Alternatively, the ethanol subsidies (not to mention all the other subsidies in general) keep a lot of farmers farming (or at least maintaining the farmland) when they otherwise would have parceled out their land to the suburb developers decades ago. I've always suspected the millions we throw at farmers in subsidies was less about supporting the "great American farming family" and more about "making sure that if the world wide shit goes down the US still has enough to eat". It's worth noting that food is one of the few things that the US exports vastely more than it imports, even with 30% of the corn going into our gas tanks.
1) GM modified the part but did not change the part number. I am not familiar with their part number structure but typically any physical change to the part changes the identifier. It makes me curious if the supplier had been buiding it wrong all that time.
Drop in replacements will frequently not have a different part number. If they did, every auto part supplier would have to update their information every time an updated part comes out.
Automated fast food cooking is a trivial problem to solve, enough so that I've wondered why it hasn't been done already. You're imagining a robot standing there with a flipper waiting for the burger to be done, that's not how you go about automation. You'd have a conveyor drop burgers onto a griddle and a top griddle come down. Temperatures would be constantly monitored and adjusted so all you have to do is time how long the burger needs to cook. High volume restaurants would have continuous process kitchens, where food is constantly moving through the line added to the front of the queue as soon as someone orders (or more likely before). The only thing preventing this is the cost.
Research clearly indicates that fake therapies can trigger the body to heal itself. In acupuncture studies, sham needling often has very high efficacy, some times higher than needling the proper points, and sometimes similar or higher efficacy than traditional medicine. It does this with far less side-effects. If it works better with less harm, it should be used - even if we don't understand it.
Why the implication that dry needling is a "fake therapy"? You're sticking a needle into the very skin and muscle that is often experiencing the discomfort being treated. That causes acute pain, inflammation, clotting and probably many other responses that your body has to getting poked with a needle. Any or all of of those could help relieve chronic pain, looses stiff muscles, etc. There's absolutely no reason to call it a "fake treatment" when there are researchable and verifiable mechanisms that haven't been fully investigated yet.
Donning O2 masks in the event of an unknown fire is what would widely be considered a "bad idea", that is why pilots have smoke hoods in the cockpit but those are only effective for 10-15 minutes or so. Pulling all non-essential breakers is step #2 (after turning to the nearest safe airport) in the event of a possible electrical fire, meaning no transponder, no ACARS, no radio. Nothing is important until the fire is contained, not "clearing the air lanes" when you're in the middle of the ocean (it's a big sky after all), not radioing the destination airport, and certainly not sending out a mayday that will do absolutely nothing to help the situation. It simply doesn't take that much. Finally, keep in mind that an airplane is an enclosed tube that doesn't actually let much air into and out of the cabin; it simply doesn't take much smoke or much fire to full the cabin and flight deck with incapacitating amounts of smoke.
Altitude changes are pretty trivial to justify in such a situation. The fire could have caused a decompression forcing the plane lower, the 12,000 ft level is pretty much the textbook height for such a maneuver. Even a climb to 42,000 could have been a desperate, last ditch effort to extinguish the fire. Also, keep in mind that those altitude readings were on the outer edges of the radar tracking the plane, without the transponders altitude readings simply aren't guaranteed to be accurate at 220 miles. If the altitude changes were less extreme they, and the bearing changes, can be explained by the 777 flying trimmed for cruise speed with autopilot off and a dead stick. As fuel is consumed the weight of the plane decreases causing it to enter a climb to maintain the speed set by the flight crew. Small instabilities lead to heading changes before the fly by wire system levels out the banks automatically.
Fire on board the plane. Pilot diverts to the nearest safe airport (which is approximately line with the sudden course change to the west). Flight crew runs through the fire checklist, which includes pulling all the breakers in case it's an electrical fire (Transponder and communications lost). Fire causes decompression, pilots bring the plane down to 12,000 ft to remain conscious and keep the passengers alive. Crew is overcome by smoke and/or decompression, plane flies on under auto-pilot until it runs out of gas.
