IMHO, San Diego Wild Animal Park is what zoos should be like. The animals roam around free in a large area, and the people who want to view them are ferried around in cages (ok, trams and trucks). Course they do have to keep certain animals separated, and the rest well-fed so they don't attack or eat each other.
The only drawback is that you may go there wanting to see, say, cheetahs, and you won't see any because the enclosure is so big and none of them want to come close enough for you to see. But I go fishing a lot, and view this as yet another lesson about nature that kids should learn. Nature doesn't always give you what you want. Our modern convenience society has just circumvented it to the extent that you can buy grapes and strawberries on demand in the middle of Winter (by flying them up from the southern hemisphere).
I thought of this a few years back when Google was paying to open up the hotspots at airports for free during the Christmas holidays (dunno if they still do that). The original push for Net Neutrality came when ISPs were trying to increase costs by charging a transaction fee to both the buyer and the seller. Somewhere along the line the concept got genericized to where any transaction with the buyer should only be with their ISP, and any transaction with the seller should only be with their ISP.
What happens when someone subverts this structure? What if the seller (website) offers to pay the buyer (you) directly? YouTube could. They make ad money every time you view a video. What if they offered to pay you a portion of that revenue each time you viewed a video? Now what if they notice you're viewing it over a high-cost mobile connection, and offer to send your payment as a credit to your mobile carrier offsetting your data costs, instead of a direct deposit into your bank account? (Pretend they're trying to increase adoption of their mobile app, so they aren't offering payments for viewing on your computer.) You basically end up with what's happening here - T-Mobile allowing you to access YouTube over your phone for free.
See, people got so wrapped up with the principle of Net Neutrality (that each person/company should only have to pay their own ISP), that they lost sight of the reason why we wanted Net Neutrality. Increasing costs is a symptom of economic inefficiency. Decreasing costs happen when you make economic transactions more efficient. We want to make the economy more efficient. That's what gives up productivity gains, and increases our standard of living despite us doing the same amount of work as before.
When ISPs tried to raise costs by charging websites (who would be forced to pass the extra cost onto the end customer), that was adding an economic inefficiency to the system. Net Neutrality was suggested as a principal we could follow which could thwart that inefficiency from expanding. Now we have a situation where a website is offering to lower the cost for the end customer. Yes it also happens to violate the principle of Net Neutrality. But lowering costs by increasing efficiency is the overall goal here that the concept of Net Neutrality was created to enforce. In other words, we've encountered a situation where the simplified rule of Net Neutrality runs counter to the desired goal of increased economic efficiency. That suggests the original rule was too simplified.
I'm trying to think of a way this T-Mobile/YouTube deal could end up costing the end customer more money. Yeah it makes other video streaming sites relatively less desirable, but their absolute desirability is the same as before because the cost to stream their data hasn't gone up. At least not unless T-Mobile is doing something underhanded and increasing their rates to make this YouTube deal a net profit for them.
So... how exactly do you propose preventing piracy over a public hotspot? Should a cafe hire someone to go around, demanding customers to show him what they're doing on their phones and laptops? Should they record all traffic going over the hotspot, and analyze it for pirate-like behavior, invading the privacy of everyone using it? Get rid of all public hotspots? That's what this is really all about - shutting down public hotspots to force all Internet traffic into places where each access to a pirate site can be linked to a specific person.
When the cure is worse than the disease, rational people just learn to live with the disease. The entire global music industry only makes about $15 billion/yr in revenue (movie industry is about $88 billion/yr). Yet they've got the government doing backflips to accommodate them imposing all sorts of crazy restrictions on the $100 billion/yr search industry, $400 billion/yr software industry, $500 billion/yr ISP industry, $1 trillion/yr electronics industry, and now the $500 billion/yr hotel industry and $3.5 trillion/yr restaurant industry. When the bug gets too annoying, you'll find it's easier to squash it than to try to be nice and allow it to live.
Here's the thing. The nominee has to be approved by a majority of the Senate (and contrary to the rhetoric I've been hearing, every Supreme Court Nominee rejected by the Senate in the last 100 years has been a Republican nominee; so it's the Democrats who haven't been shy about shooting down nominations).
The Republicans hold a 4 seat majority in the Senate. The Senators up for re-election this year came in during the Tea Party wave in 2010 - Obama's first mid-term election. Consequently, a disproportionate number of them are Republicans. There are 24 Republicans up for re-election and only 10 Democrats. They Republicans need to win 21 of 34 seats to keep the Senate.
Right now, 13 of those Republican seats are considered safe, 4 are likely to be re-elected. That's 17. 3 are leaning Republican which would only get them up to 20. And there are 3 toss-ups. So there's a very real possibility the Democrats could take the Senate, or we have a 50/50 split with the tie-breaking vote cast by the Vice President (which right now is more likely to be a Democrat).
As we get later in the year, if the polls begin to clarify the Senate and Presidential races going in the Democrats' favor, expect a change of heart from the Republican leadership. They will take a centrist justice over a hard-left liberal nominated by a Democrat President and approved by a Democrat senate.
