The new editors are much more... "active" about using slashdot as a blog, instead of approving user submissions. Of the 15 front page stories right now, only 7 are user submissions. The rest were written by various editors or their bosses (or their sponsors).
Any AI designed to act ethically has a limited set of options available to it relative to an AI designed to act unethically (or rather, not designed to take ethics into account). The ethical AI will just be killed/taken over by the unethical AI. That's how it is for people. The only reason ethical societies manage to exist is because ethical people outnumber unethical people, and are willing to band together and temporarily put aside their ethical code long enough to fight and defeat unethical people. (e.g. Imprisoning innocents is considered inhumane, but we have no problem imprisoning convicted criminals.)
I suspect the solution here isn't to design an AI to act ethically, but to design it to act as the AI or person it's dealing with acts. Basically the tit for tat strategy as a solution to the Prisoner's Dilemma. That gives it enough leeway to protect itself, while also creating an incentive for other AIs / people to act ethically.
My problem with it is that they reported the buggy results instead of the actual ones that a normal non-developer would see
So by your reasoning, if a car manufacturer accidentally made a bug which caused the engine to cheat on diesel emissions tests, it's actually the EPA's fault for not designing their test to more accurately mimic how people use their cars in real life?
Everyone seems to be trying to spin this for or against Apple / Consumer Reports. The no-spin version is that CR was using an industry-accepted practice to simulate web browser usage in a repeatable manner necessary for accurate testing. Apple accidentally created a bug which could cause excessive battery drain during these simulations (we know it's a new bug because previous CR tests didn't have any problems). The CR test occasionally triggered the bug. They and Apple worked together to track down the bug. Apple fixed it. CR is re-testing now. End of story. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Are you kidding? We had PDAs long before smartphones. They weren't klunky, and the user experience wasn't crappy. By the early 2000s, it was obvious PDAs were going to converge with phones (well, obvious to everyone except Microsoft, who completely missed the boat despite having conquered PalmOS as the PDA OS of choice). The only question was if PDAs would pick up phone features, or if phones would pick up PDA features. RIM (Blackberry) was the first company to really combine these two effectively, which is why they took an early lead in the smartphone market.
The two innovations the iPhone brought were
(1) a completely touchscreen interface. Given that LG actually did this before the iPhone, I don't really count this as a true Apple innovation. The Prada is evidence that the smartphone market was already heading in this direction before the iPhone, and our smartphones would still be touchscreen phones today even if the iPhone had never existed.
(2) an integrated app marketplace for loading third party apps onto the device. Early PDAs (like the Palm Pilot) had had the ability to run third party apps. But you had to side-load them by first downloading them onto your computer, then transfer them from the computer to the PDA. That was a klunky process. The App Store neatly streamlined that process (in the same way that iTunes streamlined getting music onto your MP3 player, leading to the success of the iPod). This was a true innovation which I give Apple full credit for - it turned your smartphone from an accessory of your personal computer, into a general purpose computer in its own right.
Since Honeycomb, Google has insisted on Android supporting on-screen navigation buttons (home, back, app list) instead of using physical buttons. I've noticed that when an app is displaying 16:9 content, these buttons have to be overlaid on top, obscuring part of the content.
18:9 would allow 16:9 content to be displayed full-size with these buttons placed to the side, no overlay. Calling it 18:9 makes it obvious the screen is slightly wider than 16:9. If you call it 2:1, that may not be obvious to people who don't know off the top of their head that 16:9 is a 1.78 aspect ratio.
If it costs more and a dentist tries to use only the new fillings so he can make more profit, patients will simply go to a different cheaper dentist who uses the old fillings.
If it costs less and a dentist tries to use only the old fillings so he can preserve his profit, people will simply go to a different cheaper dentist who uses the new fillings.
Either way, the dentist who tries to take the route with larger profit margin will lose customers and probably go broke. And people will be able to get fillings for cheaper. That's how competition works in the free market. The only way a dentist would be able to thwart this is if he (or his dental group) did like 80%+ of the fillings in the country.
No, the interesting thing will be people using this to modify their teeth. Y'know, the wannabe vampires or furries who want longer canines, or all their front teeth to be pointed.
[Response 2: Some electricity is coal-generated! As a result, in all jurisdictions, this car is more polluting than a 1973 VW Microbus!]
