Or do you really want me to believe that for over 200 years Islamic people have had little beef with the US, but over the course of the last 30 have developed a hard-on of epic proportions.
And it was just out of nowhere, and not reactionary to US foreign policy.
Did you know U.S. inteventionist foreign policy began as a reaction to Muslim acts against the U.S.? You've probably heard the opening line of the Marine Corps hymn:
The Montezuma part makes sense. The U.S. fought several wars with Mexico, so of course the Marines would be involved. But Tripoli? That's way over in Africa. What the hell were U.S. Marines doing there?
Funny you should ask. Way back around 1800 when the U.S. was a freshly minted nation, it ran into a problem. Prior to the revolution, the U.S. was a British colony, and thus fell under the protection of the British navy. When the U.S. gained independence, it lost that protection. The Muslim Barbary States decided to take advantage of the situation and began capturing U.S. merchant ships and holding the crews for ransom. Their thinking was that since these people weren't Muslim, there was no moral problem with kidnapping them and extorting a ransom.
The fledgling U.S. was deeply in debt and had its own domestic problems. The last thing it wanted to do was to meddle with things going on in other countries. But it didn't have a navy which could deal with the situation (it had been decommissioned after the Revolutionary War to save money), and attempts to negotiate a treaty with France to protect U.S. vessels fell through. So for the first few years, the U.S. just paid the ransom. Of course paying kidnappers just encourages them, and it became open season on U.S. flagged vessels. Eventually the payments became exorbitant (over 1/6th of the Federal government's total budget), and the U.S. recommissioned a navy (the USS Constitution on display in Boston was one of these first ships). President Thomas Jefferson (y'know, the guy who wrote famous things like, "We hold these truths to be self evident - that all men are created equal") launched a military operation to Africa to end the kidnappings and free the hostages.
And that is how the U.S. Marines ended up in Tripoli. That is how the permanent U.S. Navy was born. That is how U.S. meddling with foreign nations began. Because a bunch of Muslims decided to take advantage of a fledgling non-Muslim nation which wanted little to nothing to do with what was going on in the Eastern hemisphere, by kidnapping its citizens and extorting a ransom for their safe return. So if you want to play the blame game, the first incident, the precipitating act which began over two centuries of animosity and set the U.S. on a course for meddling with countries halfway around the world, was actually committed by Muslims against the U.S.
Agreed with the rest of your post, but the Department of Homeland Security reorganization was one of the few good things to come out of 9/11. Before:
Immigration and Naturalization was in the Justice Department
Customs and Border Patrol was in the Treasury Department
The animal and plant inspectors at customs were in the Agriculture Department
TSA was in the Transportation Department (regulatory agencies)
FEMA was off by itself
The Coast Guard was in the Treasury, except during war when it got transferred to Defense. Was put in Transportation in 1967 with the regulatory agencies, I guess because they inspect boats
The Secret Service was in the Treasury (the Treasury Dept. seemed to be the catch-all Department for any organization which didn't really fit anywhere else)
Despite the evil that might arise from these groups conspiring together, logistically they are much better off being grouped together and better able to coordinate their activities.
And no it's not to compete with Tesla, or because EVs are great (from an economic or market standpoint), or because of the VW diesel scandal. California and 9 other states are mandating that all automakers sell ZEVs (zero emissions vehicles), and that the ZEVs comprise at least 14.5% of their total vehicle sales by 2025. If they can't hit 14.5%, they'll either have to buy ZEV credits from another automaker, or they will be prohibited from selling any more ICE cars in those states until their ZEV sales go above 14.5%. Since those states make up approximately 1/3rd of the entire U.S. market, every automaker is busy prepping ZEVs - mostly electric, some hydrogen fuel cells.
This is why you have oddities like the BMW i3, which comes with an option for a backup ICE with a 1.9 gallon fuel tank to help people overcome range anxiety. Why not a bigger fuel tank? Because the ZEV mandate states that a ZEV is allowed to have a ICE engine as a backup, but its range on the ICE has to be less than its range as a ZEV.
This is also why Californians are enjoying some crazy-good lease and purchase deals on ZEVs right now. The ZEV requirement is already in effect, gradually ramping up to the 2025 target, so automakers have to start selling ZEVs now. But those states will consider the automakers to have hit their ZEV target for their state if they hit the target in California alone (since they're just mirroring California's mandate). So all the automakers are shipping nearly all their ZEVs to California and offering huge incentives for people there to buy/lease ZEVs before the end of the year, to drive up their ZEV sales as a percentage of all their vehicle sales in California.
That's true for now. Once multiple people start pooling and cross-referencing their private databases, it'll be easy picking out patterns like which location is most frequently visited by a car - indicating their home address.
It's not just people who drive too fast. After 30 years of driving and observing traffic patterns, the most frequent cause of sudden speed changes I see is people driving too slowly as they try to merge onto the freeway. That causes people already on the freeway to have to slow down or change lanes to avoid them, which increases the risk of an accident.
And TFA comparing car and train capacity is silly because it excludes time spent stopping to load/unload passengers. The whole reason people drive cars instead of take public transportation is because (1) they're sick of waiting for the bus/train to show up, and (2) they're sick of the trip taking 2x-3x longer than if they drive because the bus/train has to stop at a bunch of places they're not interested in going.
Autonomous cars essentially are a train. You get your own private train car, once on the freeway it merges with traffic and runs at the same speed as all other train cars. But it doesn't have to stop at every stop someone else wants to go to - it only stops where you want to stop. The only advantage of a real train is that it takes less energy since you have one power plant pulling (pushing) hundreds of people. And even that advantage could be mitigated if the longer interstate routes were replaced by trains (real ones) which ferry autonomous cars. You punch your destination as 2 states over, and the car drives you to a train station, gets aboard a flatbed car, and the train pulls your car that distance while you spend your time reading slashdot.
