Program NameThatSongApp wants access to the microphone.
Approve
(Unbeknownst to the user, the app also constantly listens for secret ultrasonic commands)
Functions which are invisible to the user should always have a master on/off switch, preferably physical, or some sort of non-defeatable indicator that they are in use. The two main culprits here are the camera and microphone. It's also the rationale for things like a light to indicate hard drive activity which oh so many laptop vendors seem anxious to eliminate.
1) They sneak in 3rd party resellers. Lots of other sites allow 3rd party resellers - Newegg, Sears (almost entirely 3rd party), eBay, etc. For the most part, they make it damn obvious you're buying from a 3rd party, not from the site itself. Most of them even let you exclude 3rd party sellers with a single click. Amazon shows the seller name in easily-missed text in the middle of the product listing - very easy to miss. It's easier if you have Prime, as many 3rd parties don't support Prime. So you'll search for a product, click on one listed with Prime shipping, and when you go to put it in your cart you notice it doesn't have Prime shipping because Amazon has silently substituted a 3rd party seller. And I haven't been able to find an option on Amazon to exclude 3rd parties.
2) Contamination of their supply chain. This is based on hearsay, although my personal experience seems to support it. Have you noticed the "Sold by xxx and shipped by Amazon" tags on some products? The way that works is the 3rd party seller sends their inventory to Amazon. Amazon stores it in their warehouse, and when you buy from that seller, Amazon ships it for them. The problem is Amazon seems to co-mingle 3rd party inventory with their own. So if you order a SD card, Amazon's computers grab the nearest available SD card whether it be from Amazon's inventory or a 3rd party's inventory. Your go through the effort of making sure you're buying the SD card with Amazon as the seller to try to get a genuine one, and you still end up getting a fake sent to Amazon by ConterfeitsRUs. I've basically given up buying commonly counterfeited items like flash drives from Amazon. I pay the extra to get them from a local retailer whose supply chain hasn't been contaminated this way.
Usually when that sort of thing happens, it's not because the programmer did something obviously wrong. It's usually because the programmer had two (or more) competing scenarios to design for. He tried to design something which would split the difference, and ended up erring too much to one side.
Lufthansa flight 2904 is a good example. The plane had to land in an expected crosswind on a wet runway. A crosswind landing requires landing with the plane's orientation misaligned from the runway. The plane is pointed into the crosswind, so is actually landing diagonally, then when it hits the ground it has to quickly yaw so it's aligned with the runway (so the wheels are pointed in the right direction). The way this is done is it lands on one gear first, pivots around on that gear to point the nose at the end of the runway, then drops down the second gear, then the nose gear.
The A320's flight computer was programmed to avoid the disastrous scenario of a thrust reverser deploying in mid-air. It prohibited deployment of the thrust reversers unless both rear landing gear had 6.3 tons of force each on them. Full deployment of the spoilers (disrupts lift to plant the plane firmly on the ground) was prohibited unless the 6.3 tons criteria was met or the wheels were spinning faster than 72 knots.
Unfortunately, in flight 2904's case, the crosswing landing maneuver placed most of the initial the force on a single landing gear, so the thrust reversers didn't deploy. The wet runway caused hydroplaning so the spoilers failed to deploy, hindering the pilots from getting the second landing gear down. By the time the above criteria were met and the plane began slowing down, it was well past the halfway point of the runway, and ended up going off the end. Design criteria selected to prevent one type of accident inadvertently caused another.
The entire reason Jammie Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay $222,000 was because she purportedly uploaded 24 songs to thousands of people. She was distributing the songs without a license from the copyright holder - something Copyright law expressly prohibits. In other words, by using copyright law crafted to stop wholesale copyright infringement, Capitol Records cast Ms. Thomas-Rasset as the mastermind of a bootleg music business and won a judgement of $222,000 against her. That judgment effectively indemnifies people who downloaded music from her uploads. She paid for the crime, not her "customers". When you shut down a counterfeit CD ring, you do not then go after the people who bought the illegitimate CDs.
If you throw all that out the window and instead argue that it's the act of downloading a song which is infringement (which current copyright law does not support), then this becomes really easy. Each downloader becomes liable for a single copy (the one they downloaded). And an appropriate fine would be, say, 3x or 5x the cost of buying the song from a legitimate source. So about $3-$5 per song. Frankly I think that's a much more sensible approach to copyright enforcement than ruining people's lives and depriving them of Internet service because they shared some music files.
But I suspect the *AA is going to want their cake and eat it too, and want to assess hundred-thousand dollar judgments against downloaders as well. This is a slimy and illogical (should be illegal) tactic of turning n crimes into n^2 crimes. If 10 people share a file and each copyright violation costs $100, then there are a total of 9 illegal copies made, and the total damages should be $900. But by the *AA's nonsensical reasoning, each person is responsible for 9 counts of copyright violation, so each person should pay $900, resulting in $10,000 in damages awarded. The math simply doesn't add up - they'd be getting $10,000 in court awards when the law has determined that they've only suffered $900 in damages.
You can't have it both ways. Either one person is liable for all the copyright infringement and you can ruin them financially. Or each person is responsible for a single copyright infringement (the file they downloaded) and you can only fine them a few times what it would've cost to buy the file legitimately.
The hippie solution doesn't work because even if you can convince 99.99% of people to be peaceful, that remaining 0.01% can still send the world into nuclear winter.
You need some sort of hybrid approach, where you convince easiest 99% of people to be peaceful, but retain enough military capability to dissuade the remaining stubborn 1% from doing anything nuts. Which is more or less what we're doing today. Except some of those pursuing the hippie part of this hybrid approach have deluded themselves into thinking their approach will work on the entirety of the remaining 1% just because it worked on the first 99%.
