Because cable companies (which became cable ISPs) weren't originally something you could call a public utility. When they started, nobody knew what was the best way to rig up houses, or allocate bandwidth. When they started offering Internet service, that increased the complexity because now each home needed to be able to transmit data back to the cable company. These were all complex problems with a plethora of possible solutions. The "myth of capitalist efficiency" is precisely what filtered out the bad solutions over three decades, leaving only the efficient ones.
If cable had been made a public utility from the onset, we'd probably still be stuck with analog broadcasts and a few dozen channels. Just like government-imposed GSM would've been stuck with approx 50 kbps data speeds if the U.S. hadn't allowed CDMA to compete against it. (Orthogonal multiplexing like CDMA and OFDMA are what allows the high speed data rates. With the original GSM TDMA spec, each phone would take up part of the data bandwidth even if it didn't use it. On the other hand, CDMA distributed bandwidth according to how much each phone was using. Eventually, nearly every GSM phone ended up using wideband CDMA for data. That's why they can talk and use data at the same time - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones only had one radio for both. That's right, CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war.)
Once you've arrived at what seems to be the optimal solution, then you can think about turning it into a public utility. That's what happened with electricity - AC and DC networks were allowed to compete, until it became economically obvious that long distance AC transmission was better. Then it got turned into a public utility. But it'd be remiss to think you could get to where we are today without the private capitalism stage - it's what allowed us to find the optimal solution in the first place. (And in fact the current state of electricity as a public utility is impeding efforts to explore if long-distance DC transmission might in fact be better with the modern high-efficiency DC converters that weren't available during the original AC vs DC war.)
It amazes me that people think they are saving a tree when they don't use paper. I highly doubt they have even seen what kind of trees paper is made from.
There was an insightful/. post years ago which pointed out that recycling paper may actually be bad. When you throw away paper in a landfill, you are sequestering carbon. The tree pulled CO2 out of the atmosphere, we turned it into paper, and threw it away in a landfill. Core samples into old landfills have turned up newspaper fragments a century old in still-readable condition. So that CO2 is being sequestered underground in a landfill. Exactly the opposite of what we're doing with oil (taking it out from the ground, burning it, and releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. So throwing away paper and not recycling it may actually be the best thing for the environment (and by extension, chopping down trees to turn them into paper, as long as you plant new trees to replace the ones you chopped down).
Also of note, the abstract mentions that the number of trees has been too low in previous estimates. I wonder how this new estimate will change climate/CO2 modeling:
That would depend on the biomass of vegetation (not just trees). I haven't read TFA but it appears to only be counting trees. Have they revised their estimates about the amount of plant biomass? (To be precise, only the living plant biomass matters. The wood in the core of a tree is dead, and does not contribute to converting CO2 into cellulose.)
It's not that it's "OK", it's just the norm for the industry. Even in the days when gaming reviews were printed on dead trees, it was a poorly-guarded secret that they were being paid by the game publishers to hype the big releases. There is no equivalent to the Hippocratic oath in the journalism industry, or Bar Association which will prohibit you from ever working in the field again if you do something egregiously wrong. And prohibiting payola doesn't eliminate the problem. Personal bias plays a huge role in story selection. Back in the early 2000s the national news was alight for weeks with a story about two WASPs who deliberately picked out a gay guy, tied him up, and dragged him behind a car until he was dead. At the same time, there was also an incident where two gay guys deliberately picked out a guy who was Christian, tied him to a fence, and beat him til he was dead, but that story got almost no coverage. They claim to be objective, and I sincerely believe most of them want to be objective. But really how objective can you be with a story you have strong personal feelings about?
You simply have to understand that this sort of stuff always goes on in journalism and probably always will. The need for journalistic freedom makes it a difficult industry to police. Take everything you read or hear from a publication with a grain of salt - like you do with the stories you see in the National Enquirer at the supermarket checkout line but not to that extent. It's why publications like Consumer Reports which follow self-imposed guidelines to improve objectivity (they accept no ads, and buy the products they test off the store shelves instead of using manufacturer-supplied samples) have a strong following.