How do you do that? I should think building a second track which is identical to the first would be a hell of a feat.
All it would take it relatively small differences in the track and it's going to make a huge difference.
We ran into this issue while programming networked simulators for the USAF. When you have two simulators interacting with each other, you can't just spam position updates as fast as you can. You'll quickly saturate the network bandwidth if you do. Consequently, you have to rely on less-frequent position updates, and dead reckoning based on velocity and orientation in between those updates.
A side-effect of this is that formation flying becomes really difficult. If two simulated planes are flying at 1000 kph, even with position updates every 100 milliseconds, they will move 28 meters in between position updates. So small errors in each plane's orientation cause each pilot to see the "other" plane drift by several cm or decimeters, before its location "jumps" back to the true location with the next position update. It breaks down the realism of the simulation, and makes flying in formation virtually impossible. (Our solution was to move objects in formation into a new reference frame relative to the "lead" plane, so that their relative velocities were much lower, resulting in less jumping.)
Anyhow, the point is, if you're spamming position updates at 60 Hz, and the car is moving at 100 kph, then it will travel a half meter between each position update. Consequently the error in positioning the cars next to each other in the simulation is potentially much greater than any error in building two "identical" tracks. You don't want to risk colliding two real cars controlled in this manner because the VR simulation didn't show one car in the proper place, or because a driver sees the other car jumping around in an unpredictable manner because the VR only updates at 60 Hz. So you put them on separate tracks, and overlap the two in the simulation, using a smoothing algorithm to minimize the "jumping". The catch being the smoothing algorithm probably eliminates many of the subtle millisecond cues these drivers use to keep from bumping into each other when side-by-side at 100 kph.
This peculiarity in tax code is triggered by the donation of appreciated shares to a non-profit, without incurring a capital gains tax liability by selling the shares prior to donation. Whether the shares were of the charity or not is irrelevant. I merely presented it that way to reduce the number of actors in a situation which is already pretty complex, and to highlight how there was no net difference in the two scenarios I bulleted.
There are times when strict accuracy and adherence to details is necessary. This was not one of those times. What was important was to explain to a general audience how this tax break works and "makes" money for the donor. It took me several days of playing with the numbers and discussing with my CPA to figure out that this was indeed how it works, and why my gut feeling that it shouldn't work this way was correct. I wanted to present it in a manner in which it would be clear to the reader within seconds, so I removed superfluous details which added complexity which would distract from that understanding. Unless the general electorate understands, there is no hope of ever fixing "exploits" like this in the tax code. That to me was more important than keeping my anecdote strictly accurate, so I simplified the story. You would prefer I sacrifice the greater good in favor of keeping my story accurate?
I simplified the situation to keep my post short. Someone wanted to donate a substantial piece of real estate to the charity. The charity wasn't sure what to do with it, and their lawyer advised them to set up a LLC to hold it while they decided. They asked me to set up the LLC ($400 was my filing expenses). I'm not sure how they translated my $400 in expenses to the number of shares they gave me, but their CPA came up with a certain percentage of shares in my name, and that's what I got. I'd been meaning to donate it back to them for some time, but kept forgetting to do it.
Shortly after I donated my shares, the charity finally managed to sell the property (it had been on the market for many years due to the recession). Based on the sale price of the building, my shares ended up being valued at approx $16k.
Absent a sale (i.e. if I had actually owned direct shares of the charity), I believe the valuation of shares is determined by a balance sheet of assets vs liabilities. You'd have to ask a CPA though.
I donated some shares to a non-profit last year. Normally when you donate, you get a tax deduction for the value of your donation. Contrary to what the NYTimes article says, this isn't a bonus. It merely zeros out the donation from your income. That is, for tax purposes it's like you redirected the donation straight from your income source to the non-profit, and it never passed through your hands. If you didn't get the deduction, you'd be paying taxes on money you gave away.
However, in the case of my shares, they'd appreciated in value considerably since I received them. I helped set up a non-profit charity, and billed them $400 for my services. They didn't have the cash, so paid me in shares instead. 15 years later those shares were worth $16k. I wasn't really interested in the money, so I donated them back to the charity. When doing my taxes this year, I ran across this tax peculiarity. I never sold the shares so I never received $16k in income, and so didn't have a capital gains tax liability on $15.6k. Yet by donating the shares I got a deduction as if I did have a capital gains tax liability.
That seemed wrong, so I asked two different CPAs about it.
If I had sold the shares to the charity at market value, then donated the $16k back to the charity, the deduction for the donation would've zeroed out my capital gains tax liability on the $16k I received as payment. (Actually not exactly since my income tax rate and capital gains tax rate are different, but the idea is that the donation money comes from my higest-tax rate income.)
If I donated the shares directly to the charity, I got the deduction even though I incurred no capital gains liability.
The net result is the same in both cases - I get no money, charity pays no money, charity gets all the shares. But the tax implications are very different.
When I explained it like that, they scratched their heads for a bit, one hit the books and researched it a bit, and both came back to me with the same answer. Yeah it's weird and seems wrong, but that's the way it works.
When your view differs from another and you label it "extreme", then you have a problem.
Then proceeded to write this:
That said, the current free-for-all absolutely is an extreme position.
There's your problem: in each of the issues you listed, the right-wing is at the most extreme position.
abortion - absolute ban, vs. limits on availability and timing
right to die - absolute ban, vs. limits on availability and timing
marijuana - absolute ban, vs. limits on availability
YOU SEE WHERE THIS IS HEADED?
The current situation with guns is not a free-for-all. Felons are generally not allowed to purchase or own guns. You need to pass background checks to purchase. Certain types of ammo are prohibited. Fully-automatic weapons are prohibited. Many jurisdictions ban assault-style guns (non-hunting long guns), etc.
