Germany has a pretty good track record in this regard. They first introduced legislation on subsidies for renewable energy installations in 1991 (i.e. something like 8 elections ago). With a few adjustments to respond to big changes in the market, this legislation still exists and has provided a stable base for long-term investments in renewable energy.
An all-platform messaging system already exists. It's called e-mail, and thankfully it's not owned by a single corporation. I don't see the need for a bazillion services that do nothing but duplicate the functionality of email, badly.
It may not be a physical disease that can be treated with medication, but it is a problem that shows up in increased healthcare cost. You know, one of the biggest money sinks on any government's budget. Also, you're wrong. Addiction is a disease. It's a psychological problem that can't be treated by giving someone a pill, but still a disease. Dismissing it by saying "you should just change your lifestyle" is a massive disservice to everyone who's ever had a psychological problem.
It's also an issue in which outside actors ("moneyed interests, with technology and gaming and all that. It's so addictive and so hard to compete with") wage a battle against the public interest in favor of their own bottom line. These battles are so skewed in favor of the outside actors, that individual citizens have little hope of winning them. This is no different to e.g. the EPA combating pollution.
I misremembered. On the iMac, the drive is replaceable but when you stick it in another machine it won't work because its encryption key is on the T2 chip.
Thanks to encryption, we now have the opposite problem. There's no longer any point in making the drive replaceable, because the secure enclave would flip out and brick itself if it detected a new drive. (source: a comment made here when the new Mac mini was introduced)
The loudness wars started before that, it's all the fault of radio. I worked in radio for a while in the 1990s. The national radio stations were compressed all to hell even back then, and the multiband compressors they used were just starting to become affordable for smaller stations like the one I worked for.
These were seen as desirable because of the way listeners find a radio station: they scroll through the FM band until they find a signal. The stronger the signal, the better. Quieter signals can get overlooked or skipped. Radio is also used in really crappy listening environments with lots of background noise, and stations wanted to be usable in those situations.
So stations compressed their audio, then started using compressors specially designed to use their FM radio signal to the maximum allowed (Orban Optimod). Then music producers got in on the act, optimizing their CDs for radio playback.
the findings suggest a way to take trial and error out of the search for new materials, in keeping with the movement of materials science toward a physics-driven approach. "You put in the properties you want, and the principle will tell you what material you need to synthesize," he said, noting that the concept can also be used to predict materials with superb antibacterial or other desirable properties.
If this approach turns out to work for other material properties, we're in for a whole world of new materials.
Any shrill alarmism is the result of people going "lalalalala, I can't hear you" when confronted with evidence of warming, because that evidence presents a threat to their current comfy gas-guzzling lifestyle.
Add to that a great deal of misinformation spread by people with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
In disbelief that people can be dumb enough to ignore the facts that are right in front of them, scientists and policymakers turned to hyperbole in hope of shaking people out of their stupor.
The reasons for this process have nothing to do with the quality of the evidence, and everything to do with human psychology, i.e. denial as a coping mechanism, and all of the irrational behavior it causes. Plus a certain amount of shortsightedness on the part of climate scientists (who are not psychologists, after all) in how to publish their message.
Still, there's hope. Denial is just one stage of the coping process, so don't worry. You'll grow out of it.
Call me when you figure out how to make a high-speed crash survivable
Current cars are vastly better at that than their counterparts from 1984. Airbags. Finite element analysis to inform a crash structure that uses 10 types of steel in the same monocoque, making sure a car crumples in just the right way to minimize deceleration for the occupants. ABS, ESP and dozens of other safety systems. 30 years of advances in tires. At a cost of a few hundred kg in extra weight, modern cars have made crashes survivable that were absolutely fatal in a 1984 vehicle.
solve the aquaplaning problem
ABS, ESP, vastly improved tire technology have done most of that. All that remains is a boxing glove that comes out of the dashboard to punch the driver in the face when he insists on keeping his foot down in torrential rain.
A totally unscientific 3-minute test on 2 files suggests a different origin.
When you click in the playback bar, it's almost impossible to jump a small amount. Testing in a 90-minute video, when you click right next to the playback indicator, there's a dead zone, the smallest available jump is about 2 minutes ahead. And playback hiccups when you use this method; it plays a tiny amount (on the order of 0.2 seconds), then repeats that section before playback becomes smooth. This is an interface problem: the dead zone remains the same independent of video length, so in a 30-second video I can jump back/forth by increments of a few seconds.
