They'd grab whatever components were cheapest at the time and put them together to build a PC. You'd buy one Acer model PC, really like it and recommend it to a friend who would buy the exact same model, and his would come with completely different components and suck. It's how Acer earned their reputation as a low-rate PC manufacturer that they're still trying to shake today. Routers occasionally run into this problem as well, as hardware changes from revision 2 to revision 3 result in incompatibilities or different behaviors even though two routers are "the same model."
If you want to dumb down the software and use non-standardized hardware, be my guest. But you'd better make damn sure the user experience is consistent across all the different hardware versions you're using. Otherwise you're saving money on the front end just to end up paying more at the support end.
I thought the whole point of giving employees work email addresses was to keep it separate from their personal email. If someone working different hours comes across a problem which only the employee who's off can handle, then I full expect them to send it to their work email address, instead of having to set a reminder to themselves that they have to email the guy the next time he's at work. Work email is like a filing inbox. You're not expecting to handle all the papers in your inbox immediately, just get to them as you can.
If something urgent crops up, you go talk to the person face to face or call him. Those are immediate remedies. If it's something that can be handled later, just email it to them. They can handle it when they come into work the next day and read their email. There's no expectation for an employee to be checking their work email during off-hours.
If we're talking about a person email address, then yeah work stuff has no business going there unless it's like a "there will be no more company tomorrow if we don't fix this tonight" kind of emergency.
Yeah, this can be a real problem. At my previous job I was reviewing employee promotions with the company president, and she mentioned that she liked that a certain employee was willing to come in during off-hours to handle an emergency which cropped up. I had to gently remind her that as laudable as that was, it was during off-hours so shouldn't be a factor. The correlation between an employee's willingness to help out the company and his actions isn't as strong during off-hours as it is during work hours. Other employees may have been just as willing to come in as he did, but couldn't because they'd already made plans for that evening, and maybe the only reason it was this employee who came in was because he happened to be free and bored that evening. During work hours everyone is supposed to be there, so you have the same basis for comparison. During off-work hours, you may be comparing the willingness to come into work of someone attending their kid's play at school, to someone flipping through channels on his TV unable to find anything interesting to watch.
(And if you're curious, we gave an immediate cash bonus to anyone coming in to work during an emergency off-hours at roughly 2x their hourly rate - basically treated it as double overtime.)
This is precisely the problem in today's world - people who assume the other guy is out to exploit them. The vast majority of companies are small businesses, and they account for roughly as many employees as the big corporations. We're small enough that we interact day-to-day with our employees. I see them as people, and hopefully they see me as a person too, not some faceless "corporation".
When people see each other as people, they tend to empathize with them. This is what makes society work. Sometimes situations crop up out of our control, and our empathy for each other is what drives us to help - take on some of their burden to make things easier for them even though it costs us. Maybe (true story) an employee's kid forgot to take his lunch, so she has to drive to school to drop it off and will be 20 minutes late for work. Or maybe (also a true story) we're trying to find the right key for a certain door after hours, and the employee's keychain has 100 keys so we figure it'll be easier if we just call him and ask instead of try every single key. People help each other. It's what we do. It's what a functional society does.
The first sign that society is breaking down is when people stop viewing each other as people. This dehumanization is what allows you to mentally justify treating another person in a way you'd never think of treating a human being face to face. Look at some of the propaganda that's generated during wars. A lot of it shows the enemy as faceless or a caricature. That's so you won't think of the enemy as a person anymore - they're dehumanized - and you'll be more willing to do all sorts of things to them that you normally wouldn't do to another person (like kill them).
This dehumanization happens on one side of the employment equation when management views employees as faceless drones. But it also happens on the other side - when you view managers and owners as a faceless corporation. They're not drones or a corporation. They're all people. We're all people. Don't fall for the political propaganda dehumanizing other people. Everything you've learned about stereotypes and discrimination is still in play. Just because some corporate owners and managers don't treat their employees like people, doesn't justify stereotyping all businesses owners as doing the same thing. That's discrimination based on class or occupation. They're still a person, they individually deserve the benefit of the doubt until they prove otherwise with their own behavior.
If you don't give them the benefit of the doubt and treat them as less than a person from the moment you meet them just because they're a business owner, you create a self-fulfilling prophecy. The small business owner who's been trying to treat his employees right, eventually gets tired of his employees not giving a f*** about him because to them he's "the man", and decides to reciprocate by not giving a f*** about his employees. You've created the very thing you're arguing against - an exploitative corporation. And the devolution of society into hostile parties who won't treat each other as human beings is complete.
Airliners are already required to have ELTs - Emergency Locator Transmitters. When a plane crashes, the impact activates the ELT, which (in the better models) transmits its GPS coordinates to satellites. There's no need to stick flash drives into foam hoping someone will physically recover the device to learn its location.
The problem with water crashes is that you don't know how the plane will crash into the water, so it's tough to design a mechanism which will survive a crash and reliably release a floating ELT. If the ELT sinks under a few mm of seawater, that effectively blocks the signal. Also, the impact with the water may not be as hard as with ground, and the ELT may not be activated at all. The problem is much easier on boats, and most sailors get one which will release and start transmitting if the boat should sink.
Unofficial official policy for Nexus devices is a minimum two years of major OS updates, 3 years of security updates. Since the Nexus 5 was released in Oct 2013 (I got mine Jan 2014), there is a chance it will not get the Android N update. It hasn't been included in the betas so far.
An update policy that short would upset me in most industries. But the smartphone industry is moving so quickly right now it doesn't really bother me. I've been meaning to update to a newer phone anyway.
18650 batteries are largely used in small high performance flashlights. "Ultrafire" is an attempt to sponge off the reputation of Surefire in that market.
The real solutions is to make APIs not covered by copyright at all, like a directory listing or mathematical formula.
That would be ideal. But a close second is if all developers refuse to use APIs unless the copyright owner releases them under some sort of open license guaranteeing you won't be sued for just using the API.
Oracle's shenanigans have gone a long way towards guaranteeing that will happen. Before if you advocated the company use open source software libraries, the legal department would point out that the OSS license would require the company to release the source code for any commercial software written using OSS libraries, possibly revealing trade secrets, and the CEO would nod and dismiss your suggestion. Now you can say that if the company doesn't use OSS, the owner of the proprietary library you use instead could later change their mind and sue the company for $9 billion, and Accounting will tell Legal to shut the hell up.
at educating people on this topic, before giving up and letting people wallow in their own ignorance.
A dedicated OC3 costs about $7500/mo. 155 Mbps, 149 Mbps after you subtract overhead. That's what you need if you want 149 Mbps without any data caps. (Yes an OC3 is symmetric. Cable can be too, they just dedicate more bandwidth to downloads since people mostly download stuff. It is not an inherent limitation of the technology which makes it "different" from an OC3.)
