Supply and demand would like to have a word with your interpretation of "price gouging." If there are 100 people wanting to get a ride via Uber, but only 25 Uber drivers currently roaming the streets, 75 people are going to have to wait a long time, 50 of them a really long time, and 25 of them a really really long time.
If demand for a product exceeds supply, the market responds by increasing the price to encourage more production of supply. Uber raises the price, and suddenly 25 Uber drivers who were instead having dinner decide to head out to the streets and pick those people up. They raise the price some more and 25 drivers who were settling in to watch their favorite TV show decide to DVR it instead and head out to pick up people. They raise it even more and 25 drivers who were about to get some nookie decide it can wait and head out to pick up people. And the 100 people wanting rides don't have to wait.
As for reading the battery level, there are two ways to interpret it. One is that Uber is using info that shouldn't be available to them to price gouge you.
The other is the Uber notices your phone's battery is about to die, and as a courtesy raises your fare to encourage the next free driver to go pick you up instead of the Uber customer closest to him. That way you're more likely to get a ride before your phone dies and you're unable to call for another ride or coordinate if your location was somehow incorrect. (This isn't to say Uber is completely innocent in all this. Ideally, their surge and low-battery pricing would give you the option of paying the higher price, or just waiting for a regular ride at the regular price. In fact, that's probably the perfect market model - allow people wanting rides to bid how much they're willing to pay. Drivers can them pick them up according to how close the pickup is and how much they'll be paid. And the price will naturally arrive at the "correct" level for supply, demand, and urgency.)
Radicalization is the problem. The two-party system effectively splits the voting population in half, maximizing the influence of radicals on both ends of the political spectrum. This disenfranchises the bulk of voters in the center, who end up dissatisfied with the choice of candidates. It's why the two candidates with probably the highest disapproval ratings are going to be the nominees - because most of that disapproval is from the half of voters who aren't voting in that party's primary. (Trump is a bit of an oddball - his views on specific issues varies widely from very conservative to liberal, which puts his mean score in the moderate category. But statistically he has a huge standard deviation, making his mean score less reliable.)
If, hypothetically, the primary system were changed so that everyone could vote in every party's primaries, Sanders, Clinton, Trump, and Cruz would've had no chance because they're too radical. Instead, moderates like Christie, Paul, and Bloomberg - people whose political views align more closely with the average of all Americans instead of just those in one party - would win.
Not really. Software companies will all close shop in the U.S. and move their operations to countries where APIs are legally declared not copyrightable. All those companies hiring H1B programmers from India or outsourcing programming work to India? They'll move to India and if you're lucky they'll outsource some of their work to you in the U.S. Software development will continue on in the rest of the world as if nothing had happened. The U.S. will be relegated to a software backwater, as most of the software made and sold in the rest of the world cannot legally be distributed in the U.S.
That's the nature of the free market. It interprets stupidity as damage, and routes around it.
Sun went under because they were heavily invested in a hardware platform which got squeezed out of existence - the minicomputer / workstation. Mainframes and supercomputers became cheaper, and microcomputers became more powerful (CISC improvements closed the gap with RISC), squeezing out Sun's primary revenue stream. Same thing happened to Silicon Graphics and HP's PA-RISC line.
Java was always open and free - Sun made money by selling systems built on Java. Their business model was to create a large population of Java-proficient programmers by making it free to use, then sell hardware which ran systems coded in Java. Because it's an interpreted language, it requires more CPU power than compiled code, helping stave off the assault from low-powered microcomputers. So your argument that Google somehow screwed Sun by using something they were giving away for free is beyond ridiculous.
Oh, and donâ(TM)t give me bullshit about how Google could have chosen a different language. Sure, they could have. Apple sure did, and Objective-C sucks. That doesnâ(TM)t change the fact that Googleâ(TM)s boostrapping would have taken FAR LONGER if theyâ(TM)d had to start from scratch.
And Sun's bootstrapping of Java would have taken FAR LONGER if they'd had to start from scratch instead of outright copying C++. I never learned Java but I have little problem reading Java code since it's nearly identical to C++.
''(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly in-fringed.
