I will add that TFS is wrong and that dark matter isn't some "new form of matter." It's called dark matter for the simple reason that it doesn't emit nor reflect sufficient light for us to see. The three forms of matter we're most familiar with - solid, liquid, gas - are all dark matter in the absence of a sufficiently powerful energy source (sunlight). The answer could be as simple as the typical Oort cloud being a lot denser or extending a lot further than we theorize. And we simply can't see that matter because it's so far from its central star.
Speaking of HP as a brand, I'm sure many here remember when HP meant "the best test equipment money could buy" (except for oscilloscopes, of course.) That sort of reputation for a brand is rare indeed. However, after going into computers, making printers, merging with Compaq, etc
Back in the day (1980s, 1990s), their printers were great. Did you know part of their regular product testing was to drop their printers from table height? That's right, they'd take that 70 pound business-class Laserjet printer and push it off a desk onto a hard floor. The printer had to survive and still function properly after that test. if it didn't, it went back to be redesigned. If you've ever taken apart one of these old HP printers, it's basically a metal interior surrounded by a several inch thick layer of decorative plastic. The plastic absorbs the energy of the fall (with a few pieces snapping off which you can snap back on after). The metal interior frame keeps the moving/working parts of the printer properly aligned and in place.
The same was true of their calculators. A friend visited HP and was surprised to see an engineer punching numbers into a calculator while standing, then deliberately drop the calculator onto the floor. He then picked it up, punched more numbers into it, and dropped it again. That's when it dawned on my friend that the drops were part of the product testing. Unlike today where some ivory tower designer decides glass is so beautiful it needs to be put on both sides of your phone, with no regard for usability and durability.
It boggles my mind that no one has stood up and said "this is stupid" over the last decades
Anyone who did stand up and say "this is stupid" was let go. Heck, even William Hewlett stood up and said "this is stupid" but he was retired so he got ignored by the hot shot MBAs.
I don't see why this is surprising. People interpret the world in terms they are familiar with. A techie views it in terms of cool stuff and science and engineering laws, and has little clue about management or marketing or economics. An accountant views it in terms of revenue and expenditure, and has little clue about market direction, technological breakthroughs, or coordinating the branches of a massive company like HP. And a MBA views it in terms of managing the business units, with little clue as to R&D and market direction. (I won't sully my mind by trying to imagine how marketers view the world, but I do acknowledge they make an important contribution to business - e.g. Steve Jobs.)
For a company to be successful, it needs to have good balance of people skilled in all these disciplines (I'd even add labor/union if there's substantial physical labor involved with making some of the company's products). What you don't know is usually as important as what you do know, and it behooves you to find/keep people on staff who are covering what you don't know. HP's problem has been the MBAs in charge assumed if they didn't understand it, it wasn't important and thus could be cut off as unnecessary expenses. That might work with a well-established industry with little left in the way of progress (e.g. farming). It's a death sentence for a tech company.
Like so many large companies, now they mostly just lurch from one thing to another hoping sooner or later one of them sticks. One gets the distinct impression nobody really has a clue of what they're doing, and even less of a clue about what to do about it.
Nobody at HP really has a clue of what they're doing. The people who had a clue were either let go or were spun off as Agilent Technologies, which inherited HP's instruments and test equipment business. That's where HP's soul went. The company called HP today just kept the HP name.
Samples collected from gutters around my office (Kanda, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo) already light up the Geiger counter, and the soles of shoes right after make nice images when placed on photographic film.
Ah yes, Nuclear myth #3: All radiation is caused by nuclear power and nuclear bombs.
Fact: Nearly everything in the world is naturally radioactive. You're horrified that that stuff around your office lights up Geiger counters, because you never pointed a Geiger counter at that stuff before the accident. Thus you are incorrectly attributing natural radiation to the accident. Your largest annual radiation dose actually comes from your own body. Potassium has a relatively common naturally occurring isotope (K40) which is radioactive, and your body needs potassium to survive (it's essential to how your nerves function). Your second largest dose comes from cosmic rays. Most of these are filtered out by the atmosphere, so in a twist of irony many of those who fled Japan by plane after the accident unwittingly exposed themselves to more radiation during their flight (planes fly above most of the atmosphere) than if they'd just stayed put in Japan.
This myth is so prevalent and pernicious that we screen our nuclear plant workers with detectors which would be screaming if placed at the exit of a drugstore or supermarket. K40 is common enough that most of the false alarms from the "dirty bomb" detectors at our borders are caused by shipments of food which are high in potassium - bananas, avocados, cocoa, etc.
Perhaps most damning with respect to TFA, burning coal releases radiation. Coal contains trace amounts of uranium. The uranium in coal actually contains more energy than the coal itself, but because people who believe this myth are staunchly opposed to nuclear power, they end up breathing in those minute traces of uranium released by burning coal instead. (Burning coal is also the current major contributor to mercury in our oceans which makes fish like tuna dangerous to consume. Historically the biggest contributor was mining, but that's been regulated enough that the primary mercury source is now coal pollution.)
Can anyone think of a case where the encryption on these drives is somehow useful to the owner?
They're used on corporate laptops where sensitive data is stored on the HDD, in case the laptop is lost or stolen. Even if the laptop is protected by a BIOS password and a Windows password, someone can still remove the HDD, connect it to a different computer, and access the data that way. Encrypting the HDD prevents that mode of attack.