It's actually worse than this. You can't look at electricity consumption overall. You have to look at the marginal increase in electricity production in response to adding a marginal increase in consumption (the EV). In nearly all locations, this added increase in consumption is met by electricity generated from burning coal or natural gas. So EVs are actually almost entirely fossil fuel powered.
The only way an EV can be powered by renewables is if you added the renewable power generation specifically because of the increased demand due to EVs. That is, if the EVs hadn't increased demand, you wouldn't have built those renewable plants. Since that's almost never true* (those renewable plants would've been built anyway to replace fossil fuel plants), EVs are powered almost entirely by existing plants which increase their output in response to the increase in demand - coal and natural gas plants.
If you don't believe that verbal logic, here's the math. Say a city generates 100 MWh from coal/gas and 100 MWh from renewables every month, for 200 MWh combined. Consumption is also 200 MWh. Now say you buy an EV which uses 300 kWh each month. Demand is now 200.3 MWh. The city has to increase generation to 200.3 MWh to match demand. It can't increase generation from renewables since those are fixed amounts based on how much the sun shines, the wind blows, and rain falls. So it increases generation by burning more coal and gas. So all of the 300 kWh the EV uses is generated from fossil fuels.
"But my home has solar panels!" Ok, so the city generates 199.7 MWh, your solar panels generate 0.3 MWh. Total consumption of the city is 200 MWh. You buy the EV which which consumes 0.3 MWh. Consumption is now 200.3 MWh, and the city has to burn a little more coal or gas to generate 200.3 MWh. And your EV is powered by fossil fuels again.
* The lone exception I've seen is Tesla buying SolarCity, to encourage buyers of Tesla vehicles to also get rooftop solar panels installed. In that case, the PV panels would not have been installed if the Tesla wasn't bought, so those Telsas are in fact being (partially) powered by solar.
The deal is the same as it has always been. It's unlimited, but after the original contract period expires it switches to a month-to-month plan. At which point either party of the contract is free to cancel it for any reason at the end of the month. Verizon was, up til now, doing these people a favor by allowing them to continue under the terms of the old plan, even though they no longer offered that plan.
If they let you have unlimited data during the time you had the plan, then they've fulfilled their contractual obligation. There is nothing in the contract which says they have to allow you to stay on that plan in perpetuity. And neither should there be. Otherwise your landlord could force you to continue to pay rent as long as he wanted, even if you wanted to move out.
Summary and TFA say this is for rounds used for training. The military is pragmatic enough that they'll use more effective conventional rounds when they actually have to kill people and break things for real.
I always did wonder, when seeing those dramatic clips of special forces teams training by shooting pop-up plywood terrorists in a mock urban environment, who's the poor slob who has to go through and sweep up all the spent shell casings and bullet fragments to prep the place for the next training session.
There are good reasons to give some devices connectivity. e.g. A washer and dryer which buzz your phone when their cycles are done and you can put in the next load.
I think what's going to have to be happen though is for router firewalls to be redesigned to block outgoing connections from certain IP addresses on your LAN. That will allow communication within your home, but won't allow devices to phone home like Windows 10 does. You can kinda do it now with a hosts file block, but it's kludgy and can be bypassed if the device uses raw IP addresses.
The FCC opened up the 57-64 GHz range for unlicensed use. These frequencies are right around the resonance frequency of O2 so suffer severe attenuation. Range is expected to be about 30 feet. Devices supporting this frequency are expected to roll out later this year. In addition to the high attenuation, the higher bandwidth (about 600 Mbps to 1.2 Gbps of real transfer speed) means devices won't be transmitting on it as long as they do at 2.4 or even 5 GHz, resulting in much less interference. Mhe beam pattern of those little whip antennas on most routers is omnidirectional in the horizontal axis - their vertical range is limited. And most of the technology uses beam-forming as well, meaning even less interference (highest signal strength is only in one direction).
They're also opening up the 64-71 GHz band for unlicensed use in the future. So there's going to be plenty of short-range bandwidth for devices to use. The bigger question is going to be should these devices be interconnected. I think it's stupid to add WiFi to a refrigerator, toilet, garage door opener (makes some sense for a washer, dryer, and window blinds). But congestion isn't going to be a problem unless you insist on using 2.4 GHz.
I'll add that every C/C++ IDE I've used has really good built-in documentation and search features. I've rarely felt the need to google something when programming in C/C++.