The government enjoys sovereign immunity. Basically the laws of the country don't apply to the government, except in a few cases where the government decides it does apply. It's up to the Supreme Court to impose Constitutional limitations on excess expansion of government power. Except the last few decades they've been going nuts allowing just about anything under the Commerce Clause.
I suspect that's his strategy. Despite the media portraying him as a looney out in right field, Trump is actually the most moderate candidate still left in the race. Even you point out he advocates liberal NE policies. His stance on core issues aligns pretty closely with the American mainstream.
How does a moderate candidate get past the primaries to run for President in our polarized two-party system? By highlighting his few extremist views to appeal to extremists in one party during the primaries to win the nomination, then coming back to center in the general election to win over the mainstream.
Do note that these were CRTs, and the tube of the CRT was in fact 17" diagonal. The 15" space of the bezel was somewhat arbitrary, since the entire front of the tube was covered with phosphors. It could in fact display a 17" image (or close to it - there are/were controls for adjusting the picture height and width), but for aesthetics and to keep the tube from falling out the front of the plastic housing, the opening of the bezel was made smaller than the tube.
In that respect, the practice was more akin to advertising your computer as having 4 GB of RAM, when only 3.5 GB is usable because some has been allocated to integrated video and BIOS reserved space. The manufacturers were labeling the monitors based on tube size, and buyers were assuming it was image size.
I just gave up and started typing things like "bank of america" (actually bofa) into Google. If I make a typo, it almost always catches it and suggests the correct URL.
In a strap-on water cooler or your spray-bottle suggestion, the heat transfer area between the heat source and water is limited to a flat surface (the minimum possible).
Microfluidic cooling increases the surface area for heat transfer by running the water through lots of tiny tubes in the heat spreader (metal-to-metal heat transfer generally is a lot faster than metal-to-water heat transfer, so the small surface area of the CPU-to-heat spreader interface isn't limiting). The surface area for heat transfer is then the sum total of the sides of all those tubes, which can be much larger than the exterior physical dimensions of the device. Same reason your lungs have lots of tiny alveoli, instead of presenting just a smooth flat surface for the air to flow over.
Evaporative cooling removes heat (energy) without a corresponding temperature increase - no heat to "get rid" of. The energy goes into the phase change of the material. For water, the phase change from liquid to gas results in (without an external heat source) a corresponding temperature drop. So if matched up properly you end up with cooling with no temperature increase. (It works for solid to liquid phase change as well, which is why we put ice in our drinks instead of hold them up next to the air conditioner.)
Course you do end up with humid air which needs to be vented out and replaced with dry air so it can continue to function. And occasionally you need to refill the water reservoir.
You're assuming the current state (public education with a uniform curriculum) is the default state and thus the burden of proof is upon other forms of education to prove their superiority.
The correct default state is actually no education. And the burden of proof is upon all forms of education to prove their level of effectiveness. I'd further hypothesize that public education was widely adopted as the norm not because it was proven most effective at teaching, but because it was most cost-effective. Only one person (hopefully a really really smart person) has to come up with a lesson plan, and each teacher can can be taught the same lessons (and they in turn teach the same thing to every kid).
Like the effect filesharing has had on music/movie distribution costs, computers and the Internet reduce most of the cost-reducing benefit of a uniform curriculum to near zero. Those who've been most successful because of the Internet are keenly aware of that, so of course they're going to think of this. So rather than immediately criticize and dismiss this idea in order to protect a method of education developed in the 1700s-1800s, I think this is something worth experimenting with. And anyway he's offering to pay for the experiment so what are you complaining about?
To draw a car analogy, in 1908 the assembly line and the use of interchangeable parts greatly increased manufacturing efficiency to where the car became affordable to the average person. The drawback was that you could have any color you wanted, as long as it was black. Around 2000, computers and the Internet (better, cheaper communications) made it feasible for you to custom-order exactly what options you want in your car and have the factory manufacture it that way. There was little to no overhead to the factory for providing this service compared to the logistical nightmare it would've been in 1908 using pen, paper, postal mail, and a chalkboard to specify which options went in which car. I really could've used more math and science in my K-12 education, instead of having read Wuthering Heights (no offense to Emily Bronte fans - you probably find the math and science in your education was wasted in your current career).
She was working late trying to get a report finished. At 6 pm I got a frantic call saying she was working when the computer suddenly started upgrading something by itself.* In a panic she had pulled the plug. Fortunately she was back to Win 7 when she booted, and I was able to guide her through the steps to prevent Win 10 from trying to force itself on her again. (It tried to install itself again while we were doing this.)
So Microsoft succeeded in wasting an hour of her life when she was supposed to be back home in time to make dinner for her kids. When I was helping her buy and set up the system, I did pitch Linux or Google Apps as free alternatives. But she insisted on Windows and Office for compatibility with corporate clients and government forms. I suspect she'll be a lot more responsive to alternatives the next computer she gets.