So I pulled the drive out of it and plugged it in as in internal drive to the desktop computer. It could see the drive so it was still working, but it could not recognize the format of it.
Research showed me that western digital use a hardware encryption chip on the driver board to protect user data.
That's probably not the reason. A lot of recent external drives use a proprietary formatting scheme. If you remove the drive from the enclosure and plug it straight into your computer, your computer will not be able to read the data written on it. The computer can use the drive just fine if you reformat it, it just can't read data written on it while it was in the enclosure.
My guess is this has something to do with the 2 TB limit of MBR partition disks. MBR was the default partitioning format for many versions of Windows. The HDD companies probably didn't want to field tech support calls from people complaining that their 3+ TB external HDD could only be formatted to 2 TB. So they came up with a proprietary hardware controller which allowed MBR disks to have partitions larger than 2 TB; the downside being the data cannot be read if you remove that controller and plug the drive straight into your computer.
Impossible or not, is it a private company's (or individual's) duty to engage in the evidence-gathering duties of law enforcement?
It was in the past. For example, the phone companies (well, phone company initially) set up their networks to make it easier for law enforcement to wiretap if they showed up with a warrant.
But given recent publicity about NSA data collection, all of that public trust and goodwill is probably gone now.* I don't think playing the "Apple is being a bad corporate citizen!" card is going to sway many opinions. If anything people will probably end up more supportive of Apple for giving the middle finger to the Feds trying to pry into things they're not supposed to without a warrant.
* The NSA actually helped make DES stronger in the 1970s. While the algorithm was being developed, the NSA told them "don't use keys within this range of numbers." The developers were a bit suspicious, but went ahead and removed those keys. 20 years later, differential crytanalysis was discovered by the academic community. And lo and behold, the keys most vulnerable to it were precisely the ones the NSA said not to use. That bought the NSA a lot of goodwill, and most security researchers were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Up until the recent rumors about NSA data collection and possible tampering with elliptical curve cryptography standards to weaken it. Snowden's revelations have pretty much evaporated any remaining goodwill the NSA had with the security community.
You're not a real geek if you didn't have mysterious parts left over after reassembling it. Bonus points if it still worked perfectly even without the parts.
The HDD market had some of the slimmest margins in the tech industry - about 1%-2%. The HDD manufacturers just weren't making enough money to even keep up with basic R&D. It needed to be consolidated. The floods in Thailand happened to be the straw that broke the camel's back. Unfortunately, they happened right in the middle of the last recession, resulting in what's probably over-consolidation.
The WD-Hitachi merger still isn't finalized. China hasn't given their final approval. My brother-in-law is working on this for WD and is pulling his hair out over how obtuse the China government has been.
WD has been buying SSD manufacturers for a while now. Silicon Systems in 2009, then sTec, Skyera. SanDisk is a much bigger name, but this isn't something they just started doing.
Albeit for the U.S. since I can't read Japanese. The death rate from leukemia in the U.S. (p. 401) is about 3.8 per 100,000 for males aged 45-54 (figure a few years between diagnosis and death, since he was diagnosed in his late 30s). It's tough to say for certain without a demographic breakdown of the 44,000 clean-up workers. But 1 case per 44,000 (2.3 per 100,000) is pretty close to what you would expect from the general population.
Real estate is a funny thing. Because its price is based on how much people are willing and able to pay, raising wages doesn't help. All it does is push the price of real estate even higher because suddenly people can afford to pay more. That's why most households are now dual income, yet we aren't much better off than in the 1940s and 1950s when most households were single income. Most of the increased earning power has been eaten up by higher real estate prices (which means higher mortgages, which means more money going to the 1% in the form of interest payments on your mortgage).
If you want to make it more affordable to live in these places, you have to increase the number of housing units available. More supply, same demand = lower prices. Unfortunately, for various reasons, these places won't allow or strictly limit the number of new housing units which can be built. That's the real problem, not the wages.
The frequency of the shaking of most earthquakes most closely matches the resonance frequency of a 3-story building. If you go back and review footage and photos of the buildings which collapsed in the Northridge, Loma Prieta, Kobe, and the Tohoku quakes, a majority of them were 3 stories. 1- and 2-story buildings have a higher resonance frequency, so they just move with the quake. Skyscrapers have a much lower resonance frequency, so they kinda shimmy in place (it's why decoupling these building from the supports with rubber or rolling "floats" works so well).
During both Northridge and Loma Prieta, downtown Los Angeles and San Francisco made it through just fine (except for two sections of freeway which were scheduled to be upgraded by sadly hadn't by the time the quake hit). The low-lying residential areas with 1- and 2-story houses made it through just fine as well. It was the 3-story apartments and condos which suffered the most damage. (Not to mention a lot of those 3-story apartments were built on landfill in San Francisco.)
Knobs and buttons will always be best in cars for physically manipulated interface controls. The reason is pretty simple - cars move. When they move, they hit bumps that makes everything inside jiggle. Unless through a remarkable coincidence the mass, springiness, and dampening of your body, arm, and fingertip exactly matches that of the LCD display, this means your finger will move relative to the screen every time you hit a bump. This makes trying to precisely manipulate touchscreen controls in a moving car an exercise in frustration.