OTOH when I was writing stuff in Perl or PHP, I was googling stuff constantly because the documentation is online and the sites' search feature sucks.
A better way to analyze the cost is to compare against the value of electricity generated. Here's a graph of nuclear power generation over the last 45 years. Generation has been about 2300 TWh per year for the last 20 years. The 25 years before that ramped up roughly as a triangle, so call it 2200/2 = 1100 TWh per year average.
This gives us a total of 73,500 TWh generated by nuclear power over the last 45 years. 20*2300 + 25*(2200/2) = 73500.
Using a global average electricity price of $0.20 per kWh, this is $14.7 trillion dollars worth of electricity generated by nuclear over the last 45 years.
Chernoby cleanup cost $235 billion, Fukushima was around $200 billion. Three Mile Island was about $1 billion. These are the only major commercial nuclear accidents in history, and their total cost is $436 billion.
$436 billion / $14.7 trillion = 0.02966. Or about 3%.
So the cleanup costs for the nuclear accidents is about 3% of the price of the electricity nuclear generates. Or 0.6 cents per kWh.
Doesn't seem so expensive when you put it in proper perspective, does it? For even more perspective, compare to the subsidies for different power sources:
Geothermal's subsidy costs about twice as much (1.25 cents/kWh).
Wind's subsidy is nearly 9x more expensive (5.25 cents/kWh).
Solar's subsidy is 161x more expensive than nuclear's cleanup costs (96.8 cents/kWh).
I see the same thing among (South) Koreans. They believe in weird things like fan death. It's basically gossip (or "fake news" as the media has started calling it) which has reached critical mass within the entire population - it's repeated enough that people believe it to be true because "everyone else" thinks it's true. Most populations have enough churn from neighbors that they get enough new people who haven't been exposed to the original gossip. These people simply don't know they're supposed to conform and when they express an outside opinion which differs from accepted belief, it provides enough basis for people to begin to question the gossip, and which point the gossip story quickly unravels.
But if the population is geographically isolated, sometimes they don't get enough outside opinions to break this self-propagating cycle. Chile has this isolation in the form of the Andes mountain range along its eastern border, and the Pacific ocean on the west. In South Korea's case, it's because the country is at the end of a peninsula with the most reclusive nation on earth as their only connected border. Until the last couple decades, churn from Japan (the other nearest neighbor) was limited due to lingering animosity over the colonial period during WWII. Speaking of which, Japan being a large island nation has it too. They come up with cute things like people's personalities being tied to blood type.
Also worth noting that the Chernobyl reactor had a positive void coefficient. Basically, the more cooling water evaporated, the greater the rate of nuclear reaction and the greater the heat generation. This is an inherently unstable design since the reactor overheating increases the heat generation, making the problem worse. If the coolant starts to evaporate, the feedback loop with more heat being generated causes a steam explosion, which why Chernobyl blew up.
Reactors outside the Soviet Union never used this design for this exact reason. Western reactors are all designed with negative void coefficients. If the coolant water becomes hot enough to bubble into steam, that slows down the nuclear reaction, decreasing the amount of heat generated. If the coolant starts to evaporate, worst case you get a meltdown due to loss of coolant. But you don't get feedback loop which causes a steam explosion.
Confirmation? We don't need no stinking confirmation.
I got tired of playing whack-a-mole with Amazon's settings trying to disable one-click ordering (there isn't one universal setting to turn it off - the different stores have their own independent settings). I ended up just creating a dummy Amazon account with no credit card info attached, and linked my phone and tablet apps which require an Amazon login to that account instead of my regular Amazon account. Sounds like that may be the best way to deal with the problem on the Echo as well.
I think this just reminds you that Kodak missed the boat a long time ago,
Kodak didn't miss the boat. They made the boat. They invented the digital camera in 1975. They were the pioneer of digital sensor technology. In the 1990s they made the first series of digital backs which fit into the film slot of existing professional SLRs (with a hard drive for storing the pictures). The damn things cost $20,000, but were immensely popular with the press who often had reporters shooting in remote locations where it was impractical to develop film. The reason Kodak has managed to stick around this long is because they owned the vast majority of early patents on digital photography. So they were kept afloat by a huge amount of royalties.
