I think that's kinda the point. They're not giving the warning based on the premise that Internet meetings are more dangerous than other types of meetings. They're just warning people that meetings arranged over the Internet are just as dangerous as other meetings. There's a tendency for people to feel safer about meeting someone over the Internet because the initial correspondence is not direct. The nervousness and anxiety which primes your fight or flight mechanisms is missing or isn't as strong. And a lot of the subconscious body language cues which help you notice that something is "off" about this guy are completely absent. This may lull people into a false sense of safety about meeting someone IRL that they "know" from the Internet.
Technically, solar, hydro, and wind aren't renewable either - you need to consume non-recyclable resources to produce the plants. Primarily concrete for the latter two, though newer wind turbines are making heavier use of fiberglass which uses plastic resins. Solar is just a mess right now - the cost to manufacture PV panels still makes it far more costly than other power sources.
I know there's a tendency to limit the term "renewable" to the fuel being consumed, because that's the most obvious consumable. But to do a proper comparison you really need to consider everything that's consumed (and not recycled) over the life cycle of the power plant, from breaking first ground through operation to demolition/disposal. I've done the math for wind vs. nuclear, and per TWh of power generated nuclear actually requires less infrastructure to be constructed (fewer construction materials consumed) than wind. Dunno if it's enough to offset the uranium that's consumed over the nuclear plant's lifetime. But saying one power source is not "renewable" while others are is not as cut and dry as popular definitions make it out to be.
Coal is widely used for heating and cooking in undeveloped countries without a national energy distribution system (electric grid) nor widespread availability of liquid fuel storage (heating oil and propane tanks), and which lack enough trees to operate wood-burning stoves. Coal is nearly as easy to transport in primitive societies as liquid fuel is in developed societies, and stores much more easily since you can just pile it up in any old place.
I know you're trying to imply the U.S., but the last vestiges of coal use will be in these undeveloped nations, and also in remote locations of developed nations even if the nation has stopped producing electricity from coal.
Nearly all of the world's population growth is in developing nations, where subsistence farmers are being put out of business by food imports from developed nations (either bought or donated). If you want to feed the world's growing population, automated farming in developed nations is not the way to do it. Automated farming in developed nations will happen simply because it's a more cost-efficient way to produce domestically consumed crops (or crops traded with other developed trading partners).
But to solve the "world's" population growth problem, the #1 priority has to be to help develop the economies of these undeveloped nations. This means stopping food imports which distort food prices and make it impossible for local farmers to survive by selling what they grow in their local market. Providing food, water, medical care, and building shelters for free as foreign aid is fine as a short-term solution to temporary crises like an earthquake or cyclone or a one-year crop failure. But long-term that "humanitarian" aid just makes things worse. It promotes population growth (doesn't cost the parents more to have more kids) beyond the ability of the region's agriculture to sustain itself. The long-term solution has to be economic development so the local people can grow their own food, develop their own clean water supplies, educate their own doctors and build their own hospitals, and build their own homes. A system of commerce and trade so these people can make a living doing this stuff by themselves has to be in place if they are to survive on their own. Otherwise you're consigning them to a fate of being forced to suck off the teat of developed nations forever just to survive.
Of course a machine is used for the initial count. That has been true since we switched to mechanical ballot counting machines. There's nothing new there - your paper ballot has been saved, and will be referenced in a recount. If need be, it will be recounted by hand (a person looking at your choices with their Mark I eyeball) to eliminate machines as a factor.
The issue here is electronic voting machines without a paper ballot. You step into the voting booth and are presented with a touchscreen. You tap your choices, the machine electronically records your choices (or so they claim), and spits out a piece of paper saying you voted. In this case, there's nothing which can be referenced in a recount except the electrons in some flash cell inside the machine. It is impossible to eliminate the machine as a factor.
Dynamic range. Sensors which can measure from 0 - 100 g's are not as sensitive in the 0-1 g range you may be more concerned about. So you instead opt for accelerometers which max out at 10 g's and try to deal with the periods of max acceleration in software.
A more elegant solution is to use both the sensitive accelerometer and an accelerometer with a greater max threshold. That way you keep the higher max limit without giving up low-gain sensitivity. But spacecraft tend to be both weight- and budget-constrained...
More troubling to me was that there wasn't some basic sanity checking going on. Like a calculation that says "3 seconds ago I was at 4 km high. Now I think I'm on the ground. Does it make sense that I could've traveled that far in that little time? No? Then the instruments saying I'm on the ground are probably wonky, and I should give other instruments a higher priority in calculating my altitude for a bit." Same way I write my code (and spreadsheets) to calculate important numbers two, three, or sometimes even four different ways to make sure they all agree before proceeding to act on it.
The web has a liberal bias. The U.S. population overall is to the right of the web, which is why the web is flabbergasted that Trump somehow managed to win the election.
They're just counting the number of Android phones which are in a location at any give time. Same as how they do their traffic monitoring, except they don't have to worry about how fast the phones are moving.
A good chunk of the exclusion zone is to the southeast of the reactor. The winds on the day of the accident were primarily to the northwest. Radiation levels in the southern portion of the zone are only slightly higher than natural background, and about the same as some of the more naturally radioactive cities on Earth. Most people don't realize that Ukraine's capitol of Kiev is only about 100 km southeast of Chernobyl.
Some elderly people have been allowed to move back into this portion of the zone, but it's still kept part of the exclusion zone out of an abundance of caution. I think it should be kept undeveloped because this is a great experiment on the long-term effects of a nuclear accident on wildlife (both flora and fauna), and the results could be very insightful for determining the effects of radiation on humans. There's very little data on long-term exposure to low levels of radiation. Right now we simply take the effects of high doses of radiation on people, and extrapolate it as a straight line down to zero assuming that if a lot is bad, then a little is also bad. The early research coming out of the Chernobyl exclusion zone seems to contradict this. Slightly elevated levels of radiation actually seem to make animals healthier than normal background radiation (though it could just be that they're not bothered by people). (source)
Allow AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, et al to maintain local monopolies over the last mile. Implement net neutrality to keep Internet access a level playing field.
Or drop net neutrality because it's government meddling in the marketplace. But also prohibit the local monopolies granted to AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, et al because that's also government meddling in the marketplace. If you have competition for the last mile, then you don't need net neutrality. The customers will vote with their dollars - any ISP who intentionally tries to degrade Netflix service as a strategy to promote their own VOD service will simply be handing all their customers who use Netflix to a competitor.
