No they didn't sit around for 6 months twiddling their thumbs. This leak and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill weren't like a leaky pipe under your kitchen sink. Poke a straw into a kid's juice box, then sit on the box. The juice will squirt out the straw. Now imagine 1.5 miles of dirt sitting on top of the box (or in the Deepwater Horizons spill, 2.5 miles of dirt + a mile of water). That's the amount of pressure you're trying to counteract. Any cap you try to put on from the top (at the end of the straw) is pretty much guaranteed to be blown off, destroying the top of the straw in the process. (Which is what happened with this gas leak. They made 7 attempts to cap it from the top, and all they managed to do was create a 25 ft crater.) .
The only sure way to fix it is to drill a relief well which intercepts the leaking well (straw) deep underground (a challenging engineering feat in itself), and cap it from below by injecting concrete. The concrete gets carried up by the outflowing fluid, but the weight of the concrete column (plug) extending up to the surface is what counteracts the pressure. Eventually there's enough pressure from the concrete column that the escaping fluid is at atmospheric pressure at the top, and the outflow ceases. You've plugged the leak. The problem being drilling a relief well takes time, more than drilling a normal well since you need to stop every so often, pull everything out, send instruments down, and take measurements to make sure you're still on track to intercept the leaking well. And you want to drill several relief wells so if the first one misses you're not starting over from scratch.
Incidentally, SoCal Gas petitioned to light the methane on fire. Burning methane (CH4) produces CO2 and 2 H2O. But each molecule of methane is about 30x more potent as a greenhouse gas than each molecule of CO2, so you're actually reducing the environmental damage considerably by burning the methane. Oil wells and refineries regularly burn off the methane that percolates out because until a few years ago when oil (energy) prices skyrocketed to $100/bbl, it wasn't worth the cost to capture it. California state regulators denied their request, worried the fire could get out of control.
Please understand, I'm not trying to give SoCal Gas a free pass here. They removed the surface safety valve on the well because it was leaking, and didn't bother replacing it because it wasn't near anything important. Best guess right now is the casing or a valve further down failed due to age. So the cause is probably failure to maintain the well and equipment.
This sort of thing really underscores the need of an instant runoff voting system. It's very possible a majority of Republican voters don't want Trump, but they're splitting their vote among the other candidates thus allowing Trump to win by simply getting a plurality of the votes.
With the simplest instant runoff system, you rank the candidates in the order you like them. If your preferred candidate doesn't win, he's eliminated and your vote goes to your next-preferred candidate. If he doesn't win, he's eliminated and your vote goes to your next-preferred candidate. And so on until it's narrowed down to just two candidates, one of whom mathematically will win by an absolute majority, not just a plurality.
Not by dollar spent, it isn't. Most of the money is on the private side
About half is right. 8% of GDP is public spending, 8.9% is private spending.
The private side of the US health care system spends vastly more than any European or Asian country, that is beyond dispute.
Incorrect. The OECD average for total healthcare spending is 9.3% of GDP. So 22 of the 33 non-U.S. OECD countries spend more on healthcare than just the private sector of the U.S. 24 OECD countries spend more than just the public sector of the U.S. If you're trying to portray private healthcare in the U.S. as the villain, you're going to fail miserably.
It's worth pointing out that pre-Obamacare, the amount of public money the U.S. spent per capita on health care was almost the same as Canada. In 2004, the U.S. government actually spent more per capita on healthcare than Canada. If you wanted a Canadian-style single payer system, the U.S. government was already spending enough money for it. A point whitewashed by the media and the Democrats to help push Obamacare through. (Just like they whitewash how big Medicare has grown. It's the second biggest chunk of the Federal budget now - nearly 1.7x military spending.)
The problem with the U.S. healthcare system isn't something with a quick and simple fix like a single payer system. If you think that, you clearly have only been listening to the talking points of your party, and not digging up your own numbers and analyzing. The problem is deeper and more endemic - inefficiencies and corruption within the small gears and cogs of the entire system which need to be individually rooted out and addressed.
You may be surprised by Trump. Despite the media trying to portray him as batshit crazy, he's actually the most politically moderate of all the candidates I've seen (Paul and Christie were the others, but they've dropped out). Aside from a huge ego and a few really off-the-wall ideas the media keeps trumping up (no pun intended), his political views actually fall right smack dab in the center of the American mainstream. A lot of my friends on the left can't see this because they think anyone to the right of them is extremist (not a dig at them - many of my friends on the right think anyone to the left of them is extremist also).
I personally don't think Trump would make a good President, but I would not underestimate his appeal to the huge chunk of voters in the center. If he becomes the nominee, I'm actually curious to see if the increasing polarization of the country is real, or just an effect of increasing control by the two parties and polarized media outlets.
I buy the blu-ray of a movie I like, then download it off a pirate website. I don't even own a blu-ray player. It's just that I have a home media server and would prefer to have movies in a format I can stream throughout my house. But Hollywood insists on only letting you stream movies over the Internet. No simple way to have a local copy which plays on all my devices.
