Someone forgot that the automakers don't make cars (and batteries) only for Americans that live in the suburbs, each with their own house, garage and a charging outlet.

In fact, most people in Europe don't live in such conditions - and while they don't drive long distances either, they don't have where to charge every night. Most cars don't park in garages overnight but out in the street or car parks without much infrastructure.

So not having to charge at an (expensive) public charger every day or every two days and an option to make a longer trip (e.g. for vacations) is what would enable a lot of people to actually consider an EV.

Right now the not having a place to cheaply charge the vehicle and the high cost are the primary reasons for people not rushing to buy EVs.

Well, it depends.

If your daily job is mostly writing code and solving complex algorithmic problems and you don't have kids to constantly disturb you, then working from home will most likely make you a lot more productive than a busy office.

On the other hand, if your job is about sitting in meetings all day long then, of course, you can't be as productive working over Zoom and what not than meeting with people in person. Then there is also feeling of some managers that unless they can watch what their underlings are doing over their shoulder, they can't be sure they are working and not wasting their time.

The same if you have kids at home - trying to do anything, whether programming or a meeting, while being constantly pestered by one's offspring is almost impossible.

Autopilot in a Cessna is extremely primitive and can fly either a given heading, speed or maintain altitude and keep the wings level. If you have a fancy avionics pack (which isn't default!), it may be able to fly a route between pre-programmed waypoints. That's all.

It can not take off, it can not land, it is unable to handle engine controls (throttle, mixture), has no control of flaps, lights or anything else, such as keeping lookout so that you don't crash into someone else (civil aviation planes don't have radars except for weather and small planes don't even have the TCAS anticollision system that the big jets carry).

Plane autopilot is effectively something like a cruise control and lane assist for a car, not a replacement for a piece of meat with 4 hunks of meat on the controls and Mk 1 brain sitting at the top and making decisions.

>You don't think there is an A&P involved in putting this thing into a cockpit, including the 337 for the modification?

The robot may be able to use an autopilot but for it to be certified by FAA it had to demonstrate that it can actually fly the plane, not just push buttons on the autopilot panel. Furthermore, as said before, the autopilot in these planes is unable to take off or land the plane anyway so it would be of little use.

So no, I don't think that there is an autopilot involved. If you look carefully at the pictures of the robot installed in that Cessna 206, it has only a very basic set of instruments + radios and I don't believe it even has any autopilot installed. Autopilot on these planes, especially old ones like this one, is an expensive extra which most people who don't fly IFR don't have.

You can't fit a "fly-by-wire" box into a plane that is flown using cables and pulleys, like those Cessna's that this robot is meant to fly.

And even for a fly-by-wire planes adding a "box" would be extremely expensive due to the required certification and the mandatory installation by a certified company/mechanic. A robot that doesn't touch anything of the plane's equipment likely won't need that and will be installable "in the field".

I.e. you have completely missed the point why this type of robot exists and what its role is - to quickly convert a small plane to an UAV, e.g. for a dangerous mission and then convert it back again.

Someone has automated the universally hated and idiotic stack ranking system. Someone's always getting fired/"retrained", no matter of the actual performance.

I guess they don't realize what this will do for the morale of the workers. Or, more likely, they do but they don't care, because the warehouse workers are effectively disposable due to the low/no qualification requirements.

And it is also telling that Amazon is using these practices only in the US - if they tried this here in their French warehouses, they would have been marched to court already.

Why? Because spying/collecting data is the primary raison-d'etre for many of these devices. The companies aren't charity, running of those services that power e.g. the smart speakers, smart tvs or webcams or what not costs something. And that isn't covered by the one-off purchase cost of the hardware (where the margins are pretty slim anyway) but by selling your data.

If you don't want to be spied on, then don't buy these products. It is that simple. Unless forced by law these companies aren't going to voluntarily cripple their revenue sources.

VPN where you don't control both endpoints is not a VPN, by definition.

What these companies are offering are only glorified traffic tunneling services and proxies, not a true private network. Good for bypassing region restrictions on stuff like Netflix but not for anything where privacy is actually required.

FYI, this is the same company that took the 3rd most popular add-on for SublimeText and silenty added ads and spyware (err, telemetry) to it.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fqz.com%2F1043614%2Fthis-st...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fforum.sublimetext.com%2F...

Sounds like someone who you want to trust with your company's source code, indeed.

Guys, before you go crazy fixing your CVs, do make sure you look at what permissions the app wants.

You need to register either by your Github - or your LinkedIn account. And it wants access to your private data, like e-mails, contacts, etc. Oh and it has your entire CV to boot - all that for a rather dubious benefit that any HR agency will do for you for free.

