Earth's atmosphere is about 300 miles (480 kilometers) thick, but most of it is within 10 miles (16 km) the surface.
So, if the asteroid was 12km large, then the outer edge of the asteroid was likely in the thinner parts of the atmosphere when the inner edge impacted.
My in-laws have a cockatoo. (They used to own two but one passed away about 15 years ago.) She can be a really sweet bird and love to be petted... until she doesn't. At that point, you'd best take your fingers away from her or you'll wind up missing one. She can crack whole walnuts in one bite and has picked master locks.
Now, size that up to T-Rex size and add razor sharp teeth. You'd have a highly intelligent dinosaur who's really agitated, sees you as a tasty snack, and who can shred anything you put up to shield yourself from those the teeth.
The latest batch of robocalls I've received warned me that my SSN was suspended and if I didn't respond immediately (presumably by giving a ton of personal information or sending them money), I'd be arrested. The others I've received are for car warranties and college loans I don't have. These are definitely NOT free speech, but scam attempts. You can't label a scam "free speech" and expect to escape any consequences.
I really wish there was an electronic solution to receipts. I get them with every purchase I make and they just tend to pile up until I throw them all out. Some retailers will e-mail me receipts, which is better, but obviously I don't want to give every merchant my e-mail address. I get enough junk mail without being signed up for every corporate newsletter they have just because I once bought one item in their store. I wish there was a way for the retailer to send me a PDF of the receipt in such a way that the retailer wouldn't know my e-mail address and wouldn't be able to use this to send additional mailings. Additional points if it could search my receipts and find "that shirt that I bought from Boscov's three weeks ago." I'd use a system like this in a heartbeat.
We basically have that with Coortinated Universal Time (UTC). The problem is that, were I to follow this time, I'd be getting up at 1am local time (6am UTC), working from 3am to 11am local time (8am to 4pm UTC), and going to sleep at 6pm local time (11pm UTC). As sunrise tends to be at around 6:30am local time, my day would be a third over before the sun even rose.
You're not going to convince many people to follow this schedule.
And even if you did that, how many human reviewers are you going to require that companies hire? Let's say that Facebook wants to protect against someone livestreaming extremist content so they implement this. There are reportedly about 1.7 billion Facebook users. If even 0.1% of them livestreamed, this would be 1,700,000 livestreams to check. Is Facebook going to hire a a million people to check livestreams?
Curse you, Music Industry. You're making me defend Charter! Do you know how much I hate Charter? A lot. I'd drop them in a second if I had any alternative in my area. However, your lawsuit is so laughable and groundless that I'm forced to take Charter's side in this. Stop it right now so I can get back to complaining about how bad Charter is.
You don't even need to go that far. The music industry regularly violates the copyright of music owned by the artists. From collecting royalties and "not being able to find the artists", to designating CD club sales as "promotional copies" and thus not owned royalties, to outright just using works and not paying the royalties owed. They care deeply about copyright violations - until it's convenient or profitable for them to ignore them.
Plus, there's the technical argument that the music industry is saying "we saw this IP address uploading songs so we know FOR A FACT that it was this person" when you really can't tie IP address to a person. It could be a grandma with an open WiFi connection - who doesn't know how to secure it. It could be a student whose roommate went on his computer without his knowledge. It could be a parent whose teenager uploaded the songs. However, the music industry doesn't care about reality and just wants to add to their "pirates caught" numbers. They want the accounts behind the IP addresses kicked off and the personal information of the account holders sent to the music industry so that they can be sued for millions (but then get a "generous" $2,000 settlement that says they admit to being a horrible pirate).
Of course it is because the music industry is making $X billion and they think they should be making $Y billion where Y > X. No matter what actual numbers you plug in there, they always think they should be getting more money. Now, they could blame themselves for producing poor quality music and put in the hard work to find better artists. Alternatively, they can blame "piracy," claim without evidence that piracy hurts the industry to the tune of $(Y - X) billion a year, and then sue companies and people to "earn back" that money. Invariably, they always choose the latter path.
That might actually take work, though. Dropping cable from their name is easy. Say what you will about cable companies, but they're never ones to make a hard fix when there's an easy band-aid that can be applied.