In other words, the perjury charge isn't about claiming copyright when you don't own the copyright. It's about claiming you're authorized by the copyright owner to enforce the copyright on their behalf, when you're not. There is basically no penalty for filing a false DMCA claim; the only penalty (perjury) is if you know the claimant doesn't own a copyright and file a DMCA notice anyway. The copyrighted work doesn't even have to be anything like the video being taken down - as long as the copyright owner alleges the video is infringing, the person filing the DMCA notice gets a free pass.
Would've figured it was higher due to being closer to the equator. The high for a U.S. city (i.e. not Death Valley) is 128 F (53 C). Several cities matched or exceeded 121 F during that heat wave. Yeah, India tends to have more humidity than Arizona, but a quick check of the weather in Phalodi says today's humidity is 11%, indicating it's also a desert-like environment.
The DMCA doesn't require the party filing the DMCA notice to provide YouTube a copy of the original so they can compare. All it requires is that they claim they own the legal copyright that the other work is infringing.
The problem is that the DMCA (being written by the copyright industry for the copyright industry) provides no punishment, no discouragement for invalid claims. The only punishment is if the filing party knows they don't own the copyright but files the claim anyway. That is, the filing party can always say "I thought I owned the copyright, but I guess I was wrong" and get away with it without even having to say "I'm sorry." That's what's led to the copyright industry filing DMCA claims willy nilly with little regard for accuracy.
Li-ion and LiMn batteries are already banned from the cargo hold of passenger planes. This seems more to be a case of people not knowing ecigs contained a lithium battery, and blithely packing them in their check-in baggage.
Lithium batteries can suffer a runaway thermal failure when they're punctured or shorted, which can then lead to an explosion and/or fire. While this is more common during use, it can happen while stored if the casing is already damaged and something (like turbulence or something falling on top of it) jostles it further.
I don't think you fully appreciate exactly what's going on here. This is an end run-around of the Windows desktop monopoly. Google is leveraging its Android success to gain a foothold in the desktop (laptop) market.
If this succeeds, I fully expect Chromebooks to increase in features and quality to match "real" laptops, minus the Windows tax. And the extra attention developers pay to the Android platform should help improve the app market for Android tablets as well. (And those who've been hoping for decades that Linux would displace Windows on the desktop will finally get their wish, though not quite in the way they'd imagined.)
I think that's the difference. Guys [are forced to] watch mediocre or bad television with their female partners, female partners [are allowed to] go do something else.
FTFY. Since complaining about the show to said female partner would disqualify him from nookie time later, guys suffer through the show and instead vent by bashing it online. I'm not sure why anyone who's been in a typical MF relationship would be surprised by this.
Alternate possibility: Defendant doesn't know anything about polygraphs, really didn't pirate the movie, so jumped on the offer as a way to "prove" his innocence. And since he "knew" the test was going to prove him innocent, he stipulated that the prosecution would have to pay his expenses so they couldn't do anything slimy like drop the case and leave him stuck with the bill.
After all the attempts to include tablets in PC sales figures to bolster Apple's standing, I figure turnabout is fair play. Having helped set up my nephew's Chromebook (sis wanted parental controls), aside from the inability to run generic apps I'd say it's more PC-like than a tablet. The physical keyboard goes a long way, and most people spend their computer time in a browser anyway.
The iPads in education were probably a kickback scam. The Chromebooks actually seem useful. A part of my nephew's homework is found online (I suppose it could be made into an interactive program, but a website allows easier control of distribution and updates). More work for IT, a lot less work for teachers and parents. They cost about 1/3 to 1/2 what an iPad does. And the lack of a store discourages kids from trying to hack it to install Angry Birds. Course they can browse to all sorts of websites (Google needs to improve the parental controls - you can eventually restrict it, but the process isn't trivial), but they can also do that on a tablet's browser.
If you think about it, Chromebooks have more or less accomplished what OLPC set out to do - driven the price of a production computer through the floor so that even people in developing countries could afford one. OLPC's actual production cost was about $490 each. (And please, no ranting about 16 GB of flash being "limiting." My first computer had 32 kB of RAM, my first laptop had a 20 MB HDD. 16 GB is enormous. OLPC only had 4-8 GB of flash storage. A compressed version of Wikipedia is 12 GB.)
