If you dig into it, the deal is half of freshman will have normal grades, half will be pass/Fail. For various reasons (scholarships, internship and other opportunity requirements) the pass/fail students will have actual letter/numeric grades, but the students won't see their (secret) grades.

Incoming freshmen have somehow survived 12+ years in school getting actual grades and somehow handled it - why is it suddenly an issue in 'grade 13' (Freshman year)?

If a student can't handle getting grades, why not just let them sign up for pass/fail for each class?

The article says 1MW (?) for the entire flight...

And also, the plane weighs 25,000 pounds at take-off and 25,000 pounds at touch-down... That's a lot of mass to push around for 27 minutes and raising up 1,100 feet in the air in the process.

I have no idea where you came up with that number...

"They" in this case likely refers to the reporter/journalist, not necessarily the scientists/engineers behind this project.

1 Megawatt is 1,000 Kilowatts, right?

If 1,000 Kilowatts only costs "about $5", that puts each Kilowatt at about 1/2 cent? Seems kind low...

So this plane flew for 27 minutes 1,100 feet above the ground? Why not higher? (Because it's safer to fall out of the sky at 1,100 feet than at 30,000, LOL?) I wonder how practical it is extrapolate real flight times from such a low-flying example? Do you burn same energy at 30,000 feet as 1,100? How much energy would have been consumed trying to get this plane up to 30,000 feet compared to 1,100 feet?

Seems like they want to treat a very special test case (aloft 27 minutes) with an actual, practical flight, or are EV airplanes going to fly at 1,100 feet?

Any vape is disposable. Disposal can be discouraged, but not prevented.

It's common in rural/farm country, and macro-level trash sorting like this is common in those locations. I once lived in a town in CT where the town dump included a shed where residents could put usable but unwanted devices for others to use.

No, we don't - landfills are still a thing, and believe it or not, turning food waste into biofuel, most recyclable material is actually not recycled, but included in trash (landfills), and we certainly do not burn trash to generate heat/electricity at any meaningful scale.

Where do you live? I challenge you to take the time and actually research where your trash and recyclables go - you will likely be amazed at what is actually done with YOUR trash/recycleables.

No.

How does future power generation relate to this burning landfill issue?

We don't need "fricking robots" to pickup trash on the side of the road, we can safely deploy humans to do this - a uniquely simply task that will help provide work for programmers displaced by code-generating AI LLM...

You know what does the same thing? Trees. As a bonus they are nice to look at too.

The issue is burning trash landfills ONLY where they have installed pollution mitigation systems. The Issue is to fix the pollution mitigation system (or just stop deploying them)

No, it's not.

There are tens of thousands of active landfills in the U.S., the only ones burning are in CA and have these special pollution mitigation/oxygen-inserting systems. The issue isn't sorting garbage (although it is a good idea), the issue is the pollution control system. That is the difference, that is the issue - not sorting your garbage.

There are tens of thousands of landfills that aren't burning uncontrollably underground in the U.S. every landfill that is burning happens to be located in California and coincidentally has a pollution mitigation system that feeds the fire with fresh oxygen.

Do I blame the Governor? No. I do blame the folks that decided to install a system that pumps oxygen into an underground fire.

Then again, this is the state that prefers uncontrolled wildfires instead of practicing forestry management wit controlled burns.

I'm sure they have their reasons, I can't wait to hear why?

What? Why would California do something stupid, like injecting oxygen into a heated mass of garbage or ignore basic forest management to mitigate wildfires?

California repeatedly does stupid things for good reasons - can't wait for that high-speed rail project to end sometime soon!

In case you missed it and were wondering why this isn't a more widespread problem:

They were so worried about pollution from a rotting mountain of garbage that they included a system that actually feeds oxygen to the rotting garbage underground, allowing it to ignite and start burning.

If we wanted to address this problem, the engineers should have included fire suppression technology along with their pollution control system...

You know this is only a problem in California, and I suspect the issue is that the Pollution Control system introduces oxygen into buried trash, that fuels these underground fires...

This is a uniquely California problem because California uniquely decided to address pollution issues and introduced oxygen into the landfill.

Uh, 8.1, 10 and 11 have perfectly fine user interfaces, each is just a minor iteration off the previous version, skipping (with extreme prejudice) anything related to "tablet mode" in Windows 8.

You may have issues with the underlying implementation and privacy issues, but the UIs listed are solid.

You mean like in MS Bob?