Most conservatives are OK with abortions to protect the life of the mother or in cases of rape. Many are even OK with it if the child has little to no chance of a decent quality of life (e.g. anencephaly). What they're opposed to is abortion as a form of birth control - for convenience. They're ok with DNRs. And popular referendums allowing marijuana use passed because many conservatives were OK with its use for medical purposes.
You need to take your own advice and stop typecasting views different from yours as extreme.
Google self-reported their excessive wifi data collection. Basically a government agency accused them of collecting more wifi data than just SSIDs. Google said, "No, we're only collecting SSIDs. Here, we'll prove it." Then they audited their own records, came back, and said, "Oops, you were right, we accidentally recorded more info than just the SSID."
Contrast this with, say, Microsoft who still won't say what data Windows 10 is collecting. Or Apple, who commandeered people's iPhones to report location and SSIDs back to them (to accomplish what Google did by paying people to drive company cars around), and still haven't admitted it, brushing it off as an oversight instead of prep for their own mapping program. I'm not sure why Google keeps getting brought up as the quintessential example of a bad guy in these privacy issues, when they've been pretty open about what they do and admit when they make mistakes. Other companies are far worse. The way the EU handled the Google case vs. the Apple case basically tells companies: if you accidentally break the law, it is better to obfuscate and deny it, than the be honest and admit it.
So they can cram even more people in coach. Because if you can swap out the passenger accommodation, everywhere on the plane can be coach.
No, they're trying to reduce turnaround time by decoupling the boarding and unboarding stage from when the airplane has to be on the ground. Basically pre-board passengers into the passenger compartment. When the plane arrives, while you're refueling it you simply swap out passenger compartments. It's what they do with luggage - you put the luggage into big baggage containers, and load/unload those in much less time than it would take to load/unload individual bags. The passenger compartment itself could still have first class, business class, and coach seating (and probably would since those first and business class tickets comprise only 8% of sales but pay for over 25% of the flight).
The same idea revolutionized cargo transport and is largely responsible for dropping shipping costs so much that imported goods from developing countries are frequently cheaper than buying goods manufactured domestically.
To be fair, Hawaii is a particularly brazen example of a territory grab. I mean sure, most of the U.S. was settled that way, taking territory from native Americans (who didn't have the concept of owning land). But Hawaii was originally a country. White settlers from the U.S. who wanted to use it for agriculture overthrew the native government, and got the U.S. to annex it. Even then it wasn't over, as the U.S. allows territories to vote for either independence or statehood (the Philippines and Cuba for example voted for independence, Puerto Rico is in a perpetual state of delaying the vote). But by the time Hawaii voted, its native population had been overwhelmed by sugar and pineapple plantation workers and military personnel at Pearl Harbor.
From the perspective of the natives, a mere kickback is probably a tiny fraction of what they feel is owed to them for basically stealing their country.
Since most of the replies to you so far are smarmy, I'll try to answer your question.
An antenna is not just a piece of metal. It's a resonance chamber. When you were a kid, you probably sloshed water back and forth in the bathtub. If you did it at the right frequency, the waves would get bigger and bigger, and eventually slosh over the sides getting your mom and dad all wet.
That's exactly what an antenna does. The EM waves passing through the antenna sloshes electrons back and forth. If it's just the right frequency (called a resonance frequency), the sloshing gets bigger and bigger, creating a stronger signal for the electronics in the phone to pick up. Other frequencies don't create as big a sloshing (or any sloshing), so the amplifies amplifies signals close to the resonance frequency relative to other frequencies. The effect is very pronounced if designed correctly, and allows you to easily pull out exactly the signal you want from a sea of EM noise. What determines the resonance frequency? The size of the bathtub, or the length of the antenna.
You can't use a metal case as an antenna because it's too broad. The resonance frequency along a diagonal would be different than along the edge, and your "antenna" wouldn't tune out a lot of the other frequencies you consider to be noise. You can get around this by using just the edge of the case (Apple tried this). But then anything conductive which touches the antenna (like your hand) can alter its resonance frequency, causing it to not work anymore as an antenna.
So the best antenna design is still a metal wire of just the right length so its resonance frequency matches your cell phone carrier's frequency, mounted internally so as to isolate it from contact with other conductive items. Wrapping that wire inside a metal body creates a Faraday cage which blocks out EM signals, making reception (and transmission) worse. That's what's been so frustrating about all these bloggers and reviewers who failed high school physics who think metal makes a phone "premium". No it doesn't, it makes it a Faraday cage which is pretty much an anti-radio, the worst possible thing you could do to a phone. Save the metal cases for jewelry boxes. Plastic or carbon fiber is the best material for a phone (or radio) case.
All the money from fines and forfeited criminal assets should go into a Federal escrow fund. Every year on April 15, the total amount in that fund gets divided by the number of people filing tax returns, and gets added as a credit to each and every tax return (2x for married couples filing jointly).
Those fines and penalties are supposed to compensate for crimes against society. So it should be distributed back to society at large, not to police or government coffers.
Yes the crew were not fully trained, but according to Airbus the plane couldn't get into the situation it was in, so why train pilots for that?
The plane can't get into that situation while the computer is in control. The Airbus flight computer has a final mode where it basically tells the pilots, "I give up, you fly the plane." Usually this mode kicks in when the computer is getting contradictory information from the instruments (AF447 where one or more of the pitot tubes clogged, causing simultaneous overspeed and stall warnings). So since it's possible for the pilot to end up in full control of the plane, it is imperative that they train for every likely situation. (AF447 crashed because while in this mode, one of the pilots continuously pulled back on the control stick almost the entire time the plane was in a stall, thus keeping it in the stall.)