RAM. About 1-2 GB instead of 4 GB standard (although it's been crawling up).
Storage. Usually 16 GB of flash, instead of a 128+ GB SSD or 1+ TB HDD.
A powerful processor. Most are ARM-based, though a few used the Intel Atom line (which Intel recently killed off).
Windows.
A large part of the higher price of laptops are due to the last two. Based on what ARM SoCs cost (about $5-$15), Intel's markup on its CPUs is several hundred dollars. And we all know what Windows costs. Those two markups come out to about $200-$300. Add in $35 for a HDD and that's pretty much the price difference between Chromebooks and low-end laptops.
So no, laptops aren't marked up. Intel and Microsoft just make out like bandits from each laptop sale (just Intel for Macs).
Modern air traffic control "radar" just shows a weak blip where the plane is at. All the other info including altitude and the bright dot is added by the plane's transponder. That's what happened to MH370 - someone turned the transponder off and the plane "disappeared" from radar. Later review of the radar tapes showed a faint radar return signal where the plane was, which was missed by the controllers. Nobody saw the plane on radar at the time of the incident even though it flew around Indonesia.
So there are alternatives - electrical failure, fire starting in the avionics bay, intentional act by the pilot(s), random structural failure. And in fact, its disappearance towards the end of its flight makes a bomb less likely. Most bombs are designed to trigger when the air pressure drops below a certain amount, indicating the plane has reached altitude and thus an explosion will do maximum damage. So most bombs go off near the beginning of the flight, not towards the end like this one. (A suicide bomber OTOH is possible.)
Likewise, a missile is also unlikely. Very few missiles can reach 37,000 feet, and the location of the plane's disappearance would seem to eliminate all the land-based variants.
When completely deprived of oxygen, loss of consciousness occurs within about 12 seconds, and death after about a minute. This is why the safety briefing aboard airliners says in the event of cabin depressurization you should put your oxygen mask on first, then your child's. If you try to put your child's mask on first, you'll likely go unconscious before you can get around to putting yours on.
It really is the perfect way to painlessly kill someone. Which I suspect is why it's not covered more by the media (a huge majority of whom are against the death penalty). A large part of the opposition to the death penalty is based on potential suffering of the prisoner. Presented with a guaranteed way to avoid that suffering, that opposition evaporates.
Disclaimer: I don't have a moral problem with a death penalty in certain cases, but I do not believe our current legal system is accurate enough to justify the use of death as a punishment. IMHO its irreversible nature disqualifies it from use in a justice system which has been proven to be error-prone.
Isn't Linkedin the site where if my friend joins and leaves a box checked because he didn't read carefully, they download his entire contact list and spam all of his contacts, and I repeatedly get emails saying that he's joined and I should join too?
Handing your info to a company whose ethical standards allow them to pull shenanigans like this is pretty much the same thing as hackers getting your info.
The new fast.com site test seems too short. Cox will give you more bandwidth than you're paying for for a few seconds (I'm on Cox) - to speed up bursty use like general web browsing, but slow down large downloads. You can see this on the speedtest.net tests. I'm on a 100 Mbps plan and it initially starts at around 160 Mbps, then gradually decreases, usually finishing around 110 Mbps. So fast.com is reporting your burst speed, not your sustained speed.
I've started using internethealthtest.org more. It runs separate tests to major backbone providers. Usually one or two are slower (often a lot slower) than your connection speed, indicating a bottleneck on the route your ISP uses to their networks. This is often the cause of some sites being fast while others are slow. You can also compare different ISPs in your area using MLab's Observatory tool.
The article linked in the summary is a (bad) tech website's take on the actual report. Look above, I've provided a link to the actual Backblaze report.
The different drives have been in operation for different lengths of time. So they have to normalize the failure rate to an annual number in order to compare. e.g. If a drive model has been in use for 3 years, you just give the number of failures in the last year. If a drive model has been in use for 3 months, you multiply its failure rate by 4 to get its projected annual failure rate. It's not perfect, but at least this way you're comparing based on the same number of operating hours.
