This would be like requiring every single restaurant and fast food place to check photo ID because somewhere in the entire state a bar exists where you have to be 21.
Not really. It's more like requiring all vendors who sell cash registers used in restaurants to support checking photo IDs because some restaurants also serve alcohol.
Because, it's California, and the Governor and mayors can't put the responsibility for actually taking care of their kids and making sure they aren't on a website "that could be dangerous".
There's no safe way to prove your age to a website. Any scheme requires trusting some arbitrary third party that could secretly be the government doing timing comparisons between the verification and DNS queries and stuff to unmask anonymous users. At least with operating system or browser vendors, they presumably have a strong commitment to minimizing the risk of someone publicly posting "John Doe just visited sexwithseaturtles.com" or whatever.
Age-verification at OS levels was always a terrible idea. It's difficult to see under what rationale Linux should be granted an exception for this dumb idea. The solution is just to repeal the law and flog the sponsors.
It's not really that terrible. If you're going to do age verification, you have two choices: browser or operating system. All else is all but guaranteed to be either a privacy disaster, a usability disaster, or both. And either way, every operating system needs to support multiple users, or the "I used dad's iPad to browse porn and buy firearms" problem makes the verification useless.
And major operating system or browser vendors that cater to the general public should make it available by default, because doing so prevents the "You downloaded the AdultCheck module, so you must be a pervert" logic that some people might use to attack people.
What's terrible is the idea of mandating that it be performed at the OS level, rather than just mandating that the OS doesn't get in the way. Browser-level verification is actually far preferable, because there's no need to bake that into an authentication framework when you can just send it out to a browser window. Leave that tiny bit of integration complexity to the companies that actually require it. But this only works if the OS supports multiple users, so that the browser's cookies and storage are not shared across multiple users.
For devices that don't have multiple users, baking it in at the OS level really is the only way, but it could just as easily be solved by baking it in at the browser level and changing the OS to allow multiple users per device. Unfortunately, such technical details are way too subtle a point for most lawmakers to understand, so obviously they did it in the most wrong way possible.
This should not be acceptable. Carve-outs are always temporary. Always. Do not give them an inch.
Wait 'til they realize that Android is distributed under a license that allows people to copy, redistribute, and modify it.
As usual, a law created by people who didn't think of the consequences then got modified to fix some of the worst consequences, but because they still did not think of the consequences, the modification created different consequences. And this is why we need better lawmakers.
Also, most cell towers do have generators and/or battery backups,
I've never seen generators on cell towers, and the batteries last a few hours. They're meant to cover the occasional western world power outage, not a major one.
AT&T added that transitioning from copper will save an estimated 300 million kilowatt-hours annually
Yepp, one of the reasons being that POTS will work even during power outages, as long as the central switches are powered. Your VoIP will be down if your house has no power. It probably is more efficient, but that "saving" is also simply shifting some of the power usage to consumers.
I've seen some people who claim to know what they are talking about say that the thermal emissivity scales by the fourth power, so the hotter you let your satellite run, it scales considerably.
I'm not a physicist, but that would make sense -- the hotter you are, not only do you emit more light, you also emit a broader spectrum. If that wasn't the case, I think the sun could be infinitely hot and would only emit infrared. Or to put it another way, the more thermal energy you have in a system, the more it wants to dissipate. Ties into the second law of thermodynamics.
Maybe, but the problem is that the electronics have to run at those temperatures and not have solder joints start popping, or other fun failures.
My guess? I doubt it saw or recognized the intent of the hand gesture, but it almost certainly recognized the flashing red. I assume the "thought" process was "well, nobody else is going. We all stopped at roughly the same time. Yeehaw." but who knows. Doesn't Tesla have some sort of "playback" feature where it can show you what it saw? Or is that only a real-time view?
As far as I know, it is just real-time. And it didn't even slow down at the flashing red light. So either it recognized that someone was waving it on or it didn't see the flashing light at all.
All those datacentres around the globe powering Google, Meta, Amazon & AWS, Azure, Anthropic, OpenAI, Cloudflare; rack upon rack stuffed with servers consuming all the CPU, GPU, storage and memory the world can make... and they're (mostly) running Linux. Feels like they should be counted too.
I *think* that number actually is counting them, though it's hard to be certain. I'm pretty sure servers are outnumbered by PCs by a large margin.
If the sensor suite is capable of detecting water (which I have no idea what sensors they even have on them, nor their capabilities) I assume it's a relatively easy fix.
Cameras and LIDAR. I am not a self-driving car engineer, but from what I understand, it seems likely that it is possible to detect water with even just cameras, at least under the right circumstances, and with cameras plus LIDAR under a lot more circumstances. But doing so would require proper training data; it's not like there's a "Ooh, that's water" recognizer built into the hardware or whatever.
