Then I got a private office, and slept on a roll-up mat.
Yeah there are damn few employers who would be ok with you sleeping in the office. Maybe that sort of thing is normal at some companies where you are but that is not normal in general. Certainly not outside silicon valley.
It's not the employers who have a problem with it per se. Sleeping (living) in a building in an industrial zone is a building code violation. A friend of mine who owned a partially empty warehouse was having problems with thieves breaking in to steal copper wiring. He's incredibly cheap, so he set up a mattress and sleeping bag and began spending the night there instead of hiring a security guard. There happened to be a building inspection shortly after, and when the inspector saw the mattress and sleeping bag, he tagged him with a $500 fine for it.
Just because you pay it monthly doesn't morally allow them to SIM-lock it. Why can't you switch carrier and pay of your debt at this one? It's not as if this locking was what insured the loaner that it will get its due.
Yes it does morally allow them to SIM-lock (or IMEI-lock) it. Because until you finish paying it off, it isn't your phone. It's their phone. They can do whatever they want to it. They're just being enough to let you use it before you finish paying for it.
Try buying an unlocked phone on a monthly payment plan. I've never seen one for sale. No seller is willing to accept the risk that you'll skip out on the payments. Unlike cars and appliances, phones aren't expensive or bulky enough for a cottage industry of repo men to spring up to reclaim the merchandise from delinquent buyers. The lock is what makes the risk acceptable to carriers who still sell phones on a payment plan.
Now, if a carrier insisted on SIM-locking or refused to unlock a phone that was entirely paid off, I'm sure the FTC and FCC would come down on them like a ton of bricks like they have with IMEI locking.
Now, I fully believe that it's possible for some golden-eared listeners to be able to tell 128kbps from flac - and I believe that it's possible for some to train themselves to tell the difference (though I don't know why you'd want to torture yourself for the rest of your life by doing that).
I don't consider myself golden-eared. My hearing above 12kHz is completely shot from having worked with high frequency sonars. But I do play piano and am pretty sensitive to small differences in sound.
The vast majority of the time, there's no difference between 128kbps and 256 kbps. But occasionally during certain parts of a song, the additional definition and clarity of 256k is audibly better than 128k. It doesn't happen often enough for me to dismiss 128k MP3s outright. For casual listening I believe 128k is just fine 99.7% of the time. But if I'm given a choice, given how cheap storage space has become, I will opt for the 256k or 320k version just to cover that extra 0.3%.
256k vs uncompressed is more a matter of preserving quality if you're going to edit the songs further. "Editing" doesn't necessarily mean going through second-by-second like a sound engineer would. Typically when you put together a bunch of songs into a playlist, some are louder than others. If you normalize all the songs in the playlist (make the quieter ones louder, and quiet down the too-loud ones), that constitutes editing. And the extra resolution of the uncompressed audio means less information is lost in the process.
I'll also add that your speakers make a difference. I have a set of studio monitors which I originally bought for my digital piano. They were so good I hated them. I could clearly hear when the digital piano sound samples were looped, and when the processor diminished its volume to simulate fade-out. When playing games, the repeating quality of sound samples were obvious, and detracted from the immersion. It was actually better to use inferior speakers or headphones because they muddied up the sound enough that I couldn't tell they were a digital sample. The vast majority of speakers sold for computers, headphones, and cars, fall into this "muddied up sound" category. Even the decent home theater speakers I bought were extraordinarily clear at first, but after a few years they loosened up to where they're muddying up the sound now. The studio monitors continue to put everything to shame though.
One of the most frustrating things about the Play store is that there's no way to sort the search results. It seems like the more popular apps (based on number of reviews since it hides the exact number of downloads) are clustered near the top, but they're not in any order I've been able to determine. So "top 20 free apps" is kinda meaningless unless you know the sort order.
Posting because there are already a couple of "you must be wrong because renewables are always right" replies.
Typical capacity factor for wind turbines on land is about 0.25. That is, if your wind turbine is rated at 1 MW max capacity, over a year it produces an average of only 250 kW due to the winds not always blowing or not blowing that strongly.
Typical capacity factor for offshore wind turbines is about 0.35.
Typical capacity factor for wind off Scotland is about 0.6 to 0.7. AFAIK, it's the spot with the most consistent winds in the world.
So AC is absolutely correct that Scotland is wildly atypical and shouldn't be used as an example of what to expect when wind power is implemented elsewhere. I absolutely support wind because it's the second renewable (after hydro) whose price has come down to fossil fuel levels (solar is still 2-4x more expensive). But you have to be realistic. If you naively replace a 1 GW nuclear plant with 1 GW of wind turbines, you're going to suffer chronic energy shortages. Most place will actually need 3-4 as much nameplate wind capacity to replace nuclear, 2-3x more to replace coal or gas.
Album oriented music tends to be longer than radio/stream oriented music because the former has a larger story telling context and the latter is about a catchy vibe.
Album music is longer because customers would complain they were ripped off if they bought a typically-priced LP that could hold 45 minutes but only contained 25 minutes (to barely justify using both sides). Or a CD which could hold 70 minutes, but only had 30 minutes of music on it.
Streaming and a la carte music shopping has meant people can pick and choose the songs they want. Three's no longer any need to buy an entire album just to get one or two songs. Since the filler songs on the album are no longer needed to pad out the album length to justify the higher album price, the only remaining pressure is for musicians to make them as short as possible to minimize the work they have to do.
If song prices were proportional to their length, I bet you'd see them becoming longer again.
Movie and TV shows can be measured in number of viewers because people typically watch a movie or show episode once.
