A friend of mine runs a multi-million dollar construction supply company and her work computer got hit with a ransomware virus. As she is manager/accountant, it was pretty serious. Fortunately she had a competent IT staff which regularly backed up her system . So they just pulled her computer offline (so it couldn't spread to other systems), and restored everything to a new computer (this is why companies like to buy a bunch of identical Dell systems). And she was back in business the next day.
Except for one file which she had been working on the day the ransomware hit, and thus hadn't been backed up. As it turned out, the ransomware authors had programmed it to allow the victim to decrypt one file - to prove that it could in fact be decrypted, and hadn't just been deleted. So she of course chose that file to decrypt, and ended up with no data loss. The only loss was she couldn't work for a day.
That's why you never hear stories of competent IT saving the day. When they do, it's a non-event about as serious as someone calling in sick for a day. It's only when they fail that the problem becomes serious enough to be news-worthy.
I've had 5 cable internet services over 2 decades (and 2 DSL). Cox (my current provider) is the second best I've had. Best was MediaOne (my first provider) - they rolled out speed increases without price increases as they upgraded their network and improved capacity. But then they got bought by RoadRunner/TWC.
Cox has done similar things (doubled my bandwidth for free as a planned upgrade last year). I only take them down a notch because they participate in the despicable marketing practice of advertising a low first year price on a 2-year contract, but burying the second year price in the fine print. But at least with Cox I was able to find that second year price on their website and make an informed decision on which plan to get. With other cable companies and DirecTV, I wasn't able to find the second year rate at all - I had to call and suffer through a marketing pitch to get that info.
I tend to see these things in terms of reciprocity. If the company feels they should be able to do things on their own to a product after you've bought it from them, then yes I do believe you have the right to force the company to spend money and man hours doing reasonable things you want on the product.
Basically, if you buy a product, you own it and the manufacturer no longer has any rights to do anything to it. But if the company insists on still retaining rights to do things to the product, then you haven't really bought it. You're merely leasing it. And as the "owner" the manufacturer has a duty to maintain the product in working order to the satisfaction of the lessee.
A flash cell is basically a capacitor which holds an electrical charge at a certain voltage. The voltage level tells you the data that's stored in the cell. In the simplest case (1 bit), a 0 is no voltage, a 1 is high voltage. MLC stores 2 bits (4 voltage levels), TLC stores 3 bits (8 voltage levels). With increasing number of bits, the voltage difference between different levels becomes smaller.
The problem is, that charge slowly leaks out of the cell. As they reduced the lithography and the cells got smaller, the surface area to volume ratio grew. The stored charge was proportional to the volume, while the rate of leakage was proportional to the surface area. So basically shrinking the lithography meant the cells leaked their charge faster. All this came to a head in the 840 EVO series. The rate of leakage was high enough and the voltage difference between the values on TLC were small enough that the voltage of the cell dropped out of spec within a few months. And the SSD began having trouble reading the data back reliably from the cell.
Fortunately Samsung built in a ton of error correction, so when this happened the data wasn't actually lost. The SSD tried reading the cell over and over again until it randomly got the correct CRC value and knew it had a clean read. Unfortunately, all those re-reads took a lot of time, and the performance of the SSD tanked. Samsung's fix (pretty much the only fix possible) was to re-write cells which had old data in them to give them a fresh charge, basically resetting the countdown before the data became corrupt again.
With 3D NAND, because the cells are also stacked vertically, it wasn't as important to make the cells so small. So Samsung went from 19nm lithography in the 840 EVO, to 40nm lithography in the 850 EVO. No leakage problem at 40nm (at least not for several decades, if that). Likewise, the 840 Pro used MLC (the EVO used TLC). So it had twice the margin of safety on the voltage values before data corruption, and thus didn't suffer this problem. Now that they're returning to 2D NAND for this new line of drives, people are rightly asking if this voltage leakage is going to become a problem again.
It's indicative of a larger problem - trying to distinguish between behaviors which only differ in people's minds. Or, what is the intent of the driver? Functionally, both ridesharing and illegal cab company are the same thing: One person gives another person a ride. The difference is entirely within the mind. In one case the driver was going there anyway and decided to pick someone up. In the other case, the driver decides to go there because of the person he picks up.
So the problem really isn't the lack of regulation. It's that you're trying to regulate something based on people's intent. Airbnb plays with the same ambiguity - do you own the home and happen to rent it out? Or do you own the home so you can rent it out? Not saying you can't regulate these things. Just be prepared for a lot of grief, stepping on toes, and grey area when you try to draw the line. And this is the sort of thing people are exceptionally good at finding and exploiting loopholes in.