That's what hippies don't seem to understand. Even if you temporarily achieved 100% indoctrination into a peaceful, cooperative society and completely disarmed. It just takes one person to be born who thinks differently and builds his own devices and following in secret, and spreads chaos and ruin upon that idyllic and disarmed utopia. You must have some sort of defense against this in reserve. Always. I don't particularly blame hippies for making this mistake - people tend to think that others will act as they themselves do. So if it's beyond their conception as to why someone would want to kill and destroy in order to have power over (parts of) the world, then it will literally be inconceivable to them that someone would ever want to do this. But that doesn't change the fact that it's a bad assumption.
I'm running into the same problem trying to get cable modem service to my business. The building currently doesn't have cable service.. The nearest location the cable company can extend service from to wire up our building is only about 1000 ft away, but they're estimating it'll cost them $14.5k. Most of that cost is in drawing up the plans and submitting it to the city so they can get permits to dig up the street to lay down new cable. You don't incur these costs when maintaining existing lines. They estimate the cost of sending a crew out to actually dig up the road, lay down the cable, and patch up the road will only be a few thousand.
Most everything you're complaining about is on the government, not VW. Basically the situation you're describing is like buying something from a store and paying sales tax, finding out it's defective, returning it for a refund, and the government refuses to reimburse you for sales tax initially paid, and then tries to tax you when use the refund to buy a replacement product.
They shouldn't be able to have it both ways - either tax the initial purchase or the replacement purchase, but not both. But logic goes out the window when it comes to government and taxes. I'm even reading that some states will try to charge income tax on the buyback amount. Basically making you pay income tax on a refund.
The way it should work: Bob wants to buy something from Frank. To facilitate this, he gives Frank his personal cell phone number. Mary wants to contact Bob. She finds out Frank has his cell phone number, so asks Frank for it. Frank calls Bob, says Mary wants his cell phone number, and asks for his permission to give it to her.
The way it currently works: Bob wants to buy something from Frank. To facilitate this, he gives Frank his personal cell phone number. Mary wants to contact Bob. She finds out Frank has his cell phone number, so asks Frank for it. Frank says he'll give it to her for $x. Bob has no say in this.
We need something like patient confidentiality rules for business transactions. If you need personal info about me like my name, age, phone number, address, SS number, location, where I went to college, what I like to buy, whatever,. so that we can conduct business, that does not give you a blanket license to sell said information to someone else without my authorization.
The failure of windows phone had nothing to do with 'developer engagement'. Simply put they were far too late to market to compete with the already established iphone & Android.
A lot of us had PDAs back in the 1990s. A lot of us also had cell phones. It didn't take a genius to figure out that having one device which worked as both a cell phone and PDA would be really nice, if for nothing but to reduce the amount of clanking going on in your pocket. So it was pretty obvious by the mid-1990s that cell phones and PDAs were going to converge. The only question was if PDAs would get phone capability added on, or if cell phones would get PDA (computing) capability added on.
The late 1990s is when this convergence began. Nokia (a phone manufacturer) was first out of the blocks, which cemented their dominance of the early smartphone market. Palm came out with the Kyocera 6035 and Treo in 2001/2002. The smartphone-ish Blackberry didn't show up until 2003.
Microsoft was right in the thick of this. Since 1996, They'd been competing with PalmOS with WinCE (which became Pocket PC which became Windows Mobile which became Windows Phone). They had enough foresight to add software hooks for phone support to Pocket PC 2000, but never put much effort into the hardware side. For some reason they never took this PDA-phone convergence seriously. Apparently they were too busy thinking up with new names for their mobile OS than to work on phone hardware integration. I remember when the Jornada 928 came to market just in time to compete with the Palm Treo in 2002, reviews panned it calling the phone functionality buggy and unreliable. For all the evils of the old Bell Telephone monopoly, one thing they got right was "It Just Works". Your electricity could be out after a storm, but your landline phone would still work. That's what people were used to and expected. An unreliable phone was dead before it even hit the market.
So Microsoft wasn't late to the market. They were right there at the beginning of the smartphone market and had ample opportunity to dominate it. They just blew it. I suspect someone high up in their management chain, maybe even Gates himself, didn't believe this phone-PDA convergence was going to happen.
Somewhere along the lines, these roles were reversed.
I think it happened right after the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War, we had a bogeyman - trumped up but still a bogeyman. We would point to things that happened in the Soviet Union like excessive government intrusion into people's private lives, and proudly proclaim that that sort of thing could never happen here. Anyone in our government who even breathed a suggestion of it would be branded a commie and instantly torpedo their career.
The Cold War ends, the poster child for an authoritative government run amok disappears, and suddenly everyone in our government who always those authoritarian powers but were too scared to try to ask for them come crawling out from the shadows.
2000 liters/day is a lot. About how much a U.S. family of 4 uses. You can make do with a lot less. India is around 130 liters/person-day. So I suspect this is more a one per 100-300 people concept, meant to provide potable water (drinking and cooking) so existing water sources can be used for things like bathing and laundry. That would help avoid things like the arsenic poisoning fiasco caused by relief agencies drilling fresh water wells in Bangladesh.
The technical term is a point spread function. A lens with good bokeh will have a PSF which falls off smoothly the further you get from the center (like a bell curve). Bad bokeh is produced by a rapid falloff (or even increases) at the edges (looking sort of like Gibbs phenomenon).
Note however that due to geometry, the PSF in front of and behind the focal plane are conjugates. If the PSF concentrates rays towards the center behind the focal plane for a pleasing bell-curve like falloff, then those center-skewed rays must deviate further from the center when in front of the focal plane thus generating harsh edges. So good bokeh behind the subject means bad bokeh in front, and vice versa. I'm not a big fan of computer-generated bokeh, but this is one advantage it has over real-world lenses.