Knobs and buttons are not just decorative. They support your fingers as you wrap them around the controls, effectively "docking" your fingers to the control. When the Shuttle or Soyuz capsule reaches the International Space Station, do they just kinda press up against the ISS and open the hatch? No. They dock the two with clamps which hold them together, then open the hatch. That's an extreme example because lives are at stake, but the principle is the same. By docking your fingers to the knob or button, you prevent your fingers from slipping around the control with every little bump you hit - your wrist and arm absorbs the relative motion of your body with the car, while your fingers remain stationary relative to the controls. Thus allowing you to precisely manipulate the interface in a moving, jiggling, bouncing car.
Don't get me wrong, touchscreens have their place. They're especially good for arbitrary 2-dimensional inputs, like typing on a virtual keyboard or flinging a GPS map back and forth. But the designers who decided to make basic controls like the radio and climate control touchscreen-only were idiots too caught up in the hype over the latest trend to bother thinking about why traditional interface controls are built they way they are. They can be somewhat forgiven because they probably used their phone or tablet inside and car and thought it was great. But what they didn't realize was that when you use a touchscreen phone or tablet in a moving car, you're holding the device so it doesn't move relative to you. And so accurate touchscreen inputs are possible.
A simple pre-shared password makes sense if you intend the network to be publicly accessible. e.g. You run a cafe and want the guests to be able to use your wifi network for Internet access. You can tell each of them the password. Ease of use outweighs security in this use case.
For home and corporate use, a public/private key system makes a lot more sense. There are only a few devices which you intend to give permanent wifi access to your home network (visitors can use your guest network which is protected by a simple password). Authenticate each of these devices with their own credentials using a key or certificate physically stored on the device and never transmitted over the network (the private key). If a device is ever compromised ("I lost my phone!"), you can simply revoke the credentials for that one device (delete the public key from the router) without having to make changes to every other device. This capability is already in most wifi routers - WPA2 Enterprise.
The downside is you need to be running some sort of server to handle these authentication requests. RADIUS seems to be the common one. Routers with a RADIUS server built in are rare, but since the software is free (FreeRAIUS) I expect it'll become more common, easier to use, and eventually replace WPA2 Personal (PSK) as the default security for home wifi routers.
FFS, why would any person who isn't an idiot email a Social Security number?
I had to last year. Didn't want to, but had to. I was buying a house. I completed most of the mortgage application online via the bank's secure server, including my SSN. But a day before closing the bank told me they needed my signature on some paperwork. The paperwork also had my SSN. The bank's loan office was a hundred mile round trip I didn't have time for, and time was of the essence. So I asked if I could scan and send it via email. They said sure.
I printed, signed, and scanned the document, put it in an encrypted zip file, and emailed it to them. I called my loan officer on the phone and left the password to unzip it on his voicemail. The next day the bank called to ask where the paperwork was. After a 5 minute discussion and some more phone calls, we determined that their anti-virus software had detected the zip file and automatically deleted the email.
So I offered to put the file on a password protected page on my web server. They could just point their browser to the URL, download the scanned PDF, and my SSN would be safe. Turns out the bank had removed all browsers on their computers with Internet access. Security, y'know.
So I asked if I could fax it in. You used to be able to, but their new policy was that fax resolution was too low and thus didn't constitute a valid signature.
So my choices were to take that afternoon off work (not that I could afford to take it off) and drive to their loan office to deliver the documents by hand. Or to email it as a plain PDF.
What could I do? I ended up emailing it to them. Ironic that the bank tightening its security forced my communication with them to be less secure.
The people hanging onto these old systems are doing so not just for nostalgia but for posterity. They're interested in keeping them in original condition so future generations know what they were really like. Including the color.
Did you know the Statue of Liberty wasn't originally green?
It really depends where you are. If you're in their 3G area, you'll be lucky to get 0.3 Mbps. But if you're within range of their 4G cells, about 5 Mbps is typical, with some areas getting 20-35 Mbps. When i bought my house last year, it had Sprint 4G coverage, and I lived off of it (I have an unlimited plan and my phone is rooted so I can tether) for 2 months while waiting for my cable Internet install date. I averaged about 60 GB/mo for those two months. (My normal usage is only about 300-500 MB/mo, so I have no qualms about sucking up huge amounts of data 1 or 2 months out of the year.)
That's really what Sprint's problem is. If they could get better 4G coverage, they'd be golden. Right now they've only got 64% LTE coverage vs 77%-84% for T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon. (Scroll down to LTE coverage by network, and select U.S. from the dropdown.) Their slower LTE speeds are also a symptom of insufficient coverage. Since I know the location of the tower giving my home 4G service, I've measured speeds at various distances. I get 25 Mbps right next to the tower, about 15 Mbps at home (about a mile away). But as I move to more typical tower distances of 3 miles, it drops down to 5 Mbps or less. By 5 miles (or behind hills), I've lost 4G service entirely. This particular tower hasn't yet gotten the Sprint Spark treatment yet (tri-band LTE), so it could potentially go up to 80 Mbps in the future, though I doubt their range will improve since two of their bands are at 1.9 and 2.5 GHz (the third is 850 MHz). The question is will Sprint be able to come up with enough money to upgrade their network to become more competitive.
Not necessarily. You have to take into account the efficiency of the transport. From the figures I've seen, the fuel cost to ship something from China to the U.S. is about the same as the fuel cost to transport it from a U.S. port to its final destination inland (the U.S. has a terrible rail system so most goods are transported by relatively inefficient trucks).
