I'm reasonably sure, yes. Air is a good insulator. Empty space between components, therefore, reduces thermal transmission between components. The best way to keep CPU heat away from the battery is to leave more space between the battery and hot components. You have two choices for doing that: make the phone bigger or make it thicker. But making it bigger means a bigger screen, which means more power consumption all around, which means more heat. Making it thicker doesn't have that problem. I suppose it does make the battery have less surface area per unit volume, which might require decreasing the charge speed to keep that from overheating the battery, but then again, you have the option of making the battery have significantly more capacity, which would mean being able to leave larger margins at the top and bottom, fewer charge cycles, shallower discharge, etc., all of which I would expect to reduce the battery's self-heating.
because for a given volume the surface area increases if you decrease one dimension
Yes, but heat sinking isn't purely about surface area. It's also about the mass of the heat sink itself. The less material you have to sink the heat, the less heat you can sink into it, which means that heat has to go somewhere. Some of it goes into the battery. A thicker, heavier case, then, could sink more heat, averaging out the amount of heat that reaches the battery and thus reducing the temperature spikes that can cause so much damage to batteries.
Also, larger cases could allow them to consider alternative chemistries with lower densities that are less temperature sensitive (e.g. Lithium-Iron Phosphate), not to mention less likely to catch fire.
Faking a production detail. That's pretty fucking minor. When they are wrong on news, they retract it publically and apologize.
When they are caught being wrong on news. Ask yourself how often they aren't caught.
I take everything I read on CNN's website with a grain of salt. Their articles are often riddled with minor factual errors, typographical errors, grammatical errors, and other problems that make me want to put my communications double major hat on, climb through the screen, and smack them upside the head with a clue bat. And they've not only taken down the comments sections, but also have made it nearly impossible to send them feedback, so these errors rarely (if ever) get corrected. And if I'm noticing those sorts of problems at a casual glance, with almost no knowledge of the subjects in question, it makes me suspicious that someone more familiar with the subjects might find much more serious problems with their articles—the way I do every time I read almost any article about technology, for example.
Every time you read an article about technology and think to yourself, "This is full of crap. It doesn't work that way," you should also be thinking to yourself, "Are all the news articles out there really just as bad?" and be afraid. Be very afraid.
This is not to say that I consider any of it "fake news" or such B.S.; I merely think that journalistic standards have fallen to an all-time low, and the entire industry needs to up its game.
Compared to the early 60s, we have QUADRUPLED per pupil spending. Are we getting four times the results?
Our schools actually are chronically underfunded, because the actual cost of materials and facilities has skyrocketed. The cost of textbooks is way more than 4x what it was in the 1960s. It's probably closer to 20x. And in the 1960s, we didn't need computers for students, nor network infrastructure. You can't compare education now to the 1960s by just comparing dollars, because if you educated someone today in the way that you educated kids in the 1960s, they would not be hirable. Too much has changed in those fifty years, and jobs that pay well tend to also require skills that do, in fact, cost way more to teach.
Also, infrastructure costs can be significant in some districts. If buildings don't get torn down and rebuilt often enough, the repair costs creep up and up, until suddenly you're using your entire facilities budget just to keep the roof from leaking. And during this time, efficiency standards have improved, everybody else is using less power and gas, and you've slowly become one of the outliers in that "top usage" bracket that get hit with the highest utility rates.
That said, one big cost that can be improved upon is administrative bloat. The districts with the worst test scores are typically the ones that have the highest administrative overhead, i.e. above a certain threshold, the administrator-to-student ratio is negatively correlated with graduation rates. That overhead generally reduces the quality of instruction by reducing the number of teachers you can hire, thus increasing classroom size and reducing the ability to give special attention to kids who actually need it. Now to be fair, sometimes that administrative cost is in part because of external factors (such as having to hire extra security people because of gun problems), so you can't necessarily say that there's causation there, but it seems pretty likely, IMO.
Either way, the ratio of teachers to students is strongly correlated with graduation rates. It stands to reason that once the non-teacher staff size increases past a baseline level, every additional administrator, counselor, or other staff person who isn't part of the teaching process is effectively reducing the number of teachers you can hire, which means increased class sizes. Because larger class sizes are correlated strongly with a lower graduation rate (independent of other factors), it seems very likely that excess staff and administration, then, would be a major contributing factor to reduced quality of education in some school districts.