When you use the keyboard to navigate, it's a different story. I've got the 'very short jump' set to 3 seconds, and the 'short jump' set to 10 seconds. These work perfectly, every time. Even jumping backwards through the video works well.
you've seen this with all of our software upgrades including AirPlay 2 and HomeKit -- is that we want to make things backward compatible to those TVs
My parents bought a Philips "smart" TV. Within 6 months, the Youtube app (the only one they used) became useless because YouTube switched to a different encryption algorithm (IIRC) and we found out the TV wouldn't be updated to support this.
Still, smart functions only included to increase profit for the manufacturer? No thanks. So for my TV replacement, I'm looking at a computer monitor and an HDMI switch box with remote control. The "smart" part will be provided by a Mac mini that's under MY control. I'll have to test how well the HDMI switch will work though (given the problems caused by HDCP in non-standard use).
Like the last time I needed to make a change to MS Office: I wanted to install a Czech language pack for MS Word. This should be a few MB worth of dictionary and hyphenation info. The Office installer proceeds to remove my entire MS Office installation, redownload 500 MB and reinstall the entire fucking Office suite. IIRC it nuked all my preferences too. The icing on the cake was that it replaced the Start menu shortcuts for all Office programs with new versions in Czech, even though my system language is set to English.
Throttling wasn't causing problems, it was preventing them, i.e. random crashes when the phone tried to draw more power than the battery could supply. Apple could have handled the situation better by making the phone indicate what it's doing instead of slowing down silently, but a slow phone is far more usable than a crashed one.
That depends on your definition of "solar system". The 'end' Livescience are talking about is the heliopause, where the environment is no longer dominated by the solar wind. The gravitational influence of the Sun reaches much further than that. The Oort cloud is thought to stretch out to about 1 ly from the sun, beyond that the Sun is no longer the dominant gravitational force.
This discovery shows it's silly to use definitive statements like "end of the solar system" when objects that are clearly part of our solar system are found beyond 122 AU.
Karman did some calculations on where lift becomes irrelevant (this depends on design parameters for the wing, so a different altitude for each design), arrived at an altitude of 85 km and rounded up to 100 km.
Branson has some precedent: the USAF defined 80 km as the boundary of space, in order to be able to call their X-15 pilots astronauts.
YBaCuO high-temperature superconductors have been known for 20 years now. But MRIs still use low-temperature superconductors that require liquid helium instead.
Electric bikes automatically regulate motor power based on pedal power (for every W the cyclist produces, the motor produces n W). This level is adjustable in steps, but once set, no manual operation is necessary.
Thumb operation seems a crappy solution in comparison.
How they did it? For more than a decade starting in 1984, they really were 'the end product that others should strive to be'. The Mac OS, combined with the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines blew everything else out of the water. Added to that were lesser innovations (zero-configuration expansion cards, effortless multi-monitor desktops, daisy-chainable port for keyboards, mice etc, excellent construction, SCSI, etc) that all helped make the Mac the machine to choose when you wanted to concentrate on your work instead of learning how to use and maintain the computer.
"Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to describe the history of the computer industry for the past decade as a massive effort to keep up with Apple... (the Mac) went on to pioneer or popularize almost every innovation in personal computing."
BYTE, December 1994
In 1985 Microsoft finally came up with a desktop environment that could somewhat compete with Mac OS, although it always felt ramshackle next to Apple's finished product.
Then Apple repeated that 1984 moment with the iPod, and again the iPhone. For ordinary consumers, the 3 most important products of the entire computer industry, and more breakthroughs than the rest of the industry combined. That's how Apple got its halo.
1. Unaffordability of housing. 2. Both partners working. It's one thing to have one partner start a new job. Moving long-distance means the other partner has to find a new job as well. 3. Most jobs don't come with a long-term contract. It's hard to justify a long-distance move when you may be out of a job after 1 year.
All of these conspire to create a situation where everybody accepts the commute from Hell rather than moving closer to where they work.
Slashdot Mirror
Germany has a pretty good track record in this regard. They first introduced legislation on subsidies for renewable energy installations in 1991 (i.e. something like 8 elections ago). With a few adjustments to respond to big changes in the market, this legislation still exists and has provided a stable base for long-term investments in renewable energy.