Can't help but feel for all the people who read Blackblaze's previous report and decided Seagate was junk and bought WD instead. I tried to warn them that the model of the drive mattered more than the manufacturer, because each manufacturer tries new technologies and new cost-cutting strategies with each different model. Sometimes it works and the model is reliable. Sometimes it doesn't and the model is unreliable. But everyone was eager to get on the bash Seagate, praise WD bandwagon and ignored me.
Well, WD was least reliable this time around. The Seagate stats in the previous report were probably being skewed by just one or two bad models. It's skewed this time by one bad model, which due to the passage of time means it makes up a tiny portion of their Seagate sample, so doesn't spike Seagate's score like before. (You can pretty much ignore WD in the 4TB graph, as a sample size of just 46 drives means the confidence interval is a 0.3% - 8.8% failure rate.)
At least Blackblaze addressed my criticism from before - they've broken down the stats to individual drive models. And you can see that like I said, there's huge variability in reliability between models within a manufacturer's lineup. Now they just need to add confidence interval to the graphs.
The problem isn't the free market. The problem (if you can call it that) is that energy is so cheap, this waste makes no practical difference to the individual person. As Summary states, the savings is only $1/yr per person. That's a trivial enough amount that the free market decides it's a non-factor.
To put the $300 million/yr figure in context, the U.S. uses about $470 billion worth of electricity in a year. So the savings from the new standard amounts to less than a 0.1% reduction in electricity consumption. While from a strictly mathematical standpoint it's worth doing, the R&D and legal effort that went into it probably would've been better spent saving power elsewhere. That's what the market would say.
Just line the area outside the cockpit with retroreflectors. That way anyone shining a laser at a plane and hitting the cockpit area will have the laser reflected right back at them.
Ideally some sort of paint like used in road signs, although that stuff uses round glass beads and scatters too much light. Optical prisms like used on the retroreflectors left on the moon would work, although it's probably rather expensive. I thought I read something about reflective paint using embedded crystals which form perfect 90 degree corners. That would be relatively cheap, and would reflect laser light right back with minimal scattering.
When I used to say "Open Word" to my IPAQ back in 2003, nobody at Microsoft got sent an audio clip. I grant you voice commands were highly limited,
That's the key. It's easy to record an audio clip, and figure out which of a dozen keywords it comes closest to matching. It's much, much harder to record an audio clip and try to find a match in a library of 20,000 words.
Hopefully in the future, processors will come down in power and cost enough for this generic speech recognition to be done locally on the device itself. But for the time being, transmitting the audio to a beefy server is the best we've got.
This is how speech recognition is done. Instead of being done in-device (which would require a semi-hefty CPU), the sound of what you say is recorded, then transmitted to a server which does the heavy lifting. The text of the recognized speech is then transmitted back to the device.
Samsung is just being up-front about all this, instead of burying the disclosure in a dense EULA like some companies do. You can argue that a smart TV doesn't need speech recognition, but after having used Roku's voice search I can tell you that the time it saves over typing searches with a navigation pad guarantees it'll win out in the long run.
The haptic feedback in the Apple watch is not like the devices found in the Playstation 4 or Nintendo controllers. (Can't speak for XBOX One, sorry.) It feels like a tap, as opposed to the vibration motor modern game controllers use.
They are both the same thing. They only differ in the frequency of the vibration.
Unless there was some new engineering required to create a driver capable of a more tap-like vibration (higher frequency, more like a square wave), there is no difference here. It's like claiming singing high notes is different and patent-worthy compared to singing low notes.
What may seen "new" and "cool" to end users often isn't from an engineering standpoint. The "bounce" effect Apple (inappropriately) patented is simply the response of an underdamped harmonic oscillator. Something mathematicians and engineers have known about for centuries. In its simplest form, haptic feedback was used in the old membrane keyboards which had a speaker generate a click sound every time you "pressed" a key. Except instead of the speaker moving air, you're using a "speaker" which moves the mass of the device. There's nothing fundamentally new here, unless you somehow consider mass (air) to be different from mass (something else).
Both parties are the same. Republicans shift workload onto society via corporate welfare. Democrats shift workload onto society via government welfare programs.
There's nothing "wrong" per se with either type of program as long as you can keep inefficiencies down. In that respect it's good to have both R and D at each others' throats - helps keep their pet programs honest. Corporate welfare helps to guide the direction of economic development and technological progress (renewable energy being the latest example). Social welfare helps to act as a safety net allowing people who fall on hard times to pick themselves up and become productive members of society again more quickly.
But when any of these programs are given a free pass (as the most staunch conservatives and staunch liberals do), inefficiency (corruption) begins to creep in and their cost to society eventually exceeds their benefit. Corporations take the subsidies without producing a meaningful product. People mooch off welfare with no intent to re-enter the workforce. If you can see the possibility of that happening with only the half of these programs your political party opposes, you're part of the reason our government wastes so much money.
