China's GDP is about 2/3rds that of the U.S. So yes it is a bit surprising that iOS app store revenue is greater for China than for the U.S. My guess would be the later introduction of the iPhone and iPad into China means people there are still in the "stocking up on apps they want" stage, while Americans left that phase 4-5 years ago.
The burn cut off 19 seconds before loss of signal, so the probe was in freefall for at least 19 seconds. From TFA:
Not only is the chute jettisoned earlier than called for in the predicted timeline, but the retrorockets that were due to switch on immediately afterwards are seen to fire for just three or four seconds. They were expected to fire for a good 30 seconds.
In the downlinked telemetry, Schiaparelli then continues transmitting a radio signal for 19 seconds after the apparent thruster shutoff. The eventual loss of signal occurs 50 seconds before Schiaparelli was supposed to be on the surface.
That last sentence, if you assume loss of signal corresponds to impact with the ground, suggests de-orbit velocity relative to the ground was much higher than expected. The early parachute release may have been the culprit. Or the probe entered the atmosphere at too steep an angle (which could also explain the early parachute release - the probe would've entered higher density atmosphere more quickly thus increasing aerodynamic load on the chute to the point at which it failed). The burn probably began at a higher velocity than it was designed for.
If we're speculating, my guess would be the higher velocity when the retro-rockets were fired caused greater instability - aerodynamic forces caused the probe to rock more than expected. The parachute's purpose isn't just to slow the craft down; it also keeps the craft's orientation stable during this period of higher aerodynamic forces. Without it, drag on tiny asymmetries on the front of the craft can result in large turning moments. With a parachute attached, these moments are countered by the righting moment the parachute imparts on the rear of the craft every time it deviates from the proper orientation. Without the parachute, the craft can experience large oscillations or even flip due to these drag-induced turning moments. The large amplitude and higher frequency of the resulting oscillations could've exceeded what the rocket control software was designed to handle, and it shut off prematurely when it exceeded some threshold programmed into the software.
My sample size is small, but I've had friends/clients come to me with 2 flaky Macbook AC adapters (with magsafe cords), vs 3 failed PC AC adapters and 1 failed laptop power socket.
If you factor in that PC laptop sales are approx 9x Mac laptop sales, the magsafe AC adapters have a 4.5x higher failure rate than the PC AC adapters.
Also, realize that magnetic power cords were used on deep oil fryers (where the cord trip hazard is much more serious) for decades before Apple used it on laptops. The only reason it's not used on PC laptops is because nobody wants to spend the millions it would cost to challenge a patent that was incorrectly granted to Apple for a pre-existing invention.
Here are the spot prices for MLC NAND flash memory. There's been a (probably temporary) spike in the last month, but the long-term average price has been:
less than $10 for 64GB
less than $5 for 32GB
$2.50 for 16GB
about $2 for 8GB
about $1.80 for 4GB.
Why in the world would anybody make a 4GB device in 2016? Bumping up to 16GB only costs about 70 cents more per device. I tried to buy a 2-4 GB microSD card for my Roku because people said it didn't need any more, but there weren't many available anymore and the price difference was so negligible it was easier to just get a 16GB card.
An old boss of mine said "If you had time to do it a second time, you had enough time to do it right the first time".
That shows a gross ignorance of the probability tradeoff involved here. Just because recall expenses for one product exceeded the marginal design cost to "get it right the first time" doesn't mean that's the most cost-effective way to design everything. The ideal production point isn't to design and manufacture everything so you never have to do a recall. It's to build stuff so that most of the time you won't need a recall. And the few times you do need to recall a poor design, the cost of that recall is cheaper than having to overdesign everything. If you issue n products and
overdesigning each cost $x
designing them with a slimmer safety margin would only cost $(x-y)
with the slimmer margin you average 1 recall per n products at a cost of $z
Then "doing it right the first time" has a cost of n*$x, while living with the slimmer margin results in a cost n*$(x-y) + $z = n*$x - n*$y + $z.
So as long as n*$y (the total amount of money saved by designing all products to a slimmer safety margin) exceeds $z (the cost of the single recall), then suffering the occasional recall is the more efficient economic strategy. I know everyone would prefer having all their toys be perfect, but that perfection would come at the cost of you being able to afford fewer toys. You are actually able to afford more toys which work as if they were perfect if you're willing to accept that a few toys won't be perfect, than if you demand all your toys be perfect.
The tradeoff gets muddled when lives are at stake, since it's difficult to place a value on a human life. (Well, placing an economic value on one is easy. Social, emotional, and moral value is difficult.) But we're talking about a smartphone. A modern convenience which didn't even exist 20 years ago.
Also, the manufacturers aren't who you need to convince here. The people you need to convince to change are the idiot reviewers in the media who pan any phone which doesn't match their misguided preconception of what a "good" phone is, and the people who buy based on those reviews. Everyone here complains phones are too thin, and most of the people I know just end up putting a case on the phone to make easier to hold. Bendgate disproved the notion that metal was better, with quantitative measurements showing that the plastic phones were equal to or stronger than the metal phones at resisting bending. And most reviewers don't use a review phone long enough to run down the battery multiple times under real-world use conditions (loaded with lots of background apps sucking power throughout the day), so tend to undervalue the importance of long battery life. The manufacturers just build to the unrealistic market expectations created by ignorant and misguided reviewers.
