This isn't some super-sophisticated robot submarine designed to spy on underwater Chinese communications (not that you could - EM signals only penetrate a few mm in seawater anyway). It's an underwater glider. It doesn't even have a motor. It moves by changing its density to alternately sink or rise, using its wings to convert that into forward motion - usually less than 1 knot. The electronics wake up every few seconds, measure the pressure to determine its depth, chirp the sonar to measure the distance to the bottom, sample the salinity and temperature, then go back to sleep. We use them in oceanography all the time for measuring temperature and salinity of the water column, and for mapping underwater terrain. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't identical to gliders NOAA uses.
From what I remember, the bias against their claim wasn't because it was counter to accepted science - everyone was killing themselves trying to replicate the experiment - copies of their paper were being faxed and re-faxed almost to illegibility prior to publication. It was because of how they sensationalized their announcement - a full press conference with all the major TV news stations broadcasting live. I think their findings would've been much better received if they'd just published a journal article saying "we got a weird unexpectedly large energy production from this experiment - can anyone else replicate it?", instead of trying to go the rock star route as if they'd already won the Nobel Prize.
It's also worth pointing out that even fusion in stars isn't anywhere near as concentrated an energy source as regular chemical reactions. The energy production by fusion in the center of the sun is estimated to only be about 275 Watts/m^3. Less than human metabolism (average human body is less than 0.1 m^3 and gives off about 100 Watts), and about the same as a compost heap. So when you're talking about low energy nuclear reactions, you're talking about really, really low energy levels. Possibly so low as to be of no practical use other than explaining some minor discrepancies in energy measured by certain very sensitive experiments.
According to TFA, the U.S. Marshals Service mistakenly believed the bag was one of Ary's personal possessions. NASA was notified of the theft of NASA items from the museum, but the bag was not listed as being one of those items.
"[The U.S. government] further alleges that NASA was the owner of the bag but was not given notice of the forfeiture or the sale of the bag," the judge recounted.
Totally different. The situation in the link you've given is someone basically cutting in line. Not only do they unfairly get in front of everyone else who waited, they also exacerbate the slowdown by making the line they just skipped over longer.
This charger situation is more analogous to the guy who is busy doing something else and doesn't notice the light has turned green. He's in his rightful place in line, but his slow response causes everyone behind him to have to wait longer.
That said, this is also an EV charging station problem. Aside from Costco, I've rarely had to wait in line to fill up on gas. The number of "pumps" needed scales with the number of cars wanting to fill up, with the average time it takes to fill up, and the inverse of the range on a fill-up. A fill-up at a Supercharger takes approx 10x longer than at a gas pump, and the range (150 miles) is approx 1/3 what you get from a tank of gas. So if we're hypothesizing replacing all ICE vehicles with EVs, we need 30x as many Supercharger plug-in spaces as there currently are gas pumps along major highways. This is the case even if every EV owner pulled out the moment their charge was completed. (The requirement is lessened considerably close to home where people can recharge in their garage).
That's why I still think the long-term solution is going to be swappable batteries, or renting an ICE car for long trips, or replacing long highway trips with trains ferrying cars. The only solution to this problem on the EV side is replacing batteries with supercapacitors, which have their own problems.
According to the space.com article, the government argued that NASA was still the owner but was not notified of the bag (which was misidentified as belonging to the thief). Frequently when people or organizations "give" something to a museum, they don't literally give it to the museum. They give it on permanent loan precisely to prevent incidents like this.
The decision is a little troubling. If I loaned my lawnmower to my neighbor and (unknown to me) he gets raided by police for possessing stolen property, and the police incorrectly identified the lawnmower as belonging to my neighbor and auction it to cover his fines, it seems like this judge is saying it's a legit sale and I have no recourse to get my lawnmower back.
For a couple of years now, China has been building artificial islands in the region. China appears to be doing this mainly to expand its territorial waters.
The International Court has already decided against China - artificial islands do not count as land for the purposes of defining territorial waters.
China's position that artificial islands can extend territorial waters is ridiculous on the face of it. If you accept China's claim, then there's nothing stopping the U.S. from building an artificial island just outside China's 200 nautical mile territorial limit. That would cut China's territorial limit in half, since the border between landmasses owned by two countries is the midway point. The U.S. could then build another island 100 nm from China's shore, "inside U.S. waters." Then 50 nm, then 25 nm, etc. And repeat this until the entirety of China's territorial waters only extended a few nautical miles from their shore.
That's the kind of ridiculous insanity that arises if you accept China's legal claim that artificial islands extend territorial waters. The only logical legal stance is that you can't make up new territory by building artificial islands.
As a final note; I do not believe for one moment that the drone deployed by the US navy only gathers such non-classified data the article mentions. Drones are primarily intelligence gathering platforms after all, not science research vessels. If I were developing, deploying and operating multi-million dollar drones in an area currently under a great deal of military and economic tensions,
This was a glider. It's got a small battery (sometimes recharged by solar) for powering electronics, and no motor. Using either the battery or materials with a negative coefficient of thermal expansion, it moves a cylinder in making its overall density slightly higher than seawater, making it sink. "Wings" convert this downward motion into forward motion. When it hits the bottom or gets to a pre-determined depth, the cylinder moves again making its overall density slightly less than seawater, making it rise. Generally they don't carry enough power to "monitor" anything. You program them to power on their electronics briefly every few seconds, collect a data sample, then go right back to sleep. Their usual job is mapping underwater terrain - it's a helluva lot cheaper than towing a sonar array with a ship that's burning hundreds or thousands of gallons of fuel every hour.