An all-platform messaging system already exists. It's called e-mail, and thankfully it's not owned by a single corporation.
I don't see the need for a bazillion services that do nothing but duplicate the functionality of email, badly.
It may not be a physical disease that can be treated with medication, but it is a problem that shows up in increased healthcare cost. You know, one of the biggest money sinks on any government's budget.
Also, you're wrong. Addiction is a disease. It's a psychological problem that can't be treated by giving someone a pill, but still a disease.
Dismissing it by saying "you should just change your lifestyle" is a massive disservice to everyone who's ever had a psychological problem.
It's also an issue in which outside actors ("moneyed interests, with technology and gaming and all that. It's so addictive and so hard to compete with") wage a battle against the public interest in favor of their own bottom line. These battles are so skewed in favor of the outside actors, that individual citizens have little hope of winning them.
This is no different to e.g. the EPA combating pollution.
Those factors make it a public health issue.
I misremembered. On the iMac, the drive is replaceable but when you stick it in another machine it won't work because its encryption key is on the T2 chip.
Thanks to encryption, we now have the opposite problem. There's no longer any point in making the drive replaceable, because the secure enclave would flip out and brick itself if it detected a new drive. (source: a comment made here when the new Mac mini was introduced)
The loudness wars started before that, it's all the fault of radio.
I worked in radio for a while in the 1990s. The national radio stations were compressed all to hell even back then, and the multiband compressors they used were just starting to become affordable for smaller stations like the one I worked for.
These were seen as desirable because of the way listeners find a radio station: they scroll through the FM band until they find a signal. The stronger the signal, the better. Quieter signals can get overlooked or skipped. Radio is also used in really crappy listening environments with lots of background noise, and stations wanted to be usable in those situations.
So stations compressed their audio, then started using compressors specially designed to use their FM radio signal to the maximum allowed (Orban Optimod).
Then music producers got in on the act, optimizing their CDs for radio playback.
the findings suggest a way to take trial and error out of the search for new materials, in keeping with the movement of materials science toward a physics-driven approach. "You put in the properties you want, and the principle will tell you what material you need to synthesize," he said, noting that the concept can also be used to predict materials with superb antibacterial or other desirable properties.
If this approach turns out to work for other material properties, we're in for a whole world of new materials.
Any shrill alarmism is the result of people going "lalalalala, I can't hear you" when confronted with evidence of warming, because that evidence presents a threat to their current comfy gas-guzzling lifestyle.
Add to that a great deal of misinformation spread by people with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
In disbelief that people can be dumb enough to ignore the facts that are right in front of them, scientists and policymakers turned to hyperbole in hope of shaking people out of their stupor.
The reasons for this process have nothing to do with the quality of the evidence, and everything to do with human psychology, i.e. denial as a coping mechanism, and all of the irrational behavior it causes. Plus a certain amount of shortsightedness on the part of climate scientists (who are not psychologists, after all) in how to publish their message.
Still, there's hope. Denial is just one stage of the coping process, so don't worry. You'll grow out of it.
That's not whoring, it's coercion. Also a crime.
Call me when you figure out how to make a high-speed crash survivable
Current cars are vastly better at that than their counterparts from 1984. Airbags. Finite element analysis to inform a crash structure that uses 10 types of steel in the same monocoque, making sure a car crumples in just the right way to minimize deceleration for the occupants. ABS, ESP and dozens of other safety systems. 30 years of advances in tires.
At a cost of a few hundred kg in extra weight, modern cars have made crashes survivable that were absolutely fatal in a 1984 vehicle.
solve the aquaplaning problem
ABS, ESP, vastly improved tire technology have done most of that. All that remains is a boxing glove that comes out of the dashboard to punch the driver in the face when he insists on keeping his foot down in torrential rain.
It's not in the menus but there's a shortcut for 'Next Frame'.
A totally unscientific 3-minute test on 2 files suggests a different origin.
When you click in the playback bar, it's almost impossible to jump a small amount. Testing in a 90-minute video, when you click right next to the playback indicator, there's a dead zone, the smallest available jump is about 2 minutes ahead. And playback hiccups when you use this method; it plays a tiny amount (on the order of 0.2 seconds), then repeats that section before playback becomes smooth.
This is an interface problem: the dead zone remains the same independent of video length, so in a 30-second video I can jump back/forth by increments of a few seconds.