So killing net neutrality is not necessarily a bad thing if it's coupled with forcing local governments to allow competition in the last mile.
Of course they can be decrypted in software. The fly in the ointment is that Netflix can't stream the movies and TV shows without Hollywood's approval. And Hollywood insists only on approving solutions on a hardware device basis. This is what delayed Netflix coming to Android. The software itself was easy enough, but Netflix had to get Hollywood's stamp of approval for every Android handset out there running the same software. That's why during the rollout, the Netflix app for Android was or wasn't available in Google's Play store depending on which phone or tablet you had.
So likely Hollywood is pulling the same shenanigans again, and only approved 4k Netflix streaming for Kaby Lake and the Edge browser at this time. Maybe they'll give approval for older processors and different browsers in the future. Maybe not. It's up to Hollywood - their content, their rules. If you don't like it, support independent artists and producers instead of the Hollywood establishment.
Agreed about Musk's vision, but you pro-solar people have got to start learning the limitations of the technology. Covering a car in solar panels is mostly pointless. The Telsa S is about 2m wide by 4m long. If you figure half of that surface area (viewed from the top) is windows, that leaves 4 m^2 for solar panels.
Assuming high-end 200 W/m^2 panels, that gives a peak generating capacity of 800 Watts. The capacity factor for solar in the continental U.S. is about 0.145. That's the ratio of actual power produced to peak capacity, taking into account night, angle of the sun, weather, dirt buildup, etc. So that 800 Watts nominal becomes 116 Watts average. If you leave a PV panel-encrusted Tesla parked in the sun all day, the total energy it gains from solar is only (0.116 kWh)*(24 hours) = 2.784 kWh.
The EPA rates the Tesla S at about 38 kWh/100 miles, so ignoring charging losses this 2.784 kWh is enough to move the car only (2.784 kWh) * (100 miles) / (38 kWh) = 7.3 miles. A Tesla S covered in solar panels left parked in the sun all day collects enough solar energy to drive it for about 10 minutes.
Musk isn't doing this so he can put solar panels on the car. He's doing it so EV purchases can be coupled with solar panel purchases. If you understand opportunity cost, you realize that installing solar panels on your house doesn't necessarily mean your EV is now solar-powered. If you would've installed the solar panels anyway (or they're already installed as is the case for most environmentally conscientious people), then adding an EV just increases your electricity consumption and that electricity ends up being generated by coal or gas. In order for solar panels on your house to mathematically power your EV, you have to have installed the solar panels only because you bought an EV. That is, if you hadn't bought the EV, you wouldn't have installed the solar panels. That is what Musk is trying to do - offer a EV + solar panels for your home package deal, so people who wouldn't have installed solar on their homes before will do so now. (That and to partake in the juicy credits the government is handing out for solar panel installation.)
That was a trip, seeing how people inside the reality distortion field view history.
Apple had a big printer business because they created Postscript - a way to scale fonts to arbitrary size. This is the one thing you got right. Only worked with laser printers though, not the dot matrix printers which were common in those days. (This isn't strictly true, but getting Postscript to work with a dot matrix printer like I had to to print banners was a PITA. You had to hack it so the computer did the font processing and printed the page as a graphic - took nearly 3 days to print a few dozen banners for an exibition). They dropped the printer line when Windows gained scalable fonts and printers adapted by adding a CPU and memory capable of rendering these scalable fonts in the printer. Before then, you had to buy a printer which was specifically capable of this. Otherwise you were stuck with the fonts which came with the printer (with some of the better printers having optional font cartridges you could plug in to expand the font library).
Kodak was making digital cameras in conjunction with Canon and Nikon years before Apple made one. Kodak's digital sensors (with a HDD for storage) strapped onto existing SLR bodies. After that it was just like shooting film. Can't get any easier than that. Casio was the first company to make the digital camera "easier" in the sense we know today - they added a LCD to the back so you could preview and view the pictures you'd just taken. Apple copied them (by Apple's standards of claiming anyone who came out with an obvious idea afterwards was copying).
Ethernet predates Appletalk, heck it pre-dates the Macintosh (1984) which introduced Appletalk.
ADB was a serial standard with a theoretical max speed of 125 kbps, though in real-world use it was limited to about 10-15 kbps. To get faster speeds back in those days, you had to resort to multiple wires carrying signals in parallel. That's why we had those massive Centronics parallel ports, and IDE and SCSI ribbon cables for HDDs. It was the only way to move data more quickly back then. USB was successful because it was serial thus needing only a thin cable, but had decent speed - 1.5 Mbps and 12 Mbps in its first iteration. Nothing to do with ADB.
I owned one of the first Linksys consumer routers - released in 2000. I bought it because I was in one of the first communities in the U.S. to get cable modems, and needed a way to share my Internet with multiple computers. If you look through that manual, you'll see the web-based interface is virtually identical to what modern routers use. Linksys nailed it on day one, which is why they grew to dominate the home networking market (before being bought by Cisco). Apple insisted on requiring you to install an app to configure the router, which is why they're getting out of the business today.
You're assuming that image enhancement algorithms are "neutral" solely if they use information already in the photo and don't add missing information to an image. But the very act of choosing which algorithms to use to "enhance" an image is not neutral - it's biased towards enhancements which disproportionately fit our expectations for how the real world works.
For a real example, look at the upscaled photos of the boy's face in TFA. The upscaling algorithms other than bicubic look for edges, and strive to keep them sharp after the upscaling because edges are very important to our visual system. So if the original photo wasn't actually of the boy, but of a billboard which had a blurry photo of the boy, then the bicubic upscaling would actually be accurate. These other upscaling algorithms would actually be making up information by exaggerating the edges (e.g. his eyelashes) even though that information wasn't present in the original. They'd be guessing that the weak lines (eyelashes) in the original photo were in fact very sharp but very thin lines, and upscaling as if they were because that's usually correct. i.e. a probabilistic assumption about how to upscale was encoded in the algorithm itself. In the case of the non-Google algorithms, it was encoded by the programmers of the algorithms. In Google's case, the algorithm just happened to be taught by machine learning. The end result isn't really that different - they all "add" information to the photo by using assumptions about what a higher-resolution original usually actually look like.