Most phones already have two or more radio antennas. GSM uses a TDMA radio with its own antenna for voice, a CDMA radio with its own antenna for 3G data, and a OFDMA radio with its own antenna for LTE. (CDMA phones use the same CDMA radio for voice and 3G data, which is why you couldn't talk and browse the web at the same time on older CDMA handsets.)
Wind has been cheaper than coal for 2 years with Solar only about a penny per/kw more
That's per kW of capacity. You need to multiply that by capacity factor - the ratio of actual power generation to theoretical max capacity - to get a cost comparison per kWh (total energy generated).
Coal's capacity factor ranges from about 0.4 to 0.6.
Wind is about 0.2 to 0.25.
Solar is about 0.1 (Germany to 0.145 (continental U.S.) to 0.19 (Southwest U.S., India).
Whats funny to me is the jackasses that think solar and wind power are a partisan political issue, because they aren't.
We "jackasses" think that because the folks advocating wind and solar keep comparing meaningless installed capacity figures (cost per kW). That's like trying to figure out which car is more fuel efficient by comparing the size of their gas tanks. The only way you could think that's a legitimate way to compare the cost-efficiency of different power sources is if you're an idiot, or if you're partisan. Forgive us for giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you're just partisan.
Different power sources have different capacity factors. So to compare across different power sources, you have to multiply by those capacity factors so you can compare figures based on actual power generation (kWh or MWh). Wind is already cost-competitive with more expensive coal sources (excluding the cost of coal pollution). Solar probably has another decade to go.
CDMA phones have had SIM cards for years now - LTE service requires a SIM card. It isn't used to store contact info like on GSM phones, but that's hardly a "serious issue" when there are hundreds of backup and restore options and Google even does it automatically on Android phones.
And CDMA is being phased out because it's old technology that's being supplanted by OFDMA (which is what most LTE implementations use). Both use orthogonal signaling to allow all devices to transmit simultaneously without interfering with each other. CDMA does it using orthogonal codes (the C in CDMA), OFDMA does it using orthogonal frequencies (the OF). OFDMA is more efficient than CDMA, but requires more processing to separate out the orthogonal signals. It wasn't until about 5 years ago that microprocessors reduced their power consumption enough to make this feasible in a phone which would last all day. Earlier implementations of OFDMA (WiMax was OFDMA) would drain your battery in about 2-4 hours. I know - I had a Sprint WiMax phone.
By the way, did you know the 3G service on your GSM phone is most likely wideband CDMA? That's right. CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. GSM (which originally used TDMA, still does for voice, giving each phone a timeslice during which no other phones are allowed to transmit) wasted gobs of bandwidth reserving timeslices for phones which had data connections active but weren't actually sending/receiving data at that moment. On CDMA, everyone transmits whenever they want. Each phone sees the transmissions of other phones as background noise, reducing the signal to noise ratio, causing bandwidth to automatically divide evenly across the number of devices transmitting at any given moment. GSM was forced to add wideband CDMA to its spec to stay competitive with CDMA cellular data services. You may recognize wideband CDMA more by the GSM trade names - UMTS, HSDPA, and HSPA+. So even if Canada phases out CDMA voice, rest assured that CDMA is still being used all over Canada in GSM phones.
If the U.S. had played along and mandated GSM like the rest of the world, our cellular data speeds today would probably be down around 500 kbps. No CDMA would've meant no proof of concept that this orthogonal signaling hocus pocus would actually work when scaled up to a national network, which would've meant no OFDMA, which would've meant no LTE.
At this point, I suspect most of the people hanging on to it are speculators hopeful that the mass recall will make it a rarity in the future, and thus valuable to collectors.
The whole premise behind drivers' licenses and vehicle registration and regulation is that the government build the roads, so they get to decide the rules which apply if you want to use those roads. If Uber builds their own roads, they can run their self-driving vehicles on those roads all day if they want. But if they want to run them on government roads, they need to play by the government's rules. Even if public safety weren't an issue, they'd still need to play by the government's rules. (The same reasoning applies to easements for utility lines, which is how we ended up with government-approved cable and phone monopolies. So I'm not saying this always results in the best outcome. Just that this is the way it works.)
How the hell did this get modded up? Bush inherited a faltering economy. He entered office just after the dot-com bubble burst. His election was in Nov 2000, he entered office Jan 2001, and a President's first budget doesn't kick in until January the following year. During a President's first year, he's actually coasting along on the previous President's budget. So the 2001 recession and 9/11 (2001) actually happened before Bush's first budget went into effect (2002).