More to the point, they would have to train it how to recognize that some particular sensor return pattern (e.g. zero LIDAR reflections off the ground) is a problem, and do so in a way that doesn't over-correct for flooded potholes, an inch of water in the street, etc. Presumably, detecting water is the easy part; detecting the depth of water is the hard part unless you know exactly how high the curbs are.
I'm a little spooked when I see Tesla FSD beta demos where the car plows right on ahead through slightly flooded streets as though there's nothing there. It makes me wonder whether it saw it and ignored it or just didn't see it. It's the same feeling I got this morning when someone was signaling me to go ahead at a flashing red light and FSD beta (12.6.4) went right on ahead. I wonder if it somehow saw the hand gestures, or if it just didn't see the flashing red light at all.
That's what makes all this stuff fun.
Obviously that is a major failure: they are setting up geo-blocking to avoid areas where there may be flooding instead of having the AI avoid driving into a flood.
Aside from this not working because they can't geo-block areas quickly & accurately enough to avoid rapidly changing flood conditions... this shows that either their hardware is not capable of detecting flood waters on the street, or the AI can't be set to avoid it. I am betting this is a hardware issue -as in the hardware does not register the flood waters on the street. If it were a software issue, it would be a relatively easy to correct.
Any hardware or device driver engineer will tell you that every hardware problem, once shipped, is a software problem.
Nothing in self-driving cars is a quick fix other than geo-blocking something. You have to train a visual or LIDAR recognition model to recognize the problem situation and then train the path finding model to flag it as a bad path. How hard that is for this particular case, I have no idea. And there's probably other stuff beyond that; I'm not an expert in this area.
A publicly traded company whose main income is from the USA taxypayer. HINT: that is why they turned a profit last year, even though they were losing money every year before that.
Yet again US taxpayers are propping up an oligarch instead of a public entity like NASA, where money was and still is, efficiently spent.
Oligarchs started the "500 dollar hammer boondoggle" and the "pencil that could write in space" narratives to transfer public taxes to private Oligarchs. This is literally Russia.
What are you smoking? NASA efficient in what way? NASA cost plus contracts are a national disgrace on overspending and waste
Yeah, there's not enough crack in the world for that to make sense. The cost-to-orbit is well documented. Artemis 2: $4.1 billion for a launch that can lift 95 tons to LEO. SuperHeavy/Starship: $90 million for a launch that can lift 150 tons to LEO. Ignoring minor details (e.g. that nobody is willing to expend a SuperHeavy to do trans-lunar injection), the reality of the matter is that the cost per ton to orbit for NASA rockets is 72x what it is expected to cost for SpaceX rockets.
And that's consistent with Falcon Heavy costs, too, so you can't hide behind "Yeah, but SuperHeavy and Starship don't work yet", because unless your payload is huge, SpaceX is still almost two orders of magnitude cheaper.
Scalping isn't, and shouldn't be, illegal. You own the ticket, you should be able to do what you want with it, including reselling it.
And no, getting rid of scalpers wouldn't make ticket prices higher. Scalpers exist because the concert ticket prices are lower than what the market will actually bear. If a theater full of people are willing to pay 1K for a concert and they sell the ticket for 500, a scalper can make a profit via arbitrage. The only actual way to get rid of scalpers is to raise the prices to the sky (like 2-5x current prices) and slowly bring down prices over time until they're all sold. But my guess is you probably wouldn't like that any better, as the end price would likely be higher than the current scalpers price.
In addition to the correct statement from @bad-badtz-maru, SpaceX has been pretty clear that Starlink is intended to eventually become a constellation of data-centers in addition to network access points.
That never made much sense to me. The power requirements and cooling requirements for a data center in the vacuum of space would be completely infeasible.
The most any commercial satellite has ever dissipated, as far as I know, is only low-double-digit kilowatts worth of heat. Three high-end NVIDIA AI cards per satellite would basically fully max out a typical satellite's heat dissipation, without factoring in any of the heat produced from communication hardware, energy storage, solar heating, or heat dissipation from the computer that's powering those GPUs.
A large data center would likely include one or more clusters of 100,000 GPUs, not three. A typical communications satellite is on the order of 220 square meters. Do the math, and you get 7,333,260 square meters, or 7.3 square km. This translates to a radius of
If, by data center, you just mean an edge cache like Cloudflare or Akamai, then it might be slightly more feasible, but even that is pushing the limits of my suspension of disbelief.
The market is a wet dream of manufacturers, of course. Already knowing that for all the forseable future however much you can produce will be sold at very good prices - amazing.
Until the house of cards comes down. Most of the stuff ordered is, as someone put well into a meme, money that doesn't yet exist buying chips that don't yet exist for data centers that have not yet been built.
If all the world's economists were laid end to end, we wouldn't reach a conclusion. -- William Baumol