Radioactive materials either are highly radioactive but decay to (relatively) safe levels quickly, or have low radioactivity but remain radioactive for a long time. A material which is highly radioactive for a long time simply can't exist. A good way to think of it is that the energy released is the degree of radioactivity (rate of release of radiation) times the duration it remains radioactive. For a given amount of energy, one trait can be high while the other low, or both moderate. But both can't be high.
The reason our nuclear "waste" is dangerous on the order of tens of thousands of years is entirely political. We consider it waste even though it still contains the vast majority of the fissible energy (typical numbers I've seen are 98% of total energy, 90%-93% of recoverable energy). We do have the technology to use that waste as fuel - a breeder reactor can process the waste to generate power, and its "waste" products in turn can be sent back to conventional reactors to be re-used as fuel. This cycle would use most of the fissible energy in the original uranium, and the end product - true nuclear waste - would only be dangerous for a couple hundred years. Easy to engineer storage solutions for.
So why don't we do it? Because breeder reactors create weapons-grade plutonium. Stuff that goes kablewie in an atomic explosion if you compress it enough (that's right, despite what you've seen in movies the fuel used in a conventional nuclear plant cannot be used to make an atomic bomb). That's the only reason. We don't want to make it any easier for rogue nations or terrorists to get weapons grade plutonium.
But fast-forward a hundred years or so when most nations will have obtained nuclear weapons capability. Then suddenly this isn't as big a deal anymore (assuming we survive). And all that nuclear "waste" we've been burying in containment designed to last 100,000 years suddenly becomes a valuable energy source. And we will want to dig it back up and reclaim it for use as fuel. It will become especially important if we ever become a space-faring species. Wind is useless in space, and solar becomes less useful in the further reaches of the solar system. Fusion has lower power density - nearly two orders of magnitude worse than fission unless you go to extremely high pressures (fun in a containment failure, as if containment failure of plasma at tens of millions of degrees isn't fun enough). That makes fusion viable (albeit expensive) for permanent installations, but unsuitable as a transportable power source. So fission remains the only long-term high-density power source suitable for space travel. Those of you wishing fission power would go away are basically condemning us to live on this rock forever.
The website is what I'll miss (picasaweb.google.com). It gives you access to the same photos as photos.google.com, but has a lot of options which are missing in the latter site, like managing albums. If they transition that capability to the Photos site, then all will be fine.
But if they insist on the dumbed-down so easy a caveman could do it approach that Photos currently uses, I'm going to have to figure out some other way to present my photos online. I recently learned that Amazon gives me unlimited photo storage with my Prime account. And not limited to 2048x2048 resolution like with Photos (if you want free unlimited storage) - I've already switched my phone's photo backup to Amazon.
It doesn't matter what currency Austria uses. As long as the U.S. dollar is viewed as a stable currency, it can and will be used if the native currency is viewed as unstable or problematic. That's why the black markets in so many countries operate in U.S. dollars.
Hitler also started Volkswagen. See, Hitler came to power via a democratic election. So he still had to please the population to stay in power. And one of the ways he did it was by commissioning the design and construction of a small, affordable automobile which could transport a typical German family (Volkswagen literally means "people's car").
Kim Jong Un doesn't have to worry about pesky elections, so you won't be seeing any similar overtures to the North Korean people. Kinda sad when Hitler actually looks like a good guy compared to you.
In The Day the Earth Stood Still, Gort is a member of an autonomous robot police force built by aliens, programmed to preserve peace in the universe by destroying any aggressor. Thus forcing fickle and emotional sentient beings to behave.
The Gibbs free energy of water is -237.14 kJ/mole, or (at 55.6 moles/liter) 13.184 MJ/liter, or (in electrical terms) 3662 kWh per ton of water. That's how much energy you gain combining hydrogen and oxygen to form water (H2 and O2 have a Gibbs free energy of zero). So about a third the energy density of gasoline (negative energy density actually, since the end product is water).
An average U.S. household uses about 13 MWh/yr, so if were to all come from hydrogen and oxygen, they would form about 3550 liters of water in a year, just under 10 liters a day. Or put another way, a 1000 MW version of this would generate about 273 tons of water per hour. Divide by the efficiency to get how many tons of water are needed to separate into hydrogen and oxygen.
This actually gets to another off-topic synergy I've been wondering about. Evaporative distillation takes more energy to desalinate seawater than reverse osmosis. So most of the solutions thus far have been to build big reverse osmosis plants. But that's purely an energy analysis. It ignores the cost of the energy. Evaporative distillation relies almost entirely on thermal energy. Well, at power generation plants, heat is considered a waste product - it's free energy.
For places where water is in short supply like California, why isn't every power plant being built near the sea, where they can use seawater for cooling? It'll have to be a two-stage cooling circuit with a heat exchanger to prevent corrosion from affecting power generation systems. But that's already what's used in nuclear plants so there's no new engineering which needs to be developed there. Do this and 1/3rd the energy from burning coal, oil, or nuclear can go into generating electricity. The remaining 2/3rds of the energy can go into desalinating seawater.