Don't be the product here.

That only means that the product actually somewhat works and is not only a load of marketing hype. That is not really any endorsement and a pretty damning remark, in fact.

Also, Magic Leap is hardly a competitor of Oculus - they are not even in the same market. AR *does not* compete with or replace VR, they serve totally different purposes and applications (and also the price bracket is completely elsewhere).

Oculus doesn't have anything AR related in their portfolio, AFAIK.

That's not a quite good analogy.

Here we are talking about replacing a proven (albeit expensive) method with a cheap computer on board of the rocket.

Those computers have always been there in the past, the range safety explosives (and any eventual rescue systems in the case of manned flights - e.g. the Apollo/Soyuz escape towers) could have been either triggered automatically when the electronics detected an anomalous deviation from the pre-programmed path OR remotely by a human from the ground should something have gone so wrong that the computer didn't (or couldn't - e.g. the Challenger explosion where the errant boosters were destroyed from the ground after the fuel tank explosion destroyed the orbiter) handle it.

The system was designed with redundancy in mind. Now we are cutting one side of that redundancy to save costs. If you work in safety systems, you certainly know that there are plenty of examples from the past where such simplification and cost savings have costed lives - e.g. the infamous Therac 25 (hw interlocks replaced with software - several people dead from radiation overdoses and many more injured), original DC 10 cargo door design where the elements indicating whether the door was safe or not were changed to show only whether it was "supposed" to be safe and not an actual position of the interlocking (door blew out at altitude, causing an airplane crash that killed 300+ people), plenty of railway accidents have been caused by a loss of redundancy in the signalling systems over the years, etc.

It doesn't take that much imagination to envision a situation where e.g. an unfortunate lightning strike knocks the computers irrecoverably offline (freak accidents that shouldn't happen but they do - e.g Apollo 12 where they got uber lucky). And now you can only watch as those 500 tons of steel and explosive fuel are going to uncontrollably land somewhere, with no way to do anything about it.

Could the current method be made less expensive? Most likely, the airforce (or military in general) are rarely concerned with doing things in a cost effective way. But taking the human out of the loop completely? That doesn't sound like such a smart idea. His role is not to be reliable (that's the computer's job) but to guard against the unexpected.

Actually the Windows Firewall has a similar problem too.

You launch an application, it starts executing and communicating over the network - while the firewall pop-up asking the user for permission to access network is up. However, the application is communicating already!

This is easily visible with Wireshark, for example.

It boggles the mind why Microsoft thought that this is actually an useful feature ...

Sadly, this is completely wrong.

There may not be a lot of retail market where margins are thin and development costs are exorbitant, but industrial market for VR is booming. We are literally turning down projects, because we have enough work.

Oculus' mistake is in focusing purely on the consumer retail - where $800 + $2000 for a PC is a tough sell, no matter what they do. For an industrial client used to pay $20-40k for an HMD *without* tracking it is an absolute steal, allowing a company to equip their worker training center for peanuts.

Valve & HTC understood this and are developing special business-oriented offers.

And I am not speaking about high end stuff like flight simulators or military (those rarely use HMDs anyway). I am speaking about blue collar workers training to operate machinery making car tires, making engine blocks or windshields - all for household brand companies I cannot name, unfortunately.

Or psychologists treating various phobias and anxieties. And those were examples only from a few of our recent projects.

Actually, even 3D TVs are useful for this - if we could actually find one that is actually sold with the glasses! Most stores don't stock and don't order them anymore, so we have to work with projectors instead.

You mean someone actually buys a *laptop* that is locked to only Windows Store?

What would be the point of doing that? If I buy a Windows laptop, I want to be able to run my own applications, not only what is in the Store (which isn't a lot).

This is not a laptop but a locked down disposable tablet with a keyboard (even the battery isn't replaceable - talk about planned obsolescence!)

Hmm, they could have used inductive sensing/power as Wacom does since eons ago and completely eliminated the need for a battery or even a separate radio in that mouse (the Wacom ones communicate using the same signal that keeps them powered). The mouse would have been lighter too - some Logitech wireless mice are literally bricks with significant momentum due to their weight, making them very tiresome to use over longer periods.

Of course, you can't use the Wacom mouse outside of the tablet surface but I guess that is a moot point here - the Logitech charging pad is meant to be the mousepad too.

Right now Logitech has managed to replace one annoyance (running out of battery) in a wireless mouse with an even larger one - proprietary charger that takes up a ton of space on your desk. Oh and it costs $150 - for a mouse!