Now obviously there's also a bottom threshold below which things stop working. You have to provide lunch. You have to have enough counselors to meet certain needs (though teachers can and should be encouraged to do some of that, too). You have to have someone to maintain the library. You have to have a functioning network (though multiple small schools sharing an IT admin is not necessarily impossible if you don't cut corners on the equipment). And so on. So it isn't negatively correlated at first, but becomes negatively correlated as the non-teacher-to-student ratios get too big.
Conclusion: The actual facts show that you're full of shit.
Statistically, as of just a couple of years ago, federal government employees were only somewhere in the neighborhood of 44% Democrat, about 40% Republican, and the rest independent. (Source: Government Executive) And in the FBI, I'm pretty sure the percentage of Democrats is significantly lower than average. So what this tells is us not that most people in government are Democrats (far from it), but rather that Republicans within our federal government found Trump so absolutely terrifying that they either did not contribute money or actively contributed to the opposing party rather than support him.
That decision had nothing to do with their political affiliation, but rather their recognition of risk. Workers in those parts of our government have seen Trump's brand of political rhetoric coming from the lips of far too many dictators and autocrats over the years, some of whom have been quite brutal. When they hear it coming from the mouth of someone running for President, they get scared sh*tless, and rightly so. Words have power, and when a president (or candidate) uses words like "treason", attacks the free press, attacks the independent judiciary, attacks the independence of Congress, etc., he is basically swinging a wrecking ball at the very foundations of our democracy. These are the actions of an autocrat—of a despot—and the ability of our country to survive with such a person as its president is the true test of our constitutional democratic system. And most people in the government were hoping that they wouldn't have to see if it can survive that test.
Of course, the SRBs also weren't really all that complex, consisting of little more than a tube with a nozzle on one end, and a parachute deployment system under a disposable nose cone on the other. So I guess in that way, it was kind of like scrap metal recovery in that there wasn't much else to recover but the metal tube.
... if you drove your Tesla down to 0% and cycled it to 100% every day (or even multiple times per day) it wouldnt last any longer than your phone.
But cell phones leave some charge in the bottom as a cushion, just like you do with your car, and typically after you charge them fully, they start using power immediately and draining the batteries, so you aren't leaving them completely full, either. So really, the usage pattern is not that different from your car; it is just accelerated by maybe a factor of 3 or 4. If Tesla batteries typically lost 20% of their capacity in 6 years, Tesla owners would likely be burning down the headquarters.
IMO, the main reason that the iPhone has such poor battery health is the same reason as all the other problems with the iPhone: It is too d**n thin. The thinner a device, the harder it is to dissipate heat, and the harder it is to get the battery far enough away from the main sources of heat to avoid it being negatively impacted by them.
This problem is further compounded by people wrapping the devices in cases because they find razor-thin cell phones too hard to grip. Suddenly, the heat is even more intense, because it is even more completely contained within the device.
For this reason, the harder you use a cell phone or other mobile device (even if you're on AC power most of the time and rarely discharge the battery much at all), the fewer years your battery will last.
And of course, the thinness also limits the capacity of the battery, which means folks run down the batteries to much closer to empty than they otherwise might, which almost certainly doesn't help. But I digress.
Re 'which means the manufacturer could easily bump up the RAM by 10-20% to support the crypto hardware"
In a weather sealed, small camera that needs 4K movies and a lot of other new useful features and has to support more and more images, have more resolution, capture more data per image?
The manufacturer has so many other heat producing, battery using systems to try and fit in without adding new costs of "bump up the RAM by 10-20%"
Then to "support the crypto hardware".
You're dragging cost in. If you'd read the rest of my post, you'd see that the very next thing I said was that the reason was cost, not technical challenges.
Heat is really not a factor in camera design, with the exception of the image sensor itself (which can't have a traditional heat sink for obvious reasons). A typical camera is huge by the standards of modern electronics, with lots of empty air space into which heat can be dissipated. An extra RAM chip isn't going to make enough difference to matter. I mean their CPUs typically run almost half a decade behind the state of the art in terms of their process size. If heat were a significant factor, don't you think they'd spend the extra money on improving that?