How then are Comcast, AT&T, etc. able to offer you 50 Mbps for just $50/mo? By doing the equivalent of putting 150 customers on an OC3. $7500/mo / 150 customers = $50/mo per customer.
But this only works if none of those 150 people hogs up all the bandwidth. If one person has torrents running at 149 Mbps for the entire month, everyone else's Internet bandwidth is going to be seriously degraded. So how do you prevent someone from hogging up that much bandwidth? You implement a monthly data cap. 149 Mbps * 1 month = 49 TB. And 49 TB / 150 customers = 326 GB per customer. So if each of those 150 people used the same amount of bandwidth, you'd expect them each to use 326 GB per month.
Not everyone uses that much though, so you can make the cap a bit higher without everything falling apart. That right there is why most ISPs are setting their caps around 300-700 GB/mo. 1 TB/mo is actually pretty generous. And being able to remove the cap for an extra $50/mo ($30/mo for AT&T) is an incredibly good deal. $100/mo is a helluva lot better than the $2500/mo you'd have to pay for a partial OC3 giving you 50 Mbps.
My parents had gotten the conference calling feature with our new phone service, and my friends and I decided to try a pen and paper RPG session over the phone, instead of having to meet up at one person's house. We ran into an obstacle with the dice rolls. The players wanted to make their own dice rolls - they felt that their characters' fate should be in their hands and thus they should be the ones to roll the dice. I was GM and worried that players would cheat on the dice rolls if I couldn't see the dice.
At first I tried having them making a bunch of pre-rolls. I would write down the results, and could go down the list every time a roll was needed. They complained this wasn't interactive enough. Apparently part of the thrill of the game for them was knowing they needed to make a good roll when their character was in a bad situation. The pre-rolls destroyed that aspect of the game for them - no more tension as to whether or not the dice would save them.
After some more thought, I had them roll a die and tell me the result. Then I flipped a coin. Heads, their die roll stood. Tails I used 7 minus their die roll (we were playing Traveller, which only used d6), which inverted the result of their roll. They got the satisfaction of controlling their own fate by rolling their own dice, and I was satisfied there was no cheating going on.
. . ..the trend to automation of mass manufacturing has been accelerating for decades. The REAL question is, what do we do with the displaced manufacturing workers, who are becoming increasingly replaced by robots? And the "service sector" does not have jobs for them, either.
The U.S. came across this fork in the road in the 1980s. Robots were becoming increasingly capable of replacing manufacturing jobs. The unions revolted, and instead of automating our factories, we protected those jobs by continuing to operate our factories with (mostly) manual labor. This turned out to be only a temporary reprieve - as transportation costs fell (advent of container shipping), overseas manual labor + shipping costs became cheaper than domestic union labor. And instead of losing the jobs but keeping the factories so workers could retrain to operate and fix the robots, we ended up losing both the jobs and the factories.
China was the primary beneficiary of that shortsightedness. They're keenly aware of what they did to America, and they don't want Thai and Vietnamese factories doing the same thing to them. They probably don't know what they're going to do with the displaced manufacturing workers if they automate. But they do know what'll happen to those workers and their factories if they don't automate. When faced with two choices - one which results in losing, and one with an unknown outcome - you pick the unknown outcome. They're not going to do what we did and try to "protect" their workers for a short while, only to lose both the jobs and factories. They're going to automate, even if they don't yet have all the answers to the questions you're asking.
Anyway, the answer to your question is the same answer it's always been for eons: Adapt or die. If you're convinced some sort of post-scarcity economic system is going to win out, go ahead and (try to) implement that. Countries which think differently will choose different strategies. The countries which pick the winning strategy will grow to dominate the future economy. Those who pick the losing one will wither and die. That's the beauty of evolution and the free market. All it takes is for one creature, person, company, or government to find a winning strategy, and soon it'll grow to dominate. If you insist on finding "the" best theoretical solution before anyone is allowed to implement any solution, you'll probably end up going extinct.
If all the early explorers and inventors had stopped every time they encountered a situation where the best answer they could give was: "I don't know," do you think we'd be where we are today geographically and technologically? Yeah it's good to analyze and plan ahead, but sometimes you have to take a leap of faith - step into the unknown hoping that you'll land on your feet at the end.
Android Marshmallow gives you the option to deny specific permissions an app asks for. I was kinda surprised at how many wanted access to the microphone and camera (that weren't sound or camera apps). It's getting to the point where I'm starting to think a mute button (physically disconnects the wires to your mic) and a physical cover to slide over any camera lenses are becoming a necessity.
The deficit caused by these big corporations using government services but yet skating out on the tax bill, has been handed to the rest of us to settle.
Funny, that was exactly the rationale used by the British in the 1700s for why those uppity Colonials should pay British taxes. They were benefiting from British government services, so they should have to foot some of the bill by paying taxes.
The Colonials saw it differently. If they were required to pay taxes, they should have a say in how those tax monies were to be spent. aka "No taxation without representation."
So you want to tax corporations. Are you prepared to give corporations representation in government?
What's that? They already have representation because their employees get to vote? Well, those employees are already paying taxes. What's your rationale for taxing them more just because they happen to work for a corporation instead of being self-employed?
I expect we'll see a resurgence of e-ink in niche applications in the next few years - the patents are starting to expire (first patent was 1996). If those niche applications can generate enough commercial interest, that'll drive the price down. And maybe we'll finally get the low-cost passive displays the technology promised 20 years ago.
The problem with these passive display technologies as photo frames has been that reflected light (like a photo) is dim and murky. Projected light (like an LCD or OLED) is bright and lively. Talk to any film photographer from back in the old days - they prefer slides to negatives partly for this reason. If you don't believe me, take a printed photo, scan it (or take a digital photo of it), then do an auto-levels adjustment to set the photo's white point at your monitor's max white, and the black point at its max black. Then hold the photo next to the monitor. There is just no comparison - the print will only have about 30%-50% the dynamic range of the monitor. That's the limitation of using reflected ambient light to indirectly generate colors, vs projected light to directly generate colors.
A passive display photo frame stood a chance two decades ago, when the nearest competitor would've been standard photo frames. But now that people have been "spoiled" by LCD photo frames, they don't stand a chance. The only one that did was the Mirasol stuff, which used interference patterns to generate colors (like a butterfly's scales). That had the potential to create colors which were much brighter than you could get by simply reflecting ambient light. But it never panned out - people were spoiled and wanted to be able to use it to view video in addition to just photos, and that turned it from a power miser into a power hog.
