From article, (Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that if President Donald Trump follows through on pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate change agreement, he'd "have no choice" but to cut off his participation in White House business councils.
POLITICO and others have reported that Trump is expected to withdraw the U.S. from the climate agreement.
Musk has emerged as the Trump White House's go-to tech industry executive. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has taken part, for example, in the so-called "President’s Strategic and Policy Forum."
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick stepped down from that group in February after a public backlash, including from inside the technology industry. At the time, Musk decided to stay involved, saying, "I believe at this time that engaging on critical issues will on balance serve the greater good."
Musk's threatened break with Trump comes as the White House is trying to bring tech CEOs and other executives to Washington on June 19 for a day-long summit on modernizing government technology, cybersecurity, immigration and other topics.)
Me, "Elon Musk's departure as a participant in White House business Councils has nothing to do with President Trump's pulling out of the Paris Climate Treaty. Musk is just looking for a reason to leave. He thought he could influence Trump into giving SpaceX contracts that would help SpaceX build its Interplanetary spacecraft. When Pres. Trump didn't, and instead approved NASA's budget without giving anything to SpaceX, Musk probably decided it was time to leave and he wanted to do it on his terms. By saying he is going to leave if Pres. Trump pulls the U.S. out of the Paris Climate treaty, he saves face with his fan base. His fan base did not like the fact that he stayed associated with Trump's administration when Trump tried to ban Muslim people from the Middle East from coming into the U.S. Elon Musk did not want to show weakness then that the will of the people forced him to leave. But Trump pulling out of the Climate Treaty would allow him to leave on his own terms."
Elon Musk: Paris deal departure would force break with Trump
Wednesday, May 31, 2017
SpaceX May Make History Again.
From article, (SpaceX took a big step toward a fully reusable launch system earlier this year by re-flying a used Falcon 9 booster, and it is making progress toward eventually recovering the rocket's upper stage and payload fairing. Now, the company is set to try to recover another key component of its space hardware—a Dragon cargo spacecraft. The launch window for the supply mission opens on Thursday, June 1, at 5:55pm ET (10:55pm BST).
This particular Dragon spacecraft was sent to the International Space Station in September 2014, and it delivered nearly 2.5 tons of cargo to the orbiting laboratory. The Dragon returned to Earth about a month later, splashing down into the ocean. It is not clear how much processing SpaceX has had to undertake to ready the spacecraft for its second flight to the station, nor has the company released a cost estimate. It also had to manufacture a new "trunk," the unpressurized rear section of the vehicle, and solar panels.
Although the company has never placed a hard dollar value on the Dragon, the savings could be considerable. SpaceX received a contract worth $1.6 billion from NASA for 12 cargo supply missions to the station in 2008—about $130 million per flight. That would have included the cost of the booster, of course, so therefore an individual Dragon spacecraft is likely valued at between $20 million to $60 million.
No private company has ever reflown an orbital spacecraft, of course, and so SpaceX can make history on Thursday with its launch from Kennedy Space Center. If successful, it should help SpaceX transition its Dragon production line to the crew variant of the vehicle, Dragon 2. This upgraded spacecraft could begin carrying astronauts to the station as early as next year, but likely won't begin service until 2019.)
Me, "Reuse is a very important part of space travel. If done right, it can lead to cheaper access to space. If done wrong, it can cost way to much to justify continued flights.
The first steps to a flying car...
From article, (The Kitty Hawk Flyer is a sort of a flying car except it’s not a car at all – it’s much more like a flying ATV, which is probably more legitimately all-terrain than most. Linguistics aside, it’s a very cool piece of tech that’s backed by Google co-founder Larry Page, and it’s already in the ‘working prototype’ phase of development.
Watch Kitty Hawk's early test pilots learn to love the flying motorbike
Business Insider got a peek behind the curtain at what it’s like to source and train test pilots for the first Kitty Hawker Flyers that can actually fly, and Kitty Hawk provided a clip featuring interviews with some of its demonstration staff. These people were selected from a range of backgrounds for their very particular skill sets, which included not just piloting know-how, but also a general love for sports and aerial activities like paragliding.
Amazingly, though each pilot got a personalized training program to get them comfortable with the experience, the basic controls are very similar to gaming with an Xbox controller, according to the BI interview. In the video above, pilots describe a moment when it all comes together and they ‘get it’ with regards to controls, so to speak.
Kitty Hawk aims to actually ship Flyers sometime later this year, and based on the clear enthusiasm of these early testers, more than a few extreme sports enthusiasts will want to pony up for an early unit.)
Me, "The first steps to a flying car."
Another Internet Search Company another Self-Driving program. Only this time, its from a Russian Company.
From article, (Russia search and internet technology giant Yandex is showing off the self-driving vehicle prototype developed by its Yandex.Taxi on-demand ride service for the first time, and the video above is the first footage of the car in action. The prototype is meant to help Yandex test its software, which the company thinks it’s uniquely well-positioned to develop for this emerging space.
