Depends on the size of the plane. For bigger jets, yes, but for smaller planes the width of runway you need to do a u-turn is about the same as the width you need to safely land of a gust pushes the plane a bit sideways.

Usually you do a 180 rather than reversing blind.

“Lossless” isn’t the term you want; that refers to not lossily compressing the main data. Lossless compression or storage of media is very rare outside of text and sometimes audio, because it ends up so large.

You want to preserve metadata. That applies regardless of how lossy the data compression is.

If we knew what city/route/service and day, we might be able to get a better idea.

• Sometimes operators declare a ‘fare holiday’ when everyone rides free, usually as compensation for some major fuckup previously, or for some other PR stunt. Metlink in Wellington doesn’t charge on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, or New Year’s Eve.

• Operators sometimes half-strike and refuse to collect fares.

• The specific route, service, or time of day might be free.

• It’s an express service that you can’t pay cash on (only fare cards) and it’s easier/nicer to tell you to ride for free than to tell you to get the next bus because they don’t take cash.

• You might be part of some group (youth, students, elderly) that doesn’t have to pay.

• Something is broken and they can’t collect fares.

• They don’t want to deal with the big banknote you had.

Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families’ reliability isn’t worth it if you’re dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.

Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.

Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.

Under US$15/TB is typically a ‘good’ price.

For media serving and deep storage, HDDs are still fine and cheap. For general file storage, consider SSDs to improve IOPS.

You’re better off putting the panel somewhere where it always gets sun, and isn’t extra weight you have to haul around.

Leafs have battery packs with no active heating or cooling, which significantly impacts their performance in bad weather and when fast charging. Coupled with very small packs in the early models, and you have a recipe for a bad experience.

Bear in mind also that the extra weight and possibly aerodynamic compromises actually reduce range. In some cases, particularly at night, in poor weather, and at high speed, the panels would be a net negative.

They would only be useful if your car sat around in the sun for long periods without access to a charger.

HDMI and DP do not carry their signals in the same way. HDMI/DVI use a pixel clock and one wire pair per colour, whereas DP is packet-based.

“DisplayPort++” is the branding for a DP port that can pretend to be an HDMI or DVI port, so an adapter or cable can convert between the two just by rearranging the pins.

To go from pure DisplayPort to HDMI, or to go from an HDMI source to a DP monitor, you need an ‘active’ adapter, which decodes and re-encodes the signal. These are bigger and sometimes require external power.

I’ve certainly never heard of a chicken ranch, but plenty of chicken farms.

Indeed, the US has a major lack of fixed-line competition and lack of regulation. Starlink doesn’t really help with that, at least in urban areas.

I’m not familiar with the wireless situation. You’re saying that there are significant coverage discrepancies to the point where many if not most consumers are choosing a carrier based on coverage, not pricing/plans? There’s always areas with unequal coverage but I didn’t think they were that common.

Here in NZ, the state funding for very rural 4G broadband (Rural Broadband Initiative 2 / RBI-2) went to the Rural Connectivity Group, setting up sites used and owned equally by all three providers, to reduce costs where capacity isn’t the constraint.

Starlink plugs the rural coverage gaps, but in urban areas it’s still more expensive than either conventional fixed-line connections or wireless (4G/5G) broadband. Even in rural areas, while it’s the best option, it’s rarely the cheapest, at least in the NZ market I’m familiar with.

It also doesn’t have the bandwidth per square kilometre/mile to serve urban areas well, and it’s probably never going to work in apartment buildings.

This is a funding/subsidisation issue, not so much a technical one. I imagine Starlink connections are eligible for the current subsidy, but in most cases it’s probably going to conventional DSL/cable/fibre/4G connections.

Aggregate bandwidth now rivals or slightly exceeds gigabit wired connections.

Where that aggregate bandwidth is shared amongst large numbers of users, bandwidth per user can suffer dramatically.

Low density areas may be fine, but cube farms are an issue especially when staff are doing data intensive or latency sensitive tasks.

If you’re giving employees docking stations for their laptops, running ethernet to those docking stations is a no-brainer.

Moving most of the traffic to wired connections frees up spectrum/bandwidth for situations that do need to be wireless.

Secondhand stuff can be really cheap if you know where to look, but the drawbacks are usually power and noise.

Yeah, you can’t really say “we started the engines but #2 wouldn’t start, so we’re continuing to the destination on one engine”. Delaying/cancelling the flight due to a safety/maintenance issue is perfectly legitimate.

The issue is that after that, a) passengers are entitled to compensation depending on the delay, and b) you need to provide food/water/aircon or take the passengers back to the terminal.

It can also include situations where the worker isn’t paid what was agreed.

For example, if you were going to have a 10% commission but the employer lowers this to 2% or nothing, or where a $30/hour rate magically becomes $15/hour after hiring.

They might legally be able to cut your pay by giving notice - this will depend on the jurisdiction. In other regimes, they essentially have to go through the full legal process to fire you.

I think you mean Alaska.

The passenger volume, cost, and build-it-today claims are I think in line with theirs. The only outlier is the energy claim, which is so absurdly false that it falls into puffery (think ‘red bull gives you wings’) and is again believable.

It’s clear HSR costs, and infrastructure in general, are getting out of control in the English-speaking world. It’s not clear how to fix this, but moving from proven and understood technology to Muppet technology doesn’t seem to be a good option.

:(

Not sure if sarcastic…

Yeah, NZ & Aus both have a ‘standard drinks’ system.

My guess is that larger quantities of alcohol (particularly bottles of spirits but also wine) simply aren’t intended to be drunk by one person in one sitting. Total volume of alcohol isn’t that useful; it’s more useful to be able to work out how much is in one shot or one glass.

This is especially important when you look at the same product being sold by the shot/bottle/cask/barrel, or being able to buy a gallon of it in your own container historically.