That actually works against the argument to remain. Had the recent vote come out >67% in favor of remaining, that would've validated the original promises of the benefits of a union. But because the vote feel short of 67% and in fact swung the other way, you can say that many of those original promises were unfulfilled with unforeseen problems created.
In other words, the recent vote to leave has greater authority than any previous vote to join. A vote to join a new organization is made based on supposition and predictions of what the future will be like. A best guess, no solid facts or direct experience to base your decision upon. A vote to leave is made after experiencing the reality of having been a member, and (for the older voters who voted predominantly to leave) being able to directly compare to when they weren't members. So the fact that Brits were gung-ho about the EU in 1975, but not so thrilled about it in 2016 means a lot of the rosy predictions made which helped garner 67% of the vote didn't come true.
See, it's the people who change their minds after getting additional data (from having experienced living in the union) who are crucial. Likewise for the current referendum, 2 million signatures or 16 million signatures (the number of people who voted to Remain) doesn't matter. What matters is how many people who voted to Leave have changed their minds, and are petitioning for a new referendum.
Wouldn't that mean that if this new rule is implemented, a new referendum vote would require at least 75% voter participation and 60%+ voting to Remain, in order to override the previous referendum vote where a plurality of voters chose to Leave? By those standards, only Scotland would just barely vote to overturn this referendum vote. London only hit 59.9% Remain, North Ireland 55.8% - both would fail to reach the new 60% threshold.
The American analogy would be the Constitution prohibiting the States from regulating interstate commerce. Only Congress has that power (analogous to the WTO). Without that, you get all sorts of silly trade embargoes and tariffs which have no net effect (the money one State collects on lumber imports, the other State makes back on steel imports), but slows down trade and creates a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy. Each State increases their their tariffs to try to come out ahead in the net balance, resulting in trade becoming so expensive neither State benefits from any trade. Classic prisoner's dilemma.
As an American who frequently visits Europe, all you need is to enter the EU via a country which has a visa waiver treaty. They check your passport, and grant you an instant 90 day visa. Once you're in an EU country, you're free to cross the borders into other EU countries - there are no more border checks. About the only things an EU passport gets you is the right to stand in the EU line at immigration (which is sometimes faster than the visitor line), and the ability to stay more than 90 days without renewing or applying for a longer-term visa.
After the UK leaves, it'll have to negotiate these waiver treaties, which might take a few years. But afterwards it'll be the same as before for 80% of travelers, except now there will be a border checkpoint at the Chunnel. The other 20% will be traveling on business, so it remains to be seen what'll happen there. I would imagine both sides will be anxious to renegotiate free trade or almost-free trade treaties ASAP to minimize the economic impact in both the UK and EU.
That's the way it's always been. They feel justified doing it to us, because when they were younger their elders did it to them.
You are most likely doing the same thing too. If you're not clamoring for your government to cut services and use the money saved pay down its debt, you're saying "Screw this, the people before me racked up this debt. I didn't get anything for it, so I'm not going to pay for it. I'll just maintain it, maybe add a little to it since everyone before me got more than they deserved by spending more than they paid in taxes (thus adding to the debt). Let my kids and grandkids deal with it instead." Meanwhile the 1% get richer without having to do any work - because they're being paid interest on all that debt.
If GP is correct that the FBI just put a trojan on a kiddie porn site that reported the computer's IP when run, I'd have to agree that doesn't require a warrant. It's not hacking per se. The government didn't take any active steps to get the file onto the suspect's computer. The suspect deliberately downloaded and ran the file all on his own. It's like setting up a bait car with a GPS transmitter inside it. If a thief steals the car, you don't need a warrant to read the GPS coordinates to get the thief's location, or for that matter to follow the car into the thief's garage.
If the FBI were doing port scans of suspected kiddie porn IP addresses, breaking into the system, and browsing the contents, then yes that would require a warrant. But if the person acts on their own to download and run a file which they believe will help them commit the crime the government is trying to stop, then that's an exigent circumstance which obviates the need for a warrant.
BP paid for screwing up. Could they have been smarter about how they drilled? Sure. Were they negligent in following industry safety practices? Probably. But the bottom line is that the Deep Horizon spill was an accident - something BP didn't want to happen, but did.
VW is paying for deliberately contravening the law. They wanted to make non-compliant cars look like they were compliant. This goes beyond negligence, where you don't know or don't care that what you're doing could cause harm. It's malfeasance. They knew what they were doing was wrong, but did it anyway. It's the difference between carelessly putting a box of rat poison on the shelf above the stove, and it accidentally falling into the soup you're serving the restaurant customers. And deliberately putting melamine into pet food knowing full well that it'll cause harm.
This supersedes how much damage was actually caused by their cheat. VW isn't paying for the damage their cars did to the environment. They're paying for deliberately flaunting the EPA's rules. And I say this as someone who supports VW's push for more diesel cars - they should be made to bleed for what they did.