The "removed regulations" that led to the housing crisis and 2007 recession are mostly blamed on the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. It was passed in 1999 and signed by... Bill Clinton. Blame is also cast on HUD lending policies mandating a larger share of loans be for affordable housing, also started under Clinton. And interest rates reduced to historically low levels to combat the sluggish economy after the dot-com bubble bursting, responsibility for which also falls upon Clinton (if you buy into the idea that Presidents are wholly responsible for the economy). You can't even blame Bush for maintaining the low interest rates through 2005. The interest rates are set by the Federal Reserve, whose chairman at the time was Alan Greenspan - a Reagan appointee retained through Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. because everyone though he was doing a great job. It was actually Bush Jr. who replaced him in 2006 with Ben Bernanke (who Obama retained).
Personally, I don't blame Presidents for bad economies. They only suggest a budget. Congress actually makes it (whether they follow any of the President's suggestions is up to them). And since we don't have a line item veto, the President has a take it or leave it choice when it comes to signing off on the whole thing. So I mostly blame Congress for bad economies, Presidents for bad executive decisions (e.g. the second Iraq war). But if you insist on blaming Presidents for bad economies, responsibility for most of what you listed falls upon Clinton, not Bush.
That's what I'd like - an ad blocker which lets static images through but blocks any scripting or flash or other weirdness. That way instead of websites having to beg me to turn off my ad blocker, I can just tell them to find an advertiser who only serves static ads. And hopefully that would exert some pressure on the industry to abandon scripted ads in favor of static ads.
While we're at it, I'd also like a law making the ad farm serving the ads legally liable for any damages a malicious ad does. They're the ones in the best position to vet the ads before they're unleashed onto users' browsers. The lack of liability has resulted in them not giving a damn about security, and just accepting anything handed over by anyone wishing to "advertise" and adding it to their ad rotation. If they were liable, we'd probably see them morph into a self-service website where you (1) upload the JPG/GIF you wish displayed as an ad, (2) pick which tracking service you wish to use, and (3) enter the account and ad ID that the tracking service should send the ad impression info to. Don't give "advertisers" the opportunity to script their own ads, make it a cookie cutter form so there's no way to insert anything malicious.
What's more interesting to me is that San Francisco's population (2015) is 864,816. Whereas California's population (2015) is 39,144,818. So San Francisco is home to 864,816 / 39,144,818 = 2.2% of the state's population, yet their homes account for 3% of the state's residential and 7% of the state's commercial power consumption. I guess they're not exactly environmentally friendly up there.
Stevens' point was a dissent, so did not establish any legal precedent. You may agree with it, hell he may even be right. But until the SCotUS decides a case and says that he's right, there is no precedent for the lower courts to follow on this matter.
The reason Stevens' statement was even included in TFA was because the Florida judge was basically saying "this is the argument of the losing side in this SCotUS case, so we will hold that the opposite of Stevens' argument is the correct decision." That may or may not be the correct decision, but now it's up to the Florida Supreme Court, and eventually the SCotUS to decide.
The U.S.has the second largest installed wind capacity - nearly all of it onshore. Offshore wind farms in the U.S. are complicated by geography. Winds in the Northern hemisphere blow predominantly from the west, so the strongest offshore winds are to the west of land masses (which slow the wind down). Europe is blessed with an extensive continental shelf to its west. So it's relatively easy to build an offshore wind farm there several tens or even a hundred kilometers from shore, before the winds are slowed down by land.
About half the U.S. West coast (California) has practically no continental shelf. You go a kilometer offshore and the water is already deeper than the European continental shelf. Go a few more kilometers offshore and the water is 1-3 km deep. Northern California to Washington does have a slight continental shelf, but (1) practically nobody lives along the coast north of San Francisco, and (2) the bulk of U.S. hydroelectric power is there giving the region the cheapest electricity in the country. So in the geographic region of the U.S.which is most analogous to Europe in terms of strongest winds, offshore wind farms are unfeasible due to underwater topography, (lack of) population, or economics.
The U.S. East coast has a large continental shelf, but due to the direction of the prevailing winds, you have to go far offshore to find winds stronger than what you'd find onshore. The focus of most offshore wind in the U.S. has been just south of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, where the shoreline turns almost directly east-west, allowing wind speeds to pick up relatively close to shore. It's still nowhere near as good as the offshore winds west of Europe though. The wind farms off Scotland enjoy some of the highest capacity factors on earth - higher than 60%. Typical offshore wind capacity factor in the U.S. is closer to 30%-35%.
But what do I know. I'm just an ignorant American.
To me, "illegitimate" is one of those words which seems to be semi-archaic in modern English. To my ears, it sounds right to use it only in certain legal contexts. e.g. An illegitimate search, an illegitimate child, etc. In the context of a phising email, I would simply say "that's not a legitimate email." And that's rather easy to corrupt into "that's a legitimate email" if you're thinking 5 words ahead of your typing.
Of course I proofread my emails before hitting send to avoid these problems. And Delavan claiming he meant "illegitimate" rather than "not legitimate" decreases the possibility that this explanation is correct. Just wondering what native English speakers think. Despite living here 45 years and English being my best language, it isn't my native language and some of the intricacies still elude me.
Google realized pretty early on that the way technology advances isn't by careful planning and execution. It's by trying all sorts of different stuff and seeing what works. Normally this different stuff happens in different companies. The companies where stuff didn't work have to take a write-down or go bankrupt. The companies where stuff works becomes successful (at least for a time).