There are actually three stances here, not the two you're implying.
Can't ban something because it generates a lot of money.
Ban something regardless of how much money it generates.
Some things that make a lot of money are worth banning, some things shouldn't be banned regardless of making a lot of money.
As for the money-making activities you've cited, those are banned because their productivity generation is a net negative. The money the sex trafficker or cocaine dealer or ransomware author makes is less than the cost paid by the other party (sex slave loses freedom, drug addict suffers degraded productivity, ransomware victim should never have had to pay ransom). One party is making money at the expense of the other.
Legitimate business activities like, say, drone manufacturing are a net positive. The revenue the drone manufacturer gets from selling the drone is more than their cost in parts and labor. And the money the drone purchaser makes from the utility or enjoyment of using the drone exceeds the purchase price. Both parties benefit from the transaction. Until some government floozy decides because some screwdrivers can be used to help pick locks, that all screwdrivers should be banned. Except for very rare cases, bans should be on activities, not on tools which can be misused.
A lot of sites break if you try to zoom in or change the default fonts. Word wraps don't align properly. Letters start to overlap pictures or sidebar menus.
The entire concept of the WWW as Berners-Lee conceived it was that the website would transmit information to the client, and the client's browser would display it in a format most suitable for the client display device. That way the exact same web page would work on a tiny cell phone screen or gargantuan 50" 4k TV used as a screen. Neither of those existed at the time, but he had enough foresight to predict a wide variation in client display sizes and requirements.
But the people who became web designers were formerly page layout designers. They revolted. They were used to printed paper, where they controlled everything the reader saw - fonts, font sizes, text wrap around photos, columns, etc. Their ego couldn't stand ceding some of that control to the reader, so they fought tooth and nail to bring that control back to themselves. The early flash-only websites were their first salvo. Everyone hated flash sites, but they loved them because it would display exactly and only as they designed it. If the 1024 pixel width they chose didn't fit in someone's 800x600 monitor? Well obviously it was the reader's fault and they needed to upgrade to a better GPU and monitor. Modern websites are so design-centered that they actually have to create two different sites for display on large computer monitors vs small phone and tablet screens. There's almost nothing left under the client's control that can be modified without breaking something about the site.
NASA picked up a lot of experience putting landers on the moon. The Soviets also sent a lot of moon landers, but never really ironed out the bugs (had a lot of failures). Those problems followed them to Mars where they went 0 for 6 (well, 1 for 6 but the single success ceased communicating after 14.5 seconds with no useful data received).
Current Li-ion batteries only have about twice the energy density of NiCds. The reputation NiCds got for having lousy energy capacity was due to a memory effect. If you kept recharging the battery before it had been fully discharged, it "learned" the low charge state as its new zero state, and you lost that bottom portion of its capacity (due to crystalline growth).
Rechargeable batteries have increased about 2x in energy density in the last half century, and about 3.5x in the last century (from lead-acid to li-ion). So claims of a 10x increase in the near future are going to be met with a lot of skepticism.
TFA says they handle 15% of all online retail sales, maybe 20%-30% if you include third party sales handled through Amazon. Online sales comprise only 8.1% of all retail sales. So Amazon's (very small) slice of the whole pie is just 1.2%, possibly 1.6%-2.4% if you include their third party affiliates.
Amazon barely cracked the top-10 stores in retail sales for 2015. There's a tendency for people who like to be online to over-exaggerate the effect of the Internet. Retail sales are still very much a brick and mortar business.
Localization of the power source doesn't matter. Everything is interconnected by the grid anyway, so only total generation and total consumption matter. Say everything except your Tesla uses x kWh.
Original case: x kWh generated, x kWh consumed.
Now add the Tesla and solar panels on your house:
Work night shift, Solar panels generate y kWh, Tesla consumes y kWh to charge (set them both to y to simplifiy):
x + y kWh generated, x + y kWh consumed
Work day shift, Solar panels generate y kWh which is sent to the grid, Telsa consumes y kWh from the grid to charge:
x + y kWh generated, x + y kWh consumed. Same as above.
Basically, if you work the day shift, the addition of your solar panels at your house reduces the amount of power the coal plant needs to generate by y kWh. When you plug the Tesla into a charger at work, it increases the amount of power the coal plant needs to generate by y kWh. And the whole thing is a wash. Exactly the same as if you charged the Tesla at home using (only) power from your home solar panels.
A lot of people don't seem to get this. The marginal increase power use doesn't have to be directly connected to the marginal increase in power generation to have the same effect. This is also why you should conserve electricity even if you're in the Pacific Northwest which is powered mostly by hydroelectric. Any reduction in your consumption means a little bit of hydro power is left over and can be transmitted to the rest of the country, and a coal plant elsewhere needs to burn a little less coal. Exactly the same as if someone living next to the coal plant conserved electricity.
For the same reason, EVs are predominantly powered by electricity from coal and natural gas, not by renewables. Those are the two power generation sources which are flexible enough to ramp up with increases in demand. EVs are only powered by electricity from renewables if you wouldn't have built the renewable plant if you hadn't bought the EV. If you would've built the renewable plant anyway, then it results in a marginal decrease in the generation from coal and gas, while the addition of an EV results in a marginal increase in the generation from coal and gas. So the EV's power is coming from coal and gas. This is the case even if the electricity from your solar panels are going straight to your EV. If in the absence of your EV the electricity from your solar panels would've instead gone onto the grid, then by putting it into your EV you are depriving the grid of those kWh, and a coal/gas plant elsewhere needs to generate those kWh.