* If it's true that it's asking users before installing, my guess is she was hit by a long time Windows bug/feature. Other OSes distinguish between an app being in the foreground (on top of other apps), and having focus. Windows doesn't - the app in the foreground always has focus, and the app with focus is always in the foreground. One of the downsides of this approach is that if a warning dialog pops up while you're typing, your keyboard input is immediately directed to the dialog (it needs to be on top so it's in the foreground, and since it's in the foreground it has focus). When you hit space or enter, the OK button (which is usually pre-selected) receives that keyboard input as confirmation. So you'll be merrily typing away, a dialog flashes on your screen for a millisecond before disappearing, and you have no idea WTF you just agreed to. In the Unix systems I've used, the dialog pops up on top, but the app you were typing in retains focus and thus keeps getting all your keystrokes. To dismiss the dialog, you have to first click it to give it focus, then it'll accept your click or space or enter on OK.
IT suffers from the same problem as engineering. When you do your job right, nothing happens. When you do your job wrong, the world implodes and costs your company millions, and the fault can be traced back directly to you.
Contrast this with, say, sales. When you do your job right, a new contract is signed and the company gets millions in additional revenue which can be attributed directly to you. When you do your job wrong, nothing happens.
I've been trying to come up with some sort of algorithm which corrects for this, and correctly quantifies a worker's contribution regardless of how easy or difficult it is to see. Without such a correction, you tend to see the former type of employees as less productive than they really are, and the latter type as more productive than they really are. (I leave management out because that's mostly take credit when those under you do stuff right, blame those under you when they do stuff wrong. To correct that, you need to get feedback from the people they're managing.)
(Another more complicated example is HR. While it seems like their good or bad hiring decisions can be attributed back to them, that's not actually true. Only half of their decisions can be attributed back to them. If they fail to hire a great applicant or decline to hire a terrible applicant, nothing happens and they get no blame/credit for it. Your "stellar" hiring manager who's hired some of your best employees may in fact be costing you money because he's using irrelevant criteria to thin out the applicant stack to reduce his workload, resulting in him turning away other skilled applicants who might've been even better employees.)
OK, let's do it your way. The government regulates firearms so only a few select individuals they approve can own them. Then they decide to regulate a backdoor into every phone to monitor everything you do. Everyone protests, but they decide to do it anyway.
How then do you propose exerting control over or overthrowing this government run amok, when you previously willingly allowed it to de-fang its citizens by taking their guns away?
The battlefield here isn't devices. The battlefield is power - power of the individual citizens over the government, or power of the government over the individual. It's amazing how many of you who've never lived under an oppressive government just don't seem to get that. You seem to think just because your government has been benign your entire lives, that somehow by magic it's guaranteed to always be that way forever.
You're complaining that the government is crossing one line (privacy rights) on the path to tyranny, while simultaneously assuming it would never cross another line further down that same path (right of individual freedom). The very fact that it's crossing that first line should be proof enough to you that the possibility exists that the second line could be crossed. The Founding Fathers put the 2nd Amendment in there precisely because they'd just gotten out of a war to overthrow a tyrannical government. They knew the only way to insure tyranny never took hold here was for its citizens to hold ultimate power over the government; not power on paper (which is what the Bill of Rights ultimately is) - real power to, if need me, actually force the government to behave.
It isn't about personal comfort or enjoyment. It's about inflicting your desires onto others, giving you a sense of power over them. It's the same reason idiots tweak/remove the exhaust system of their car so it can be heard for miles. I suggested just rigging up a computer to the tachometer and having it generate the same sound through the car's speaker system. They get the loud noise they desire, everyone else gets peace and quiet. They laughed at me.
,br>
It's why the guy openly showed the jammer to everyone in the train car. If people didn't know that he was the cause, that he was the one with the power and in control, the whole thing would've been meaningless to him and thus not worth doing.
Scary thing is, I see the same thing happening more and more in politics. The polarization of the country has emboldened both the far left and far right to try to impose their hardcore beliefs onto everyone.
Gasoline is subsidized (in the U.S.) by about 2 to 2.5 cents/gallon. It's estimated the oil industry receives about $4 billion in subsidies, which sounds like a lot until you realize the country uses 137 billion gallons of gasoline a year and about 40 billion gallons of transportation diesel a year. Dividing $4 billion by that gives a subsidy of a whopping 2.2 cents/gallon.
Price per GB has resumed dropping since the effect of the Thailand flooding and HDD consolidation in 2011-2012. Quite frankly, that price adjustment upwards was needed, as the HDD industry had some of the slimmest margins in the electronics industry (around 1%-3%, vs 5%-10% for electronics overall). Slim margins = less money companies are able to devote to R&D = slower rate of capacity improvement.
And don't fret about the rate of price drops slowing down since 2009 in the graph. The y-axis on that chart needs to be on a log scale to draw that sort of conclusion.
Oh please. Apple started doing this in 2009 - before the iPad was even released. They didn't even know if their ebook reader was going to be a success. They did this for one and only one reason - to ingratiate themselves with the publishers so the publishers would line up to provide iPad versions of their books and magazines so it would have a large library for people to buy when released.. As a side effect, once the publishers were making the "best" version of their publications for the iPad, the fixed price industry-wide meant that all other ebook readers and tablets would be at a competitive disadvantage against the iPad version. You could get the "good" version on the iPad, or pay the exact same price for an inferior version on any other device.