Most people probably haven't experienced total darkness. I experienced it while working late at a campsite (astronomy camp). I had to walk from the lab to my cabin on a moonless night with thick fog, no lights. You literally cannot see your hand in front of your face. You can't even tell if your eyes are open or closed. It was one of those epiphany moments where you're experiencing something completely new for the first time in your life. I remember thinking, wow, so this is what it's like to be blind. I had to find my way back to the cabin entirely by feel and my memory of the path.
Anyway, a mask or bag over your head isn't going to cut it. Even the photographic dark rooms I've been in always had a faint glimmer of light leaking in somewhere - a point of reference that told me which way I was facing. Fortunately the walk back to my cabin was downhill with grass on the edges of the path so I could tell I was sort of going in the right way. I don't think I would've made it if it had been completely flat and all grass.
Why not? The bank has lots of money to invest. It wants to know where the smartest place to invest it is. So it commissions a study to figure that out. Assuming they follow through with their investment, they're putting their money where their mouth is. Which is more than I can say for both sides of the climate debate (one side wants to control how other people's money is spent, the other side doesn't want to pay for damage caused by their own choices).
It's worth noting that current trends in wifi technology are moving in a direction which overcomes Shannon's law. The theorem assumes a shared communications channel. That is, if you transmit your signal at -45 dB, then everyone else using that same channel sees -45 dB of noise (your signal is noise to them).
Beam-forming and MIMO (multipath) techniques subvert this assumption. For a visual analogy, it's why you can see your smartphone display in the sunlight, even though the sun is much, much brighter (its signal strength at optical wavelengths far exceeds your phone display's signal strength). Although the sun is very bright, the light it gives off is highly directional. By using sensors (the lens structure of your eyes) which can "tune in" to light coming from a narrow angle, you can basically filter out all that sunlight noise and pull out a clear signal from the smartphone display.
We're still a long way from this being able to beat out a direct fiber connection. But with phased array antennas (basically what MIMO does except using a lot more transceivers for much finer angular resolution) acting like a "lens" to "focus" radio waves, it's not outlandish to think that in the future all wireless communications could effectively be point-to-point with little to no interference from other wireless sources. Even though everyone is transmitting at the same frequencies, the highly directional nature of the transmissions would mean Shannon's law almost never comes into play, and you get to use all that bandwidth as if you were the only one transmitting on it.
Which is why I have give up on any app which has a corresponding web-page.
This is a really important point. The reason the web was so successful was because once you made a website, anyone with a computer could access it and anyone else's website using a single program. A common, unified method of interacting with multiple persons or organizations with minimum hassle. Prior to that was the telephone, which allowed you to call anyone using a single device. And prior to that was the invention of postal mail, which allowed you to write to anyone by dropping off your letters at a single location.
What's happening with every site out there trying to foist their own app onto your phone is a huge step backwards. It takes us back to the day when the only way for you to interact with a person or a organization was to physically travel to their unique location. We've spent centuries arriving at the optimal solution to the problem of contacting others to exchange information with a minimum of hassle. Now marketers want to undo several centuries of progress in the name of advertising and data collection. What's happening with apps right now is equivalent to each person in your contact list insisting that you keep a separate telephone just for calling them, and which can only call them, and oh by the way that phone will listen in on what you're doing and report it back to its master..
Don't fall for it. Unless the app includes some functionality which requires it to be an app (e.g. my banking app lets me deposit checks by securely taking a picture), insist on using the website. If the experience on your phone's browser sucks, that just means the website needs a better mobile site, or HTML needs to be extended to allow for a better mobile experience (theoretically the browser could be allowed access to your camera to let my bank's website take a picture allowing me to deposit checks). And if a site is so obnoxious as to block mobile browsers and insist you download their app, stop giving them your business and find an alternate.