There is actually a lot of evidence to support the premise that fracking not only pollutes the ground water, but also causes mild earth quakes.
Most fracking is done several km undeground. Most groundwater aquifers are less than a km underground, usually less than 100 meters. The premise behind the fracking fluid polluting groundwater requires you to believe that the fluid can permeate several km up through the rock, while simultaneously water is incapable of draining down several km. If pollution from fracking were possible, the bigger issue in the news would be fracking causing cracks at the impermeable rocks at the bottom of the aquifer, causing the entire aquifer to drain further underground.
The gases released by fracking OTOH can in theory percolate up. However, the dramatic videos you've seen of people lighting their tap water on fire leave out one important question - could they do that before the fracking? Volcanic gases naturally percolate up through the rock until it reaches aquifers, where they dissolve into the water. When the gas is CO2, we call the result sparkling water. If the gas is CH4, you end up with water you can light on fire (the gas bubbles out when you pump the water up and the ambient pressure decreases). I'm sure you believe in natural sparkling water springs. So why is it so hard to believe in natural well water you can light on fire?
As for earthquakes, those wanting to ban fracking because of earthquakes are the ones who are short-sighted. The fracking doesn't cause the earthquakes, it merely triggers them. Fracking comes nowhere near pumping enough energy into the ground to cause an earthquake. If it were that energy-intensive, we wouldn't be doing it because the energy you got from the natural gas and oil recovered this way wouldn't cover the energy used by the fracking process. All fracking does is trigger the release of energy already there - built up in the rocks by natural geological forces.
This is energy that would've eventually been released in an earthquake anyway. Usually a much bigger and much more destructive earthquake. Fracking allows the release of that energy more frequently in smaller amounts, instead of less frequently all at once. It's analogous to deliberately triggering small harmless avalanches on a snow-covered mountain to eliminate the possibility of a large destructive avalanche later in the year. We've accidentally stumbled upon a method to mitigate the danger of large earthquakes (which so far we've been unable to predict), but the technology is going to be buried because the anti-fracking crowd have turned it into a negative by selectively looking only at the short-term consequences.
By and large I've found Uber rides cheaper than cabs. It doesn't make sense that cheaper ride sources would ultimately end up in more income to the driver.
Actually, that does make sense. It's one aspect to this whole thing which is missing from this analysis - how much money is Uber making? If Uber's margin is (say) 15% of the gross while a taxi company's is 30%, then it would be possible for Uber to pay its drivers more while charging customers less. The pro-Uber tagline thus far has been the traditional taxi companies are crufty and inefficient, protected from competition by their government-granted monopoly. So in that respect, it does make sense to expect cheaper rides but more income for drivers.
Unfortunately everyone is so focused on the two endpoints (money paid as fares, money to driver) that they're not bothering to do this in-between efficiency calculation. The smaller % of the gross the managing company takes as a cut, the more efficient it is. And it's the more efficient company that should win in the market, not necessarily the one with the cheapest fares or the highest pay for drivers. That's how you can tell if Uber is real or blowing hot air. Compare their cut of the gross to a taxi company's cut of the gross. If Uber's is a smaller percentage, then they're right. Get rid of the traditional taxi companies, and add a few competitors who operate like Uber does. If it's the same percentage or higher, then they're not doing anything better than a traditional taxi company.
The old Walkman and MP3 player style headphones use 3.5mm jacks. Phones switched to 2.5mm jacks because in addition to left/right speakers, they also needed to carry a signal from the microphone. If they'd made it 3.5mm, they would've been deluged with complaints that the person on the other end of the call couldn't hear them talking when they had (regular) headphones plugged into the phone. So they made it 2.5mm so there's no way you could mix the two up (which is starting to happen now that some laptops are combining the 3.5mm stereo-out and mic-in ports into a single combo port).
Anyway, to get back on topic, format changes like this make sense when you need to add a required or useful capability that's lacking in the old format. If they're going to replace it with something that relays more info than left / right / mic, then they have a shot of it working. But if they're just trying to move L/R/Mic to a different format, then yeah, good luck with that.
What? So I am supposed to buy all the cards, and test them myself, so I can decide which one to buy?
Yes, exactly. If you and a million other video card buyers pool your resources and chip in just $1/yr, you'll have enough money to buy test equipment, pay a couple engineers to do the reviews, and still have enough money left over to buy a couple thousand video cards off the store shelves.
It's amazing what you can do, when you have 7 million subscribers, each paying $30 a year, isn't it?
I like to think of it more as 7 million of us regular people deciding to each chip in $30/yr so we can hire some folks to buy a bunch of products and do head-to-head comparison reviews.
If you want products to be reviewed, someone has to pay for it. The question you have to ask yourself is, are you willing to pay for it to insure the reviews are done in your best interest? Or are you so insistent on wanting stuff "for free" that you think it's OK for advertisers (i.e. the companies who make the products) to pay for their own reviews?