YouTube viewers and Fortnite players cannot be measured this way because there are no end to the show.
If you want to compare all of them, you need a new metric: Hours per person per year. Take the total number of hours by all persons spent watching movies or TV shows or playing Fortnite or spent on YouTube in a year, divide it by the population. That gives you the average number of hours each person spends on each form of entertainment. Then you can compare all of these against each other. (Technically you don't have to divide by the population. But doing so results in a figure which is easier for an individual to relate to. e.g. "Oh wow, I spend 3x as much time playing Fortnite as the average American.")
But on the flip side, I don't think you get to 0 without having the same kind of control that Apple exhibits,
Technically, Apple's iOS release are not available on their phones in 0 days.
Apple's software guys are happy with all the feature changes they want to make to iOS. This is analogous to Google making a new version of Android available.
Apple then tests it internally on their current, upcoming, and older phones to make sure everything still works. If something doesn't work, the software guys have to tweak it further, test it on all models again, repeat. Until it's finally ready to be released to to all users. This is analogous to the Android version being rolled out to the different phones.
So the difference is that in Apple's case, the lag between software feature freeze and end of hardware testing is internal and hidden from the public. In Android's case, the lag is public, making people antsy about a "delay" which really is nonexistent. Android rollouts are "slower than iOS" only if you use different ways of measuring how long a rollout takes for the two OSes.
In other words, if Google did it Apple's way, they would not release the new version of Android on their AOSP servers the moment their software guys were finished with it. They would send it in secret to all their OEM vendors, then OEM vendors would work to modify it to make it compatible with all their devices. All OEMs would be embargoed from releasing the new version of Android until the last OEM finished their testing and had it ready for their phones. Then there would be a simultaneous rollout of The New Version of Android across all devices and on the AOSP servers on "day 0".
So really, those graphs in TFA should be inverted, with the last OEM to release each Android version set at zero. And the bars for the other OEMs indicating how many days before day 0 you got the new Android version on your device, because your vendor managed to finish modifying and testing that Android version before what would've been day 0 in Apple's case.
The basic problem with Facebook, Google+ etc. is that you actually don't know the real price - your privacy, and you don't have control over what information that you own anymore when you have dropped it to another site.
Agree with this.
In the early days of the internet people experimented by setting up their own homepages, then came Geocities and now everything is essentially collected in either Facebook or LinkedIn.
Disagree with this.
In the early days, it was really hard to set up your own home page. You had to:
1. Register a domain (this used to cost over $100/year).
2. Pay for a dedicated server which was online 24/7 (shared servers not having been invented yet).
3. Install and configure Apache on that server.
4. Edit HTML files locally on your computer, previewing them to see what they'd look like as a web page.
5. Then you could set up your own home page by uploading the.HTML files.
Geocities made it easy. They took care of steps 1-3 for you, and combined 4-5 into one step. All you had to do was craft your HTML files on their server, and your Geocities homepage was immediately active.
Where the train went off the rails was that people refused to pay even a token amount for this service. Within a short time, domain names dropped to less than $10/yr, and web services with shared hosting became available which either took care of steps 1-3 for you or handheld you through it. All you had to do was steps 4-5 to create your own web page (which became much easier to do with Dreamweaver or later even Word). But these web hosts charged about $4-$10 a month. Given a choice between giving up a couple days of coffee per month to pay for your own private website, or getting one from Geocities or Myspace for free (paid for by letting them collect your private info), people overwhelmingly picked free.
Email went down a similar path, except it had additional pressure from spam. I ran my own email server for over a decade, using my own domain. Eventually I had to give it up because my spam filters were becoming increasingly ineffective, and my server was being blacklisted by other email servers more and more often because some spammer managed to weasel an account with my hosting service and fired off a couple million spam emails before the hosting service shut them down. The other email servers would blacklist the entire IP block for my hosting service, and I would have to petition every one of them individually saying I'm not the spammer. When the frequency of this happening rose to once or twice a month, and I wasn't even bothering anymore to try to petition some of the email servers I rarely sent mail to, I finally threw in the towel. I redirected all my domain's email through Gmail, and let them deal with the spam filters and clearing up blacklist blocks.
You can monetize by giving customers what they want. If your product fulfills their needs, they will gladly pay you for it.
Or you can monetize by entrapping your customers and charging them excessively. This works (at least it does for the seller) if you have a monopoly or near-monopoly (e.g. cable companies). But if you don't, it just makes your customers flee and switch to someone else's product. That's what we seem to be seeing here.
While coding as a hobby and helping projects as a philanthropy work is very good, long term stable projects need continuous funding.
Another thing long term stable projects need is a way to keep tabs on what customers want. What new features were helpful and should take priority? What changes were made that actually annoyed customers rather than helped them?
I haven't seen open source address that, when it's the most important thing you lose when you make a project open source instead of pay software. With pay software, the amount customers are willing to pay for your product signals to you how much they like or dislike what you're doing. It creates a direct positive feedback loop - you add something customers want, more of them buy your product, creating a greater incentive for you to add more things customers want, making more of them want to buy your product, etc. That it also solves the funding problem is just gravy.
The DoD is just being systematic. Science cannot prove a negative. You cannot prove that wormholes, or invisibility cloaks, or extra dimensions do not exist. So instead what you have to do is make an honest effort into researching each one. And when that research uncovers nothing plausible, you say that these things probably do not exist, and our research dollars are better spent on other things that we either don't know if they exist, or we know exist and need to study more to refine our understanding.