At first I borrowed a friend's BD drive and tried ripping the blu-rays and re-encoding the movies to a smaller size (raw rip of the LotR trilogy was nearly 200 GB). After struggling with merging the two-disc parts into one movie file and keeping subtitles synchronized, I threw in the towel and just downloaded it from a pirate site. Someone much better at video encoding than I had already licked those problems, plus his encode was smaller yet higher quality than mine.
So I ditched my plans to buy my own BD drive for ripping, and now I just pirate the movies after buying the blu-ray. Though I'm not sure you can really call it pirating, since I own the blu-ray which by Hollywood's insistence that I'm buying a license not a copy means I'm licensed to own and view the content. What does Hollywood think will happen to folks who used Slysoft's software to rip their own discs now? If the lack of updates means the software won't be able to rip future blu-ray releases, those folks are going to start doing what I'm doing - buying the blu-ray and downloading the movie from a pirate site. Only some of them won't be as honest as me and will quickly realize they don't really need to buy the blu-ray in the first place.
BTW, this inverts the backup argument. The blu-ray disc becomes my backup copy, safely stored in its case. Heck, I haven't even removed the shrinkwrap off of most of them. Though I prefer to think of them as a physical certificate of the license to the movie, and my backup would be downloading the movie off the net again.
That's revenue. You have to subtract operating expenses. Google's profit per quarter is about $4 billion.
France has a population of 66 million people. Assume 2/3 of those use Google (the rest being too young or luddites) and you get 44 million users. Figure Google has a billion users, so France accounts for 4.4% of that.
If you look at Google's growth profile, it more or less forms a triangle going back to about 2005. So assuming constant profit margin, total Google profit has been about $4 billion * 4 quarters * 11 years / 2 = $88 billion.
4.4% of $88 billion is $3.87 billion. So France wants to tax Google at a $1.76 / $3.87 = 45.5% tax rate.
The limited range is what allows these open frequencies to remain open. Because the power is limited, your neighbor's wifi isn't able to overwhelm your wifi, and the two can reasonably co-exist.
If you want greater range, you need to move to a directional antenna. Currently, this means something like a Yagi. But there's hope on the horizon. Newer wifi chipsets are using multiple receivers (the math for a receiver is the same as for a transmitter, so they are interchangeable). Right now it's only used to separate out multipath signals to increase bandwidth. But in the future, this should transition to full phased array antennas.
By mathematically "pointing" the antenna directly at the antenna you're communicating with, you're able to reject noise coming from other directions and thus increase range, without increasing power. Likewise, because other people's antennas are picking up only directional signals, your transmissions will not interfere with them unless your signal path happens to be parallel and in-line with their signal path. So Shannon's Law on the limits of information bandwidth no longer apply either (well, it still applies, but your noise floor is now directional so multiple people can use the same channel without creating noise for each other, essentially acting as if each has their own independent channel even though they're broadcasting at the same frequency.)
That's actually the whole point. Inflation discourages saving, encourages investing. More precisely, by making you lose money (or not make as much money) if you just put it into a "safe" investment like a savings account, it lowers the threshold at which putting your money into a riskier investment becomes worth it.
Why do that? Because on average, those riskier investments pan out. And those riskier investments are what drive technological progress. In other words, inflation accelerates the rate of technological advancement (and thus economic development). Without inflation, a dollar put in a piggy bank in 1980 might still be worth a dollar, instead of 35 cents. But we'd probably be at about circa-1990 level of technology today, instead of 2016 technology. You think the entire reason it took 120 years to go from the first manned balloon flight to the first manned powered flight, but just 65 years from the first manned powered flight to sending man to the moon, is because we're just better and smarter than people 100 years ago?
Cancer is the fountain of youth. Your cells are programmed to reproduce up to a certain point, stop reproducing, serve a function, then die. Cancer is what you get when that programming goes awry and the cell doesn't stop reproducing. Sometimes, even the mechanism which causes cell line to die after a few reproductions stops working, and the cancerous cell line can live forever.
While the change could be triggered by a virus, it's probably not necessary. Every cell already contains the mechanism by which it can become cancerous. All it takes is the "stop reproducing" part of the programming to malfunction for any reason. (A cancer which has metastasized has also had a breakdown in the "stay in this location" part of its cellular programming. The cells unanchor themselves and travel to other parts of the body, thus causing the cancer to spread.)
Maybe the half who've actually read the news reports about this case, instead of what others have been blogging about the case, and thus know that this isn't the shooter's phone. The phone belongs to the San Bernardino government. It was assigned to the shooter as a work phone.
All the government is asking is for Apple to help assist it bypass the encryption on its own phone. In other words, this isn't a privacy issue like it's being made out to be. This is a company refusing to help an owner bypass a lost password on their own device, even though the circumstances are extraordinary.
If this were the shooter's personal phone, then I would 100% be supporting Apple. In fact I did support them up until I learned it wasn't the shooter's phone. Refusing to help the phone's owner under extraordinary circumstances is just asinine. What next? You lend your car to a friend who then goes missing, and OnStar refuses to help you or the police track down the car's whereabouts because it would violate your friend's privacy? Owner's right's have to trump privacy rights in situations involving items they own.