Tesla understands this, which is why they're trying to link home solar installation with EV car purchases. If you can link the two, then the purchase of the EV results in the installation of PV solar generation which would not have existed without the EV. And then you can truthfully say the EV is being powered by electricity from solar.
NASA was much the same before the Challenger accident. The PR people had way too much power - enough to force a launch to proceed when the engineers were saying it wasn't safe.
I'm willing to cut the ESA a little slack here. Nobody was really hurt by trying to de-emphasize the lander's failure, and the bulk of the instruments are in the orbiter (which will also serve as a communications relay station for future missions). So while the mass media obviously was focused on the lander's failure, from a scientific standpoint the orbiter's success was the bigger story.
That's a key difference between how regular people and rich people tend to think about money. $x million is an amount. Income is a rate. Regular people think having a large amount of money is being rich. $100 million > $50 million, so they'll take the $100 million. Rich people think having a high income is being rich. $100 million earning 5%/yr is increasing at $5 million/yr. $50 million earning 40%/yr is increasing at $20 million/yr, and will exceed the value of the $100 million in 5 years,. So they'll likely consider the $50 million to be the better choice. You can see this among lottery jackpot winners. The long-term payment (over 20-30 years) is usually the better choice, but most winners opt for the immediate lump-sum payment.
Likewise, Microsoft offered to buy FB for $24 billion because they thought that was the best place to invest their money to get the highest return on investment. Zuckerberg turned down the offer because he thought his highest ROI was in continuing to work on improving FB, rather than taking the money and investing it elsewhere. 50% of new companies fail within 5 years; 2/3rds fail within 10 years. So if you think the company you currently own is likely to experience strong growth, selling it with the intent of using the money to start a new company is a very risky proposition.
This. Commercial PV panels are about 18% efficient at converting solar energy into electricity, and the best fluorescent bulbs are about 15% efficient at converting electricity into light (the rest becomes heat). So if you install PV panels to power your lights, you're only converting about 2.7% of the sunlight hitting your solar panels into interior light.
In other words, covering your roof entirely with PV panels gets you as much solar lighting as cutting holes in 2.7% of your roof. The little squares in the Walmart pic you've linked covers about 1/12th the roof (one per 3x4 grid), or 8.3%. So it's providing 3x more free lighting than if you'd covered the entire roof with PV panels. Most of the warehouse stores I've been to (Costco, Home Depot, etc) use similar natural lighting extensively. (Note that you can still cover the space in between these skylights with PV panels.)
Yeah, that's the trend I see in Consumer Reports auto owner surveys. Owners of expensive luxury brands like BMW, Mercedes, and Jaguar tend to be happier with their vehicles, even though they report these vehicles as having more problems than other cars.
0.9 is the historical capacity factor for nuclear in the U.S. Yeah, nuclear is really best for base load. It's slow to ramp up or down, so is not very good for peaking power load (the hourly and instantaneous spikes and dips in power consumption for the grid overall). Peaking load is usually handled by hydro and gas plants, sometimes coal.
The difference is that nuclear power proponents do not advocate making 100% of power generation nuclear. They are ok with using hydro, gas, wind, solar to handle peaking load. Renewable power proponents OTOH advocate 100% of our power come from hydro, wind, and solar, even though none of them are suitable for base load. Geothermal was really the only viable renewable for base load, but it has become collateral damage in environmentalists' war against fracking. (The energy of earthquakes triggered by fracking was already in the earth. If that energy hadn't been released by the fracking, it would've been released in a natural earthquake some time in the future. But in their zeal to shut down fracking for oil by incorrectly blaming fracking for all the energy released in an earthquake, they've poisoned public perception so that geothermal would also be blamed for earthquakes.)
As for rates for different power sources, wind is getting close to nuclear, but solar is still nowhere near. And as mentioned above, neither are suitable for base load. Most of the articles I've read proclaiming renewables will overtake nuclear and fossil fuels in cost mistakenly omit capacity factor in their comparison. They wind up comparing peak generating capacity, which has very little to do with rates. Theoretically you could use renewables for base load if you had sufficient storage capacity. But the most efficient storage system (pumped storage) only has about 75% efficiency, so that automatically makes it at least 1.33x more expensive than its source.
Nuclear power has a capacity factor of about 0.9. So a 1 GW plant will generate on average 900 MW throughout the year after taking into account downtime for maintenance and refueling.
8766 hours in a year (taking into account leap years), so that's 7889 GWh per year.
At a U.S. average rate of 12 cents/kWh = $120/MWh = $0.12 million/GWh, that's $947 million worth of power generated per year.
Nuclear plants are licensed to operate for 40 years. So that's $37.9 billion worth of power generated over 40 years.
Most of the older plants have had their license extended to 60 years. Some are requesting an extension to 80 years because everything is working just fine. So the actual power generated over the lifetime of the plant will likely be 1.5x to 2x higher.
So yeah, the $4.7 billion construction cost is tiny compared to the return you'll get. For your example of a 3.2 GW output plant that costs £24.5 billion ($30 billion) including financing, at the UK average rate of US$0.22/kWh, the expected power generated over 40 years would be worth $222 billion.
The interesting thing is that they're implying the FBI was the source for these requests. The NSA and CIA have been able to weasel through their requests on the grounds that they're investigating electronic communications with people outside the U.S. who don't have Constitutional protection. i.e. Someone in California emails someone in Virginia, both are protected by the 4th Amendment, and there needs to be a warrant before their communications can be read by the government. But someone in China emails someone in California, and the NSA and CIA's legal argument is that the Chinese sender doesn't have 4th Amendment protection, so they are within their rights to intercept communications en masse without a warrant, then filter out entirely domestic communications which would require a warrant, leaving only international communications.