Last I checked technology doesn't get more expensive as time goes on so yeah, the $20/month I used to pay for unlimited dial-up should be what I pay today.
No the technology doesn't get more expensive. But $20/mo for 56 kbps scales up to $17,860/mo for a 50 Mbps connection. Fortunately, technology has allowed that price to drop closer to about $2500/mo for a dedicated 50 Mbps connection. So how are you able to get a 50 Mbps connection for just $50/mo? Because you're sharing that 50 Mbps with 50 other customers, and your combined payment is enough to cover the $2500/mo cost.
Guess what? Sharing stops working when one person hogs up all the 50 Mbps bandwidth 24/7. So what's can you do to prevent that from happening? Well how about putting in a monthly data cap? 50 Mbps * 1 month = 16.43 TB. Divide that by 50 users and you get 328.6 GB/user. And the caps that are in place are right around 300-600 GB. That's not a coincidence. It's math (the cap can be slightly higher than the actual 1/50 split because not everyone uses their entire cap every month).
Nobody except filesharers use their bandwidth that way. The vast majority of users' usage is bursty, hitting the cap for a fraction of a second, then dropping to zero for several minutes. Even sustained usage like Netflix tops out at about 5 Mbps per 1080p stream. So it's meaningless to break down usage into "approximately 60 or 70 hours" unless you're a filesharer who's always maxing out their bandwidth.
For some REAL perspective, bandwidth without caps requires a dedicated connection. An OC3 costs about $8000/mo - that's a dedicated 155 Mbps line, or about 149 Mbps of data (rest is overhead). That's how much you should be paying if you plan to sit at your max bandwidth all month. That's 49 TB/mo.
The UVerse 45 Mbps plan is $65/mo with a 600 GB/mo cap. 600 GB/mo is 1.22% of the above 49 TB/mo. And 1.22% of $8000/mo is $97.60/mo. So AT&T is actually giving you a helluva deal for what's effectively a partial OC3 metered based on usage.
To top it off, if you do want to sit at your max bandwidth 24/7, AT&T will remove the cap if you pay an extra $30/mo, or subscribe to a combo Internet + TV + phone package plan. This is by far the most generous Internet service I've seen, period, of any cable company, DSL company, or dedicated service company. You can get the equivalent of an OC1 (for download purposes) for just $95/month!
Depends on exactly what it means. On laptops, the F1-F12 keys along the top are doubled up in function with laptop adjustments like sleep, screen brightness, volume up/down, etc. You access these alternative functions by pushing the F1-F12 while holding the Fn button down. (Some laptops even reverse this, with the laptop functions primary, and you have to hold down Fn to use the F1-F12 keys. A real PITA even for web browsing since most browsers use F3 for "find next" after a search.)
If they're going to convert the F1-F12 keys to an OLED touch bar, then yeah that's really stupid.
But if they're going to keep the physical F1-F12 keys and move these function keys to a separate OLED bar, thus allowing them to get rid of the Fn button, then great!
The U.S. ethanol fuel program began in the 1970s after the Arab Oil Embargo. The U.S. subsidizes food production to insure there is always an oversupply, and we don't end up with people going hungry like happened during the Great Depression. This oversupply means there's always excess food. The question then becomes what to do with this excess food.
A lot of it is used as cheap feed for cattle, since Americans love beef. Some of it is given away as foreign aid. Someone came up with the idea of processing the corn to create HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) as a substitute for imported sugar (which grows readily in the U.S. only in Florida and Hawaii).
And someone came up with the idea of converting that excess corn into ethanol to use as a gasoline substitute. This is why our ethanol program is based on such a terrible source crop - the efficiency or cost to grow the corn wasn't a factor because it was a sunk cost. This was excess corn which was going to be eaten by mice and rats anyway - better to get some use out of it than none.
Fast-forward to today. The ethanol lobby has become a monster. We are no longer talking about excess corn which was going to go to waste. Through their lobbying, they've gotten subsidies to grow corn for the explicit purpose of turning it into ethanol. Now it's no longer a sunk cost - the cost to grow that corn and the efficiency of converting it into ethanol ARE a factor. And it's a huge waste of money and resources for what amounts to a needless subsidy of the corn-agri business.
This does have a roundabout tie to hydrogen as a fuel. Liberating hydrogen from water via electrolysis is massively inefficient (about 30% on an industrial scale - 70% of the energy becomes heat). But liberating hydrogen from a higher energy state like in methane can be done much more efficiently. If (big if since there's been little research) you can come up with an efficient and cost-effective way to convert plant sugars or plant matter into ethanol (highly unlikely to be corn), then that becomes a renewable source of high-energy hydrogen. Liberate the hydrogen from the ethanol and you can send it through a hydrogen fuel cell at a much better efficiency. (Of course simply burning the ethanol in an ICE or converting the plant matter into biodiesel may be even more efficient.)
Even waste heat itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Most attempts at desalination have concentrated on reverse osmosis. This requires mostly electrical energy to drive the pumps. But desalination via evaporation and distillation requires mostly heat energy. States like California where fresh water is in short supply could couple up power generation stations and electrolysis factories with evaporative desalination stations, and a lot of that energy "wasted" as heat would actually be used for something productive.
Completely agreed that hydrogen fuel cells don't make sense from an energy standpoint (unless you're liberating the hydrogen from a high Gibbs free energy source like methane, or if you're getting the energy from a non-polluting source like nuclear or wind (in which case the hydrogen is basically acting like a battery). The transport argument is more specious. Yes transport and storage is worse than for gasoline (pretty much everything is worse, which is why we use gasoline). But electricity isn't much better - easier to transport, more expensive to store, and much harder to transfer from one storage medium (the charging station) to another (the car battery).
From an energy efficiency standpoint. the cost advantage of operating an electric car is only slightly due to improved energy efficiency. The vast majority of the price differential is due to the extremely low price of coal and natural gas relative to gasoline.
An ICE engine can hit about 30% efficiency. An automatic transmission is about 90%-95% efficient (pretty impressive considering it's just squirting fluid at a turbine).
Newer coal plants are about 40% efficient. Natural gas plants are about 60% efficient. Split the difference and go with 50%. Power lines are about 98% efficient. Real-world charging efficiency of the Tesla is about 80% (1/1.26 = 0.79). That is, 80% of the electricity from your wall socket goes into the battery, the other 20% becomes heat. I can't find any numbers for discharge efficiency, so let's call it 100% for now. And electric motor efficiency is about 90%-95%.
Electrolysis of hydrogen from water is about 65% efficient in the lab, closer to 30% in practice. Efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells is close to 90% in the lab, but is closer to 50% for industrial applications like a car motor.
Tally it up and you get:
ICE: 30% * 92.5% = 27.8% efficient
EV: 50% * 98% * 80% * (100%) * 92.5% = 36.3% efficient.