Quick tip for those trying to argue against this. You can't simply argue "Net neutrality good!" There's a real lowered economic cost with the way Comcast delivers these services - they locally host the servers which contain the streaming data, so the data doesn't have to get to them over the Internet. Consequently it doesn't cost them any bandwidth so they can provide it to you at lower cost. And since the data never has to travel over the Internet to get to them, net neutrality doesn't really apply.
The way you have to argue against this is that they're mingling the accounting between two different operations. Unless they can prove the service costs them exactly $15/mo per user or less (minus their normal profit margin), they're essentially taking money from other cable subscribers to subsidize this service. That should be pretty easy to prove given that HBO Now just by itself is $15/mo. Thus they're pricing it below their own cost, which given the local monopoly they hold is illegal. Add in the fact that they initially refused to accept the local servers Netflix offered to them for free precisely to eliminate the bandwidth charges, and you have a slam dunk of an anti-trust case.
Fundamentally, the problem is that the company which owns the pipes is also selling stuff transported through those pipes. That gives them an unfair advantage over competing companies trying to sell stuff transported through their pipes. The solution is to prohibit the company who owns the pipes from selling anything which is sent through it. Break the company up into two separate entities - a pipe maintenance company and a pipe content company.
Erm, the municipalities are the ones who gave the cable and phone companies monopolies in the first place. Why are you trying to solve a government-created problem with more government control? Europe and Asia have better Internet than the U.S. not because of more government control, but because they were smart enough to regulate their Internet in a way which creates more competition.
The only way to get competition is to prohibit the company who owns the pipe from selling what's sent through the pipes. This is already done for natural gas and electricity in in most areas. One company owns and maintains your gas lines, but you can choose from hundreds if not thousands of gas providers. The company who owns the pipes usually also sells gas, but only through a subsidiary (in my area, that's the difference between The Gas Company and Sempra Energy), and they're required to allow other gas providers to send gas through their pipes for the same transport fee they charge their subsidiary.
Of course if you choose to buy gas from company ABC, the methane atoms that come into your house don't all come from company ABC. They all get mixed together in the pipeline. But as long as you use x cubic feet of gas, and company ABC inserts x cubit feet of gas into the system on your behalf, the numbers all balance out.
We tried a similar thing with DSL for a while - forcing local phone companies to lease their lines to other DSL providers for the same price as their own DSL service. It worked on the pricing side. What sank it was (at least in my area) Verizon gave priority to fixing physical line problems when the line used their DSL service. Getting them to fix a line problem when using a 3rd party DSL service was like pulling teeth - they'd keep blaming the DSL company for the problem. In the face of that kind of malfeasance, the only solution is to entirely prohibit the company who owns the pipe from selling what's sent through the pipes.
"Base load" is the logistic equivalent of shifting fast- and far-moving traffic onto highways. By using a highway/grid, you ignore the individual variances in driving habits/power usage which is probably only 20%-50% predictable, and combine it into a statistical whole which is 90%+ predictable. The "base load" covers the predictable 90%, while dynamic peaking load plants only have to be able to cover the other 10%.
Unless you like your electronics being fried by brownouts and power surges, predictability is paramount. It's why a tightrope walker holds a huge, heavy bar. Yeah, the extra weight sucks, but the predictability it adds (by absorbing tiny short time-constant movements of his body into large time-constant movements of the bar) makes a nearly impossible task almost easy.
And nukes are slow to turn down, but as long as you have a place to dump the excess heat you can always turn them down. If renewables aren't providing enough power, you can't turn them up.
Hydro doesn't have enough capacity to provide base load. Try getting permits to build a new dam in Oregon. The environmentalists will flambe you and eat you for breakfast.
Hydro's ability to quickly throttle up or down as needed makes it the best power source for dynamic peaking load.. That's why hydro's capacity factor is only around 40%. There's a fixed amount of water every year, and they save it shape the power generation profile to match peaking load. Using hydro for base load would just create a new problem - what power source do you use for peaking load? Right now the best alternative is gas plants, which is a fossil fuel.
Geothermal still needs to be proven. The one place geothermal has worked out well (Iceland) is blessed with shallow geothermal vents. In the rest of the world, you have to drill deep into the ground to make it work. In fact, it's almost exactly the same procedure as fracking since you need to maximize the surface contact area between the rocks and the water you pump down there.
The F-16, by virtue of its light weight (the F-35 weighs 1.8x more, F-22 weighs than 2.3x more), is one of the nimblest dogfighters out there. Its thrust to weight ratio is substantially better than the F-35's. You think a 40-year fighter jet is still in service worldwide just because it's cheap to maintain?
I agree that the F-35 is a boondoggle. They tried to make a single airframe do too many different things. But if its dogfighting capability compares favorably to an F-16, I'd have to take back some of my past criticisms. This report contradicts earlier tests last year which showed the F-35 losing badly to the F-16. Is the pilot just BSing, or have they really improved its performance that much in less than a year?
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, San Diego Wild Animal Park is what zoos should be like. The animals roam around free in a large area, and the people who want to view them are ferried around in cages (ok, trams and trucks). Course they do have to keep certain animals separated, and the rest well-fed so they don't attack or eat each other.