All Google did was bring this under a single roof, like other companies that did crazy stuff like this in the past - the R&D departments at Xerox (xerographic photocopying, ethernet, GUI, mouse, laser printer), HP (LED, pocket calculator - arguably the grandfather of mobile computing, inkjet printing, memristor), Bell Labs (transistor, error-correction coding, Unix,CCD).
Google isn't bothering to maintain anything unless it reaches critical mass and they decide it's important enough to turn it into an official (non-beta) product. They don't necessarily lack the ability to follow-through. Xerox was the champion of that (nearly all their ideas got poached), and Google is doing much better than them. Speaking as an engineer, it's just that a lot of stuff which seems great on paper and in the lab turns out to have a lot of problems in real-world use.
The number is likely accurate. The flow of a fluid (gas or liquid) under a given pressure through a certain diameter pipe is relatively simple to calculate. If there had been a deception, any engineer who had taken a fluid dynamics course could've calculated it and noticed the discrepancy.
Do note that the Southern California Gas Company petitioned to light the venting methane on fire because methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. This is standard procedure in blowouts. The State denied that request, citing the fire hazard risk to nearby buildings (which had all been evacuated). I believe that decision was short-sighted, if not intentionally malicious (make the problem worse to increase the fines on the company). Burning methane produces water and CO2. There are no embers that can fly around and light other things on fire.
By divesting in these companies, you decrease demand for their stock. That drives the stock price down. Which allows the company to buy back its stock at a lower price. When it pays dividends, it gets to keep more of those dividends instead of having to distribute them to shareholders, because it owns more of its own shares. So by divesting from these companies, you're allowing the people running them who are gung-ho about fossil fuels to keep a larger percentage of their profits to reinvest into more future fossil fuel production.
OTOH if you buy up as many shares of the stock as you can, you gain voting power at annual shareholder meetings. Usually this means you get more votes for who gets elected to the board of directors who oversee the top officer of the company. Most of these companies aren't fossil fuel companies; they're energy companies. They dabble in renewables and nuclear power, it's just that most of their operations are in fossil fuels. If you can get enough shares to elect anti-fossil fuel people to the board of directors, they would have the influence to get the corporate officers to decrease future fossil fuel operations and invest more heavily in renewables.
I guess the hope is that instead of investing in fossil fuel companies, you can invest the money in renewable energy companies. And that eventually the renewable energy companies will drive the fossil fuel companies out of business. But as I said, most of these fossil fuel companies are actually energy companies. Unlike pro-renewables people who are mostly anti-fossil fuels, the pro-fossil fuels people are not anti-renewables. They simply prefer fossil fuels because they're cheaper. If renewables become cheaper than fossil fuels (whether naturally or after government subsidies), they will simply shift their operations more towards renewables. So I'm really skeptical the "drive them out of business" plan would work.
So the best course of action would seem to be to invest heavily into fossil fuels companies, elect directors sympathetic to your cause, and have them exert pressure on the corporate officers to steer these companies away from fossil fuels and towards renewables.
Just ask them to remove local channels and local sports from your cable package. Buy an eternal VHF/UHF antenna to pick up those channels. Yes your TV will look retro like something from the 1970s. Who cares, you look at the screen, not the antenna.
If Comcast lets you remove those channels, then you won't have to pay the fees and you'll make back the cost of the antenna in a few months. You can pocket the savings every month thereafter.
If Comcast says you can't remove those channels, then they've basically admitted that they are falsely advertising their prices. If there's no way to remove a fee from the price, the fee is a part of the price, not an optional add-on. And they will lose the lawsuits and be forced to include these fees in their advertised prices.
That was my first thought upon reading OP's post too. Huffmann may have actually done the world a favor. He's opened people's eyes to the possibility that this type of behind-the-curtain manipulation can happen; something the tech community has been trying for years without success to warn the general public about with respect to electronic voting machines.
If we're lucky, this will kick off a wave of forum sites coming up with clever hash systems allowing you to confirm that the message you posted on a forum has not been altered. And the best of these systems could trickle down into a way to confirm that a ballot you cast on an electronic voting machine has not been tampered with.
That's all true, but doesn't really change OP's suggestion. All you need is to give riders the option to request a ride under their real name and profile, or as a random number. Kinda like how a particular website lets people post under the profile or anonymously. People extremely paranoid about their privacy, like celebrities, can use the service anonymously all the time if they wish.
That's not Amazon's doing. They'd probably like nothing more than to offer a single Prime Video to the entire world.
It's the movie studios and their insistence on geographic market segregation which makes this impossible. The want the streamed version of a movie to come out no sooner than Dec 12 in the U.S., Dec 26 in the UK, Jan 4 in Germany, Feb 1 in Australia, March 1 in Japan, and May 1 in China. Multiply that by every movie and every country on Earth, and it becomes a logistical nightmare for any streaming service. They're forced to intentionally limit the number of countries where they provide service in order to have any level of confidence that they're complying with the studios' silly demands.
