Aerospace, where this material would most likely be used first, still predominantly uses Imperial units. Does that mean you should "learn to live with it" as well?
As a trained engineer, I'm fluent in both Imperial and metric units (both CGS and MKS for metric). I've never really understood bashing each other over unit choices. We don't bash each other because a paper was published in Russian instead of English. (And no the Mars Climate Orbiter was not lost due to an erroneous Imperial to metric conversion. It was lost because someone left the units off a number entirely, and someone else assumed what the units were instead of making a phone call to ask. It just so happened the units left off were Imperial and the second person assumed they were metric. The exact same thing could've happened if all the numbers had been entirely metric - if the unlabeled numbers had been in kilonewtons and the second person assumed they were newtons.)
Of the hundreds of abortion clinic bombings, I've only been able to find one which resulted in a fatality. It's almost as if the bombers were carefully trying to avoid human fatalities. Which makes sense since their whole rationale for doing it was to stop what they perceive as widespread murder of unborn children. i.e. They did it because they value life; their definition of life just happens to be a superset of yours. They only resorted to bombings and arson to in their view stop a greater violence (buildings and equipment being less valuable than lives), the opposite of your implication.
The lone exception was the bombing carried out by Eric Rudolph. You may know him better as the Centennial Olympic Park bomber, so clearly he had no qualms about using indiscriminate violence in support of his beliefs. (There have been several shootings of abortion clinic workers. But shootings are targeted, not indiscriminate like bombings.)
That doesn't completely fix it. The problem is related to both polling frequency and positional error.
The reason is pretty obvious if your GPS device has ever been slow getting a fix on multiple satellites and has a large error circle. One moment it says you're at position x, 5 seconds later it says you've warped half a mile away. The larger the positional error, the greater the distance error. Assuming you're traveling a straight line path, the positional errors average out to zero only when the errors fall along the line you're traveling. Any positional error perpendicular to your direction of motion results in an overestimate of distance traveled by tracing your route as a zig-zag instead of straight.
That would suggest a smoothing algorithm could mostly fix this. Basically draw the simplest curve you can that goes through all the error circles around the breadcrumbs the GPS has recorded.
Terrorist is a pejorative term applied to them by the targets of the violence. They don't call themselves that. You can't determine their strategy with insults.
The schoolyard bully isn't a bully because we call him that. He's a bully because he beats you up just enough intimidate you into giving in to his future demands, but not enough to get in trouble with local authorities. He can call himself rightful ruler of the school for all we care. He's still a bully. It's the strategy which determines the name, not the other way around.
Likewise they're not terrorists because we call them that. They're terrorists because of their strategy of deliberately targeting soft targets with no or negligible military value. i.e. The goal is to terrorize the populace to induce a socio-political change in behavior, not to inflict military damage.
Terrorism is a subset of psychological warfare, which encompasses tactics ranging from torture all the way to acceptable things like dropping leaflets to demoralize the opposition. All focus on destroying the opponent's will to fight, rather than his ability to fight. There's nothing pejorative about it; the word itself is pretty indicative of the strategy it's describing. Early colonial opposition during the American Revolutionary war could be considered terrorism (e.g. Boston Tea Party). Towards the end of WWII, after some off-target bombing raids opened the doors, both sides were wantonly bombing each others' civilian population centers to try to get each other to stop fighting. Basically terrorism.
Same thing happened with Authentec (the fingerprint scanner company) when Apple acquired them. As the new owners I don't have a problem with them withdrawing the product from the market for use exclusively on Apple devices. But they also took down the website where all the drivers and software for previously-sold devices were distributed. Yeah you could still get drivers from your laptop manufacturer. But because of how Firefox's and Chrome's version numbering worked, the browser extension software needed to be updated every new browser release. When Apple took the website down, all those fingerprint scanners because unusable with a modern browser.
20 years ago I would've agreed. However, technological progress is leading us to one inevitable outcome. Nuclear weapons used to be possessed by only the most powerful nation-states. Then smaller but advanced nation-states acquired them. In the past 20 years, technologically and socio-economically backwards nations have begun to acquire nuclear weapons (Pakistan, North Korea). Extend that trend and you realize at some point in the not-so-distant future, non-nation states with a sense of purpose and the finances to back it up will eventually acquire nuclear weapons.
Some sort of solution to terrorism needs to be developed before that happens, whether it be socio-political engineering and economic assistance to eliminate its roots, or swift and consistent reprisal that clearly establishes that the perpetrators of terrorism will always pay far more than they will ever gain by the tactic. I don't claim to know what the solution is, but we need to be working on figuring it out now, while it's still a small problem. It's much more preferable to work on figuring out a solution now while terrorism is still statistically irrelevant, than to ignore until cities are being destroyed by backpack nukes.
You don't wait until you have stage 4 cancer to start to treat it; you test to try to detect it early before it becomes incurable. We didn't wait until Ebola became a global pandemic to work on figuring out ways to control and contain it. We hopefully won't ignore global warming just because the initial symptoms are small and easily ignored. Likewise, just because terrorism is currently statistically insignificant as a cause of death doesn't mean we should be ignoring it.
My suggestion is to develop a highly precise retroreflector material, like used in road sign paint or bicycle reflectors (they appear bright because they reflect your headlights back at you) but much more precise. Then paint all aircraft with this material. Then the idiots shining lasers at planes will end up blinding themselves.
I'm curious how someone on the ground is able to aim at the windshield of the cockpit from the ground. It seems like geometry of shining a laser at a plane would be such that if you were reasonably close to a plane, the windshield wouldn't be line of sight to an observer on the ground.