It's also important to realize the human visual system isn't one where simply adding more detail produces a "better" image. We cue off of certain traits, and enhancing those traits disproportionately improves the subjective quality of an image, even when it's actually decreasing the objective quality. A good example is unsharp masking. It actually degrades image quality by distorting the image to exaggerate edges (darkens the dark half of an edge, brightens the bright half). But because our eyes have neurons which fire when they detect edges, it makes this worse-quality image appear sharper and better because the "enhanced" photo triggers those neurons more frequently or heavily. This is also the reason we keep seeing faces on Mars. Our brain has neurons which scream "that's a face!" at us whenever they see anything remotely face-like. An algorithm tailored towards those neurons would enhance face-like qualities in photos and make us see nonexistent faces, even though it didn't "add" anything to the photo.
If all you have is a low-res photo, then that's all you have, period. If you want to upscale it 2x, bicubic is probably the only neutral way to do it. (Nearest neighbor introduces high frequency noise by exaggerating pixel boundaries. Pixels are represented on displays as squares because that's the way to maximize light transmission from the backlight. Theoretically, pixels are points, not squares.)
looks like the most delicious roast chicken a dog could ever want.
LOL. Dogs are bred from wolves, which chase their prey down - sometimes for miles - until it tires or stumbles and they're able to make the kill. So they're genetically predisposed to chase after things that move - squirrels, cars, tennis balls, thrown sticks. A boat in the water is a moving (chase-able) object with no distracting background, so triggers this chase instinct.
Usually the way this sort of thing works is you discover a natural source which has the desired effect. That natural source is then tested widely (instead of by a single researcher on a single farm) to determine if it really does have the desired effect. Once it's established that it really does what is claimed, then either they set about figuring a way to grow enough of it naturally, or isolating the compound which creates the desired effect so it can be manufactured in sufficient quantity.
Annual global seaweed harvest was 28,000 metric tons (61,729,433lbs) in '88 according to Wikipedia.
And your 28,000 metric tons figure must be for a single country or a single species of seaweed, not properly fact-checked by Wikipedia's editors since it references a paper article instead of web link. Seaweed is a staple food in Asia, and global production is about 25 million tons annually. Even in the late 1980s it was nearly 5 million tons/yr.
But take note, according to this pro-meat article, livestock accounts for 20% of greenhouse emissions. Should be worrisome to anyone consuming cows or dairy...that's a lot we could cut out very quickly if the will existed.
A large part of the world's open plains have been fenced off for livestock. If you eliminated livestock, you wouldn't eliminate those methane emissions. Those open areas wouldn't need to be fenced anymore, and those wild grasses would instead be consumed by wild herbivores who would produce the same amount of methane (or more).
Livestock feed also represents a convenient sink for excess grain production due to our policy of overproducing food to prevent shortages (having too much food is a much preferable problem to not having enough). In the U.S. at least, the government has been subsidizing farming since the Great Depression to prevent a repeat of the famine which followed the dust bowl (drought and windstorms which blew away much of the topsoil on farms in the Great Plains). Farmers are encouraged to overproduce, and some are paid to leave their fields unplanted just so we'll have excess farmland if there's another dust bowl. Normally this would crater the price for grains since supply exceeds demand. So the government buys all the grain at a set price high enough to keep the farmers in businesses, reselling what people need for food.
The excess grain is used for a variety of things - feed for cattle, converted into high fructose corn syrup as a substitute for imported cane sugar, foreign food aid, and ethanol production being the major ones. (This is why we use corn for ethanol even though economically it's a terrible crop for making ethanol. When the program was first started, it was excess corn being turned into ethanol. The cost to grow it was a sunk cost, so didn't factor into the economics. But then the corn lobby got their hands on it and now we wastefully grow corn for the explicit purpose of converting it into ethanol.) Eliminate feed for cattle and we'd have a lot more excess grain every year. We'd have to figure out something else to do with that grain, or the government would have to scale back these food production subsidies, putting us at greater risk of food shortages.
That has nothing to do with OLED. It can be addressed with a simple color profile; but unfortunately Google hasn't yet added color profile support to Android. Samsung has addressed it by hacking color profiles into the version of Android running on their phones. iOS does support color profiles, at least internally (it's how Apple makes their screens so color accurate).
In a nutshell, OLED has completely black blacks, and has a wider color gamut than LED - it can display more saturated colors like in real life. The current TV and web standard for color gamut is sRGB, which unfortunately was a reduction in color gamut from the NTSC standard that was used for CRT TVs. Early LCDs were vastly inferior in color reproduction than CRTs, and manufacturers managed to get the sRGB color standard hobbled to compensate for this. So all images you see designed to sRGB can only display up to about 50% the color saturation of real-life. OLEDs easily cover the Adobe RGB color gamut, which is pretty close to the old NTSC gamut.
When you display an sRGB image on a display which is capable of a wider gamut, it basically stretches the sRGB colors to map them onto the display's gamut. This is what leads to the lurid colors. The green which is supposed to be 50% of the deepest green you can see in real life (maximum green for sRGB) gets mapped to 70% of the deepest green you can see in real life, making it look unnaturally green. But if you calibrate the display with a color profile, the OS sees that the image it's trying to display is sRGB, and correctly maps it to the (roughly) lower 2/3rds of the color range the display is capable of, and the 50% green remains 50%. It's like how a stereo system which can output 200 Watts can also output 100 Watts. But to play music normalized for a 100 Watt stereo system, you have to turn down the volume on a 200 Watt system. Android currently doesn't have a standardized way to turn down the volume. (Meanwhile, the 100 Watt system can never output sound at 200 Watts.)
With proper software support, there's basically no downside to OLED other than burn-in. Color shift and fade can be compensated for by profiling the screen again. Color professionals (photographers, graphics artists, videographers) do this with their own colorimeter they buy. But there's no reason phone stores couldn't have a colorimeter on hand. You could drop by the store once a year, they use their colorimeter to profile your phone in 10 minutes, and you're out the door with a new color profile and accurate colors. But the OS has to support custom color profiles to be able to do this. And the burn-in problem was more or less solved in the CRT days with screen savers. CRTs used phosphors which also suffered burn-in, and a screen saver evened out phosphor use enough to mitigate burn-in. (You younger folks have probably wondered why they're called a screen "saver" - now you know).