#1 is double- (or triple-) charging people for stuff they've already paid for on vinyl, tape, CD, videotape, or DVD. They argue that we aren't buying the product, we're merely licensing it - OK, I can accept that. But then they argue we need to buy a new license just to get the same product on a different medium, and they won't give us a discount if we wish to upgrade from an earlier medium? How in the world does that make any sense? Even the software industry recognizes that the vast majority of what you're getting for in the new license is identical to the old license you already paid for, so lets you upgrade to the new license at a significantly reduced price.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't some super-sophisticated robot submarine designed to spy on underwater Chinese communications (not that you could - EM signals only penetrate a few mm in seawater anyway). It's an underwater glider. It doesn't even have a motor. It moves by changing its density to alternately sink or rise, using its wings to convert that into forward motion - usually less than 1 knot. The electronics wake up every few seconds, measure the pressure to determine its depth, chirp the sonar to measure the distance to the bottom, sample the salinity and temperature, then go back to sleep. We use them in oceanography all the time for measuring temperature and salinity of the water column, and for mapping underwater terrain. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't identical to gliders NOAA uses.
From what I remember, the bias against their claim wasn't because it was counter to accepted science - everyone was killing themselves trying to replicate the experiment - copies of their paper were being faxed and re-faxed almost to illegibility prior to publication. It was because of how they sensationalized their announcement - a full press conference with all the major TV news stations broadcasting live. I think their findings would've been much better received if they'd just published a journal article saying "we got a weird unexpectedly large energy production from this experiment - can anyone else replicate it?", instead of trying to go the rock star route as if they'd already won the Nobel Prize.
It's also worth pointing out that even fusion in stars isn't anywhere near as concentrated an energy source as regular chemical reactions. The energy production by fusion in the center of the sun is estimated to only be about 275 Watts/m^3. Less than human metabolism (average human body is less than 0.1 m^3 and gives off about 100 Watts), and about the same as a compost heap. So when you're talking about low energy nuclear reactions, you're talking about really, really low energy levels. Possibly so low as to be of no practical use other than explaining some minor discrepancies in energy measured by certain very sensitive experiments.
Totally different. The situation in the link you've given is someone basically cutting in line. Not only do they unfairly get in front of everyone else who waited, they also exacerbate the slowdown by making the line they just skipped over longer.
This charger situation is more analogous to the guy who is busy doing something else and doesn't notice the light has turned green. He's in his rightful place in line, but his slow response causes everyone behind him to have to wait longer.
That said, this is also an EV charging station problem. Aside from Costco, I've rarely had to wait in line to fill up on gas. The number of "pumps" needed scales with the number of cars wanting to fill up, with the average time it takes to fill up, and the inverse of the range on a fill-up. A fill-up at a Supercharger takes approx 10x longer than at a gas pump, and the range (150 miles) is approx 1/3 what you get from a tank of gas. So if we're hypothesizing replacing all ICE vehicles with EVs, we need 30x as many Supercharger plug-in spaces as there currently are gas pumps along major highways. This is the case even if every EV owner pulled out the moment their charge was completed. (The requirement is lessened considerably close to home where people can recharge in their garage).
That's why I still think the long-term solution is going to be swappable batteries, or renting an ICE car for long trips, or replacing long highway trips with trains ferrying cars. The only solution to this problem on the EV side is replacing batteries with supercapacitors, which have their own problems.
According to the space.com article, the government argued that NASA was still the owner but was not notified of the bag (which was misidentified as belonging to the thief). Frequently when people or organizations "give" something to a museum, they don't literally give it to the museum. They give it on permanent loan precisely to prevent incidents like this.
The decision is a little troubling. If I loaned my lawnmower to my neighbor and (unknown to me) he gets raided by police for possessing stolen property, and the police incorrectly identified the lawnmower as belonging to my neighbor and auction it to cover his fines, it seems like this judge is saying it's a legit sale and I have no recourse to get my lawnmower back.
The International Court has already decided against China - artificial islands do not count as land for the purposes of defining territorial waters.
China's position that artificial islands can extend territorial waters is ridiculous on the face of it. If you accept China's claim, then there's nothing stopping the U.S. from building an artificial island just outside China's 200 nautical mile territorial limit. That would cut China's territorial limit in half, since the border between landmasses owned by two countries is the midway point. The U.S. could then build another island 100 nm from China's shore, "inside U.S. waters." Then 50 nm, then 25 nm, etc. And repeat this until the entirety of China's territorial waters only extended a few nautical miles from their shore.
That's the kind of ridiculous insanity that arises if you accept China's legal claim that artificial islands extend territorial waters. The only logical legal stance is that you can't make up new territory by building artificial islands.
This was a glider. It's got a small battery (sometimes recharged by solar) for powering electronics, and no motor. Using either the battery or materials with a negative coefficient of thermal expansion, it moves a cylinder in making its overall density slightly higher than seawater, making it sink. "Wings" convert this downward motion into forward motion. When it hits the bottom or gets to a pre-determined depth, the cylinder moves again making its overall density slightly less than seawater, making it rise. Generally they don't carry enough power to "monitor" anything. You program them to power on their electronics briefly every few seconds, collect a data sample, then go right back to sleep. Their usual job is mapping underwater terrain - it's a helluva lot cheaper than towing a sonar array with a ship that's burning hundreds or thousands of gallons of fuel every hour.