They knew exactly where the future lay. How they screwed up is that they didn't have a marketable technology once film was gone. Fuji at least had the foresight to branch out into making cameras (decent cameras, not the cheap consumer crap Kodak churned out). So when Fuji's film revenue dried up, they had camera revenue to fall back on. Film cameras and digital cameras aren't all that different to make. Kodak OTOH only concentrated on the low-end consumer camera market (e.g. disposable cameras). Digital cameras made this camera market segment obsolete right along with film, leaving Kodak with no marketable consumer products. They were the leader in sensor technology, but didn't own any fabs. That meant they knew what to make, but they didn't know how to make it. So Sony, who had a lot of experience making electronics, ended up dominating the digital sensor market (most camera phones and point and shoot digicams use Sony sensors).
Your front windshield is already tempered. This provides much more resistance to chipping and breaking than the glass formulation. Basically, the glass is cooled in a way that the exterior is always in compression (glass is really, really strong in compression). This means when a rock hits your windshield, the force it imparts has to first overcome the glass' innate compression, before it can start to create tensile stresses and have a chance to chip or shatter the glass.
Smarter Every Day has a pretty good explanation of how tempering strengthens the glass. In the case of Price Rupert's drops, there's a weak point in the tail, but the exterior is strong enough to shatter lead bullets. For a plate windshield glass, the weak points are all internal and it's most vulnerable to impacts inwards from the edges.
The U.S. people didn't prefer Clinton - she only got 48% of the popular vote. A plurality, not a majority. If you break down the popular vote by political spectrum:
Liberal canddiates (Clinton, Sanders, Stein, Riva) got 49.24% of the vote.
Conservative candidates (Trump, Kasich, Johnson, McMullin, Castle) got 49.91% of the vote.
The remaining 0.85% was split among other candidates.
So a more fair assessment of the popular vote tally would be that the U.S. people preferred a conservative candidate.
trucks and buses tested in Germany and Finland emitted about 210mg NOx per kilometer driven, less than half the 500mg/km produced by diesel cars that meet the highest "Euro 6" emission standards.
And if you're curious, here's how much the cheating 2.0L VW diesels were emitting. If the Euro 6 standard is 500 mg/km (0.310 g/mi), it looks like the 2015 VWs were already in compliance, and the 2013-2014 VWs were just barely out of compliance.
The definition of "employee" varies by country. But in the U.S., the distinction is based more or less on who dictates how the work is done. If you give a person a task to complete, and the person is free to complete the task when and how they want (subject to a deadline and requirements), then they are a contractor. But if you dictate how or when the person has to work, then they are an employee.
So it's not just about dictating work hours. A good analogue is workers from a temp agency. The temp agency matches up temporary jobs with temporary workers, but the workers are considered employees of the temp agency. If they tried to act like Craigslist or eBay - simply providing a place for people looking for temp work and people looking to hire temp workers to meet up, and took a cut of the payment - they'd probably be classified as contractors. But when you start to meddle with the individual transactions (creating uniform pricing, dictating standards for worker behavior, etc) you're starting to encroach on employee territory.
greenhouses work because glass (or plastic sheeting) does not well transmit infrared radiative energy. IE, its an insulator that blocks the transmission of radiative heating, or radiative transfer. visible and ultraviolet light passes through the glass and strikes the surface of the objects inside, including the molecules of air. some of this energy is then re-radiated as infrared light energy, ie, heat. Because the glass blocks the infrared from exiting the structure, the system becomes unbalanced.
In thermodynamics terms, the greenhouse is an enclosed system with 1 input and no output.
And therefore because Ei > Eo, the total energy of the system must increase, and this results in increased temperature inside.
This is the oversimplified explanation of climate change which I have problems with. Unfortunately, it is the argument parroted by nearly all the armchair climatologists as the reason why global warming is real and we must do something about it Right Now.
From a thermodynamics standpoint, the rate of heat radiated by a black body is proportional to the fourth power of its temperature. The Ei > Eo state is a transitory state - it is only temporary. The temperature increases causes Eo to (quickly) increase, until Eo is large enough to match Ei.. So we end up with Ei = Eo again, but at a new, higher T. In other words, the system stabilizes at a new, higher temperature. This is why glass greenhouses don't continue to increase in temperature until the inside is hot enough to melt the glass. T^4 is a huge number. It only takes a small temperature increase to offset a large Ei increase (actually Pi would be more accurate - the rate of energy coming in, or power coming in).