I usually flip this around on Mac fanboys (also applies to iOS fanboys). Pick out a Windows laptop and ask if the Macbook meets or beats all its specs. Macbook has a worse GPU? It loses. Macbook doesn't have an SD card slot? It loses. Macbook has lower resolution? It loses. A few rounds of this is usually enough to convince them how silly this type of comparison is.
As I like to say, there is no such thing as a "best laptop." There is a "best laptop for you" and a "best laptop for me" and a "best laptop for Frank in accounting," but in all likelihood they're going to be different laptops for each person. Come up with a list of features and specs which are most important to you, as well as those which are of little or no importance to you. Then you can meaningfully ask me to help you find a laptop which best matches your requirements. "I want it to be like a Macbook" is not a valid specification. If you want your laptop to be like a Macbook, just get a Macbook.
OP is absolutely correct. I was reading the summary and thinking "WTF?" The math is absolute rubbish. BeauHD, if that isn't obvious to you, you need to stop personally selecting stories with stats in them to post on the front page of slashdot.
The whole point of having reader submissions which are first vetted by other readers, and the cream of the crop elevated by editors to the front page, is to filter out crap articles like this one. It keeps the signal to noise ratio up. You (and the other "editors" doing the same) are short-circuiting that process by posting stories you find interesting straight to the front page. Please stop.
Actually, most of that "waste" can be reused as fuel. Modern light water nuclear plants only use about 3% of the energy in uranium. That's why the waste is "hot" for so long - it's like burning 3% of a gallon of gas and declaring the rest of it waste which has to be buried. A breeder reactor can use the "waste" as fuel, and in the process convert it into a form which can be sent back to light water reactors for use as fuel. Done properly, about 90%-95% of the energy from the uranium can be extracted, and the remaining waste is only "hot" for a few hundred years.
France uses breeder reactors, so they don't have anywhere near the nuclear waste problem that we do. (Jimmy Carter banned the commercial use of breeder reactors in the U.S. because they can be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.)
Also, nuclear in the U.S. produces about 800 TWh of electricity per year. The amount of spent fuel that's created to produce that much energy is about a single tractor trailer's worth (the entire volume of nuclear waste produced since we began using nuclear power would about fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool). Contrast that with coal. A ton of coal produces about 2000 kWh of electricity. So to produce 800 TWh would require about 400 million tons of coal, or about 300 million cubic meters - enough to fill a thousand oil tankers. It also produces 1.14 billion tons of CO2.
So compare that single tractor trailer of nuclear waste (which still contains 97% of the energy in the uranium because we don't reprocess) to a thousand oil tankers full of coal. Still think nuclear is such a bad idea?
I think blaming the customer is misguided. The problem is, one of those $2 Apple chargers is in fact real - made by the same factory where the real ones are made, but made after normal business hours. And people know it. That's what happens when most of the value of a product is in the brand name instead of the in the product itself. The huge delta between the cost to produce it and how much people are paying for it attracts counterfeiters.
This isn't really a counterfeiting "problem" - the counterfeiting is a symptom. The real problem is companies vastly overpricing their products, coming up with ways to thwart the introduction of compatible competition to the market thus producing artificial scarcity, instead of dropping their prices to compete (printer ink cartridges are another example). If the Apple charger costs $1.75 to make and Apple sold it for $2.50, people would gladly pay the extra 50 cents to buy it from Apple directly instead of playing the lottery with $2 chargers on Amazon. But instead Apple prices it at $29, and people decide it's worth taking the risk to play the lottery. They can lose 13 times and still come out ahead.
You don't need to concentrate on the music to listen to it. You can have it playing in the background and it doesn't interfere with the task at hand.Games by definition require you to concentrate on them to be playing them.
The closest you could come to his prediction is something like Pokemon Go, except you don't have to have the game running as you're walking around. It automatically buzzes your phone if there happens to be a Pokemon nearby that you haven't yet captured, giving you the option to play it for a while. This is more akin to your phone alerting you that a song you like is about to play on the radio, not leaving songs playing all the time with Spotify.
You could have simply said "There's nothing we can do about the travesty of this election. Except maybe the Second Amendment People can do something, I don't know."
Only people who equate guns with murder interpreted that as meaning he was implying someone should assassinate Clinton.
People who actually understand why the Second Amendment is there correctly understood that he meant they could (attempt to) overthrow the government. It's the last line of defense against a corrupt government, and why it was listed second in the Bill of Rights, right after Freedom of Speech.
Or they're creating one huge standardized install image containing all software which could conceivably be needed, and installing it on all their computers to simplify IT administration. Mainly to eliminate the need for someone to have to dig through the basement of a warehouse or run to the store to find an install disk when they suddenly find out they need a program and it isn't on the computer - kinda important when you're in the middle of the Pacific ocean. And they only paid for 38 licenses because that's how many computers they're actually planning to use it on at this time.
I visited a lot of election results sites during the night of the election. The New York Times site was by far the best one.
They didn't project results based on exit polls. They projected it based on tallied votes. As each precinct reported its vote tally, it was added to that county's vote count. That was extrapolated to the number of precincts in the county to estimate how the entire county would vote. And the same was done for every county in the state to project how the state would vote. Statistical uncertainties were also calculated, and they had a nifty little confidence graph projecting which candidate was projected to win, how likely they were given the number of uncounted ballots, and what their estimated margin of victory was going to be.
This was a brilliant way to use computers to quickly crunch the overwhelming amount of election results data into a simple human-readable format. It takes all the guesswork out of it - CNN had pundits eyeballing which counties still waiting for precinct returns, and trying to predict the state's outcome based on just those few counties. They thought Pennsylvania might flip to Clinton because the urban areas around Philadelphia still had a large number of precincts not yet reported. But the NYT site showed that there were lots of rural counties which were breaking heavily for Trump yet to be counted. Each county on its own wasn't big enough in population to catch CNN's attention. But the NYT site showed that in total they would easily swamp out the uncounted urban vote, and Pennsylvania would remain Trump's.
With this system, any mis-predictions are simply sampling flukes - precincts with higher-than-average votes for Clinton or Trump just happened to report first. If the NYT continues this format, I will definitely be visiting their site in future elections.