It saves the banks money because it drastically reduces the fraud rate. So, no consumers are not paying for this
Banks and credit card companies do not pay for fraud. They've set it up so the merchants pay for fraud. If you spot a fraudulent transaction on your card, request a chargeback, and the bank approves it, the merchant is out the money and the merchandise - they've paid for the fraud. The fees the banks and credit card companies collect pay for transaction costs, and for people who default on paying back their credit card debt.
Also, it's disingenuous to claim the merchant or customer does not pay for these fees. The credit card companies got laws passed making it illegal for merchants to charge an extra fee for credit card transactions. Consequently when you buy something with a credit card, it's the same price as if you paid in cash (a rare exception being stores which use the "cash discount" loophole). So the fee is coming straight out of the merchant's markup on the item sold - the merchant is paying for the fee. If you want to kick it up one more level, the merchant has to raise its prices to compensate for this reduced effective price markup. So the fee is coming out of the customer's wallet, with cash customers subsidizing the fee for credit card customers since their transactions do not incur the fee, yet they still pay the higher price.
The U.S. government screwed this up royally when it put its site for people to get their free credit report on the domain annualcreditreport.com. The credit agencies all set up similar sites with similar domains, which would give you your credit report but require you to submit a credit card and would try to subscribe you to their credit monitoring services. For years, Google searches would return these spoofing sites instead of the real one as the top result, doubtless due to aggressive SEO. It seems to have stabilized on the real one as the top result now, though I don't know if that's due to Google clamping down on SEO exploits, or if they just hard-coded the government site as the top result. All of this could have been prevented if the government set it up as a.gov TLD, since companies can't set up sites under that domain.
Likewise, a.apple,.ibm,.canon,.samsung TLD would prevent spoofed sites. I tend to side with a strong hierarchical structure to domain names (company.com, organization.org, network.net, etc). But not everyone realized the importance of nabbing a.com domain early on, resulting in headaches which have done nothing but make lawyers rich. Granting an organizations-specific TLD if the organization is large enough may be a solution to this, provided you also prohibit said organization from taking over similarly named.com sites like applesucks.com. Once you own a TLD that only you can make sites on, it's clear whether or not a site is your "real" site, so name confusion and trademark dilution claims should no longer apply.
Although that's certainly how some people will try to spin it. Venus' atmosphere is theorized to have begun much like Earth's. The crucial difference was its proximity to the sun caused its water to mostly turn into vapor, instead of remain as a liquid. This (1) contributed to the greenhouse effect - water vapor is the biggest greenhouse gas contributor on Earth despite only a tiny fraction of our water being in vapor form, and (2) rose above heavier CO2 thus shielding it from being lost into space or being broken apart into its elements by solar radiation (Venus has almost no magnetosphere to protect it).
So Venus' CO2 was allowed to build up instead of being lost to space, eventually leading to the enormous pressures Venus has today. Mars's atmosphere has a similar composition (both are 96% CO2), but due to its weaker gravity and lack of water vapor, most of Mars' CO2 was lost into space giving Mars a surface atmospheric pressure only 0.6% that of Earth's.
Venus' surface pressure by contrast is 92 times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level. CO2's critical point is at 73.9 bar (atmospheres) and 31 C, above which the difference between the gas and liquid phases disappears. So the CO2 "atmosphere" on Venus' surface is more like a sea of CO2 fluid (the Venera landers didn't even use parachutes for the final descent - they gently floated down using nothing but hull drag). You basically have the greenhouse effect of the CO2 gas, compressed into the higher density of liquid CO2. All made possible by excess water vapor early in Venus' early history.
Earth's early atmosphere was also nearly the same as on Mars and Venus. But Earth retained liquid water, which was able to dissolve most of the CO2, creating the "habitable" conditions for life we have today. So it's actually liquid vs gaseous water which is the key difference, not CO2 levels. In fact Venus' present atmosphere is theorized to actually be much more hospitable. In the past when water vapor was still present, temperatures there were probably twice what they are today.
I don't see why there has to be a single answer to this. There are already laws in place governing traffic flow. Violators of those laws (people running red lights, jaywalkers, etc) should be given lower priority in the "attempt to save" ranking.
If the vehicle calculates it has to leave the road to avoid an accident, but its trajectory would make it hit pedestrians on the sidewalk, protect the pedestrians and do not avoid the accident. Basically, accident avoidance in this case requires the vehicle to leave its legal lane of travel, so the pedestrians traveling legally on the sidewalk should get higher priority.
If the vehicle is traveling legally on the road and a pedestrian jumps/falls into the vehicle's path, swerve to avoid the pedestrian if possible, but go ahead and hit the pedestrian if swerving would result in hitting another car. I'm thinking of an accident near my workplace where a driver swerved to avoid a cat that ran into the road, hit another car, flipped, and killed himself. He basically gave his live to save a cat (which lived). Multiple accidents of this nature in the same location are an indication that the speed limit is too high, or that the road needs some sort of protective barricade (e.g. prevent kids from the nearby playground from chasing balls out into the street).
If both vehicle and pedestrian are traveling legally when the collision occurs, then obviously this is an oversight (a "bug") in the vehicle code. The law needs to be changed, and neither the car nor pedestrian should be liable for the consequences of the accident. The car should be free to respond as it wishes in this case, although there are two major factors which favor protecting the pedestrian:
The occupants of the vehicle are strapped into and enclosed in a crash-rated metal safety cage, and can survive much higher accident forces than a pedestrian.