The 130-page report (PDF) shows that Li-on batteries will drop from $550 per kilowatt hour (kWh) in 2014 to $200 per kWh by 2020
The going rate for residential electricity in the U.S. is about $0.11/kWh. So basically if these batteries charge/discharge once per day (as the case would be for solar), and you want the batteries to only add (say) 20% to the price of the generated electricity in order for it to remain cost-competitive (note: wind is nearly cost-competitive, solar is still about 2x-3x more expensive), then it currently takes $550 per kWh / ($0.11 per kWh * 20% * 365 cycles/yr) = 68.5 years for these batteries to pay for themselves, but by 2020 it will take 27.4 years. Yay progress?
Unless the levelized price for renewable generation drops substantially below that of coal, I don't see how this will "spur renewable energy adoption" except for regions where electricity prices are substantially higher (e.g. Hawaii, $0.30/kWh)
1. a data cap that from an "unlimited" that is not unlimited, since the user signed a contract that had some sort of fair use policy allowing redefinition of the word "unlimited" by the ISP,for marketing purposes;
I think most (all?) carriers have dropped unlimited data plans. Sprint is the only one I'm not sure about.
The remaining people with unlimited plans are grandfathered in (I'm one). Legally, the carrier is not required to continue to keep these people on those grandfathered unlimited plans. Once your multi-year contract is up, your service is month to month. You are free to cancel it at any time, but the carrier is also free to cancel it at any time. The carriers have, as a courtesy, just been allowing customers on the old plans to continue month-to-month under the terms of the old plan. There is no legal requirement for them to do so, and they could in theory just force you into a current data capped plan if they wanted.
I agree marketing data plans as "unlimited" in the first place was stupid. But it happened, and it's in the past. Carriers are now doing the right thing by specifying what your bandwidth limit is. The "my contract says unlimited" argument really carries little legal weight (unless a carrier still offers an unlimited data plan).
2. Did I read that right about them targeting torrent and p2p users first? Didn't the US just pass a net neutrality law? Isn't protocol-specific "accusing" a type of discrimination punished by law when it concerns American citizens, because it would automatically assume the content these users were trading was illegal without a serious base for such accusation? I mean, seriously. Who gave these corporate douches the power to decide how their service is to be used. It's about time all service providers understand that a user has a right to privacy that goes well beyond his right to sniff on the user's content.
Understand that the typical Internet service you pay $50/mo for is actually a shared service. If you to try to buy (say) 20 Mbps for your sole, exclusive use, it would cost you around $2000-$5000/mo. The only way the ISP can offer it to you for $50/mo is by having you share it with about 100 other people. And the only way sharing it with about 100 other people works is if on average each of them uses about 65 GB/month.
The easy way is to set a bandwidth limit of about 100 GB/mo (most customers won't come anywhere near 65 GB/mo so you have some extra headroom). But you can't do that with unlimited plans. So you can either let the service go to hell with transmission rates slowing to a crawl due to everyone torrenting and P2Ping 24/7. Or you can selectively slow down services which most people don't care about in order to maintain speed in the services most people do care about (web browsing). If you're going to say they're not allowed to do that because of net neutrality, then that is equivalent to choosing the "go to hell" option.
There's no free lunch here. You can pay for a dedicated line and have no usage restrictions, or you can pay the shared rate and accept some usage restrictions and bandwidth limitations. The idea that you can pay the shared rate but use it as if were a dedicated line is a fantasy sold to you by unscrupulous marketers.
Tethering and unlimited data are an either/or. Either you can have unlimited data but no tethering, or you can have tethering but with data caps.