At least 7 million of us buyers of cars, appliances, and household products are willing to pay for objective reviews. Video card enthusiasts apparently are more interested in free stuff.
The market for consumer computer hardware component reviews, does not have this kind of reach, however.
Think there might be a lot more consumers looking for reviews on products in the $100 billion+ per Year market for Cars, Versus the $50 mllion+ per Year market for video cards?
Number of people cancels out of the equation, so the total dollar amount of the market is irrelevant. The cost of the review scales with the cost of the products being reviewed (after subtracting salary for the reviewer and initial purchase cost of the test equipment). So it boils down to what percentage of your purchase price you're willing to pay. If each member buys a $30,000 car every 5 years ($6000/yr) and $30/yr is sufficient to purchase and review those cars, that means the reviews cost 0.5% of the purchase price. So if video card enthusiasts buy a $300 video card every 2 years ($150/yr), they should be able to put together an objective review organization which charges them less than $1/yr.
Even if you only get 200,000 members, $200,000/yr is enough to pay a couple full-time reviewers and buy a heckuva lot of video cards. Though I daresay, at just $1/yr, you're more likely to hit several million members. Unless of course the desire for free stuff is so powerful among your user demographic that they start sharing the login info for the reviews amongst themselves instead of paying $1/yr.
So no, this is NOT because the banks can make money from those two days.
If the banks truly weren't interested in making money from those two days, they'd deduct the funds immediately. But then after the transaction was finalized, post-date the transaction as having occurred two days later. That way you'd get credit (earn interest) on that money during the two day float (time between when the money leaves your account and when the recipient gets paid). This would be trivial to implement.
When I bought my house, the escrow company credited me with interest earned on my down payment during the 45 days from when I gave them the money to when they sent me back a refund check for the excess amount I'd paid (and earned as interest). That's the way it should work with an ethical third party overseeing a transfer of money between two parties. They were paid a fee for their services, but the money was never theirs so any interest earned wasn't theirs. The way banks do it now, they're stealing your money by keeping that interest. If they want to charge a transaction fee, then they should be up-front about it and tell you there's a transaction fee per check.
Yeah the government could be watching me too. But while I oppose that on philosophical grounds, I don't personally do anything that might interest the government. Hackers OTOH are less discriminating, and it's easier to just eliminate the possibility of compromising pictures or even blackmail by covering the camera with some tape. The 1 cent it'll cost you is the cheapest insurance you can buy.
You do realize that in order not to show you the same ad more than once, they have to track you so they know which ads they've already shown you?
Free ad-supported content, tracking users and harvesting their info for marketing purposes, and seeing relevant and non-repetitive ads are all different aspects of the same thing.
SMS is notoriously unsecure. The encryption is only between the phone and the tower. A hacker could potentially intercept the message anywhere else along the transmission route. To truly be secure, it has to be end-to-end encryption, like SSL on websites. Apple sort of has the right idea with iMessage, except they manage the end-to-end keys themselves so they (or a hacker who breaks into their servers) could potentially read your messages. It needs to be done using keys generated and stored only on the endpoint device. (Which has the obvious drawback of past messages becoming unreadable if you lose your device. The keys should be backed up onto another personal device, but because people are lazy/foolish/ignorant Apple decided to back it up on their servers.)
And even end-to-end encryption isn't completely secure. There are apps out there which when installed on your phone will surreptitiously forward a copy of all your text messages to someone else. Likewise, if you lose your phone (unheard of I know, but it happens) your security is blown. In particular, for people with Android phones, 2FA for Google accounts via SMS is just 1FA. If a thief steals your phone, it's already got access to your Google accounts. And now they're going to 2FA validate you're you by sending a text to the phone in the thief's possession?
This is the same reason I switched from Google's Authenticator 2FA app to Authy. Authenticator just runs - it assumes your phone is secure and always in your possession. Yes you can and should put a password on your phone, but sometimes you do hand your phone unlocked to other people so they can use it, or a thief can steal it from your hands while it's unlocked and you're using it. Authy at least requires you to enter a PIN or password each time you use it.
Just guessing, without modeling, I think the thrust would be mostly down, with some backwards.
Water is incompressible. The volume flowrate of water the wheel pulls up into the wheel well has to equal the volume flowrate the wheel pushes down, and by Newton's 3rd law there is no net thrust up or down. An impeller works by scooping up a volume of water through a large opening at a low flowrate, and shooting it through a smaller opening at a high flowrate. The difference in in/out opening size is crucial to keep an impeller obeying conservation of mass. I haven't looked closely at the Tesla S, but I suspect the clearance in the front and back of the wheel well is the same.