H2: 30% * 50% = 15% efficient (did I mention hydrogen doesn't make sense from an energy standpoint?)
So really not that big an efficiency difference between the EV and ICE. If battery discharge efficiency is also 80%, then the EV is basically identical to an ICE in overall energy efficiency. Yes if solar and wind come down in price to match or beat coal, then you can drop the 50% at the front. But wind is still about 1.5x-2x the price of coal, and solar about 5x-7x the price. Nuclear would be the obvious solution, but the people supporting EVs seem hell-bent on shutting down nuclear.
Now look at the fuel price side.
Coal costs about $50/ton, and contains about 24 GJ/ton. That's $2.08 per GJ.
Gasoline costs about $2/gallon and contains about 120 MJ/gallon. That's $16.67 per GJ. Almost an order of magnitude more.
So there you have it. EVs are only 1.1x-1.3x more energy efficient than ICE cars. But their fuel source is 8x cheaper. That's why EVs are cheaper to operate than ICE vehicles. If more of our electricity production shifts away from fossil fuels and towards non-polluting sources, then that also makes the hydrogen economy more viable. EVs and hydrogen in inextricably linked in this way.
I know a lot of you think the iPhone's introduction was like the second coming of Christ, but RIM/Blackberry increased in market share from 2007 to 2009 immediately after the iPhone was released. RIM's decline actually correlates closer with Android's rise in popularity.
The big losers in the early smartphone days were Nokia (Symbian was dated and badly needed an overhaul, which never happened) and Microsoft (who started off with a good lead from Windows Mobile on PDAs, but squandered it).
As for privacy, Apple has shown they're more than happy to violate their users' privacy when it's in their self-interest. When Apple ditched Google Maps, they didn't have their own database of SSID locations, so they couldn't locate you if you had the GPS turned off. The first year they paid for a wifi database from Skyhook. The next year, they used their own database. How did they mysteriously generate this database without sending around Apple street view cars to record the SSID and location of every hotspot on Earth like Google did? By secretly logging iPhone owners' locations and nearby SSIDs, and having the phones send the info back to them. Essentially, Apple turned all iPhone owners into unpaid contractors who scoured the Earth recording the locations of every SSID, and used a chunk of their data plan to transmit this data back to themselves.
Lots of PC laptops hit or beat the size/wight of the Macbooks. The screen is a bit dodgy since the Macbook Pros (I assume you mean the Pros, since the Airs have crappy low-res TN panels) are specialized for photo/video/graphics work, which is a pretty limited market. There are a few dozen PC laptops which will hit 100% sRGB like the MBPs, or close to it. Up from about 4-5 just 7 years ago. And a few which surpass it by targeting AdobeRGB. A couple of them even claim to calibrate the screen like the MBPs do. If this is what you need, you know what to look for. If you don't need all that color gamut, then you're spending a lot of money just to get slightly more saturated colors which (unless you get an AdobeRGB screen) don't even match the color gamut we used to get on CRTs. Also, pretty much every external monitor can hit 100% sRGB, so it really boils down to a question of if you really need that color gamut on your laptop screen for it to be worth paying the price premium for it.
The higher resolution screens aren't as necessary PC laptops because Windows uses subpixel rendering (MS calls it ClearType) to effectively triple the horizontal resolution of the screen. Many decades ago, Apple made the choice not to go down that route. Subpixel rendering aliases fonts to align with the subpixel grid - it shifts the letters slightly left or right to line them up with the subpixels. Since one of Apple's core demographics was page layout graphics artists, Apple decided to eschew subpixel rendering in order to prioritize accuracy. A Mac will display a page render with the fonts positioned more accurately, even if it is blurrier (their rendering engine, a great great grandson of Postscript, will anti-alias the font's pixels for any exact location on the screen). If you've still got one of those old 1024x768 LCDs around, try connecting it to a Windows PC, then to a Mac. The fonts on the Mac will look like blurry crap compared to the PC. Consequently, the only way for the Macbooks to improve the appearance of fonts was by cranking up screen resolution, while higher resolution is less important for Windows PCs.
As for the Macbook chassis, nobody else designs theirs that way because it's a stupid design. There are no vent holes on the bottom. Airflow comes in through a few vent holes along the sides, runs across the mainboard, and is vented out by the fan. This means the air gets heated up by other components before it reaches the hottest components, reducing heat transfer rate. On PC laptops, there are vent holes placed underneath the hottest parts, so fresh cool air contacts those parts first maximizing heat transfer to the air (heat transfer rate is proportional to temperature differential). Also, if you spill liquid into the laptop, it'll drain out of most PC laptops through those vent holes (although not all are designed to channel water away from vital components). The bottom half of a Macbook OTOH makes a nice bathtub unless it's tilted so water can drain out those side vents. The Macbook chassis is the epitome of prioritizing form over function. If you've ever wondered why Apple won't put a decent GPU into their 15" MBP, this is why - they can't because it would overheat.
1) This is a non-event, about on par with the non-events in nuclear power that mdsolar regularly submits (which for some baffling reason gets approved). The reflected sunlight set a few wire bundles on fire, and the fire damaged some piping. That's it. Ars Technica has about the only non-dramatized coverage of it I've read. I suppose you could view the hype as counterbalancing mdsolar's anti-nuclear hype, but I'd just rather not have hype of any kind on/.
3) After fuels that you burn and Banqiao, solar is the most dangerous energy source once you normalize for amount of electricity generated. About 10x deadlier than nuclear power,
Energy efficiency and economic efficiency are totally different. Economic efficiency is "how much effort and resources do I have to expend to get this thing to work?" You can have 100% energy efficiency, but if its economic efficiency is $100 per kWh, nobody is going to use it. It is literally cheaper to build a larger system with lower energy efficiency to harvest the same amount of energy. This seawater method could have 0.1% energy efficiency, but if it economic efficiency is $0.05 per kWh it would be a tremendous breakthrough.
mdsolar doesn't care about economic efficiency, which is why his "solutions" are pointless for the real world. The reason PV solar languishes at below 1% of electrical production is not some grand conspiracy. It's because PV's wholesale production cost (after factoring in construction, financing, maintenance, lifespan) is up around $200-$300 per MWh. Coal is around $40 per MWh, around $350 per MWh if you include the environmental and health damage it causes that the IMF estimated in it's "$5.3 trillion subsidy" report. Gas around $60. Nuclear is around $60 ($90-$100 for new construction). Hydro around $30. Wind around $70-$100.
PV has dropped to about $125-$150 per MWh in the last few years, but it remains to be seen if that's real gains or due to dumping by Chinese manufacturers to try to drive other manufacturers out of business. Even if real, it still remains the most expensive source of electricity, which is why it's stuck at below 1% of production.