Frankly, I think the latter makes a lot more sense. Tethering is a very useful tool built into every wifi-capable Android phone by default (the carriers disable it). If you have it, it eliminates the need to get a separate cellular data plan for your laptop, tablet, etc, and you're no longer limited to using those devices only within earshot of a wifi hotspot. I show people how to tether with their phones, and they're flabbergasted when they realize the possibilities it opens up. e.g. Kids can watch a streamed movie on their tablet during a long road trip. You can navigate using a bigger tablet as your map, instead of the tiny screen on your phone).
Logically, it makes no sense to discriminate based on where the data will end up - your phone or your tablet/computer. That's like a restaurant saying you aren't allowed to share the food you buy with someone else - only you are allowed to eat it. You've paid for the food/data, why should they have any say over what you do with it? On unlimited plans, disallowing tethering is really just a roundabout way to limit bandwidth (like buffet restaurants don't allow you to share food with someone not buying the buffet). Why do that and suffer the collateral damage it causes, when you can just limit bandwidth directly with a cap?
Given that CPU and memory get less expensive over time, it is no surprise that algorithms work practically today that would not have when various standards groups started meeting.
I remember when the preliminary JPEG standard first showed up in the early 1990s, a 640x480 8-bit GIF would decode and display in about a second on my PC. A 640x480 24-bit JPEG took about 30 seconds. JPEG's strength back then was its much smaller file size. Aforementioned GIF was about 200 kB, while the JPEG was about 35 kB with better colors (if your video card could do 24-bit color). That was a huge deal when most of us were still using 14.4 kbps modems and hard drives were around 500MB - 2GB.
unless of course you're terrified of computers and networks, view them as tantamount to witchcraft, don't understand them, and hate and fear anyone who does.
This is the way the world works. The 50+ generation grew up in a world without computers. The 30+ generation grew up during the transition to widespread computer use. And anyone younger grew up when computers were ubiquitous.
As long as those (currently) 50+ people are alive, these laws will probably stay in the books for the reasons you cite. As they grow old and die, people will start talking about getting rid of the "silly" distinction of crimes using a computer. And when only those currently under 30 are alive, they'll see no point to these computer-specific laws and will repeal all of them.
In other words, people's opinions don't really change. They just grow old and die, causing a shift in the prevalent opinion of the electorate.
Part of the problem is one of incentives: the incentives to do a study which simply replicates a pre-existing study is low, and many journals won't even publish them.
Yeah that's what I noticed too (my minor was in cognitive psychology - like trying to figure out AI from the opposite direction). When Fleischmann and Pons posted their cold fusion paper, every physics lab in every school grabbed it and tried to replicate it, just because of how cool it would be if it actually worked. I never saw the same zeal to replicate interesting results in psychology. In fact you are banned from trying to replicate some of the most notable experiments because of ethical issues. It always felt to me like "this other guy tried it and this is what happened, so it must be true."
Chrome plating is only about 70% reflective. A bathroom-variety mirror is only about 75% reflective. The remaining 25%-30% of energy from the laser would be absorbed by the drone as heat. Aluminum coatings used on telescope mirrors can get to about 90% reflectivity, about 98% with good coatings. But that's at a specific wavelength (visual spectrum), and they're very delicate (only about 100 nm thick) and degrade as cruft settles on them. That's why electroplated chrome is more popular for decorative reflectivity - it's much more durable. (Silver actually has better reflectivty, but it quickly tarnishes upon contact with the air. Aluminum does too, but the resulting aluminum oxide is transparent in the visible spectrum and forms an airtight barrier protecting the remaining aluminum.)
So all a mirrored drone would do is increase the amount of time it takes for a laser to shoot it down. If drones did start to go that route, the obvious countermeasure would be to make the laser more powerful. It's a lot easier to make the laser bigger than it is to keep the mirrored surface of a drone pristine.
Unrelated trivia: The best reflective surface is actually a prism, which relies on a phenomenon called total internal reflection - the same property which makes optical fibers work. Their biggest losses are actually at the air-prism interface where the light enters and exits the prism - typically 99.7%-99.8% transmission. They're highly directional though, so (unless someone can come up with an extremely clever design) wouldn't work omnidirectionally.