But until you make this honest effort, you cannot authoritatively say that these things are not worth investigating. Anyone dismissing these ideas out of hand is jumping to a conclusion based not on evidence, but on their preconceived notions.
Unfortunately, history courses and especially TV/movies do not teach people the value of failure, and quite often ridicule it. Failures are just as important as successes. Every success does not stand by itself. The success was made possible only because countless failures that came before told the successful people what not to do. When a reporter questioned Edison about the amount of effort wasted on failures finding a material which would work as a filament for a light bulb, Edison replied "I have not failed 700 times. I've succeeded in proving 700 ways how not to build a lightbulb."
Furthermore you agree not to use the Services to: (1) [...]; (2) impersonate any person or entity, including, but not limited to, anyone affiliated with 23andMe, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation with a person or entity;
I suspect if a reporter did submit samples under different names, a court would side with the press against their terms of service. Eventually.
But by using identical twins, you sidesteps the possibility of wasting time, effort, and money because your report has been tied up by a gag order while a court mulls over what to do.
It already skews representation in Congress and votes for the Presidential election. The wording for the Census says it will count all "persons", not just those eligible to vote. In 2016, the Supreme Court decided that this wording means people in the country illegally get counted in the Census. (I should note that this was a 9-0 decision. If you don't like it, the Constitution needs to be amended to change the wording.)
Since the Census is used to decide apportionment (how many Representatives a state gets in the House), and the number of Electoral votes a state gets in the Presidential election, this has the effect of giving additional votes to states with higher populations of illegal immigrants. It's currently at about 710,000 residents per representative, so California gets 3 additional House seats, Texas gets 2 extra, and New York and Florida get 1 extra due to their illegal resident populations. That's a net +4 for blue states, +2 for red, and 1 swing state.
This is what the whole brouhaha over the citizenship question on the census is about. Those for it argue it's needed to properly measure the magnitude of the skew. Those against it argue the question discourages people in the country legally from responding to the Census.
It's not the parents' fault. These companies were slow to add the concept of child accounts - accounts which had access to the apps purchased by the main account, but which had fewer privileges (including no purchase privilege). As a result, if you as a parent wanted to buy an app for your child's device, you had two choices. Either buy them on your account, and use your account on your child's device. Or buy them on your child's account (add your credit card info to their account). Both solutions end up with the child's device having access to purchase permission.
To be fair, the companies added the ability to require a passcode to be punched in before a purchase would go through. But then as you say, they also gave you the option to have the device remember the passcode so you wouldn't have to punch it in all the time.
Given that children are necessary for the species to survive, the proper solution is to allow child accounts. These are accounts which have access to apps purchased by the parent account, but which have no purchase privileges themselves. I can understand why the companies are reluctant to do it though - it means you can let your friends use the apps you buy by setting them up with a child account. Google added this capability a few years back (dunno about Facebook or Apple), but hasn't publicized it well. So many parents continue to use their main account on their children' devices.
That's not what he's saying at all. He's saying the objects motion is statistically unlike anything else in our part of the Milky Way. It's essentially stationary with respect to the rest of the galaxy. A large amount of energy would be needed to achieve that relative velocity.
Most of the solutions to the three-body problem (what happens when 3 arbitrary bodies bound by gravity are orbiting each other) result in two of the bodies kicking the third body out in an arbitrary direction, while the two remain orbiting each other. So statistically there should be lots of objects in the galaxy whose motion does not match the general rotational velocity of the Milky Way.
Anonymous claims that this site, like the Giza Pyramids, is perfectly aligned with certain star constellations
The Giza Pyramids are arranged with the smaller one slightly to the south of a line drawn between the two bigger ones. The stars in Orion's belt are arranged with the one which is supposed to correspond to the smallest pyramid slight to the north of a line drawn between the other two. So to make this fit, you have to rotate the pyramids 180 degrees.
The 180 degree rotation we have to do today to match the pyramids up with Orion's belt is not what ancient Egyptians would have seen. The Earth precesses, like a spinning top slowly changes the direction it's pointing. So the Earth's North pole was pointed at a different point in the sky when these pyramids were built. Unless the Egyptians also knew about precession and decided, "hey, let's line up these pyramids so that people 4500 years in the future will see them perfectly match with Orion's belt," it's not an exact 180 degree flip. Calculations put the deviation at about 10 degrees between ancient stellar north and modern stellar North. So now we're dealing with an arbitrary rotation, not precisely 180 degrees.
"Perfectly" aligning two objects is trivial if you're allowed to rotate and scale. Any two points can be rotated and scaled (zoomed in or out) to "line up" with any two other points. So all we're seeing with this alignment is a coincidental alignment of one object with one star, not three objects with three stars. (If you look at that alignment pic and rotate it slightly counterclockwise and shrink it a bit so the two bigger pyramids are precisely lined up with the lower stars, then the third pyramid no longer falls on the third star.) The three stars in Orion's belt are among the 100 brightest, so it would seem to be an extraordinary coincidence that these line up so well with the Giza Pyramids to within a few arc-minutes, even after rotating and scaling. Roughly 1 in 10 million given how big the sky is. Divide that by the 100 brightest stars and it's a 1 in 100,000 coincidence. However, you also have to factor in that there are over 100 pyramids, with nearly half of them tightly clustered just south of Cairo. So now the 1 in 100,000 coincidence drops to a 1 in 2,000 coincidence.
I think you can safely say that there are well over 2,000 famous archaeological sites throughout the world. So you would actually expect that a few of these ancient sites will line up with the brightest star constellations (after rotating and scaling) completely by coincidence. In fact it would be more extraordinary if none of them aligned with any constellations.