The bar graph (or anything comparing based on manufacturer) is pretty useless. I'd suggest just ignoring it. You want to concentrate on looking at the different model drives. The bar graph is made by lumping the statistics of each manufacturer's drives they used for the year. So it's a non-normalized amalgam of (1) a different mix of drive models every year, (2) in different quantities. Those two variables pretty much wipe out any statistical meaning, which you can get directly from the other charts they provide anyway. It's something that would be useful to Backblaze internally (see how well they're doing at filtering out unreliable drive models year over year), but useless for anyone else.
IBM sold their storage division to Hitachi, who renamed it HGST. So it was never Japanese to begin with.
Several countries objected to the HGST and WD merger since it would leave only two manufacturers of 3.5" HDDs (WD and Seagate). So to push the merger through, HGST agreed to sell its 3.5" assets to Toshiba (which until then only made 2.5" HDDs) so we would have three manufacturers of 3.5" HDDs
It includes historical models as well as statistical confidence intervals - very useful for determining which model drive is more reliable. I know everyone wants to use an easy rule like "Seagate bad" when buying, but it's not that simple. Each new model of drive includes new design changes to try to increase capacity, improve speed and reliability, and/or reduce cost. Sometimes these design changes work, sometimes they don't and the model is less reliable (e.g. Samsung 840 EVO). The statistics have the greatest orthogonality when broken down by model, not by manufacturer.
Too many people will post a ten paragraph screed against their coworkers on Facebook and then act surprised when their boss finds it.
I'm kinda curious / worried how exactly the loss of that ability will change society. Not everyone gets along - that's a given. For all of human history, when we run across a person we have trouble working with, we've been able to rant about it to our friends or family. This isn't because we feel we shouldn't be working with the person - if that were the case we'd either bring up the problem with our supervisor or quit our job. It's because we grin and bear it, blowing off steam by ranting about the "unfairness" of it all to friends and family with a near-zero probability of our rants being found by coworkers.
Now, suddenly robbed of that ability to relieve stress, what's going to happen? An increase in workplace violence? A increase in incidence of stomach ulcers and a decrease in average lifespan? A more open society where criticism of co-workers is more accepted and people become better at working through their differences? Higher employee churn rate as people simply quit their job and find a new one when they encounter a person they can't work with? I honestly don't know where this is all leading. But it's not as simple as "don't post stuff you don't want others outside your close circle to read."
Talented as she may be, opinions like hers are born from a lifetime of entitlement under a Copyright system which lets them work once, and collect money for selling the same work over and over. No other business or occupation operates like this - after you've been paid once, if you want to be paid again, you have to do new work. The closest is the rental industry, and they still have to pay for maintenance and replacement costs as the things they're renting out break down and wear out.
Wedding photographers went through exactly this shift in business. They used to shoot the weddings for free, then charge for the prints and reprints - collecting money for selling the same work over and over. The advent of low-cost scanners and inkjet photo printers forced them to realign their business model with reality. Nowadays, wedding photographers charge you up-front to shoot the wedding, and they'll give you the prints at cost or even free. You're paying for a one-time service instead of a product. Which more accurately represents what's actually going on - the bulk of the photographer's production costs are in the photography, not in the prints. Just like in days past when composers would write music on commission as a service, not get an artificial monopoly on selling a product - the printed composition. The bulk of the composer's production costs are in the composition, not in the copies of it which are reprinted.
This has already been addressed. The government has required carriers and phones implement a system by which emergency messages can be broadcast from cell towers to phones. Not a point to point connection like a phone call, but a point to multipoint broadcast just like FM radio. There's no need to turn on the FM radio or tune in to the proper frequency. If your phone is connected to a tower in the affected area, you automatically get the broadcast. Your phone will make the annoying alert noise, and announces the emergency message at full volume over the speaker. I've already gotten several AMBER alerts and a couple severe weather warnings this way (I live near to a flood zone).