The only drawback is that you may go there wanting to see, say, cheetahs, and you won't see any because the enclosure is so big and none of them want to come close enough for you to see. But I go fishing a lot, and view this as yet another lesson about nature that kids should learn. Nature doesn't always give you what you want. Our modern convenience society has just circumvented it to the extent that you can buy grapes and strawberries on demand in the middle of Winter (by flying them up from the southern hemisphere).
I thought of this a few years back when Google was paying to open up the hotspots at airports for free during the Christmas holidays (dunno if they still do that). The original push for Net Neutrality came when ISPs were trying to increase costs by charging a transaction fee to both the buyer and the seller. Somewhere along the line the concept got genericized to where any transaction with the buyer should only be with their ISP, and any transaction with the seller should only be with their ISP.
What happens when someone subverts this structure? What if the seller (website) offers to pay the buyer (you) directly? YouTube could. They make ad money every time you view a video. What if they offered to pay you a portion of that revenue each time you viewed a video? Now what if they notice you're viewing it over a high-cost mobile connection, and offer to send your payment as a credit to your mobile carrier offsetting your data costs, instead of a direct deposit into your bank account? (Pretend they're trying to increase adoption of their mobile app, so they aren't offering payments for viewing on your computer.) You basically end up with what's happening here - T-Mobile allowing you to access YouTube over your phone for free.
See, people got so wrapped up with the principle of Net Neutrality (that each person/company should only have to pay their own ISP), that they lost sight of the reason why we wanted Net Neutrality. Increasing costs is a symptom of economic inefficiency. Decreasing costs happen when you make economic transactions more efficient. We want to make the economy more efficient. That's what gives up productivity gains, and increases our standard of living despite us doing the same amount of work as before.
When ISPs tried to raise costs by charging websites (who would be forced to pass the extra cost onto the end customer), that was adding an economic inefficiency to the system. Net Neutrality was suggested as a principal we could follow which could thwart that inefficiency from expanding. Now we have a situation where a website is offering to lower the cost for the end customer. Yes it also happens to violate the principle of Net Neutrality. But lowering costs by increasing efficiency is the overall goal here that the concept of Net Neutrality was created to enforce. In other words, we've encountered a situation where the simplified rule of Net Neutrality runs counter to the desired goal of increased economic efficiency. That suggests the original rule was too simplified.
I'm trying to think of a way this T-Mobile/YouTube deal could end up costing the end customer more money. Yeah it makes other video streaming sites relatively less desirable, but their absolute desirability is the same as before because the cost to stream their data hasn't gone up. At least not unless T-Mobile is doing something underhanded and increasing their rates to make this YouTube deal a net profit for them.
So... how exactly do you propose preventing piracy over a public hotspot? Should a cafe hire someone to go around, demanding customers to show him what they're doing on their phones and laptops? Should they record all traffic going over the hotspot, and analyze it for pirate-like behavior, invading the privacy of everyone using it? Get rid of all public hotspots? That's what this is really all about - shutting down public hotspots to force all Internet traffic into places where each access to a pirate site can be linked to a specific person.
When the cure is worse than the disease, rational people just learn to live with the disease. The entire global music industry only makes about $15 billion/yr in revenue (movie industry is about $88 billion/yr). Yet they've got the government doing backflips to accommodate them imposing all sorts of crazy restrictions on the $100 billion/yr search industry, $400 billion/yr software industry, $500 billion/yr ISP industry, $1 trillion/yr electronics industry, and now the $500 billion/yr hotel industry and $3.5 trillion/yr restaurant industry. When the bug gets too annoying, you'll find it's easier to squash it than to try to be nice and allow it to live.
Here's the thing. The nominee has to be approved by a majority of the Senate (and contrary to the rhetoric I've been hearing, every Supreme Court Nominee rejected by the Senate in the last 100 years has been a Republican nominee; so it's the Democrats who haven't been shy about shooting down nominations).
The Republicans hold a 4 seat majority in the Senate. The Senators up for re-election this year came in during the Tea Party wave in 2010 - Obama's first mid-term election. Consequently, a disproportionate number of them are Republicans. There are 24 Republicans up for re-election and only 10 Democrats. They Republicans need to win 21 of 34 seats to keep the Senate.
Right now, 13 of those Republican seats are considered safe, 4 are likely to be re-elected. That's 17. 3 are leaning Republican which would only get them up to 20. And there are 3 toss-ups. So there's a very real possibility the Democrats could take the Senate, or we have a 50/50 split with the tie-breaking vote cast by the Vice President (which right now is more likely to be a Democrat).
As we get later in the year, if the polls begin to clarify the Senate and Presidential races going in the Democrats' favor, expect a change of heart from the Republican leadership. They will take a centrist justice over a hard-left liberal nominated by a Democrat President and approved by a Democrat senate.
The government enjoys sovereign immunity. Basically the laws of the country don't apply to the government, except in a few cases where the government decides it does apply. It's up to the Supreme Court to impose Constitutional limitations on excess expansion of government power. Except the last few decades they've been going nuts allowing just about anything under the Commerce Clause.