The FBI does not have jurisdiction outside of the U.S. (that's the CIA's and NSA's job). The only time they're allowed to investigate something outside the U.S. is when a foreign country invites them to do so (e.g. Pan Am bombing over Scotland). So if it was in fact the FBI which made the request, I'm curious what sort of legal argument they used to get this type of widescale monitoring approved by the FISA court.
Slashdot Mirror
Program NameThatSongApp wants access to the microphone.
Approve
(Unbeknownst to the user, the app also constantly listens for secret ultrasonic commands)
Functions which are invisible to the user should always have a master on/off switch, preferably physical, or some sort of non-defeatable indicator that they are in use. The two main culprits here are the camera and microphone. It's also the rationale for things like a light to indicate hard drive activity which oh so many laptop vendors seem anxious to eliminate.
1) They sneak in 3rd party resellers. Lots of other sites allow 3rd party resellers - Newegg, Sears (almost entirely 3rd party), eBay, etc. For the most part, they make it damn obvious you're buying from a 3rd party, not from the site itself. Most of them even let you exclude 3rd party sellers with a single click. Amazon shows the seller name in easily-missed text in the middle of the product listing - very easy to miss. It's easier if you have Prime, as many 3rd parties don't support Prime. So you'll search for a product, click on one listed with Prime shipping, and when you go to put it in your cart you notice it doesn't have Prime shipping because Amazon has silently substituted a 3rd party seller. And I haven't been able to find an option on Amazon to exclude 3rd parties.
2) Contamination of their supply chain. This is based on hearsay, although my personal experience seems to support it. Have you noticed the "Sold by xxx and shipped by Amazon" tags on some products? The way that works is the 3rd party seller sends their inventory to Amazon. Amazon stores it in their warehouse, and when you buy from that seller, Amazon ships it for them. The problem is Amazon seems to co-mingle 3rd party inventory with their own. So if you order a SD card, Amazon's computers grab the nearest available SD card whether it be from Amazon's inventory or a 3rd party's inventory. Your go through the effort of making sure you're buying the SD card with Amazon as the seller to try to get a genuine one, and you still end up getting a fake sent to Amazon by ConterfeitsRUs. I've basically given up buying commonly counterfeited items like flash drives from Amazon. I pay the extra to get them from a local retailer whose supply chain hasn't been contaminated this way.
Usually when that sort of thing happens, it's not because the programmer did something obviously wrong. It's usually because the programmer had two (or more) competing scenarios to design for. He tried to design something which would split the difference, and ended up erring too much to one side.
Lufthansa flight 2904 is a good example. The plane had to land in an expected crosswind on a wet runway. A crosswind landing requires landing with the plane's orientation misaligned from the runway. The plane is pointed into the crosswind, so is actually landing diagonally, then when it hits the ground it has to quickly yaw so it's aligned with the runway (so the wheels are pointed in the right direction). The way this is done is it lands on one gear first, pivots around on that gear to point the nose at the end of the runway, then drops down the second gear, then the nose gear.
The A320's flight computer was programmed to avoid the disastrous scenario of a thrust reverser deploying in mid-air. It prohibited deployment of the thrust reversers unless both rear landing gear had 6.3 tons of force each on them. Full deployment of the spoilers (disrupts lift to plant the plane firmly on the ground) was prohibited unless the 6.3 tons criteria was met or the wheels were spinning faster than 72 knots.
Unfortunately, in flight 2904's case, the crosswing landing maneuver placed most of the initial the force on a single landing gear, so the thrust reversers didn't deploy. The wet runway caused hydroplaning so the spoilers failed to deploy, hindering the pilots from getting the second landing gear down. By the time the above criteria were met and the plane began slowing down, it was well past the halfway point of the runway, and ended up going off the end. Design criteria selected to prevent one type of accident inadvertently caused another.
The entire reason Jammie Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay $222,000 was because she purportedly uploaded 24 songs to thousands of people. She was distributing the songs without a license from the copyright holder - something Copyright law expressly prohibits. In other words, by using copyright law crafted to stop wholesale copyright infringement, Capitol Records cast Ms. Thomas-Rasset as the mastermind of a bootleg music business and won a judgement of $222,000 against her. That judgment effectively indemnifies people who downloaded music from her uploads. She paid for the crime, not her "customers". When you shut down a counterfeit CD ring, you do not then go after the people who bought the illegitimate CDs.
If you throw all that out the window and instead argue that it's the act of downloading a song which is infringement (which current copyright law does not support), then this becomes really easy. Each downloader becomes liable for a single copy (the one they downloaded). And an appropriate fine would be, say, 3x or 5x the cost of buying the song from a legitimate source. So about $3-$5 per song. Frankly I think that's a much more sensible approach to copyright enforcement than ruining people's lives and depriving them of Internet service because they shared some music files.
But I suspect the *AA is going to want their cake and eat it too, and want to assess hundred-thousand dollar judgments against downloaders as well. This is a slimy and illogical (should be illegal) tactic of turning n crimes into n^2 crimes. If 10 people share a file and each copyright violation costs $100, then there are a total of 9 illegal copies made, and the total damages should be $900. But by the *AA's nonsensical reasoning, each person is responsible for 9 counts of copyright violation, so each person should pay $900, resulting in $10,000 in damages awarded. The math simply doesn't add up - they'd be getting $10,000 in court awards when the law has determined that they've only suffered $900 in damages.
You can't have it both ways. Either one person is liable for all the copyright infringement and you can ruin them financially. Or each person is responsible for a single copyright infringement (the file they downloaded) and you can only fine them a few times what it would've cost to buy the file legitimately.