Battery power for RAM is a factor, but not a big one. The number of shots per battery charge is measured in the high hundreds to low thousands, most serious shooters carry multiple batteries, and most casual shooters can go two or three days on a charge unless they're shooting lots of video or have Wi-Fi turned on. And the number of shooters who care whether it's 900 shots to a charge or 800 is likely about the same size as the number of shooters who care about crypto.
No, those things are excuses. The reason is cost, period.
Selling a slower camera with less images per buffer size at the same price as next generation will be difficult given what new encryption will take away.
The buffer size is an implementation detail. Nobody outside the manufacturer knows the actual amount of RAM (though we can roughly approximate it by multiplication), which means the manufacturer could easily bump up the RAM by 10-20% to support the crypto hardware, and the public would be none the wiser.
And at current flash card write speeds, I don't think you'll hit a wall in terms of performance or heat, either.
No, the reason they won't add this feature is that only a tiny percentage of users care, and it would probably add ten bucks to the BOM cost of the product — a cost that they will have to eat, because only a tiny percentage of users care. If it added ten cents to the BOM cost, it would be too much.
Realistically, the way you're going to get features like this is not through the manufacturer, but rather through custom firmware like Magic Lantern. They have some limited encryption (public-key crypto is likely impractical because of limited CPU speed), and it would be relatively easy turn it into nearly unbreakable encryption through careful use of a one-time pad:
Write a random data file that is roughly the size of the flash card BEFORE you leave the U.S.
Make a copy (or multiple copies) of that file and leave it (them) at home.
XOR each block of new files with a block from the end of that file.
Truncate the random file to discard the random blocks.
Write the encrypted data to the flash card.
Write a mapping table entry that says "file foo.jpg should be decrypted with blocks 794-796".
With that approach (truncating before writing), nearly all of the used random data blocks will get overwritten almost immediately by encrypted image data, making recovery of the original random data physically impossible for anyone without a copy of the original random data file.
For maximum safety/paranoia, you could add code so that when you switch the camera off, it creates a file as big as the remaining space on the flash card, zero-fills it, and deletes it a few times, but such a feature should be independently gated by a separate, user-controllable setting, because it would have a serious impact on the lifespan of flash cards.
As far as driving goes, I think they should be harsher on enforcement so that everyone would take it for real. If police actually pulled people over going 70 instead of 65, people would quickly realize they should obey the speed limit.
The reason for lax enforcement is that everybody(*) speeds, and the speed limits are set lower than necessary under the assumption that every car on the road will speed. If someone managed to pull over every car going over the limit, there wouldn't be room on the shoulder, and nobody (including police cars) would still be left on the road. Also, if everyone drove at the posted limit consistently, the entire road system would collapse into total gridlock.
And, more realistically, if a limited number of police cars started indiscriminately pulling over every car that was speeding, regardless of how far over the limit it was going, you would see a huge increase in traffic accidents, because the police would be busy writing a ticket for a nickel crime, and thus unable to chase down the morons going 30+ over the limit as they speed by.
So between the gridlock and the huge reduction in road safety, I'm pretty sure that if they started consistently pulling over people for going 5 MPH over the limit, people would probably light city hall on fire, hunt down the people who set bafflingly low speed limits, and put their heads on a pike. Such strict enforcement of speed limits is simply a terrible idea without a complete nationwide (or at least statewide) overhaul of all the posted speed limits.
* According to an Allstate survey, 89% of American drivers admit to routinely going over the speed limit, and a whopping 40% admit to regularly driving at least 20 MPH over the speed limit. And those are just the ones that admitted it to their insurance company! If I read Purdue's 2008 study correctly, approximately 100% of Indiana drivers think that it is safe to drive above the speed limit, with more than a third considering it safe to drive up to 20 MPH over. Based on that data, it seems likely that when it comes to speed limits, law-abiding drivers amount to a rounding error. Everybody speeds.
He/she thinks that punishing the people who make fake phone calls that lead to a police shooting death will cause the police to not come out. Pedantically, he/she's right, but only because people will stop making the fake phone calls.
Cell phone usage has increased by over an order of magnitude between 1992 and 2014 in the US.
The rate of brain cancer diagnoses has slightly decreased in the same time span.