I suspect that's his strategy. Despite the media portraying him as a looney out in right field, Trump is actually the most moderate candidate still left in the race. Even you point out he advocates liberal NE policies. His stance on core issues aligns pretty closely with the American mainstream.
How does a moderate candidate get past the primaries to run for President in our polarized two-party system? By highlighting his few extremist views to appeal to extremists in one party during the primaries to win the nomination, then coming back to center in the general election to win over the mainstream.
Do note that these were CRTs, and the tube of the CRT was in fact 17" diagonal. The 15" space of the bezel was somewhat arbitrary, since the entire front of the tube was covered with phosphors. It could in fact display a 17" image (or close to it - there are/were controls for adjusting the picture height and width), but for aesthetics and to keep the tube from falling out the front of the plastic housing, the opening of the bezel was made smaller than the tube.
In that respect, the practice was more akin to advertising your computer as having 4 GB of RAM, when only 3.5 GB is usable because some has been allocated to integrated video and BIOS reserved space. The manufacturers were labeling the monitors based on tube size, and buyers were assuming it was image size.
I just gave up and started typing things like "bank of america" (actually bofa) into Google. If I make a typo, it almost always catches it and suggests the correct URL.
In a strap-on water cooler or your spray-bottle suggestion, the heat transfer area between the heat source and water is limited to a flat surface (the minimum possible).
Microfluidic cooling increases the surface area for heat transfer by running the water through lots of tiny tubes in the heat spreader (metal-to-metal heat transfer generally is a lot faster than metal-to-water heat transfer, so the small surface area of the CPU-to-heat spreader interface isn't limiting). The surface area for heat transfer is then the sum total of the sides of all those tubes, which can be much larger than the exterior physical dimensions of the device. Same reason your lungs have lots of tiny alveoli, instead of presenting just a smooth flat surface for the air to flow over.
Evaporative cooling removes heat (energy) without a corresponding temperature increase - no heat to "get rid" of. The energy goes into the phase change of the material. For water, the phase change from liquid to gas results in (without an external heat source) a corresponding temperature drop. So if matched up properly you end up with cooling with no temperature increase. (It works for solid to liquid phase change as well, which is why we put ice in our drinks instead of hold them up next to the air conditioner.)
Course you do end up with humid air which needs to be vented out and replaced with dry air so it can continue to function. And occasionally you need to refill the water reservoir.
You're assuming the current state (public education with a uniform curriculum) is the default state and thus the burden of proof is upon other forms of education to prove their superiority.
The correct default state is actually no education. And the burden of proof is upon all forms of education to prove their level of effectiveness. I'd further hypothesize that public education was widely adopted as the norm not because it was proven most effective at teaching, but because it was most cost-effective. Only one person (hopefully a really really smart person) has to come up with a lesson plan, and each teacher can can be taught the same lessons (and they in turn teach the same thing to every kid).
Like the effect filesharing has had on music/movie distribution costs, computers and the Internet reduce most of the cost-reducing benefit of a uniform curriculum to near zero. Those who've been most successful because of the Internet are keenly aware of that, so of course they're going to think of this. So rather than immediately criticize and dismiss this idea in order to protect a method of education developed in the 1700s-1800s, I think this is something worth experimenting with. And anyway he's offering to pay for the experiment so what are you complaining about?
To draw a car analogy, in 1908 the assembly line and the use of interchangeable parts greatly increased manufacturing efficiency to where the car became affordable to the average person. The drawback was that you could have any color you wanted, as long as it was black. Around 2000, computers and the Internet (better, cheaper communications) made it feasible for you to custom-order exactly what options you want in your car and have the factory manufacture it that way. There was little to no overhead to the factory for providing this service compared to the logistical nightmare it would've been in 1908 using pen, paper, postal mail, and a chalkboard to specify which options went in which car. I really could've used more math and science in my K-12 education, instead of having read Wuthering Heights (no offense to Emily Bronte fans - you probably find the math and science in your education was wasted in your current career).
She was working late trying to get a report finished. At 6 pm I got a frantic call saying she was working when the computer suddenly started upgrading something by itself.* In a panic she had pulled the plug. Fortunately she was back to Win 7 when she booted, and I was able to guide her through the steps to prevent Win 10 from trying to force itself on her again. (It tried to install itself again while we were doing this.)
So Microsoft succeeded in wasting an hour of her life when she was supposed to be back home in time to make dinner for her kids. When I was helping her buy and set up the system, I did pitch Linux or Google Apps as free alternatives. But she insisted on Windows and Office for compatibility with corporate clients and government forms. I suspect she'll be a lot more responsive to alternatives the next computer she gets.
* If it's true that it's asking users before installing, my guess is she was hit by a long time Windows bug/feature. Other OSes distinguish between an app being in the foreground (on top of other apps), and having focus. Windows doesn't - the app in the foreground always has focus, and the app with focus is always in the foreground. One of the downsides of this approach is that if a warning dialog pops up while you're typing, your keyboard input is immediately directed to the dialog (it needs to be on top so it's in the foreground, and since it's in the foreground it has focus). When you hit space or enter, the OK button (which is usually pre-selected) receives that keyboard input as confirmation. So you'll be merrily typing away, a dialog flashes on your screen for a millisecond before disappearing, and you have no idea WTF you just agreed to. In the Unix systems I've used, the dialog pops up on top, but the app you were typing in retains focus and thus keeps getting all your keystrokes. To dismiss the dialog, you have to first click it to give it focus, then it'll accept your click or space or enter on OK.