The vast majority of the energy of a crash is coming from the car, not the pedestrian. So in the event that an accident is unavoidable, it is just Right that most of that energy be directed at the car's occupants, not the pedestrian. If you feel the need to hurtle yourself at death-defying speeds (pretty much anything over 45 mph) to get somewhere faster, then you should bear the consequences of your choice. Not be allowed to inflict those consequences upon someone taking a casual stroll down the sidewalk.
2 years to build a new Soyuz capsule after it's ordered? It takes Boeing and Airbus about 80 days to build a 777 or A380.
Even factoring in number of orders doesn't account for the difference. There are about 15 Soyuz launches per year. Airbus is delivering about 30 A380s per year. So that would only account for a factor of 2, putting expected build time for a Soyuz at 160 days, or less than half a year.
That's a really weird metric to use. Since these services charge per month (or per year for Amazon), isn't the relevant metric individual users per month, not individual users per day? In fact, like MMOs, doesn't a service like this want its users per month metric to be high (to maximize revenue) while keeping its users per day metric low (to reduce bandwidth costs)? Though of course GB per user per month would be a more accurate assessment of bandwidth than users per day.
Even advertisers would be more interested in hours viewed per day, or hours viewed per user per day. I can't think of any way users per day is a useful stat. Maybe to someone maintaining the login servers so they know on average how many authentication requests they'll have to handle per day?
Feature was introduced in Marshmallow I believe. I had to do that when a utility app which had previously been silent got updated to spam me with ads disguised as a notification popup every few hours.
Settings -> Apps -> [app in question] -> Notifications -> Block all
You can also control most app permissions (independent of the app requesting them) in the same place.
Settings -> Apps -> [app in question] -> Permissions
Doesn't let you control an app's network usage (except cellular data use in the background). But if you're rooted you can use AFWall+ to do that.
""Eighty-four percent of clinicians listed the correct diagnosis in the top three possibilities, compared with 51 percent for the digital symptom-checkers."
I'm surprised that digital diagnosis is that good already.
When comparing percentages, you need to compare them in the manner which has the biggest consequences. A good example is OCR software (optical character recognition). If one has an accuracy of 99.99% and another cheaper one has an accuracy of 99.95%, you might think there's very little difference between the two and you should buy the cheaper one. But the cheaper one has a 5x the failure rate (.05% vs.01%), meaning you'll have to spend 5x as much time fixing errors in the scanned text.
Likewise, a 84% vs 51% success rate is not a mere 33% difference. It's a 3x higher failure rate (16% vs 49%).
I install and repair computer systems for doctors at private practices. Every single one of them hates those pharma reps. I think you've concocted this fantasy where the reps bribe doctors with free lunches and golf trips. The reality is that they're door-to-door salesmen. Several of them come in every day, asking to talk to the doctor so they can give their sales pitch.
The doctors hate this just like you hate door-to-door salesmen at your home, probably more so since they have to put up with a lot more of them and don't have the option of pretending nobody is home and not answering the door. When I'm working on a computer in the reception area, several doctors have asked me to lie and tell these salesmen that they're not in the office that day. Apparently that's what they tell their staff to do, and they don't want me to give it away. They accept the sample drugs just to make the salesmen go away, and because they figure if a patient does happen to need that drug, they can save them a few bucks by giving them a sample instead of having them get it from a pharmacy.
Think about what they've done with their trackpad - made it a fixed non-moving unit which measures pressure, using a vibrating module underneath to simulate the tactile feedback of a click when sufficient pressure is used.
Isn't that the logical conclusion for where they're headed with this? A keyboard with no moving parts, and reconfigurable e-ink "keys" which simulate a keypress with a little synthetic click when you press the right location with enough pressure.
This was tried in the late 1970s with membrane keyboards (the click was simulated by a speaker underneath the keyboard). Those were terrible for typing, but I guess technology has progressed enough that it might be worth trying again.
The one that lowers to form a ramp to enter the ship. Can't have actors walking on a styrofoam ramp. TFA says in the 1977 movie, the door/ramp was lowered by hand using pulleys. Guess someone decided the new movies deserved a fancy mechanized door. Except since this is for a movie and not "real" use, it was designed and built by prop makers who never really gave much thought to safety since the very low frequency of use of their props meant accidents were exceedingly rare.
While I agree that this fine seems absurdly small, revenue does not take into account costs incurred while doing business. If your revenue from selling lemonade is $1 a cup, and the materials and labor to make the lemonade cost $0.25/cup, you are only making $0.75 per cup, not $1/cup. A lot of that revenue Comcast took in was probably sent as payment to the premium channel companies.
Subtracting operating expenses, Comcast had a EBIT of $16 billion in 2015. That works out to $43.8 million/day. And they will make back the fine in 1 hour, 16 minutes.
Bush said that in January 2004, towards the end of his first term. Despite all the flak he gets from the left, he is responsible for the biggest increase in science R&D in the last half-century.
Energy in has to equal energy out. Plants take in CO2 and H2O, and use sunlight to convert it to (C6H10O5)n - cellulose. Energy from sunlight gets converted into energy stored in cellulose. That energy is released during fires. So for global warming to be causing a two-fold increase in forest fires, it must first be causing a two-fold increase in the creation of cellulose - growth of plant matter Any increase in fires without a corresponding increase in the creation of plant matter is just a transient blip in the data.