You forgot one critical statistic. Cell phones in 1992 were all analog, with some producing up to 3W continuous (though 600 mW was more common) while in use. Maximum output from an LTE radio is typically 200 mW, and unless you're in fringe territory, it is even lower than that, with typical output peaking at ~125 mW, and potentially being orders of magnitude lower if you're close enough to a tower. So as cell tower density has increased, the amount of RFR you're exposed to by cell phones has decreased pretty dramatically.
So the rate of brain cancer going down tells us that either there's no correlation OR that the decrease in power, coupled with increased use of hands-free devices, headphones, and speakerphone modes has roughly balanced out the increase in usage. Determining which will likely require actual studies beyond what can be done with correlation alone, such as the one described here.
I volunteer to be on that jury, and demand they produce every bit of the evidence!
I can see it now. Ten minutes into the plaintiff's opening arguments, one of the jurists says, "Your honor, with all due respect, pics or it didn't happen."
What I think everybody is missing here is that the only reason we don't have the complete story is because they created a special court so they could keep their investigations secret. And now, we are getting one side of the story, formulated by friends of the administration, and because of the FISA court's sealed records, we are unable to get the other side of the story.
If ever there were absolute proof that secret court proceedings are a fundamental threat to democracy, THIS IS IT RIGHT HERE. We absolutely MUST dissolve the FISA court and do so through a constitutional amendment to make it clear that such shenanigans must never be used again. There is no greater threat to our democracy than public officials who cannot be held accountable by the people, whether those officials are members of the White House, members of the FBI, or anybody else.
How do you figure? AFAIK, there's no law requiring intelligence officials to disclose every detail to a courts about how information was obtained. So unless the information was obtained illegally (fruit of the poisonous tree), I don't see how that could possibly invalidate the warrant. It might certainly be a violation of procedure that is worthy of termination, but that's an entirely separate matter than whether the warrant is legal.
If true (citation needed), the important question to ask is why it was rejected. For example, if they tried to push a connector like Lightning, I can understand why. It's a very Apple-centric design, and has lots of behavior that isn't all that useful for other devices that aren't trying to do unusual tasks like providing non-USB serial lines, analog audio, etc. It also has pins on the outside of the plug, which requires some degree of intelligence on the other end to avoid risk of shorting out and causing real problems. It's really a rather bad design in a number of very objectively measured ways.
But either way, the idea wasn't rejected, and USB-IF eventually did come up with something that is, IMO, far superior to Lightning.
USB-C didn't come out of thin air. And I'm pretty sure there was zero need for it - after all, all the cables had USB 3.0 versions of them.
There was definitely a need. Several needs, actually:
A need for a small connector that was less flimsy than micro-USB, which has a bad problem with connectors wearing to the point that they become unreliable.
A need for more pins to allow better bandwidth.
A need for more power to make it practical to charge tablets that are getting closer and closer to being full laptops.
As an added bonus, they made it reversible.
Of course, it's also a reason why USB-C is a bit of a mess, since Apple designed it and gave it away and pretty much defined everything about it so it would fit with their use case of laptops...
I'm pretty sure that's why the 14V option exists, anyway.:-)
You're misunderstanding what I mean by independent touches. I mean apps where you touch two different things on the screen and do something with them simultaneously, where the exact spatial position of each touch matters (e.g. a virtual theremin app where one finger controls volume and another controls pitch). The trackpad works fine for gestures, and it works fine for clicking and dragging a single item. It cannot fully replicate the touch behavior of a phone, because there is no spatial mapping between trackpad touches and coordinates on the screen.
During certain times of year, winds shift in such a way that they go from using the five parallel north-south runways (four primary, plus one shorter runway for small planes) to using the two 45-degree runways.
When this happens, they have to stop all departures and all arrivals that aren't already lined up, and once the inbound traffic is cleared, then and only then can they resume takeoffs and landings on the new runways. IIRC, the changeover itself creates about a twenty or thirty minute hiccup every time they switch runways.
But to make matters worse, at that point, there are less than half as many active runways, which reduces the maximum traffic volume proportionately. So if it stays in that configuration during high-volume periods, delays can pile up, and in some cases, they may end up diverting some arrivals to Love Field.
The problem is then you get no innovation. Micro USB sucks in various ways, being a single orientation connector is one of them. Yet, if everyone stuck to the standard, we'd all be... stuck with the standard.