For emergency broadcasts during a long-term (multi-day) disaster, FM radios on phones are a poor choice because when the cellular network goes down, the power grid usually goes down as well. A phone is a terrible device for that situation because most people aren't going to be able to recharge their phones for the duration of the disaster. And although a smartphone with the cellular radio turned off will last nearly a week on battery, if you forget to put it in airplane mode (turn the cellular radio off) the phone will begin broadcasting at full power trying to find a tower and your battery will drain in probably a few hours. A car radio or transistor radio that takes AA batteries or even MP3 player with FM radio (if you've still got one of those) is better for that situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Supply and demand would like to have a word with your interpretation of "price gouging." If there are 100 people wanting to get a ride via Uber, but only 25 Uber drivers currently roaming the streets, 75 people are going to have to wait a long time, 50 of them a really long time, and 25 of them a really really long time.
If demand for a product exceeds supply, the market responds by increasing the price to encourage more production of supply. Uber raises the price, and suddenly 25 Uber drivers who were instead having dinner decide to head out to the streets and pick those people up. They raise the price some more and 25 drivers who were settling in to watch their favorite TV show decide to DVR it instead and head out to pick up people. They raise it even more and 25 drivers who were about to get some nookie decide it can wait and head out to pick up people. And the 100 people wanting rides don't have to wait.
As for reading the battery level, there are two ways to interpret it. One is that Uber is using info that shouldn't be available to them to price gouge you.
The other is the Uber notices your phone's battery is about to die, and as a courtesy raises your fare to encourage the next free driver to go pick you up instead of the Uber customer closest to him. That way you're more likely to get a ride before your phone dies and you're unable to call for another ride or coordinate if your location was somehow incorrect. (This isn't to say Uber is completely innocent in all this. Ideally, their surge and low-battery pricing would give you the option of paying the higher price, or just waiting for a regular ride at the regular price. In fact, that's probably the perfect market model - allow people wanting rides to bid how much they're willing to pay. Drivers can them pick them up according to how close the pickup is and how much they'll be paid. And the price will naturally arrive at the "correct" level for supply, demand, and urgency.)
Radicalization is the problem. The two-party system effectively splits the voting population in half, maximizing the influence of radicals on both ends of the political spectrum. This disenfranchises the bulk of voters in the center, who end up dissatisfied with the choice of candidates. It's why the two candidates with probably the highest disapproval ratings are going to be the nominees - because most of that disapproval is from the half of voters who aren't voting in that party's primary. (Trump is a bit of an oddball - his views on specific issues varies widely from very conservative to liberal, which puts his mean score in the moderate category. But statistically he has a huge standard deviation, making his mean score less reliable.)
If, hypothetically, the primary system were changed so that everyone could vote in every party's primaries, Sanders, Clinton, Trump, and Cruz would've had no chance because they're too radical. Instead, moderates like Christie, Paul, and Bloomberg - people whose political views align more closely with the average of all Americans instead of just those in one party - would win.
Not really. Software companies will all close shop in the U.S. and move their operations to countries where APIs are legally declared not copyrightable. All those companies hiring H1B programmers from India or outsourcing programming work to India? They'll move to India and if you're lucky they'll outsource some of their work to you in the U.S. Software development will continue on in the rest of the world as if nothing had happened. The U.S. will be relegated to a software backwater, as most of the software made and sold in the rest of the world cannot legally be distributed in the U.S.
That's the nature of the free market. It interprets stupidity as damage, and routes around it.
Java was always open and free - Sun made money by selling systems built on Java. Their business model was to create a large population of Java-proficient programmers by making it free to use, then sell hardware which ran systems coded in Java. Because it's an interpreted language, it requires more CPU power than compiled code, helping stave off the assault from low-powered microcomputers. So your argument that Google somehow screwed Sun by using something they were giving away for free is beyond ridiculous.
And Sun's bootstrapping of Java would have taken FAR LONGER if they'd had to start from scratch instead of outright copying C++. I never learned Java but I have little problem reading Java code since it's nearly identical to C++.
In other words, the perjury charge isn't about claiming copyright when you don't own the copyright. It's about claiming you're authorized by the copyright owner to enforce the copyright on their behalf, when you're not. There is basically no penalty for filing a false DMCA claim; the only penalty (perjury) is if you know the claimant doesn't own a copyright and file a DMCA notice anyway. The copyrighted work doesn't even have to be anything like the video being taken down - as long as the copyright owner alleges the video is infringing, the person filing the DMCA notice gets a free pass.