By conservation of energy, the long-term average of plant matter destroyed by forest fires has to be proportional to the long-term average rate of plant growth. But the people trying to blame these things on global warming are also usually the same ones decrying deforestation. The first implies an increase in energy storage by plants, the latter implies a decrease in energy storage by plants. These two assertions are self-contradictory. So in all likelihood, this is nothing more than a transient spike in the data caused by too-aggressive firefighting of brush and forest fires during the last century.
All the vehicles thus far called zero emissions simply shift their emissions elsewhere. Operating an EV emits plenty of pollution, it's just that the power plants which generate the electricity get blamed for emitting it instead of the owners who drive the vehicles. Even if you're getting your electricity 100% from renewables, there's still the emissions during construction, refining of the materials needed to build PV cells and wind turbines, maintenance, etc. Same goes for hydrogen-powered vehicles - their emissions come predominantly from the process of generating the hydrogen needed to power them, which from all the calculations I've seen thus far exceed the emissions from ICEs.
Right now, environmental policy is being driven by popularity and emotion. It needs to be replaced with a rational, mathematical approach. If you choose to drive a car from location x to location y, it will need to use a certain amount of energy. Generating that energy with an ICE creates a certain amount of emitted pollutants. Generating it with renewables creates a different amount and different types of pollutants. Same goes for steam, coal, natural gas, nuclear, etc. You don't get to draw a black box around just the car, blithely ignore what's needed to create what goes into the box, then irrationally proclaim that you've created a zero emissions vehicle.
And no, you cannot claim your EV is zero emissions because you installed solar panels on your house which you then use to recharge your EV. That's a gross misunderstanding of opportunity cost. The correct comparison in that case is how much emissions your activities would generate if you use the solar panels to recharge your EV, vs if you used the solar panels to offset your household electricity use and used a different type of car. The only way the solar panels can show up only on the EV side of the comparison is if you would not have installed solar panels if you didn't get the EV. That is almost never the case.
For the same reason, EVs are being powered almost 100% by coal and gas plants right now. The electrical demand prior to EVs was being supplied by coal, gas, nuclear, and renewables. Nuclear has not increased. We're increasing renewables pretty much as fast as we can, but that increase would've happened even if EVs didn't exist. So the extra demand for electricity caused by EVs is being filled by the most flexible electricity generation sources we have right now - coal and gas.
Stop trying to think of energy in terms of us (eco-car owners) vs them (dirty polluting ICE owners). Start thinking of it in terms of world-wide energy production and use.
Jury trials are a fail-safe against the government becoming so corrupt that it starts passing and enforcing laws contradictory to the wishes and best interests of the citizens as a whole. Like the Second Amendment, the value of jury trials is not obvious when things are working more or less fine - in fact as you express it may actually make things worse during these times. But when the sh!t hits the fan, it's one last way for the citizens to reassert dominance over an out-of-control government.
That's why you should make sure everyone you know knows about jury nullifcation. Judges hate it and go out their way to trick jurors into thinking they don't have that right (they instruct the jury to decide based on the facts of the case and the law as written). But the right of jury nullification was deliberately placed in our Constitution as one last bulwark against an overreaching government.
That particular clause is in there to prevent a situation where a user posts something on a public forum, then later changes their mind and uses copyright law to force the forum to delete their post. It's not a problem if one or even a handful of users does it. But when you start to get up to hundreds or even thousands of users doing it, it turns the forum's historical archives into swiss cheese, not to mention the extra cost and manpower needed to remove the posts from things like backup tapes.
The wiser companies phrase their EULAs so that the user gives them an irrevokable license to "publish" their posts for the purpose of providing the service (the forum). The ones with overzealous lawyers or nefarious intent phrased it as the user signing over all copyright to their post to the company. I'm not even sure that's legally valid since there's no consideration - something of value like money or goods given in exchange for giving up the copyright.
The population of people working in the field may differ substantially from the general population in terms of race or gender. The genetics or cultural backgrounds of certain races may bias them towards or away from certain professions (e.g. African Americans disproportionately overrepresented in athletics and music). Differences in what activities males and females enjoy may cause them to gravitate towards or away from different professions. So simply comparing the breakdown of the job population to the general population (as the mass media likes to do) isn't sufficient evidence for proving gender or race discrimination.
Age is totally different. Everyone gets older. So for the most part the age distribution of qualified people matches the age distribution of the general population. There are some smaller deviations (e.g. older people preferring email, younger people preferring SMS), and certain jobs are age-specific (a 20-something marketer may be better at marketing a product for 20-somethings). But in general technical competence is biased in favor of older workers (they have more experience). So for more difficult jobs, you should actually find a pro-old age bias (i.e. younger people are more likely to burger flippers, older people in higher positions like management). If you find the opposite, that's a pretty big red flag that discrimination may be going on.
There's more to it than a removable batteries simply being unpopular. Lithium-ion batteries have a shallower voltage curve than other rechargeable battery chemistries. That is, the voltage does not change that much as you discharge or charge the battery. This makes it trickier to detect how much remaining charge there is, and when the battery is at full charge. Doubly so when you add in voltage depression due to load, and elevation due to the device being charged. Add in Li-ion's tendency to experience thermal runaway when overcharged, or over-discharged then recharged, and getting the charging mechanism just right is critical but requires very precise knowledge of both the battery, and how much current the device draws.