Microsoft has a vested interest that just happens to align with our interest in this situation. Faster broadband speeds for everyone would mean more people could use things like their XBox online gaming systems. If you have slow Internet, you're much less likely to use this stuff and their customer base shrinks. So Microsoft stands to profit more if we have better Internet connectivity. It doesn't mean I don't welcome their help, mind you. It just explains why they're on our side in this matter, but will be anti-consumer on other issues - they are a corporation and so they follow the money.
I used to use a shared hosting environment (years and years ago). However, I ran into the unspoken rule of Shared Hosting: "Your site/content better not get too popular." The host has thousands of sites on a single server. As long as those thousand sites each gets a tiny amount of traffic (and most do), this is fine. modern servers can handle a thousand "hundred hits a month is a lot" sites with no problem. When one site becomes too popular, though, it starts to drain resources from the other sites and throws off the host's business model. So you can find your account suspended for too much traffic with the host pushing you to a more expensive dedicated server plan. (Likely with too much power and way too expensive for your site's needs.)
I now have a virtual private server. It's much less expensive than a dedicated server, but doesn't run into the shared server's issue with "my neighbor is really popular/ran an infinite loop in their code/was hacked and now the entire server is slowing down."
Back in college, I jokingly sent my friend 1 million digits of PI. This was on a VAX terminal college e-mail system and he didn't know how to delete the message without scrolling through the entire thing. So he sat there hitting page down over and over until he reached the bottom. For some reason, he didn't seem to appreciate the practical joke.
That's exactly the position I'm in. I have one book published and a second almost ready (it's in the beta reader stage). Sales of my first book were horrible (mainly because I stink at promotion and went immediately into writing Book 2). I haven't even made back the $300 that I invested in the first book's production. I definitely can't afford $2,000 to produce a decent audiobook.
I actually made a "text-to-voice" version of my new book for my son to read along with. (He likes reading along with audiobooks.) It came out sounding like a robot reading my book. Nice for a free version for my son to read, but definitely nothing I'd try selling to people.
I've heard some good audiobooks and some bad ones. The Harry Potter series in audiobook form is amazing. The author does different voices for each character, but never does it come across as cheesy.
My wife is very into audiobooks as well. (She crochets while listening.) And she's also said that she's listened to great books that were ruined by bad narrators. I actually considered doing it myself for a bit. It would be the cheapest route - about $200 in equipment and then a time commitment. Unfortunately, it is also the route that is most likely to result in a bad audiobook. If I ever do decide to do this, I'd rather pay someone with a good voice and a good handle on audiobook production than to make a horrible audiobook in order to save some money,
I wish I could publish my book as an audiobook. They're rising in popularity and it would be nice to be able to tap into that market. Unfortunately, audiobook publishing is prohibitively expensive. The least expensive option has you buy about $200 worth of audio gear, spend hours recording yourself reading your book, and then spend more on a sound engineer to turn that into something decent sounding. The higher priced option is to spend about $2,000 to have a professional read/record your book for you. I'd love to release my novel as an audiobook, but I just can't afford it. I'll have to stay with print and ebook for now.
Sorry, I missed the "most" in your post. I've seen too many people say "the Amish never vaccinate and don't have any autism... proof that vaccines cause autism!" Setting aside for a moment that this wouldn't be definitive proof (it could be dozens of other things that the Amish refrain from), the fact of the matter is that the Amish do vaccinate. If they do have a lower rate of Autism, it could also be from lower detection rates (fewer Amish families taking their kids to get diagnosed) versus an actual lower rate.
Exactly. Wakefield wasn't an anti-vaxxer originally. He wanted the MMR banned so his competing vaccine would rake in cash. When that didn't work and he smelled money from anti-vaxxers, he jumped on their bandwagon and started selling them snake oil.
Kids who cannot be vaccinated due to medical issues (immune system disorder) are different than kids who weren't vaccinated due to the mother reading a stupid Facebook post. The former relies on the vaccinated kids to survive (herd immunity). The latter weakens herd immunity because they could have been vaccinated.