Unstable "runaway" systems are extremely rare in nature. The reason is simple - anything that's unstable tends to, over billions of years, destroy itself. So the overwhelming majority of things remaining in the universe are stable systems. There is no "delicate balance" of nature. There is no "runaway" greenhouse effect - all we're doing is shifting the equilibrium point. We know this to be true because global CO2 concentrations and temperatures have been higher in the past than they are today, and the Earth did not self-destruct - it is still around with life intact.
Now, from all I've read, that new equilibrium temperature point is high enough to cause massive problems for human civilization if we don't address it. But the alarming layman's explanation of the greenhouse effect that you've given is just as wrong and misleading as the climate change deniers' explanations.
Either a) 1800 people are about to be unemployed, or more likely b) Many of these databases aren't critical in the first place.
There's a third possibility: c) database is (semi)critical, but the person/manager who made/approved it was too cheap to pay a real database administrator to help with the original setup and configuration.
Most engineering professions where lives or large dollar amounts are at risk (civil engineering, structural engineering, many forms of mechanical engineering) require the person designing the system to have some sort of outside certification that s/he knows what s/he is doing. But software is still the Wild West where you can get your 13 year old nephew to set up that database for you.
Slashdot Mirror
The new editors are much more... "active" about using slashdot as a blog, instead of approving user submissions. Of the 15 front page stories right now, only 7 are user submissions. The rest were written by various editors or their bosses (or their sponsors).
Any AI designed to act ethically has a limited set of options available to it relative to an AI designed to act unethically (or rather, not designed to take ethics into account). The ethical AI will just be killed/taken over by the unethical AI. That's how it is for people. The only reason ethical societies manage to exist is because ethical people outnumber unethical people, and are willing to band together and temporarily put aside their ethical code long enough to fight and defeat unethical people. (e.g. Imprisoning innocents is considered inhumane, but we have no problem imprisoning convicted criminals.)
I suspect the solution here isn't to design an AI to act ethically, but to design it to act as the AI or person it's dealing with acts. Basically the tit for tat strategy as a solution to the Prisoner's Dilemma. That gives it enough leeway to protect itself, while also creating an incentive for other AIs / people to act ethically.
So by your reasoning, if a car manufacturer accidentally made a bug which caused the engine to cheat on diesel emissions tests, it's actually the EPA's fault for not designing their test to more accurately mimic how people use their cars in real life?
Everyone seems to be trying to spin this for or against Apple / Consumer Reports. The no-spin version is that CR was using an industry-accepted practice to simulate web browser usage in a repeatable manner necessary for accurate testing. Apple accidentally created a bug which could cause excessive battery drain during these simulations (we know it's a new bug because previous CR tests didn't have any problems). The CR test occasionally triggered the bug. They and Apple worked together to track down the bug. Apple fixed it. CR is re-testing now. End of story. Nothing to see here. Move along.
The two innovations the iPhone brought were
Since Honeycomb, Google has insisted on Android supporting on-screen navigation buttons (home, back, app list) instead of using physical buttons. I've noticed that when an app is displaying 16:9 content, these buttons have to be overlaid on top, obscuring part of the content.
18:9 would allow 16:9 content to be displayed full-size with these buttons placed to the side, no overlay. Calling it 18:9 makes it obvious the screen is slightly wider than 16:9. If you call it 2:1, that may not be obvious to people who don't know off the top of their head that 16:9 is a 1.78 aspect ratio.
If it costs more and a dentist tries to use only the new fillings so he can make more profit, patients will simply go to a different cheaper dentist who uses the old fillings.
If it costs less and a dentist tries to use only the old fillings so he can preserve his profit, people will simply go to a different cheaper dentist who uses the new fillings.
Either way, the dentist who tries to take the route with larger profit margin will lose customers and probably go broke. And people will be able to get fillings for cheaper. That's how competition works in the free market. The only way a dentist would be able to thwart this is if he (or his dental group) did like 80%+ of the fillings in the country.
No, the interesting thing will be people using this to modify their teeth. Y'know, the wannabe vampires or furries who want longer canines, or all their front teeth to be pointed.
The most efficient EV (Hyundai Ioniq) uses about 25 kWh per 100 miles. 310 miles range is them 77.5 kWh.