Solyndra was a scam. Their "technology" involved using half-cylinder solar panels (hence the name) laid out on a plane to get around the problem of lower solar production when sunlight hits at oblique angles. Anyone who's reasonably competent at geometry can tell you the problem right there. The effective collecting area is the projection of the surface of your collectors at a right angle to the direction of the incoming sunlight. That is, the planar area the sunlight sees - the cosine of the angle between the incoming sunlight and a normal from the plane of your collecting area. Doesn't matter whether your panels are flat, a cylinder, pyramids, or whatever - only the projection matters.
And since the largest planar area you can cover given a square meter of PV cells is flat, a cylindrical collector is actually less efficient than a flat panel. In fact it's efficiency is a factor of 2/pi (0.6366), since it's just the ratio of semi-circumference (half cylinder) to the diameter (flat). When some of the Solyndra generation data leaked out, they were indeed about 40% less effective at generating power than a flat panel.
Could they have arranged their half-cylinders in something other than a plane? Yes, but non-planar arrangements run into the problem of shadows from one collector covering up another collector at certain times of the day. The net result is worse than a plane. So flat panels are always best. If you want to capture oblique sunlight more effectively, the mathematically best solution is to tilt the panels to follow the sun (shadows from panel to panel will still interfere at extremely oblique angles). Or to raise reflectors at certain times of the day to reflect the sunlight into your static collectors.
How many GOP Texans were screaming about how solar, wind and other renewables were nothing but communist liberal bullshit and yet.. here we are.
This is classic misunderstanding of Republican ideals. They're not against renewables per se. They're against subsidizing the sale of technologies which can't self-support themselves. If/when the technology is able to compete economically on its own with existing technologies, they are more than happy to use it.
The error is actually in the environmentalists' thinking. They support wind and solar unconditionally regardless of cost. They then assume everyone else thinks like they do. Since the GOP opposed wind and solar in the past, they erroneously assume the GOP must oppose wind and solar unconditionally. (I narrow it down to environmentalists because most of the people on the left are aware of cost constraints.)
In fairness, there is a non-monetary cost associated with pollution which many GOPers leave out. But if you factor that in, then nuclear ends up being the best choice of power source at present. And most environmentalists oppose nuclear so I can't give them credit for correctly factoring in pollution costs.
The viability of solar and wind are highly dependent on geography. Just like you wouldn't build a hydroelectric dam in the desert, there are specific areas which are prime for solar and wind. Building solar or wind outside of those locations represents lower energy production for the same cost, so it's preferable to use that money to build elsewhere. The wind farms tend to get built where there's the most wind. The solar farms tend to get built where there's the most sunshine. It's pretty much only the southwestern U.S. where these two overlap (actually, wind is viable in lots of places, solar is pretty much only viable in the desert southwest + Hawaii).
Once their energy production costs drop to where you can plop a wind turbine or a solar panel pretty much anywhere and it'll cost less than buying power from the grid, then you'll see more overlap. Wind is almost there - its cost per kWh is about the same to 50% more than coal in the prime locations. Solar still has a ways to go, costing 2-4x more.
No, no keyboard please. I've been waiting for a reasonable 13+ inch tablet to replace my 3 foot stack of music books for my piano. I scanned my most-used music scores long ago (or downloaded from imslp.org), and used to use a 12.1" PC tablet a decade ago for this purpose (it had a 1440x1050 screen, vs the 1024x768 or 1366x768 which was common at the time). I'd consider that size the absolute minimum size and resolution - the notes are (barely) large enough to easily recognize at typical reading distance when placed on a piano, and the resolution is high enough to easily distinguish different types of notes from each other. 18" would be just awesome.