I hate Verizon and refuse to get service from them. But one of the anti-spam measures commonly touted is to simply add a per-message fee which is small enough not to bother regular users (who send only a few thousand text messages a month), but big enough to cripple spammers (who send a few million text messages a month).
Such a fee is effective, but does have consequences for high-volume users. That is by design. This isn't a "Verizon is evil so this is wrong" thing. This is a "do you want to try to reduce or eliminate spamming by making it unprofitable?" thing.
The fee would increase Remind's costs for sending texts to Verizon users from a few hundred thousand dollars to several million dollars per year, Remind said. Remind said it would absorb the cost in order to continue providing the paid version of its service. But most of Remind's 30 million users rely on the free version of the service, and Remind said it could no longer provide free text message notifications over Verizon's network unless the fee is reversed.
Several million dollars a year / 30 million users = about 10 cents per user per year.
Even if you assume "several million" is more than $5 million and divide by Verizon's 35% market share, that works out to less than a dollar per user per year. The fee is not ruinous. Unless you're a spammer.
They weren't rigged. She had a 5 in 6 chance of winning and the die came up 1
That's not how sampling margin of error works. Each poll individually had about a 1 in 6 chance of being wrong about Clinton winning. (Some polls showed it more likely, some showed it less, but on average it was about 1 in 6). But nearly every single poll showed Clinton winning. For that to have happened, the dozens of polls would've had to have each rolled a die, and had it come up 1 every time. That's near-impossible given the number of polls which nearly unanimously showed Clinton winning.
If the bias had simply been due to sampling error, then you'd expect about half the polls to show Trump winning (a % close to the final election tally %). That didn't happen. There was a more systematic bias in all the polling against Trump.
One of the few polls which correctly predicted Trump's win came up with the reason. All the anti-Trump bias in the media's coverage, and the open hostility of Clinton supporters against anyone who dared to even hint that they supported Trump, led to Trump supporters being reluctant to tell pollsters that they were going to vote for Trump. When the L.A. Times/USC poll accounted for this, they correctly predicted a Trump win.
So if Cohen did try to bias online polls in Trump's favor, it was a snowflake in a hellstorm of pro-Clinton bias in the media and by Clinton supporters.
The 'compass' to the right of the screen which you can tap for 'full overhead' or 'rear chase helicopter, video game style' camera has been very "cleverly" removed by yet another moron.
There's no simple way to have the map always face north when in navigation mode, there's no simple way to make the map always have the above view camera. It's just the behind view thing and the tracking seems suddenly worse to boot.
Chase camera mode (tilted mode) is now seamlessly integrated with top-down mode. You do a two-finger swipe up or down to tilt the map at any arbitrary angle from top-down view to fullly tilted (looks to be about 30 degrees). I never used chase camera mode, so was mildly annoyed when I first accidentally tilted the map. But it was easy enough to put it back into top-down mode.
The compass which used to always be present now disappears when you have the map aligned so North is up. If you rotate the map (two finger twist), the compass reappears. Tapping it when it appears re-aligns your map so North is up, like before (and makes the compass disappear). I consider this a useful change because back when the compass was always present, you couldn't be sure if the map was properly aligned so North was up if it was slightly rotated. The OCD part of me was always tapping the compass when it was already aligned so North was up.
On top of this, they finally added back the general "avoid tolls" option. This used to be a general option in the early 2010s. But then they moved it so it was only available when you made a navigation route; the problem being it didn't remember your setting on previous routes. So I was constantly getting routes on a nearby toll road unless I disabled toll routes every single time. They finally changed it back to a general setting a few updates ago.
If the housing prices in your area ranges from $x00,000 to $y,000,000, then there are z people who can afford to live in the area.
If you construct n new homes in the $x00,000 to $y,000,000 price range, then the number of homes those z people can afford increases. Supply exceeds demand, and the average price decreases. And now (z+n) people can afford afford to live in the area. The n who were added all bought in the below-$x00,000 price range. But the average price decrease is because all homes in the $x000,000 to $y,000,000 price range decrease in price. Basically, the n people bought homes which used to cost more than $x00,000, but dropped in price below $x00,000 so they could afford them.
If you construct n new homes but restrict them to people who can afford less-than-$x00,000 price range, then the number of people who can afford to live in the area is now (z+n). The n additional people bought the sub-$x00,000 homes like above. But the reservation of those homes for lower income people means less land is available for regular new home construction. Meaning the average price for $x00,000 to $y,000,000 homes increases. Exacerbating the very problem you're trying to solve (unaffordable housing).
It's the same problem that's plaguing student loans. When you subsidize demand, the average price goes up. That's led to school tuitions spiraling up out of control. If you want to lower prices, you need to subsidize supply. Instead of building additional homes and giving them to people at below-market prices (which has the same effect on market prices as handing those people money), build additional homes and just flood the market with them.
I can't help but think this is just spitting into the wind. There are lots of chemicals which potentially harm reefs. Oxybenzone and octinoxate just get picked on because there was already a large conspiracy theory-ish movement to get those two banned, which quickly latched on to any alternative reason to ban them.
if you look at all chemicals we add to the water which potentially harms coral, fertilizer would seem to be the biggest culprit. And we dump probably a trillion times more fertilizer into the oceans (via agricultural runoff) than sunscreen. These sunscreen bans are like making a fuss over a tiny crack in the road, while ignoring the smoking mile-wide crater.