That said, several of the recent automation accidents seem to be caused not by the automation itself, but by the crew misinterpreting what mode the computer is in and/or misunderstand what the computer will and will not do when in that mode. Asiana 214 crashed because the pilots thought the computer was in a mode where it would auto-throttle to maintain altitude, when it was in a different mode. TAM 3054 crashed because the thrust reverser on one engine was inoperative so the pilots relied on the autothrottle to slow that engine to idle. But when they moved the other engine control to idle then reverse (to deploy its thrust reverser), that disengaged the autothrottle which caused the other engine to spin up to the full throttle setting it was set at.
It would probably be worthwhile for the major airliner manufacturers to get together and standardize the automation modes and what is/isn't controlled in each mode. Then pilots can be trained against a consistent standard instead of having to re-learn all the automation when they change aircraft (what the second pilot was doing in Asiana 214 - if both pilots had been experienced in the 777, one of them may have noticed the error). The way it is now, it's like on one plane pulling back on the stick makes it pitch up, while on another plane pulling back on the stick sometimes makes it pitch down.
More subtle was using a specific seed in a calculator RNG to generate a certain sequence of rolls. A friend tried this during character generation. I knew about seeds so I said sure, but we'll flip a coin each time. If it's heads, we'll take the 2d6 roll the calculator shows (this was Traveller where stats were 2d6). If it's tails, we'll use 14-2d6. He must've decided it was better to have an average character than one half of whose stats sucked, because he quietly said he'd use regular dice.
To be fair, most any padlock can be defeated in 1 second with a bolt cutter. This type of lock is supposed to be used when you just want to keep curious people out, or for liability purposes (you knew an area was dangerous and used the lock to make it difficult to enter, and trespasser intentionally bypassed your attempts to protect him). If I'm trying to protect something worth a couple hundred bucks or more, I'm gonna use something more robust.
Flash was originally created as an artist's tool - to allow streaming animation which didn't take up as much bandwidth by only transmitting backgrounds and sprites once and animating them on the client, rather than streaming raw video. For that purpose it's a fantastic tool, with several TV shows and animated movies still being created with it.
Flash didn't ask to become the de facto scripting language for the web. It only became that because the HTML standard lacked scripting and programming capability which Flash provided. It was a security disaster because it was only ever intended to be an artist's tool and little thought went into making it secure. If you want to blame someone, blame the folks in charge of the HTML standard. They dragged their feet for over a decade, and didn't update HTML to provide many of the capabilities Flash provided until HTML5. HTML 4.01 was standardized in Dec 1999. HTML 5 was standardized in Oct 2014. It should have been made standard in 2001-2003.
Most environmental concern is BASED on the findings of science,
whereas lack of environmental concern is based on either ignorance or selfish greed.
Your statements and his are not mutually exclusive. The bulk of people who are environmentalists or who think climate change is bunk form their positions on these issues for philosophical or economic reasons, not rational reasons. I'm an engineer and I spend a lot of time "educating" them. If you don't know the difference between kilowatts and kilowatt-hours (as most of these people don't), you have no business trying to influence energy policy. It's completely obvious you're basing your opinion on things other than facts.
The environmental scientists who research this stuff do so with a fairly neutral approach. A lot of engineers are environmentally conscientious as well because it correlates with energy efficiency, and engineers love optimizing for efficiency. But they're realistic about it. That's why such a large segment of slashdot readers are both pro-environment and pro-nuclear. They're realistic enough to realize that although nuclear has its drawbacks, the drawbacks of opposing it resulting in continued use of coal and oil are much, much worse (because wind and solar technologies are not yet capable of taking over base load, and probably won't be for another 20 years). Go ahead. Ask anyone who's pro-solar how many square meters of solar panels they'll need on average to charge their EV every night (using batteries as interim storage). Most of them have no clue, and wouldn't even know how to start figuring it out. Heck, most of them don't even have the faintest concept of how big a solar panel it takes to light a light bulb. How can you compare a technology to alternatives and come to a decision to advocate it if you don't even understand these basic things?
That's not all there is to it. The EPA tests just two aspects of driving - highway cruise (65 mph), and start-and-stop city driving (averaging 21 mph). A lot of people's driving seems to fall somewhere in between those two test cases in terms of speed - i.e. around 30-40 mph.
That speed corresponds to the peak efficiency for diesel engines (gasoline engines peak around 40-45 mph). In other words, the EPA highway mileage rating for a gasoline engine is closer to the best MPG you can expect from it in any use case. But the best MPG you can get from a diesel is actually a lot higher than the EPA highway rating, and you can see a lot more MPG improvement if you drive slower in a diesel than if you drive slower with a gasoline engine..
So if an SUV is two times heavier than a light sedan it requires two times more force (energy, fuel) to accelerate (to drive). I mean if two cars are of approximately the same technological level the heavier one burns more fuel, and consequently emits more CO2.
Actually, most SUVs are only about 1.5x heavier. And there are other complexities. e.g. Engines don't operate at the same efficiency at all RPMs. So a transmission with more gears will be heavier, but may allow the engine to operate in a more efficient range for longer, resulting in lower fuel consumption despite the increased mass. So you can't regulate assuming weight is always proportional to fuel consumption.
Also, MPG is the inverse of fuel consumption (and therefore emissions). So those ultra-high MPG vehicles like the Prius aren't really saving you much fuel. Every time you double MPG, you save only half as much fuel. The biggest fuel savings (and therefore most pollution reduction) comes from making high fuel consumption vehicles more efficient. In other words, we should be concentrating on improving the efficiency of trucks and tractor trailers first, not econoboxes.
This is why Europe never bothered with hybrids until automakers started making them for the U.S. market. The rest of the world measures fuel consumption in liters per 100 km, which is proportional to (not the inverse of) fuel consumption, and so there was little pressure to improve fuel efficiency at the low-consumption end - you pour billions of dollars (euros) into R&D for very little payoff in terms of fuel saved.. Improving a SUV from 17 MPG to 20 MPG may not sound impressive, but it saves just as much fuel as improving an econobox from 35 MPG to 50 MPG. In L/100km, those figures are 13.8 to 11.8 for the SUV, 6.7 to 4.7 for the econobox, for the exact same fuel savings of 2 liters per 100 km.