The Edge as it's marketed is a gimmick, but it was developed to solve a real problem. The larger phones are very popular in Asia among women, who put a nice cover on them and carry them around in their purses (as opposed to men who want a smaller phone which fits in their pocket). The problem is, what happens when you get a text? You have to open your purse, take the phone out, flip open the cover, then read the text only to discover it was something that you could read/deal with later, close the cover, put the phone back in your purse, and close the purse. With an Edge, you hear the text chime, crack open your purse and peek at the text preview on the edge display, see it can wait, and close your purse again.
Just enable 2-factor authentication on your Gmail/Google account. (Note: I linked to Authy because I recommend it over Google Authenticator. Authy requires you to enter a passcode or password to view an authentication code. Authenticator will just spit out the authentication code if you're in possession of the account owner's device. Kinda defeats the purpose if you're trying to protect yourself if your phone should be stolen.)
That's not the case here. The phone belongs to the San Bernardino government. It was assigned to the shooter as his work phone.
The government is just asking for Apple's help to recover the info off a device they legally own, above and beyond the help Apple would normally provide an owner who accidentally locks himself out of his own phone, because of the special circumstances. Despite all the rhetoric about privacy rights, they're not relevant to this case. It isn't the shooter's phone. Whatever privacy rights he had to info on his phone, he waived when he decided to store it on his employer's phone instead of his personal phone.
The government got a court to certify that these programs were legal. A secret court whose decisions were (originally) never seen by the public, but a still a court. By our governmental system, that makes it OK. The legislative branch passed the program, the executive branch implemented it, and the judicial branch OKed it. So in that respect, the government did in fact play by the rules. Just because you disagree with the court's decision doesn't mean the government broke the rules.
The only wrinkle is that because it was a secret court, there was no opportunity for those impacted (The People) to appeal that decision all the way up to the Supreme Court on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. Frankly I'm not sure which way the SCotUS would go. On the one hand, these programs pretty much seem to be an unwarranted search. OTOH, the SCotUS has given the government a fairly wide rein when it comes to keeping secrets when they claim it's in the best interest of the public.
The primary reason for the Space Shuttle program's existence was to service these spy satellites in orbit. Originally in the design phase it was to reload film, but as digital sensors became realistic the mission changed to refueling, upgrading, and maintaining. That was the design criteria which dictated the size of the payload bay.
I don't think it worked though. Most spy satellites are launched into a polar orbit to maximize coverage of the earth's surface. An equatorial orbit like out of Kennedy only covers about a 30% band near the equator. You can still see stuff further north or south, but only at oblique angles and greater distances. U.S. polar orbit launches happen out of Vandenberg, California. The USAF spent a couple billion dollars upgrading the facilities there so the Shuttle could launch out of there, but never actually did a Shuttle launch.
The loss of these USAF maintenance missions is partly what doomed the Shuttle. The economics of the Shuttle were calculated assuming almost weekly launches. That way you could amortize the cost of the facilities and support staff across all those missions, and the cost per mission became lower than having your rockets burn up on re-entry. But the Shuttle only averaged about 8 launches per year, meaning these amortized costs were over 6x higher than planned, turning the Shuttle into the most expensive launch system ever built.
Doesn't work like that. You can't increase resolution by combining images. Only aperture works. So you cannot replace a large telescope with multiple independently targetable smaller telescopes.
You can combine multiple smaller scopes by using them as if they were part of the mirror of a large telescope (imagine covering up all of the mirror of a large telescope except for two spots near the edges). That makes an interferometer and gives you the angular resolution of the larger scope (assuming the smaller scopes are positioned near the edges of the mirror of what would be the larger scope - i.e. they still have the aperture of the larger scope), but the light gathering area of the smaller scopes. The light from the two scopes has to be combined optically though. The phase information is crucial (the two mirrors have to be aligned to a fraction of a wavelength of light).
Giving up light gathering area is not a trade-off astronomers usually want to make, but probably isn't an issue for spy satellites viewing targets bathed in sunlight. And there's been remarkable progress in the sensitivity of light sensors in the last two decades, so loss of light-gathering area probably isn't an issue for the spy satellite guys. That's probably what happened. The next gen spy satellites are probably interferometers using a synthetic aperture larger than the old 2.4 meter mirrors to achieve higher target resolution (the 2.4m mirrors were already good enough to resolve down to about 5 inches). And it was a waste of money for them to send up another spy satellite using the "older" technology, so they donated the components to NASA, where the light-gathering area might still be useful.
It's too bad for the FBI since it turns their tactic into a one-trick pony. But I believe the strategy around that in the gangster days was to not use the testimony of the stool pigeon directly in court against a suspect. Rather, use the info learned to set up other stings which would generate enough evidence to charge the suspect. Then they wouldn't have to reveal who their inside source was.
FYI, ctrl-l is the shortcut to select the URL bar in all the major browsers. That's a good way to insure you're not typing in some search engine's form.
If he was in fact typing in the URL bar and getting a search engine result, it sounds like he had some malware installed on his browser which redirected all URLs and searches to their own website.