Forward thrust would be due to the bottom of the tires pushing free-flowing water backwards, pushing the car forwards. The water in the top of the tires would be pushed forwards, but it hits the wheel well and transfers its momentum back to the car (being diverted down in the process), canceling out the backwards thrust from the top of the wheel. In other words, the top half of the rotating wheel draws water up into the wheel well, pushes the water forward (pushing the car backward), but the wheel well then diverts the water down (pushing the car forward the same amount). And the net momentum change for water moving around the top of the tire is zero. But the bottom of the tire is pushing unobstructed water, so it pushes the water backwards, pushing the car forward in the process.
While all cars will float, ICE vehicles are nose-heavy due to the engine location. The front end will pitch down making any attempt to use it as a boat dangerous if not fatal - moving forward will increase water pressure on the top of the hood, forcing the vehicle to pitch nose-down even further.
In an EV, the weight is concentrated in the battery, which is usually evenly distributed across the vehicle's floor. So I would expect it to remain closer to horizontal when used as a boat. With some fairing on the bottom of the front end, you could even attach a propeller and get some decent forward speed out of it.
Or banning cell phones because you don't want an amateur video of your concert on youtube.
Here's an idea. Instead of taking the heavy-handed approach of banning cell phones at concerts, simply remove the incentive to create an amateur video of the concert you're attending with your cell phone. Hire a professional camera crew who makes a slick video of the concert. Then give each ticket-holder a unique code which entitles them to download a free copy of this video a few days after the concert.
The fans are happy because they get a nice video to relieve the experience, instead of a crappy cell phone video. The musician is happy because there are no (or fewer) annoying cell phones and flashes going off in the concert. And the production studio is happy because they can use software to detect copies of the concert video uploaded to YouTube, instead of having to hire people to scour YouTube for amateur videos of the concert. Win-win-win.
a monolithic system with 10.65 million compute cores [...] theoretical peak performance is 124.5 petaflops
You can hit ridiculously high numbers of FLOPS if you throw enough cores at it. Folding@home hits about 100 petaFLOPS this way. They're currently at about 200,000 CPUs + GPUs. If they could get 10 million participants, that would project out to 5 exaFLOPS, easily surpassing anything else in the top 500 list. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if some criminal botnet is the "fastest supercomputer" by this measure.
Reading between the lines: "We noticed streaming video players mostly ran in Silverlight, because Hollywood insists on decoding streamed video in a Silverlight encrypted virtual machine.* So we scheduled a meeting with the Silverlight dev team and got them to make some power optimization tweaks to it, but only activated these optimizations in Edge, not in other browsers."
* If they sent a raw unencrypted stream, you could capture the stream and have a copy of the movie. But decrypting the stream in a virtual machine means the CPU has to do all the video decoding. You cannot use the power-efficient video decoding hardware in the GPU. Stupid, but that's Hollywood.
It's important to remember that the NSA, FBI, and CIA didn't come up with these surveillance programs on their own. They were tasked with coming up with these programs by Congress (not all members - there's a committee which approves clandestine programs) at the request of the President. When these programs became public and the shit hit the fan, Congress went into full CYA mode and managed to shift the blame from themselves onto these agencies.
If these had truly been rogue programs made and operated without the knowledge of the President and the legislators who were supposed to be overseeing it, the people directing these programs would be on trial for treason right now.
When Flash was first introduced, a large number of people were still on dial-up and Flash sites were a big no-no because by then we already knew that people would click away if their site didn't load in 5s or less. Flash was then marketed towards people marketing towards broadband (video and interactive sites and DHTML were going to be all the rage once everyone got broadband).
You've got that backwards. The very reason Flash exists was to reach people trying to access the Internet on dialup. Dialup wasn't fast enough to stream video, but real-life video is different from animation. Flash was originally an artist's tool to allow animation over dialup. Instead of having to send a constant video stream, you could send a few sprites and images of backgrounds, then animate those on the user's local computer.
It was only later when web developers realized that Flash was flexible enough to essentially run universal interpreted code (same code would work on PC, Mac, and Linux) that they went nuts. Entire websites in flash, thus defeating the whole purpose of HTML (displaying info in the format the end-user decided was best). Flash ads bypassing the user blocking animated GIF ads. And flash streaming video became ubiquitous (which wouldn't have happened if the folks at W3C had actually added the features web developers were asking for like embedded streaming video, instead of waiting 10 years like they did with HTML 5).
That's why Flash is so full of security holes. Because when Macromedia invented it, they were just thinking of a a good way to animate stuff on the end user's PC. They had no idea it was going to become The way for web developers to do everything they wanted but couldn't because "HTML didn't support it." It's still an excellent animation tool. A large number of animated TV shows and animated movies are partly or completely made with Flash.
The stuff most aid organizations provide (food, clean water, medicine) aren't really what poor countries need. It's literally putting the cart before the horse, and can even be counter-productive by making life harder or impossible for domestic producers of those things, and allowing these countries' population to grow beyond their ability to self-sustain themselves.
