zilles, professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign."
TL;DR - people who just want to memorize shit to pass or crib answers for homework found a cheaper, easier mechanism to let them slide by. Yay?
See Snake Pliskin.
It needs meatpuppets to interact with other humans in realspace - wine and dine customers at expensive restaurants, take them to hostess clubs, pass them bribes... Once VCs replace C-suite executives with AI bots, they can bypass all these intermediary steps.
In the meantime... industries that supply hookers and blow are bullish on AI?
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