Simple geometry says if the pilot can see the ground, a laser on the ground can reach his eyes. Anyhow, a disturbing fraction of laser strikes are happening as planes are on final approach for landing. Their proximity, slower speed, and predicable path makes them more tempting targets at that stage of the flight. And it's precisely that stage where there's the slimmest margin for recovery should an incident occur.
I doubt a laser alone will bring down an airliner (there are two pilots specifically so one can take over if the other is disabled). But if the pilots are busy dealing with another problem, a laser strike may be the critical factor which pushes the situation over the threshold from a safe emergency landing to a crashed airplane. If you've read any airliner accident reports, it's almost always a combination of multiple factors which cause the plane to crash. if any one of those factors hadn't happened, the plane wouldn't have crashed.
The article lists some red flags that should have been raised (two addresses listed as being active, the IRS getting W2 forms from two employers that weren't even near each other, etc). In my experience, though, companies and government agencies don't mind missing red flags. Red flags mean that someone has to put in extra effort to resolve the issue. Ignoring the red flag, though, means that you continue doing what you're doing and it becomes someone else's problem.
There's a more sinister reason behind it. A huge chunk of W2s under duplicate SSNs are due to illegal immigrants using a fake SSN to work. You can't just make up any number - the IRS will reject that. So (presumably) they or someone they hire gets a real person's SSN, and the illegal immigrant adopts that person's name, identity, and SSN. "Fixing" this problem means creating a sure-fire way to prevent illegal immigrants from working in the country, so nothing is done about it. One party doesn't want to fix it because they want to make these people citizens so they'll vote for that party. An influential fraction of the other party doesn't want to fix it because they want these people to remain as a source of cheap labor.
I used to do the accounting at a company which I'm pretty sure had a not-insignificant number of illegal immigrants. Employers are only allowed to ask potential employees for certain pieces of ID, and the most common one is the Social Security Card. The government has no system by which an employer can verify a SSN matches other info the applicant provides, so all you can do is look at it and see if it seems real (it's super-easy to fake), make a photocopy of it, and keep it in the employee's file. If INS ever comes knocking, that's your proof that you've done your due diligence. Anyway, about a month or two after I completed everyone's W2s, I got a stack of letters from the IRS about "irregularities" with the W2s. Some careful reading between the lines and some web research turned up that these letters are commonly generated when two W2s are issued for the same person whose name and SSN match but other details (like address) differ. As an employer, you just sign saying that the employee swears that that's their real SSN, mail it back, and it becomes the government's problem. I'd like to do more as an employer, but my job is running a company, not immigration enforcement. The government doesn't even provide me with tools to verify it anyway. And the potential liability for incorrectly ratting someone out as illegal is huge.
Exactly this. It is a trade-off between having perfect devices for every possible task, and the inconvenience of having a multiple devices which you need to lug around and keep synchronized. At some point you have to ask yourself, does this particular task need its own dedicated device, or can another device I already own do a good enough job? That's what the Surface Book is aiming at - merging the laptop and large tablet categories.
I've been using tablet PCs for over a decade now, primarily because I wanted the larger (12+ inch) display in tablet form factor. Current technology seems to only be able to get that size screen in a tablet at a weight of 1.6 lbs (iPad Pro, Surface Book tablet-only, Surface Pro, Samsung Tab Pro all hit this weight). That's too much extra weight to lug around in my bag when I travel to warrant a separate device. But if my laptop can double as a tablet, I can cover both bases with a single device. I'm going to get that device, even if it's only 90% as good as a separate laptop and 90% as good as a separate tablet. Cook's reasoning is right if you're a CEO who has an entourage of staff carrying his bags for him everywhere he goes. For the rest of us who have to carry our own bags and have a limited budget, a device which does two functions well enough will trump two separate devices.
BTW, I had a Thinkpad Yoga 14 for a while. My main reason for giving it up was the screen's 16:9 aspect ratio - it's way too narrow in portrait orientation. 16:10 or 3:2 is much more preferable. And before anyone starts crowing about the iPad's 4:3, I lived with a 4:3 tablet from 2004-2008. It's too wide in portrait format. PDFs end up with excess blank space on the left and right margins, or the top and bottom have to be clipped. 4:3 seems like it would be best if you think of a letter-sized sheet of paper (8.5x11 = 1.29). But when you actually scan pages and try it, you quickly realize you're wasting a ton of expensive screen space on useless white margins. Remove the margins and you're right around 3:2 or 16:10.
The problem is they aren't actually louder. The FCC sets loudness limits that commercials aren't allowed to exceed in response to viewer complaints about the commercials being louder. They've just been dynamically compressed (like with the loudness wars) so even the soft parts are at max loudness.
The network usage numbers back this up too. Every pro-Apple site seemed to crow over the NetMarketShare stats showing iOS having roughly twice the browser traffic of Android. The reality was that Android passed iOS web traffic in 2013.
How can that be? NetMarketShare (Net Applications) tracks a relatively small sample of sites (about 40,000), and only counts individual visits in a month. So when they said iOS traffic exceeded Android traffic by nearly 2x, what they meant was there were 2x as many unique iOS visitors as unique Android visitors in a month. StatCounter tracks over 3 million sites and counts page hits - i.e. actual traffic volume. By their measurements Android passed iOS around 2013, and is currently at about 2.5x iOS traffic volume.
In other words, back when twice as many iOS users browsed the web than Android users, each browsing Android user generated more than 2x as much traffic as the typical iOS user. Combine this with the mobile device market share stats (roughly 80% Android) and the complete picture you get is: The vast majority of Android users never browse the web. iOS users occasionally browse the web (I wouldn't call them all kids, just light or occasional users). A small group of Android users - the "premium" users - browse the web heavily on their devices, much more heavily than iOS users.