I realize this isn't exactly a prevalent use case. But those of you looking for a large laptop already have a lot of choices, and those of you looking for a small tablet already have a lot of choices. Don't ruin this for those of us who want a larger tablet just because you personally don't have a use for it.
It's actually far, far more instructive to read and think about and critique less good books. By seeing the mistakes those authors make, and how they abuse rules of composition in ways that don't work is far, far more instructive.
Exactly. For a visual analogy, if you see a movie with good visual effects, you come out thinking that looked really good, without really understanding why it looked good. If you see a movie with bad visual effects, you come out and talk with all your friends about how this effect looked so fake because of A, and that effect was bad because of B. Once you understand a bunch of stuff which doesn't work, what's left over is mostly stuff which does work.
One of the greatest benefits of digital photography has been the instantaneous feedback. You see something interesting and take a picture. The picture doesn't look like you imagined it would, so you tweak some settings on your camera and take another picture. You repeat this process noting which changes seemed to improve the picture the most. And eventually (hopefully) you arrive at the picture as you imagined it would look. You have to crawl through all that stuff which doesn't work in order to learn what does work. Being presented only with the final successful picture does very little to teach you how the photographer arrived at that picture.
The poor kid was awfully, terribly confused. Because nothing made any sense. It was all presented as a collection of "facts" and "rules" that you then have to "apply" to problem after problem.
The whole concept of thinking or reasoning or working out is utterly absent (first principles? what's that?). The idea seemed to be to identify the fact to apply (by magic? guessing?) then apply it to reach the answer.
Yeah, that's the big difference I'm noticing from when I went to school and when I'm tutoring my nephews and nieces. When I was in K-12, they taught basic concepts and how you could build and apply them to solve problems and develop more complex concepts.
The kids I'm tutoring now are taught methods. If you have this type of problem, the method you use to solve it is to plug in this number here, that number there, and out pops the answer. No attempt is made to explain why the method works, or why this number has to go here, or why that number has to go there. Our educational system is putting a generation of kids on a career path where they'll only be qualified to push buttons in a specific pattern to solve problems, without understanding what the buttons do nor why that particular pattern of pushing buttons solves the problem. Never mind how to design such a machine with buttons.
From what I gather, the teachers don't have much choice in it too. It's the teaching method sanctioned by the school district, so they're required to teach it that way. It makes me think the people coming up with these teaching methods don't really understand the topic in the first place, and are imposing their naive approach to tackling something they don't understand onto all the kids. It seriously makes me consider home-schooling my kids or finding a decent private school.
Jobs didn't want Flash on iOS because it tore down the wall of their garden. In the iOS ecosystem, the only way to install an app is via the App Store, where Apple gets a 30% cut. If they had allowed flash, anyone could write a flash app, put it on any web site, and you could browse to that site and run that flash app on your iDevice without paying Apple their 30%. Apple also disallows compilers and tightly controls emulators for the same reason.
All that talk about flash draining battery life was just spin to put lipstick on this pig-headed decision. Flash on Android didn't run by default - any flash scripts on a web page were replaced by a stylized F. If you tapped on the F, only then would that flash script run. If you've used Flashblock on Firefox, exact same thing. So no excess battery drain from ads or whatnot unless you specifically allowed the flash app to run.
Flash was originally created as an artist's animation tool. It was never intended to be the web's de facto executable scripting language. That's why it has so many security holes - because it was being used in ways it was never originally intended. Now that HTML5 adds many features which previously could only be accomplished via flash, and more importantly are designed from the get-go for web use, it is natural that flash is being phased out. Jobs had nothing to do with it, and certainly his decision a decade ago when HTML5 wasn't around still makes no sense (until you recognize the financial reason).
Flash originally was an artist's tool for creating animations with a minimum of fuss, and more importantly for the web a minimum of bandwidth. It was born when someone asked, if I'm making an animation of a character walking in front of a static background, why does it need to be encoded as a single video? Why can't I just code (transmit) the background once, then overlay the moving character on top of it?