Assuming the 1 cent to transport a T-shirt from China figure is correct, if you're driving more than 500 feet to buy your "local" T-shirt, you're producing more pollution buying from that local store. It's even questionable if walking that distance has a smaller pollution footprint because of the energy cost needed to produce the food you ate which powers your walk to the local store. (And no, you cannot bypass this by growing a home garden. People vastly underestimate how much land is needed to grow the food we eat. Now factor in the energy needed to work all that land, and you'll quickly find that you'll need to increase your daily caloric intake to 5000-8000 kcal/day if you farm that by hand. There's a very good reason we shifted that inefficient labor-intensive task to being done by machines.)
Maximum energy efficiency is achieved when you multitask and group multiple tasks together. That's how buying stuff on Amazon can end up cheaper with a smaller energy footprint than buying stuff locally. Yes if Amazon were to ship just one T-shirt to you and UPS sent a truck out to deliver just one T-shirt to your house, it' be horribly inefficient. But that UPS truck makes a hundred or so deliveries on its daily route so the portion of its total drive attributable to your T-shirt package delivery is only a few hundred or few thousand feet. Likewise Amazon processes millions of orders every day, so the portion of its operating costs attributable to your single order is very small. This is also the same reason the big department stores end up being able to offer lower prices than the small mom and pop shop - greater volume of sales generates more opportunity for efficiency improvements. If you can come up with a way to combine big box efficiency with the mom and pop buying experience, you'll become the next billionaire.
Not sure why the summary concentrated on just the winner. This is an annual competition where teams from different schools (and sometimes companies) build energy-efficient homes. Most of the entrants are on display in Irvine, California until the 18th. Free admission.
As with most things in life, there is no single "best" answer. While they do pick a winner, if you take the time to visit the exhibit and browse the different homes, you'll see a lot of really great ideas on how to save energy.
"BBC iPlayer and the content on it is paid for by UK licence fee payers in the UK and we take appropriate steps to protect access to this content."
Then shouldn't the UK license fee payers be the ones who decide whether the content should be protected, or anyone in the world should be allowed to view it? Not the BBC?
Summary focused on legal ramifications for individuals on their personal computers. But this is actually a bigger issue for corporate use of cloud services. What if your company has an official Twitter feed or Facebook wall which needs to be updated by multiple people? Right now, the only way you can do that is to share the single password with all those people. Now what if one of those people gets fired and you're a little slow to change the password? People criticized Sony for making themselves easy to hack by keeping their passwords in a plain text file, but that's inevitably what happens when you need to share an account among multiple employees and the service providing the account only allows a single login. First the password gets posted on the refrigerator door. But one day an unauthorized employee uses it, and someone gets the "clever" idea of putting it in a text file on the file server in a directory where only the people who are authorized to use that account and password have read access. Right where hackers can get it.
You can't create a guest account because those services don't yet support that. What needs to happen is for these services to either allow logins with multiple revocable keys/passwords; or allow multiple sub-accounts under a master account, with the sub-accounts able to post as if they were the master account. The same concept applies for collaborative virtual spaces.
If every online service allowed this, then the issue in TFA becomes easy. If Netflix allows up to 4 family members to share the account, then each of those family members should have a separate login and password, with one being a master account which has the power to revoke login permissions for the sub-accounts. If you want to let a new "family member" temporarily use the account, you simply give them a sub-account. And when you no longer wish them to have access, you simply revoke the permissions of the sub-account. (And as you point out, for your home PC, you can simply log them into the guest account.)
Only 27% of people in India own a refrigerator. In the West we take things like refrigeration and toilets for granted...
While not as many individuals may own a refrigerator in developing countries, a lot of their food is still refrigerated during transport. In fact that's how Chicago became the 3rd largest city in the U.S. The development of refrigerated rail cars in the late 1800s and early 1900s meant the meat processing industry in Chicago could ship product all the way to New York without spoilage. Customers there could buy fresh beef thanks to refrigeration, even though most of them didn't own a refrigerator until the 1940s. (Why Chicago? Because it was right next to Lake Michigan, with an ample supply of ice during the winter which could be harvested and stored for use in the summer. Mechanical refrigeration using a compressor didn't really take off until the late 20th century.)
Nearly all ratings are voluntary, and so suffer from self-selection bias. The measured ratings for general interest movie like Shawshank Redemption are typically lower than a special interest movie like Dark Knight (or Harry Potter, or Twilight, or Lord of the Rings) which appeals to a dedicated fanbase. The latter typically have a lot of fans who rate it highly just because it appeals to their group. That is, they rate it according to more lenient standard than they rate other movies, or they flat-out stuff the ballot box to try to get others to see it, to exaggerate the size of their interest group in hopes of encouraging more such movies to be made.
This sort of bias is so endemic to online polling that it's hopeless to try to correct it. All you can do is keep it in mind when you see ratings, and decide that Dark Knight is probably really around a 8.7, not a 9.0. And Shawshank Redemption must be really, really good if it's holding onto the #1 spot despite not appealing to a specific demographic.
I've seen some sites attempt to correct for this by assuming any "real" sample will be gaussian (have a distribution which falls on a normal curve). If the votes something receives are skewed away from guassian (e.g. clustered towards the high end), the site attempts to correct for this by skewing the score down. No idea how accurate or reliable that is, but it is being done in some places.