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They'd grab whatever components were cheapest at the time and put them together to build a PC. You'd buy one Acer model PC, really like it and recommend it to a friend who would buy the exact same model, and his would come with completely different components and suck. It's how Acer earned their reputation as a low-rate PC manufacturer that they're still trying to shake today. Routers occasionally run into this problem as well, as hardware changes from revision 2 to revision 3 result in incompatibilities or different behaviors even though two routers are "the same model."
If you want to dumb down the software and use non-standardized hardware, be my guest. But you'd better make damn sure the user experience is consistent across all the different hardware versions you're using. Otherwise you're saving money on the front end just to end up paying more at the support end.
A chatbot is a live Turing test. It's how AI researches compare the length of their academic penises.
I thought the whole point of giving employees work email addresses was to keep it separate from their personal email. If someone working different hours comes across a problem which only the employee who's off can handle, then I full expect them to send it to their work email address, instead of having to set a reminder to themselves that they have to email the guy the next time he's at work. Work email is like a filing inbox. You're not expecting to handle all the papers in your inbox immediately, just get to them as you can.
If something urgent crops up, you go talk to the person face to face or call him. Those are immediate remedies. If it's something that can be handled later, just email it to them. They can handle it when they come into work the next day and read their email. There's no expectation for an employee to be checking their work email during off-hours.
If we're talking about a person email address, then yeah work stuff has no business going there unless it's like a "there will be no more company tomorrow if we don't fix this tonight" kind of emergency.
Yeah, this can be a real problem. At my previous job I was reviewing employee promotions with the company president, and she mentioned that she liked that a certain employee was willing to come in during off-hours to handle an emergency which cropped up. I had to gently remind her that as laudable as that was, it was during off-hours so shouldn't be a factor. The correlation between an employee's willingness to help out the company and his actions isn't as strong during off-hours as it is during work hours. Other employees may have been just as willing to come in as he did, but couldn't because they'd already made plans for that evening, and maybe the only reason it was this employee who came in was because he happened to be free and bored that evening. During work hours everyone is supposed to be there, so you have the same basis for comparison. During off-work hours, you may be comparing the willingness to come into work of someone attending their kid's play at school, to someone flipping through channels on his TV unable to find anything interesting to watch.
(And if you're curious, we gave an immediate cash bonus to anyone coming in to work during an emergency off-hours at roughly 2x their hourly rate - basically treated it as double overtime.)
This is precisely the problem in today's world - people who assume the other guy is out to exploit them. The vast majority of companies are small businesses, and they account for roughly as many employees as the big corporations. We're small enough that we interact day-to-day with our employees. I see them as people, and hopefully they see me as a person too, not some faceless "corporation".
When people see each other as people, they tend to empathize with them. This is what makes society work. Sometimes situations crop up out of our control, and our empathy for each other is what drives us to help - take on some of their burden to make things easier for them even though it costs us. Maybe (true story) an employee's kid forgot to take his lunch, so she has to drive to school to drop it off and will be 20 minutes late for work. Or maybe (also a true story) we're trying to find the right key for a certain door after hours, and the employee's keychain has 100 keys so we figure it'll be easier if we just call him and ask instead of try every single key. People help each other. It's what we do. It's what a functional society does.
The first sign that society is breaking down is when people stop viewing each other as people. This dehumanization is what allows you to mentally justify treating another person in a way you'd never think of treating a human being face to face. Look at some of the propaganda that's generated during wars. A lot of it shows the enemy as faceless or a caricature. That's so you won't think of the enemy as a person anymore - they're dehumanized - and you'll be more willing to do all sorts of things to them that you normally wouldn't do to another person (like kill them).
This dehumanization happens on one side of the employment equation when management views employees as faceless drones. But it also happens on the other side - when you view managers and owners as a faceless corporation. They're not drones or a corporation. They're all people. We're all people. Don't fall for the political propaganda dehumanizing other people. Everything you've learned about stereotypes and discrimination is still in play. Just because some corporate owners and managers don't treat their employees like people, doesn't justify stereotyping all businesses owners as doing the same thing. That's discrimination based on class or occupation. They're still a person, they individually deserve the benefit of the doubt until they prove otherwise with their own behavior.
If you don't give them the benefit of the doubt and treat them as less than a person from the moment you meet them just because they're a business owner, you create a self-fulfilling prophecy. The small business owner who's been trying to treat his employees right, eventually gets tired of his employees not giving a f*** about him because to them he's "the man", and decides to reciprocate by not giving a f*** about his employees. You've created the very thing you're arguing against - an exploitative corporation. And the devolution of society into hostile parties who won't treat each other as human beings is complete.
Airliners are already required to have ELTs - Emergency Locator Transmitters. When a plane crashes, the impact activates the ELT, which (in the better models) transmits its GPS coordinates to satellites. There's no need to stick flash drives into foam hoping someone will physically recover the device to learn its location.
The problem with water crashes is that you don't know how the plane will crash into the water, so it's tough to design a mechanism which will survive a crash and reliably release a floating ELT. If the ELT sinks under a few mm of seawater, that effectively blocks the signal. Also, the impact with the water may not be as hard as with ground, and the ELT may not be activated at all. The problem is much easier on boats, and most sailors get one which will release and start transmitting if the boat should sink.
Unofficial official policy for Nexus devices is a minimum two years of major OS updates, 3 years of security updates. Since the Nexus 5 was released in Oct 2013 (I got mine Jan 2014), there is a chance it will not get the Android N update. It hasn't been included in the betas so far.
An update policy that short would upset me in most industries. But the smartphone industry is moving so quickly right now it doesn't really bother me. I've been meaning to update to a newer phone anyway.
18650 batteries are largely used in small high performance flashlights. "Ultrafire" is an attempt to sponge off the reputation of Surefire in that market.
That would be ideal. But a close second is if all developers refuse to use APIs unless the copyright owner releases them under some sort of open license guaranteeing you won't be sued for just using the API.
Oracle's shenanigans have gone a long way towards guaranteeing that will happen. Before if you advocated the company use open source software libraries, the legal department would point out that the OSS license would require the company to release the source code for any commercial software written using OSS libraries, possibly revealing trade secrets, and the CEO would nod and dismiss your suggestion. Now you can say that if the company doesn't use OSS, the owner of the proprietary library you use instead could later change their mind and sue the company for $9 billion, and Accounting will tell Legal to shut the hell up.
at educating people on this topic, before giving up and letting people wallow in their own ignorance.