The thermal energy cost to desalinate is on the order of 80 kWh/ton. Or 288 MJ/ton. So your 1000 MWe power plant (which is generating about 2000 MW of thermal energy) has enough thermal energy to desalinate seawater to produce 3.5 tons of fresh water per second.
This site has a bunch of arcade and video games from the 1980s emulated in flash. Those of you who grew up with a NES may be interested in their NES games library.
The site is a good argument for why (1) copyright on software should be for a shorter duration than for other media, or (2) copyright on software should expire if it hasn't been republished for a decade or two. Unlike an old book which you can pick off the shelf in a library and read, software is pretty useless unless you can actually run it. Unless the copyright owner is actively porting the old software to run on new hardware, it's essentially become abandonware. And only through the work of sites like this (technically illegal under copyright law) can people experience what the software was originally like.
Both terms were used. Application referred more to something which was polished and sellable to the end user (c.f. 'appliance'). Those could be called programs as well. But lines of code which you hacked together for your high school intro to computers course were always called a program, never an application. App was the shortened version (prog sounded like something you'd do in bed to your SO).
The parlance may have started with the Apple III and Macintosh. I think Apple referred to its GUI apps only as application, never as programs. But they didn't own the term. They did file for a trademark for the term 'applet' (see how it has "apple" in it?), which refers to a really small or simple application.
Some of the GPS units I've used just start giving you street directions right away after you enter a destination. The better ones I've used (including Google Maps) start with an overhead view of your entire route, then zoom in to the street-by-street view. That makes it rather simple to spot silly errors like driving from San Francisco to Springfield, Missouri, instead of Springfield, California.
If you truly believe that, then that right there is admission that this law is wrong. If you truly believe people have a fundamental right to be forgotten, then that should apply to all people, not just your citizens. Same reason it's not ok to rob or kill foreign tourists, or why U.S. Constitutional protections apply even to illegal immigrants. People are deemed to have these rights simply by being people. Human rights are not granted by the goodwill of some bureaucrat in a government office only to those he deems worthy.
1. There is no requirement for the material to be removed from the source web site.
Which is precisely the problem with these right to be forgotten laws. They're shooting the messenger, not the originator of the message. If it's really so damn important that this information be removed from the web, then they should be going after the sites which still host the "wrong" or "outdated" information.
The only reason Google (and other search engines) are targets of these laws is because it's easier to go after a few search engines than to track down every single web site. As I've said since this whole thing began, the people supporting the right to be forgotten should be overjoyed that Google indexes and gives them the search results. It quickly and easily tells them exactly which sites they need to track down to get that information expunged.
2. Google still index and list that site for other search terms.
Which is another reason why these laws are dumb. It's ok to display pumpkins in a north-facing window, but not a west-facing window?
3. Why does Google have free speech rights that normal companies don't, e.g. credit references can't report things that happened long ago by law, and can't claim free speech allows them to.
Google search results are basically displaying zeitgeist - a snapshot of the sign of the times. By manipulating and altering search results with laws, you are causing this snapshot to differ from what's actually out there. Ask yourself: why does free speech exist? Because this sort of manipulation has always been used in the past to hide things that the public should know about. Mandating such manipulation as law is the first step down a really slippery slope.
I understand the desire for a right to be forgotten law. The flip side of free speech is gossip - stuff that isn't or may not be true, but gets spread around anyway. Yeah a lot of times I'd like to stop gossip, but never at the expense of giving up free speech rights. If you want to stop gossip, refer back to point (1) - go after the people spreading the gossip, not the people telling you who is spreading the gossip (search engines).
We could also have import tariffs and whatnot to offset the reduced cost of not caring about employee safety. But we're all about "free trade" nowadays, where companies are free to roam the globe looking for the cheapest, most desperate labor with the lowest cost of living. If laws can drive industry away, they can keep it around too.
Companies roaming the globe looking for the cheapest labor is exactly how the economy in those places improve so they are no longer cheapest (which is why China is starting to lose labor contracts to Vietnam and Thailand). The market sees a disparity in wages as an inefficiency, and seeks to remedy it by shifting work from the high wage region to the low wage region (up until low wages + transport cost = high wages). The end result being wage equality throughout the world (well, to the point where local regulations cause wage inequalities which can't be corrected by the market).
The folks who express a desire to protect jobs here are the same ones who proclaim the wealthy should "pay their fair share". Well, understand that the U.S. is one of the wealthiest nations on the planet. Part of "paying our fair share" is hiring workers in developing countries to help spread the wealth around, help their economies develop. Erecting trade barriers to keep our wealth within our borders is exactly the opposite of paying our fair share. It's telling the workers in developing countries to go eat cake.