Gotta be careful just how true to life the stories are. To quote Starman (an alien who becomes human and tries to get around), "I watched you very carefully. Red light stop, green light go, yellow light go very fast."
I'm all for a right to privacy. But Mrs. Adams, TFS, and TFAs have all made the same mistake I'm seeing repeated over and over in this case.
It is not the shooter's phone!
The phone belongs to his employer - the San Bernardino government. They're the ones who paid for it and the service. It was issued to the shooter, presumably for work-related use only, but the employer chose to overlook personal use like usually happens.
Apple isn't protecting our right to privacy. They're protecting their right to refuse to help the rightful owner of a phone figure out WTF a criminal did while in possession of their property. If their current stance holds up in court, think what it means if your phone is stolen. Apple or the carrier could know exactly where it is because it's reporting its GPS coordinates back to them, they will not be able to tell you, the rightful owner, or law enforcement where the phone is. Because the privacy of the criminal in possession of your property outweighs your rights as the property owner.
With all the rhetoric surrounding this case, I didn't learn a crucial fact until reading this CNN article - It is not the shooter's phone!
The phone belongs to his employer - the San Bernardino government. This is like a homeowner letting someone stay in his home, and the guest changes the locks. The guest then kills a bunch of people and himself. The homeowner wants to get back in and (clumsily) resets the lock so the old key won't work even if they managed to find it. They then ask the lock maker (Apple) to help them unlock the door, and Apple refuses.
I'm all for keeping the government out of my encrypted data. But this is the wrong case to fight that fight.
Wind capacity factor is about 25%. It varies from about 20% in non-choice locations to about 30% in good areas. Offshore is higher. Especially good areas offshore often hit 40%, while the best areas (off Scotland) can hit 60%.
The way load works, nuclear and coal provide base load. Renewables provide whatever they can on top of that. Gas and especially hydro handles the dynamic load - making generation match actual demand. So nuclear not being good at following the exact load curve is not a problem. It only becomes a problem if you're like most renewable fans who insist that only hydro, wind, and solar generate all the electricity.
The best way to match demand is (at least) one base load source + (at least) one dynamic generation source. Variable (unpredictable) sources like wind and solar can be added n on top of base load as an option. They reduce the base generation requirement, but put more stress on dynamic generation since it may be called upon to cover a shortfall in the variable source. Consequently, they're the least desirable power source - you still need a base load generation source and a dynamic load generation source.
Deduplication is the RAM hog (it's also a performance killer). I run a ZFS file server (FreeNAS) on just 5 GB of RAM with deduplication off, despite FreeNAS recommending 8 GB. I haven't had any problems (in fact the logs rarely show it going above 2-3 GB of usage - only when I copy a huge number of files to it at once does it go above that).
Deduplication sounds cool and all, but if you don't have a heavy need for it (e.g. you're running 20 identical virtual machines with their files stored on ZFS), just save yourself a lot of headaches and turn it off. Buying additional hard drive space is cheaper than buying extra RAM and processor power to deal with deduplication.
It's not quite that simple. There's an apocryphal story that right after the Cold War ended, senior officials from the KGB and CIA met one night for drinks and got to talking about their espionage exploits. The CIA people said how easy it must've been for the KGB to infiltrate an open society like the U.S. Able to blend in with the population, travel freely, and get access to documents while posing as regular citizens. The KGB people said on the contrary it was extraordinarily difficult. While the U.S. secrets were mostly all out there, they were mixed in with an ocean of tabloid and conspiracy publications an open society produces. They had to waste tremendous resources trying to figure out of that National Enquirer story about the U.S. having captured aliens and their UFO was made up, or if there really was some truth behind it.
That's what you have to deal with with open publications. Yeah western inellignece can read Dabiq. But ISIS also knows that they can read it. Thus it becomes a perfect platform for feeding western intelligence agencies disinformation. Anything that's openly published that way has to be taken with a huge grain of salt unless it's corroborated by other intelligence. The reason why intelligence agencies are so desperate to break crypto is because if you're encrypting something, you're presumably doing so because it contains information you don't want foreign intelligence agencies to read. Thus it is precisely the type of stuff intelligence agencies want to be able to read.
That's not to say we should roll over and let NSA put backdoors in everything. If they get that, then ISIS knows and can start poisoning their encrypted communications with disinformation, while pulling their real communication behind a higher level of encryption. No, in order for what the NSA wants to work, they would have to insert backdoors but also keep those backdoors secret from the public. My best guess is the western intelligence agencies are raising the spectre of backdoors in encryption software they know they can't break, in the hopes it scares groups like ISIS into using different encryption tools. Perhaps ones they can already break. Or maybe ISIS will try to write their own encryption software, which is notoriously difficult and can easily result in flaws which can be exploited by intelligence agencies to help them crack it.
And in case anyone is wondering, no she didn't get the ransomware by clicking on some random email attachment. One of the sales staff got it first, and the ransomware spread itself by using his email to spam people in his address book. She thought she was opening a report sent by one of her salesmen. The employee was honest enough to tell IT about it soon after he realized what was happening, and they got the word out to everyone not to open any email attachments. They managed to stop it at only four computers infected.