IT suffers from the same problem as engineering. When you do your job right, nothing happens. When you do your job wrong, the world implodes and costs your company millions, and the fault can be traced back directly to you.
Contrast this with, say, sales. When you do your job right, a new contract is signed and the company gets millions in additional revenue which can be attributed directly to you. When you do your job wrong, nothing happens.
I've been trying to come up with some sort of algorithm which corrects for this, and correctly quantifies a worker's contribution regardless of how easy or difficult it is to see. Without such a correction, you tend to see the former type of employees as less productive than they really are, and the latter type as more productive than they really are. (I leave management out because that's mostly take credit when those under you do stuff right, blame those under you when they do stuff wrong. To correct that, you need to get feedback from the people they're managing.)
(Another more complicated example is HR. While it seems like their good or bad hiring decisions can be attributed back to them, that's not actually true. Only half of their decisions can be attributed back to them. If they fail to hire a great applicant or decline to hire a terrible applicant, nothing happens and they get no blame/credit for it. Your "stellar" hiring manager who's hired some of your best employees may in fact be costing you money because he's using irrelevant criteria to thin out the applicant stack to reduce his workload, resulting in him turning away other skilled applicants who might've been even better employees.)
OK, let's do it your way. The government regulates firearms so only a few select individuals they approve can own them. Then they decide to regulate a backdoor into every phone to monitor everything you do. Everyone protests, but they decide to do it anyway.
How then do you propose exerting control over or overthrowing this government run amok, when you previously willingly allowed it to de-fang its citizens by taking their guns away?
The battlefield here isn't devices. The battlefield is power - power of the individual citizens over the government, or power of the government over the individual. It's amazing how many of you who've never lived under an oppressive government just don't seem to get that. You seem to think just because your government has been benign your entire lives, that somehow by magic it's guaranteed to always be that way forever.
You're complaining that the government is crossing one line (privacy rights) on the path to tyranny, while simultaneously assuming it would never cross another line further down that same path (right of individual freedom). The very fact that it's crossing that first line should be proof enough to you that the possibility exists that the second line could be crossed. The Founding Fathers put the 2nd Amendment in there precisely because they'd just gotten out of a war to overthrow a tyrannical government. They knew the only way to insure tyranny never took hold here was for its citizens to hold ultimate power over the government; not power on paper (which is what the Bill of Rights ultimately is) - real power to, if need me, actually force the government to behave.
It isn't about personal comfort or enjoyment. It's about inflicting your desires onto others, giving you a sense of power over them. It's the same reason idiots tweak/remove the exhaust system of their car so it can be heard for miles. I suggested just rigging up a computer to the tachometer and having it generate the same sound through the car's speaker system. They get the loud noise they desire, everyone else gets peace and quiet. They laughed at me.
,br> It's why the guy openly showed the jammer to everyone in the train car. If people didn't know that he was the cause, that he was the one with the power and in control, the whole thing would've been meaningless to him and thus not worth doing.
Scary thing is, I see the same thing happening more and more in politics. The polarization of the country has emboldened both the far left and far right to try to impose their hardcore beliefs onto everyone.
Gasoline is subsidized (in the U.S.) by about 2 to 2.5 cents/gallon. It's estimated the oil industry receives about $4 billion in subsidies, which sounds like a lot until you realize the country uses 137 billion gallons of gasoline a year and about 40 billion gallons of transportation diesel a year. Dividing $4 billion by that gives a subsidy of a whopping 2.2 cents/gallon.
Gasoline is taxed (in the U.S.) by about 30 cents/gallon. It goes up to about 50 cents/gallon if you include other taxes on the oil industry, not just vehicle fuel taxes.
Price per GB has resumed dropping since the effect of the Thailand flooding and HDD consolidation in 2011-2012. Quite frankly, that price adjustment upwards was needed, as the HDD industry had some of the slimmest margins in the electronics industry (around 1%-3%, vs 5%-10% for electronics overall). Slim margins = less money companies are able to devote to R&D = slower rate of capacity improvement.
And don't fret about the rate of price drops slowing down since 2009 in the graph. The y-axis on that chart needs to be on a log scale to draw that sort of conclusion.
Oh please. Apple started doing this in 2009 - before the iPad was even released. They didn't even know if their ebook reader was going to be a success. They did this for one and only one reason - to ingratiate themselves with the publishers so the publishers would line up to provide iPad versions of their books and magazines so it would have a large library for people to buy when released.. As a side effect, once the publishers were making the "best" version of their publications for the iPad, the fixed price industry-wide meant that all other ebook readers and tablets would be at a competitive disadvantage against the iPad version. You could get the "good" version on the iPad, or pay the exact same price for an inferior version on any other device.