When you use the keyboard to navigate, it's a different story. I've got the 'very short jump' set to 3 seconds, and the 'short jump' set to 10 seconds. These work perfectly, every time. Even jumping backwards through the video works well.
you've seen this with all of our software upgrades including AirPlay 2 and HomeKit -- is that we want to make things backward compatible to those TVs
My parents bought a Philips "smart" TV. Within 6 months, the Youtube app (the only one they used) became useless because YouTube switched to a different encryption algorithm (IIRC) and we found out the TV wouldn't be updated to support this.
Still, smart functions only included to increase profit for the manufacturer? No thanks. So for my TV replacement, I'm looking at a computer monitor and an HDMI switch box with remote control. The "smart" part will be provided by a Mac mini that's under MY control. I'll have to test how well the HDMI switch will work though (given the problems caused by HDCP in non-standard use).
I don't know if I'd characterize Solidworks as anything resembling 'low-end'. Maybe compared to CATIA...
Like the last time I needed to make a change to MS Office: I wanted to install a Czech language pack for MS Word. This should be a few MB worth of dictionary and hyphenation info. The Office installer proceeds to remove my entire MS Office installation, redownload 500 MB and reinstall the entire fucking Office suite. IIRC it nuked all my preferences too.
The icing on the cake was that it replaced the Start menu shortcuts for all Office programs with new versions in Czech, even though my system language is set to English.
Throttling wasn't causing problems, it was preventing them, i.e. random crashes when the phone tried to draw more power than the battery could supply. Apple could have handled the situation better by making the phone indicate what it's doing instead of slowing down silently, but a slow phone is far more usable than a crashed one.
Dockable palettes or some other way to make sure they stop overlapping my artwork. Esp. the color palette is bloody annoying.
That depends on your definition of "solar system". The 'end' Livescience are talking about is the heliopause, where the environment is no longer dominated by the solar wind. The gravitational influence of the Sun reaches much further than that. The Oort cloud is thought to stretch out to about 1 ly from the sun, beyond that the Sun is no longer the dominant gravitational force.
This discovery shows it's silly to use definitive statements like "end of the solar system" when objects that are clearly part of our solar system are found beyond 122 AU.
Karman did some calculations on where lift becomes irrelevant (this depends on design parameters for the wing, so a different altitude for each design), arrived at an altitude of 85 km and rounded up to 100 km.
Branson has some precedent: the USAF defined 80 km as the boundary of space, in order to be able to call their X-15 pilots astronauts.
YBaCuO high-temperature superconductors have been known for 20 years now. But MRIs still use low-temperature superconductors that require liquid helium instead.
Hell no. Carpet is essential to reduce noise levels. Concrete is also cold and unpleasant to walk on.
Completely agree. Tagged this story "nomorebitcoinstories".
Electric bikes automatically regulate motor power based on pedal power (for every W the cyclist produces, the motor produces n W). This level is adjustable in steps, but once set, no manual operation is necessary.
Thumb operation seems a crappy solution in comparison.
How they did it? For more than a decade starting in 1984, they really were 'the end product that others should strive to be'. The Mac OS, combined with the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines blew everything else out of the water.
Added to that were lesser innovations (zero-configuration expansion cards, effortless multi-monitor desktops, daisy-chainable port for keyboards, mice etc, excellent construction, SCSI, etc) that all helped make the Mac the machine to choose when you wanted to concentrate on your work instead of learning how to use and maintain the computer.
"Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to describe the history of the computer industry for the past decade as a massive effort to keep up with Apple... (the Mac) went on to pioneer or popularize almost every innovation in personal computing."
BYTE, December 1994
In 1985 Microsoft finally came up with a desktop environment that could somewhat compete with Mac OS, although it always felt ramshackle next to Apple's finished product.
Then Apple repeated that 1984 moment with the iPod, and again the iPhone. For ordinary consumers, the 3 most important products of the entire computer industry, and more breakthroughs than the rest of the industry combined. That's how Apple got its halo.
1. Unaffordability of housing.
2. Both partners working. It's one thing to have one partner start a new job. Moving long-distance means the other partner has to find a new job as well.
3. Most jobs don't come with a long-term contract. It's hard to justify a long-distance move when you may be out of a job after 1 year.
All of these conspire to create a situation where everybody accepts the commute from Hell rather than moving closer to where they work.