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No they didn't sit around for 6 months twiddling their thumbs. This leak and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill weren't like a leaky pipe under your kitchen sink. Poke a straw into a kid's juice box, then sit on the box. The juice will squirt out the straw. Now imagine 1.5 miles of dirt sitting on top of the box (or in the Deepwater Horizons spill, 2.5 miles of dirt + a mile of water). That's the amount of pressure you're trying to counteract. Any cap you try to put on from the top (at the end of the straw) is pretty much guaranteed to be blown off, destroying the top of the straw in the process. (Which is what happened with this gas leak. They made 7 attempts to cap it from the top, and all they managed to do was create a 25 ft crater.) .
The only sure way to fix it is to drill a relief well which intercepts the leaking well (straw) deep underground (a challenging engineering feat in itself), and cap it from below by injecting concrete. The concrete gets carried up by the outflowing fluid, but the weight of the concrete column (plug) extending up to the surface is what counteracts the pressure. Eventually there's enough pressure from the concrete column that the escaping fluid is at atmospheric pressure at the top, and the outflow ceases. You've plugged the leak. The problem being drilling a relief well takes time, more than drilling a normal well since you need to stop every so often, pull everything out, send instruments down, and take measurements to make sure you're still on track to intercept the leaking well. And you want to drill several relief wells so if the first one misses you're not starting over from scratch.
Incidentally, SoCal Gas petitioned to light the methane on fire. Burning methane (CH4) produces CO2 and 2 H2O. But each molecule of methane is about 30x more potent as a greenhouse gas than each molecule of CO2, so you're actually reducing the environmental damage considerably by burning the methane. Oil wells and refineries regularly burn off the methane that percolates out because until a few years ago when oil (energy) prices skyrocketed to $100/bbl, it wasn't worth the cost to capture it. California state regulators denied their request, worried the fire could get out of control.
Please understand, I'm not trying to give SoCal Gas a free pass here. They removed the surface safety valve on the well because it was leaking, and didn't bother replacing it because it wasn't near anything important. Best guess right now is the casing or a valve further down failed due to age. So the cause is probably failure to maintain the well and equipment.
This sort of thing really underscores the need of an instant runoff voting system. It's very possible a majority of Republican voters don't want Trump, but they're splitting their vote among the other candidates thus allowing Trump to win by simply getting a plurality of the votes.
With the simplest instant runoff system, you rank the candidates in the order you like them. If your preferred candidate doesn't win, he's eliminated and your vote goes to your next-preferred candidate. If he doesn't win, he's eliminated and your vote goes to your next-preferred candidate. And so on until it's narrowed down to just two candidates, one of whom mathematically will win by an absolute majority, not just a plurality.
About half is right. 8% of GDP is public spending, 8.9% is private spending.
Incorrect. The OECD average for total healthcare spending is 9.3% of GDP. So 22 of the 33 non-U.S. OECD countries spend more on healthcare than just the private sector of the U.S. 24 OECD countries spend more than just the public sector of the U.S. If you're trying to portray private healthcare in the U.S. as the villain, you're going to fail miserably.
It's worth pointing out that pre-Obamacare, the amount of public money the U.S. spent per capita on health care was almost the same as Canada. In 2004, the U.S. government actually spent more per capita on healthcare than Canada. If you wanted a Canadian-style single payer system, the U.S. government was already spending enough money for it. A point whitewashed by the media and the Democrats to help push Obamacare through. (Just like they whitewash how big Medicare has grown. It's the second biggest chunk of the Federal budget now - nearly 1.7x military spending.)
The problem with the U.S. healthcare system isn't something with a quick and simple fix like a single payer system. If you think that, you clearly have only been listening to the talking points of your party, and not digging up your own numbers and analyzing. The problem is deeper and more endemic - inefficiencies and corruption within the small gears and cogs of the entire system which need to be individually rooted out and addressed.
You may be surprised by Trump. Despite the media trying to portray him as batshit crazy, he's actually the most politically moderate of all the candidates I've seen (Paul and Christie were the others, but they've dropped out). Aside from a huge ego and a few really off-the-wall ideas the media keeps trumping up (no pun intended), his political views actually fall right smack dab in the center of the American mainstream. A lot of my friends on the left can't see this because they think anyone to the right of them is extremist (not a dig at them - many of my friends on the right think anyone to the left of them is extremist also).
I personally don't think Trump would make a good President, but I would not underestimate his appeal to the huge chunk of voters in the center. If he becomes the nominee, I'm actually curious to see if the increasing polarization of the country is real, or just an effect of increasing control by the two parties and polarized media outlets.
I buy the blu-ray of a movie I like, then download it off a pirate website. I don't even own a blu-ray player. It's just that I have a home media server and would prefer to have movies in a format I can stream throughout my house. But Hollywood insists on only letting you stream movies over the Internet. No simple way to have a local copy which plays on all my devices.
At first I borrowed a friend's BD drive and tried ripping the blu-rays and re-encoding the movies to a smaller size (raw rip of the LotR trilogy was nearly 200 GB). After struggling with merging the two-disc parts into one movie file and keeping subtitles synchronized, I threw in the towel and just downloaded it from a pirate site. Someone much better at video encoding than I had already licked those problems, plus his encode was smaller yet higher quality than mine.