Its flexible nature allowed it to be hijacked by sites wishing to display video, because the folks in charge of the HTML sat on their collective asses when there was clearly a demand for more flexible scripting features to be added to the HTML standard. Once a critical mass of people had installed it to view movies, advertisers began to use it to create those annoying animated ads.
Flash never asked to be the de facto executable scripting language for the web (though I'm sure Macromedia/Adobe weren't displeased with that development). That's why it has so many security holes. For its original intended purpose as an artist's tool, it is not rubbish, and is arguably the best tool out there. And even if it's excised from web browsers it will continue to be used to create movies and TV shows.
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Because cable companies (which became cable ISPs) weren't originally something you could call a public utility. When they started, nobody knew what was the best way to rig up houses, or allocate bandwidth. When they started offering Internet service, that increased the complexity because now each home needed to be able to transmit data back to the cable company. These were all complex problems with a plethora of possible solutions. The "myth of capitalist efficiency" is precisely what filtered out the bad solutions over three decades, leaving only the efficient ones.
If cable had been made a public utility from the onset, we'd probably still be stuck with analog broadcasts and a few dozen channels. Just like government-imposed GSM would've been stuck with approx 50 kbps data speeds if the U.S. hadn't allowed CDMA to compete against it. (Orthogonal multiplexing like CDMA and OFDMA are what allows the high speed data rates. With the original GSM TDMA spec, each phone would take up part of the data bandwidth even if it didn't use it. On the other hand, CDMA distributed bandwidth according to how much each phone was using. Eventually, nearly every GSM phone ended up using wideband CDMA for data. That's why they can talk and use data at the same time - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones only had one radio for both. That's right, CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war.)
Once you've arrived at what seems to be the optimal solution, then you can think about turning it into a public utility. That's what happened with electricity - AC and DC networks were allowed to compete, until it became economically obvious that long distance AC transmission was better. Then it got turned into a public utility. But it'd be remiss to think you could get to where we are today without the private capitalism stage - it's what allowed us to find the optimal solution in the first place. (And in fact the current state of electricity as a public utility is impeding efforts to explore if long-distance DC transmission might in fact be better with the modern high-efficiency DC converters that weren't available during the original AC vs DC war.)
There was an insightful /. post years ago which pointed out that recycling paper may actually be bad. When you throw away paper in a landfill, you are sequestering carbon. The tree pulled CO2 out of the atmosphere, we turned it into paper, and threw it away in a landfill. Core samples into old landfills have turned up newspaper fragments a century old in still-readable condition. So that CO2 is being sequestered underground in a landfill. Exactly the opposite of what we're doing with oil (taking it out from the ground, burning it, and releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. So throwing away paper and not recycling it may actually be the best thing for the environment (and by extension, chopping down trees to turn them into paper, as long as you plant new trees to replace the ones you chopped down).
That would depend on the biomass of vegetation (not just trees). I haven't read TFA but it appears to only be counting trees. Have they revised their estimates about the amount of plant biomass? (To be precise, only the living plant biomass matters. The wood in the core of a tree is dead, and does not contribute to converting CO2 into cellulose.)
It's not that it's "OK", it's just the norm for the industry. Even in the days when gaming reviews were printed on dead trees, it was a poorly-guarded secret that they were being paid by the game publishers to hype the big releases. There is no equivalent to the Hippocratic oath in the journalism industry, or Bar Association which will prohibit you from ever working in the field again if you do something egregiously wrong. And prohibiting payola doesn't eliminate the problem. Personal bias plays a huge role in story selection. Back in the early 2000s the national news was alight for weeks with a story about two WASPs who deliberately picked out a gay guy, tied him up, and dragged him behind a car until he was dead. At the same time, there was also an incident where two gay guys deliberately picked out a guy who was Christian, tied him to a fence, and beat him til he was dead, but that story got almost no coverage. They claim to be objective, and I sincerely believe most of them want to be objective. But really how objective can you be with a story you have strong personal feelings about?