Incredibly simple explanation for everything that is known at this point, even some of the sketchier details that are 100% for sure at this point.
Well... relatively. It would still take processing hundreds of tons of lunar rock to get useful amounts of He3, which in turn means hundreds of tons of equipment, fuel, etc, especially since you're going to want lots and lots of the stuff, not just a sample.
a wonderful fuel source that can easily be used to go pretty much everywhere else in the solar system.
Easily? You know we do have He3 here on Earth right and we still aren't at the point of firing up a fusion reactor with it. Granted, if there were a large and steady supply it would certainly lead to more research into He3 reactors (right now He3 reactors simply can't be economically feasible), but you're still talking a few decades of research and development for a reactor on the ground, let alone putting one in space which would require miniaturizing and automating the first generation by orders of magnitude.
Most current space ships have to lift the fuel out of the earth's gravity well, which means they have practically none left to go anywhere at speed. instead they drift along without any engine providing thrust.
There's reasons for this that go beyond fuel, VASMIR engines combined with orbital refueling with more run of the mill propellents and energy sources for example. We don't do it though, not because it's impossible, but because it's expensive and high risk. Not nearly as expensive and high risk as trying to jump start a He3 economy based on the moon.
Lets say hypothetically, just pulling numbers out of no where, that Watson is 1/10th the price of a specialized team but only half as accurate. I think those numbers are probably a bit on the pessimistic side... yes Watson is an expensive system but each query will be completed in minutes or at most hours, the marginal cost of each additional patient just isn't very high when compared to a multidisciplinary team of geneticists, oncologists, toxicologists, and general practitioners. As for accuracy, well to put it simply this kind of network analysis is what Watson was designed from the ground up to do and it does it shockingly well.
But I digress, back to the example. Lets say there are enough specialized teams to treat 1,000 glioblastoma patients per year and they successfully treat 80% of patients. 800 saved hurray! But, for the same price, Watson could develop treatments for 10,000 patients, saving 4,000 of them. The of course there is the fact that Watson is not a build once and done kind of system. Every year there'd be 10,000 new pieces of information to be entered into the system, refining the probabilities further and further. Sooner or later, Watson will be not just equal to the human team, but will far surpass it.
Many countries with what I could consider "pure" rehabilitation programs spend a fraction what the US does on incarceration and have lower recidivism rates. These systems are generally run on the basic philosophy that criminal behavior that can't be fixed is a mental illness and should be treated as such, often meaning they are in fact removed from society longer than they would have been if they had simply thrown in prison. Everyone else goes through counseling, education, etc during their prison sentence. And again, at a lower cost and lower recidivism rate than we see with our punishment centered systems.
I think you're underestimating what that kind of subjective time would do to a person. Bear in mind, with the straight "time dilation" drug solution that she proposes (begging the question that such a thing is even possible) the time would by definition be spent in solitary. No one can accompany you on your 1000 year drug induced stupor. We know what extended periods of solitary confinement does to a person, the human mind simply isn't designed to be without social stimulation for long lengths of time.
Now, the hypothetical of a virtual reality prison, where prisoners could spend hundreds of years getting actually rehabilitation... that I could get behind. But then, there are so many better, more interesting uses for a such a technology that using it to imprison (even for rehabilitation) seems like it would be an afterthought.
1000 years subject time, all spent strapped to a gurney and looking at the ceiling and you think they're going to come out of it as a productive member of society? Not to mention submitting someone to 1000 years of that torture in less time than it takes for a lawyer to file an appeal, that's just a great idea for justice. I sincerely hope the author of this piece was being satirical... the alternative is that she's a raging sociopath.
The 50% drop was self reported by the officers. In other words, the officers themselves self reported using force around half as often as before. Reports of abusive cops drops 90% though, so your point still stands, just not in the context of this particular thread.
Your explanation is a possible one, but it is not the only one.