Most phones already have two or more radio antennas. GSM uses a TDMA radio with its own antenna for voice, a CDMA radio with its own antenna for 3G data, and a OFDMA radio with its own antenna for LTE. (CDMA phones use the same CDMA radio for voice and 3G data, which is why you couldn't talk and browse the web at the same time on older CDMA handsets.)
I suppose you could say the patent is for two profiles (phone numbers) on a single phone. Except Samsung already has had that capability in production phones for several years now.
That's per kW of capacity. You need to multiply that by capacity factor - the ratio of actual power generation to theoretical max capacity - to get a cost comparison per kWh (total energy generated).
Coal's capacity factor ranges from about 0.4 to 0.6.
Wind is about 0.2 to 0.25.
Solar is about 0.1 (Germany to 0.145 (continental U.S.) to 0.19 (Southwest U.S., India).
We "jackasses" think that because the folks advocating wind and solar keep comparing meaningless installed capacity figures (cost per kW). That's like trying to figure out which car is more fuel efficient by comparing the size of their gas tanks. The only way you could think that's a legitimate way to compare the cost-efficiency of different power sources is if you're an idiot, or if you're partisan. Forgive us for giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you're just partisan.
Different power sources have different capacity factors. So to compare across different power sources, you have to multiply by those capacity factors so you can compare figures based on actual power generation (kWh or MWh). Wind is already cost-competitive with more expensive coal sources (excluding the cost of coal pollution). Solar probably has another decade to go.
CDMA phones have had SIM cards for years now - LTE service requires a SIM card. It isn't used to store contact info like on GSM phones, but that's hardly a "serious issue" when there are hundreds of backup and restore options and Google even does it automatically on Android phones.
And CDMA is being phased out because it's old technology that's being supplanted by OFDMA (which is what most LTE implementations use). Both use orthogonal signaling to allow all devices to transmit simultaneously without interfering with each other. CDMA does it using orthogonal codes (the C in CDMA), OFDMA does it using orthogonal frequencies (the OF). OFDMA is more efficient than CDMA, but requires more processing to separate out the orthogonal signals. It wasn't until about 5 years ago that microprocessors reduced their power consumption enough to make this feasible in a phone which would last all day. Earlier implementations of OFDMA (WiMax was OFDMA) would drain your battery in about 2-4 hours. I know - I had a Sprint WiMax phone.
By the way, did you know the 3G service on your GSM phone is most likely wideband CDMA? That's right. CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. GSM (which originally used TDMA, still does for voice, giving each phone a timeslice during which no other phones are allowed to transmit) wasted gobs of bandwidth reserving timeslices for phones which had data connections active but weren't actually sending/receiving data at that moment. On CDMA, everyone transmits whenever they want. Each phone sees the transmissions of other phones as background noise, reducing the signal to noise ratio, causing bandwidth to automatically divide evenly across the number of devices transmitting at any given moment. GSM was forced to add wideband CDMA to its spec to stay competitive with CDMA cellular data services. You may recognize wideband CDMA more by the GSM trade names - UMTS, HSDPA, and HSPA+. So even if Canada phases out CDMA voice, rest assured that CDMA is still being used all over Canada in GSM phones.
If the U.S. had played along and mandated GSM like the rest of the world, our cellular data speeds today would probably be down around 500 kbps. No CDMA would've meant no proof of concept that this orthogonal signaling hocus pocus would actually work when scaled up to a national network, which would've meant no OFDMA, which would've meant no LTE.
At this point, I suspect most of the people hanging on to it are speculators hopeful that the mass recall will make it a rarity in the future, and thus valuable to collectors.
The whole premise behind drivers' licenses and vehicle registration and regulation is that the government build the roads, so they get to decide the rules which apply if you want to use those roads. If Uber builds their own roads, they can run their self-driving vehicles on those roads all day if they want. But if they want to run them on government roads, they need to play by the government's rules. Even if public safety weren't an issue, they'd still need to play by the government's rules. (The same reasoning applies to easements for utility lines, which is how we ended up with government-approved cable and phone monopolies. So I'm not saying this always results in the best outcome. Just that this is the way it works.)
How the hell did this get modded up? Bush inherited a faltering economy. He entered office just after the dot-com bubble burst. His election was in Nov 2000, he entered office Jan 2001, and a President's first budget doesn't kick in until January the following year. During a President's first year, he's actually coasting along on the previous President's budget. So the 2001 recession and 9/11 (2001) actually happened before Bush's first budget went into effect (2002).
The "removed regulations" that led to the housing crisis and 2007 recession are mostly blamed on the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. It was passed in 1999 and signed by... Bill Clinton. Blame is also cast on HUD lending policies mandating a larger share of loans be for affordable housing, also started under Clinton. And interest rates reduced to historically low levels to combat the sluggish economy after the dot-com bubble bursting, responsibility for which also falls upon Clinton (if you buy into the idea that Presidents are wholly responsible for the economy). You can't even blame Bush for maintaining the low interest rates through 2005. The interest rates are set by the Federal Reserve, whose chairman at the time was Alan Greenspan - a Reagan appointee retained through Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. because everyone though he was doing a great job. It was actually Bush Jr. who replaced him in 2006 with Ben Bernanke (who Obama retained).