77.5 kWh / 20 minutes = 232.5 kW, or enough to power about 200 homes
77.5 kWh / (480 Volts * 20 minutes) = 484.4 Amps
And that's assuming 100% charging efficiency (not factoring in heat losses during charging).
It's actually worse than this. You can't look at electricity consumption overall. You have to look at the marginal increase in electricity production in response to adding a marginal increase in consumption (the EV). In nearly all locations, this added increase in consumption is met by electricity generated from burning coal or natural gas. So EVs are actually almost entirely fossil fuel powered.
The only way an EV can be powered by renewables is if you added the renewable power generation specifically because of the increased demand due to EVs. That is, if the EVs hadn't increased demand, you wouldn't have built those renewable plants. Since that's almost never true* (those renewable plants would've been built anyway to replace fossil fuel plants), EVs are powered almost entirely by existing plants which increase their output in response to the increase in demand - coal and natural gas plants.
If you don't believe that verbal logic, here's the math. Say a city generates 100 MWh from coal/gas and 100 MWh from renewables every month, for 200 MWh combined. Consumption is also 200 MWh. Now say you buy an EV which uses 300 kWh each month. Demand is now 200.3 MWh. The city has to increase generation to 200.3 MWh to match demand. It can't increase generation from renewables since those are fixed amounts based on how much the sun shines, the wind blows, and rain falls. So it increases generation by burning more coal and gas. So all of the 300 kWh the EV uses is generated from fossil fuels.
"But my home has solar panels!" Ok, so the city generates 199.7 MWh, your solar panels generate 0.3 MWh. Total consumption of the city is 200 MWh. You buy the EV which which consumes 0.3 MWh. Consumption is now 200.3 MWh, and the city has to burn a little more coal or gas to generate 200.3 MWh. And your EV is powered by fossil fuels again.
* The lone exception I've seen is Tesla buying SolarCity, to encourage buyers of Tesla vehicles to also get rooftop solar panels installed. In that case, the PV panels would not have been installed if the Tesla wasn't bought, so those Telsas are in fact being (partially) powered by solar.
The deal is the same as it has always been. It's unlimited, but after the original contract period expires it switches to a month-to-month plan. At which point either party of the contract is free to cancel it for any reason at the end of the month. Verizon was, up til now, doing these people a favor by allowing them to continue under the terms of the old plan, even though they no longer offered that plan.
If they let you have unlimited data during the time you had the plan, then they've fulfilled their contractual obligation. There is nothing in the contract which says they have to allow you to stay on that plan in perpetuity. And neither should there be. Otherwise your landlord could force you to continue to pay rent as long as he wanted, even if you wanted to move out.
Summary and TFA say this is for rounds used for training. The military is pragmatic enough that they'll use more effective conventional rounds when they actually have to kill people and break things for real.
I always did wonder, when seeing those dramatic clips of special forces teams training by shooting pop-up plywood terrorists in a mock urban environment, who's the poor slob who has to go through and sweep up all the spent shell casings and bullet fragments to prep the place for the next training session.
There are good reasons to give some devices connectivity. e.g. A washer and dryer which buzz your phone when their cycles are done and you can put in the next load.
I think what's going to have to be happen though is for router firewalls to be redesigned to block outgoing connections from certain IP addresses on your LAN. That will allow communication within your home, but won't allow devices to phone home like Windows 10 does. You can kinda do it now with a hosts file block, but it's kludgy and can be bypassed if the device uses raw IP addresses.
The FCC opened up the 57-64 GHz range for unlicensed use. These frequencies are right around the resonance frequency of O2 so suffer severe attenuation. Range is expected to be about 30 feet. Devices supporting this frequency are expected to roll out later this year. In addition to the high attenuation, the higher bandwidth (about 600 Mbps to 1.2 Gbps of real transfer speed) means devices won't be transmitting on it as long as they do at 2.4 or even 5 GHz, resulting in much less interference. Mhe beam pattern of those little whip antennas on most routers is omnidirectional in the horizontal axis - their vertical range is limited. And most of the technology uses beam-forming as well, meaning even less interference (highest signal strength is only in one direction).
They're also opening up the 64-71 GHz band for unlicensed use in the future. So there's going to be plenty of short-range bandwidth for devices to use. The bigger question is going to be should these devices be interconnected. I think it's stupid to add WiFi to a refrigerator, toilet, garage door opener (makes some sense for a washer, dryer, and window blinds). But congestion isn't going to be a problem unless you insist on using 2.4 GHz.