Note: Net Applications finally showed Android passing iOS in mid-2014. So now not only does more web browsing come from Android, but more unique visitors as well. Of course you probably never heard about that happening because the press has a strong pro-Apple bias and rarely publishes anything which casts Apple in a bad light. Just like you never heard about the iPad losing tablet market share until it dropped below 50%, even though it was obvious for 2 years that was happening if you were tracking the quarterly statistics.
I completely agree. The TV is just a monitor, and tying it to tie it with another device/service on a different upgrade cycle is silly bordering on stupid. An extreme case is the high-end iMac, where they've coupled a beautiful monitor that'll probably be usable for 15-20 years, with computer hardware which will be obsolete in 5-7.
But you have to remember the vast majority of people used to have VCRs endlessly flashing 12:00. They have a hard enough time just changing video input mode when they plug in a Roku or Chromecast. You start talking about Kodi (XBMC) and streaming, and their eyes will glaze over. Something that is integrated and works out the box offers value to them, despite the higher costs (purchase price, needing more frequent replacement, and loss of privacy). That's why those iMacs sell. That's why Smart TVs sell.
You're assuming "no security" is the worst possible state. I'd rate them from best to worst:
Strong security
Weak security
No security
Security people think is strong but is in fact weak
If Apple et al were marketing fingerprint scanners as weak security, I'd have no problem with it. But they've been trying to market them as strong security, e.g. claiming it's based on the structure inside your finger and not your fingerprint itself (which was quickly discredited when people bypassed it with latex copies of fingerprints). Lulling people into a false sense of security like that just makes them easier targets for thieves and criminals. If your email is permanently logged in on your phone and your only security is a fingerprint scanner, then any thief who gets your phone and goes through the effort to lift your fingerprint can request password resets from every online account you have. Never mind the new phone-as-a-credit-card systems.
If the regulation is unenforceable (i.e. half the kids get a drone for Christmas), then it's a bad thing to have it on the books. The government will then use selective enforcement to punish people they don't like, rather than enforcing in a fair and evenhanded manner. The regulation then becomes a means for the government to control the population, when in fact the population should be controlling the government.
What happened to passenger hovercraft? That's obvious; the flexibility they provide (amphibious, require little infrastructure) obviously doesn't offset their inherent disadvantages (lack of carrying capacity, poor fuel efficiency, etc) except for military applications.
As this is/., I'll get into some of the technical details. The resistance a hovercraft encounters is basically energy transferred to the water and dissipated as waves. The slower the hovercraft is moving, the greater this wave resistance. It's greatest when the hovercraft is stationary - in that mode the air cushion is displacing a volume of water equivalent to the vehicle weight, just like a displacement hull ship. As it speeds up, this wave resistance decreases. Basically each "block" of water experiences the weight of the air cushion for less time the faster the hovercraft is moving. So the faster the hovercraft is moving, the less time there is for each "block" of water to start accelerating downwards, the less it moves, and the less wave resistance there is. At extremely high speeds, there's practically no wave resistance - just like a planing hull except without the friction between the hull and water.
As it turns out, for most commercial ship sizes and speed regimes, the hovercraft doesn't have much if any advantage over a fast catamaran or even a planing hull. But because it's basically an aircraft (and generates thrust via the air), it's a lot more expensive to operate. At extremely high speeds (50-100 knots) the hovercraft is more efficient (albeit still using more energy than traveling at slower speeds). But it's pretty much only the military who really wants ships which can go that fast. (At even higher speeds you're better off with a WIG - wing in ground effect vehicles - which are even more like an airplane.)
What I want to know is what happened to the hydrofoil? I got to ride on one from H.K. to Macao at a very young age; I remember being mildly disturbed at the speeds we were traveling at... I've never heard a peep about them, however.
Cost of construction, maintenance, and operation. Like with the hovercraft, it's basically an aircraft. The one you rode from HK to Macau was probably a Kawasaki jetfoil. It was originally designed by Boeing, and licensed to Kawasaki when they couldn't sell any in the U.S. In terms of construction, it's basically an airplane in the shape of a ship (lightweight aluminum construction).
A displacement hull and even most catamarans are dirt simple to build and maintain and don't really care how much weight you load onto them (less true for catamarans). Hydrofoils, like hovercraft and aircraft, are extremely weight-sensitive. That pretty much limits them to carrying passengers. And the higher construction and maintenance costs means their ticket prices are only sustainable on extremely lucrative routes, like people traveling from Hong Kong to Macau to gamble.
There's just not much of a market space between a 30 knot conventional ferry and a 200 knot turboprop aircraft. If you want cheap, the ferry is considerably cheaper. If you're willing to pay more, the turboprop will almost always get you there a lot quicker for just a little more cost.
Only idiots would think unlimited data will work. Go look at the pricing for dedicated connections some time. An OC3 with a mere 155 Mbps (148 Mbps actual data) is $10k-$20k/mo. Compare that to the latest Time Warner plan for 300 Mbps for $60/mo that they're advertising.
The only way you can make those numbers work is by oversubscribing by two orders of magnitude (i.e. a cable subscriber's average bandwidth is about 1/100 to 1/300 what they would use if they maxed it out 24/7). And the only way you can make oversubscribing work is either with data caps, or by unceremoniously cutting off service to data hogs.
300 Mbps * 1/300 = 1 Mbps
1 Mbps * 1 month = 328 GB
Hey whaddaya know, that's almost exactly the data cap for the $60 service. What a coincidence!