Personally, I don't blame Presidents for bad economies. They only suggest a budget. Congress actually makes it (whether they follow any of the President's suggestions is up to them). And since we don't have a line item veto, the President has a take it or leave it choice when it comes to signing off on the whole thing. So I mostly blame Congress for bad economies, Presidents for bad executive decisions (e.g. the second Iraq war). But if you insist on blaming Presidents for bad economies, responsibility for most of what you listed falls upon Clinton, not Bush.
That's what I'd like - an ad blocker which lets static images through but blocks any scripting or flash or other weirdness. That way instead of websites having to beg me to turn off my ad blocker, I can just tell them to find an advertiser who only serves static ads. And hopefully that would exert some pressure on the industry to abandon scripted ads in favor of static ads.
While we're at it, I'd also like a law making the ad farm serving the ads legally liable for any damages a malicious ad does. They're the ones in the best position to vet the ads before they're unleashed onto users' browsers. The lack of liability has resulted in them not giving a damn about security, and just accepting anything handed over by anyone wishing to "advertise" and adding it to their ad rotation. If they were liable, we'd probably see them morph into a self-service website where you (1) upload the JPG/GIF you wish displayed as an ad, (2) pick which tracking service you wish to use, and (3) enter the account and ad ID that the tracking service should send the ad impression info to. Don't give "advertisers" the opportunity to script their own ads, make it a cookie cutter form so there's no way to insert anything malicious.
What's more interesting to me is that San Francisco's population (2015) is 864,816. Whereas California's population (2015) is 39,144,818. So San Francisco is home to 864,816 / 39,144,818 = 2.2% of the state's population, yet their homes account for 3% of the state's residential and 7% of the state's commercial power consumption. I guess they're not exactly environmentally friendly up there.
Stevens' point was a dissent, so did not establish any legal precedent. You may agree with it, hell he may even be right. But until the SCotUS decides a case and says that he's right, there is no precedent for the lower courts to follow on this matter.
The reason Stevens' statement was even included in TFA was because the Florida judge was basically saying "this is the argument of the losing side in this SCotUS case, so we will hold that the opposite of Stevens' argument is the correct decision." That may or may not be the correct decision, but now it's up to the Florida Supreme Court, and eventually the SCotUS to decide.
The U.S.has the second largest installed wind capacity - nearly all of it onshore. Offshore wind farms in the U.S. are complicated by geography. Winds in the Northern hemisphere blow predominantly from the west, so the strongest offshore winds are to the west of land masses (which slow the wind down). Europe is blessed with an extensive continental shelf to its west. So it's relatively easy to build an offshore wind farm there several tens or even a hundred kilometers from shore, before the winds are slowed down by land.
About half the U.S. West coast (California) has practically no continental shelf. You go a kilometer offshore and the water is already deeper than the European continental shelf. Go a few more kilometers offshore and the water is 1-3 km deep. Northern California to Washington does have a slight continental shelf, but (1) practically nobody lives along the coast north of San Francisco, and (2) the bulk of U.S. hydroelectric power is there giving the region the cheapest electricity in the country. So in the geographic region of the U.S.which is most analogous to Europe in terms of strongest winds, offshore wind farms are unfeasible due to underwater topography, (lack of) population, or economics.
The U.S. East coast has a large continental shelf, but due to the direction of the prevailing winds, you have to go far offshore to find winds stronger than what you'd find onshore. The focus of most offshore wind in the U.S. has been just south of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, where the shoreline turns almost directly east-west, allowing wind speeds to pick up relatively close to shore. It's still nowhere near as good as the offshore winds west of Europe though. The wind farms off Scotland enjoy some of the highest capacity factors on earth - higher than 60%. Typical offshore wind capacity factor in the U.S. is closer to 30%-35%.
But what do I know. I'm just an ignorant American.
To me, "illegitimate" is one of those words which seems to be semi-archaic in modern English. To my ears, it sounds right to use it only in certain legal contexts. e.g. An illegitimate search, an illegitimate child, etc. In the context of a phising email, I would simply say "that's not a legitimate email." And that's rather easy to corrupt into "that's a legitimate email" if you're thinking 5 words ahead of your typing.
Of course I proofread my emails before hitting send to avoid these problems. And Delavan claiming he meant "illegitimate" rather than "not legitimate" decreases the possibility that this explanation is correct. Just wondering what native English speakers think. Despite living here 45 years and English being my best language, it isn't my native language and some of the intricacies still elude me.
Google realized pretty early on that the way technology advances isn't by careful planning and execution. It's by trying all sorts of different stuff and seeing what works. Normally this different stuff happens in different companies. The companies where stuff didn't work have to take a write-down or go bankrupt. The companies where stuff works becomes successful (at least for a time).
All Google did was bring this under a single roof, like other companies that did crazy stuff like this in the past - the R&D departments at Xerox (xerographic photocopying, ethernet, GUI, mouse, laser printer), HP (LED, pocket calculator - arguably the grandfather of mobile computing, inkjet printing, memristor), Bell Labs (transistor, error-correction coding, Unix,CCD).