Removable batteries throws a big monkey wrench into all this. Now suddenly the battery that's put into the device may not be the same as the charging mechanism was originally designed to work with. So you have to make the charging mechanism flexible enough to deal with all the different batteries which might end up being plugged into it.
I totally disagree with you that removable batteries are unpopular. If two devices with identical form and functionality, but one with a slightly smaller removable battery, were sold side-by-side, IMHO the removable battery model would far outsell the fixed battery model. But manufacturers are going with fixed batteries simply because they're easier to design, and because it helps reduce their exposure to liability (In the early days, cell phone makers were sued when their phones caught fire, but it turned out most of these people had replaced their original battery with a cheap Chinese knockoff).
That is self-contradictory. If discrimination against an individual male can be justified because of the average traits of males as a whole can legitimately warrant that discrimination, then discrimination against any individual can be justified because of the average traits of the larger group he/she belongs to.
The whole point of anti-stereotype and anti-discrimination statutes is to prohibit using average traits of the group an individual belongs to as justification for sanctions against that individual. The assumption being that while the stereotype may be true of the group on average, it may not be true of a particular individual who belongs to that group, and it is wrong to pre-assume that individual exhibits those traits and thus must be sanctioned for it.
In other words, you cannot pick and choose which groups get protection from discrimination and stereotyping. Either all are protected, or none are. Either applying the average traits of a group to all individual members of that group is OK, or it is wrong.
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China's GDP is about 2/3rds that of the U.S. So yes it is a bit surprising that iOS app store revenue is greater for China than for the U.S. My guess would be the later introduction of the iPhone and iPad into China means people there are still in the "stocking up on apps they want" stage, while Americans left that phase 4-5 years ago.
That last sentence, if you assume loss of signal corresponds to impact with the ground, suggests de-orbit velocity relative to the ground was much higher than expected. The early parachute release may have been the culprit. Or the probe entered the atmosphere at too steep an angle (which could also explain the early parachute release - the probe would've entered higher density atmosphere more quickly thus increasing aerodynamic load on the chute to the point at which it failed). The burn probably began at a higher velocity than it was designed for.
If we're speculating, my guess would be the higher velocity when the retro-rockets were fired caused greater instability - aerodynamic forces caused the probe to rock more than expected. The parachute's purpose isn't just to slow the craft down; it also keeps the craft's orientation stable during this period of higher aerodynamic forces. Without it, drag on tiny asymmetries on the front of the craft can result in large turning moments. With a parachute attached, these moments are countered by the righting moment the parachute imparts on the rear of the craft every time it deviates from the proper orientation. Without the parachute, the craft can experience large oscillations or even flip due to these drag-induced turning moments. The large amplitude and higher frequency of the resulting oscillations could've exceeded what the rocket control software was designed to handle, and it shut off prematurely when it exceeded some threshold programmed into the software.
My sample size is small, but I've had friends/clients come to me with 2 flaky Macbook AC adapters (with magsafe cords), vs 3 failed PC AC adapters and 1 failed laptop power socket.
If you factor in that PC laptop sales are approx 9x Mac laptop sales, the magsafe AC adapters have a 4.5x higher failure rate than the PC AC adapters.
Also, realize that magnetic power cords were used on deep oil fryers (where the cord trip hazard is much more serious) for decades before Apple used it on laptops. The only reason it's not used on PC laptops is because nobody wants to spend the millions it would cost to challenge a patent that was incorrectly granted to Apple for a pre-existing invention.
Here are the spot prices for MLC NAND flash memory. There's been a (probably temporary) spike in the last month, but the long-term average price has been:
less than $10 for 64GB
less than $5 for 32GB
$2.50 for 16GB
about $2 for 8GB
about $1.80 for 4GB.
Why in the world would anybody make a 4GB device in 2016? Bumping up to 16GB only costs about 70 cents more per device. I tried to buy a 2-4 GB microSD card for my Roku because people said it didn't need any more, but there weren't many available anymore and the price difference was so negligible it was easier to just get a 16GB card.
That shows a gross ignorance of the probability tradeoff involved here. Just because recall expenses for one product exceeded the marginal design cost to "get it right the first time" doesn't mean that's the most cost-effective way to design everything. The ideal production point isn't to design and manufacture everything so you never have to do a recall. It's to build stuff so that most of the time you won't need a recall. And the few times you do need to recall a poor design, the cost of that recall is cheaper than having to overdesign everything. If you issue n products and
Then "doing it right the first time" has a cost of n*$x, while living with the slimmer margin results in a cost n*$(x-y) + $z = n*$x - n*$y + $z.
So as long as n*$y (the total amount of money saved by designing all products to a slimmer safety margin) exceeds $z (the cost of the single recall), then suffering the occasional recall is the more efficient economic strategy. I know everyone would prefer having all their toys be perfect, but that perfection would come at the cost of you being able to afford fewer toys. You are actually able to afford more toys which work as if they were perfect if you're willing to accept that a few toys won't be perfect, than if you demand all your toys be perfect.
The tradeoff gets muddled when lives are at stake, since it's difficult to place a value on a human life. (Well, placing an economic value on one is easy. Social, emotional, and moral value is difficult.) But we're talking about a smartphone. A modern convenience which didn't even exist 20 years ago.