Fortunately, Android users aren't as hamstrung as iOS users. You can convert your existing 32-bit Android apps to raw APK files. Save those on your computer and install them onto your older device by side-loading. Actually, I suspect when Google drops 32-bit-only apps from the Play store (making it impossible for 32-bit devices to use the Play store), other Android app repositories will take up the slack and continue to offer them. Depending on how many 32-bit devices are still in use in 2021, it might actually be a good opportunity to break the Play store's hegemony on Android apps.
There is actually a statistical difference between all of these.
Stocks are (over time) positive sum. The total value of all stocks goes up over time, meaning on average stock investors are winners. So trading and investing in stocks is good for the economy.
Same goes for savings accounts. They're positive sum. You make money (interest), the bank makes money (dividends from investing your savings). So it's good for the economy.
Insurance is zero sum (negative sum if you subtract the cut taken by the insurance company). But the "winners" in insurance are people who suffer an pre-agreed loss. So insurance has the effect of minimizing individual deviations from the average. Minimizing deviations results in more economic stability (fewer bankruptcies), so it actually ends up a net gain for the economy.
Gambling is zero sum (negative sum if you include the cut taken by the casino). On average, gamblers are losers. On top of that the winners are randomly distributed, so there's no benefit to the economy as with insurance. So gambling is on balance bad for the economy. (The only way it helps the economy is if you count its entertainment value as stress relief for the gamblers. But the few addicted gamblers who gamble too much end up counteracting this benefit on average.)
From what I can tell, about 15,600 Americans die from skin cancer each year. That puts it at a little less than half your risk of dying in a car accident. So rather than turning vampire and avoiding sunlight as much as you can, just employ safe practices. Just like you buckle your seat belt when riding in a car, use sunscreen when going outdoors. Or put another way, if you're going to freak out about this and avoid going into sunlight, you should be doubly-freaked out about riding in a car.
The problem is a mismatch between expectations and reality. SJWs believe without qualifications that men and women are equal. But it's been empirically proven that they're wrong - men and women prefer different types of games. So it's not at all surprising that a culture at a company developing games with a primarily male audience (90% of MOBA players are male) will be skewed towards silly male behavior. Just like I'd expect the culture at a company developing games with a primarily female audience would be skewed towards silly female behavior.
If you ignore the evidence and use the fantasy that the two are equal as your guiding principle, you end up with employment environments which are inferior for producing both types of games (those preferred by men, and those preferred by women). Because you've stripped away part of the development culture which makes the games "click" with their audiences. You gotta be careful to limit your remedies to target actual problems - harassment, demands for sex, withholding promotions based on gender (which to be fair seems to be most of the criticism leveled at Riot). When you start to targeting innocent "male" behaviors like nerf fights in the hall, or the gender ratio of your developers matching the pool of job applicants rather than being 50/50, you've gone too far.
Disclaimer: I have nothing against female gamers or female game developers. One of the most influential video game developers in the genre I preferred when I was growing up (adventure games) was a woman. And I think she was instrumental in breaking home computer games away from the stereotypical shoot-em-up genre popular in arcades. But even she recognized that men and women have different interests.
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It's not the employers who have a problem with it per se. Sleeping (living) in a building in an industrial zone is a building code violation. A friend of mine who owned a partially empty warehouse was having problems with thieves breaking in to steal copper wiring. He's incredibly cheap, so he set up a mattress and sleeping bag and began spending the night there instead of hiring a security guard. There happened to be a building inspection shortly after, and when the inspector saw the mattress and sleeping bag, he tagged him with a $500 fine for it.
Yes it does morally allow them to SIM-lock (or IMEI-lock) it. Because until you finish paying it off, it isn't your phone. It's their phone. They can do whatever they want to it. They're just being enough to let you use it before you finish paying for it.
Try buying an unlocked phone on a monthly payment plan. I've never seen one for sale. No seller is willing to accept the risk that you'll skip out on the payments. Unlike cars and appliances, phones aren't expensive or bulky enough for a cottage industry of repo men to spring up to reclaim the merchandise from delinquent buyers. The lock is what makes the risk acceptable to carriers who still sell phones on a payment plan.
Now, if a carrier insisted on SIM-locking or refused to unlock a phone that was entirely paid off, I'm sure the FTC and FCC would come down on them like a ton of bricks like they have with IMEI locking.
I don't consider myself golden-eared. My hearing above 12kHz is completely shot from having worked with high frequency sonars. But I do play piano and am pretty sensitive to small differences in sound.
The vast majority of the time, there's no difference between 128kbps and 256 kbps. But occasionally during certain parts of a song, the additional definition and clarity of 256k is audibly better than 128k. It doesn't happen often enough for me to dismiss 128k MP3s outright. For casual listening I believe 128k is just fine 99.7% of the time. But if I'm given a choice, given how cheap storage space has become, I will opt for the 256k or 320k version just to cover that extra 0.3%.
256k vs uncompressed is more a matter of preserving quality if you're going to edit the songs further. "Editing" doesn't necessarily mean going through second-by-second like a sound engineer would. Typically when you put together a bunch of songs into a playlist, some are louder than others. If you normalize all the songs in the playlist (make the quieter ones louder, and quiet down the too-loud ones), that constitutes editing. And the extra resolution of the uncompressed audio means less information is lost in the process.