Or is this one of those situations where you think the wealthy should pay their fair share when they're someone else. But if you are one of them you think the whole idea is baloney? A real philosophical stance remains consistent whether you're on the receiving or the losing end. If you flip-flop the moment the stance becomes inconvenient to you personally, it was never a philosophical stance; it was pure selfishness.
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A friend of mine runs a multi-million dollar construction supply company and her work computer got hit with a ransomware virus. As she is manager/accountant, it was pretty serious. Fortunately she had a competent IT staff which regularly backed up her system . So they just pulled her computer offline (so it couldn't spread to other systems), and restored everything to a new computer (this is why companies like to buy a bunch of identical Dell systems). And she was back in business the next day.
Except for one file which she had been working on the day the ransomware hit, and thus hadn't been backed up. As it turned out, the ransomware authors had programmed it to allow the victim to decrypt one file - to prove that it could in fact be decrypted, and hadn't just been deleted. So she of course chose that file to decrypt, and ended up with no data loss. The only loss was she couldn't work for a day.
That's why you never hear stories of competent IT saving the day. When they do, it's a non-event about as serious as someone calling in sick for a day. It's only when they fail that the problem becomes serious enough to be news-worthy.
I've had 5 cable internet services over 2 decades (and 2 DSL). Cox (my current provider) is the second best I've had. Best was MediaOne (my first provider) - they rolled out speed increases without price increases as they upgraded their network and improved capacity. But then they got bought by RoadRunner/TWC.
Cox has done similar things (doubled my bandwidth for free as a planned upgrade last year). I only take them down a notch because they participate in the despicable marketing practice of advertising a low first year price on a 2-year contract, but burying the second year price in the fine print. But at least with Cox I was able to find that second year price on their website and make an informed decision on which plan to get. With other cable companies and DirecTV, I wasn't able to find the second year rate at all - I had to call and suffer through a marketing pitch to get that info.
I tend to see these things in terms of reciprocity. If the company feels they should be able to do things on their own to a product after you've bought it from them, then yes I do believe you have the right to force the company to spend money and man hours doing reasonable things you want on the product.
Basically, if you buy a product, you own it and the manufacturer no longer has any rights to do anything to it. But if the company insists on still retaining rights to do things to the product, then you haven't really bought it. You're merely leasing it. And as the "owner" the manufacturer has a duty to maintain the product in working order to the satisfaction of the lessee.
A flash cell is basically a capacitor which holds an electrical charge at a certain voltage. The voltage level tells you the data that's stored in the cell. In the simplest case (1 bit), a 0 is no voltage, a 1 is high voltage. MLC stores 2 bits (4 voltage levels), TLC stores 3 bits (8 voltage levels). With increasing number of bits, the voltage difference between different levels becomes smaller.
The problem is, that charge slowly leaks out of the cell. As they reduced the lithography and the cells got smaller, the surface area to volume ratio grew. The stored charge was proportional to the volume, while the rate of leakage was proportional to the surface area. So basically shrinking the lithography meant the cells leaked their charge faster. All this came to a head in the 840 EVO series. The rate of leakage was high enough and the voltage difference between the values on TLC were small enough that the voltage of the cell dropped out of spec within a few months. And the SSD began having trouble reading the data back reliably from the cell.
Fortunately Samsung built in a ton of error correction, so when this happened the data wasn't actually lost. The SSD tried reading the cell over and over again until it randomly got the correct CRC value and knew it had a clean read. Unfortunately, all those re-reads took a lot of time, and the performance of the SSD tanked. Samsung's fix (pretty much the only fix possible) was to re-write cells which had old data in them to give them a fresh charge, basically resetting the countdown before the data became corrupt again.
With 3D NAND, because the cells are also stacked vertically, it wasn't as important to make the cells so small. So Samsung went from 19nm lithography in the 840 EVO, to 40nm lithography in the 850 EVO. No leakage problem at 40nm (at least not for several decades, if that). Likewise, the 840 Pro used MLC (the EVO used TLC). So it had twice the margin of safety on the voltage values before data corruption, and thus didn't suffer this problem. Now that they're returning to 2D NAND for this new line of drives, people are rightly asking if this voltage leakage is going to become a problem again.
It's indicative of a larger problem - trying to distinguish between behaviors which only differ in people's minds. Or, what is the intent of the driver? Functionally, both ridesharing and illegal cab company are the same thing: One person gives another person a ride. The difference is entirely within the mind. In one case the driver was going there anyway and decided to pick someone up. In the other case, the driver decides to go there because of the person he picks up.