Also, the manufacturers aren't who you need to convince here. The people you need to convince to change are the idiot reviewers in the media who pan any phone which doesn't match their misguided preconception of what a "good" phone is, and the people who buy based on those reviews. Everyone here complains phones are too thin, and most of the people I know just end up putting a case on the phone to make easier to hold. Bendgate disproved the notion that metal was better, with quantitative measurements showing that the plastic phones were equal to or stronger than the metal phones at resisting bending. And most reviewers don't use a review phone long enough to run down the battery multiple times under real-world use conditions (loaded with lots of background apps sucking power throughout the day), so tend to undervalue the importance of long battery life. The manufacturers just build to the unrealistic market expectations created by ignorant and misguided reviewers.
Banks and credit card companies do not pay for fraud. They've set it up so the merchants pay for fraud. If you spot a fraudulent transaction on your card, request a chargeback, and the bank approves it, the merchant is out the money and the merchandise - they've paid for the fraud. The fees the banks and credit card companies collect pay for transaction costs, and for people who default on paying back their credit card debt.
Also, it's disingenuous to claim the merchant or customer does not pay for these fees. The credit card companies got laws passed making it illegal for merchants to charge an extra fee for credit card transactions. Consequently when you buy something with a credit card, it's the same price as if you paid in cash (a rare exception being stores which use the "cash discount" loophole). So the fee is coming straight out of the merchant's markup on the item sold - the merchant is paying for the fee. If you want to kick it up one more level, the merchant has to raise its prices to compensate for this reduced effective price markup. So the fee is coming out of the customer's wallet, with cash customers subsidizing the fee for credit card customers since their transactions do not incur the fee, yet they still pay the higher price.
The U.S. government screwed this up royally when it put its site for people to get their free credit report on the domain annualcreditreport.com. The credit agencies all set up similar sites with similar domains, which would give you your credit report but require you to submit a credit card and would try to subscribe you to their credit monitoring services. For years, Google searches would return these spoofing sites instead of the real one as the top result, doubtless due to aggressive SEO. It seems to have stabilized on the real one as the top result now, though I don't know if that's due to Google clamping down on SEO exploits, or if they just hard-coded the government site as the top result. All of this could have been prevented if the government set it up as a .gov TLD, since companies can't set up sites under that domain.
.apple, .ibm, .canon, .samsung TLD would prevent spoofed sites. I tend to side with a strong hierarchical structure to domain names (company.com, organization.org, network.net, etc). But not everyone realized the importance of nabbing a .com domain early on, resulting in headaches which have done nothing but make lawyers rich. Granting an organizations-specific TLD if the organization is large enough may be a solution to this, provided you also prohibit said organization from taking over similarly named .com sites like applesucks.com. Once you own a TLD that only you can make sites on, it's clear whether or not a site is your "real" site, so name confusion and trademark dilution claims should no longer apply.
Likewise, a
Although that's certainly how some people will try to spin it. Venus' atmosphere is theorized to have begun much like Earth's. The crucial difference was its proximity to the sun caused its water to mostly turn into vapor, instead of remain as a liquid. This (1) contributed to the greenhouse effect - water vapor is the biggest greenhouse gas contributor on Earth despite only a tiny fraction of our water being in vapor form, and (2) rose above heavier CO2 thus shielding it from being lost into space or being broken apart into its elements by solar radiation (Venus has almost no magnetosphere to protect it).
So Venus' CO2 was allowed to build up instead of being lost to space, eventually leading to the enormous pressures Venus has today. Mars's atmosphere has a similar composition (both are 96% CO2), but due to its weaker gravity and lack of water vapor, most of Mars' CO2 was lost into space giving Mars a surface atmospheric pressure only 0.6% that of Earth's. Venus' surface pressure by contrast is 92 times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level. CO2's critical point is at 73.9 bar (atmospheres) and 31 C, above which the difference between the gas and liquid phases disappears. So the CO2 "atmosphere" on Venus' surface is more like a sea of CO2 fluid (the Venera landers didn't even use parachutes for the final descent - they gently floated down using nothing but hull drag). You basically have the greenhouse effect of the CO2 gas, compressed into the higher density of liquid CO2. All made possible by excess water vapor early in Venus' early history.
Earth's early atmosphere was also nearly the same as on Mars and Venus. But Earth retained liquid water, which was able to dissolve most of the CO2, creating the "habitable" conditions for life we have today. So it's actually liquid vs gaseous water which is the key difference, not CO2 levels. In fact Venus' present atmosphere is theorized to actually be much more hospitable. In the past when water vapor was still present, temperatures there were probably twice what they are today.
2 years to build a new Soyuz capsule after it's ordered? It takes Boeing and Airbus about 80 days to build a 777 or A380.
Even factoring in number of orders doesn't account for the difference. There are about 15 Soyuz launches per year. Airbus is delivering about 30 A380s per year. So that would only account for a factor of 2, putting expected build time for a Soyuz at 160 days, or less than half a year.
That's a really weird metric to use. Since these services charge per month (or per year for Amazon), isn't the relevant metric individual users per month, not individual users per day? In fact, like MMOs, doesn't a service like this want its users per month metric to be high (to maximize revenue) while keeping its users per day metric low (to reduce bandwidth costs)? Though of course GB per user per month would be a more accurate assessment of bandwidth than users per day.