I'll also add that your speakers make a difference. I have a set of studio monitors which I originally bought for my digital piano. They were so good I hated them. I could clearly hear when the digital piano sound samples were looped, and when the processor diminished its volume to simulate fade-out. When playing games, the repeating quality of sound samples were obvious, and detracted from the immersion. It was actually better to use inferior speakers or headphones because they muddied up the sound enough that I couldn't tell they were a digital sample. The vast majority of speakers sold for computers, headphones, and cars, fall into this "muddied up sound" category. Even the decent home theater speakers I bought were extraordinarily clear at first, but after a few years they loosened up to where they're muddying up the sound now. The studio monitors continue to put everything to shame though.
One of the most frustrating things about the Play store is that there's no way to sort the search results. It seems like the more popular apps (based on number of reviews since it hides the exact number of downloads) are clustered near the top, but they're not in any order I've been able to determine. So "top 20 free apps" is kinda meaningless unless you know the sort order.
So AC is absolutely correct that Scotland is wildly atypical and shouldn't be used as an example of what to expect when wind power is implemented elsewhere. I absolutely support wind because it's the second renewable (after hydro) whose price has come down to fossil fuel levels (solar is still 2-4x more expensive). But you have to be realistic. If you naively replace a 1 GW nuclear plant with 1 GW of wind turbines, you're going to suffer chronic energy shortages. Most place will actually need 3-4 as much nameplate wind capacity to replace nuclear, 2-3x more to replace coal or gas.
Album music is longer because customers would complain they were ripped off if they bought a typically-priced LP that could hold 45 minutes but only contained 25 minutes (to barely justify using both sides). Or a CD which could hold 70 minutes, but only had 30 minutes of music on it.
Streaming and a la carte music shopping has meant people can pick and choose the songs they want. Three's no longer any need to buy an entire album just to get one or two songs. Since the filler songs on the album are no longer needed to pad out the album length to justify the higher album price, the only remaining pressure is for musicians to make them as short as possible to minimize the work they have to do.
If song prices were proportional to their length, I bet you'd see them becoming longer again.
If you want to compare all of them, you need a new metric: Hours per person per year. Take the total number of hours by all persons spent watching movies or TV shows or playing Fortnite or spent on YouTube in a year, divide it by the population. That gives you the average number of hours each person spends on each form of entertainment. Then you can compare all of these against each other. (Technically you don't have to divide by the population. But doing so results in a figure which is easier for an individual to relate to. e.g. "Oh wow, I spend 3x as much time playing Fortnite as the average American.")
Technically, Apple's iOS release are not available on their phones in 0 days.
So the difference is that in Apple's case, the lag between software feature freeze and end of hardware testing is internal and hidden from the public. In Android's case, the lag is public, making people antsy about a "delay" which really is nonexistent. Android rollouts are "slower than iOS" only if you use different ways of measuring how long a rollout takes for the two OSes.
In other words, if Google did it Apple's way, they would not release the new version of Android on their AOSP servers the moment their software guys were finished with it. They would send it in secret to all their OEM vendors, then OEM vendors would work to modify it to make it compatible with all their devices. All OEMs would be embargoed from releasing the new version of Android until the last OEM finished their testing and had it ready for their phones. Then there would be a simultaneous rollout of The New Version of Android across all devices and on the AOSP servers on "day 0".
So really, those graphs in TFA should be inverted, with the last OEM to release each Android version set at zero. And the bars for the other OEMs indicating how many days before day 0 you got the new Android version on your device, because your vendor managed to finish modifying and testing that Android version before what would've been day 0 in Apple's case.
Agree with this.
Disagree with this.
In the early days, it was really hard to set up your own home page. You had to:
Geocities made it easy. They took care of steps 1-3 for you, and combined 4-5 into one step. All you had to do was craft your HTML files on their server, and your Geocities homepage was immediately active.
Where the train went off the rails was that people refused to pay even a token amount for this service. Within a short time, domain names dropped to less than $10/yr, and web services with shared hosting became available which either took care of steps 1-3 for you or handheld you through it. All you had to do was steps 4-5 to create your own web page (which became much easier to do with Dreamweaver or later even Word). But these web hosts charged about $4-$10 a month. Given a choice between giving up a couple days of coffee per month to pay for your own private website, or getting one from Geocities or Myspace for free (paid for by letting them collect your private info), people overwhelmingly picked free.
Email went down a similar path, except it had additional pressure from spam. I ran my own email server for over a decade, using my own domain. Eventually I had to give it up because my spam filters were becoming increasingly ineffective, and my server was being blacklisted by other email servers more and more often because some spammer managed to weasel an account with my hosting service and fired off a couple million spam emails before the hosting service shut them down. The other email servers would blacklist the entire IP block for my hosting service, and I would have to petition every one of them individually saying I'm not the spammer. When the frequency of this happening rose to once or twice a month, and I wasn't even bothering anymore to try to petition some of the email servers I rarely sent mail to, I finally threw in the towel. I redirected all my domain's email through Gmail, and let them deal with the spam filters and clearing up blacklist blocks.
Or you can monetize by entrapping your customers and charging them excessively. This works (at least it does for the seller) if you have a monopoly or near-monopoly (e.g. cable companies). But if you don't, it just makes your customers flee and switch to someone else's product. That's what we seem to be seeing here.
Another thing long term stable projects need is a way to keep tabs on what customers want. What new features were helpful and should take priority? What changes were made that actually annoyed customers rather than helped them?
I haven't seen open source address that, when it's the most important thing you lose when you make a project open source instead of pay software. With pay software, the amount customers are willing to pay for your product signals to you how much they like or dislike what you're doing. It creates a direct positive feedback loop - you add something customers want, more of them buy your product, creating a greater incentive for you to add more things customers want, making more of them want to buy your product, etc. That it also solves the funding problem is just gravy.