Slashdot Mirror
Also:
So, if the asteroid was 12km large, then the outer edge of the asteroid was likely in the thinner parts of the atmosphere when the inner edge impacted.
My in-laws have a cockatoo. (They used to own two but one passed away about 15 years ago.) She can be a really sweet bird and love to be petted... until she doesn't. At that point, you'd best take your fingers away from her or you'll wind up missing one. She can crack whole walnuts in one bite and has picked master locks.
Now, size that up to T-Rex size and add razor sharp teeth. You'd have a highly intelligent dinosaur who's really agitated, sees you as a tasty snack, and who can shred anything you put up to shield yourself from those the teeth.
The latest batch of robocalls I've received warned me that my SSN was suspended and if I didn't respond immediately (presumably by giving a ton of personal information or sending them money), I'd be arrested. The others I've received are for car warranties and college loans I don't have. These are definitely NOT free speech, but scam attempts. You can't label a scam "free speech" and expect to escape any consequences.
Relevant XKCD about voting software: https://xkcd.com/2030/
I really wish there was an electronic solution to receipts. I get them with every purchase I make and they just tend to pile up until I throw them all out. Some retailers will e-mail me receipts, which is better, but obviously I don't want to give every merchant my e-mail address. I get enough junk mail without being signed up for every corporate newsletter they have just because I once bought one item in their store. I wish there was a way for the retailer to send me a PDF of the receipt in such a way that the retailer wouldn't know my e-mail address and wouldn't be able to use this to send additional mailings. Additional points if it could search my receipts and find "that shirt that I bought from Boscov's three weeks ago." I'd use a system like this in a heartbeat.
We basically have that with Coortinated Universal Time (UTC). The problem is that, were I to follow this time, I'd be getting up at 1am local time (6am UTC), working from 3am to 11am local time (8am to 4pm UTC), and going to sleep at 6pm local time (11pm UTC). As sunrise tends to be at around 6:30am local time, my day would be a third over before the sun even rose.
You're not going to convince many people to follow this schedule.
And even if you did that, how many human reviewers are you going to require that companies hire? Let's say that Facebook wants to protect against someone livestreaming extremist content so they implement this. There are reportedly about 1.7 billion Facebook users. If even 0.1% of them livestreamed, this would be 1,700,000 livestreams to check. Is Facebook going to hire a a million people to check livestreams?
Curse you, Music Industry. You're making me defend Charter! Do you know how much I hate Charter? A lot. I'd drop them in a second if I had any alternative in my area. However, your lawsuit is so laughable and groundless that I'm forced to take Charter's side in this. Stop it right now so I can get back to complaining about how bad Charter is.
You don't even need to go that far. The music industry regularly violates the copyright of music owned by the artists. From collecting royalties and "not being able to find the artists", to designating CD club sales as "promotional copies" and thus not owned royalties, to outright just using works and not paying the royalties owed. They care deeply about copyright violations - until it's convenient or profitable for them to ignore them.
Plus, there's the technical argument that the music industry is saying "we saw this IP address uploading songs so we know FOR A FACT that it was this person" when you really can't tie IP address to a person. It could be a grandma with an open WiFi connection - who doesn't know how to secure it. It could be a student whose roommate went on his computer without his knowledge. It could be a parent whose teenager uploaded the songs. However, the music industry doesn't care about reality and just wants to add to their "pirates caught" numbers. They want the accounts behind the IP addresses kicked off and the personal information of the account holders sent to the music industry so that they can be sued for millions (but then get a "generous" $2,000 settlement that says they admit to being a horrible pirate).
Of course it is because the music industry is making $X billion and they think they should be making $Y billion where Y > X. No matter what actual numbers you plug in there, they always think they should be getting more money. Now, they could blame themselves for producing poor quality music and put in the hard work to find better artists. Alternatively, they can blame "piracy," claim without evidence that piracy hurts the industry to the tune of $(Y - X) billion a year, and then sue companies and people to "earn back" that money. Invariably, they always choose the latter path.
That might actually take work, though. Dropping cable from their name is easy. Say what you will about cable companies, but they're never ones to make a hard fix when there's an easy band-aid that can be applied.