A) The general public would know about the initiative. Being recorded works both ways, it makes everyone think about their actions more, cops and civilians alike. B) It's possible that the video encourages cops to be more polite and less aggressive because they know the video has their back if something gets out of hand. C) It's possible that the video encourages cops to be more polite and less aggressive because they are more likely to get in trouble for it if they step out of line.
Personally, if I had to guess, I'd bet that most of the change comes from B, though indirectly. I'd be willing to pay money that the first few days with the camera officers were extremely self conscious about their actions, less aggressive and more polite in their interactions. I'm guessing the cops saw how much easier and safer their jobs can be by being less aggressive and confrontational.
Did you actually click the link? If anything the paid results are more obvious in my opinion. There's a bright yellow icon marking them out explicitly as "ADS" versus a light grey border labeled euphemistically "sponsored results". This is, at most, a step to the side, not a step backwards.
Except Google has no way of knowing if it is the child or the adult using the phone, so it's reasonable to hold the owner responsible in such cases.
Google has an easy way of verifying that the account holder or someone authorized by them is using the phone: require the password. If you don't want to require the password every purchase and want to have a 30 minute grace period after each password entry, put an active notification in the notification bar with a countdown and a way to manually leave the grace period.
Doesn't this mean that anybody could reverse any online marketplace credit card transaction just blaming their kids? Or even wife, if it wasn't my intent that she used my card for online shopping?
Yes, and that would be fraud: deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.
While there are other techniques that can be used to make 2-party-only communications, quantum secured methods have the advantage that there is no known way to recreate a photon with the same properties as the one you had to intercept to XOR against that bit that was sent in a clear channel (assuming you even know which property is being used to modify the data feed).
You don't need to if you're truly a man in the middle, what you need is two setups just like the people you are eavesdropping on. During negotiation, you receive a photon from Alice, you send a different photon on to Bob. When information comes down, you decrypt it with the first photon, read what you want, then re-encrypt it with the second.
I've not heard any explanation for how such systems prevent a man in the middle attack, I suspect the answer is simply that they don't. Of course, if you were to combine quantum cryptography with more pedestrian forms you might be able to make the claim, but if you're going to do that aren't there easier methods of unbreakable communication?
At the moment no one is dying in the streets in fact. Whatever the legality of Russia's actions there have not been any shots fired between Russian and Ukrainian forces. Well, ok, I think I read one story about warning shots being fired, but no one is being shot at this time. The cyber antics are part of a larger picture, on the one hand Russia bunkering up on the Crimean peninsula, consolidating their hold on infrastructure and communications. On the other, a disorganized (and presumably grass roots) hacking effort that looks more like the actions of Anonymous than the Ukrainian government (and probably is).
This is perhaps a stupid question but one worth asking. For what it's worth I originally agreed with your stated concern and I'd much prefer the ability to disable this functionality on any device I own but I digress.
What would this hypothetical ability to brick your phone give the government that they don't already have? The government having this ability in the event of a revolution presupposes cooperation with the carriers. The very carriers that can already block your phone by number or location. For that matter, the army could send a small force to each and every cell tower in the area and shut them down manually (violently) if necessary. For that matter it would probably be more useful for them to just listen in on anyone they are worried about, which again they can already do.
So I just can't buy that this is some kind of government power grab. It's still a terrible idea IMO, but that particular argument just doesn't ring true to me.
Additionally, the Ouya hardware fell behind the market fairly quickly because of its use of a Tegra 3 which is actually quite poor in terms of graphical power. A Tegra 4 iteration should do a lot to fix this, although a Tegra K1 would be most optimal.
By the time a company the size of Ouya designs, prototypes, tests, tweaks, retests, produces, and ships a product, there will be another generation or two beyond that available and they'll be behind again. Mobile CPU/GPU advancements are simply happening too quickly right now for them to be leveraged by anyone except the heaviest of heavy hitters.