Incidentally, even when 100% of precincts have reported their votes, the state cannot be called if the tally is close enough. There are still absentee ballots outstanding. Those have to be opened up and counted, and could conceivably flip a close election. That's why Michigan is still listed (at the time I'm writing this) as 92% likely to be won by Trump even though 100% of precincts have reported. Trump leads by 13,000 votes, and there are enough absentee ballots still waiting to be counted that statistically there's an 8% chance that they could flip the state to Clinton. Most live news stations don't bother accounting for absentee ballots because it just complicates things and rarely flips a state.
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I think that's kinda the point. They're not giving the warning based on the premise that Internet meetings are more dangerous than other types of meetings. They're just warning people that meetings arranged over the Internet are just as dangerous as other meetings. There's a tendency for people to feel safer about meeting someone over the Internet because the initial correspondence is not direct. The nervousness and anxiety which primes your fight or flight mechanisms is missing or isn't as strong. And a lot of the subconscious body language cues which help you notice that something is "off" about this guy are completely absent. This may lull people into a false sense of safety about meeting someone IRL that they "know" from the Internet.
Technically, solar, hydro, and wind aren't renewable either - you need to consume non-recyclable resources to produce the plants. Primarily concrete for the latter two, though newer wind turbines are making heavier use of fiberglass which uses plastic resins. Solar is just a mess right now - the cost to manufacture PV panels still makes it far more costly than other power sources.
I know there's a tendency to limit the term "renewable" to the fuel being consumed, because that's the most obvious consumable. But to do a proper comparison you really need to consider everything that's consumed (and not recycled) over the life cycle of the power plant, from breaking first ground through operation to demolition/disposal. I've done the math for wind vs. nuclear, and per TWh of power generated nuclear actually requires less infrastructure to be constructed (fewer construction materials consumed) than wind. Dunno if it's enough to offset the uranium that's consumed over the nuclear plant's lifetime. But saying one power source is not "renewable" while others are is not as cut and dry as popular definitions make it out to be.
Coal is widely used for heating and cooking in undeveloped countries without a national energy distribution system (electric grid) nor widespread availability of liquid fuel storage (heating oil and propane tanks), and which lack enough trees to operate wood-burning stoves. Coal is nearly as easy to transport in primitive societies as liquid fuel is in developed societies, and stores much more easily since you can just pile it up in any old place.
I know you're trying to imply the U.S., but the last vestiges of coal use will be in these undeveloped nations, and also in remote locations of developed nations even if the nation has stopped producing electricity from coal.
The problem with that premise is, population growth in developed nations is nearly non-existent. Several developed nations are even shrinking in population (e.g. Japan, Portugul, Spain).
Nearly all of the world's population growth is in developing nations, where subsistence farmers are being put out of business by food imports from developed nations (either bought or donated). If you want to feed the world's growing population, automated farming in developed nations is not the way to do it. Automated farming in developed nations will happen simply because it's a more cost-efficient way to produce domestically consumed crops (or crops traded with other developed trading partners).
But to solve the "world's" population growth problem, the #1 priority has to be to help develop the economies of these undeveloped nations. This means stopping food imports which distort food prices and make it impossible for local farmers to survive by selling what they grow in their local market. Providing food, water, medical care, and building shelters for free as foreign aid is fine as a short-term solution to temporary crises like an earthquake or cyclone or a one-year crop failure. But long-term that "humanitarian" aid just makes things worse. It promotes population growth (doesn't cost the parents more to have more kids) beyond the ability of the region's agriculture to sustain itself. The long-term solution has to be economic development so the local people can grow their own food, develop their own clean water supplies, educate their own doctors and build their own hospitals, and build their own homes. A system of commerce and trade so these people can make a living doing this stuff by themselves has to be in place if they are to survive on their own. Otherwise you're consigning them to a fate of being forced to suck off the teat of developed nations forever just to survive.
Of course a machine is used for the initial count. That has been true since we switched to mechanical ballot counting machines. There's nothing new there - your paper ballot has been saved, and will be referenced in a recount. If need be, it will be recounted by hand (a person looking at your choices with their Mark I eyeball) to eliminate machines as a factor.
The issue here is electronic voting machines without a paper ballot. You step into the voting booth and are presented with a touchscreen. You tap your choices, the machine electronically records your choices (or so they claim), and spits out a piece of paper saying you voted. In this case, there's nothing which can be referenced in a recount except the electrons in some flash cell inside the machine. It is impossible to eliminate the machine as a factor.
Dynamic range. Sensors which can measure from 0 - 100 g's are not as sensitive in the 0-1 g range you may be more concerned about. So you instead opt for accelerometers which max out at 10 g's and try to deal with the periods of max acceleration in software.
A more elegant solution is to use both the sensitive accelerometer and an accelerometer with a greater max threshold. That way you keep the higher max limit without giving up low-gain sensitivity. But spacecraft tend to be both weight- and budget-constrained...
More troubling to me was that there wasn't some basic sanity checking going on. Like a calculation that says "3 seconds ago I was at 4 km high. Now I think I'm on the ground. Does it make sense that I could've traveled that far in that little time? No? Then the instruments saying I'm on the ground are probably wonky, and I should give other instruments a higher priority in calculating my altitude for a bit." Same way I write my code (and spreadsheets) to calculate important numbers two, three, or sometimes even four different ways to make sure they all agree before proceeding to act on it.
The web has a liberal bias. The U.S. population overall is to the right of the web, which is why the web is flabbergasted that Trump somehow managed to win the election.
They're just counting the number of Android phones which are in a location at any give time. Same as how they do their traffic monitoring, except they don't have to worry about how fast the phones are moving.
A good chunk of the exclusion zone is to the southeast of the reactor. The winds on the day of the accident were primarily to the northwest. Radiation levels in the southern portion of the zone are only slightly higher than natural background, and about the same as some of the more naturally radioactive cities on Earth. Most people don't realize that Ukraine's capitol of Kiev is only about 100 km southeast of Chernobyl.