If you expect such ratings to 100% match your own opinion, you have an over inflated sense of self importance.;-)
Rather than try to come up with one, universal rating which is implicitly applicable to everyone, Netflix's approach is probably more sensible. Depending on the movies you watch and the ratings you give them, Netflix builds up a profile of your preferences. They try to match your profile with that of other people who watched similar movies and gave them similar ratings, then makes recommendations based on what those other people watched. So if you hated Dark Knight, then there's a good chance you're not really into movies based on comic bo^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgraphic novels, and so will downrate them for you personally.
This does raise some privacy implications, but on the balance I believe this is the more sensible approach to ratings. Giving up some privacy to greatly increase the signal-to-noise ratio of things like movie recommendations may be worth it in some cases. This also mostly corrects for self-selection bias, assuming your self-selection can be accurately measured.
Slashdot Mirror
I will add that TFS is wrong and that dark matter isn't some "new form of matter." It's called dark matter for the simple reason that it doesn't emit nor reflect sufficient light for us to see. The three forms of matter we're most familiar with - solid, liquid, gas - are all dark matter in the absence of a sufficiently powerful energy source (sunlight). The answer could be as simple as the typical Oort cloud being a lot denser or extending a lot further than we theorize. And we simply can't see that matter because it's so far from its central star.
Back in the day (1980s, 1990s), their printers were great. Did you know part of their regular product testing was to drop their printers from table height? That's right, they'd take that 70 pound business-class Laserjet printer and push it off a desk onto a hard floor. The printer had to survive and still function properly after that test. if it didn't, it went back to be redesigned. If you've ever taken apart one of these old HP printers, it's basically a metal interior surrounded by a several inch thick layer of decorative plastic. The plastic absorbs the energy of the fall (with a few pieces snapping off which you can snap back on after). The metal interior frame keeps the moving/working parts of the printer properly aligned and in place.
The same was true of their calculators. A friend visited HP and was surprised to see an engineer punching numbers into a calculator while standing, then deliberately drop the calculator onto the floor. He then picked it up, punched more numbers into it, and dropped it again. That's when it dawned on my friend that the drops were part of the product testing. Unlike today where some ivory tower designer decides glass is so beautiful it needs to be put on both sides of your phone, with no regard for usability and durability.
Anyone who did stand up and say "this is stupid" was let go. Heck, even William Hewlett stood up and said "this is stupid" but he was retired so he got ignored by the hot shot MBAs.
I don't see why this is surprising. People interpret the world in terms they are familiar with. A techie views it in terms of cool stuff and science and engineering laws, and has little clue about management or marketing or economics. An accountant views it in terms of revenue and expenditure, and has little clue about market direction, technological breakthroughs, or coordinating the branches of a massive company like HP. And a MBA views it in terms of managing the business units, with little clue as to R&D and market direction. (I won't sully my mind by trying to imagine how marketers view the world, but I do acknowledge they make an important contribution to business - e.g. Steve Jobs.)
For a company to be successful, it needs to have good balance of people skilled in all these disciplines (I'd even add labor/union if there's substantial physical labor involved with making some of the company's products). What you don't know is usually as important as what you do know, and it behooves you to find/keep people on staff who are covering what you don't know. HP's problem has been the MBAs in charge assumed if they didn't understand it, it wasn't important and thus could be cut off as unnecessary expenses. That might work with a well-established industry with little left in the way of progress (e.g. farming). It's a death sentence for a tech company.
Nobody at HP really has a clue of what they're doing. The people who had a clue were either let go or were spun off as Agilent Technologies, which inherited HP's instruments and test equipment business. That's where HP's soul went. The company called HP today just kept the HP name.
Ah yes, Nuclear myth #3: All radiation is caused by nuclear power and nuclear bombs.
Fact: Nearly everything in the world is naturally radioactive. You're horrified that that stuff around your office lights up Geiger counters, because you never pointed a Geiger counter at that stuff before the accident. Thus you are incorrectly attributing natural radiation to the accident. Your largest annual radiation dose actually comes from your own body. Potassium has a relatively common naturally occurring isotope (K40) which is radioactive, and your body needs potassium to survive (it's essential to how your nerves function). Your second largest dose comes from cosmic rays. Most of these are filtered out by the atmosphere, so in a twist of irony many of those who fled Japan by plane after the accident unwittingly exposed themselves to more radiation during their flight (planes fly above most of the atmosphere) than if they'd just stayed put in Japan.
This myth is so prevalent and pernicious that we screen our nuclear plant workers with detectors which would be screaming if placed at the exit of a drugstore or supermarket. K40 is common enough that most of the false alarms from the "dirty bomb" detectors at our borders are caused by shipments of food which are high in potassium - bananas, avocados, cocoa, etc.
Perhaps most damning with respect to TFA, burning coal releases radiation. Coal contains trace amounts of uranium. The uranium in coal actually contains more energy than the coal itself, but because people who believe this myth are staunchly opposed to nuclear power, they end up breathing in those minute traces of uranium released by burning coal instead. (Burning coal is also the current major contributor to mercury in our oceans which makes fish like tuna dangerous to consume. Historically the biggest contributor was mining, but that's been regulated enough that the primary mercury source is now coal pollution.)