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Alternatively, the ethanol subsidies (not to mention all the other subsidies in general) keep a lot of farmers farming (or at least maintaining the farmland) when they otherwise would have parceled out their land to the suburb developers decades ago. I've always suspected the millions we throw at farmers in subsidies was less about supporting the "great American farming family" and more about "making sure that if the world wide shit goes down the US still has enough to eat". It's worth noting that food is one of the few things that the US exports vastely more than it imports, even with 30% of the corn going into our gas tanks.
1) GM modified the part but did not change the part number. I am not familiar with their part number structure but typically any physical change to the part changes the identifier. It makes me curious if the supplier had been buiding it wrong all that time.
Drop in replacements will frequently not have a different part number. If they did, every auto part supplier would have to update their information every time an updated part comes out.
Automated fast food cooking is a trivial problem to solve, enough so that I've wondered why it hasn't been done already. You're imagining a robot standing there with a flipper waiting for the burger to be done, that's not how you go about automation. You'd have a conveyor drop burgers onto a griddle and a top griddle come down. Temperatures would be constantly monitored and adjusted so all you have to do is time how long the burger needs to cook. High volume restaurants would have continuous process kitchens, where food is constantly moving through the line added to the front of the queue as soon as someone orders (or more likely before). The only thing preventing this is the cost.
Research clearly indicates that fake therapies can trigger the body to heal itself. In acupuncture studies, sham needling often has very high efficacy, some times higher than needling the proper points, and sometimes similar or higher efficacy than traditional medicine. It does this with far less side-effects. If it works better with less harm, it should be used - even if we don't understand it.
Why the implication that dry needling is a "fake therapy"? You're sticking a needle into the very skin and muscle that is often experiencing the discomfort being treated. That causes acute pain, inflammation, clotting and probably many other responses that your body has to getting poked with a needle. Any or all of of those could help relieve chronic pain, looses stiff muscles, etc. There's absolutely no reason to call it a "fake treatment" when there are researchable and verifiable mechanisms that haven't been fully investigated yet.
[...]people really believe things.
Not everything is about money.
Can't it be both?
Donning O2 masks in the event of an unknown fire is what would widely be considered a "bad idea", that is why pilots have smoke hoods in the cockpit but those are only effective for 10-15 minutes or so. Pulling all non-essential breakers is step #2 (after turning to the nearest safe airport) in the event of a possible electrical fire, meaning no transponder, no ACARS, no radio. Nothing is important until the fire is contained, not "clearing the air lanes" when you're in the middle of the ocean (it's a big sky after all), not radioing the destination airport, and certainly not sending out a mayday that will do absolutely nothing to help the situation. It simply doesn't take that much. Finally, keep in mind that an airplane is an enclosed tube that doesn't actually let much air into and out of the cabin; it simply doesn't take much smoke or much fire to full the cabin and flight deck with incapacitating amounts of smoke.
Altitude changes are pretty trivial to justify in such a situation. The fire could have caused a decompression forcing the plane lower, the 12,000 ft level is pretty much the textbook height for such a maneuver. Even a climb to 42,000 could have been a desperate, last ditch effort to extinguish the fire. Also, keep in mind that those altitude readings were on the outer edges of the radar tracking the plane, without the transponders altitude readings simply aren't guaranteed to be accurate at 220 miles. If the altitude changes were less extreme they, and the bearing changes, can be explained by the 777 flying trimmed for cruise speed with autopilot off and a dead stick. As fuel is consumed the weight of the plane decreases causing it to enter a climb to maintain the speed set by the flight crew. Small instabilities lead to heading changes before the fly by wire system levels out the banks automatically.
To summarize:
Fire on board the plane.
Pilot diverts to the nearest safe airport (which is approximately line with the sudden course change to the west).
Flight crew runs through the fire checklist, which includes pulling all the breakers in case it's an electrical fire (Transponder and communications lost).
Fire causes decompression, pilots bring the plane down to 12,000 ft to remain conscious and keep the passengers alive.
Crew is overcome by smoke and/or decompression, plane flies on under auto-pilot until it runs out of gas.
Incredibly simple explanation for everything that is known at this point, even some of the sketchier details that are 100% for sure at this point.