I'll add that every C/C++ IDE I've used has really good built-in documentation and search features. I've rarely felt the need to google something when programming in C/C++.
OTOH when I was writing stuff in Perl or PHP, I was googling stuff constantly because the documentation is online and the sites' search feature sucks.
This gives us a total of 73,500 TWh generated by nuclear power over the last 45 years. 20*2300 + 25*(2200/2) = 73500.
Using a global average electricity price of $0.20 per kWh, this is $14.7 trillion dollars worth of electricity generated by nuclear over the last 45 years.
Chernoby cleanup cost $235 billion, Fukushima was around $200 billion. Three Mile Island was about $1 billion. These are the only major commercial nuclear accidents in history, and their total cost is $436 billion.
$436 billion / $14.7 trillion = 0.02966. Or about 3%.
So the cleanup costs for the nuclear accidents is about 3% of the price of the electricity nuclear generates. Or 0.6 cents per kWh.
Doesn't seem so expensive when you put it in proper perspective, does it? For even more perspective, compare to the subsidies for different power sources:
I see the same thing among (South) Koreans. They believe in weird things like fan death. It's basically gossip (or "fake news" as the media has started calling it) which has reached critical mass within the entire population - it's repeated enough that people believe it to be true because "everyone else" thinks it's true. Most populations have enough churn from neighbors that they get enough new people who haven't been exposed to the original gossip. These people simply don't know they're supposed to conform and when they express an outside opinion which differs from accepted belief, it provides enough basis for people to begin to question the gossip, and which point the gossip story quickly unravels.
But if the population is geographically isolated, sometimes they don't get enough outside opinions to break this self-propagating cycle. Chile has this isolation in the form of the Andes mountain range along its eastern border, and the Pacific ocean on the west. In South Korea's case, it's because the country is at the end of a peninsula with the most reclusive nation on earth as their only connected border. Until the last couple decades, churn from Japan (the other nearest neighbor) was limited due to lingering animosity over the colonial period during WWII. Speaking of which, Japan being a large island nation has it too. They come up with cute things like people's personalities being tied to blood type.
It's worth pointing out that these beliefs are not always supernatural. It can happen with anything which is difficult or impossible to disprove, especially when it's advocated by seeming eyewitness testimony or people wanting it to be true. Coercion of children to provide false testimony and seemingly incompetent disabled people being secretly competent are good examples.
Also worth noting that the Chernobyl reactor had a positive void coefficient. Basically, the more cooling water evaporated, the greater the rate of nuclear reaction and the greater the heat generation. This is an inherently unstable design since the reactor overheating increases the heat generation, making the problem worse. If the coolant starts to evaporate, the feedback loop with more heat being generated causes a steam explosion, which why Chernobyl blew up.
Reactors outside the Soviet Union never used this design for this exact reason. Western reactors are all designed with negative void coefficients. If the coolant water becomes hot enough to bubble into steam, that slows down the nuclear reaction, decreasing the amount of heat generated. If the coolant starts to evaporate, worst case you get a meltdown due to loss of coolant. But you don't get feedback loop which causes a steam explosion.
Confirmation? We don't need no stinking confirmation.
I got tired of playing whack-a-mole with Amazon's settings trying to disable one-click ordering (there isn't one universal setting to turn it off - the different stores have their own independent settings). I ended up just creating a dummy Amazon account with no credit card info attached, and linked my phone and tablet apps which require an Amazon login to that account instead of my regular Amazon account. Sounds like that may be the best way to deal with the problem on the Echo as well.
Kodak didn't miss the boat. They made the boat. They invented the digital camera in 1975. They were the pioneer of digital sensor technology. In the 1990s they made the first series of digital backs which fit into the film slot of existing professional SLRs (with a hard drive for storing the pictures). The damn things cost $20,000, but were immensely popular with the press who often had reporters shooting in remote locations where it was impractical to develop film. The reason Kodak has managed to stick around this long is because they owned the vast majority of early patents on digital photography. So they were kept afloat by a huge amount of royalties.
