The description of an unexpected/(impossible) orientation for an on road obstacle works as an excuse, right up to the point where you realize that the software should, explicitly, not run into anything at all. That’s got to be, like, the first law of (robotic) vehicle piloting.

It was just lucky that it happened twice as, otherwise, Alphabet likely would have shrugged it off as some unimportant, random event.

Prime used to mean something. Guaranteed 2 day shipping with no minimum for no extra charge. $5 for next day shipping. Then next day disappeared. Then the 2 day guarantee disappeared. Then delivery times were in the 3-5 day range for most things. Then, in my university town, around the time of students returning to school for terms it would be 1-2 weeks. I’m not paying an ever increasing annual fee for that.

In traffic, the largest reduction of efficiency comes from accelerating and the braking. You use energy to start moving (proportional to m V^2) and then you dump that energy into heat in your brakes to stop. The second comes from idling where you use energy to keep the engine rotating. As others have mentioned, EVs use regenerative braking so a substantial portion of the energy used to slow and stop the car is used to recharge the battery. EVs have no need to keep an engine running so unless you’re running the a/c there are minimal demands on a stopped/idling EV.

On the highway, you have the internal friction in the drivetrain to overcome, the constant deformation of the tires, and - most importantly - wind resistance, which is proportional to cd x rho x V2.

Cd (drag) and rho (air density) are low, but that V (speed) squared means driving at 75mph incurs 25x the energy use as driving at 15 mph. An EV gets no sage harbor here - plowing through a fluid (air) is essentially the same work.

To give you a sense of numbers, my vehicle (F150) gets less than 10mpg the 5 miles to my local pool/gym. The speed limit is 25 mph but there are stop signs every block or two. Lots of braking loss. On back roads with gentle curves and a 45 mph limit I get close to 30 mpg. That’s the sweet spot between overcoming transmission friction and air resistance. On the highway at 60 mph I get 22-23 mpg. At 78-79 mph I get 19 mpg. These are all generally on flat stretches using the 6 min average on my dashboard.

(Sorry for the long post…I’m an engineer and mechanical efficiency and aerodynamics are my happy place)

Which is why the Moderna vaccine will be priced at just 95% of the cost of the repeat treatments and hospitalization plus the value of the time saved and pain and suffering avoidance by the patient. Say, an extra half a million. I mean, what price would you put on avoiding seeing your parent or child subjected to round after round of chemotherapy?

The only way you die on that hill is from crushing as we are all crowded on there with you.

Hell, I picked up the book last year and had forgotten that Marley was a single (former) partner, not two brothers.

No, no - they're not raising the price; they're rebalancing it to reflect the value it delivers!!1!

And since they've reduced the free version functionality significantly, I believe I'm due a substantial rebate.

One reviewer mentioned disappointment that it's still a full 11.7" long and 2" thick. I realize that some people are not built for that kind of size, but I enjoy the heft and find the ergonomics of the original pleasing. I find that it stands out among smaller equipment and any substantial reduction would limit the versatility and, quite frankly, my overall enjoyment.

Clarance Thomas: “Am I a joke to you?”

Good Lord - $2600 for a whole house system? I think that's what my local (mid-Atlantic US) HVAC shop is getting for a single-room mini-split.

Wait until people find out about ground-source heat pumps and water heater heat pumps. What you get out of those is more consistent year round, too. It's almost like leveraging technology has benefits over just burning carbon and hydrogen to make heat.

The Administration knows there is no solution to this conflict. It also knows there is no state-side position which is politically expedient.

I’m going to say this as loud as I can. There will be no winners in this conflict. Ever. For anyone, involved or on the sidelines.

This memo is confirmation that the US administration knows there is no solution and doesn’t want anyone to say anything because no matter what they say it will make things worse. This is a tacit admission that there is nothing anyone outside can do. It’s like trying to extinguish a lithium battery fire - the stored energy will continue to be exothermic until it’s expended and any attempt to tamp it down is likely to make things worse.

It’s a shitty position were in, but this isn’t some Hollywood script where you can just write a happy ending. There is no happy ending.

Well, that and every time you touch a DOC/DOCX file it reformats itself to your local settings, fucking up the entire layout. PDF is a terrible, inefficient, poorly (or at least variably) implemented format which was proprietary for two decades but is now about the best option we have for a document to look the same at the recipient end as the sender and still include text, vector, bitmapped, semi-interactive, and certifiable/traceable contents.

What OP didn't tell you is that, due to its age, it's running on an unpatched WinXP SP2 install and patching, upgrading to SP3, or to any newer Windows OS will break the software calls that version of Pascal relies upon.