And improving a tractor trailer from 7 MPG to 8 MPG (33.6 to 29.4 L/100km) results in 4.2 liters saved per 100 km. More than twice the fuel savings of getting someone to switch from a Civic to a Prius.
ASCII is 7-bit so only supports 128 different characters. Unicode was made to encompass all character sets of all languages, so is 16-bit, supporting 65535 characters. It has since been expanded with 16 "planes" (4 extra bits), giving a total of over 1 million characters. That's considerably more than all the character sets of all the languages on Earth (even including Chinese), so there is a lot of extra room to do silly things with. Computer data storage has become so cheap that it doesn't cost you much to store all the extra graphics of emojis.
Actually, the standard 3.5mm jack does have a design flaw. When it's inserted, it sticks out from the device. That's fine if you want to place the device in a pocket so that the jack is pointed at the opening. But if for some reason you want to orient the device so the jack is pointed away from the opening, it'll stick out and catch on things, increasing the risk of breakage.
A better design would be a spring-loaded recessed plug, so when you press the jack in all the way, only the flexible part of the wires stick out of the device. Or something that latches on flat against the side of the device (spring clip or magnetically attached).
Slashdot Mirror
Did you know U.S. inteventionist foreign policy began as a reaction to Muslim acts against the U.S.? You've probably heard the opening line of the Marine Corps hymn:
From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli...
The Montezuma part makes sense. The U.S. fought several wars with Mexico, so of course the Marines would be involved. But Tripoli? That's way over in Africa. What the hell were U.S. Marines doing there?
Funny you should ask. Way back around 1800 when the U.S. was a freshly minted nation, it ran into a problem. Prior to the revolution, the U.S. was a British colony, and thus fell under the protection of the British navy. When the U.S. gained independence, it lost that protection. The Muslim Barbary States decided to take advantage of the situation and began capturing U.S. merchant ships and holding the crews for ransom. Their thinking was that since these people weren't Muslim, there was no moral problem with kidnapping them and extorting a ransom.
The fledgling U.S. was deeply in debt and had its own domestic problems. The last thing it wanted to do was to meddle with things going on in other countries. But it didn't have a navy which could deal with the situation (it had been decommissioned after the Revolutionary War to save money), and attempts to negotiate a treaty with France to protect U.S. vessels fell through. So for the first few years, the U.S. just paid the ransom. Of course paying kidnappers just encourages them, and it became open season on U.S. flagged vessels. Eventually the payments became exorbitant (over 1/6th of the Federal government's total budget), and the U.S. recommissioned a navy (the USS Constitution on display in Boston was one of these first ships). President Thomas Jefferson (y'know, the guy who wrote famous things like, "We hold these truths to be self evident - that all men are created equal") launched a military operation to Africa to end the kidnappings and free the hostages.
And that is how the U.S. Marines ended up in Tripoli. That is how the permanent U.S. Navy was born. That is how U.S. meddling with foreign nations began. Because a bunch of Muslims decided to take advantage of a fledgling non-Muslim nation which wanted little to nothing to do with what was going on in the Eastern hemisphere, by kidnapping its citizens and extorting a ransom for their safe return. So if you want to play the blame game, the first incident, the precipitating act which began over two centuries of animosity and set the U.S. on a course for meddling with countries halfway around the world, was actually committed by Muslims against the U.S.
Despite the evil that might arise from these groups conspiring together, logistically they are much better off being grouped together and better able to coordinate their activities.
And no it's not to compete with Tesla, or because EVs are great (from an economic or market standpoint), or because of the VW diesel scandal. California and 9 other states are mandating that all automakers sell ZEVs (zero emissions vehicles), and that the ZEVs comprise at least 14.5% of their total vehicle sales by 2025. If they can't hit 14.5%, they'll either have to buy ZEV credits from another automaker, or they will be prohibited from selling any more ICE cars in those states until their ZEV sales go above 14.5%. Since those states make up approximately 1/3rd of the entire U.S. market, every automaker is busy prepping ZEVs - mostly electric, some hydrogen fuel cells.
This is why you have oddities like the BMW i3, which comes with an option for a backup ICE with a 1.9 gallon fuel tank to help people overcome range anxiety. Why not a bigger fuel tank? Because the ZEV mandate states that a ZEV is allowed to have a ICE engine as a backup, but its range on the ICE has to be less than its range as a ZEV.
This is also why Californians are enjoying some crazy-good lease and purchase deals on ZEVs right now. The ZEV requirement is already in effect, gradually ramping up to the 2025 target, so automakers have to start selling ZEVs now. But those states will consider the automakers to have hit their ZEV target for their state if they hit the target in California alone (since they're just mirroring California's mandate). So all the automakers are shipping nearly all their ZEVs to California and offering huge incentives for people there to buy/lease ZEVs before the end of the year, to drive up their ZEV sales as a percentage of all their vehicle sales in California.
That's true for now. Once multiple people start pooling and cross-referencing their private databases, it'll be easy picking out patterns like which location is most frequently visited by a car - indicating their home address.
It's not just people who drive too fast. After 30 years of driving and observing traffic patterns, the most frequent cause of sudden speed changes I see is people driving too slowly as they try to merge onto the freeway. That causes people already on the freeway to have to slow down or change lanes to avoid them, which increases the risk of an accident.
And TFA comparing car and train capacity is silly because it excludes time spent stopping to load/unload passengers. The whole reason people drive cars instead of take public transportation is because (1) they're sick of waiting for the bus/train to show up, and (2) they're sick of the trip taking 2x-3x longer than if they drive because the bus/train has to stop at a bunch of places they're not interested in going.