These countries need to develop their own economy first.That's why UN assistance for developing nations focuses on building infrastructure, increasing the number of citizens participating in the economy (education and gender equality), figuring out ways to exploit natural resources, facilitating trade and economic development, and helping set up government programs to help support all these things. Once you get the economic ball rolling, they can grow their own food, clean their own water, build their own hospitals. These things are the result of development. Giving people the end product instead of the means to produce the end product is exactly what the aphorism "give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for life" tells us not to do.
Shhhh. All of us 30+ year olds know "ultrasonic mosquito repellent" is just a code phrase for "ultrasonic loitering teenager repellent." Don't let the secret out.
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That actually works against the argument to remain. Had the recent vote come out >67% in favor of remaining, that would've validated the original promises of the benefits of a union. But because the vote feel short of 67% and in fact swung the other way, you can say that many of those original promises were unfulfilled with unforeseen problems created.
In other words, the recent vote to leave has greater authority than any previous vote to join. A vote to join a new organization is made based on supposition and predictions of what the future will be like. A best guess, no solid facts or direct experience to base your decision upon. A vote to leave is made after experiencing the reality of having been a member, and (for the older voters who voted predominantly to leave) being able to directly compare to when they weren't members. So the fact that Brits were gung-ho about the EU in 1975, but not so thrilled about it in 2016 means a lot of the rosy predictions made which helped garner 67% of the vote didn't come true.
See, it's the people who change their minds after getting additional data (from having experienced living in the union) who are crucial. Likewise for the current referendum, 2 million signatures or 16 million signatures (the number of people who voted to Remain) doesn't matter. What matters is how many people who voted to Leave have changed their minds, and are petitioning for a new referendum.
Wouldn't that mean that if this new rule is implemented, a new referendum vote would require at least 75% voter participation and 60%+ voting to Remain, in order to override the previous referendum vote where a plurality of voters chose to Leave? By those standards, only Scotland would just barely vote to overturn this referendum vote. London only hit 59.9% Remain, North Ireland 55.8% - both would fail to reach the new 60% threshold.
The American analogy would be the Constitution prohibiting the States from regulating interstate commerce. Only Congress has that power (analogous to the WTO). Without that, you get all sorts of silly trade embargoes and tariffs which have no net effect (the money one State collects on lumber imports, the other State makes back on steel imports), but slows down trade and creates a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy. Each State increases their their tariffs to try to come out ahead in the net balance, resulting in trade becoming so expensive neither State benefits from any trade. Classic prisoner's dilemma.
As an American who frequently visits Europe, all you need is to enter the EU via a country which has a visa waiver treaty. They check your passport, and grant you an instant 90 day visa. Once you're in an EU country, you're free to cross the borders into other EU countries - there are no more border checks. About the only things an EU passport gets you is the right to stand in the EU line at immigration (which is sometimes faster than the visitor line), and the ability to stay more than 90 days without renewing or applying for a longer-term visa.
After the UK leaves, it'll have to negotiate these waiver treaties, which might take a few years. But afterwards it'll be the same as before for 80% of travelers, except now there will be a border checkpoint at the Chunnel. The other 20% will be traveling on business, so it remains to be seen what'll happen there. I would imagine both sides will be anxious to renegotiate free trade or almost-free trade treaties ASAP to minimize the economic impact in both the UK and EU.
That's the way it's always been. They feel justified doing it to us, because when they were younger their elders did it to them.
You are most likely doing the same thing too. If you're not clamoring for your government to cut services and use the money saved pay down its debt, you're saying "Screw this, the people before me racked up this debt. I didn't get anything for it, so I'm not going to pay for it. I'll just maintain it, maybe add a little to it since everyone before me got more than they deserved by spending more than they paid in taxes (thus adding to the debt). Let my kids and grandkids deal with it instead." Meanwhile the 1% get richer without having to do any work - because they're being paid interest on all that debt.
If GP is correct that the FBI just put a trojan on a kiddie porn site that reported the computer's IP when run, I'd have to agree that doesn't require a warrant. It's not hacking per se. The government didn't take any active steps to get the file onto the suspect's computer. The suspect deliberately downloaded and ran the file all on his own. It's like setting up a bait car with a GPS transmitter inside it. If a thief steals the car, you don't need a warrant to read the GPS coordinates to get the thief's location, or for that matter to follow the car into the thief's garage.
If the FBI were doing port scans of suspected kiddie porn IP addresses, breaking into the system, and browsing the contents, then yes that would require a warrant. But if the person acts on their own to download and run a file which they believe will help them commit the crime the government is trying to stop, then that's an exigent circumstance which obviates the need for a warrant.
BP paid for screwing up. Could they have been smarter about how they drilled? Sure. Were they negligent in following industry safety practices? Probably. But the bottom line is that the Deep Horizon spill was an accident - something BP didn't want to happen, but did.