Nonsense. If companies decide that the standard isn't good enough, they can improve the standard, just like the USB consortium did with USB-C.
IMO, if Apple had pushed for improvements to the standard instead of going off on their own with Lightning, we wouldn't have two incompatible standards right now. After all, I think everybody had concluded that micro-USB was fundamentally unreliable by the time Lightning came out, and they were looking for a replacement by that point anyway. The idea of making a reversible connector might have been borrowed from Apple (no idea about the timeline for that decision), but it certainly wasn't the primary driver for replacing micro-USB.
In fact, if Apple had stuck with the standards and pushed to improve those standards rather than using the 30-pin dock connector way back in the day, there's a good chance we'd have gotten a USB-C-like connector many years earlier, instead of the disaster that micro-USB turned out to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Comey was a registered Republican for most of his life, and now considers himself an independent—presumably because of Trump. Try again.
I'm reasonably sure, yes. Air is a good insulator. Empty space between components, therefore, reduces thermal transmission between components. The best way to keep CPU heat away from the battery is to leave more space between the battery and hot components. You have two choices for doing that: make the phone bigger or make it thicker. But making it bigger means a bigger screen, which means more power consumption all around, which means more heat. Making it thicker doesn't have that problem. I suppose it does make the battery have less surface area per unit volume, which might require decreasing the charge speed to keep that from overheating the battery, but then again, you have the option of making the battery have significantly more capacity, which would mean being able to leave larger margins at the top and bottom, fewer charge cycles, shallower discharge, etc., all of which I would expect to reduce the battery's self-heating.
Yes, but heat sinking isn't purely about surface area. It's also about the mass of the heat sink itself. The less material you have to sink the heat, the less heat you can sink into it, which means that heat has to go somewhere. Some of it goes into the battery. A thicker, heavier case, then, could sink more heat, averaging out the amount of heat that reaches the battery and thus reducing the temperature spikes that can cause so much damage to batteries.
Also, larger cases could allow them to consider alternative chemistries with lower densities that are less temperature sensitive (e.g. Lithium-Iron Phosphate), not to mention less likely to catch fire.
Wow. Troll? Somebody doesn't like geography jokes.
When they are caught being wrong on news. Ask yourself how often they aren't caught.
I take everything I read on CNN's website with a grain of salt. Their articles are often riddled with minor factual errors, typographical errors, grammatical errors, and other problems that make me want to put my communications double major hat on, climb through the screen, and smack them upside the head with a clue bat. And they've not only taken down the comments sections, but also have made it nearly impossible to send them feedback, so these errors rarely (if ever) get corrected. And if I'm noticing those sorts of problems at a casual glance, with almost no knowledge of the subjects in question, it makes me suspicious that someone more familiar with the subjects might find much more serious problems with their articles—the way I do every time I read almost any article about technology, for example.
Every time you read an article about technology and think to yourself, "This is full of crap. It doesn't work that way," you should also be thinking to yourself, "Are all the news articles out there really just as bad?" and be afraid. Be very afraid.
This is not to say that I consider any of it "fake news" or such B.S.; I merely think that journalistic standards have fallen to an all-time low, and the entire industry needs to up its game.
Our schools actually are chronically underfunded, because the actual cost of materials and facilities has skyrocketed. The cost of textbooks is way more than 4x what it was in the 1960s. It's probably closer to 20x. And in the 1960s, we didn't need computers for students, nor network infrastructure. You can't compare education now to the 1960s by just comparing dollars, because if you educated someone today in the way that you educated kids in the 1960s, they would not be hirable. Too much has changed in those fifty years, and jobs that pay well tend to also require skills that do, in fact, cost way more to teach.
Also, infrastructure costs can be significant in some districts. If buildings don't get torn down and rebuilt often enough, the repair costs creep up and up, until suddenly you're using your entire facilities budget just to keep the roof from leaking. And during this time, efficiency standards have improved, everybody else is using less power and gas, and you've slowly become one of the outliers in that "top usage" bracket that get hit with the highest utility rates.