Autonomous cars essentially are a train. You get your own private train car, once on the freeway it merges with traffic and runs at the same speed as all other train cars. But it doesn't have to stop at every stop someone else wants to go to - it only stops where you want to stop. The only advantage of a real train is that it takes less energy since you have one power plant pulling (pushing) hundreds of people. And even that advantage could be mitigated if the longer interstate routes were replaced by trains (real ones) which ferry autonomous cars. You punch your destination as 2 states over, and the car drives you to a train station, gets aboard a flatbed car, and the train pulls your car that distance while you spend your time reading slashdot.
We ran into this issue while programming networked simulators for the USAF. When you have two simulators interacting with each other, you can't just spam position updates as fast as you can. You'll quickly saturate the network bandwidth if you do. Consequently, you have to rely on less-frequent position updates, and dead reckoning based on velocity and orientation in between those updates.
A side-effect of this is that formation flying becomes really difficult. If two simulated planes are flying at 1000 kph, even with position updates every 100 milliseconds, they will move 28 meters in between position updates. So small errors in each plane's orientation cause each pilot to see the "other" plane drift by several cm or decimeters, before its location "jumps" back to the true location with the next position update. It breaks down the realism of the simulation, and makes flying in formation virtually impossible. (Our solution was to move objects in formation into a new reference frame relative to the "lead" plane, so that their relative velocities were much lower, resulting in less jumping.)
Anyhow, the point is, if you're spamming position updates at 60 Hz, and the car is moving at 100 kph, then it will travel a half meter between each position update. Consequently the error in positioning the cars next to each other in the simulation is potentially much greater than any error in building two "identical" tracks. You don't want to risk colliding two real cars controlled in this manner because the VR simulation didn't show one car in the proper place, or because a driver sees the other car jumping around in an unpredictable manner because the VR only updates at 60 Hz. So you put them on separate tracks, and overlap the two in the simulation, using a smoothing algorithm to minimize the "jumping". The catch being the smoothing algorithm probably eliminates many of the subtle millisecond cues these drivers use to keep from bumping into each other when side-by-side at 100 kph.
This peculiarity in tax code is triggered by the donation of appreciated shares to a non-profit, without incurring a capital gains tax liability by selling the shares prior to donation. Whether the shares were of the charity or not is irrelevant. I merely presented it that way to reduce the number of actors in a situation which is already pretty complex, and to highlight how there was no net difference in the two scenarios I bulleted.
There are times when strict accuracy and adherence to details is necessary. This was not one of those times. What was important was to explain to a general audience how this tax break works and "makes" money for the donor. It took me several days of playing with the numbers and discussing with my CPA to figure out that this was indeed how it works, and why my gut feeling that it shouldn't work this way was correct. I wanted to present it in a manner in which it would be clear to the reader within seconds, so I removed superfluous details which added complexity which would distract from that understanding. Unless the general electorate understands, there is no hope of ever fixing "exploits" like this in the tax code. That to me was more important than keeping my anecdote strictly accurate, so I simplified the story. You would prefer I sacrifice the greater good in favor of keeping my story accurate?
What's interesting is that the USPTO invalidated Apple's main design patent in this case. But hardly any of the mainstream media reported it.
I simplified the situation to keep my post short. Someone wanted to donate a substantial piece of real estate to the charity. The charity wasn't sure what to do with it, and their lawyer advised them to set up a LLC to hold it while they decided. They asked me to set up the LLC ($400 was my filing expenses). I'm not sure how they translated my $400 in expenses to the number of shares they gave me, but their CPA came up with a certain percentage of shares in my name, and that's what I got. I'd been meaning to donate it back to them for some time, but kept forgetting to do it.
Shortly after I donated my shares, the charity finally managed to sell the property (it had been on the market for many years due to the recession). Based on the sale price of the building, my shares ended up being valued at approx $16k.
Absent a sale (i.e. if I had actually owned direct shares of the charity), I believe the valuation of shares is determined by a balance sheet of assets vs liabilities. You'd have to ask a CPA though.
However, in the case of my shares, they'd appreciated in value considerably since I received them. I helped set up a non-profit charity, and billed them $400 for my services. They didn't have the cash, so paid me in shares instead. 15 years later those shares were worth $16k. I wasn't really interested in the money, so I donated them back to the charity. When doing my taxes this year, I ran across this tax peculiarity. I never sold the shares so I never received $16k in income, and so didn't have a capital gains tax liability on $15.6k. Yet by donating the shares I got a deduction as if I did have a capital gains tax liability.
That seemed wrong, so I asked two different CPAs about it.
The net result is the same in both cases - I get no money, charity pays no money, charity gets all the shares. But the tax implications are very different.
When I explained it like that, they scratched their heads for a bit, one hit the books and researched it a bit, and both came back to me with the same answer. Yeah it's weird and seems wrong, but that's the way it works.
Then proceeded to write this:
The current situation with guns is not a free-for-all. Felons are generally not allowed to purchase or own guns. You need to pass background checks to purchase. Certain types of ammo are prohibited. Fully-automatic weapons are prohibited. Many jurisdictions ban assault-style guns (non-hunting long guns), etc.
Most conservatives are OK with abortions to protect the life of the mother or in cases of rape. Many are even OK with it if the child has little to no chance of a decent quality of life (e.g. anencephaly). What they're opposed to is abortion as a form of birth control - for convenience. They're ok with DNRs. And popular referendums allowing marijuana use passed because many conservatives were OK with its use for medical purposes.
You need to take your own advice and stop typecasting views different from yours as extreme.
Google self-reported their excessive wifi data collection. Basically a government agency accused them of collecting more wifi data than just SSIDs. Google said, "No, we're only collecting SSIDs. Here, we'll prove it." Then they audited their own records, came back, and said, "Oops, you were right, we accidentally recorded more info than just the SSID."