It's a terrible law with no checks and balances.
Would've figured it was higher due to being closer to the equator. The high for a U.S. city (i.e. not Death Valley) is 128 F (53 C). Several cities matched or exceeded 121 F during that heat wave. Yeah, India tends to have more humidity than Arizona, but a quick check of the weather in Phalodi says today's humidity is 11%, indicating it's also a desert-like environment.
The DMCA doesn't require the party filing the DMCA notice to provide YouTube a copy of the original so they can compare. All it requires is that they claim they own the legal copyright that the other work is infringing.
The problem is that the DMCA (being written by the copyright industry for the copyright industry) provides no punishment, no discouragement for invalid claims. The only punishment is if the filing party knows they don't own the copyright but files the claim anyway. That is, the filing party can always say "I thought I owned the copyright, but I guess I was wrong" and get away with it without even having to say "I'm sorry." That's what's led to the copyright industry filing DMCA claims willy nilly with little regard for accuracy.
Li-ion and LiMn batteries are already banned from the cargo hold of passenger planes. This seems more to be a case of people not knowing ecigs contained a lithium battery, and blithely packing them in their check-in baggage.
Lithium batteries can suffer a runaway thermal failure when they're punctured or shorted, which can then lead to an explosion and/or fire. While this is more common during use, it can happen while stored if the casing is already damaged and something (like turbulence or something falling on top of it) jostles it further.
I don't think you fully appreciate exactly what's going on here. This is an end run-around of the Windows desktop monopoly. Google is leveraging its Android success to gain a foothold in the desktop (laptop) market.
If this succeeds, I fully expect Chromebooks to increase in features and quality to match "real" laptops, minus the Windows tax. And the extra attention developers pay to the Android platform should help improve the app market for Android tablets as well. (And those who've been hoping for decades that Linux would displace Windows on the desktop will finally get their wish, though not quite in the way they'd imagined.)
FTFY. Since complaining about the show to said female partner would disqualify him from nookie time later, guys suffer through the show and instead vent by bashing it online. I'm not sure why anyone who's been in a typical MF relationship would be surprised by this.
alt + left arrow or right arrow are equivalent to the back and forward buttons. I know, I know, two buttons at once is sooooo hard, but you'll manage.
For the remaining billions of us who've lost countless hours of typing due to this stupid "feature", Hooray!
Alternate possibility: Defendant doesn't know anything about polygraphs, really didn't pirate the movie, so jumped on the offer as a way to "prove" his innocence. And since he "knew" the test was going to prove him innocent, he stipulated that the prosecution would have to pay his expenses so they couldn't do anything slimy like drop the case and leave him stuck with the bill.
After all the attempts to include tablets in PC sales figures to bolster Apple's standing, I figure turnabout is fair play. Having helped set up my nephew's Chromebook (sis wanted parental controls), aside from the inability to run generic apps I'd say it's more PC-like than a tablet. The physical keyboard goes a long way, and most people spend their computer time in a browser anyway.
The iPads in education were probably a kickback scam. The Chromebooks actually seem useful. A part of my nephew's homework is found online (I suppose it could be made into an interactive program, but a website allows easier control of distribution and updates). More work for IT, a lot less work for teachers and parents. They cost about 1/3 to 1/2 what an iPad does. And the lack of a store discourages kids from trying to hack it to install Angry Birds. Course they can browse to all sorts of websites (Google needs to improve the parental controls - you can eventually restrict it, but the process isn't trivial), but they can also do that on a tablet's browser.
If you think about it, Chromebooks have more or less accomplished what OLPC set out to do - driven the price of a production computer through the floor so that even people in developing countries could afford one. OLPC's actual production cost was about $490 each. (And please, no ranting about 16 GB of flash being "limiting." My first computer had 32 kB of RAM, my first laptop had a 20 MB HDD. 16 GB is enormous. OLPC only had 4-8 GB of flash storage. A compressed version of Wikipedia is 12 GB.)