Some elderly people have been allowed to move back into this portion of the zone, but it's still kept part of the exclusion zone out of an abundance of caution. I think it should be kept undeveloped because this is a great experiment on the long-term effects of a nuclear accident on wildlife (both flora and fauna), and the results could be very insightful for determining the effects of radiation on humans. There's very little data on long-term exposure to low levels of radiation. Right now we simply take the effects of high doses of radiation on people, and extrapolate it as a straight line down to zero assuming that if a lot is bad, then a little is also bad. The early research coming out of the Chernobyl exclusion zone seems to contradict this. Slightly elevated levels of radiation actually seem to make animals healthier than normal background radiation (though it could just be that they're not bothered by people). (source)
So killing net neutrality is not necessarily a bad thing if it's coupled with forcing local governments to allow competition in the last mile.
Of course they can be decrypted in software. The fly in the ointment is that Netflix can't stream the movies and TV shows without Hollywood's approval. And Hollywood insists only on approving solutions on a hardware device basis. This is what delayed Netflix coming to Android. The software itself was easy enough, but Netflix had to get Hollywood's stamp of approval for every Android handset out there running the same software. That's why during the rollout, the Netflix app for Android was or wasn't available in Google's Play store depending on which phone or tablet you had.
So likely Hollywood is pulling the same shenanigans again, and only approved 4k Netflix streaming for Kaby Lake and the Edge browser at this time. Maybe they'll give approval for older processors and different browsers in the future. Maybe not. It's up to Hollywood - their content, their rules. If you don't like it, support independent artists and producers instead of the Hollywood establishment.
Agreed about Musk's vision, but you pro-solar people have got to start learning the limitations of the technology. Covering a car in solar panels is mostly pointless. The Telsa S is about 2m wide by 4m long. If you figure half of that surface area (viewed from the top) is windows, that leaves 4 m^2 for solar panels.
Assuming high-end 200 W/m^2 panels, that gives a peak generating capacity of 800 Watts. The capacity factor for solar in the continental U.S. is about 0.145. That's the ratio of actual power produced to peak capacity, taking into account night, angle of the sun, weather, dirt buildup, etc. So that 800 Watts nominal becomes 116 Watts average. If you leave a PV panel-encrusted Tesla parked in the sun all day, the total energy it gains from solar is only (0.116 kWh)*(24 hours) = 2.784 kWh.
The EPA rates the Tesla S at about 38 kWh/100 miles, so ignoring charging losses this 2.784 kWh is enough to move the car only (2.784 kWh) * (100 miles) / (38 kWh) = 7.3 miles. A Tesla S covered in solar panels left parked in the sun all day collects enough solar energy to drive it for about 10 minutes.
Musk isn't doing this so he can put solar panels on the car. He's doing it so EV purchases can be coupled with solar panel purchases. If you understand opportunity cost, you realize that installing solar panels on your house doesn't necessarily mean your EV is now solar-powered. If you would've installed the solar panels anyway (or they're already installed as is the case for most environmentally conscientious people), then adding an EV just increases your electricity consumption and that electricity ends up being generated by coal or gas. In order for solar panels on your house to mathematically power your EV, you have to have installed the solar panels only because you bought an EV. That is, if you hadn't bought the EV, you wouldn't have installed the solar panels. That is what Musk is trying to do - offer a EV + solar panels for your home package deal, so people who wouldn't have installed solar on their homes before will do so now. (That and to partake in the juicy credits the government is handing out for solar panel installation.)
That was a trip, seeing how people inside the reality distortion field view history.
Apple had a big printer business because they created Postscript - a way to scale fonts to arbitrary size. This is the one thing you got right. Only worked with laser printers though, not the dot matrix printers which were common in those days. (This isn't strictly true, but getting Postscript to work with a dot matrix printer like I had to to print banners was a PITA. You had to hack it so the computer did the font processing and printed the page as a graphic - took nearly 3 days to print a few dozen banners for an exibition). They dropped the printer line when Windows gained scalable fonts and printers adapted by adding a CPU and memory capable of rendering these scalable fonts in the printer. Before then, you had to buy a printer which was specifically capable of this. Otherwise you were stuck with the fonts which came with the printer (with some of the better printers having optional font cartridges you could plug in to expand the font library).
Kodak was making digital cameras in conjunction with Canon and Nikon years before Apple made one. Kodak's digital sensors (with a HDD for storage) strapped onto existing SLR bodies. After that it was just like shooting film. Can't get any easier than that. Casio was the first company to make the digital camera "easier" in the sense we know today - they added a LCD to the back so you could preview and view the pictures you'd just taken. Apple copied them (by Apple's standards of claiming anyone who came out with an obvious idea afterwards was copying).
Ethernet predates Appletalk, heck it pre-dates the Macintosh (1984) which introduced Appletalk.
ADB was a serial standard with a theoretical max speed of 125 kbps, though in real-world use it was limited to about 10-15 kbps. To get faster speeds back in those days, you had to resort to multiple wires carrying signals in parallel. That's why we had those massive Centronics parallel ports, and IDE and SCSI ribbon cables for HDDs. It was the only way to move data more quickly back then. USB was successful because it was serial thus needing only a thin cable, but had decent speed - 1.5 Mbps and 12 Mbps in its first iteration. Nothing to do with ADB.
I owned one of the first Linksys consumer routers - released in 2000. I bought it because I was in one of the first communities in the U.S. to get cable modems, and needed a way to share my Internet with multiple computers. If you look through that manual, you'll see the web-based interface is virtually identical to what modern routers use. Linksys nailed it on day one, which is why they grew to dominate the home networking market (before being bought by Cisco). Apple insisted on requiring you to install an app to configure the router, which is why they're getting out of the business today.
You're assuming that image enhancement algorithms are "neutral" solely if they use information already in the photo and don't add missing information to an image. But the very act of choosing which algorithms to use to "enhance" an image is not neutral - it's biased towards enhancements which disproportionately fit our expectations for how the real world works.
For a real example, look at the upscaled photos of the boy's face in TFA. The upscaling algorithms other than bicubic look for edges, and strive to keep them sharp after the upscaling because edges are very important to our visual system. So if the original photo wasn't actually of the boy, but of a billboard which had a blurry photo of the boy, then the bicubic upscaling would actually be accurate. These other upscaling algorithms would actually be making up information by exaggerating the edges (e.g. his eyelashes) even though that information wasn't present in the original. They'd be guessing that the weak lines (eyelashes) in the original photo were in fact very sharp but very thin lines, and upscaling as if they were because that's usually correct. i.e. a probabilistic assumption about how to upscale was encoded in the algorithm itself. In the case of the non-Google algorithms, it was encoded by the programmers of the algorithms. In Google's case, the algorithm just happened to be taught by machine learning. The end result isn't really that different - they all "add" information to the photo by using assumptions about what a higher-resolution original usually actually look like.