The DoD is just being systematic. Science cannot prove a negative. You cannot prove that wormholes, or invisibility cloaks, or extra dimensions do not exist. So instead what you have to do is make an honest effort into researching each one. And when that research uncovers nothing plausible, you say that these things probably do not exist, and our research dollars are better spent on other things that we either don't know if they exist, or we know exist and need to study more to refine our understanding.
But until you make this honest effort, you cannot authoritatively say that these things are not worth investigating. Anyone dismissing these ideas out of hand is jumping to a conclusion based not on evidence, but on their preconceived notions.
Unfortunately, history courses and especially TV/movies do not teach people the value of failure, and quite often ridicule it. Failures are just as important as successes. Every success does not stand by itself. The success was made possible only because countless failures that came before told the successful people what not to do. When a reporter questioned Edison about the amount of effort wasted on failures finding a material which would work as a filament for a light bulb, Edison replied "I have not failed 700 times. I've succeeded in proving 700 ways how not to build a lightbulb."
I suspect if a reporter did submit samples under different names, a court would side with the press against their terms of service. Eventually.
But by using identical twins, you sidesteps the possibility of wasting time, effort, and money because your report has been tied up by a gag order while a court mulls over what to do.
It already skews representation in Congress and votes for the Presidential election. The wording for the Census says it will count all "persons", not just those eligible to vote. In 2016, the Supreme Court decided that this wording means people in the country illegally get counted in the Census. (I should note that this was a 9-0 decision. If you don't like it, the Constitution needs to be amended to change the wording.)
Since the Census is used to decide apportionment (how many Representatives a state gets in the House), and the number of Electoral votes a state gets in the Presidential election, this has the effect of giving additional votes to states with higher populations of illegal immigrants. It's currently at about 710,000 residents per representative, so California gets 3 additional House seats, Texas gets 2 extra, and New York and Florida get 1 extra due to their illegal resident populations. That's a net +4 for blue states, +2 for red, and 1 swing state.
This is what the whole brouhaha over the citizenship question on the census is about. Those for it argue it's needed to properly measure the magnitude of the skew. Those against it argue the question discourages people in the country legally from responding to the Census.
It's not the parents' fault. These companies were slow to add the concept of child accounts - accounts which had access to the apps purchased by the main account, but which had fewer privileges (including no purchase privilege). As a result, if you as a parent wanted to buy an app for your child's device, you had two choices. Either buy them on your account, and use your account on your child's device. Or buy them on your child's account (add your credit card info to their account). Both solutions end up with the child's device having access to purchase permission.
To be fair, the companies added the ability to require a passcode to be punched in before a purchase would go through. But then as you say, they also gave you the option to have the device remember the passcode so you wouldn't have to punch it in all the time.
Given that children are necessary for the species to survive, the proper solution is to allow child accounts. These are accounts which have access to apps purchased by the parent account, but which have no purchase privileges themselves. I can understand why the companies are reluctant to do it though - it means you can let your friends use the apps you buy by setting them up with a child account. Google added this capability a few years back (dunno about Facebook or Apple), but hasn't publicized it well. So many parents continue to use their main account on their children' devices.
Most of the solutions to the three-body problem (what happens when 3 arbitrary bodies bound by gravity are orbiting each other) result in two of the bodies kicking the third body out in an arbitrary direction, while the two remain orbiting each other. So statistically there should be lots of objects in the galaxy whose motion does not match the general rotational velocity of the Milky Way.
The Giza Pyramids are arranged with the smaller one slightly to the south of a line drawn between the two bigger ones. The stars in Orion's belt are arranged with the one which is supposed to correspond to the smallest pyramid slight to the north of a line drawn between the other two. So to make this fit, you have to rotate the pyramids 180 degrees.
The 180 degree rotation we have to do today to match the pyramids up with Orion's belt is not what ancient Egyptians would have seen. The Earth precesses, like a spinning top slowly changes the direction it's pointing. So the Earth's North pole was pointed at a different point in the sky when these pyramids were built. Unless the Egyptians also knew about precession and decided, "hey, let's line up these pyramids so that people 4500 years in the future will see them perfectly match with Orion's belt," it's not an exact 180 degree flip. Calculations put the deviation at about 10 degrees between ancient stellar north and modern stellar North. So now we're dealing with an arbitrary rotation, not precisely 180 degrees.
"Perfectly" aligning two objects is trivial if you're allowed to rotate and scale. Any two points can be rotated and scaled (zoomed in or out) to "line up" with any two other points. So all we're seeing with this alignment is a coincidental alignment of one object with one star, not three objects with three stars. (If you look at that alignment pic and rotate it slightly counterclockwise and shrink it a bit so the two bigger pyramids are precisely lined up with the lower stars, then the third pyramid no longer falls on the third star.) The three stars in Orion's belt are among the 100 brightest, so it would seem to be an extraordinary coincidence that these line up so well with the Giza Pyramids to within a few arc-minutes, even after rotating and scaling. Roughly 1 in 10 million given how big the sky is. Divide that by the 100 brightest stars and it's a 1 in 100,000 coincidence. However, you also have to factor in that there are over 100 pyramids, with nearly half of them tightly clustered just south of Cairo. So now the 1 in 100,000 coincidence drops to a 1 in 2,000 coincidence.
I think you can safely say that there are well over 2,000 famous archaeological sites throughout the world. So you would actually expect that a few of these ancient sites will line up with the brightest star constellations (after rotating and scaling) completely by coincidence. In fact it would be more extraordinary if none of them aligned with any constellations.