Even advertisers would be more interested in hours viewed per day, or hours viewed per user per day. I can't think of any way users per day is a useful stat. Maybe to someone maintaining the login servers so they know on average how many authentication requests they'll have to handle per day?
Feature was introduced in Marshmallow I believe. I had to do that when a utility app which had previously been silent got updated to spam me with ads disguised as a notification popup every few hours.
Settings -> Apps -> [app in question] -> Notifications -> Block all
You can also control most app permissions (independent of the app requesting them) in the same place.
Settings -> Apps -> [app in question] -> Permissions
Doesn't let you control an app's network usage (except cellular data use in the background). But if you're rooted you can use AFWall+ to do that.
When comparing percentages, you need to compare them in the manner which has the biggest consequences. A good example is OCR software (optical character recognition). If one has an accuracy of 99.99% and another cheaper one has an accuracy of 99.95%, you might think there's very little difference between the two and you should buy the cheaper one. But the cheaper one has a 5x the failure rate (.05% vs .01%), meaning you'll have to spend 5x as much time fixing errors in the scanned text.
Likewise, a 84% vs 51% success rate is not a mere 33% difference. It's a 3x higher failure rate (16% vs 49%).
I install and repair computer systems for doctors at private practices. Every single one of them hates those pharma reps. I think you've concocted this fantasy where the reps bribe doctors with free lunches and golf trips. The reality is that they're door-to-door salesmen. Several of them come in every day, asking to talk to the doctor so they can give their sales pitch.
The doctors hate this just like you hate door-to-door salesmen at your home, probably more so since they have to put up with a lot more of them and don't have the option of pretending nobody is home and not answering the door. When I'm working on a computer in the reception area, several doctors have asked me to lie and tell these salesmen that they're not in the office that day. Apparently that's what they tell their staff to do, and they don't want me to give it away. They accept the sample drugs just to make the salesmen go away, and because they figure if a patient does happen to need that drug, they can save them a few bucks by giving them a sample instead of having them get it from a pharmacy.
Think about what they've done with their trackpad - made it a fixed non-moving unit which measures pressure, using a vibrating module underneath to simulate the tactile feedback of a click when sufficient pressure is used.
Isn't that the logical conclusion for where they're headed with this? A keyboard with no moving parts, and reconfigurable e-ink "keys" which simulate a keypress with a little synthetic click when you press the right location with enough pressure.
This was tried in the late 1970s with membrane keyboards (the click was simulated by a speaker underneath the keyboard). Those were terrible for typing, but I guess technology has progressed enough that it might be worth trying again.
The one that lowers to form a ramp to enter the ship. Can't have actors walking on a styrofoam ramp. TFA says in the 1977 movie, the door/ramp was lowered by hand using pulleys. Guess someone decided the new movies deserved a fancy mechanized door. Except since this is for a movie and not "real" use, it was designed and built by prop makers who never really gave much thought to safety since the very low frequency of use of their props meant accidents were exceedingly rare.
While I agree that this fine seems absurdly small, revenue does not take into account costs incurred while doing business. If your revenue from selling lemonade is $1 a cup, and the materials and labor to make the lemonade cost $0.25/cup, you are only making $0.75 per cup, not $1/cup. A lot of that revenue Comcast took in was probably sent as payment to the premium channel companies.
Subtracting operating expenses, Comcast had a EBIT of $16 billion in 2015. That works out to $43.8 million/day. And they will make back the fine in 1 hour, 16 minutes.
Bush said that in January 2004, towards the end of his first term. Despite all the flak he gets from the left, he is responsible for the biggest increase in science R&D in the last half-century.
Energy in has to equal energy out. Plants take in CO2 and H2O, and use sunlight to convert it to (C6H10O5)n - cellulose. Energy from sunlight gets converted into energy stored in cellulose. That energy is released during fires. So for global warming to be causing a two-fold increase in forest fires, it must first be causing a two-fold increase in the creation of cellulose - growth of plant matter Any increase in fires without a corresponding increase in the creation of plant matter is just a transient blip in the data.
By conservation of energy, the long-term average of plant matter destroyed by forest fires has to be proportional to the long-term average rate of plant growth. But the people trying to blame these things on global warming are also usually the same ones decrying deforestation. The first implies an increase in energy storage by plants, the latter implies a decrease in energy storage by plants. These two assertions are self-contradictory. So in all likelihood, this is nothing more than a transient spike in the data caused by too-aggressive firefighting of brush and forest fires during the last century.
All the vehicles thus far called zero emissions simply shift their emissions elsewhere. Operating an EV emits plenty of pollution, it's just that the power plants which generate the electricity get blamed for emitting it instead of the owners who drive the vehicles. Even if you're getting your electricity 100% from renewables, there's still the emissions during construction, refining of the materials needed to build PV cells and wind turbines, maintenance, etc. Same goes for hydrogen-powered vehicles - their emissions come predominantly from the process of generating the hydrogen needed to power them, which from all the calculations I've seen thus far exceed the emissions from ICEs.
Right now, environmental policy is being driven by popularity and emotion. It needs to be replaced with a rational, mathematical approach. If you choose to drive a car from location x to location y, it will need to use a certain amount of energy. Generating that energy with an ICE creates a certain amount of emitted pollutants. Generating it with renewables creates a different amount and different types of pollutants. Same goes for steam, coal, natural gas, nuclear, etc. You don't get to draw a black box around just the car, blithely ignore what's needed to create what goes into the box, then irrationally proclaim that you've created a zero emissions vehicle.