The hippie solution doesn't work because even if you can convince 99.99% of people to be peaceful, that remaining 0.01% can still send the world into nuclear winter.
You need some sort of hybrid approach, where you convince easiest 99% of people to be peaceful, but retain enough military capability to dissuade the remaining stubborn 1% from doing anything nuts. Which is more or less what we're doing today. Except some of those pursuing the hippie part of this hybrid approach have deluded themselves into thinking their approach will work on the entirety of the remaining 1% just because it worked on the first 99%.
That's what hippies don't seem to understand. Even if you temporarily achieved 100% indoctrination into a peaceful, cooperative society and completely disarmed. It just takes one person to be born who thinks differently and builds his own devices and following in secret, and spreads chaos and ruin upon that idyllic and disarmed utopia. You must have some sort of defense against this in reserve. Always. I don't particularly blame hippies for making this mistake - people tend to think that others will act as they themselves do. So if it's beyond their conception as to why someone would want to kill and destroy in order to have power over (parts of) the world, then it will literally be inconceivable to them that someone would ever want to do this. But that doesn't change the fact that it's a bad assumption.
I'm running into the same problem trying to get cable modem service to my business. The building currently doesn't have cable service.. The nearest location the cable company can extend service from to wire up our building is only about 1000 ft away, but they're estimating it'll cost them $14.5k. Most of that cost is in drawing up the plans and submitting it to the city so they can get permits to dig up the street to lay down new cable. You don't incur these costs when maintaining existing lines. They estimate the cost of sending a crew out to actually dig up the road, lay down the cable, and patch up the road will only be a few thousand.
Most everything you're complaining about is on the government, not VW. Basically the situation you're describing is like buying something from a store and paying sales tax, finding out it's defective, returning it for a refund, and the government refuses to reimburse you for sales tax initially paid, and then tries to tax you when use the refund to buy a replacement product.
They shouldn't be able to have it both ways - either tax the initial purchase or the replacement purchase, but not both. But logic goes out the window when it comes to government and taxes. I'm even reading that some states will try to charge income tax on the buyback amount. Basically making you pay income tax on a refund.
The way it should work: Bob wants to buy something from Frank. To facilitate this, he gives Frank his personal cell phone number. Mary wants to contact Bob. She finds out Frank has his cell phone number, so asks Frank for it. Frank calls Bob, says Mary wants his cell phone number, and asks for his permission to give it to her.
The way it currently works: Bob wants to buy something from Frank. To facilitate this, he gives Frank his personal cell phone number. Mary wants to contact Bob. She finds out Frank has his cell phone number, so asks Frank for it. Frank says he'll give it to her for $x. Bob has no say in this.
We need something like patient confidentiality rules for business transactions. If you need personal info about me like my name, age, phone number, address, SS number, location, where I went to college, what I like to buy, whatever,. so that we can conduct business, that does not give you a blanket license to sell said information to someone else without my authorization.
A lot of us had PDAs back in the 1990s. A lot of us also had cell phones. It didn't take a genius to figure out that having one device which worked as both a cell phone and PDA would be really nice, if for nothing but to reduce the amount of clanking going on in your pocket. So it was pretty obvious by the mid-1990s that cell phones and PDAs were going to converge. The only question was if PDAs would get phone capability added on, or if cell phones would get PDA (computing) capability added on.
The late 1990s is when this convergence began. Nokia (a phone manufacturer) was first out of the blocks, which cemented their dominance of the early smartphone market. Palm came out with the Kyocera 6035 and Treo in 2001/2002. The smartphone-ish Blackberry didn't show up until 2003.
Microsoft was right in the thick of this. Since 1996, They'd been competing with PalmOS with WinCE (which became Pocket PC which became Windows Mobile which became Windows Phone). They had enough foresight to add software hooks for phone support to Pocket PC 2000, but never put much effort into the hardware side. For some reason they never took this PDA-phone convergence seriously. Apparently they were too busy thinking up with new names for their mobile OS than to work on phone hardware integration. I remember when the Jornada 928 came to market just in time to compete with the Palm Treo in 2002, reviews panned it calling the phone functionality buggy and unreliable. For all the evils of the old Bell Telephone monopoly, one thing they got right was "It Just Works". Your electricity could be out after a storm, but your landline phone would still work. That's what people were used to and expected. An unreliable phone was dead before it even hit the market.
So Microsoft wasn't late to the market. They were right there at the beginning of the smartphone market and had ample opportunity to dominate it. They just blew it. I suspect someone high up in their management chain, maybe even Gates himself, didn't believe this phone-PDA convergence was going to happen.
I think it happened right after the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War, we had a bogeyman - trumped up but still a bogeyman. We would point to things that happened in the Soviet Union like excessive government intrusion into people's private lives, and proudly proclaim that that sort of thing could never happen here. Anyone in our government who even breathed a suggestion of it would be branded a commie and instantly torpedo their career.
The Cold War ends, the poster child for an authoritative government run amok disappears, and suddenly everyone in our government who always those authoritarian powers but were too scared to try to ask for them come crawling out from the shadows.
2000 liters/day is a lot. About how much a U.S. family of 4 uses. You can make do with a lot less. India is around 130 liters/person-day. So I suspect this is more a one per 100-300 people concept, meant to provide potable water (drinking and cooking) so existing water sources can be used for things like bathing and laundry. That would help avoid things like the arsenic poisoning fiasco caused by relief agencies drilling fresh water wells in Bangladesh.
The technical term is a point spread function. A lens with good bokeh will have a PSF which falls off smoothly the further you get from the center (like a bell curve). Bad bokeh is produced by a rapid falloff (or even increases) at the edges (looking sort of like Gibbs phenomenon).
