> which can pose a significant (and growing, as standards improve) obstacle for older cars.
At least for my state, the emissions test a car has to pass is whatever it was supposed to have passed when it was fresh off the assembly line. So older cars do not have to pass stricter newer standards that newer cars have to pass.
Now, granted, wear and tear will eventually result in an older car not passing its original standard, but at least the standard it has to pass is fixed, rather than a moving target.
This is because all lenders require title insurance as a requirement for receiving the loan monies. So for almost all buyers they have no choice, their bank/credit union that is actually putting up most of the money forces it upon them.
> so I didn't understand why automakers kept shoving them in.
The article explained why. Since 2018 in the US, due to the proliferation of giant trucks being used as passenger vehicles (SUV's) backup cameras have been mandatory safety equipment. A backup camera requires a screen. So the automakers have to install a screen in the dashboard.
It is only a few dollars more to install a "touch screen" vs. a "basic display screen", and with the addition of those few dollars to the screen, that touch screen can now replace hundreds of dollars of physical buttons and their necessary wiring.
Net result, the BOM cost of the car drops by several hundred dollars, and the cost to assemble drops by some measurable amount as well.
So they why is: "because they save the automakers BOM and assembly costs".
In that case, when you have personal knowledge of the facts, or know the specific domain area, you can see where the reporter mixed things up.
AI is no different, it's just a bunch of matrix math substituting for "the reporter" regurgitating what it was previously told. So the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect would apply just the same. If you have domain knowledge, you immediately see where the AI got it wrong. When you do not have domain knowledge, you have less chance of seeing where the AI was wrong.
> very low density (relatively speaking to today) make them more robust against gamma-rays and other radiation problems once outside the atmosphere?
Yes. Large size transistors (and other IC components) are less impacted by the radiation problems that exist outside the relative security of the atmosphere. Most radiation hardened IC circuity is many process sizes larger than whatever the current state of the art tiny process sizes happen to be at any given time.
But note I said "less impacted". Given sufficient radiation, things will have issues, which is why items like the Shuttle carried the redundant computers, to cover for the possible lucky-strike impacts.
Indeed. If $job is not willing to buy and hand me a "work phone" then they are out of luck, nothing for $job gets put onto my private phone. If they think they need this ability, then they also need to add a line item to their budgets for the cost of the phone and the service. And when faced with this alternative, they have not, so far, decided they want to pay for a phone.
The article implied (but did not seem to ever state) that they simply added liquid cooled cold plates to all the other components that were previously air cooled.
But it did not sound like they were describing a Cray 2 style liquid immersion cooling system.
It does not reach headline news because everyone just accepts that the "filter" is imperfect.
But, for some reason, little twelve year old Jimmy obtaining access to porn evokes some kind of far more visceral reaction in Jimmy's parents (or if not Jimmy's parents, some "busybody" who wants to "protect all the children") than Jimmy managing to get himself a pack of Salem's or a Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboy.
> so most people can just charge their EV in their driveway every night.
That does presume that those "most people" have a driveway where they can do charging. I.e., all apartment dwellers with cars in parking lots/garages (excluding those few that may have installed electrical plugs at each parking spot) are cut off, as are city dwellers without driveways who park on the street (or in another garage, again without electric hookups for charging).
Yes, eventually those garages and parking lots will likely include some form of "car charging" infrastructure, but until that happens, "most" is not as big of a percentage as that word makes it appear.
> This completely ignores the situation on the ground when C was developed.
A great many of those replying are many years short of having experienced anything like "the situation on the ground when C was developed". They simply have never known a day without hundreds of gigabytes or more of disk storage and 8G or more of RAM available for user processes after the OS consumes what it needs for its own work. They are "ignoring" because they simply have no basis for understanding.
Yes, a failure of both the journalist and the editor.
Sadly, this kind of failure is all too common. I encounter articles that often omit a photo of the "thing" the article is describing. This (no photo) might have made some sense fifty years ago in the heyday of paper print where including a photo was much more work. But today, for HTML publishing, it is just an indication of failure on the part of the publisher.
> I've yet to read a good explanation of why the telcos permit ...
They (the telcos) are paid for every message they deliver. So absent regulation forcing them to do otherwise, it is in their best interest (additional profit) to pass through every message with no filtering of any form.
And, if the regulators had any technical knowledge at all, they would recognize that the billing system is the key to stopping the robo texts. Every text can be traced back to its origin through the billing system (because that's how the telco's collect their fees, so of course they know who to collect from for which messages they forwarded). So the regulators just need to force open the billing systems and trace the money back to the illicit senders, and then they know who to cut off (or to fine out of existence).
> a surprising number of robot calls match my own exchange number (why? what's the point?).
The robocallers have found that if the fake caller id given matches the area code and exchange of the number being called, that more of the recipients are willing to answer.
And from a robocaller's perspective, getting folks to answer is critical to being able to transfer them to someone in the scam boiler room for reaping.
At least for my state, the emissions test a car has to pass is whatever it was supposed to have passed when it was fresh off the assembly line. So older cars do not have to pass stricter newer standards that newer cars have to pass.
Now, granted, wear and tear will eventually result in an older car not passing its original standard, but at least the standard it has to pass is fixed, rather than a moving target.