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melkiaur

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No effort to make other chips perform [...] worse is expended.

I don't know about nowadays, but it used to be that the intel libs and compiler would specifically disable SIMD instructions if they found that the CPUid returned a non-"Genuine Intel" string. Doing nothing - and just relying on the CPU feature flags - would have been more fair.

What exactly is the human bringing to the table?

He can see the big truck 200 yards in front of him, and recognize that it is indeed a truck, and not an overhead traffic sign. Apparently, Teslas don't bring that to the table.

Alternatively, the human could recognize that the truck is on fire and smoking, and that it would be a good idea to stay away from it.

You missed the part about the trusses in the bell tower that didn't burn. If they burnt and the bells fell (13 tons for the biggest one!), then the whole building would have collapsed.

They had guys in the tower, protecting that.

Apparently, a significant difference between American and French firefighters is that the latter prefer to fight the fire from the inside (e.g.: avoid the heat and steam to accumulate inside).

Apart from the video aspect, wouldn't the Colossus' water stream help them achieve that: creating a path for them to intervene and potentially escape ?

I disagree strongly. It looks obvious to me that they can be equal and that this is a special case. The comparison is done only after checking for A<B, and only if a boolean called "ActiveIfEqual" is true. I mean, I don't know how much more obvious they could have made it.

It could be solved, but is it really ?

Shall I remind you of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_horse_meat_scandal#UK_Inv...

The blockchain doesn't offer a technological solution that couldn't be done with a centralized authority (I particularly like the way passports rfid reading involves certificates signed by each country). But it offers means to achieve that even if nobody safe enough wants to host the bloody service.

No, I think you "only" need to trust the veterinary, and make sure that all animals are tracked (which is the case in Europe, which is why the Lasagna scandal came to be a scandal). Both things are already true here.

The anti-double-spend features of blockchains is what matters after that: your cow cannot be sent to slaughterhouse 1 and 2 at the same time. Slaugher house cannot ship it to butcher A and butcher B. And it's fairly easy to check that the butcher doesn't sell it twice.

Though as I said in another comment, this can all be solved very easily if you give the DB hosting to the veterinary authorities, and very likely to be much cheaper too.

There's one I like: the farmer has a veal and introduces its date of birth on the blockchain.

The veterinary that comes to check it posts a validation mark on the blockchain. If you trust the veterinary, you should trust the birthdate.

The veal grows up to become a cow, and is sent for slaughter. The farmer stores an event on the blockchain and sends it to be cut into meat.

The slaughterhouse stores an event (with the weight) on the blockchain and sends it for distribution.

The butcher creates the packets of meat, with a QR-code which lets you check the whole list of events, with their dates and places, and of course, you can check that the same part of beef doesn't end up in two different shops. You have complete traceability of your meat despite all the actors not knowing each-others.

I hate the blockchain hype. I think most uses can be solved by a simple database hosted by a trusted authority. Yet, just reading the first two samples, I already disagree with them.

Re the 1st one: it's true only if the transporter doesn't risk anything if the sensor is tampered with. As soon as you introduce strong fines and/or consequences if a validating authority randomly checks your goods and discover some tampering, the system is a bit more likely to be trusted. But of course, in such a case, you might as well just host the temperature log with the validating authority (like it's done for Concrete, or in the Auto industry).

The second one is even more compelling: of course the trust chain stops when the trust chains stops ! But if every luxury Louis Vuitton handbag is tracked and you know precisely whether it's been sold or whether it's supposed to be sitting on a shop shelf somewhere, you have zero risk of double sell (or at least, within the same limits as a bitcoin double-spend).

We had a big teletext offering in France too at some point. Minitel is not it. Minitel was a modem+terminal in your house. So, it was bidirectional, secure, and had incorporated billing. You were able to do all kinds of things with it: enter chatrooms, order stuff (like train tickets), register/check the results for some exams, etc.

I've only been once in Washington, and it was ages ago. But they have this incredible system where they put you in a massive bus (At first I didn't even realise it was a bus, it looked more like a room), and the bus goes to the plane, lifts ups, and docks to the plane door. So, it's very important they can cram the people in the bus as fast as possible. Do a google image search for "Dulles buses", you'll understand what I'm on about.

But this benefit (of accelerated boarding) would apply to any airport where you don't go into a jet bridge but have to take the bus to go to the plane.

In France, Polytechnique is probably the most sought after. There's an oral exam to get in, and guess what ? Only 25% of student from Paris are eliminated, versus 40% of kids from la province.

7% of girls are eliminated in the Computer Science branch (MP-Info), versus 27% of boys.

More info, in french: https://www.lemonde.fr/campus/article/2014/11/25/l-ecole-pol...

And besides, the real filtering is actually done after the Baccalauréat: not everyone gets to be admitted to the big Parisian Lycées (Henry-IV, Louis-Le-Grand, etc.).

My guess is that Uber simply wants to maintain some hope of future growth, particularly with their autonomous car program in shambles.

They also benefit from future free advertising. Everytime you'll see a bit of news talking about autonomous drones, flying taxis, or the like, you can bet that the writer will mention Uber, thus giving them free Brand recognition. The same happened with Amazon's delivery drones, or Uber self driving cabs.

Ok, let's use normal right-sided driving method. Imagine you're vulnerable (on a bike, or worse: on an electric scooter), and you want to turn left. You were going northbound and want to go westbound.

In "normal" fashion, you'd have to stay on the left of your lane, and wait for the traffic coming in front of you to die down before you can cross. That puts you straight in the middle of the intersection for some time, which is dangerous.

With a hook turn, you go and wait along with the traffic coming from the east to the west. They are stopped, so they are not a danger to you. When the east-west traffic light finally turns green, you won't be crossing anyone's traffic, and you'll be already standing on the rightmost part of your new road.

I understand perfectly well how my car works. I know I could change the oil if I wanted to, yet I also know that I have never and will never do so, because it's messy, time-consuming the first couple of times, and you still have to dispose of the old oil anyway.

That mindset, my mindset, is completely alien to people of my parents generation. I think it's the same thing for hobby programming in my generation.

it does take about 30 seconds

As long as there's nobody in the queue, and the "scannette" (yes, that's how they're called) still has enough battery, and you haven't tried to buy razor-blades which require a manual action from an attendant to remove the theft-protection device, and the granny in front of you isn't trying to pay with coins.

I can't speak about other European countries, but in France, an employment contract gives you an insane amount of security. If you're made redundant, you get paid 60-70% of your salary for up to 2 years, you get loads of paid maternity leave. You get a nice state-funded pension. You get free healthcare (including dental and glasses). You get 100% sick-leave coverage. You get mandatory training. You get access to job promotions inside companies. It's much easier to get a mortgage or just to rent. And you don't have to also work on finding the contracts. So, you need to more than double your salary to get the equivalent billable rate, and that's assuming you never have issues finding work to do.