A dedicated OC3 costs about $7500/mo. 155 Mbps, 149 Mbps after you subtract overhead. That's what you need if you want 149 Mbps without any data caps. (Yes an OC3 is symmetric. Cable can be too, they just dedicate more bandwidth to downloads since people mostly download stuff. It is not an inherent limitation of the technology which makes it "different" from an OC3.)
How then are Comcast, AT&T, etc. able to offer you 50 Mbps for just $50/mo? By doing the equivalent of putting 150 customers on an OC3. $7500/mo / 150 customers = $50/mo per customer.
But this only works if none of those 150 people hogs up all the bandwidth. If one person has torrents running at 149 Mbps for the entire month, everyone else's Internet bandwidth is going to be seriously degraded. So how do you prevent someone from hogging up that much bandwidth? You implement a monthly data cap. 149 Mbps * 1 month = 49 TB. And 49 TB / 150 customers = 326 GB per customer. So if each of those 150 people used the same amount of bandwidth, you'd expect them each to use 326 GB per month.
Not everyone uses that much though, so you can make the cap a bit higher without everything falling apart. That right there is why most ISPs are setting their caps around 300-700 GB/mo. 1 TB/mo is actually pretty generous. And being able to remove the cap for an extra $50/mo ($30/mo for AT&T) is an incredibly good deal. $100/mo is a helluva lot better than the $2500/mo you'd have to pay for a partial OC3 giving you 50 Mbps.
My parents had gotten the conference calling feature with our new phone service, and my friends and I decided to try a pen and paper RPG session over the phone, instead of having to meet up at one person's house. We ran into an obstacle with the dice rolls. The players wanted to make their own dice rolls - they felt that their characters' fate should be in their hands and thus they should be the ones to roll the dice. I was GM and worried that players would cheat on the dice rolls if I couldn't see the dice.
At first I tried having them making a bunch of pre-rolls. I would write down the results, and could go down the list every time a roll was needed. They complained this wasn't interactive enough. Apparently part of the thrill of the game for them was knowing they needed to make a good roll when their character was in a bad situation. The pre-rolls destroyed that aspect of the game for them - no more tension as to whether or not the dice would save them.
After some more thought, I had them roll a die and tell me the result. Then I flipped a coin. Heads, their die roll stood. Tails I used 7 minus their die roll (we were playing Traveller, which only used d6), which inverted the result of their roll. They got the satisfaction of controlling their own fate by rolling their own dice, and I was satisfied there was no cheating going on.
The U.S. came across this fork in the road in the 1980s. Robots were becoming increasingly capable of replacing manufacturing jobs. The unions revolted, and instead of automating our factories, we protected those jobs by continuing to operate our factories with (mostly) manual labor. This turned out to be only a temporary reprieve - as transportation costs fell (advent of container shipping), overseas manual labor + shipping costs became cheaper than domestic union labor. And instead of losing the jobs but keeping the factories so workers could retrain to operate and fix the robots, we ended up losing both the jobs and the factories.
China was the primary beneficiary of that shortsightedness. They're keenly aware of what they did to America, and they don't want Thai and Vietnamese factories doing the same thing to them. They probably don't know what they're going to do with the displaced manufacturing workers if they automate. But they do know what'll happen to those workers and their factories if they don't automate. When faced with two choices - one which results in losing, and one with an unknown outcome - you pick the unknown outcome. They're not going to do what we did and try to "protect" their workers for a short while, only to lose both the jobs and factories. They're going to automate, even if they don't yet have all the answers to the questions you're asking.
Anyway, the answer to your question is the same answer it's always been for eons: Adapt or die. If you're convinced some sort of post-scarcity economic system is going to win out, go ahead and (try to) implement that. Countries which think differently will choose different strategies. The countries which pick the winning strategy will grow to dominate the future economy. Those who pick the losing one will wither and die. That's the beauty of evolution and the free market. All it takes is for one creature, person, company, or government to find a winning strategy, and soon it'll grow to dominate. If you insist on finding "the" best theoretical solution before anyone is allowed to implement any solution, you'll probably end up going extinct.
If all the early explorers and inventors had stopped every time they encountered a situation where the best answer they could give was: "I don't know," do you think we'd be where we are today geographically and technologically? Yeah it's good to analyze and plan ahead, but sometimes you have to take a leap of faith - step into the unknown hoping that you'll land on your feet at the end.
Android Marshmallow gives you the option to deny specific permissions an app asks for. I was kinda surprised at how many wanted access to the microphone and camera (that weren't sound or camera apps). It's getting to the point where I'm starting to think a mute button (physically disconnects the wires to your mic) and a physical cover to slide over any camera lenses are becoming a necessity.
Funny, that was exactly the rationale used by the British in the 1700s for why those uppity Colonials should pay British taxes. They were benefiting from British government services, so they should have to foot some of the bill by paying taxes.
The Colonials saw it differently. If they were required to pay taxes, they should have a say in how those tax monies were to be spent. aka "No taxation without representation."
So you want to tax corporations. Are you prepared to give corporations representation in government?
What's that? They already have representation because their employees get to vote? Well, those employees are already paying taxes. What's your rationale for taxing them more just because they happen to work for a corporation instead of being self-employed?
I expect we'll see a resurgence of e-ink in niche applications in the next few years - the patents are starting to expire (first patent was 1996). If those niche applications can generate enough commercial interest, that'll drive the price down. And maybe we'll finally get the low-cost passive displays the technology promised 20 years ago.
The problem with these passive display technologies as photo frames has been that reflected light (like a photo) is dim and murky. Projected light (like an LCD or OLED) is bright and lively. Talk to any film photographer from back in the old days - they prefer slides to negatives partly for this reason. If you don't believe me, take a printed photo, scan it (or take a digital photo of it), then do an auto-levels adjustment to set the photo's white point at your monitor's max white, and the black point at its max black. Then hold the photo next to the monitor. There is just no comparison - the print will only have about 30%-50% the dynamic range of the monitor. That's the limitation of using reflected ambient light to indirectly generate colors, vs projected light to directly generate colors.
A passive display photo frame stood a chance two decades ago, when the nearest competitor would've been standard photo frames. But now that people have been "spoiled" by LCD photo frames, they don't stand a chance. The only one that did was the Mirasol stuff, which used interference patterns to generate colors (like a butterfly's scales). That had the potential to create colors which were much brighter than you could get by simply reflecting ambient light. But it never panned out - people were spoiled and wanted to be able to use it to view video in addition to just photos, and that turned it from a power miser into a power hog.
No the technology doesn't get more expensive. But $20/mo for 56 kbps scales up to $17,860/mo for a 50 Mbps connection. Fortunately, technology has allowed that price to drop closer to about $2500/mo for a dedicated 50 Mbps connection. So how are you able to get a 50 Mbps connection for just $50/mo? Because you're sharing that 50 Mbps with 50 other customers, and your combined payment is enough to cover the $2500/mo cost.