Note however that due to geometry, the PSF in front of and behind the focal plane are conjugates. If the PSF concentrates rays towards the center behind the focal plane for a pleasing bell-curve like falloff, then those center-skewed rays must deviate further from the center when in front of the focal plane thus generating harsh edges. So good bokeh behind the subject means bad bokeh in front, and vice versa. I'm not a big fan of computer-generated bokeh, but this is one advantage it has over real-world lenses.
As for the money-making activities you've cited, those are banned because their productivity generation is a net negative. The money the sex trafficker or cocaine dealer or ransomware author makes is less than the cost paid by the other party (sex slave loses freedom, drug addict suffers degraded productivity, ransomware victim should never have had to pay ransom). One party is making money at the expense of the other.
Legitimate business activities like, say, drone manufacturing are a net positive. The revenue the drone manufacturer gets from selling the drone is more than their cost in parts and labor. And the money the drone purchaser makes from the utility or enjoyment of using the drone exceeds the purchase price. Both parties benefit from the transaction. Until some government floozy decides because some screwdrivers can be used to help pick locks, that all screwdrivers should be banned. Except for very rare cases, bans should be on activities, not on tools which can be misused.
A lot of sites break if you try to zoom in or change the default fonts. Word wraps don't align properly. Letters start to overlap pictures or sidebar menus.
The entire concept of the WWW as Berners-Lee conceived it was that the website would transmit information to the client, and the client's browser would display it in a format most suitable for the client display device. That way the exact same web page would work on a tiny cell phone screen or gargantuan 50" 4k TV used as a screen. Neither of those existed at the time, but he had enough foresight to predict a wide variation in client display sizes and requirements.
But the people who became web designers were formerly page layout designers. They revolted. They were used to printed paper, where they controlled everything the reader saw - fonts, font sizes, text wrap around photos, columns, etc. Their ego couldn't stand ceding some of that control to the reader, so they fought tooth and nail to bring that control back to themselves. The early flash-only websites were their first salvo. Everyone hated flash sites, but they loved them because it would display exactly and only as they designed it. If the 1024 pixel width they chose didn't fit in someone's 800x600 monitor? Well obviously it was the reader's fault and they needed to upgrade to a better GPU and monitor. Modern websites are so design-centered that they actually have to create two different sites for display on large computer monitors vs small phone and tablet screens. There's almost nothing left under the client's control that can be modified without breaking something about the site.
NASA picked up a lot of experience putting landers on the moon. The Soviets also sent a lot of moon landers, but never really ironed out the bugs (had a lot of failures). Those problems followed them to Mars where they went 0 for 6 (well, 1 for 6 but the single success ceased communicating after 14.5 seconds with no useful data received).
Current Li-ion batteries only have about twice the energy density of NiCds. The reputation NiCds got for having lousy energy capacity was due to a memory effect. If you kept recharging the battery before it had been fully discharged, it "learned" the low charge state as its new zero state, and you lost that bottom portion of its capacity (due to crystalline growth).
Rechargeable batteries have increased about 2x in energy density in the last half century, and about 3.5x in the last century (from lead-acid to li-ion). So claims of a 10x increase in the near future are going to be met with a lot of skepticism.
TFA says they handle 15% of all online retail sales, maybe 20%-30% if you include third party sales handled through Amazon. Online sales comprise only 8.1% of all retail sales. So Amazon's (very small) slice of the whole pie is just 1.2%, possibly 1.6%-2.4% if you include their third party affiliates.
Amazon barely cracked the top-10 stores in retail sales for 2015. There's a tendency for people who like to be online to over-exaggerate the effect of the Internet. Retail sales are still very much a brick and mortar business.
Now add the Tesla and solar panels on your house:
x + y kWh generated, x + y kWh consumed
x + y kWh generated, x + y kWh consumed. Same as above.
Basically, if you work the day shift, the addition of your solar panels at your house reduces the amount of power the coal plant needs to generate by y kWh. When you plug the Tesla into a charger at work, it increases the amount of power the coal plant needs to generate by y kWh. And the whole thing is a wash. Exactly the same as if you charged the Tesla at home using (only) power from your home solar panels.
A lot of people don't seem to get this. The marginal increase power use doesn't have to be directly connected to the marginal increase in power generation to have the same effect. This is also why you should conserve electricity even if you're in the Pacific Northwest which is powered mostly by hydroelectric. Any reduction in your consumption means a little bit of hydro power is left over and can be transmitted to the rest of the country, and a coal plant elsewhere needs to burn a little less coal. Exactly the same as if someone living next to the coal plant conserved electricity.
For the same reason, EVs are predominantly powered by electricity from coal and natural gas, not by renewables. Those are the two power generation sources which are flexible enough to ramp up with increases in demand. EVs are only powered by electricity from renewables if you wouldn't have built the renewable plant if you hadn't bought the EV. If you would've built the renewable plant anyway, then it results in a marginal decrease in the generation from coal and gas, while the addition of an EV results in a marginal increase in the generation from coal and gas. So the EV's power is coming from coal and gas. This is the case even if the electricity from your solar panels are going straight to your EV. If in the absence of your EV the electricity from your solar panels would've instead gone onto the grid, then by putting it into your EV you are depriving the grid of those kWh, and a coal/gas plant elsewhere needs to generate those kWh.
Tesla understands this, which is why they're trying to link home solar installation with EV car purchases. If you can link the two, then the purchase of the EV results in the installation of PV solar generation which would not have existed without the EV. And then you can truthfully say the EV is being powered by electricity from solar.
NASA was much the same before the Challenger accident. The PR people had way too much power - enough to force a launch to proceed when the engineers were saying it wasn't safe.