And no, you cannot claim your EV is zero emissions because you installed solar panels on your house which you then use to recharge your EV. That's a gross misunderstanding of opportunity cost. The correct comparison in that case is how much emissions your activities would generate if you use the solar panels to recharge your EV, vs if you used the solar panels to offset your household electricity use and used a different type of car. The only way the solar panels can show up only on the EV side of the comparison is if you would not have installed solar panels if you didn't get the EV. That is almost never the case.
For the same reason, EVs are being powered almost 100% by coal and gas plants right now. The electrical demand prior to EVs was being supplied by coal, gas, nuclear, and renewables. Nuclear has not increased. We're increasing renewables pretty much as fast as we can, but that increase would've happened even if EVs didn't exist. So the extra demand for electricity caused by EVs is being filled by the most flexible electricity generation sources we have right now - coal and gas.
Stop trying to think of energy in terms of us (eco-car owners) vs them (dirty polluting ICE owners). Start thinking of it in terms of world-wide energy production and use.
Jury trials are a fail-safe against the government becoming so corrupt that it starts passing and enforcing laws contradictory to the wishes and best interests of the citizens as a whole. Like the Second Amendment, the value of jury trials is not obvious when things are working more or less fine - in fact as you express it may actually make things worse during these times. But when the sh!t hits the fan, it's one last way for the citizens to reassert dominance over an out-of-control government.
That's why you should make sure everyone you know knows about jury nullifcation. Judges hate it and go out their way to trick jurors into thinking they don't have that right (they instruct the jury to decide based on the facts of the case and the law as written). But the right of jury nullification was deliberately placed in our Constitution as one last bulwark against an overreaching government.
That particular clause is in there to prevent a situation where a user posts something on a public forum, then later changes their mind and uses copyright law to force the forum to delete their post. It's not a problem if one or even a handful of users does it. But when you start to get up to hundreds or even thousands of users doing it, it turns the forum's historical archives into swiss cheese, not to mention the extra cost and manpower needed to remove the posts from things like backup tapes.
The wiser companies phrase their EULAs so that the user gives them an irrevokable license to "publish" their posts for the purpose of providing the service (the forum). The ones with overzealous lawyers or nefarious intent phrased it as the user signing over all copyright to their post to the company. I'm not even sure that's legally valid since there's no consideration - something of value like money or goods given in exchange for giving up the copyright.
The population of people working in the field may differ substantially from the general population in terms of race or gender. The genetics or cultural backgrounds of certain races may bias them towards or away from certain professions (e.g. African Americans disproportionately overrepresented in athletics and music). Differences in what activities males and females enjoy may cause them to gravitate towards or away from different professions. So simply comparing the breakdown of the job population to the general population (as the mass media likes to do) isn't sufficient evidence for proving gender or race discrimination.
Age is totally different. Everyone gets older. So for the most part the age distribution of qualified people matches the age distribution of the general population. There are some smaller deviations (e.g. older people preferring email, younger people preferring SMS), and certain jobs are age-specific (a 20-something marketer may be better at marketing a product for 20-somethings). But in general technical competence is biased in favor of older workers (they have more experience). So for more difficult jobs, you should actually find a pro-old age bias (i.e. younger people are more likely to burger flippers, older people in higher positions like management). If you find the opposite, that's a pretty big red flag that discrimination may be going on.
There's more to it than a removable batteries simply being unpopular. Lithium-ion batteries have a shallower voltage curve than other rechargeable battery chemistries. That is, the voltage does not change that much as you discharge or charge the battery. This makes it trickier to detect how much remaining charge there is, and when the battery is at full charge. Doubly so when you add in voltage depression due to load, and elevation due to the device being charged. Add in Li-ion's tendency to experience thermal runaway when overcharged, or over-discharged then recharged, and getting the charging mechanism just right is critical but requires very precise knowledge of both the battery, and how much current the device draws.
Removable batteries throws a big monkey wrench into all this. Now suddenly the battery that's put into the device may not be the same as the charging mechanism was originally designed to work with. So you have to make the charging mechanism flexible enough to deal with all the different batteries which might end up being plugged into it.
I totally disagree with you that removable batteries are unpopular. If two devices with identical form and functionality, but one with a slightly smaller removable battery, were sold side-by-side, IMHO the removable battery model would far outsell the fixed battery model. But manufacturers are going with fixed batteries simply because they're easier to design, and because it helps reduce their exposure to liability (In the early days, cell phone makers were sued when their phones caught fire, but it turned out most of these people had replaced their original battery with a cheap Chinese knockoff).
That is self-contradictory. If discrimination against an individual male can be justified because of the average traits of males as a whole can legitimately warrant that discrimination, then discrimination against any individual can be justified because of the average traits of the larger group he/she belongs to.
The whole point of anti-stereotype and anti-discrimination statutes is to prohibit using average traits of the group an individual belongs to as justification for sanctions against that individual. The assumption being that while the stereotype may be true of the group on average, it may not be true of a particular individual who belongs to that group, and it is wrong to pre-assume that individual exhibits those traits and thus must be sanctioned for it.
In other words, you cannot pick and choose which groups get protection from discrimination and stereotyping. Either all are protected, or none are. Either applying the average traits of a group to all individual members of that group is OK, or it is wrong.