A large part of the higher price of laptops are due to the last two. Based on what ARM SoCs cost (about $5-$15), Intel's markup on its CPUs is several hundred dollars. And we all know what Windows costs. Those two markups come out to about $200-$300. Add in $35 for a HDD and that's pretty much the price difference between Chromebooks and low-end laptops.
So no, laptops aren't marked up. Intel and Microsoft just make out like bandits from each laptop sale (just Intel for Macs).
Modern air traffic control "radar" just shows a weak blip where the plane is at. All the other info including altitude and the bright dot is added by the plane's transponder. That's what happened to MH370 - someone turned the transponder off and the plane "disappeared" from radar. Later review of the radar tapes showed a faint radar return signal where the plane was, which was missed by the controllers. Nobody saw the plane on radar at the time of the incident even though it flew around Indonesia.
So there are alternatives - electrical failure, fire starting in the avionics bay, intentional act by the pilot(s), random structural failure. And in fact, its disappearance towards the end of its flight makes a bomb less likely. Most bombs are designed to trigger when the air pressure drops below a certain amount, indicating the plane has reached altitude and thus an explosion will do maximum damage. So most bombs go off near the beginning of the flight, not towards the end like this one. (A suicide bomber OTOH is possible.)
Likewise, a missile is also unlikely. Very few missiles can reach 37,000 feet, and the location of the plane's disappearance would seem to eliminate all the land-based variants.
When completely deprived of oxygen, loss of consciousness occurs within about 12 seconds, and death after about a minute. This is why the safety briefing aboard airliners says in the event of cabin depressurization you should put your oxygen mask on first, then your child's. If you try to put your child's mask on first, you'll likely go unconscious before you can get around to putting yours on.
It really is the perfect way to painlessly kill someone. Which I suspect is why it's not covered more by the media (a huge majority of whom are against the death penalty). A large part of the opposition to the death penalty is based on potential suffering of the prisoner. Presented with a guaranteed way to avoid that suffering, that opposition evaporates.
Disclaimer: I don't have a moral problem with a death penalty in certain cases, but I do not believe our current legal system is accurate enough to justify the use of death as a punishment. IMHO its irreversible nature disqualifies it from use in a justice system which has been proven to be error-prone.
Isn't Linkedin the site where if my friend joins and leaves a box checked because he didn't read carefully, they download his entire contact list and spam all of his contacts, and I repeatedly get emails saying that he's joined and I should join too?
Handing your info to a company whose ethical standards allow them to pull shenanigans like this is pretty much the same thing as hackers getting your info.
Oooh, that's clever. Set up a speed test site which if the ISP prioritizes to speed up their results, also speeds up Netflix's CDNs.
The new fast.com site test seems too short. Cox will give you more bandwidth than you're paying for for a few seconds (I'm on Cox) - to speed up bursty use like general web browsing, but slow down large downloads. You can see this on the speedtest.net tests. I'm on a 100 Mbps plan and it initially starts at around 160 Mbps, then gradually decreases, usually finishing around 110 Mbps. So fast.com is reporting your burst speed, not your sustained speed.
I've started using internethealthtest.org more. It runs separate tests to major backbone providers. Usually one or two are slower (often a lot slower) than your connection speed, indicating a bottleneck on the route your ISP uses to their networks. This is often the cause of some sites being fast while others are slow. You can also compare different ISPs in your area using MLab's Observatory tool.
The article linked in the summary is a (bad) tech website's take on the actual report. Look above, I've provided a link to the actual Backblaze report.
The different drives have been in operation for different lengths of time. So they have to normalize the failure rate to an annual number in order to compare. e.g. If a drive model has been in use for 3 years, you just give the number of failures in the last year. If a drive model has been in use for 3 months, you multiply its failure rate by 4 to get its projected annual failure rate. It's not perfect, but at least this way you're comparing based on the same number of operating hours.
The bar graph (or anything comparing based on manufacturer) is pretty useless. I'd suggest just ignoring it. You want to concentrate on looking at the different model drives. The bar graph is made by lumping the statistics of each manufacturer's drives they used for the year. So it's a non-normalized amalgam of (1) a different mix of drive models every year, (2) in different quantities. Those two variables pretty much wipe out any statistical meaning, which you can get directly from the other charts they provide anyway. It's something that would be useful to Backblaze internally (see how well they're doing at filtering out unreliable drive models year over year), but useless for anyone else.