Contrast this with, say, Microsoft who still won't say what data Windows 10 is collecting. Or Apple, who commandeered people's iPhones to report location and SSIDs back to them (to accomplish what Google did by paying people to drive company cars around), and still haven't admitted it, brushing it off as an oversight instead of prep for their own mapping program. I'm not sure why Google keeps getting brought up as the quintessential example of a bad guy in these privacy issues, when they've been pretty open about what they do and admit when they make mistakes. Other companies are far worse. The way the EU handled the Google case vs. the Apple case basically tells companies: if you accidentally break the law, it is better to obfuscate and deny it, than the be honest and admit it.
No, they're trying to reduce turnaround time by decoupling the boarding and unboarding stage from when the airplane has to be on the ground. Basically pre-board passengers into the passenger compartment. When the plane arrives, while you're refueling it you simply swap out passenger compartments. It's what they do with luggage - you put the luggage into big baggage containers, and load/unload those in much less time than it would take to load/unload individual bags. The passenger compartment itself could still have first class, business class, and coach seating (and probably would since those first and business class tickets comprise only 8% of sales but pay for over 25% of the flight).
The same idea revolutionized cargo transport and is largely responsible for dropping shipping costs so much that imported goods from developing countries are frequently cheaper than buying goods manufactured domestically.
To be fair, Hawaii is a particularly brazen example of a territory grab. I mean sure, most of the U.S. was settled that way, taking territory from native Americans (who didn't have the concept of owning land). But Hawaii was originally a country. White settlers from the U.S. who wanted to use it for agriculture overthrew the native government, and got the U.S. to annex it. Even then it wasn't over, as the U.S. allows territories to vote for either independence or statehood (the Philippines and Cuba for example voted for independence, Puerto Rico is in a perpetual state of delaying the vote). But by the time Hawaii voted, its native population had been overwhelmed by sugar and pineapple plantation workers and military personnel at Pearl Harbor.
From the perspective of the natives, a mere kickback is probably a tiny fraction of what they feel is owed to them for basically stealing their country.
Since most of the replies to you so far are smarmy, I'll try to answer your question.
An antenna is not just a piece of metal. It's a resonance chamber. When you were a kid, you probably sloshed water back and forth in the bathtub. If you did it at the right frequency, the waves would get bigger and bigger, and eventually slosh over the sides getting your mom and dad all wet.
That's exactly what an antenna does. The EM waves passing through the antenna sloshes electrons back and forth. If it's just the right frequency (called a resonance frequency), the sloshing gets bigger and bigger, creating a stronger signal for the electronics in the phone to pick up. Other frequencies don't create as big a sloshing (or any sloshing), so the amplifies amplifies signals close to the resonance frequency relative to other frequencies. The effect is very pronounced if designed correctly, and allows you to easily pull out exactly the signal you want from a sea of EM noise. What determines the resonance frequency? The size of the bathtub, or the length of the antenna.
You can't use a metal case as an antenna because it's too broad. The resonance frequency along a diagonal would be different than along the edge, and your "antenna" wouldn't tune out a lot of the other frequencies you consider to be noise. You can get around this by using just the edge of the case (Apple tried this). But then anything conductive which touches the antenna (like your hand) can alter its resonance frequency, causing it to not work anymore as an antenna.
So the best antenna design is still a metal wire of just the right length so its resonance frequency matches your cell phone carrier's frequency, mounted internally so as to isolate it from contact with other conductive items. Wrapping that wire inside a metal body creates a Faraday cage which blocks out EM signals, making reception (and transmission) worse. That's what's been so frustrating about all these bloggers and reviewers who failed high school physics who think metal makes a phone "premium". No it doesn't, it makes it a Faraday cage which is pretty much an anti-radio, the worst possible thing you could do to a phone. Save the metal cases for jewelry boxes. Plastic or carbon fiber is the best material for a phone (or radio) case.
All the money from fines and forfeited criminal assets should go into a Federal escrow fund. Every year on April 15, the total amount in that fund gets divided by the number of people filing tax returns, and gets added as a credit to each and every tax return (2x for married couples filing jointly).
Those fines and penalties are supposed to compensate for crimes against society. So it should be distributed back to society at large, not to police or government coffers.
The plane can't get into that situation while the computer is in control. The Airbus flight computer has a final mode where it basically tells the pilots, "I give up, you fly the plane." Usually this mode kicks in when the computer is getting contradictory information from the instruments (AF447 where one or more of the pitot tubes clogged, causing simultaneous overspeed and stall warnings). So since it's possible for the pilot to end up in full control of the plane, it is imperative that they train for every likely situation. (AF447 crashed because while in this mode, one of the pilots continuously pulled back on the control stick almost the entire time the plane was in a stall, thus keeping it in the stall.)
That said, several of the recent automation accidents seem to be caused not by the automation itself, but by the crew misinterpreting what mode the computer is in and/or misunderstand what the computer will and will not do when in that mode. Asiana 214 crashed because the pilots thought the computer was in a mode where it would auto-throttle to maintain altitude, when it was in a different mode. TAM 3054 crashed because the thrust reverser on one engine was inoperative so the pilots relied on the autothrottle to slow that engine to idle. But when they moved the other engine control to idle then reverse (to deploy its thrust reverser), that disengaged the autothrottle which caused the other engine to spin up to the full throttle setting it was set at.
It would probably be worthwhile for the major airliner manufacturers to get together and standardize the automation modes and what is/isn't controlled in each mode. Then pilots can be trained against a consistent standard instead of having to re-learn all the automation when they change aircraft (what the second pilot was doing in Asiana 214 - if both pilots had been experienced in the 777, one of them may have noticed the error). The way it is now, it's like on one plane pulling back on the stick makes it pitch up, while on another plane pulling back on the stick sometimes makes it pitch down.