That said, one big cost that can be improved upon is administrative bloat. The districts with the worst test scores are typically the ones that have the highest administrative overhead, i.e. above a certain threshold, the administrator-to-student ratio is negatively correlated with graduation rates. That overhead generally reduces the quality of instruction by reducing the number of teachers you can hire, thus increasing classroom size and reducing the ability to give special attention to kids who actually need it. Now to be fair, sometimes that administrative cost is in part because of external factors (such as having to hire extra security people because of gun problems), so you can't necessarily say that there's causation there, but it seems pretty likely, IMO.
Either way, the ratio of teachers to students is strongly correlated with graduation rates. It stands to reason that once the non-teacher staff size increases past a baseline level, every additional administrator, counselor, or other staff person who isn't part of the teaching process is effectively reducing the number of teachers you can hire, which means increased class sizes. Because larger class sizes are correlated strongly with a lower graduation rate (independent of other factors), it seems very likely that excess staff and administration, then, would be a major contributing factor to reduced quality of education in some school districts.
Now obviously there's also a bottom threshold below which things stop working. You have to provide lunch. You have to have enough counselors to meet certain needs (though teachers can and should be encouraged to do some of that, too). You have to have someone to maintain the library. You have to have a functioning network (though multiple small schools sharing an IT admin is not necessarily impossible if you don't cut corners on the equipment). And so on. So it isn't negatively correlated at first, but becomes negatively correlated as the non-teacher-to-student ratios get too big.
Statistically, as of just a couple of years ago, federal government employees were only somewhere in the neighborhood of 44% Democrat, about 40% Republican, and the rest independent. (Source: Government Executive) And in the FBI, I'm pretty sure the percentage of Democrats is significantly lower than average. So what this tells is us not that most people in government are Democrats (far from it), but rather that Republicans within our federal government found Trump so absolutely terrifying that they either did not contribute money or actively contributed to the opposing party rather than support him.
That decision had nothing to do with their political affiliation, but rather their recognition of risk. Workers in those parts of our government have seen Trump's brand of political rhetoric coming from the lips of far too many dictators and autocrats over the years, some of whom have been quite brutal. When they hear it coming from the mouth of someone running for President, they get scared sh*tless, and rightly so. Words have power, and when a president (or candidate) uses words like "treason", attacks the free press, attacks the independent judiciary, attacks the independence of Congress, etc., he is basically swinging a wrecking ball at the very foundations of our democracy. These are the actions of an autocrat—of a despot—and the ability of our country to survive with such a person as its president is the true test of our constitutional democratic system. And most people in the government were hoping that they wouldn't have to see if it can survive that test.
It used to be, before it moved about 3300 miles to the left.
It wasn't quite that extreme. They didn't melt them down or anything. But they did pretty much dismantle them, test each piece for conformance, and put them back together.
Of course, the SRBs also weren't really all that complex, consisting of little more than a tube with a nozzle on one end, and a parachute deployment system under a disposable nose cone on the other. So I guess in that way, it was kind of like scrap metal recovery in that there wasn't much else to recover but the metal tube.
But cell phones leave some charge in the bottom as a cushion, just like you do with your car, and typically after you charge them fully, they start using power immediately and draining the batteries, so you aren't leaving them completely full, either. So really, the usage pattern is not that different from your car; it is just accelerated by maybe a factor of 3 or 4. If Tesla batteries typically lost 20% of their capacity in 6 years, Tesla owners would likely be burning down the headquarters.
IMO, the main reason that the iPhone has such poor battery health is the same reason as all the other problems with the iPhone: It is too d**n thin. The thinner a device, the harder it is to dissipate heat, and the harder it is to get the battery far enough away from the main sources of heat to avoid it being negatively impacted by them.
This problem is further compounded by people wrapping the devices in cases because they find razor-thin cell phones too hard to grip. Suddenly, the heat is even more intense, because it is even more completely contained within the device.
For this reason, the harder you use a cell phone or other mobile device (even if you're on AC power most of the time and rarely discharge the battery much at all), the fewer years your battery will last.
And of course, the thinness also limits the capacity of the battery, which means folks run down the batteries to much closer to empty than they otherwise might, which almost certainly doesn't help. But I digress.
So the Tesla will have full self-driving capabilities, then?
You're dragging cost in. If you'd read the rest of my post, you'd see that the very next thing I said was that the reason was cost, not technical challenges.