So I ditched my plans to buy my own BD drive for ripping, and now I just pirate the movies after buying the blu-ray. Though I'm not sure you can really call it pirating, since I own the blu-ray which by Hollywood's insistence that I'm buying a license not a copy means I'm licensed to own and view the content. What does Hollywood think will happen to folks who used Slysoft's software to rip their own discs now? If the lack of updates means the software won't be able to rip future blu-ray releases, those folks are going to start doing what I'm doing - buying the blu-ray and downloading the movie from a pirate site. Only some of them won't be as honest as me and will quickly realize they don't really need to buy the blu-ray in the first place.
BTW, this inverts the backup argument. The blu-ray disc becomes my backup copy, safely stored in its case. Heck, I haven't even removed the shrinkwrap off of most of them. Though I prefer to think of them as a physical certificate of the license to the movie, and my backup would be downloading the movie off the net again.
That's revenue. You have to subtract operating expenses. Google's profit per quarter is about $4 billion.
France has a population of 66 million people. Assume 2/3 of those use Google (the rest being too young or luddites) and you get 44 million users. Figure Google has a billion users, so France accounts for 4.4% of that.
If you look at Google's growth profile, it more or less forms a triangle going back to about 2005. So assuming constant profit margin, total Google profit has been about $4 billion * 4 quarters * 11 years / 2 = $88 billion.
4.4% of $88 billion is $3.87 billion. So France wants to tax Google at a $1.76 / $3.87 = 45.5% tax rate.
The limited range is what allows these open frequencies to remain open. Because the power is limited, your neighbor's wifi isn't able to overwhelm your wifi, and the two can reasonably co-exist.
If you want greater range, you need to move to a directional antenna. Currently, this means something like a Yagi. But there's hope on the horizon. Newer wifi chipsets are using multiple receivers (the math for a receiver is the same as for a transmitter, so they are interchangeable). Right now it's only used to separate out multipath signals to increase bandwidth. But in the future, this should transition to full phased array antennas.
By mathematically "pointing" the antenna directly at the antenna you're communicating with, you're able to reject noise coming from other directions and thus increase range, without increasing power. Likewise, because other people's antennas are picking up only directional signals, your transmissions will not interfere with them unless your signal path happens to be parallel and in-line with their signal path. So Shannon's Law on the limits of information bandwidth no longer apply either (well, it still applies, but your noise floor is now directional so multiple people can use the same channel without creating noise for each other, essentially acting as if each has their own independent channel even though they're broadcasting at the same frequency.)
That's actually the whole point. Inflation discourages saving, encourages investing. More precisely, by making you lose money (or not make as much money) if you just put it into a "safe" investment like a savings account, it lowers the threshold at which putting your money into a riskier investment becomes worth it.
Why do that? Because on average, those riskier investments pan out. And those riskier investments are what drive technological progress. In other words, inflation accelerates the rate of technological advancement (and thus economic development). Without inflation, a dollar put in a piggy bank in 1980 might still be worth a dollar, instead of 35 cents. But we'd probably be at about circa-1990 level of technology today, instead of 2016 technology. You think the entire reason it took 120 years to go from the first manned balloon flight to the first manned powered flight, but just 65 years from the first manned powered flight to sending man to the moon, is because we're just better and smarter than people 100 years ago?
Cancer is the fountain of youth. Your cells are programmed to reproduce up to a certain point, stop reproducing, serve a function, then die. Cancer is what you get when that programming goes awry and the cell doesn't stop reproducing. Sometimes, even the mechanism which causes cell line to die after a few reproductions stops working, and the cancerous cell line can live forever.
While the change could be triggered by a virus, it's probably not necessary. Every cell already contains the mechanism by which it can become cancerous. All it takes is the "stop reproducing" part of the programming to malfunction for any reason. (A cancer which has metastasized has also had a breakdown in the "stay in this location" part of its cellular programming. The cells unanchor themselves and travel to other parts of the body, thus causing the cancer to spread.)
Maybe the half who've actually read the news reports about this case, instead of what others have been blogging about the case, and thus know that this isn't the shooter's phone . The phone belongs to the San Bernardino government. It was assigned to the shooter as a work phone.
All the government is asking is for Apple to help assist it bypass the encryption on its own phone. In other words, this isn't a privacy issue like it's being made out to be. This is a company refusing to help an owner bypass a lost password on their own device, even though the circumstances are extraordinary.
If this were the shooter's personal phone, then I would 100% be supporting Apple. In fact I did support them up until I learned it wasn't the shooter's phone. Refusing to help the phone's owner under extraordinary circumstances is just asinine. What next? You lend your car to a friend who then goes missing, and OnStar refuses to help you or the police track down the car's whereabouts because it would violate your friend's privacy? Owner's right's have to trump privacy rights in situations involving items they own.