Quick tip for those trying to argue against this. You can't simply argue "Net neutrality good!" There's a real lowered economic cost with the way Comcast delivers these services - they locally host the servers which contain the streaming data, so the data doesn't have to get to them over the Internet. Consequently it doesn't cost them any bandwidth so they can provide it to you at lower cost. And since the data never has to travel over the Internet to get to them, net neutrality doesn't really apply.
The way you have to argue against this is that they're mingling the accounting between two different operations. Unless they can prove the service costs them exactly $15/mo per user or less (minus their normal profit margin), they're essentially taking money from other cable subscribers to subsidize this service. That should be pretty easy to prove given that HBO Now just by itself is $15/mo. Thus they're pricing it below their own cost, which given the local monopoly they hold is illegal. Add in the fact that they initially refused to accept the local servers Netflix offered to them for free precisely to eliminate the bandwidth charges, and you have a slam dunk of an anti-trust case.
Fundamentally, the problem is that the company which owns the pipes is also selling stuff transported through those pipes. That gives them an unfair advantage over competing companies trying to sell stuff transported through their pipes. The solution is to prohibit the company who owns the pipes from selling anything which is sent through it. Break the company up into two separate entities - a pipe maintenance company and a pipe content company.
Erm, the municipalities are the ones who gave the cable and phone companies monopolies in the first place. Why are you trying to solve a government-created problem with more government control? Europe and Asia have better Internet than the U.S. not because of more government control, but because they were smart enough to regulate their Internet in a way which creates more competition.
The only way to get competition is to prohibit the company who owns the pipe from selling what's sent through the pipes. This is already done for natural gas and electricity in in most areas. One company owns and maintains your gas lines, but you can choose from hundreds if not thousands of gas providers. The company who owns the pipes usually also sells gas, but only through a subsidiary (in my area, that's the difference between The Gas Company and Sempra Energy), and they're required to allow other gas providers to send gas through their pipes for the same transport fee they charge their subsidiary.
Of course if you choose to buy gas from company ABC, the methane atoms that come into your house don't all come from company ABC. They all get mixed together in the pipeline. But as long as you use x cubic feet of gas, and company ABC inserts x cubit feet of gas into the system on your behalf, the numbers all balance out.
We tried a similar thing with DSL for a while - forcing local phone companies to lease their lines to other DSL providers for the same price as their own DSL service. It worked on the pricing side. What sank it was (at least in my area) Verizon gave priority to fixing physical line problems when the line used their DSL service. Getting them to fix a line problem when using a 3rd party DSL service was like pulling teeth - they'd keep blaming the DSL company for the problem. In the face of that kind of malfeasance, the only solution is to entirely prohibit the company who owns the pipe from selling what's sent through the pipes.
The Pacific Northwest gets a disproportionate share of its electricity from hydro. And hydro is the only power source cheaper than coal.
All you have to do is enter your PIN and it'll tell you how common it is.
"Base load" is the logistic equivalent of shifting fast- and far-moving traffic onto highways. By using a highway/grid, you ignore the individual variances in driving habits/power usage which is probably only 20%-50% predictable, and combine it into a statistical whole which is 90%+ predictable. The "base load" covers the predictable 90%, while dynamic peaking load plants only have to be able to cover the other 10%.
Unless you like your electronics being fried by brownouts and power surges, predictability is paramount. It's why a tightrope walker holds a huge, heavy bar. Yeah, the extra weight sucks, but the predictability it adds (by absorbing tiny short time-constant movements of his body into large time-constant movements of the bar) makes a nearly impossible task almost easy.
And nukes are slow to turn down, but as long as you have a place to dump the excess heat you can always turn them down. If renewables aren't providing enough power, you can't turn them up.
Hydro doesn't have enough capacity to provide base load. Try getting permits to build a new dam in Oregon. The environmentalists will flambe you and eat you for breakfast.
Hydro's ability to quickly throttle up or down as needed makes it the best power source for dynamic peaking load.. That's why hydro's capacity factor is only around 40%. There's a fixed amount of water every year, and they save it shape the power generation profile to match peaking load. Using hydro for base load would just create a new problem - what power source do you use for peaking load? Right now the best alternative is gas plants, which is a fossil fuel.
Geothermal still needs to be proven. The one place geothermal has worked out well (Iceland) is blessed with shallow geothermal vents. In the rest of the world, you have to drill deep into the ground to make it work. In fact, it's almost exactly the same procedure as fracking since you need to maximize the surface contact area between the rocks and the water you pump down there.
The F-16, by virtue of its light weight (the F-35 weighs 1.8x more, F-22 weighs than 2.3x more), is one of the nimblest dogfighters out there. Its thrust to weight ratio is substantially better than the F-35's. You think a 40-year fighter jet is still in service worldwide just because it's cheap to maintain?
I agree that the F-35 is a boondoggle. They tried to make a single airframe do too many different things. But if its dogfighting capability compares favorably to an F-16, I'd have to take back some of my past criticisms. This report contradicts earlier tests last year which showed the F-35 losing badly to the F-16. Is the pilot just BSing, or have they really improved its performance that much in less than a year?