IBM sold their storage division to Hitachi, who renamed it HGST. So it was never Japanese to begin with.
Several countries objected to the HGST and WD merger since it would leave only two manufacturers of 3.5" HDDs (WD and Seagate). So to push the merger through, HGST agreed to sell its 3.5" assets to Toshiba (which until then only made 2.5" HDDs) so we would have three manufacturers of 3.5" HDDs
And not some news website which doesn't even have the courtesy to provide a link to the actual source report.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/
It includes historical models as well as statistical confidence intervals - very useful for determining which model drive is more reliable. I know everyone wants to use an easy rule like "Seagate bad" when buying, but it's not that simple. Each new model of drive includes new design changes to try to increase capacity, improve speed and reliability, and/or reduce cost. Sometimes these design changes work, sometimes they don't and the model is less reliable (e.g. Samsung 840 EVO). The statistics have the greatest orthogonality when broken down by model, not by manufacturer.
I'm kinda curious / worried how exactly the loss of that ability will change society. Not everyone gets along - that's a given. For all of human history, when we run across a person we have trouble working with, we've been able to rant about it to our friends or family. This isn't because we feel we shouldn't be working with the person - if that were the case we'd either bring up the problem with our supervisor or quit our job. It's because we grin and bear it, blowing off steam by ranting about the "unfairness" of it all to friends and family with a near-zero probability of our rants being found by coworkers.
Now, suddenly robbed of that ability to relieve stress, what's going to happen? An increase in workplace violence? A increase in incidence of stomach ulcers and a decrease in average lifespan? A more open society where criticism of co-workers is more accepted and people become better at working through their differences? Higher employee churn rate as people simply quit their job and find a new one when they encounter a person they can't work with? I honestly don't know where this is all leading. But it's not as simple as "don't post stuff you don't want others outside your close circle to read."
Talented as she may be, opinions like hers are born from a lifetime of entitlement under a Copyright system which lets them work once, and collect money for selling the same work over and over. No other business or occupation operates like this - after you've been paid once, if you want to be paid again, you have to do new work. The closest is the rental industry, and they still have to pay for maintenance and replacement costs as the things they're renting out break down and wear out.
Wedding photographers went through exactly this shift in business. They used to shoot the weddings for free, then charge for the prints and reprints - collecting money for selling the same work over and over. The advent of low-cost scanners and inkjet photo printers forced them to realign their business model with reality. Nowadays, wedding photographers charge you up-front to shoot the wedding, and they'll give you the prints at cost or even free. You're paying for a one-time service instead of a product. Which more accurately represents what's actually going on - the bulk of the photographer's production costs are in the photography, not in the prints. Just like in days past when composers would write music on commission as a service, not get an artificial monopoly on selling a product - the printed composition. The bulk of the composer's production costs are in the composition, not in the copies of it which are reprinted.
This has already been addressed. The government has required carriers and phones implement a system by which emergency messages can be broadcast from cell towers to phones. Not a point to point connection like a phone call, but a point to multipoint broadcast just like FM radio. There's no need to turn on the FM radio or tune in to the proper frequency. If your phone is connected to a tower in the affected area, you automatically get the broadcast. Your phone will make the annoying alert noise, and announces the emergency message at full volume over the speaker. I've already gotten several AMBER alerts and a couple severe weather warnings this way (I live near to a flood zone).
For emergency broadcasts during a long-term (multi-day) disaster, FM radios on phones are a poor choice because when the cellular network goes down, the power grid usually goes down as well. A phone is a terrible device for that situation because most people aren't going to be able to recharge their phones for the duration of the disaster. And although a smartphone with the cellular radio turned off will last nearly a week on battery, if you forget to put it in airplane mode (turn the cellular radio off) the phone will begin broadcasting at full power trying to find a tower and your battery will drain in probably a few hours. A car radio or transistor radio that takes AA batteries or even MP3 player with FM radio (if you've still got one of those) is better for that situation.