The Edge as it's marketed is a gimmick, but it was developed to solve a real problem. The larger phones are very popular in Asia among women, who put a nice cover on them and carry them around in their purses (as opposed to men who want a smaller phone which fits in their pocket). The problem is, what happens when you get a text? You have to open your purse, take the phone out, flip open the cover, then read the text only to discover it was something that you could read/deal with later, close the cover, put the phone back in your purse, and close the purse. With an Edge, you hear the text chime, crack open your purse and peek at the text preview on the edge display, see it can wait, and close your purse again.
Just enable 2-factor authentication on your Gmail/Google account. (Note: I linked to Authy because I recommend it over Google Authenticator. Authy requires you to enter a passcode or password to view an authentication code. Authenticator will just spit out the authentication code if you're in possession of the account owner's device. Kinda defeats the purpose if you're trying to protect yourself if your phone should be stolen.)
That's not the case here. The phone belongs to the San Bernardino government. It was assigned to the shooter as his work phone.
The government is just asking for Apple's help to recover the info off a device they legally own, above and beyond the help Apple would normally provide an owner who accidentally locks himself out of his own phone, because of the special circumstances. Despite all the rhetoric about privacy rights, they're not relevant to this case. It isn't the shooter's phone. Whatever privacy rights he had to info on his phone, he waived when he decided to store it on his employer's phone instead of his personal phone.
The government got a court to certify that these programs were legal. A secret court whose decisions were (originally) never seen by the public, but a still a court. By our governmental system, that makes it OK. The legislative branch passed the program, the executive branch implemented it, and the judicial branch OKed it. So in that respect, the government did in fact play by the rules. Just because you disagree with the court's decision doesn't mean the government broke the rules.
The only wrinkle is that because it was a secret court, there was no opportunity for those impacted (The People) to appeal that decision all the way up to the Supreme Court on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. Frankly I'm not sure which way the SCotUS would go. On the one hand, these programs pretty much seem to be an unwarranted search. OTOH, the SCotUS has given the government a fairly wide rein when it comes to keeping secrets when they claim it's in the best interest of the public.
The primary reason for the Space Shuttle program's existence was to service these spy satellites in orbit. Originally in the design phase it was to reload film, but as digital sensors became realistic the mission changed to refueling, upgrading, and maintaining. That was the design criteria which dictated the size of the payload bay.
I don't think it worked though. Most spy satellites are launched into a polar orbit to maximize coverage of the earth's surface. An equatorial orbit like out of Kennedy only covers about a 30% band near the equator. You can still see stuff further north or south, but only at oblique angles and greater distances. U.S. polar orbit launches happen out of Vandenberg, California. The USAF spent a couple billion dollars upgrading the facilities there so the Shuttle could launch out of there, but never actually did a Shuttle launch.
The loss of these USAF maintenance missions is partly what doomed the Shuttle. The economics of the Shuttle were calculated assuming almost weekly launches. That way you could amortize the cost of the facilities and support staff across all those missions, and the cost per mission became lower than having your rockets burn up on re-entry. But the Shuttle only averaged about 8 launches per year, meaning these amortized costs were over 6x higher than planned, turning the Shuttle into the most expensive launch system ever built.
Doesn't work like that. You can't increase resolution by combining images. Only aperture works. So you cannot replace a large telescope with multiple independently targetable smaller telescopes.
You can combine multiple smaller scopes by using them as if they were part of the mirror of a large telescope (imagine covering up all of the mirror of a large telescope except for two spots near the edges). That makes an interferometer and gives you the angular resolution of the larger scope (assuming the smaller scopes are positioned near the edges of the mirror of what would be the larger scope - i.e. they still have the aperture of the larger scope), but the light gathering area of the smaller scopes. The light from the two scopes has to be combined optically though. The phase information is crucial (the two mirrors have to be aligned to a fraction of a wavelength of light).
Giving up light gathering area is not a trade-off astronomers usually want to make, but probably isn't an issue for spy satellites viewing targets bathed in sunlight. And there's been remarkable progress in the sensitivity of light sensors in the last two decades, so loss of light-gathering area probably isn't an issue for the spy satellite guys. That's probably what happened. The next gen spy satellites are probably interferometers using a synthetic aperture larger than the old 2.4 meter mirrors to achieve higher target resolution (the 2.4m mirrors were already good enough to resolve down to about 5 inches). And it was a waste of money for them to send up another spy satellite using the "older" technology, so they donated the components to NASA, where the light-gathering area might still be useful.
Yeah, the court seems to be following the same line of reasoning which got the source code for breathalyzers released.
It's too bad for the FBI since it turns their tactic into a one-trick pony. But I believe the strategy around that in the gangster days was to not use the testimony of the stool pigeon directly in court against a suspect. Rather, use the info learned to set up other stings which would generate enough evidence to charge the suspect. Then they wouldn't have to reveal who their inside source was.
FYI, ctrl-l is the shortcut to select the URL bar in all the major browsers. That's a good way to insure you're not typing in some search engine's form.
If he was in fact typing in the URL bar and getting a search engine result, it sounds like he had some malware installed on his browser which redirected all URLs and searches to their own website.
Gotta be careful just how true to life the stories are. To quote Starman (an alien who becomes human and tries to get around), "I watched you very carefully. Red light stop, green light go, yellow light go very fast."