They're used on corporate laptops where sensitive data is stored on the HDD, in case the laptop is lost or stolen. Even if the laptop is protected by a BIOS password and a Windows password, someone can still remove the HDD, connect it to a different computer, and access the data that way. Encrypting the HDD prevents that mode of attack.
That's probably not the reason. A lot of recent external drives use a proprietary formatting scheme. If you remove the drive from the enclosure and plug it straight into your computer, your computer will not be able to read the data written on it. The computer can use the drive just fine if you reformat it, it just can't read data written on it while it was in the enclosure.
My guess is this has something to do with the 2 TB limit of MBR partition disks. MBR was the default partitioning format for many versions of Windows. The HDD companies probably didn't want to field tech support calls from people complaining that their 3+ TB external HDD could only be formatted to 2 TB. So they came up with a proprietary hardware controller which allowed MBR disks to have partitions larger than 2 TB; the downside being the data cannot be read if you remove that controller and plug the drive straight into your computer.
It was in the past. For example, the phone companies (well, phone company initially) set up their networks to make it easier for law enforcement to wiretap if they showed up with a warrant.
But given recent publicity about NSA data collection, all of that public trust and goodwill is probably gone now.* I don't think playing the "Apple is being a bad corporate citizen!" card is going to sway many opinions. If anything people will probably end up more supportive of Apple for giving the middle finger to the Feds trying to pry into things they're not supposed to without a warrant.
* The NSA actually helped make DES stronger in the 1970s. While the algorithm was being developed, the NSA told them "don't use keys within this range of numbers." The developers were a bit suspicious, but went ahead and removed those keys. 20 years later, differential crytanalysis was discovered by the academic community. And lo and behold, the keys most vulnerable to it were precisely the ones the NSA said not to use. That bought the NSA a lot of goodwill, and most security researchers were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Up until the recent rumors about NSA data collection and possible tampering with elliptical curve cryptography standards to weaken it. Snowden's revelations have pretty much evaporated any remaining goodwill the NSA had with the security community.
You're not a real geek if you didn't have mysterious parts left over after reassembling it. Bonus points if it still worked perfectly even without the parts.
The HDD market had some of the slimmest margins in the tech industry - about 1%-2%. The HDD manufacturers just weren't making enough money to even keep up with basic R&D. It needed to be consolidated. The floods in Thailand happened to be the straw that broke the camel's back. Unfortunately, they happened right in the middle of the last recession, resulting in what's probably over-consolidation.
The WD-Hitachi merger still isn't finalized. China hasn't given their final approval. My brother-in-law is working on this for WD and is pulling his hair out over how obtuse the China government has been.
WD has been buying SSD manufacturers for a while now. Silicon Systems in 2009, then sTec, Skyera. SanDisk is a much bigger name, but this isn't something they just started doing.
Albeit for the U.S. since I can't read Japanese. The death rate from leukemia in the U.S. (p. 401) is about 3.8 per 100,000 for males aged 45-54 (figure a few years between diagnosis and death, since he was diagnosed in his late 30s). It's tough to say for certain without a demographic breakdown of the 44,000 clean-up workers. But 1 case per 44,000 (2.3 per 100,000) is pretty close to what you would expect from the general population.
Real estate is a funny thing. Because its price is based on how much people are willing and able to pay, raising wages doesn't help. All it does is push the price of real estate even higher because suddenly people can afford to pay more. That's why most households are now dual income, yet we aren't much better off than in the 1940s and 1950s when most households were single income. Most of the increased earning power has been eaten up by higher real estate prices (which means higher mortgages, which means more money going to the 1% in the form of interest payments on your mortgage).
If you want to make it more affordable to live in these places, you have to increase the number of housing units available. More supply, same demand = lower prices. Unfortunately, for various reasons, these places won't allow or strictly limit the number of new housing units which can be built. That's the real problem, not the wages.
The frequency of the shaking of most earthquakes most closely matches the resonance frequency of a 3-story building. If you go back and review footage and photos of the buildings which collapsed in the Northridge, Loma Prieta, Kobe, and the Tohoku quakes, a majority of them were 3 stories. 1- and 2-story buildings have a higher resonance frequency, so they just move with the quake. Skyscrapers have a much lower resonance frequency, so they kinda shimmy in place (it's why decoupling these building from the supports with rubber or rolling "floats" works so well).
During both Northridge and Loma Prieta, downtown Los Angeles and San Francisco made it through just fine (except for two sections of freeway which were scheduled to be upgraded by sadly hadn't by the time the quake hit). The low-lying residential areas with 1- and 2-story houses made it through just fine as well. It was the 3-story apartments and condos which suffered the most damage. (Not to mention a lot of those 3-story apartments were built on landfill in San Francisco.)
Knobs and buttons will always be best in cars for physically manipulated interface controls. The reason is pretty simple - cars move. When they move, they hit bumps that makes everything inside jiggle. Unless through a remarkable coincidence the mass, springiness, and dampening of your body, arm, and fingertip exactly matches that of the LCD display, this means your finger will move relative to the screen every time you hit a bump. This makes trying to precisely manipulate touchscreen controls in a moving car an exercise in frustration.