VW is paying for deliberately contravening the law. They wanted to make non-compliant cars look like they were compliant. This goes beyond negligence, where you don't know or don't care that what you're doing could cause harm. It's malfeasance. They knew what they were doing was wrong, but did it anyway. It's the difference between carelessly putting a box of rat poison on the shelf above the stove, and it accidentally falling into the soup you're serving the restaurant customers. And deliberately putting melamine into pet food knowing full well that it'll cause harm.
This supersedes how much damage was actually caused by their cheat. VW isn't paying for the damage their cars did to the environment. They're paying for deliberately flaunting the EPA's rules. And I say this as someone who supports VW's push for more diesel cars - they should be made to bleed for what they did.
Most fracking is done several km undeground. Most groundwater aquifers are less than a km underground, usually less than 100 meters. The premise behind the fracking fluid polluting groundwater requires you to believe that the fluid can permeate several km up through the rock, while simultaneously water is incapable of draining down several km. If pollution from fracking were possible, the bigger issue in the news would be fracking causing cracks at the impermeable rocks at the bottom of the aquifer, causing the entire aquifer to drain further underground.
The gases released by fracking OTOH can in theory percolate up. However, the dramatic videos you've seen of people lighting their tap water on fire leave out one important question - could they do that before the fracking? Volcanic gases naturally percolate up through the rock until it reaches aquifers, where they dissolve into the water. When the gas is CO2, we call the result sparkling water. If the gas is CH4, you end up with water you can light on fire (the gas bubbles out when you pump the water up and the ambient pressure decreases). I'm sure you believe in natural sparkling water springs. So why is it so hard to believe in natural well water you can light on fire?
As for earthquakes, those wanting to ban fracking because of earthquakes are the ones who are short-sighted. The fracking doesn't cause the earthquakes, it merely triggers them. Fracking comes nowhere near pumping enough energy into the ground to cause an earthquake. If it were that energy-intensive, we wouldn't be doing it because the energy you got from the natural gas and oil recovered this way wouldn't cover the energy used by the fracking process. All fracking does is trigger the release of energy already there - built up in the rocks by natural geological forces.
This is energy that would've eventually been released in an earthquake anyway. Usually a much bigger and much more destructive earthquake. Fracking allows the release of that energy more frequently in smaller amounts, instead of less frequently all at once. It's analogous to deliberately triggering small harmless avalanches on a snow-covered mountain to eliminate the possibility of a large destructive avalanche later in the year. We've accidentally stumbled upon a method to mitigate the danger of large earthquakes (which so far we've been unable to predict), but the technology is going to be buried because the anti-fracking crowd have turned it into a negative by selectively looking only at the short-term consequences.
Actually, that does make sense. It's one aspect to this whole thing which is missing from this analysis - how much money is Uber making? If Uber's margin is (say) 15% of the gross while a taxi company's is 30%, then it would be possible for Uber to pay its drivers more while charging customers less. The pro-Uber tagline thus far has been the traditional taxi companies are crufty and inefficient, protected from competition by their government-granted monopoly. So in that respect, it does make sense to expect cheaper rides but more income for drivers.
Unfortunately everyone is so focused on the two endpoints (money paid as fares, money to driver) that they're not bothering to do this in-between efficiency calculation. The smaller % of the gross the managing company takes as a cut, the more efficient it is. And it's the more efficient company that should win in the market, not necessarily the one with the cheapest fares or the highest pay for drivers. That's how you can tell if Uber is real or blowing hot air. Compare their cut of the gross to a taxi company's cut of the gross. If Uber's is a smaller percentage, then they're right. Get rid of the traditional taxi companies, and add a few competitors who operate like Uber does. If it's the same percentage or higher, then they're not doing anything better than a traditional taxi company.
The old Walkman and MP3 player style headphones use 3.5mm jacks. Phones switched to 2.5mm jacks because in addition to left/right speakers, they also needed to carry a signal from the microphone. If they'd made it 3.5mm, they would've been deluged with complaints that the person on the other end of the call couldn't hear them talking when they had (regular) headphones plugged into the phone. So they made it 2.5mm so there's no way you could mix the two up (which is starting to happen now that some laptops are combining the 3.5mm stereo-out and mic-in ports into a single combo port).
Anyway, to get back on topic, format changes like this make sense when you need to add a required or useful capability that's lacking in the old format. If they're going to replace it with something that relays more info than left / right / mic, then they have a shot of it working. But if they're just trying to move L/R/Mic to a different format, then yeah, good luck with that.
Yes, exactly. If you and a million other video card buyers pool your resources and chip in just $1/yr, you'll have enough money to buy test equipment, pay a couple engineers to do the reviews, and still have enough money left over to buy a couple thousand video cards off the store shelves.
I like to think of it more as 7 million of us regular people deciding to each chip in $30/yr so we can hire some folks to buy a bunch of products and do head-to-head comparison reviews.