The fact that Internet bandwidth is expensive in the U.S. has nothing to do with data caps. It's because nearly every municipal government in the country has granted a monopoly to a single phone company and a single cable TV/Internet company. That lack of competition means prices remain artificially high. Ironically, "socialist" Europe is doing it right and allowing multiple ISPs to compete, resulting in better service and lower prices. In the U.S. you have the government claiming to regulate wired carriers for the greater good, but actually making things worse.
What needs to happen is for Internet service to be regulated like electricity and gas utilities. A single company builds and maintains the actual lines. But they're prohibited from selling the electricity or gas which flows through those line. Instead you buy those from your choice of hundreds of different suppliers, and the supplier pays the maintenance company a fixed (regulated) rate for use of the line. Do that with Internet service and things will quickly and dramatically improve in the U.S. The unregulated free-for-all model works best when a technology is first being implemented (e.g. both AC and DC electrical distribution networks were allowed to be built). But once it becomes clear which technology is best (fiber to the home looks like the end-game for Internet), you can turn it into a utility.
Doesn't high humidity solve one of the biggest problems in the region though? Lack of fresh water. You could pull it out of the atmosphere with dew catchers or even active chillers (which have the downside of putting out heat), instead of more expensive desalination. Basically, the sun is doing the expensive water vaporization stage "for free", and all you need to build are the condensers. What do the models say will happen to the temperature if the region goes from being desert to overgrown with plants and trees providing lots of shade?
That's the big problem I'm seeing with a lot of the climate change narrative lately. Because it's already been decided that the change is bad, everything the media carries focuses on the negative consequences. In the last 5 years I've only seen one story on how it could benefit certain areas.
It's got nothing to do with AMD. Processor performance hit a brick wall in the early 2000s. Prior to then, most performance gains came from ramping up the clock speed.
At about 3-4 GHz,we reached a point where power leakage made higher frequencies completely impractical. AMD used a more power-thrifty architecture at that time which allowed them to briefly take the CPU lead from Intel, who was completely committed to ramping up clock speed with Prescott. Intel had to abandon netburst and later Intel CPUs were based on the mobile Pentium M, which eschewed high clock speeds to instead concentrate on lower power consumption (it was designed for laptops).
Ever since then, both Intel and AMD have kept clock speed about the same, and focused instead on redesigning CPUs for more efficient parallel processing, increasing the number of cores, and reducing power consumption. Unless there's some earthshattering technological breakthrough, the days of CPU performance increasing 10x every 5 years are over. 5%-10% a year (about 1.5x increase every 5 years, which is about the performance delta between Sandy Bridge and Skylake) is the new norm. Get used to it.
Most of the CPU improvements are instead going into reducing power consumption (Skylake uses about 1/3 to 1/4 the power of Sandy Bridge). My phone is more powerful than the computer I was using in 2000 and lasts 36+ hours on a single charge of a battery smaller than a Kit Kat bar. That is mind-boggling if you think about it.
Actually, I'm not sure it's the FTC's job either. This is one of those places where the International nature of the Internet which usually protects individual users from government censorship, ends up hurting them. If the U.S. government were to mandate that Google and Facebook honor Do Not Track requests, what's to stop them from just moving all their servers to a country which won't impede them from tracking users? The only way to enforce it then would be to require Google and Facebook abide by U.S. law regardless of where they're operating from. That's a huge slippery slope which legitimizes China's censorship of the Internet, and France's attempts to make Google's global search results abide by French law.
why not just beef up and extend public transport infrastructure, make it more affordable, while at the same time reduce the multi-billion dollar subsidies to the oil industry, thereby making private car use more expensive
The subsidies the oil industry gets amount to about 1 cent per gallon of gas. It's far, far outweighed by the fuel taxes imposed by the Federal and state governments (about 15 cents/gal each). Those fuel taxes pay for maintenance and construction of roads. If you shift road use from private vehicles to public transportation, that drop in fuel tax revenue would have to be made up by the remaining vehicles. And public transportation would in fact become more expensive.
In other words, public transportation is already "made more affordable" - by taxes paid by private vehicles.
There is no single solution to transportation. Public transportation works better in certain circumstances, private transportation works better in others. If you try to design your transportation system around the mantra that one is always better than the other (what happened in Los Angeles in the 1940s when public transportation was dismantled in favor of freeways for private cars), you will seriously screw up the transportation system for a long, long time.
The content industry has this enormous misconception about how the Internet works. They think it's like a street you drive down, the websites are like stores you pass by, and if you see an interesting store you stop by to visit. They opposed Google News aggregating snippets from news sites because they felt it was like Google was putting a big Google sign in front of their store.
That's not how the Internet works. There is no independent road. The hyperlinks are the road. That is, you do not travel down a road passing by stores. You travel from store to store via hyperlinks. That entire network of hyperlinks connecting the stores is the Internet.
If this law passes, the content industry thinks they can assert copyright over a hyperlink to their site, and the linking site will have to pay them a small copyright fee. In reality what will happen is the linking site will simply delete the hyperlink. The end result will be what happened when they tried to prevent Google News from linking their articles, times a million. Any site exercising copyright control over hyperlinks will be cutting themselves off from the Internet. First their Google Pagerank will plummet since it's based partly on how many other sites link to your site, and they'll disappear from the search engines. Eventually there will no longer be any way to navigate from the Internet at large to those sites, because all the hyperlinks to them have been deleted per their request. Exercising copyright over hyperlinks will be electronic suicide, and the only remaining sites will be ones which include a legal waiver that it is completely legal to link to their site.