The moon consists of a large amount of helium 3
Well... relatively. It would still take processing hundreds of tons of lunar rock to get useful amounts of He3, which in turn means hundreds of tons of equipment, fuel, etc, especially since you're going to want lots and lots of the stuff, not just a sample.
a wonderful fuel source that can easily be used to go pretty much everywhere else in the solar system.
Easily? You know we do have He3 here on Earth right and we still aren't at the point of firing up a fusion reactor with it. Granted, if there were a large and steady supply it would certainly lead to more research into He3 reactors (right now He3 reactors simply can't be economically feasible), but you're still talking a few decades of research and development for a reactor on the ground, let alone putting one in space which would require miniaturizing and automating the first generation by orders of magnitude.
Most current space ships have to lift the fuel out of the earth's gravity well, which means they have practically none left to go anywhere at speed. instead they drift along without any engine providing thrust.
There's reasons for this that go beyond fuel, VASMIR engines combined with orbital refueling with more run of the mill propellents and energy sources for example. We don't do it though, not because it's impossible, but because it's expensive and high risk. Not nearly as expensive and high risk as trying to jump start a He3 economy based on the moon.
Lets say hypothetically, just pulling numbers out of no where, that Watson is 1/10th the price of a specialized team but only half as accurate. I think those numbers are probably a bit on the pessimistic side... yes Watson is an expensive system but each query will be completed in minutes or at most hours, the marginal cost of each additional patient just isn't very high when compared to a multidisciplinary team of geneticists, oncologists, toxicologists, and general practitioners. As for accuracy, well to put it simply this kind of network analysis is what Watson was designed from the ground up to do and it does it shockingly well.
But I digress, back to the example. Lets say there are enough specialized teams to treat 1,000 glioblastoma patients per year and they successfully treat 80% of patients. 800 saved hurray! But, for the same price, Watson could develop treatments for 10,000 patients, saving 4,000 of them. The of course there is the fact that Watson is not a build once and done kind of system. Every year there'd be 10,000 new pieces of information to be entered into the system, refining the probabilities further and further. Sooner or later, Watson will be not just equal to the human team, but will far surpass it.
Many countries with what I could consider "pure" rehabilitation programs spend a fraction what the US does on incarceration and have lower recidivism rates. These systems are generally run on the basic philosophy that criminal behavior that can't be fixed is a mental illness and should be treated as such, often meaning they are in fact removed from society longer than they would have been if they had simply thrown in prison. Everyone else goes through counseling, education, etc during their prison sentence. And again, at a lower cost and lower recidivism rate than we see with our punishment centered systems.
I think you're underestimating what that kind of subjective time would do to a person. Bear in mind, with the straight "time dilation" drug solution that she proposes (begging the question that such a thing is even possible) the time would by definition be spent in solitary. No one can accompany you on your 1000 year drug induced stupor. We know what extended periods of solitary confinement does to a person, the human mind simply isn't designed to be without social stimulation for long lengths of time.
Now, the hypothetical of a virtual reality prison, where prisoners could spend hundreds of years getting actually rehabilitation... that I could get behind. But then, there are so many better, more interesting uses for a such a technology that using it to imprison (even for rehabilitation) seems like it would be an afterthought.
1000 years subject time, all spent strapped to a gurney and looking at the ceiling and you think they're going to come out of it as a productive member of society? Not to mention submitting someone to 1000 years of that torture in less time than it takes for a lawyer to file an appeal, that's just a great idea for justice. I sincerely hope the author of this piece was being satirical... the alternative is that she's a raging sociopath.
It tells me that there are people out there who will openly admit to using their children as metaphorical weapons in a war on other groups of people.
The 50% drop was self reported by the officers. In other words, the officers themselves self reported using force around half as often as before. Reports of abusive cops drops 90% though, so your point still stands, just not in the context of this particular thread.
Your explanation is a possible one, but it is not the only one.
A) The general public would know about the initiative. Being recorded works both ways, it makes everyone think about their actions more, cops and civilians alike.