It's also important to realize the human visual system isn't one where simply adding more detail produces a "better" image. We cue off of certain traits, and enhancing those traits disproportionately improves the subjective quality of an image, even when it's actually decreasing the objective quality. A good example is unsharp masking. It actually degrades image quality by distorting the image to exaggerate edges (darkens the dark half of an edge, brightens the bright half). But because our eyes have neurons which fire when they detect edges, it makes this worse-quality image appear sharper and better because the "enhanced" photo triggers those neurons more frequently or heavily. This is also the reason we keep seeing faces on Mars. Our brain has neurons which scream "that's a face!" at us whenever they see anything remotely face-like. An algorithm tailored towards those neurons would enhance face-like qualities in photos and make us see nonexistent faces, even though it didn't "add" anything to the photo.
If all you have is a low-res photo, then that's all you have, period. If you want to upscale it 2x, bicubic is probably the only neutral way to do it. (Nearest neighbor introduces high frequency noise by exaggerating pixel boundaries. Pixels are represented on displays as squares because that's the way to maximize light transmission from the backlight. Theoretically, pixels are points, not squares.)
LOL. Dogs are bred from wolves, which chase their prey down - sometimes for miles - until it tires or stumbles and they're able to make the kill. So they're genetically predisposed to chase after things that move - squirrels, cars, tennis balls, thrown sticks. A boat in the water is a moving (chase-able) object with no distracting background, so triggers this chase instinct.
Cats likewise are stealth pouncers, so turning your back on them (so you can no longer see the cat) triggers an instinctive attack response.
And your 28,000 metric tons figure must be for a single country or a single species of seaweed, not properly fact-checked by Wikipedia's editors since it references a paper article instead of web link. Seaweed is a staple food in Asia, and global production is about 25 million tons annually. Even in the late 1980s it was nearly 5 million tons/yr.
A large part of the world's open plains have been fenced off for livestock. If you eliminated livestock, you wouldn't eliminate those methane emissions. Those open areas wouldn't need to be fenced anymore, and those wild grasses would instead be consumed by wild herbivores who would produce the same amount of methane (or more).
Livestock feed also represents a convenient sink for excess grain production due to our policy of overproducing food to prevent shortages (having too much food is a much preferable problem to not having enough). In the U.S. at least, the government has been subsidizing farming since the Great Depression to prevent a repeat of the famine which followed the dust bowl (drought and windstorms which blew away much of the topsoil on farms in the Great Plains). Farmers are encouraged to overproduce, and some are paid to leave their fields unplanted just so we'll have excess farmland if there's another dust bowl. Normally this would crater the price for grains since supply exceeds demand. So the government buys all the grain at a set price high enough to keep the farmers in businesses, reselling what people need for food.
The excess grain is used for a variety of things - feed for cattle, converted into high fructose corn syrup as a substitute for imported cane sugar, foreign food aid, and ethanol production being the major ones. (This is why we use corn for ethanol even though economically it's a terrible crop for making ethanol. When the program was first started, it was excess corn being turned into ethanol. The cost to grow it was a sunk cost, so didn't factor into the economics. But then the corn lobby got their hands on it and now we wastefully grow corn for the explicit purpose of converting it into ethanol.) Eliminate feed for cattle and we'd have a lot more excess grain every year. We'd have to figure out something else to do with that grain, or the government would have to scale back these food production subsidies, putting us at greater risk of food shortages.
That has nothing to do with OLED. It can be addressed with a simple color profile; but unfortunately Google hasn't yet added color profile support to Android. Samsung has addressed it by hacking color profiles into the version of Android running on their phones. iOS does support color profiles, at least internally (it's how Apple makes their screens so color accurate).
In a nutshell, OLED has completely black blacks, and has a wider color gamut than LED - it can display more saturated colors like in real life. The current TV and web standard for color gamut is sRGB, which unfortunately was a reduction in color gamut from the NTSC standard that was used for CRT TVs. Early LCDs were vastly inferior in color reproduction than CRTs, and manufacturers managed to get the sRGB color standard hobbled to compensate for this. So all images you see designed to sRGB can only display up to about 50% the color saturation of real-life. OLEDs easily cover the Adobe RGB color gamut, which is pretty close to the old NTSC gamut.
When you display an sRGB image on a display which is capable of a wider gamut, it basically stretches the sRGB colors to map them onto the display's gamut. This is what leads to the lurid colors. The green which is supposed to be 50% of the deepest green you can see in real life (maximum green for sRGB) gets mapped to 70% of the deepest green you can see in real life, making it look unnaturally green. But if you calibrate the display with a color profile, the OS sees that the image it's trying to display is sRGB, and correctly maps it to the (roughly) lower 2/3rds of the color range the display is capable of, and the 50% green remains 50%. It's like how a stereo system which can output 200 Watts can also output 100 Watts. But to play music normalized for a 100 Watt stereo system, you have to turn down the volume on a 200 Watt system. Android currently doesn't have a standardized way to turn down the volume. (Meanwhile, the 100 Watt system can never output sound at 200 Watts.)
With proper software support, there's basically no downside to OLED other than burn-in. Color shift and fade can be compensated for by profiling the screen again. Color professionals (photographers, graphics artists, videographers) do this with their own colorimeter they buy. But there's no reason phone stores couldn't have a colorimeter on hand. You could drop by the store once a year, they use their colorimeter to profile your phone in 10 minutes, and you're out the door with a new color profile and accurate colors. But the OS has to support custom color profiles to be able to do this. And the burn-in problem was more or less solved in the CRT days with screen savers. CRTs used phosphors which also suffered burn-in, and a screen saver evened out phosphor use enough to mitigate burn-in. (You younger folks have probably wondered why they're called a screen "saver" - now you know).
I usually flip this around on Mac fanboys (also applies to iOS fanboys). Pick out a Windows laptop and ask if the Macbook meets or beats all its specs. Macbook has a worse GPU? It loses. Macbook doesn't have an SD card slot? It loses. Macbook has lower resolution? It loses. A few rounds of this is usually enough to convince them how silly this type of comparison is.