Occasionally I'll know someone who wants to send me a text using their stupid custom emojis. It comes into my phone as blank, mostly because the whole fucking point it to make me download their shit, and probably track me.
As far as I can tell, most emojis are just graphic files,
They're just binary data strings, 16-bits per "character" instead of 7- or 8-bits like regular SMS text. Your phone (or rather, the SMS app) has to have the graphics which correspond to the Unicode emojis though (64k possible ones right now), otherwise they just show up as blank squares. Receiving them in a text doesn't make you download graphics files or track you.
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Aerospace, where this material would most likely be used first, still predominantly uses Imperial units. Does that mean you should "learn to live with it" as well?
As a trained engineer, I'm fluent in both Imperial and metric units (both CGS and MKS for metric). I've never really understood bashing each other over unit choices. We don't bash each other because a paper was published in Russian instead of English. (And no the Mars Climate Orbiter was not lost due to an erroneous Imperial to metric conversion. It was lost because someone left the units off a number entirely, and someone else assumed what the units were instead of making a phone call to ask. It just so happened the units left off were Imperial and the second person assumed they were metric. The exact same thing could've happened if all the numbers had been entirely metric - if the unlabeled numbers had been in kilonewtons and the second person assumed they were newtons.)
Of the hundreds of abortion clinic bombings, I've only been able to find one which resulted in a fatality. It's almost as if the bombers were carefully trying to avoid human fatalities. Which makes sense since their whole rationale for doing it was to stop what they perceive as widespread murder of unborn children. i.e. They did it because they value life; their definition of life just happens to be a superset of yours. They only resorted to bombings and arson to in their view stop a greater violence (buildings and equipment being less valuable than lives), the opposite of your implication.
The lone exception was the bombing carried out by Eric Rudolph. You may know him better as the Centennial Olympic Park bomber, so clearly he had no qualms about using indiscriminate violence in support of his beliefs. (There have been several shootings of abortion clinic workers. But shootings are targeted, not indiscriminate like bombings.)
"You are not ready for immortality."
That doesn't completely fix it. The problem is related to both polling frequency and positional error.
The reason is pretty obvious if your GPS device has ever been slow getting a fix on multiple satellites and has a large error circle. One moment it says you're at position x, 5 seconds later it says you've warped half a mile away. The larger the positional error, the greater the distance error. Assuming you're traveling a straight line path, the positional errors average out to zero only when the errors fall along the line you're traveling. Any positional error perpendicular to your direction of motion results in an overestimate of distance traveled by tracing your route as a zig-zag instead of straight.
That would suggest a smoothing algorithm could mostly fix this. Basically draw the simplest curve you can that goes through all the error circles around the breadcrumbs the GPS has recorded.
The schoolyard bully isn't a bully because we call him that. He's a bully because he beats you up just enough intimidate you into giving in to his future demands, but not enough to get in trouble with local authorities. He can call himself rightful ruler of the school for all we care. He's still a bully. It's the strategy which determines the name, not the other way around.
Likewise they're not terrorists because we call them that. They're terrorists because of their strategy of deliberately targeting soft targets with no or negligible military value. i.e. The goal is to terrorize the populace to induce a socio-political change in behavior, not to inflict military damage.
Terrorism is a subset of psychological warfare, which encompasses tactics ranging from torture all the way to acceptable things like dropping leaflets to demoralize the opposition. All focus on destroying the opponent's will to fight, rather than his ability to fight. There's nothing pejorative about it; the word itself is pretty indicative of the strategy it's describing. Early colonial opposition during the American Revolutionary war could be considered terrorism (e.g. Boston Tea Party). Towards the end of WWII, after some off-target bombing raids opened the doors, both sides were wantonly bombing each others' civilian population centers to try to get each other to stop fighting. Basically terrorism.
Same thing happened with Authentec (the fingerprint scanner company) when Apple acquired them. As the new owners I don't have a problem with them withdrawing the product from the market for use exclusively on Apple devices. But they also took down the website where all the drivers and software for previously-sold devices were distributed. Yeah you could still get drivers from your laptop manufacturer. But because of how Firefox's and Chrome's version numbering worked, the browser extension software needed to be updated every new browser release. When Apple took the website down, all those fingerprint scanners because unusable with a modern browser.
20 years ago I would've agreed. However, technological progress is leading us to one inevitable outcome. Nuclear weapons used to be possessed by only the most powerful nation-states. Then smaller but advanced nation-states acquired them. In the past 20 years, technologically and socio-economically backwards nations have begun to acquire nuclear weapons (Pakistan, North Korea). Extend that trend and you realize at some point in the not-so-distant future, non-nation states with a sense of purpose and the finances to back it up will eventually acquire nuclear weapons.
Some sort of solution to terrorism needs to be developed before that happens, whether it be socio-political engineering and economic assistance to eliminate its roots, or swift and consistent reprisal that clearly establishes that the perpetrators of terrorism will always pay far more than they will ever gain by the tactic. I don't claim to know what the solution is, but we need to be working on figuring it out now, while it's still a small problem. It's much more preferable to work on figuring out a solution now while terrorism is still statistically irrelevant, than to ignore until cities are being destroyed by backpack nukes.
You don't wait until you have stage 4 cancer to start to treat it; you test to try to detect it early before it becomes incurable. We didn't wait until Ebola became a global pandemic to work on figuring out ways to control and contain it. We hopefully won't ignore global warming just because the initial symptoms are small and easily ignored. Likewise, just because terrorism is currently statistically insignificant as a cause of death doesn't mean we should be ignoring it.