So the problem really isn't the lack of regulation. It's that you're trying to regulate something based on people's intent. Airbnb plays with the same ambiguity - do you own the home and happen to rent it out? Or do you own the home so you can rent it out? Not saying you can't regulate these things. Just be prepared for a lot of grief, stepping on toes, and grey area when you try to draw the line. And this is the sort of thing people are exceptionally good at finding and exploiting loopholes in.
Can't help but feel for all the people who read Blackblaze's previous report and decided Seagate was junk and bought WD instead. I tried to warn them that the model of the drive mattered more than the manufacturer, because each manufacturer tries new technologies and new cost-cutting strategies with each different model. Sometimes it works and the model is reliable. Sometimes it doesn't and the model is unreliable. But everyone was eager to get on the bash Seagate, praise WD bandwagon and ignored me.
Well, WD was least reliable this time around. The Seagate stats in the previous report were probably being skewed by just one or two bad models. It's skewed this time by one bad model, which due to the passage of time means it makes up a tiny portion of their Seagate sample, so doesn't spike Seagate's score like before. (You can pretty much ignore WD in the 4TB graph, as a sample size of just 46 drives means the confidence interval is a 0.3% - 8.8% failure rate.)
At least Blackblaze addressed my criticism from before - they've broken down the stats to individual drive models. And you can see that like I said, there's huge variability in reliability between models within a manufacturer's lineup. Now they just need to add confidence interval to the graphs.
The problem isn't the free market. The problem (if you can call it that) is that energy is so cheap, this waste makes no practical difference to the individual person. As Summary states, the savings is only $1/yr per person. That's a trivial enough amount that the free market decides it's a non-factor.
To put the $300 million/yr figure in context, the U.S. uses about $470 billion worth of electricity in a year. So the savings from the new standard amounts to less than a 0.1% reduction in electricity consumption. While from a strictly mathematical standpoint it's worth doing, the R&D and legal effort that went into it probably would've been better spent saving power elsewhere. That's what the market would say.
Just line the area outside the cockpit with retroreflectors. That way anyone shining a laser at a plane and hitting the cockpit area will have the laser reflected right back at them.
Ideally some sort of paint like used in road signs, although that stuff uses round glass beads and scatters too much light. Optical prisms like used on the retroreflectors left on the moon would work, although it's probably rather expensive. I thought I read something about reflective paint using embedded crystals which form perfect 90 degree corners. That would be relatively cheap, and would reflect laser light right back with minimal scattering.
That's the key. It's easy to record an audio clip, and figure out which of a dozen keywords it comes closest to matching. It's much, much harder to record an audio clip and try to find a match in a library of 20,000 words.
Hopefully in the future, processors will come down in power and cost enough for this generic speech recognition to be done locally on the device itself. But for the time being, transmitting the audio to a beefy server is the best we've got.
This is how speech recognition is done. Instead of being done in-device (which would require a semi-hefty CPU), the sound of what you say is recorded, then transmitted to a server which does the heavy lifting. The text of the recognized speech is then transmitted back to the device.
Samsung is just being up-front about all this, instead of burying the disclosure in a dense EULA like some companies do. You can argue that a smart TV doesn't need speech recognition, but after having used Roku's voice search I can tell you that the time it saves over typing searches with a navigation pad guarantees it'll win out in the long run.
They are both the same thing. They only differ in the frequency of the vibration.
Unless there was some new engineering required to create a driver capable of a more tap-like vibration (higher frequency, more like a square wave), there is no difference here. It's like claiming singing high notes is different and patent-worthy compared to singing low notes.
What may seen "new" and "cool" to end users often isn't from an engineering standpoint. The "bounce" effect Apple (inappropriately) patented is simply the response of an underdamped harmonic oscillator. Something mathematicians and engineers have known about for centuries. In its simplest form, haptic feedback was used in the old membrane keyboards which had a speaker generate a click sound every time you "pressed" a key. Except instead of the speaker moving air, you're using a "speaker" which moves the mass of the device. There's nothing fundamentally new here, unless you somehow consider mass (air) to be different from mass (something else).
Both parties are the same. Republicans shift workload onto society via corporate welfare. Democrats shift workload onto society via government welfare programs.
There's nothing "wrong" per se with either type of program as long as you can keep inefficiencies down. In that respect it's good to have both R and D at each others' throats - helps keep their pet programs honest. Corporate welfare helps to guide the direction of economic development and technological progress (renewable energy being the latest example). Social welfare helps to act as a safety net allowing people who fall on hard times to pick themselves up and become productive members of society again more quickly.
But when any of these programs are given a free pass (as the most staunch conservatives and staunch liberals do), inefficiency (corruption) begins to creep in and their cost to society eventually exceeds their benefit. Corporations take the subsidies without producing a meaningful product. People mooch off welfare with no intent to re-enter the workforce. If you can see the possibility of that happening with only the half of these programs your political party opposes, you're part of the reason our government wastes so much money.