Heat is really not a factor in camera design, with the exception of the image sensor itself (which can't have a traditional heat sink for obvious reasons). A typical camera is huge by the standards of modern electronics, with lots of empty air space into which heat can be dissipated. An extra RAM chip isn't going to make enough difference to matter. I mean their CPUs typically run almost half a decade behind the state of the art in terms of their process size. If heat were a significant factor, don't you think they'd spend the extra money on improving that?
Battery power for RAM is a factor, but not a big one. The number of shots per battery charge is measured in the high hundreds to low thousands, most serious shooters carry multiple batteries, and most casual shooters can go two or three days on a charge unless they're shooting lots of video or have Wi-Fi turned on. And the number of shooters who care whether it's 900 shots to a charge or 800 is likely about the same size as the number of shooters who care about crypto.
No, those things are excuses. The reason is cost, period.
The buffer size is an implementation detail. Nobody outside the manufacturer knows the actual amount of RAM (though we can roughly approximate it by multiplication), which means the manufacturer could easily bump up the RAM by 10-20% to support the crypto hardware, and the public would be none the wiser.
And at current flash card write speeds, I don't think you'll hit a wall in terms of performance or heat, either.
No, the reason they won't add this feature is that only a tiny percentage of users care, and it would probably add ten bucks to the BOM cost of the product — a cost that they will have to eat, because only a tiny percentage of users care. If it added ten cents to the BOM cost, it would be too much.
Realistically, the way you're going to get features like this is not through the manufacturer, but rather through custom firmware like Magic Lantern. They have some limited encryption (public-key crypto is likely impractical because of limited CPU speed), and it would be relatively easy turn it into nearly unbreakable encryption through careful use of a one-time pad:
With that approach (truncating before writing), nearly all of the used random data blocks will get overwritten almost immediately by encrypted image data, making recovery of the original random data physically impossible for anyone without a copy of the original random data file.
For maximum safety/paranoia, you could add code so that when you switch the camera off, it creates a file as big as the remaining space on the flash card, zero-fills it, and deletes it a few times, but such a feature should be independently gated by a separate, user-controllable setting, because it would have a serious impact on the lifespan of flash cards.
The reason for lax enforcement is that everybody(*) speeds, and the speed limits are set lower than necessary under the assumption that every car on the road will speed. If someone managed to pull over every car going over the limit, there wouldn't be room on the shoulder, and nobody (including police cars) would still be left on the road. Also, if everyone drove at the posted limit consistently, the entire road system would collapse into total gridlock.
And, more realistically, if a limited number of police cars started indiscriminately pulling over every car that was speeding, regardless of how far over the limit it was going, you would see a huge increase in traffic accidents, because the police would be busy writing a ticket for a nickel crime, and thus unable to chase down the morons going 30+ over the limit as they speed by.
So between the gridlock and the huge reduction in road safety, I'm pretty sure that if they started consistently pulling over people for going 5 MPH over the limit, people would probably light city hall on fire, hunt down the people who set bafflingly low speed limits, and put their heads on a pike. Such strict enforcement of speed limits is simply a terrible idea without a complete nationwide (or at least statewide) overhaul of all the posted speed limits.
* According to an Allstate survey, 89% of American drivers admit to routinely going over the speed limit, and a whopping 40% admit to regularly driving at least 20 MPH over the speed limit. And those are just the ones that admitted it to their insurance company! If I read Purdue's 2008 study correctly, approximately 100% of Indiana drivers think that it is safe to drive above the speed limit, with more than a third considering it safe to drive up to 20 MPH over. Based on that data, it seems likely that when it comes to speed limits, law-abiding drivers amount to a rounding error. Everybody speeds.
He/she thinks that punishing the people who make fake phone calls that lead to a police shooting death will cause the police to not come out. Pedantically, he/she's right, but only because people will stop making the fake phone calls.
You only need one statistic.
Cell phone usage has increased by over an order of magnitude between 1992 and 2014 in the US.
The rate of brain cancer diagnoses has slightly decreased in the same time span.
You forgot one critical statistic. Cell phones in 1992 were all analog, with some producing up to 3W continuous (though 600 mW was more common) while in use. Maximum output from an LTE radio is typically 200 mW, and unless you're in fringe territory, it is even lower than that, with typical output peaking at ~125 mW, and potentially being orders of magnitude lower if you're close enough to a tower. So as cell tower density has increased, the amount of RFR you're exposed to by cell phones has decreased pretty dramatically.