Such a fee is effective, but does have consequences for high-volume users. That is by design. This isn't a "Verizon is evil so this is wrong" thing. This is a "do you want to try to reduce or eliminate spamming by making it unprofitable?" thing.
Several million dollars a year / 30 million users = about 10 cents per user per year.
Even if you assume "several million" is more than $5 million and divide by Verizon's 35% market share, that works out to less than a dollar per user per year. The fee is not ruinous. Unless you're a spammer.
That's not how sampling margin of error works. Each poll individually had about a 1 in 6 chance of being wrong about Clinton winning. (Some polls showed it more likely, some showed it less, but on average it was about 1 in 6). But nearly every single poll showed Clinton winning. For that to have happened, the dozens of polls would've had to have each rolled a die, and had it come up 1 every time. That's near-impossible given the number of polls which nearly unanimously showed Clinton winning.
If the bias had simply been due to sampling error, then you'd expect about half the polls to show Trump winning (a % close to the final election tally %). That didn't happen. There was a more systematic bias in all the polling against Trump.
One of the few polls which correctly predicted Trump's win came up with the reason. All the anti-Trump bias in the media's coverage, and the open hostility of Clinton supporters against anyone who dared to even hint that they supported Trump, led to Trump supporters being reluctant to tell pollsters that they were going to vote for Trump. When the L.A. Times/USC poll accounted for this, they correctly predicted a Trump win.
So if Cohen did try to bias online polls in Trump's favor, it was a snowflake in a hellstorm of pro-Clinton bias in the media and by Clinton supporters.
Chase camera mode (tilted mode) is now seamlessly integrated with top-down mode. You do a two-finger swipe up or down to tilt the map at any arbitrary angle from top-down view to fullly tilted (looks to be about 30 degrees). I never used chase camera mode, so was mildly annoyed when I first accidentally tilted the map. But it was easy enough to put it back into top-down mode.
The compass which used to always be present now disappears when you have the map aligned so North is up. If you rotate the map (two finger twist), the compass reappears. Tapping it when it appears re-aligns your map so North is up, like before (and makes the compass disappear). I consider this a useful change because back when the compass was always present, you couldn't be sure if the map was properly aligned so North was up if it was slightly rotated. The OCD part of me was always tapping the compass when it was already aligned so North was up.
On top of this, they finally added back the general "avoid tolls" option. This used to be a general option in the early 2010s. But then they moved it so it was only available when you made a navigation route; the problem being it didn't remember your setting on previous routes. So I was constantly getting routes on a nearby toll road unless I disabled toll routes every single time. They finally changed it back to a general setting a few updates ago.
It's the same problem that's plaguing student loans. When you subsidize demand, the average price goes up. That's led to school tuitions spiraling up out of control. If you want to lower prices, you need to subsidize supply. Instead of building additional homes and giving them to people at below-market prices (which has the same effect on market prices as handing those people money), build additional homes and just flood the market with them.
I can't help but think this is just spitting into the wind. There are lots of chemicals which potentially harm reefs. Oxybenzone and octinoxate just get picked on because there was already a large conspiracy theory-ish movement to get those two banned, which quickly latched on to any alternative reason to ban them.
if you look at all chemicals we add to the water which potentially harms coral, fertilizer would seem to be the biggest culprit. And we dump probably a trillion times more fertilizer into the oceans (via agricultural runoff) than sunscreen. These sunscreen bans are like making a fuss over a tiny crack in the road, while ignoring the smoking mile-wide crater.
Fortunately, Android users aren't as hamstrung as iOS users. You can convert your existing 32-bit Android apps to raw APK files. Save those on your computer and install them onto your older device by side-loading. Actually, I suspect when Google drops 32-bit-only apps from the Play store (making it impossible for 32-bit devices to use the Play store), other Android app repositories will take up the slack and continue to offer them. Depending on how many 32-bit devices are still in use in 2021, it might actually be a good opportunity to break the Play store's hegemony on Android apps.
From what I can tell, about 15,600 Americans die from skin cancer each year. That puts it at a little less than half your risk of dying in a car accident. So rather than turning vampire and avoiding sunlight as much as you can, just employ safe practices. Just like you buckle your seat belt when riding in a car, use sunscreen when going outdoors. Or put another way, if you're going to freak out about this and avoid going into sunlight, you should be doubly-freaked out about riding in a car.
The problem is a mismatch between expectations and reality. SJWs believe without qualifications that men and women are equal. But it's been empirically proven that they're wrong - men and women prefer different types of games. So it's not at all surprising that a culture at a company developing games with a primarily male audience (90% of MOBA players are male) will be skewed towards silly male behavior. Just like I'd expect the culture at a company developing games with a primarily female audience would be skewed towards silly female behavior.
If you ignore the evidence and use the fantasy that the two are equal as your guiding principle, you end up with employment environments which are inferior for producing both types of games (those preferred by men, and those preferred by women). Because you've stripped away part of the development culture which makes the games "click" with their audiences. You gotta be careful to limit your remedies to target actual problems - harassment, demands for sex, withholding promotions based on gender (which to be fair seems to be most of the criticism leveled at Riot). When you start to targeting innocent "male" behaviors like nerf fights in the hall, or the gender ratio of your developers matching the pool of job applicants rather than being 50/50, you've gone too far.
Disclaimer: I have nothing against female gamers or female game developers. One of the most influential video game developers in the genre I preferred when I was growing up (adventure games) was a woman. And I think she was instrumental in breaking home computer games away from the stereotypical shoot-em-up genre popular in arcades. But even she recognized that men and women have different interests.