Guess what? Sharing stops working when one person hogs up all the 50 Mbps bandwidth 24/7. So what's can you do to prevent that from happening? Well how about putting in a monthly data cap? 50 Mbps * 1 month = 16.43 TB. Divide that by 50 users and you get 328.6 GB/user. And the caps that are in place are right around 300-600 GB. That's not a coincidence. It's math (the cap can be slightly higher than the actual 1/50 split because not everyone uses their entire cap every month).
Nobody except filesharers use their bandwidth that way. The vast majority of users' usage is bursty, hitting the cap for a fraction of a second, then dropping to zero for several minutes. Even sustained usage like Netflix tops out at about 5 Mbps per 1080p stream. So it's meaningless to break down usage into "approximately 60 or 70 hours" unless you're a filesharer who's always maxing out their bandwidth.
For some REAL perspective, bandwidth without caps requires a dedicated connection. An OC3 costs about $8000/mo - that's a dedicated 155 Mbps line, or about 149 Mbps of data (rest is overhead). That's how much you should be paying if you plan to sit at your max bandwidth all month. That's 49 TB/mo.
The UVerse 45 Mbps plan is $65/mo with a 600 GB/mo cap. 600 GB/mo is 1.22% of the above 49 TB/mo. And 1.22% of $8000/mo is $97.60/mo. So AT&T is actually giving you a helluva deal for what's effectively a partial OC3 metered based on usage.
To top it off, if you do want to sit at your max bandwidth 24/7, AT&T will remove the cap if you pay an extra $30/mo, or subscribe to a combo Internet + TV + phone package plan. This is by far the most generous Internet service I've seen, period, of any cable company, DSL company, or dedicated service company. You can get the equivalent of an OC1 (for download purposes) for just $95/month!
Depends on exactly what it means. On laptops, the F1-F12 keys along the top are doubled up in function with laptop adjustments like sleep, screen brightness, volume up/down, etc. You access these alternative functions by pushing the F1-F12 while holding the Fn button down. (Some laptops even reverse this, with the laptop functions primary, and you have to hold down Fn to use the F1-F12 keys. A real PITA even for web browsing since most browsers use F3 for "find next" after a search.)
If they're going to convert the F1-F12 keys to an OLED touch bar, then yeah that's really stupid.
But if they're going to keep the physical F1-F12 keys and move these function keys to a separate OLED bar, thus allowing them to get rid of the Fn button, then great!
The U.S. ethanol fuel program began in the 1970s after the Arab Oil Embargo. The U.S. subsidizes food production to insure there is always an oversupply, and we don't end up with people going hungry like happened during the Great Depression. This oversupply means there's always excess food. The question then becomes what to do with this excess food.
A lot of it is used as cheap feed for cattle, since Americans love beef. Some of it is given away as foreign aid. Someone came up with the idea of processing the corn to create HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) as a substitute for imported sugar (which grows readily in the U.S. only in Florida and Hawaii).
And someone came up with the idea of converting that excess corn into ethanol to use as a gasoline substitute. This is why our ethanol program is based on such a terrible source crop - the efficiency or cost to grow the corn wasn't a factor because it was a sunk cost. This was excess corn which was going to be eaten by mice and rats anyway - better to get some use out of it than none.
Fast-forward to today. The ethanol lobby has become a monster. We are no longer talking about excess corn which was going to go to waste. Through their lobbying, they've gotten subsidies to grow corn for the explicit purpose of turning it into ethanol. Now it's no longer a sunk cost - the cost to grow that corn and the efficiency of converting it into ethanol ARE a factor. And it's a huge waste of money and resources for what amounts to a needless subsidy of the corn-agri business.
This does have a roundabout tie to hydrogen as a fuel. Liberating hydrogen from water via electrolysis is massively inefficient (about 30% on an industrial scale - 70% of the energy becomes heat). But liberating hydrogen from a higher energy state like in methane can be done much more efficiently. If (big if since there's been little research) you can come up with an efficient and cost-effective way to convert plant sugars or plant matter into ethanol (highly unlikely to be corn), then that becomes a renewable source of high-energy hydrogen. Liberate the hydrogen from the ethanol and you can send it through a hydrogen fuel cell at a much better efficiency. (Of course simply burning the ethanol in an ICE or converting the plant matter into biodiesel may be even more efficient.)
Even waste heat itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Most attempts at desalination have concentrated on reverse osmosis. This requires mostly electrical energy to drive the pumps. But desalination via evaporation and distillation requires mostly heat energy. States like California where fresh water is in short supply could couple up power generation stations and electrolysis factories with evaporative desalination stations, and a lot of that energy "wasted" as heat would actually be used for something productive.
Completely agreed that hydrogen fuel cells don't make sense from an energy standpoint (unless you're liberating the hydrogen from a high Gibbs free energy source like methane, or if you're getting the energy from a non-polluting source like nuclear or wind (in which case the hydrogen is basically acting like a battery). The transport argument is more specious. Yes transport and storage is worse than for gasoline (pretty much everything is worse, which is why we use gasoline). But electricity isn't much better - easier to transport, more expensive to store, and much harder to transfer from one storage medium (the charging station) to another (the car battery).
From an energy efficiency standpoint. the cost advantage of operating an electric car is only slightly due to improved energy efficiency. The vast majority of the price differential is due to the extremely low price of coal and natural gas relative to gasoline.
An ICE engine can hit about 30% efficiency. An automatic transmission is about 90%-95% efficient (pretty impressive considering it's just squirting fluid at a turbine).
Newer coal plants are about 40% efficient. Natural gas plants are about 60% efficient. Split the difference and go with 50%. Power lines are about 98% efficient. Real-world charging efficiency of the Tesla is about 80% (1/1.26 = 0.79). That is, 80% of the electricity from your wall socket goes into the battery, the other 20% becomes heat. I can't find any numbers for discharge efficiency, so let's call it 100% for now. And electric motor efficiency is about 90%-95%.
Electrolysis of hydrogen from water is about 65% efficient in the lab, closer to 30% in practice. Efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells is close to 90% in the lab, but is closer to 50% for industrial applications like a car motor. Tally it up and you get:
ICE: 30% * 92.5% = 27.8% efficient
EV: 50% * 98% * 80% * (100%) * 92.5% = 36.3% efficient.
H2: 30% * 50% = 15% efficient (did I mention hydrogen doesn't make sense from an energy standpoint?)