So the rate of brain cancer going down tells us that either there's no correlation OR that the decrease in power, coupled with increased use of hands-free devices, headphones, and speakerphone modes has roughly balanced out the increase in usage. Determining which will likely require actual studies beyond what can be done with correlation alone, such as the one described here.
I volunteer to be on that jury, and demand they produce every bit of the evidence!
I can see it now. Ten minutes into the plaintiff's opening arguments, one of the jurists says, "Your honor, with all due respect, pics or it didn't happen."
That's a pretty big "if".
What I think everybody is missing here is that the only reason we don't have the complete story is because they created a special court so they could keep their investigations secret. And now, we are getting one side of the story, formulated by friends of the administration, and because of the FISA court's sealed records, we are unable to get the other side of the story.
If ever there were absolute proof that secret court proceedings are a fundamental threat to democracy, THIS IS IT RIGHT HERE. We absolutely MUST dissolve the FISA court and do so through a constitutional amendment to make it clear that such shenanigans must never be used again. There is no greater threat to our democracy than public officials who cannot be held accountable by the people, whether those officials are members of the White House, members of the FBI, or anybody else.
How do you figure? AFAIK, there's no law requiring intelligence officials to disclose every detail to a courts about how information was obtained. So unless the information was obtained illegally (fruit of the poisonous tree), I don't see how that could possibly invalidate the warrant. It might certainly be a violation of procedure that is worthy of termination, but that's an entirely separate matter than whether the warrant is legal.
If true (citation needed), the important question to ask is why it was rejected. For example, if they tried to push a connector like Lightning, I can understand why. It's a very Apple-centric design, and has lots of behavior that isn't all that useful for other devices that aren't trying to do unusual tasks like providing non-USB serial lines, analog audio, etc. It also has pins on the outside of the plug, which requires some degree of intelligence on the other end to avoid risk of shorting out and causing real problems. It's really a rather bad design in a number of very objectively measured ways.
But either way, the idea wasn't rejected, and USB-IF eventually did come up with something that is, IMO, far superior to Lightning.
There was definitely a need. Several needs, actually:
As an added bonus, they made it reversible.
I'm pretty sure that's why the 14V option exists, anyway. :-)
You're misunderstanding what I mean by independent touches. I mean apps where you touch two different things on the screen and do something with them simultaneously, where the exact spatial position of each touch matters (e.g. a virtual theremin app where one finger controls volume and another controls pitch). The trackpad works fine for gestures, and it works fine for clicking and dragging a single item. It cannot fully replicate the touch behavior of a phone, because there is no spatial mapping between trackpad touches and coordinates on the screen.
Not in California. That's why they still require front plates. :-D
During certain times of year, winds shift in such a way that they go from using the five parallel north-south runways (four primary, plus one shorter runway for small planes) to using the two 45-degree runways.
When this happens, they have to stop all departures and all arrivals that aren't already lined up, and once the inbound traffic is cleared, then and only then can they resume takeoffs and landings on the new runways. IIRC, the changeover itself creates about a twenty or thirty minute hiccup every time they switch runways.
But to make matters worse, at that point, there are less than half as many active runways, which reduces the maximum traffic volume proportionately. So if it stays in that configuration during high-volume periods, delays can pile up, and in some cases, they may end up diverting some arrivals to Love Field.
Nonsense. If companies decide that the standard isn't good enough, they can improve the standard, just like the USB consortium did with USB-C.
IMO, if Apple had pushed for improvements to the standard instead of going off on their own with Lightning, we wouldn't have two incompatible standards right now. After all, I think everybody had concluded that micro-USB was fundamentally unreliable by the time Lightning came out, and they were looking for a replacement by that point anyway. The idea of making a reversible connector might have been borrowed from Apple (no idea about the timeline for that decision), but it certainly wasn't the primary driver for replacing micro-USB.
In fact, if Apple had stuck with the standards and pushed to improve those standards rather than using the 30-pin dock connector way back in the day, there's a good chance we'd have gotten a USB-C-like connector many years earlier, instead of the disaster that micro-USB turned out to be.