They knew exactly where the future lay. How they screwed up is that they didn't have a marketable technology once film was gone. Fuji at least had the foresight to branch out into making cameras (decent cameras, not the cheap consumer crap Kodak churned out). So when Fuji's film revenue dried up, they had camera revenue to fall back on. Film cameras and digital cameras aren't all that different to make. Kodak OTOH only concentrated on the low-end consumer camera market (e.g. disposable cameras). Digital cameras made this camera market segment obsolete right along with film, leaving Kodak with no marketable consumer products. They were the leader in sensor technology, but didn't own any fabs. That meant they knew what to make, but they didn't know how to make it. So Sony, who had a lot of experience making electronics, ended up dominating the digital sensor market (most camera phones and point and shoot digicams use Sony sensors).
Your front windshield is already tempered. This provides much more resistance to chipping and breaking than the glass formulation. Basically, the glass is cooled in a way that the exterior is always in compression (glass is really, really strong in compression). This means when a rock hits your windshield, the force it imparts has to first overcome the glass' innate compression, before it can start to create tensile stresses and have a chance to chip or shatter the glass.
Smarter Every Day has a pretty good explanation of how tempering strengthens the glass. In the case of Price Rupert's drops, there's a weak point in the tail, but the exterior is strong enough to shatter lead bullets. For a plate windshield glass, the weak points are all internal and it's most vulnerable to impacts inwards from the edges.
So a more fair assessment of the popular vote tally would be that the U.S. people preferred a conservative candidate.
The current standard for diesel passenger vehicles in CARB states (California Air Resources Board, which sets the limit for California and 16 other states) is 0.05 grams/mi, which is 80 mg/km.
And if you're curious, here's how much the cheating 2.0L VW diesels were emitting. If the Euro 6 standard is 500 mg/km (0.310 g/mi), it looks like the 2015 VWs were already in compliance, and the 2013-2014 VWs were just barely out of compliance.
The definition of "employee" varies by country. But in the U.S., the distinction is based more or less on who dictates how the work is done. If you give a person a task to complete, and the person is free to complete the task when and how they want (subject to a deadline and requirements), then they are a contractor. But if you dictate how or when the person has to work, then they are an employee.
So it's not just about dictating work hours. A good analogue is workers from a temp agency. The temp agency matches up temporary jobs with temporary workers, but the workers are considered employees of the temp agency. If they tried to act like Craigslist or eBay - simply providing a place for people looking for temp work and people looking to hire temp workers to meet up, and took a cut of the payment - they'd probably be classified as contractors. But when you start to meddle with the individual transactions (creating uniform pricing, dictating standards for worker behavior, etc) you're starting to encroach on employee territory.
This is the oversimplified explanation of climate change which I have problems with. Unfortunately, it is the argument parroted by nearly all the armchair climatologists as the reason why global warming is real and we must do something about it Right Now.
From a thermodynamics standpoint, the rate of heat radiated by a black body is proportional to the fourth power of its temperature. The Ei > Eo state is a transitory state - it is only temporary. The temperature increases causes Eo to (quickly) increase, until Eo is large enough to match Ei.. So we end up with Ei = Eo again, but at a new, higher T. In other words, the system stabilizes at a new, higher temperature. This is why glass greenhouses don't continue to increase in temperature until the inside is hot enough to melt the glass. T^4 is a huge number. It only takes a small temperature increase to offset a large Ei increase (actually Pi would be more accurate - the rate of energy coming in, or power coming in).
Unstable "runaway" systems are extremely rare in nature. The reason is simple - anything that's unstable tends to, over billions of years, destroy itself. So the overwhelming majority of things remaining in the universe are stable systems. There is no "delicate balance" of nature. There is no "runaway" greenhouse effect - all we're doing is shifting the equilibrium point. We know this to be true because global CO2 concentrations and temperatures have been higher in the past than they are today, and the Earth did not self-destruct - it is still around with life intact.
Now, from all I've read, that new equilibrium temperature point is high enough to cause massive problems for human civilization if we don't address it. But the alarming layman's explanation of the greenhouse effect that you've given is just as wrong and misleading as the climate change deniers' explanations.
There's a third possibility: c) database is (semi)critical, but the person/manager who made/approved it was too cheap to pay a real database administrator to help with the original setup and configuration.
Most engineering professions where lives or large dollar amounts are at risk (civil engineering, structural engineering, many forms of mechanical engineering) require the person designing the system to have some sort of outside certification that s/he knows what s/he is doing. But software is still the Wild West where you can get your 13 year old nephew to set up that database for you.