Yandex notes that it has navigation, geolocation, computer vision, and machine learning expertise from other ongoing products and services, including Yandex.Navigator and Yandex.Maps.
“We use anonymised data that we receive from Yandex.Navigator users, which allows us to understand how to drive in a city with its traffic congestion, accidents, speed limits, road closures and other traffic events,” Yandex.Taxi Head of PR Vladimir Isaev explained via email. “We have been using computer vision technologies in a number of our services for quite a while. We use them to find vacant parking spaces or read road signs, for instance, in our geolocation services.”
you may have noticed the lingering shot on that Nvidia GTX GPU in the car, as well as that Velodyne LiDAR unit up top: Yandex says it’s using its own “custom-built” hardware as well as mass market, generally available components for now, but it’s in talks with partners regarding the creation of fit-for-purpose automotive grade hardware down the road.
The vehicle in the video isn’t yet navigating real city streets, but Yandex says that testing is coming on public roads within a year, if all goes as planned. It’s too early yet for any projections regarding commercial service availability, however, Isaev tells me. Eventually, the company hopes to partner with car manufacturers and others looking to bring autonomous vehicles to market.)
Me, "Another Search and Internet company, Russian giant Yandex is getting in on Self-Driving cars. The more companies funding research into Self-Driving cars, the better off the driving public will be. If one company fails at it, there are more out there to take over."
How a new word is born...
From article, (Covfefe: sometimes it takes something special to make you step back and realize the state of the world you live in.
That’s what happened this Tuesday evening in the U.S. when President Trump gifted the internet a very unexpected present: the covfefe meme.
Within an hour of the misspelled word going out in a tweet to his 31 million followers, “covfefe” had become Twitter’s No. 1 trending hashtag worldwide. It is even trending in countries outside of the U.S.
At the time of writing, the tweet was sent one hour ago and still had not been deleted. Over that period, it racked up nearly 35,000 retweets and over 42,000 likes.
As you’d expect, Twitter users — one of the internet’s most enthusiastic meme-loving communities — seized on the error, which has become the source of much comedy.
Update: The President has now deleted the original tweet, but then made light of his error with another 140 character missive.)
Me, "It just goes to show you, if you are popular and you misspell a word or miss pronounce a word, you can create a whole new word. This has been shown time and again with different languages. Latin, Spanish, French, Italian. German, English, all share words, they are just spelled and pronounced differently. The reasoning being as people spread out around Europe their pronouncement of words kept changing and whole new languages formed. While Pres. Trump, made a mistake in typing out a word, meant to be 'coverage' and it came out Covfefe. It shows how new words are created everyday. And once you get enough people saying it, it ends up in a dictionary."
Not too Big, Not too Small.
From article, (smartphone screen size sweet-spot looks firmly settled at between 5 and 6 inches for the foreseeable future. At least until the computing paradigm shifts again — and some kind of socially acceptable wearable manages to lift everyone’s eyes off attention-sucking glass slabs with an augmented vista of the real world instead. At least that’s one theory.
it’s expecting the vast bulk of the smartphone market to become almost equally divided between devices with screens of between 5-inches and less than 5.5-inches, and those with screens of 5.5-inches and under 6-inches — expecting shipments to grow from 593.3M and 558.7M this year respectively, to 731.4M and 749.3M by 2021.
Analyst IDC put out its latest smartphone market projections yesterday, and looking ahead to 2021 it sees shipments of devices with screens of 4-inches (up to less than 5-inches) losing out to those with larger panes. It’s projecting 314.2M million devices in this iPhone SE size category will ship worldwide this year — shrinking to 223.3M by 2021.
That said, IDC isn’t expecting much market change for the very biggest smartphones (of between 6-inches to under 7-inches). It’s expecting shipments in this whopper category to be 32M this year — and to have grown only slightly to 37.4M by 2021.)
Me, "At one point the makers of cell phone were trying to make cell phones as small as possible thinking smaller was better. Now, it seems a certain cell phone size does mater. Not too big and not too small."
Smartphone screens find their size sweet spot
it’s expecting the vast bulk of the smartphone market to become almost equally divided between devices with screens of between 5-inches and less than 5.5-inches, and those with screens of 5.5-inches and under 6-inches — expecting shipments to grow from 593.3M and 558.7M this year respectively, to 731.4M and 749.3M by 2021.
Analyst IDC put out its latest smartphone market projections yesterday, and looking ahead to 2021 it sees shipments of devices with screens of 4-inches (up to less than 5-inches) losing out to those with larger panes. It’s projecting 314.2M million devices in this iPhone SE size category will ship worldwide this year — shrinking to 223.3M by 2021.
That said, IDC isn’t expecting much market change for the very biggest smartphones (of between 6-inches to under 7-inches). It’s expecting shipments in this whopper category to be 32M this year — and to have grown only slightly to 37.4M by 2021.)
Me, "At one point the makers of cell phone were trying to make cell phones as small as possible thinking smaller was better. Now, it seems a certain cell phone size does mater. Not too big and not too small."
Smartphone screens find their size sweet spot
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