So really not that big an efficiency difference between the EV and ICE. If battery discharge efficiency is also 80%, then the EV is basically identical to an ICE in overall energy efficiency. Yes if solar and wind come down in price to match or beat coal, then you can drop the 50% at the front. But wind is still about 1.5x-2x the price of coal, and solar about 5x-7x the price. Nuclear would be the obvious solution, but the people supporting EVs seem hell-bent on shutting down nuclear.
Now look at the fuel price side.
Coal costs about $50/ton, and contains about 24 GJ/ton. That's $2.08 per GJ. Gasoline costs about $2/gallon and contains about 120 MJ/gallon. That's $16.67 per GJ. Almost an order of magnitude more.
So there you have it. EVs are only 1.1x-1.3x more energy efficient than ICE cars. But their fuel source is 8x cheaper. That's why EVs are cheaper to operate than ICE vehicles. If more of our electricity production shifts away from fossil fuels and towards non-polluting sources, then that also makes the hydrogen economy more viable. EVs and hydrogen in inextricably linked in this way.
I know a lot of you think the iPhone's introduction was like the second coming of Christ, but RIM/Blackberry increased in market share from 2007 to 2009 immediately after the iPhone was released. RIM's decline actually correlates closer with Android's rise in popularity.
The big losers in the early smartphone days were Nokia (Symbian was dated and badly needed an overhaul, which never happened) and Microsoft (who started off with a good lead from Windows Mobile on PDAs, but squandered it).
As for privacy, Apple has shown they're more than happy to violate their users' privacy when it's in their self-interest. When Apple ditched Google Maps, they didn't have their own database of SSID locations, so they couldn't locate you if you had the GPS turned off. The first year they paid for a wifi database from Skyhook. The next year, they used their own database. How did they mysteriously generate this database without sending around Apple street view cars to record the SSID and location of every hotspot on Earth like Google did? By secretly logging iPhone owners' locations and nearby SSIDs, and having the phones send the info back to them. Essentially, Apple turned all iPhone owners into unpaid contractors who scoured the Earth recording the locations of every SSID, and used a chunk of their data plan to transmit this data back to themselves.
Lots of PC laptops hit or beat the size/wight of the Macbooks. The screen is a bit dodgy since the Macbook Pros (I assume you mean the Pros, since the Airs have crappy low-res TN panels) are specialized for photo/video/graphics work, which is a pretty limited market. There are a few dozen PC laptops which will hit 100% sRGB like the MBPs, or close to it. Up from about 4-5 just 7 years ago. And a few which surpass it by targeting AdobeRGB. A couple of them even claim to calibrate the screen like the MBPs do. If this is what you need, you know what to look for. If you don't need all that color gamut, then you're spending a lot of money just to get slightly more saturated colors which (unless you get an AdobeRGB screen) don't even match the color gamut we used to get on CRTs. Also, pretty much every external monitor can hit 100% sRGB, so it really boils down to a question of if you really need that color gamut on your laptop screen for it to be worth paying the price premium for it.
The higher resolution screens aren't as necessary PC laptops because Windows uses subpixel rendering (MS calls it ClearType) to effectively triple the horizontal resolution of the screen. Many decades ago, Apple made the choice not to go down that route. Subpixel rendering aliases fonts to align with the subpixel grid - it shifts the letters slightly left or right to line them up with the subpixels. Since one of Apple's core demographics was page layout graphics artists, Apple decided to eschew subpixel rendering in order to prioritize accuracy. A Mac will display a page render with the fonts positioned more accurately, even if it is blurrier (their rendering engine, a great great grandson of Postscript, will anti-alias the font's pixels for any exact location on the screen). If you've still got one of those old 1024x768 LCDs around, try connecting it to a Windows PC, then to a Mac. The fonts on the Mac will look like blurry crap compared to the PC. Consequently, the only way for the Macbooks to improve the appearance of fonts was by cranking up screen resolution, while higher resolution is less important for Windows PCs.
As for the Macbook chassis, nobody else designs theirs that way because it's a stupid design. There are no vent holes on the bottom. Airflow comes in through a few vent holes along the sides, runs across the mainboard, and is vented out by the fan. This means the air gets heated up by other components before it reaches the hottest components, reducing heat transfer rate. On PC laptops, there are vent holes placed underneath the hottest parts, so fresh cool air contacts those parts first maximizing heat transfer to the air (heat transfer rate is proportional to temperature differential). Also, if you spill liquid into the laptop, it'll drain out of most PC laptops through those vent holes (although not all are designed to channel water away from vital components). The bottom half of a Macbook OTOH makes a nice bathtub unless it's tilted so water can drain out those side vents. The Macbook chassis is the epitome of prioritizing form over function. If you've ever wondered why Apple won't put a decent GPU into their 15" MBP, this is why - they can't because it would overheat.
1) This is a non-event, about on par with the non-events in nuclear power that mdsolar regularly submits (which for some baffling reason gets approved). The reflected sunlight set a few wire bundles on fire, and the fire damaged some piping. That's it. Ars Technica has about the only non-dramatized coverage of it I've read. I suppose you could view the hype as counterbalancing mdsolar's anti-nuclear hype, but I'd just rather not have hype of any kind on /.
2) The danger of solar comes mostly during installation and maintenance. Working on the roof (where most PV panels are installed) is the most dangerous construction job out there. And the always-generating nature of PV panels makes them an electrocution hazard. Not really an issue here since Ivanpah is a solar thermal plant.
3) After fuels that you burn and Banqiao, solar is the most dangerous energy source once you normalize for amount of electricity generated. About 10x deadlier than nuclear power,
Energy efficiency and economic efficiency are totally different. Economic efficiency is "how much effort and resources do I have to expend to get this thing to work?" You can have 100% energy efficiency, but if its economic efficiency is $100 per kWh, nobody is going to use it. It is literally cheaper to build a larger system with lower energy efficiency to harvest the same amount of energy. This seawater method could have 0.1% energy efficiency, but if it economic efficiency is $0.05 per kWh it would be a tremendous breakthrough.
mdsolar doesn't care about economic efficiency, which is why his "solutions" are pointless for the real world. The reason PV solar languishes at below 1% of electrical production is not some grand conspiracy. It's because PV's wholesale production cost (after factoring in construction, financing, maintenance, lifespan) is up around $200-$300 per MWh. Coal is around $40 per MWh, around $350 per MWh if you include the environmental and health damage it causes that the IMF estimated in it's "$5.3 trillion subsidy" report. Gas around $60. Nuclear is around $60 ($90-$100 for new construction). Hydro around $30. Wind around $70-$100.
PV has dropped to about $125-$150 per MWh in the last few years, but it remains to be seen if that's real gains or due to dumping by Chinese manufacturers to try to drive other manufacturers out of business. Even if real, it still remains the most expensive source of electricity, which is why it's stuck at below 1% of production.