Radioactive materials either are highly radioactive but decay to (relatively) safe levels quickly, or have low radioactivity but remain radioactive for a long time. A material which is highly radioactive for a long time simply can't exist. A good way to think of it is that the energy released is the degree of radioactivity (rate of release of radiation) times the duration it remains radioactive. For a given amount of energy, one trait can be high while the other low, or both moderate. But both can't be high.
The reason our nuclear "waste" is dangerous on the order of tens of thousands of years is entirely political. We consider it waste even though it still contains the vast majority of the fissible energy (typical numbers I've seen are 98% of total energy, 90%-93% of recoverable energy). We do have the technology to use that waste as fuel - a breeder reactor can process the waste to generate power, and its "waste" products in turn can be sent back to conventional reactors to be re-used as fuel. This cycle would use most of the fissible energy in the original uranium, and the end product - true nuclear waste - would only be dangerous for a couple hundred years. Easy to engineer storage solutions for.
So why don't we do it? Because breeder reactors create weapons-grade plutonium. Stuff that goes kablewie in an atomic explosion if you compress it enough (that's right, despite what you've seen in movies the fuel used in a conventional nuclear plant cannot be used to make an atomic bomb). That's the only reason. We don't want to make it any easier for rogue nations or terrorists to get weapons grade plutonium.
But fast-forward a hundred years or so when most nations will have obtained nuclear weapons capability. Then suddenly this isn't as big a deal anymore (assuming we survive). And all that nuclear "waste" we've been burying in containment designed to last 100,000 years suddenly becomes a valuable energy source. And we will want to dig it back up and reclaim it for use as fuel. It will become especially important if we ever become a space-faring species. Wind is useless in space, and solar becomes less useful in the further reaches of the solar system. Fusion has lower power density - nearly two orders of magnitude worse than fission unless you go to extremely high pressures (fun in a containment failure, as if containment failure of plasma at tens of millions of degrees isn't fun enough). That makes fusion viable (albeit expensive) for permanent installations, but unsuitable as a transportable power source. So fission remains the only long-term high-density power source suitable for space travel. Those of you wishing fission power would go away are basically condemning us to live on this rock forever.
The website is what I'll miss (picasaweb.google.com). It gives you access to the same photos as photos.google.com, but has a lot of options which are missing in the latter site, like managing albums. If they transition that capability to the Photos site, then all will be fine.
But if they insist on the dumbed-down so easy a caveman could do it approach that Photos currently uses, I'm going to have to figure out some other way to present my photos online. I recently learned that Amazon gives me unlimited photo storage with my Prime account. And not limited to 2048x2048 resolution like with Photos (if you want free unlimited storage) - I've already switched my phone's photo backup to Amazon.
It doesn't matter what currency Austria uses. As long as the U.S. dollar is viewed as a stable currency, it can and will be used if the native currency is viewed as unstable or problematic. That's why the black markets in so many countries operate in U.S. dollars.
Hitler also started Volkswagen. See, Hitler came to power via a democratic election. So he still had to please the population to stay in power. And one of the ways he did it was by commissioning the design and construction of a small, affordable automobile which could transport a typical German family (Volkswagen literally means "people's car").
Kim Jong Un doesn't have to worry about pesky elections, so you won't be seeing any similar overtures to the North Korean people. Kinda sad when Hitler actually looks like a good guy compared to you.
In The Day the Earth Stood Still, Gort is a member of an autonomous robot police force built by aliens, programmed to preserve peace in the universe by destroying any aggressor. Thus forcing fickle and emotional sentient beings to behave.
The Gibbs free energy of water is -237.14 kJ/mole, or (at 55.6 moles/liter) 13.184 MJ/liter, or (in electrical terms) 3662 kWh per ton of water. That's how much energy you gain combining hydrogen and oxygen to form water (H2 and O2 have a Gibbs free energy of zero). So about a third the energy density of gasoline (negative energy density actually, since the end product is water).
An average U.S. household uses about 13 MWh/yr, so if were to all come from hydrogen and oxygen, they would form about 3550 liters of water in a year, just under 10 liters a day. Or put another way, a 1000 MW version of this would generate about 273 tons of water per hour. Divide by the efficiency to get how many tons of water are needed to separate into hydrogen and oxygen.
This actually gets to another off-topic synergy I've been wondering about. Evaporative distillation takes more energy to desalinate seawater than reverse osmosis. So most of the solutions thus far have been to build big reverse osmosis plants. But that's purely an energy analysis. It ignores the cost of the energy. Evaporative distillation relies almost entirely on thermal energy. Well, at power generation plants, heat is considered a waste product - it's free energy.
