It’s not as dumb as you make it out. The issue isn’t that GPS is really, really good at what it does; it’s that it’s also incredibly vulnerable to disruption and spoofing. And due to the particulars of how GPS works, we can’t entirely fix that. We can do some things to ameliorate it, but a lot of those aren’t suitable for smaller things that use GPS today.

The other thing is that GPS largely replaced a tremendous number of other navigation aides and techniques, including other radio-navigation systems like LORAN-C.

This. I think people are way, way underestimating the integration costs for all of this. It’s not as simple as “buy the pieces, plug them into each other, instant sensor system!”

Especially for riding around in a rough environment, a Pixel is sensors, communication, storage, power, all wrapped up in a reasonably robust case and featuring premade software to run the whole mess when you purchase it.

With every month that passes, I feel ever more infuriated that so many of the programs I use are essentially hard-locked to Nvidia, with frankly miserable performance on other GPUs. Not the cards’ fault, the software devs’ fault for - when they even bother at all - doing a piss-poor job of integration with other GPUs.

Yeah, I do apologize - I’m somewhat simplifying my explanation because when you start going into the full detail, it just brings up more questions.

So yes, like the other comment says, the particles are constantly bouncing into other things.

• If they’re bounded in by something - walls of a container, or even just more gas surrounding the specific sample you’re looking at - they’ll bump into that, and transfer some of their energy to that.
• If they don’t have something to bump off of and the particles are free-floating, they’ll take off in any given direction. If they only have something to bump off of in a limited number of directions, they’ll take off in the other direction. (For instance, in a rocket engine, we make a lot of molecules really, really hot and then surround them with barriers in every direction except the one we want them to zoom out in.)
• In some cases, the molecules have electromagnetic bonds with each other, which take more energy to break than the energy contained in their “bouncing around”. So they’ll stay stuck, just bouncing off each other, even in a vacuum, (Or at least, until they radiate away their heat via electromagnetic energy… another whole story.)

Yes, and no. Heat and kinetic energy are fundamentally all just energy. What we call heat is, technically, the kinetic energy of molecules vibrating around.

When exhaust gas passes through a turbocharger, it is both slowed and reduced in pressure, resulting in it coming out slightly cooler than when it entered. This device is using a different method of getting energy out of the exhaust gas, but it’s fundamentally still the kinetic energy of those very energetic exhaust gas molecules bouncing against one side of the thermoelectric generator and giving up their energy into it. I would still expect the exhaust gas to come out of it slightly cooler and slower.