Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26124 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
And guaranteed customers.
Intel build a cheap "CPU factory" that packages chips made by TSMC - call it encapsulation of core modules to confuse politicians.
Require that US federal funded agencies buy these "Made in America" chips for reasons of national security.
Charge twice as much for them
Profit
There are lots of power applications that need 40-130um
You used to get by by using 2 generations old CPU fab to make your switching parts, nobody is going to invest in building a new 40um fab from scratch.
I wonder if the old fabs will continue to be used or if we will get to a point where 'old' 14nm is no good for a mosfet and people need to build 'vintage' fabs ?
The launch complex is based around a specific model. If Guiana was upgraded to Ariane 6 it may not be possible to assemble and launch a 5, even if you can find one sitting around in the back of the cupboard.
The worry was that if JWST was delayed for another 5-10 years there wouldn't be an Ariane 5 for it and re-engineering for a new launch vehicle would be a massive task
When this was being planned back in the 90s the favourite design was a cheap lightweighted 6m conventional mirror, to be launched on the relatively new Ariane 5 with a bulged out fairing
Then after a change of government it had to be launched on a freedom rocket (instead of a cheese eating surrender rocket) which involved the complex folding design. This took so long and cost so much they had to find european partners who contributed the Ariane 5 launch
The concern since is whether it will be ready before Ariane 5 is retired
You'd be astonished by the number of "Space" inventions that were invented/developed for nuclear weapons, from PTFE to micro-electronics.
Instead astronomers in universities come up with proposals, university labs + JPL + Boeing/Ball/Lockheed build them.
Nasa used to be responsible for launching them.
Now they are built and launched commercially, NASA mostly adds overhead.
What NASA really wants to do is manned missions - t brings decades of funding and glory.
Hence SLS and whatever the "Put Square Jawed (but ethnically diverse) Test Pilots on the Moon Again" mission is called this budget cycle.
>JPL is NASA. What's your point again?
Actually JPL is Caltech, leased to NASA, who contract operations back to Caltech (at least when I worked there) while everyone claiming this is efficient.
NASA may have got its rocket scientists from the Third Reich but it definitely got its administration from the CCCP
But AWS etal do need the stuff the sell as a service to be open source, because they need customers to know about it.
If AWS offer todays_flavour_of_the_month.js which everybody knows because it's open source and I can hire developers for, while IBM only sells IIIAAS (Incomprehensible Internal IBM Acronym As A Service)
I don't know if you can see this in your absolute monarchy List_of_websites_blocked_in_the_United_Kingdom and Web_blocking_in_the_United_Kingdom
>There's clearly a political choice
After independence the USA turned up and said, "hello little brown people, would you like to swap your tea drinking colonial masters for some new coffee drinking colonial masters?"
Then uncle Joe turned up and said "Want to annoy the colonial oppressors, while learning how to control millions of peasants? Join our club!"
It's why the USA is such a staunch ally of Pakistan.
France as always, will sell weapons to both sides - it's why they have all those philosophers.
>...and how do they plan to get by without a fairly elaborate steerable antenna?
Short messages.
If you want to maintain an hour long video call you need either a steerable dish or a lot of satellites and a complex TDRS system.
If you want to send a few byte message giving the status of your pipeline monitor, dam level, railway track, river level etc then sending a 1ms burst when the satellite is overhead is fine.
Braking radar is a must if I ever buy a new car.
Was on a motorway and realised too late that the 3 lanes of traffic ahead were all stopped and had been stopped for long enough that nobody had brake lights on.
Nice thing about everybody over here driving automatics is that they all have to keep their foot on the brake light pedal while stopped.
> what happens when a road has edge lines at first but then stops having them?
Then it requires the driver to take over.
The system doesn't NEED white lines. We did lane following systems in the 90s just using the correlation of road shape, tire tracks, kerbs, lane edge markers etc. For well built roads with sensible curves it works well.
The Tesla system is deliberately only allowing use on roads with white lines to stop people using it in "unusual" conditions. Driving off-road, into driveways, across fields etc.
>What if the camera gets old and the edge lines are "burned" onto the camera,
This only happens if you hit 88mph, the car time travels back to 1986 and replaces all the CMOS cameras with Videcon tubes
"hey, in 1 mile I'm taking exit 98, you'll need to take over from there".
That would work, the real danger with the current systems is that they are totally automatic until they fail and then hand over to you a split second before disaster.
eg car drives into blind bend, there is a truck on the wrong side of the road 10m ahead and it says "abnormal event - reverting to manual , good luck"
IIRC there was a similar problem with autopilot on some turboprop that caused a crash. Wings iced up and autopilot silently compensated for it, right upto the point where the plane could no longer fly and the autopilot switches off and says - "so long, been nice knowing you"
>"Looked But Failed to See (LBFS)" ... up and including emergency vehicles covered with flashing lights.
We've had people that have steered in front of a 300ton bright yellow haul truck
It's deceptive how fast they are moving and how close they are sometimes
It often doesn't end well. We put high vis masts on the pickup trucks, but often that just means you know which wheel to dig them out from under.
I had one that ran into me from behind (at slow speed) while I was stopped at a light.
They lifted my back end off the ground and my plate got hooked into their bumper so I couldn't ride off.
Then just sat there looking at me through the windscreen while I tried to unhook myself.
Very different agencies. The NHTSA is in charge of highways and safety measures (speed limits, crash test standards etc) and is very slow and bureaucratic and does "dialogues-with-stackholders".
The NTSB is used to beating the heads of $bn defense companies and robber baron railroads. A much tougher bunch
I think banks come under the heading of serious disorganised crime British bank TSB says it will fix days-long transaction troubles tonight
We have worse here - it's done at the province (ie state) level - with provinces the size of european countries.
So kid snatched by divorced parent on the border of another state, where his whole family live - and they don't put announcements in that province but alert me 1000mi and 2 ferries away.
It's like a Scottish dad snatching his kid in Berwick and and they don't put out an alert in Scotland but everyones phone in Jersey rings.