If you want products to be reviewed, someone has to pay for it. The question you have to ask yourself is, are you willing to pay for it to insure the reviews are done in your best interest? Or are you so insistent on wanting stuff "for free" that you think it's OK for advertisers (i.e. the companies who make the products) to pay for their own reviews?
At least 7 million of us buyers of cars, appliances, and household products are willing to pay for objective reviews. Video card enthusiasts apparently are more interested in free stuff.
Number of people cancels out of the equation, so the total dollar amount of the market is irrelevant. The cost of the review scales with the cost of the products being reviewed (after subtracting salary for the reviewer and initial purchase cost of the test equipment). So it boils down to what percentage of your purchase price you're willing to pay. If each member buys a $30,000 car every 5 years ($6000/yr) and $30/yr is sufficient to purchase and review those cars, that means the reviews cost 0.5% of the purchase price. So if video card enthusiasts buy a $300 video card every 2 years ($150/yr), they should be able to put together an objective review organization which charges them less than $1/yr.
Even if you only get 200,000 members, $200,000/yr is enough to pay a couple full-time reviewers and buy a heckuva lot of video cards. Though I daresay, at just $1/yr, you're more likely to hit several million members. Unless of course the desire for free stuff is so powerful among your user demographic that they start sharing the login info for the reviews amongst themselves instead of paying $1/yr.
If the banks truly weren't interested in making money from those two days, they'd deduct the funds immediately. But then after the transaction was finalized, post-date the transaction as having occurred two days later. That way you'd get credit (earn interest) on that money during the two day float (time between when the money leaves your account and when the recipient gets paid). This would be trivial to implement.
When I bought my house, the escrow company credited me with interest earned on my down payment during the 45 days from when I gave them the money to when they sent me back a refund check for the excess amount I'd paid (and earned as interest). That's the way it should work with an ethical third party overseeing a transfer of money between two parties. They were paid a fee for their services, but the money was never theirs so any interest earned wasn't theirs. The way banks do it now, they're stealing your money by keeping that interest. If they want to charge a transaction fee, then they should be up-front about it and tell you there's a transaction fee per check.
It's about how ridiculously easy it is for hackers to pwn your laptop and watch you over your webcam. The "community" that does that sort of thing has become pretty sophisticated in their tools.
Yeah the government could be watching me too. But while I oppose that on philosophical grounds, I don't personally do anything that might interest the government. Hackers OTOH are less discriminating, and it's easier to just eliminate the possibility of compromising pictures or even blackmail by covering the camera with some tape. The 1 cent it'll cost you is the cheapest insurance you can buy.
You do realize that in order not to show you the same ad more than once, they have to track you so they know which ads they've already shown you?
Free ad-supported content, tracking users and harvesting their info for marketing purposes, and seeing relevant and non-repetitive ads are all different aspects of the same thing.
SMS is notoriously unsecure. The encryption is only between the phone and the tower. A hacker could potentially intercept the message anywhere else along the transmission route. To truly be secure, it has to be end-to-end encryption, like SSL on websites. Apple sort of has the right idea with iMessage, except they manage the end-to-end keys themselves so they (or a hacker who breaks into their servers) could potentially read your messages. It needs to be done using keys generated and stored only on the endpoint device. (Which has the obvious drawback of past messages becoming unreadable if you lose your device. The keys should be backed up onto another personal device, but because people are lazy/foolish/ignorant Apple decided to back it up on their servers.)
And even end-to-end encryption isn't completely secure. There are apps out there which when installed on your phone will surreptitiously forward a copy of all your text messages to someone else. Likewise, if you lose your phone (unheard of I know, but it happens) your security is blown. In particular, for people with Android phones, 2FA for Google accounts via SMS is just 1FA. If a thief steals your phone, it's already got access to your Google accounts. And now they're going to 2FA validate you're you by sending a text to the phone in the thief's possession?
This is the same reason I switched from Google's Authenticator 2FA app to Authy. Authenticator just runs - it assumes your phone is secure and always in your possession. Yes you can and should put a password on your phone, but sometimes you do hand your phone unlocked to other people so they can use it, or a thief can steal it from your hands while it's unlocked and you're using it. Authy at least requires you to enter a PIN or password each time you use it.
Water is incompressible. The volume flowrate of water the wheel pulls up into the wheel well has to equal the volume flowrate the wheel pushes down, and by Newton's 3rd law there is no net thrust up or down. An impeller works by scooping up a volume of water through a large opening at a low flowrate, and shooting it through a smaller opening at a high flowrate. The difference in in/out opening size is crucial to keep an impeller obeying conservation of mass. I haven't looked closely at the Tesla S, but I suspect the clearance in the front and back of the wheel well is the same.
Forward thrust would be due to the bottom of the tires pushing free-flowing water backwards, pushing the car forwards. The water in the top of the tires would be pushed forwards, but it hits the wheel well and transfers its momentum back to the car (being diverted down in the process), canceling out the backwards thrust from the top of the wheel. In other words, the top half of the rotating wheel draws water up into the wheel well, pushes the water forward (pushing the car backward), but the wheel well then diverts the water down (pushing the car forward the same amount). And the net momentum change for water moving around the top of the tire is zero. But the bottom of the tire is pushing unobstructed water, so it pushes the water backwards, pushing the car forward in the process.