More subtle was using a specific seed in a calculator RNG to generate a certain sequence of rolls. A friend tried this during character generation. I knew about seeds so I said sure, but we'll flip a coin each time. If it's heads, we'll take the 2d6 roll the calculator shows (this was Traveller where stats were 2d6). If it's tails, we'll use 14-2d6. He must've decided it was better to have an average character than one half of whose stats sucked, because he quietly said he'd use regular dice.
To be fair, most any padlock can be defeated in 1 second with a bolt cutter. This type of lock is supposed to be used when you just want to keep curious people out, or for liability purposes (you knew an area was dangerous and used the lock to make it difficult to enter, and trespasser intentionally bypassed your attempts to protect him). If I'm trying to protect something worth a couple hundred bucks or more, I'm gonna use something more robust.
Flash was originally created as an artist's tool - to allow streaming animation which didn't take up as much bandwidth by only transmitting backgrounds and sprites once and animating them on the client, rather than streaming raw video. For that purpose it's a fantastic tool, with several TV shows and animated movies still being created with it.
Flash didn't ask to become the de facto scripting language for the web. It only became that because the HTML standard lacked scripting and programming capability which Flash provided. It was a security disaster because it was only ever intended to be an artist's tool and little thought went into making it secure. If you want to blame someone, blame the folks in charge of the HTML standard. They dragged their feet for over a decade, and didn't update HTML to provide many of the capabilities Flash provided until HTML5. HTML 4.01 was standardized in Dec 1999. HTML 5 was standardized in Oct 2014. It should have been made standard in 2001-2003.
Your statements and his are not mutually exclusive. The bulk of people who are environmentalists or who think climate change is bunk form their positions on these issues for philosophical or economic reasons, not rational reasons. I'm an engineer and I spend a lot of time "educating" them. If you don't know the difference between kilowatts and kilowatt-hours (as most of these people don't), you have no business trying to influence energy policy. It's completely obvious you're basing your opinion on things other than facts.
The environmental scientists who research this stuff do so with a fairly neutral approach. A lot of engineers are environmentally conscientious as well because it correlates with energy efficiency, and engineers love optimizing for efficiency. But they're realistic about it. That's why such a large segment of slashdot readers are both pro-environment and pro-nuclear. They're realistic enough to realize that although nuclear has its drawbacks, the drawbacks of opposing it resulting in continued use of coal and oil are much, much worse (because wind and solar technologies are not yet capable of taking over base load, and probably won't be for another 20 years). Go ahead. Ask anyone who's pro-solar how many square meters of solar panels they'll need on average to charge their EV every night (using batteries as interim storage). Most of them have no clue, and wouldn't even know how to start figuring it out. Heck, most of them don't even have the faintest concept of how big a solar panel it takes to light a light bulb. How can you compare a technology to alternatives and come to a decision to advocate it if you don't even understand these basic things?
That's not all there is to it. The EPA tests just two aspects of driving - highway cruise (65 mph), and start-and-stop city driving (averaging 21 mph). A lot of people's driving seems to fall somewhere in between those two test cases in terms of speed - i.e. around 30-40 mph.
That speed corresponds to the peak efficiency for diesel engines (gasoline engines peak around 40-45 mph). In other words, the EPA highway mileage rating for a gasoline engine is closer to the best MPG you can expect from it in any use case. But the best MPG you can get from a diesel is actually a lot higher than the EPA highway rating, and you can see a lot more MPG improvement if you drive slower in a diesel than if you drive slower with a gasoline engine..
Actually, most SUVs are only about 1.5x heavier. And there are other complexities. e.g. Engines don't operate at the same efficiency at all RPMs. So a transmission with more gears will be heavier, but may allow the engine to operate in a more efficient range for longer, resulting in lower fuel consumption despite the increased mass. So you can't regulate assuming weight is always proportional to fuel consumption.
Also, MPG is the inverse of fuel consumption (and therefore emissions). So those ultra-high MPG vehicles like the Prius aren't really saving you much fuel. Every time you double MPG, you save only half as much fuel. The biggest fuel savings (and therefore most pollution reduction) comes from making high fuel consumption vehicles more efficient. In other words, we should be concentrating on improving the efficiency of trucks and tractor trailers first, not econoboxes.
This is why Europe never bothered with hybrids until automakers started making them for the U.S. market. The rest of the world measures fuel consumption in liters per 100 km, which is proportional to (not the inverse of) fuel consumption, and so there was little pressure to improve fuel efficiency at the low-consumption end - you pour billions of dollars (euros) into R&D for very little payoff in terms of fuel saved.. Improving a SUV from 17 MPG to 20 MPG may not sound impressive, but it saves just as much fuel as improving an econobox from 35 MPG to 50 MPG. In L/100km, those figures are 13.8 to 11.8 for the SUV, 6.7 to 4.7 for the econobox, for the exact same fuel savings of 2 liters per 100 km.
And improving a tractor trailer from 7 MPG to 8 MPG (33.6 to 29.4 L/100km) results in 4.2 liters saved per 100 km. More than twice the fuel savings of getting someone to switch from a Civic to a Prius.
ASCII is 7-bit so only supports 128 different characters. Unicode was made to encompass all character sets of all languages, so is 16-bit, supporting 65535 characters. It has since been expanded with 16 "planes" (4 extra bits), giving a total of over 1 million characters. That's considerably more than all the character sets of all the languages on Earth (even including Chinese), so there is a lot of extra room to do silly things with. Computer data storage has become so cheap that it doesn't cost you much to store all the extra graphics of emojis.
Actually, the standard 3.5mm jack does have a design flaw. When it's inserted, it sticks out from the device. That's fine if you want to place the device in a pocket so that the jack is pointed at the opening. But if for some reason you want to orient the device so the jack is pointed away from the opening, it'll stick out and catch on things, increasing the risk of breakage.
A better design would be a spring-loaded recessed plug, so when you press the jack in all the way, only the flexible part of the wires stick out of the device. Or something that latches on flat against the side of the device (spring clip or magnetically attached).