As I like to say, there is no such thing as a "best laptop." There is a "best laptop for you" and a "best laptop for me" and a "best laptop for Frank in accounting," but in all likelihood they're going to be different laptops for each person. Come up with a list of features and specs which are most important to you, as well as those which are of little or no importance to you. Then you can meaningfully ask me to help you find a laptop which best matches your requirements. "I want it to be like a Macbook" is not a valid specification. If you want your laptop to be like a Macbook, just get a Macbook.
OP is absolutely correct. I was reading the summary and thinking "WTF?" The math is absolute rubbish. BeauHD, if that isn't obvious to you, you need to stop personally selecting stories with stats in them to post on the front page of slashdot.
The whole point of having reader submissions which are first vetted by other readers, and the cream of the crop elevated by editors to the front page, is to filter out crap articles like this one. It keeps the signal to noise ratio up. You (and the other "editors" doing the same) are short-circuiting that process by posting stories you find interesting straight to the front page. Please stop.
Actually, most of that "waste" can be reused as fuel. Modern light water nuclear plants only use about 3% of the energy in uranium. That's why the waste is "hot" for so long - it's like burning 3% of a gallon of gas and declaring the rest of it waste which has to be buried. A breeder reactor can use the "waste" as fuel, and in the process convert it into a form which can be sent back to light water reactors for use as fuel. Done properly, about 90%-95% of the energy from the uranium can be extracted, and the remaining waste is only "hot" for a few hundred years.
France uses breeder reactors, so they don't have anywhere near the nuclear waste problem that we do. (Jimmy Carter banned the commercial use of breeder reactors in the U.S. because they can be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.)
Also, nuclear in the U.S. produces about 800 TWh of electricity per year. The amount of spent fuel that's created to produce that much energy is about a single tractor trailer's worth (the entire volume of nuclear waste produced since we began using nuclear power would about fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool). Contrast that with coal. A ton of coal produces about 2000 kWh of electricity. So to produce 800 TWh would require about 400 million tons of coal, or about 300 million cubic meters - enough to fill a thousand oil tankers. It also produces 1.14 billion tons of CO2.
So compare that single tractor trailer of nuclear waste (which still contains 97% of the energy in the uranium because we don't reprocess) to a thousand oil tankers full of coal. Still think nuclear is such a bad idea?
I think blaming the customer is misguided. The problem is, one of those $2 Apple chargers is in fact real - made by the same factory where the real ones are made, but made after normal business hours. And people know it. That's what happens when most of the value of a product is in the brand name instead of the in the product itself. The huge delta between the cost to produce it and how much people are paying for it attracts counterfeiters.
This isn't really a counterfeiting "problem" - the counterfeiting is a symptom. The real problem is companies vastly overpricing their products, coming up with ways to thwart the introduction of compatible competition to the market thus producing artificial scarcity, instead of dropping their prices to compete (printer ink cartridges are another example). If the Apple charger costs $1.75 to make and Apple sold it for $2.50, people would gladly pay the extra 50 cents to buy it from Apple directly instead of playing the lottery with $2 chargers on Amazon. But instead Apple prices it at $29, and people decide it's worth taking the risk to play the lottery. They can lose 13 times and still come out ahead.
You don't need to concentrate on the music to listen to it. You can have it playing in the background and it doesn't interfere with the task at hand .Games by definition require you to concentrate on them to be playing them.
The closest you could come to his prediction is something like Pokemon Go, except you don't have to have the game running as you're walking around. It automatically buzzes your phone if there happens to be a Pokemon nearby that you haven't yet captured, giving you the option to play it for a while. This is more akin to your phone alerting you that a song you like is about to play on the radio, not leaving songs playing all the time with Spotify.
Only people who equate guns with murder interpreted that as meaning he was implying someone should assassinate Clinton.
People who actually understand why the Second Amendment is there correctly understood that he meant they could (attempt to) overthrow the government. It's the last line of defense against a corrupt government, and why it was listed second in the Bill of Rights, right after Freedom of Speech.
Or they're creating one huge standardized install image containing all software which could conceivably be needed, and installing it on all their computers to simplify IT administration. Mainly to eliminate the need for someone to have to dig through the basement of a warehouse or run to the store to find an install disk when they suddenly find out they need a program and it isn't on the computer - kinda important when you're in the middle of the Pacific ocean. And they only paid for 38 licenses because that's how many computers they're actually planning to use it on at this time.
I visited a lot of election results sites during the night of the election. The New York Times site was by far the best one.
They didn't project results based on exit polls. They projected it based on tallied votes. As each precinct reported its vote tally, it was added to that county's vote count. That was extrapolated to the number of precincts in the county to estimate how the entire county would vote. And the same was done for every county in the state to project how the state would vote. Statistical uncertainties were also calculated, and they had a nifty little confidence graph projecting which candidate was projected to win, how likely they were given the number of uncounted ballots, and what their estimated margin of victory was going to be.
This was a brilliant way to use computers to quickly crunch the overwhelming amount of election results data into a simple human-readable format. It takes all the guesswork out of it - CNN had pundits eyeballing which counties still waiting for precinct returns, and trying to predict the state's outcome based on just those few counties. They thought Pennsylvania might flip to Clinton because the urban areas around Philadelphia still had a large number of precincts not yet reported. But the NYT site showed that there were lots of rural counties which were breaking heavily for Trump yet to be counted. Each county on its own wasn't big enough in population to catch CNN's attention. But the NYT site showed that in total they would easily swamp out the uncounted urban vote, and Pennsylvania would remain Trump's.
With this system, any mis-predictions are simply sampling flukes - precincts with higher-than-average votes for Clinton or Trump just happened to report first. If the NYT continues this format, I will definitely be visiting their site in future elections.
Incidentally, even when 100% of precincts have reported their votes, the state cannot be called if the tally is close enough. There are still absentee ballots outstanding. Those have to be opened up and counted, and could conceivably flip a close election. That's why Michigan is still listed (at the time I'm writing this) as 92% likely to be won by Trump even though 100% of precincts have reported. Trump leads by 13,000 votes, and there are enough absentee ballots still waiting to be counted that statistically there's an 8% chance that they could flip the state to Clinton. Most live news stations don't bother accounting for absentee ballots because it just complicates things and rarely flips a state.