Starting with Marshmallow, you can disable microphone access on an app-by-app basis.
There's been at least one pilot injured, perhaps permanently by a laser.
My suggestion is to develop a highly precise retroreflector material, like used in road sign paint or bicycle reflectors (they appear bright because they reflect your headlights back at you) but much more precise. Then paint all aircraft with this material. Then the idiots shining lasers at planes will end up blinding themselves.
Simple geometry says if the pilot can see the ground, a laser on the ground can reach his eyes. Anyhow, a disturbing fraction of laser strikes are happening as planes are on final approach for landing. Their proximity, slower speed, and predicable path makes them more tempting targets at that stage of the flight. And it's precisely that stage where there's the slimmest margin for recovery should an incident occur.
I doubt a laser alone will bring down an airliner (there are two pilots specifically so one can take over if the other is disabled). But if the pilots are busy dealing with another problem, a laser strike may be the critical factor which pushes the situation over the threshold from a safe emergency landing to a crashed airplane. If you've read any airliner accident reports, it's almost always a combination of multiple factors which cause the plane to crash. if any one of those factors hadn't happened, the plane wouldn't have crashed.
There's a more sinister reason behind it. A huge chunk of W2s under duplicate SSNs are due to illegal immigrants using a fake SSN to work. You can't just make up any number - the IRS will reject that. So (presumably) they or someone they hire gets a real person's SSN, and the illegal immigrant adopts that person's name, identity, and SSN. "Fixing" this problem means creating a sure-fire way to prevent illegal immigrants from working in the country, so nothing is done about it. One party doesn't want to fix it because they want to make these people citizens so they'll vote for that party. An influential fraction of the other party doesn't want to fix it because they want these people to remain as a source of cheap labor.
I used to do the accounting at a company which I'm pretty sure had a not-insignificant number of illegal immigrants. Employers are only allowed to ask potential employees for certain pieces of ID, and the most common one is the Social Security Card. The government has no system by which an employer can verify a SSN matches other info the applicant provides, so all you can do is look at it and see if it seems real (it's super-easy to fake), make a photocopy of it, and keep it in the employee's file. If INS ever comes knocking, that's your proof that you've done your due diligence. Anyway, about a month or two after I completed everyone's W2s, I got a stack of letters from the IRS about "irregularities" with the W2s. Some careful reading between the lines and some web research turned up that these letters are commonly generated when two W2s are issued for the same person whose name and SSN match but other details (like address) differ. As an employer, you just sign saying that the employee swears that that's their real SSN, mail it back, and it becomes the government's problem. I'd like to do more as an employer, but my job is running a company, not immigration enforcement. The government doesn't even provide me with tools to verify it anyway. And the potential liability for incorrectly ratting someone out as illegal is huge.
Exactly this. It is a trade-off between having perfect devices for every possible task, and the inconvenience of having a multiple devices which you need to lug around and keep synchronized. At some point you have to ask yourself, does this particular task need its own dedicated device, or can another device I already own do a good enough job? That's what the Surface Book is aiming at - merging the laptop and large tablet categories.
I've been using tablet PCs for over a decade now, primarily because I wanted the larger (12+ inch) display in tablet form factor. Current technology seems to only be able to get that size screen in a tablet at a weight of 1.6 lbs (iPad Pro, Surface Book tablet-only, Surface Pro, Samsung Tab Pro all hit this weight). That's too much extra weight to lug around in my bag when I travel to warrant a separate device. But if my laptop can double as a tablet, I can cover both bases with a single device. I'm going to get that device, even if it's only 90% as good as a separate laptop and 90% as good as a separate tablet. Cook's reasoning is right if you're a CEO who has an entourage of staff carrying his bags for him everywhere he goes. For the rest of us who have to carry our own bags and have a limited budget, a device which does two functions well enough will trump two separate devices.
BTW, I had a Thinkpad Yoga 14 for a while. My main reason for giving it up was the screen's 16:9 aspect ratio - it's way too narrow in portrait orientation. 16:10 or 3:2 is much more preferable. And before anyone starts crowing about the iPad's 4:3, I lived with a 4:3 tablet from 2004-2008. It's too wide in portrait format. PDFs end up with excess blank space on the left and right margins, or the top and bottom have to be clipped. 4:3 seems like it would be best if you think of a letter-sized sheet of paper (8.5x11 = 1.29). But when you actually scan pages and try it, you quickly realize you're wasting a ton of expensive screen space on useless white margins. Remove the margins and you're right around 3:2 or 16:10.
The problem is they aren't actually louder. The FCC sets loudness limits that commercials aren't allowed to exceed in response to viewer complaints about the commercials being louder. They've just been dynamically compressed (like with the loudness wars) so even the soft parts are at max loudness.
The network usage numbers back this up too. Every pro-Apple site seemed to crow over the NetMarketShare stats showing iOS having roughly twice the browser traffic of Android. The reality was that Android passed iOS web traffic in 2013. How can that be? NetMarketShare (Net Applications) tracks a relatively small sample of sites (about 40,000), and only counts individual visits in a month. So when they said iOS traffic exceeded Android traffic by nearly 2x, what they meant was there were 2x as many unique iOS visitors as unique Android visitors in a month. StatCounter tracks over 3 million sites and counts page hits - i.e. actual traffic volume. By their measurements Android passed iOS around 2013, and is currently at about 2.5x iOS traffic volume.
In other words, back when twice as many iOS users browsed the web than Android users, each browsing Android user generated more than 2x as much traffic as the typical iOS user. Combine this with the mobile device market share stats (roughly 80% Android) and the complete picture you get is: The vast majority of Android users never browse the web. iOS users occasionally browse the web (I wouldn't call them all kids, just light or occasional users). A small group of Android users - the "premium" users - browse the web heavily on their devices, much more heavily than iOS users.