Microsoft has a vested interest that just happens to align with our interest in this situation. Faster broadband speeds for everyone would mean more people could use things like their XBox online gaming systems. If you have slow Internet, you're much less likely to use this stuff and their customer base shrinks. So Microsoft stands to profit more if we have better Internet connectivity. It doesn't mean I don't welcome their help, mind you. It just explains why they're on our side in this matter, but will be anti-consumer on other issues - they are a corporation and so they follow the money.
I used to use a shared hosting environment (years and years ago). However, I ran into the unspoken rule of Shared Hosting: "Your site/content better not get too popular." The host has thousands of sites on a single server. As long as those thousand sites each gets a tiny amount of traffic (and most do), this is fine. modern servers can handle a thousand "hundred hits a month is a lot" sites with no problem. When one site becomes too popular, though, it starts to drain resources from the other sites and throws off the host's business model. So you can find your account suspended for too much traffic with the host pushing you to a more expensive dedicated server plan. (Likely with too much power and way too expensive for your site's needs.)
I now have a virtual private server. It's much less expensive than a dedicated server, but doesn't run into the shared server's issue with "my neighbor is really popular/ran an infinite loop in their code/was hacked and now the entire server is slowing down."
It's also Albert Einstein's birthday, relatively speaking.
Back in college, I jokingly sent my friend 1 million digits of PI. This was on a VAX terminal college e-mail system and he didn't know how to delete the message without scrolling through the entire thing. So he sat there hitting page down over and over until he reached the bottom. For some reason, he didn't seem to appreciate the practical joke.
That's exactly the position I'm in. I have one book published and a second almost ready (it's in the beta reader stage). Sales of my first book were horrible (mainly because I stink at promotion and went immediately into writing Book 2). I haven't even made back the $300 that I invested in the first book's production. I definitely can't afford $2,000 to produce a decent audiobook.
I actually made a "text-to-voice" version of my new book for my son to read along with. (He likes reading along with audiobooks.) It came out sounding like a robot reading my book. Nice for a free version for my son to read, but definitely nothing I'd try selling to people.
I've heard some good audiobooks and some bad ones. The Harry Potter series in audiobook form is amazing. The author does different voices for each character, but never does it come across as cheesy.
My wife is very into audiobooks as well. (She crochets while listening.) And she's also said that she's listened to great books that were ruined by bad narrators. I actually considered doing it myself for a bit. It would be the cheapest route - about $200 in equipment and then a time commitment. Unfortunately, it is also the route that is most likely to result in a bad audiobook. If I ever do decide to do this, I'd rather pay someone with a good voice and a good handle on audiobook production than to make a horrible audiobook in order to save some money,
I wish I could publish my book as an audiobook. They're rising in popularity and it would be nice to be able to tap into that market. Unfortunately, audiobook publishing is prohibitively expensive. The least expensive option has you buy about $200 worth of audio gear, spend hours recording yourself reading your book, and then spend more on a sound engineer to turn that into something decent sounding. The higher priced option is to spend about $2,000 to have a professional read/record your book for you. I'd love to release my novel as an audiobook, but I just can't afford it. I'll have to stay with print and ebook for now.
Sorry, I missed the "most" in your post. I've seen too many people say "the Amish never vaccinate and don't have any autism... proof that vaccines cause autism!" Setting aside for a moment that this wouldn't be definitive proof (it could be dozens of other things that the Amish refrain from), the fact of the matter is that the Amish do vaccinate. If they do have a lower rate of Autism, it could also be from lower detection rates (fewer Amish families taking their kids to get diagnosed) versus an actual lower rate.
Exactly. Wakefield wasn't an anti-vaxxer originally. He wanted the MMR banned so his competing vaccine would rake in cash. When that didn't work and he smelled money from anti-vaxxers, he jumped on their bandwagon and started selling them snake oil.
Actually, the Amish vaccinate. It's a myth that they don't. (Just like it's a myth that there aren't any autistic Amish.)
Kids who cannot be vaccinated due to medical issues (immune system disorder) are different than kids who weren't vaccinated due to the mother reading a stupid Facebook post. The former relies on the vaccinated kids to survive (herd immunity). The latter weakens herd immunity because they could have been vaccinated.
NARF!