I'm all for a right to privacy. But Mrs. Adams, TFS, and TFAs have all made the same mistake I'm seeing repeated over and over in this case. It is not the shooter's phone!
The phone belongs to his employer - the San Bernardino government. They're the ones who paid for it and the service. It was issued to the shooter, presumably for work-related use only, but the employer chose to overlook personal use like usually happens.
Apple isn't protecting our right to privacy. They're protecting their right to refuse to help the rightful owner of a phone figure out WTF a criminal did while in possession of their property. If their current stance holds up in court, think what it means if your phone is stolen. Apple or the carrier could know exactly where it is because it's reporting its GPS coordinates back to them, they will not be able to tell you, the rightful owner, or law enforcement where the phone is. Because the privacy of the criminal in possession of your property outweighs your rights as the property owner.
With all the rhetoric surrounding this case, I didn't learn a crucial fact until reading this CNN article - It is not the shooter's phone!
The phone belongs to his employer - the San Bernardino government. This is like a homeowner letting someone stay in his home, and the guest changes the locks. The guest then kills a bunch of people and himself. The homeowner wants to get back in and (clumsily) resets the lock so the old key won't work even if they managed to find it. They then ask the lock maker (Apple) to help them unlock the door, and Apple refuses.
I'm all for keeping the government out of my encrypted data. But this is the wrong case to fight that fight.
Nuclear capacity factor is about 90%.
Wind capacity factor is about 25%. It varies from about 20% in non-choice locations to about 30% in good areas. Offshore is higher. Especially good areas offshore often hit 40%, while the best areas (off Scotland) can hit 60%.
The way load works, nuclear and coal provide base load. Renewables provide whatever they can on top of that. Gas and especially hydro handles the dynamic load - making generation match actual demand. So nuclear not being good at following the exact load curve is not a problem. It only becomes a problem if you're like most renewable fans who insist that only hydro, wind, and solar generate all the electricity.
The best way to match demand is (at least) one base load source + (at least) one dynamic generation source. Variable (unpredictable) sources like wind and solar can be added n on top of base load as an option. They reduce the base generation requirement, but put more stress on dynamic generation since it may be called upon to cover a shortfall in the variable source. Consequently, they're the least desirable power source - you still need a base load generation source and a dynamic load generation source.
Deduplication is the RAM hog (it's also a performance killer). I run a ZFS file server (FreeNAS) on just 5 GB of RAM with deduplication off, despite FreeNAS recommending 8 GB. I haven't had any problems (in fact the logs rarely show it going above 2-3 GB of usage - only when I copy a huge number of files to it at once does it go above that).
Deduplication sounds cool and all, but if you don't have a heavy need for it (e.g. you're running 20 identical virtual machines with their files stored on ZFS), just save yourself a lot of headaches and turn it off. Buying additional hard drive space is cheaper than buying extra RAM and processor power to deal with deduplication.
It's not quite that simple. There's an apocryphal story that right after the Cold War ended, senior officials from the KGB and CIA met one night for drinks and got to talking about their espionage exploits. The CIA people said how easy it must've been for the KGB to infiltrate an open society like the U.S. Able to blend in with the population, travel freely, and get access to documents while posing as regular citizens. The KGB people said on the contrary it was extraordinarily difficult. While the U.S. secrets were mostly all out there, they were mixed in with an ocean of tabloid and conspiracy publications an open society produces. They had to waste tremendous resources trying to figure out of that National Enquirer story about the U.S. having captured aliens and their UFO was made up, or if there really was some truth behind it.
That's what you have to deal with with open publications. Yeah western inellignece can read Dabiq. But ISIS also knows that they can read it. Thus it becomes a perfect platform for feeding western intelligence agencies disinformation. Anything that's openly published that way has to be taken with a huge grain of salt unless it's corroborated by other intelligence. The reason why intelligence agencies are so desperate to break crypto is because if you're encrypting something, you're presumably doing so because it contains information you don't want foreign intelligence agencies to read. Thus it is precisely the type of stuff intelligence agencies want to be able to read.
That's not to say we should roll over and let NSA put backdoors in everything. If they get that, then ISIS knows and can start poisoning their encrypted communications with disinformation, while pulling their real communication behind a higher level of encryption. No, in order for what the NSA wants to work, they would have to insert backdoors but also keep those backdoors secret from the public. My best guess is the western intelligence agencies are raising the spectre of backdoors in encryption software they know they can't break, in the hopes it scares groups like ISIS into using different encryption tools. Perhaps ones they can already break. Or maybe ISIS will try to write their own encryption software, which is notoriously difficult and can easily result in flaws which can be exploited by intelligence agencies to help them crack it.
And in case anyone is wondering, no she didn't get the ransomware by clicking on some random email attachment. One of the sales staff got it first, and the ransomware spread itself by using his email to spam people in his address book. She thought she was opening a report sent by one of her salesmen. The employee was honest enough to tell IT about it soon after he realized what was happening, and they got the word out to everyone not to open any email attachments. They managed to stop it at only four computers infected.