Note: Net Applications finally showed Android passing iOS in mid-2014. So now not only does more web browsing come from Android, but more unique visitors as well. Of course you probably never heard about that happening because the press has a strong pro-Apple bias and rarely publishes anything which casts Apple in a bad light. Just like you never heard about the iPad losing tablet market share until it dropped below 50%, even though it was obvious for 2 years that was happening if you were tracking the quarterly statistics.
I completely agree. The TV is just a monitor, and tying it to tie it with another device/service on a different upgrade cycle is silly bordering on stupid. An extreme case is the high-end iMac, where they've coupled a beautiful monitor that'll probably be usable for 15-20 years, with computer hardware which will be obsolete in 5-7.
But you have to remember the vast majority of people used to have VCRs endlessly flashing 12:00. They have a hard enough time just changing video input mode when they plug in a Roku or Chromecast. You start talking about Kodi (XBMC) and streaming, and their eyes will glaze over. Something that is integrated and works out the box offers value to them, despite the higher costs (purchase price, needing more frequent replacement, and loss of privacy). That's why those iMacs sell. That's why Smart TVs sell.
You're assuming "no security" is the worst possible state. I'd rate them from best to worst:
Strong security
Weak security
No security
Security people think is strong but is in fact weak
If Apple et al were marketing fingerprint scanners as weak security, I'd have no problem with it. But they've been trying to market them as strong security, e.g. claiming it's based on the structure inside your finger and not your fingerprint itself (which was quickly discredited when people bypassed it with latex copies of fingerprints). Lulling people into a false sense of security like that just makes them easier targets for thieves and criminals. If your email is permanently logged in on your phone and your only security is a fingerprint scanner, then any thief who gets your phone and goes through the effort to lift your fingerprint can request password resets from every online account you have. Never mind the new phone-as-a-credit-card systems.
If the regulation is unenforceable (i.e. half the kids get a drone for Christmas), then it's a bad thing to have it on the books. The government will then use selective enforcement to punish people they don't like, rather than enforcing in a fair and evenhanded manner. The regulation then becomes a means for the government to control the population, when in fact the population should be controlling the government.
As this is /., I'll get into some of the technical details. The resistance a hovercraft encounters is basically energy transferred to the water and dissipated as waves. The slower the hovercraft is moving, the greater this wave resistance. It's greatest when the hovercraft is stationary - in that mode the air cushion is displacing a volume of water equivalent to the vehicle weight, just like a displacement hull ship. As it speeds up, this wave resistance decreases. Basically each "block" of water experiences the weight of the air cushion for less time the faster the hovercraft is moving. So the faster the hovercraft is moving, the less time there is for each "block" of water to start accelerating downwards, the less it moves, and the less wave resistance there is. At extremely high speeds, there's practically no wave resistance - just like a planing hull except without the friction between the hull and water.
As it turns out, for most commercial ship sizes and speed regimes, the hovercraft doesn't have much if any advantage over a fast catamaran or even a planing hull. But because it's basically an aircraft (and generates thrust via the air), it's a lot more expensive to operate. At extremely high speeds (50-100 knots) the hovercraft is more efficient (albeit still using more energy than traveling at slower speeds). But it's pretty much only the military who really wants ships which can go that fast. (At even higher speeds you're better off with a WIG - wing in ground effect vehicles - which are even more like an airplane.)
Cost of construction, maintenance, and operation. Like with the hovercraft, it's basically an aircraft. The one you rode from HK to Macau was probably a Kawasaki jetfoil. It was originally designed by Boeing, and licensed to Kawasaki when they couldn't sell any in the U.S. In terms of construction, it's basically an airplane in the shape of a ship (lightweight aluminum construction).
A displacement hull and even most catamarans are dirt simple to build and maintain and don't really care how much weight you load onto them (less true for catamarans). Hydrofoils, like hovercraft and aircraft, are extremely weight-sensitive. That pretty much limits them to carrying passengers. And the higher construction and maintenance costs means their ticket prices are only sustainable on extremely lucrative routes, like people traveling from Hong Kong to Macau to gamble.
There's just not much of a market space between a 30 knot conventional ferry and a 200 knot turboprop aircraft. If you want cheap, the ferry is considerably cheaper. If you're willing to pay more, the turboprop will almost always get you there a lot quicker for just a little more cost.
Only idiots would think unlimited data will work. Go look at the pricing for dedicated connections some time. An OC3 with a mere 155 Mbps (148 Mbps actual data) is $10k-$20k/mo. Compare that to the latest Time Warner plan for 300 Mbps for $60/mo that they're advertising.
The only way you can make those numbers work is by oversubscribing by two orders of magnitude (i.e. a cable subscriber's average bandwidth is about 1/100 to 1/300 what they would use if they maxed it out 24/7). And the only way you can make oversubscribing work is either with data caps, or by unceremoniously cutting off service to data hogs.
300 Mbps * 1/300 = 1 Mbps
1 Mbps * 1 month = 328 GB
Hey whaddaya know, that's almost exactly the data cap for the $60 service. What a coincidence!
The fact that Internet bandwidth is expensive in the U.S. has nothing to do with data caps. It's because nearly every municipal government in the country has granted a monopoly to a single phone company and a single cable TV/Internet company. That lack of competition means prices remain artificially high. Ironically, "socialist" Europe is doing it right and allowing multiple ISPs to compete, resulting in better service and lower prices. In the U.S. you have the government claiming to regulate wired carriers for the greater good, but actually making things worse.