For places where water is in short supply like California, why isn't every power plant being built near the sea, where they can use seawater for cooling? It'll have to be a two-stage cooling circuit with a heat exchanger to prevent corrosion from affecting power generation systems. But that's already what's used in nuclear plants so there's no new engineering which needs to be developed there. Do this and 1/3rd the energy from burning coal, oil, or nuclear can go into generating electricity. The remaining 2/3rds of the energy can go into desalinating seawater.
The thermal energy cost to desalinate is on the order of 80 kWh/ton. Or 288 MJ/ton. So your 1000 MWe power plant (which is generating about 2000 MW of thermal energy) has enough thermal energy to desalinate seawater to produce 3.5 tons of fresh water per second.
This site has a bunch of arcade and video games from the 1980s emulated in flash. Those of you who grew up with a NES may be interested in their NES games library.
The site is a good argument for why (1) copyright on software should be for a shorter duration than for other media, or (2) copyright on software should expire if it hasn't been republished for a decade or two. Unlike an old book which you can pick off the shelf in a library and read, software is pretty useless unless you can actually run it. Unless the copyright owner is actively porting the old software to run on new hardware, it's essentially become abandonware. And only through the work of sites like this (technically illegal under copyright law) can people experience what the software was originally like.
Both terms were used. Application referred more to something which was polished and sellable to the end user (c.f. 'appliance'). Those could be called programs as well. But lines of code which you hacked together for your high school intro to computers course were always called a program, never an application. App was the shortened version (prog sounded like something you'd do in bed to your SO).
The parlance may have started with the Apple III and Macintosh. I think Apple referred to its GUI apps only as application, never as programs. But they didn't own the term. They did file for a trademark for the term 'applet' (see how it has "apple" in it?), which refers to a really small or simple application.
Some of the GPS units I've used just start giving you street directions right away after you enter a destination. The better ones I've used (including Google Maps) start with an overhead view of your entire route, then zoom in to the street-by-street view. That makes it rather simple to spot silly errors like driving from San Francisco to Springfield, Missouri, instead of Springfield, California.
No, the problem is the maker of a programmable device artificially limiting the font selection available to the owner.
If you truly believe that, then that right there is admission that this law is wrong. If you truly believe people have a fundamental right to be forgotten, then that should apply to all people, not just your citizens. Same reason it's not ok to rob or kill foreign tourists, or why U.S. Constitutional protections apply even to illegal immigrants. People are deemed to have these rights simply by being people. Human rights are not granted by the goodwill of some bureaucrat in a government office only to those he deems worthy.
Which is precisely the problem with these right to be forgotten laws. They're shooting the messenger, not the originator of the message. If it's really so damn important that this information be removed from the web, then they should be going after the sites which still host the "wrong" or "outdated" information.
The only reason Google (and other search engines) are targets of these laws is because it's easier to go after a few search engines than to track down every single web site. As I've said since this whole thing began, the people supporting the right to be forgotten should be overjoyed that Google indexes and gives them the search results. It quickly and easily tells them exactly which sites they need to track down to get that information expunged.
Which is another reason why these laws are dumb. It's ok to display pumpkins in a north-facing window, but not a west-facing window?
Google search results are basically displaying zeitgeist - a snapshot of the sign of the times. By manipulating and altering search results with laws, you are causing this snapshot to differ from what's actually out there. Ask yourself: why does free speech exist? Because this sort of manipulation has always been used in the past to hide things that the public should know about. Mandating such manipulation as law is the first step down a really slippery slope.
I understand the desire for a right to be forgotten law. The flip side of free speech is gossip - stuff that isn't or may not be true, but gets spread around anyway. Yeah a lot of times I'd like to stop gossip, but never at the expense of giving up free speech rights. If you want to stop gossip, refer back to point (1) - go after the people spreading the gossip, not the people telling you who is spreading the gossip (search engines).
Companies roaming the globe looking for the cheapest labor is exactly how the economy in those places improve so they are no longer cheapest (which is why China is starting to lose labor contracts to Vietnam and Thailand). The market sees a disparity in wages as an inefficiency, and seeks to remedy it by shifting work from the high wage region to the low wage region (up until low wages + transport cost = high wages). The end result being wage equality throughout the world (well, to the point where local regulations cause wage inequalities which can't be corrected by the market).
The folks who express a desire to protect jobs here are the same ones who proclaim the wealthy should "pay their fair share". Well, understand that the U.S. is one of the wealthiest nations on the planet. Part of "paying our fair share" is hiring workers in developing countries to help spread the wealth around, help their economies develop. Erecting trade barriers to keep our wealth within our borders is exactly the opposite of paying our fair share. It's telling the workers in developing countries to go eat cake.
Or is this one of those situations where you think the wealthy should pay their fair share when they're someone else. But if you are one of them you think the whole idea is baloney? A real philosophical stance remains consistent whether you're on the receiving or the losing end. If you flip-flop the moment the stance becomes inconvenient to you personally, it was never a philosophical stance; it was pure selfishness.