B) It's possible that the video encourages cops to be more polite and less aggressive because they know the video has their back if something gets out of hand.
C) It's possible that the video encourages cops to be more polite and less aggressive because they are more likely to get in trouble for it if they step out of line.
Personally, if I had to guess, I'd bet that most of the change comes from B, though indirectly. I'd be willing to pay money that the first few days with the camera officers were extremely self conscious about their actions, less aggressive and more polite in their interactions. I'm guessing the cops saw how much easier and safer their jobs can be by being less aggressive and confrontational.
Did you actually click the link? If anything the paid results are more obvious in my opinion. There's a bright yellow icon marking them out explicitly as "ADS" versus a light grey border labeled euphemistically "sponsored results". This is, at most, a step to the side, not a step backwards.
Except Google has no way of knowing if it is the child or the adult using the phone, so it's reasonable to hold the owner responsible in such cases.
Google has an easy way of verifying that the account holder or someone authorized by them is using the phone: require the password. If you don't want to require the password every purchase and want to have a 30 minute grace period after each password entry, put an active notification in the notification bar with a countdown and a way to manually leave the grace period.
Doesn't this mean that anybody could reverse any online marketplace credit card transaction just blaming their kids? Or even wife, if it wasn't my intent that she used my card for online shopping?
Yes, and that would be fraud: deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.
While there are other techniques that can be used to make 2-party-only communications, quantum secured methods have the advantage that there is no known way to recreate a photon with the same properties as the one you had to intercept to XOR against that bit that was sent in a clear channel (assuming you even know which property is being used to modify the data feed).
You don't need to if you're truly a man in the middle, what you need is two setups just like the people you are eavesdropping on. During negotiation, you receive a photon from Alice, you send a different photon on to Bob. When information comes down, you decrypt it with the first photon, read what you want, then re-encrypt it with the second.
I've not heard any explanation for how such systems prevent a man in the middle attack, I suspect the answer is simply that they don't. Of course, if you were to combine quantum cryptography with more pedestrian forms you might be able to make the claim, but if you're going to do that aren't there easier methods of unbreakable communication?
Our healthcare system has many problems, vaccines are not one of them. You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater to use an old phrase.
At the moment no one is dying in the streets in fact. Whatever the legality of Russia's actions there have not been any shots fired between Russian and Ukrainian forces. Well, ok, I think I read one story about warning shots being fired, but no one is being shot at this time. The cyber antics are part of a larger picture, on the one hand Russia bunkering up on the Crimean peninsula, consolidating their hold on infrastructure and communications. On the other, a disorganized (and presumably grass roots) hacking effort that looks more like the actions of Anonymous than the Ukrainian government (and probably is).
This is perhaps a stupid question but one worth asking. For what it's worth I originally agreed with your stated concern and I'd much prefer the ability to disable this functionality on any device I own but I digress.
What would this hypothetical ability to brick your phone give the government that they don't already have? The government having this ability in the event of a revolution presupposes cooperation with the carriers. The very carriers that can already block your phone by number or location. For that matter, the army could send a small force to each and every cell tower in the area and shut them down manually (violently) if necessary. For that matter it would probably be more useful for them to just listen in on anyone they are worried about, which again they can already do.
So I just can't buy that this is some kind of government power grab. It's still a terrible idea IMO, but that particular argument just doesn't ring true to me.
Additionally, the Ouya hardware fell behind the market fairly quickly because of its use of a Tegra 3 which is actually quite poor in terms of graphical power. A Tegra 4 iteration should do a lot to fix this, although a Tegra K1 would be most optimal.
By the time a company the size of Ouya designs, prototypes, tests, tweaks, retests, produces, and ships a product, there will be another generation or two beyond that available and they'll be behind again. Mobile CPU/GPU advancements are simply happening too quickly right now for them to be leveraged by anyone except the heaviest of heavy hitters.
Actually, mitochondria DNA does have effects on athletic performance, so there is that.