Knobs and buttons are not just decorative. They support your fingers as you wrap them around the controls, effectively "docking" your fingers to the control. When the Shuttle or Soyuz capsule reaches the International Space Station, do they just kinda press up against the ISS and open the hatch? No. They dock the two with clamps which hold them together, then open the hatch. That's an extreme example because lives are at stake, but the principle is the same. By docking your fingers to the knob or button, you prevent your fingers from slipping around the control with every little bump you hit - your wrist and arm absorbs the relative motion of your body with the car, while your fingers remain stationary relative to the controls. Thus allowing you to precisely manipulate the interface in a moving, jiggling, bouncing car.
Don't get me wrong, touchscreens have their place. They're especially good for arbitrary 2-dimensional inputs, like typing on a virtual keyboard or flinging a GPS map back and forth. But the designers who decided to make basic controls like the radio and climate control touchscreen-only were idiots too caught up in the hype over the latest trend to bother thinking about why traditional interface controls are built they way they are. They can be somewhat forgiven because they probably used their phone or tablet inside and car and thought it was great. But what they didn't realize was that when you use a touchscreen phone or tablet in a moving car, you're holding the device so it doesn't move relative to you. And so accurate touchscreen inputs are possible.
A simple pre-shared password makes sense if you intend the network to be publicly accessible. e.g. You run a cafe and want the guests to be able to use your wifi network for Internet access. You can tell each of them the password. Ease of use outweighs security in this use case.
For home and corporate use, a public/private key system makes a lot more sense. There are only a few devices which you intend to give permanent wifi access to your home network (visitors can use your guest network which is protected by a simple password). Authenticate each of these devices with their own credentials using a key or certificate physically stored on the device and never transmitted over the network (the private key). If a device is ever compromised ("I lost my phone!"), you can simply revoke the credentials for that one device (delete the public key from the router) without having to make changes to every other device. This capability is already in most wifi routers - WPA2 Enterprise.
The downside is you need to be running some sort of server to handle these authentication requests. RADIUS seems to be the common one. Routers with a RADIUS server built in are rare, but since the software is free (FreeRAIUS) I expect it'll become more common, easier to use, and eventually replace WPA2 Personal (PSK) as the default security for home wifi routers.
I had to last year. Didn't want to, but had to. I was buying a house. I completed most of the mortgage application online via the bank's secure server, including my SSN. But a day before closing the bank told me they needed my signature on some paperwork. The paperwork also had my SSN. The bank's loan office was a hundred mile round trip I didn't have time for, and time was of the essence. So I asked if I could scan and send it via email. They said sure.
I printed, signed, and scanned the document, put it in an encrypted zip file, and emailed it to them. I called my loan officer on the phone and left the password to unzip it on his voicemail. The next day the bank called to ask where the paperwork was. After a 5 minute discussion and some more phone calls, we determined that their anti-virus software had detected the zip file and automatically deleted the email.
So I offered to put the file on a password protected page on my web server. They could just point their browser to the URL, download the scanned PDF, and my SSN would be safe. Turns out the bank had removed all browsers on their computers with Internet access. Security, y'know.
So I asked if I could fax it in. You used to be able to, but their new policy was that fax resolution was too low and thus didn't constitute a valid signature.
So my choices were to take that afternoon off work (not that I could afford to take it off) and drive to their loan office to deliver the documents by hand. Or to email it as a plain PDF.
What could I do? I ended up emailing it to them. Ironic that the bank tightening its security forced my communication with them to be less secure.
The people hanging onto these old systems are doing so not just for nostalgia but for posterity. They're interested in keeping them in original condition so future generations know what they were really like. Including the color.
Did you know the Statue of Liberty wasn't originally green?
It really depends where you are. If you're in their 3G area, you'll be lucky to get 0.3 Mbps. But if you're within range of their 4G cells, about 5 Mbps is typical, with some areas getting 20-35 Mbps. When i bought my house last year, it had Sprint 4G coverage, and I lived off of it (I have an unlimited plan and my phone is rooted so I can tether) for 2 months while waiting for my cable Internet install date. I averaged about 60 GB/mo for those two months. (My normal usage is only about 300-500 MB/mo, so I have no qualms about sucking up huge amounts of data 1 or 2 months out of the year.)
That's really what Sprint's problem is. If they could get better 4G coverage, they'd be golden. Right now they've only got 64% LTE coverage vs 77%-84% for T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon. (Scroll down to LTE coverage by network, and select U.S. from the dropdown.) Their slower LTE speeds are also a symptom of insufficient coverage. Since I know the location of the tower giving my home 4G service, I've measured speeds at various distances. I get 25 Mbps right next to the tower, about 15 Mbps at home (about a mile away). But as I move to more typical tower distances of 3 miles, it drops down to 5 Mbps or less. By 5 miles (or behind hills), I've lost 4G service entirely. This particular tower hasn't yet gotten the Sprint Spark treatment yet (tri-band LTE), so it could potentially go up to 80 Mbps in the future, though I doubt their range will improve since two of their bands are at 1.9 and 2.5 GHz (the third is 850 MHz). The question is will Sprint be able to come up with enough money to upgrade their network to become more competitive.
Not necessarily. You have to take into account the efficiency of the transport. From the figures I've seen, the fuel cost to ship something from China to the U.S. is about the same as the fuel cost to transport it from a U.S. port to its final destination inland (the U.S. has a terrible rail system so most goods are transported by relatively inefficient trucks).