Google isn't bothering to maintain anything unless it reaches critical mass and they decide it's important enough to turn it into an official (non-beta) product. They don't necessarily lack the ability to follow-through. Xerox was the champion of that (nearly all their ideas got poached), and Google is doing much better than them. Speaking as an engineer, it's just that a lot of stuff which seems great on paper and in the lab turns out to have a lot of problems in real-world use.
The number is likely accurate. The flow of a fluid (gas or liquid) under a given pressure through a certain diameter pipe is relatively simple to calculate. If there had been a deception, any engineer who had taken a fluid dynamics course could've calculated it and noticed the discrepancy.
Do note that the Southern California Gas Company petitioned to light the venting methane on fire because methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. This is standard procedure in blowouts. The State denied that request, citing the fire hazard risk to nearby buildings (which had all been evacuated). I believe that decision was short-sighted, if not intentionally malicious (make the problem worse to increase the fines on the company). Burning methane produces water and CO2. There are no embers that can fly around and light other things on fire.
By divesting in these companies, you decrease demand for their stock. That drives the stock price down. Which allows the company to buy back its stock at a lower price. When it pays dividends, it gets to keep more of those dividends instead of having to distribute them to shareholders, because it owns more of its own shares. So by divesting from these companies, you're allowing the people running them who are gung-ho about fossil fuels to keep a larger percentage of their profits to reinvest into more future fossil fuel production.
OTOH if you buy up as many shares of the stock as you can, you gain voting power at annual shareholder meetings. Usually this means you get more votes for who gets elected to the board of directors who oversee the top officer of the company. Most of these companies aren't fossil fuel companies; they're energy companies. They dabble in renewables and nuclear power, it's just that most of their operations are in fossil fuels. If you can get enough shares to elect anti-fossil fuel people to the board of directors, they would have the influence to get the corporate officers to decrease future fossil fuel operations and invest more heavily in renewables.
I guess the hope is that instead of investing in fossil fuel companies, you can invest the money in renewable energy companies. And that eventually the renewable energy companies will drive the fossil fuel companies out of business. But as I said, most of these fossil fuel companies are actually energy companies. Unlike pro-renewables people who are mostly anti-fossil fuels, the pro-fossil fuels people are not anti-renewables. They simply prefer fossil fuels because they're cheaper. If renewables become cheaper than fossil fuels (whether naturally or after government subsidies), they will simply shift their operations more towards renewables. So I'm really skeptical the "drive them out of business" plan would work.
So the best course of action would seem to be to invest heavily into fossil fuels companies, elect directors sympathetic to your cause, and have them exert pressure on the corporate officers to steer these companies away from fossil fuels and towards renewables.
Just ask them to remove local channels and local sports from your cable package. Buy an eternal VHF/UHF antenna to pick up those channels. Yes your TV will look retro like something from the 1970s. Who cares, you look at the screen, not the antenna.
If Comcast lets you remove those channels, then you won't have to pay the fees and you'll make back the cost of the antenna in a few months. You can pocket the savings every month thereafter.
If Comcast says you can't remove those channels, then they've basically admitted that they are falsely advertising their prices. If there's no way to remove a fee from the price, the fee is a part of the price, not an optional add-on. And they will lose the lawsuits and be forced to include these fees in their advertised prices.
That was my first thought upon reading OP's post too. Huffmann may have actually done the world a favor. He's opened people's eyes to the possibility that this type of behind-the-curtain manipulation can happen; something the tech community has been trying for years without success to warn the general public about with respect to electronic voting machines.
If we're lucky, this will kick off a wave of forum sites coming up with clever hash systems allowing you to confirm that the message you posted on a forum has not been altered. And the best of these systems could trickle down into a way to confirm that a ballot you cast on an electronic voting machine has not been tampered with.
That's all true, but doesn't really change OP's suggestion. All you need is to give riders the option to request a ride under their real name and profile, or as a random number. Kinda like how a particular website lets people post under the profile or anonymously. People extremely paranoid about their privacy, like celebrities, can use the service anonymously all the time if they wish.
That's not Amazon's doing. They'd probably like nothing more than to offer a single Prime Video to the entire world.
It's the movie studios and their insistence on geographic market segregation which makes this impossible. The want the streamed version of a movie to come out no sooner than Dec 12 in the U.S., Dec 26 in the UK, Jan 4 in Germany, Feb 1 in Australia, March 1 in Japan, and May 1 in China. Multiply that by every movie and every country on Earth, and it becomes a logistical nightmare for any streaming service. They're forced to intentionally limit the number of countries where they provide service in order to have any level of confidence that they're complying with the studios' silly demands.
It's #2 on my excuses to pirate stuff.
#1 is double- (or triple-) charging people for stuff they've already paid for on vinyl, tape, CD, videotape, or DVD. They argue that we aren't buying the product, we're merely licensing it - OK, I can accept that. But then they argue we need to buy a new license just to get the same product on a different medium, and they won't give us a discount if we wish to upgrade from an earlier medium? How in the world does that make any sense? Even the software industry recognizes that the vast majority of what you're getting for in the new license is identical to the old license you already paid for, so lets you upgrade to the new license at a significantly reduced price.