While all cars will float, ICE vehicles are nose-heavy due to the engine location. The front end will pitch down making any attempt to use it as a boat dangerous if not fatal - moving forward will increase water pressure on the top of the hood, forcing the vehicle to pitch nose-down even further.
In an EV, the weight is concentrated in the battery, which is usually evenly distributed across the vehicle's floor. So I would expect it to remain closer to horizontal when used as a boat. With some fairing on the bottom of the front end, you could even attach a propeller and get some decent forward speed out of it.
Here's an idea. Instead of taking the heavy-handed approach of banning cell phones at concerts, simply remove the incentive to create an amateur video of the concert you're attending with your cell phone. Hire a professional camera crew who makes a slick video of the concert. Then give each ticket-holder a unique code which entitles them to download a free copy of this video a few days after the concert.
The fans are happy because they get a nice video to relieve the experience, instead of a crappy cell phone video. The musician is happy because there are no (or fewer) annoying cell phones and flashes going off in the concert. And the production studio is happy because they can use software to detect copies of the concert video uploaded to YouTube, instead of having to hire people to scour YouTube for amateur videos of the concert. Win-win-win.
You can hit ridiculously high numbers of FLOPS if you throw enough cores at it. Folding@home hits about 100 petaFLOPS this way. They're currently at about 200,000 CPUs + GPUs. If they could get 10 million participants, that would project out to 5 exaFLOPS, easily surpassing anything else in the top 500 list. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if some criminal botnet is the "fastest supercomputer" by this measure.
Reading between the lines: "We noticed streaming video players mostly ran in Silverlight, because Hollywood insists on decoding streamed video in a Silverlight encrypted virtual machine.* So we scheduled a meeting with the Silverlight dev team and got them to make some power optimization tweaks to it, but only activated these optimizations in Edge, not in other browsers."
* If they sent a raw unencrypted stream, you could capture the stream and have a copy of the movie. But decrypting the stream in a virtual machine means the CPU has to do all the video decoding. You cannot use the power-efficient video decoding hardware in the GPU. Stupid, but that's Hollywood.
It's important to remember that the NSA, FBI, and CIA didn't come up with these surveillance programs on their own. They were tasked with coming up with these programs by Congress (not all members - there's a committee which approves clandestine programs) at the request of the President. When these programs became public and the shit hit the fan, Congress went into full CYA mode and managed to shift the blame from themselves onto these agencies.
If these had truly been rogue programs made and operated without the knowledge of the President and the legislators who were supposed to be overseeing it, the people directing these programs would be on trial for treason right now.
You've got that backwards. The very reason Flash exists was to reach people trying to access the Internet on dialup. Dialup wasn't fast enough to stream video, but real-life video is different from animation. Flash was originally an artist's tool to allow animation over dialup. Instead of having to send a constant video stream, you could send a few sprites and images of backgrounds, then animate those on the user's local computer.
It was only later when web developers realized that Flash was flexible enough to essentially run universal interpreted code (same code would work on PC, Mac, and Linux) that they went nuts. Entire websites in flash, thus defeating the whole purpose of HTML (displaying info in the format the end-user decided was best). Flash ads bypassing the user blocking animated GIF ads. And flash streaming video became ubiquitous (which wouldn't have happened if the folks at W3C had actually added the features web developers were asking for like embedded streaming video, instead of waiting 10 years like they did with HTML 5).
That's why Flash is so full of security holes. Because when Macromedia invented it, they were just thinking of a a good way to animate stuff on the end user's PC. They had no idea it was going to become The way for web developers to do everything they wanted but couldn't because "HTML didn't support it." It's still an excellent animation tool. A large number of animated TV shows and animated movies are partly or completely made with Flash.
The stuff most aid organizations provide (food, clean water, medicine) aren't really what poor countries need. It's literally putting the cart before the horse, and can even be counter-productive by making life harder or impossible for domestic producers of those things, and allowing these countries' population to grow beyond their ability to self-sustain themselves.
These countries need to develop their own economy first.That's why UN assistance for developing nations focuses on building infrastructure, increasing the number of citizens participating in the economy (education and gender equality), figuring out ways to exploit natural resources, facilitating trade and economic development, and helping set up government programs to help support all these things. Once you get the economic ball rolling, they can grow their own food, clean their own water, build their own hospitals. These things are the result of development. Giving people the end product instead of the means to produce the end product is exactly what the aphorism "give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for life" tells us not to do.
Shhhh. All of us 30+ year olds know "ultrasonic mosquito repellent" is just a code phrase for "ultrasonic loitering teenager repellent." Don't let the secret out.