I'm willing to cut the ESA a little slack here. Nobody was really hurt by trying to de-emphasize the lander's failure, and the bulk of the instruments are in the orbiter (which will also serve as a communications relay station for future missions). So while the mass media obviously was focused on the lander's failure, from a scientific standpoint the orbiter's success was the bigger story.
That's a key difference between how regular people and rich people tend to think about money. $x million is an amount. Income is a rate. Regular people think having a large amount of money is being rich. $100 million > $50 million, so they'll take the $100 million. Rich people think having a high income is being rich. $100 million earning 5%/yr is increasing at $5 million/yr. $50 million earning 40%/yr is increasing at $20 million/yr, and will exceed the value of the $100 million in 5 years,. So they'll likely consider the $50 million to be the better choice. You can see this among lottery jackpot winners. The long-term payment (over 20-30 years) is usually the better choice, but most winners opt for the immediate lump-sum payment.
Likewise, Microsoft offered to buy FB for $24 billion because they thought that was the best place to invest their money to get the highest return on investment. Zuckerberg turned down the offer because he thought his highest ROI was in continuing to work on improving FB, rather than taking the money and investing it elsewhere. 50% of new companies fail within 5 years; 2/3rds fail within 10 years. So if you think the company you currently own is likely to experience strong growth, selling it with the intent of using the money to start a new company is a very risky proposition.
This. Commercial PV panels are about 18% efficient at converting solar energy into electricity, and the best fluorescent bulbs are about 15% efficient at converting electricity into light (the rest becomes heat). So if you install PV panels to power your lights, you're only converting about 2.7% of the sunlight hitting your solar panels into interior light.
In other words, covering your roof entirely with PV panels gets you as much solar lighting as cutting holes in 2.7% of your roof. The little squares in the Walmart pic you've linked covers about 1/12th the roof (one per 3x4 grid), or 8.3%. So it's providing 3x more free lighting than if you'd covered the entire roof with PV panels. Most of the warehouse stores I've been to (Costco, Home Depot, etc) use similar natural lighting extensively. (Note that you can still cover the space in between these skylights with PV panels.)
Yeah, that's the trend I see in Consumer Reports auto owner surveys. Owners of expensive luxury brands like BMW, Mercedes, and Jaguar tend to be happier with their vehicles, even though they report these vehicles as having more problems than other cars.
0.9 is the historical capacity factor for nuclear in the U.S. Yeah, nuclear is really best for base load. It's slow to ramp up or down, so is not very good for peaking power load (the hourly and instantaneous spikes and dips in power consumption for the grid overall). Peaking load is usually handled by hydro and gas plants, sometimes coal.
The difference is that nuclear power proponents do not advocate making 100% of power generation nuclear. They are ok with using hydro, gas, wind, solar to handle peaking load. Renewable power proponents OTOH advocate 100% of our power come from hydro, wind, and solar, even though none of them are suitable for base load. Geothermal was really the only viable renewable for base load, but it has become collateral damage in environmentalists' war against fracking. (The energy of earthquakes triggered by fracking was already in the earth. If that energy hadn't been released by the fracking, it would've been released in a natural earthquake some time in the future. But in their zeal to shut down fracking for oil by incorrectly blaming fracking for all the energy released in an earthquake, they've poisoned public perception so that geothermal would also be blamed for earthquakes.)
As for rates for different power sources, wind is getting close to nuclear, but solar is still nowhere near. And as mentioned above, neither are suitable for base load. Most of the articles I've read proclaiming renewables will overtake nuclear and fossil fuels in cost mistakenly omit capacity factor in their comparison. They wind up comparing peak generating capacity, which has very little to do with rates. Theoretically you could use renewables for base load if you had sufficient storage capacity. But the most efficient storage system (pumped storage) only has about 75% efficiency, so that automatically makes it at least 1.33x more expensive than its source.
Nuclear power has a capacity factor of about 0.9. So a 1 GW plant will generate on average 900 MW throughout the year after taking into account downtime for maintenance and refueling.
8766 hours in a year (taking into account leap years), so that's 7889 GWh per year.
At a U.S. average rate of 12 cents/kWh = $120/MWh = $0.12 million/GWh, that's $947 million worth of power generated per year.
Nuclear plants are licensed to operate for 40 years. So that's $37.9 billion worth of power generated over 40 years.
Most of the older plants have had their license extended to 60 years. Some are requesting an extension to 80 years because everything is working just fine. So the actual power generated over the lifetime of the plant will likely be 1.5x to 2x higher.
So yeah, the $4.7 billion construction cost is tiny compared to the return you'll get. For your example of a 3.2 GW output plant that costs £24.5 billion ($30 billion) including financing, at the UK average rate of US$0.22/kWh, the expected power generated over 40 years would be worth $222 billion.
The interesting thing is that they're implying the FBI was the source for these requests. The NSA and CIA have been able to weasel through their requests on the grounds that they're investigating electronic communications with people outside the U.S. who don't have Constitutional protection. i.e. Someone in California emails someone in Virginia, both are protected by the 4th Amendment, and there needs to be a warrant before their communications can be read by the government. But someone in China emails someone in California, and the NSA and CIA's legal argument is that the Chinese sender doesn't have 4th Amendment protection, so they are within their rights to intercept communications en masse without a warrant, then filter out entirely domestic communications which would require a warrant, leaving only international communications.
The FBI does not have jurisdiction outside of the U.S. (that's the CIA's and NSA's job). The only time they're allowed to investigate something outside the U.S. is when a foreign country invites them to do so (e.g. Pan Am bombing over Scotland). So if it was in fact the FBI which made the request, I'm curious what sort of legal argument they used to get this type of widescale monitoring approved by the FISA court.