Assuming the 1 cent to transport a T-shirt from China figure is correct, if you're driving more than 500 feet to buy your "local" T-shirt, you're producing more pollution buying from that local store. It's even questionable if walking that distance has a smaller pollution footprint because of the energy cost needed to produce the food you ate which powers your walk to the local store. (And no, you cannot bypass this by growing a home garden. People vastly underestimate how much land is needed to grow the food we eat. Now factor in the energy needed to work all that land, and you'll quickly find that you'll need to increase your daily caloric intake to 5000-8000 kcal/day if you farm that by hand. There's a very good reason we shifted that inefficient labor-intensive task to being done by machines.)
Maximum energy efficiency is achieved when you multitask and group multiple tasks together. That's how buying stuff on Amazon can end up cheaper with a smaller energy footprint than buying stuff locally. Yes if Amazon were to ship just one T-shirt to you and UPS sent a truck out to deliver just one T-shirt to your house, it' be horribly inefficient. But that UPS truck makes a hundred or so deliveries on its daily route so the portion of its total drive attributable to your T-shirt package delivery is only a few hundred or few thousand feet. Likewise Amazon processes millions of orders every day, so the portion of its operating costs attributable to your single order is very small. This is also the same reason the big department stores end up being able to offer lower prices than the small mom and pop shop - greater volume of sales generates more opportunity for efficiency improvements. If you can come up with a way to combine big box efficiency with the mom and pop buying experience, you'll become the next billionaire.
Not sure why the summary concentrated on just the winner. This is an annual competition where teams from different schools (and sometimes companies) build energy-efficient homes. Most of the entrants are on display in Irvine, California until the 18th. Free admission.
As with most things in life, there is no single "best" answer. While they do pick a winner, if you take the time to visit the exhibit and browse the different homes, you'll see a lot of really great ideas on how to save energy.
Where'd you get those numbers? The average U.S. household uses 10,908 kWh/yr.
Then shouldn't the UK license fee payers be the ones who decide whether the content should be protected, or anyone in the world should be allowed to view it? Not the BBC?
Summary focused on legal ramifications for individuals on their personal computers. But this is actually a bigger issue for corporate use of cloud services. What if your company has an official Twitter feed or Facebook wall which needs to be updated by multiple people? Right now, the only way you can do that is to share the single password with all those people. Now what if one of those people gets fired and you're a little slow to change the password? People criticized Sony for making themselves easy to hack by keeping their passwords in a plain text file, but that's inevitably what happens when you need to share an account among multiple employees and the service providing the account only allows a single login. First the password gets posted on the refrigerator door. But one day an unauthorized employee uses it, and someone gets the "clever" idea of putting it in a text file on the file server in a directory where only the people who are authorized to use that account and password have read access. Right where hackers can get it.
You can't create a guest account because those services don't yet support that. What needs to happen is for these services to either allow logins with multiple revocable keys/passwords; or allow multiple sub-accounts under a master account, with the sub-accounts able to post as if they were the master account. The same concept applies for collaborative virtual spaces.
If every online service allowed this, then the issue in TFA becomes easy. If Netflix allows up to 4 family members to share the account, then each of those family members should have a separate login and password, with one being a master account which has the power to revoke login permissions for the sub-accounts. If you want to let a new "family member" temporarily use the account, you simply give them a sub-account. And when you no longer wish them to have access, you simply revoke the permissions of the sub-account. (And as you point out, for your home PC, you can simply log them into the guest account.)
While not as many individuals may own a refrigerator in developing countries, a lot of their food is still refrigerated during transport. In fact that's how Chicago became the 3rd largest city in the U.S. The development of refrigerated rail cars in the late 1800s and early 1900s meant the meat processing industry in Chicago could ship product all the way to New York without spoilage. Customers there could buy fresh beef thanks to refrigeration, even though most of them didn't own a refrigerator until the 1940s. (Why Chicago? Because it was right next to Lake Michigan, with an ample supply of ice during the winter which could be harvested and stored for use in the summer. Mechanical refrigeration using a compressor didn't really take off until the late 20th century.)
This sort of bias is so endemic to online polling that it's hopeless to try to correct it. All you can do is keep it in mind when you see ratings, and decide that Dark Knight is probably really around a 8.7, not a 9.0. And Shawshank Redemption must be really, really good if it's holding onto the #1 spot despite not appealing to a specific demographic.
I've seen some sites attempt to correct for this by assuming any "real" sample will be gaussian (have a distribution which falls on a normal curve). If the votes something receives are skewed away from guassian (e.g. clustered towards the high end), the site attempts to correct for this by skewing the score down. No idea how accurate or reliable that is, but it is being done in some places.
Rather than try to come up with one, universal rating which is implicitly applicable to everyone, Netflix's approach is probably more sensible. Depending on the movies you watch and the ratings you give them, Netflix builds up a profile of your preferences. They try to match your profile with that of other people who watched similar movies and gave them similar ratings, then makes recommendations based on what those other people watched. So if you hated Dark Knight, then there's a good chance you're not really into movies based on comic bo^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgraphic novels, and so will downrate them for you personally.
This does raise some privacy implications, but on the balance I believe this is the more sensible approach to ratings. Giving up some privacy to greatly increase the signal-to-noise ratio of things like movie recommendations may be worth it in some cases. This also mostly corrects for self-selection bias, assuming your self-selection can be accurately measured.