What needs to happen is for Internet service to be regulated like electricity and gas utilities. A single company builds and maintains the actual lines. But they're prohibited from selling the electricity or gas which flows through those line. Instead you buy those from your choice of hundreds of different suppliers, and the supplier pays the maintenance company a fixed (regulated) rate for use of the line. Do that with Internet service and things will quickly and dramatically improve in the U.S. The unregulated free-for-all model works best when a technology is first being implemented (e.g. both AC and DC electrical distribution networks were allowed to be built). But once it becomes clear which technology is best (fiber to the home looks like the end-game for Internet), you can turn it into a utility.
Doesn't high humidity solve one of the biggest problems in the region though? Lack of fresh water. You could pull it out of the atmosphere with dew catchers or even active chillers (which have the downside of putting out heat), instead of more expensive desalination. Basically, the sun is doing the expensive water vaporization stage "for free", and all you need to build are the condensers. What do the models say will happen to the temperature if the region goes from being desert to overgrown with plants and trees providing lots of shade?
That's the big problem I'm seeing with a lot of the climate change narrative lately. Because it's already been decided that the change is bad, everything the media carries focuses on the negative consequences. In the last 5 years I've only seen one story on how it could benefit certain areas.
It's got nothing to do with AMD. Processor performance hit a brick wall in the early 2000s. Prior to then, most performance gains came from ramping up the clock speed.
1985 - 2 MHz
1990 - 33 MHz
1995 - 300 MHz
2000 - 1.2 GHz
2005 - 3.5 GHz
2010 - 3.7 GHz
2015 - 4.0 GHz
At about 3-4 GHz,we reached a point where power leakage made higher frequencies completely impractical. AMD used a more power-thrifty architecture at that time which allowed them to briefly take the CPU lead from Intel, who was completely committed to ramping up clock speed with Prescott. Intel had to abandon netburst and later Intel CPUs were based on the mobile Pentium M, which eschewed high clock speeds to instead concentrate on lower power consumption (it was designed for laptops).
Ever since then, both Intel and AMD have kept clock speed about the same, and focused instead on redesigning CPUs for more efficient parallel processing, increasing the number of cores, and reducing power consumption. Unless there's some earthshattering technological breakthrough, the days of CPU performance increasing 10x every 5 years are over. 5%-10% a year (about 1.5x increase every 5 years, which is about the performance delta between Sandy Bridge and Skylake) is the new norm. Get used to it.
Most of the CPU improvements are instead going into reducing power consumption (Skylake uses about 1/3 to 1/4 the power of Sandy Bridge). My phone is more powerful than the computer I was using in 2000 and lasts 36+ hours on a single charge of a battery smaller than a Kit Kat bar. That is mind-boggling if you think about it.
Actually, I'm not sure it's the FTC's job either. This is one of those places where the International nature of the Internet which usually protects individual users from government censorship, ends up hurting them. If the U.S. government were to mandate that Google and Facebook honor Do Not Track requests, what's to stop them from just moving all their servers to a country which won't impede them from tracking users? The only way to enforce it then would be to require Google and Facebook abide by U.S. law regardless of where they're operating from. That's a huge slippery slope which legitimizes China's censorship of the Internet, and France's attempts to make Google's global search results abide by French law.
The subsidies the oil industry gets amount to about 1 cent per gallon of gas. It's far, far outweighed by the fuel taxes imposed by the Federal and state governments (about 15 cents/gal each). Those fuel taxes pay for maintenance and construction of roads. If you shift road use from private vehicles to public transportation, that drop in fuel tax revenue would have to be made up by the remaining vehicles. And public transportation would in fact become more expensive.
In other words, public transportation is already "made more affordable" - by taxes paid by private vehicles.
There is no single solution to transportation. Public transportation works better in certain circumstances, private transportation works better in others. If you try to design your transportation system around the mantra that one is always better than the other (what happened in Los Angeles in the 1940s when public transportation was dismantled in favor of freeways for private cars), you will seriously screw up the transportation system for a long, long time.
The content industry has this enormous misconception about how the Internet works. They think it's like a street you drive down, the websites are like stores you pass by, and if you see an interesting store you stop by to visit. They opposed Google News aggregating snippets from news sites because they felt it was like Google was putting a big Google sign in front of their store.
That's not how the Internet works. There is no independent road. The hyperlinks are the road. That is, you do not travel down a road passing by stores. You travel from store to store via hyperlinks. That entire network of hyperlinks connecting the stores is the Internet.
If this law passes, the content industry thinks they can assert copyright over a hyperlink to their site, and the linking site will have to pay them a small copyright fee. In reality what will happen is the linking site will simply delete the hyperlink. The end result will be what happened when they tried to prevent Google News from linking their articles, times a million. Any site exercising copyright control over hyperlinks will be cutting themselves off from the Internet. First their Google Pagerank will plummet since it's based partly on how many other sites link to your site, and they'll disappear from the search engines. Eventually there will no longer be any way to navigate from the Internet at large to those sites, because all the hyperlinks to them have been deleted per their request. Exercising copyright over hyperlinks will be electronic suicide, and the only remaining sites will be ones which include a legal waiver that it is completely legal to link to their site.
Please please please let this law pass!
They're just binary data strings, 16-bits per "character" instead of 7- or 8-bits like regular SMS text. Your phone (or rather, the SMS app) has to have the graphics which correspond to the Unicode emojis though (64k possible ones right now), otherwise they just show up as blank squares. Receiving them in a text doesn't make you download graphics files or track you.