You simply have to understand that this sort of stuff always goes on in journalism and probably always will. The need for journalistic freedom makes it a difficult industry to police. Take everything you read or hear from a publication with a grain of salt - like you do with the stories you see in the National Enquirer at the supermarket checkout line but not to that extent. It's why publications like Consumer Reports which follow self-imposed guidelines to improve objectivity (they accept no ads, and buy the products they test off the store shelves instead of using manufacturer-supplied samples) have a strong following.
Most people probably haven't experienced total darkness. I experienced it while working late at a campsite (astronomy camp). I had to walk from the lab to my cabin on a moonless night with thick fog, no lights. You literally cannot see your hand in front of your face. You can't even tell if your eyes are open or closed. It was one of those epiphany moments where you're experiencing something completely new for the first time in your life. I remember thinking, wow, so this is what it's like to be blind. I had to find my way back to the cabin entirely by feel and my memory of the path.
Anyway, a mask or bag over your head isn't going to cut it. Even the photographic dark rooms I've been in always had a faint glimmer of light leaking in somewhere - a point of reference that told me which way I was facing. Fortunately the walk back to my cabin was downhill with grass on the edges of the path so I could tell I was sort of going in the right way. I don't think I would've made it if it had been completely flat and all grass.
Why not? The bank has lots of money to invest. It wants to know where the smartest place to invest it is. So it commissions a study to figure that out. Assuming they follow through with their investment, they're putting their money where their mouth is. Which is more than I can say for both sides of the climate debate (one side wants to control how other people's money is spent, the other side doesn't want to pay for damage caused by their own choices).
It's worth noting that current trends in wifi technology are moving in a direction which overcomes Shannon's law. The theorem assumes a shared communications channel. That is, if you transmit your signal at -45 dB, then everyone else using that same channel sees -45 dB of noise (your signal is noise to them).
Beam-forming and MIMO (multipath) techniques subvert this assumption. For a visual analogy, it's why you can see your smartphone display in the sunlight, even though the sun is much, much brighter (its signal strength at optical wavelengths far exceeds your phone display's signal strength). Although the sun is very bright, the light it gives off is highly directional. By using sensors (the lens structure of your eyes) which can "tune in" to light coming from a narrow angle, you can basically filter out all that sunlight noise and pull out a clear signal from the smartphone display.
We're still a long way from this being able to beat out a direct fiber connection. But with phased array antennas (basically what MIMO does except using a lot more transceivers for much finer angular resolution) acting like a "lens" to "focus" radio waves, it's not outlandish to think that in the future all wireless communications could effectively be point-to-point with little to no interference from other wireless sources. Even though everyone is transmitting at the same frequencies, the highly directional nature of the transmissions would mean Shannon's law almost never comes into play, and you get to use all that bandwidth as if you were the only one transmitting on it.
Lenovo bought Motorola. That coupled with their China-only smartphones made them the #4 phone manufacturer in 2014.
This is a really important point. The reason the web was so successful was because once you made a website, anyone with a computer could access it and anyone else's website using a single program. A common, unified method of interacting with multiple persons or organizations with minimum hassle. Prior to that was the telephone, which allowed you to call anyone using a single device. And prior to that was the invention of postal mail, which allowed you to write to anyone by dropping off your letters at a single location.
What's happening with every site out there trying to foist their own app onto your phone is a huge step backwards. It takes us back to the day when the only way for you to interact with a person or a organization was to physically travel to their unique location. We've spent centuries arriving at the optimal solution to the problem of contacting others to exchange information with a minimum of hassle. Now marketers want to undo several centuries of progress in the name of advertising and data collection. What's happening with apps right now is equivalent to each person in your contact list insisting that you keep a separate telephone just for calling them, and which can only call them, and oh by the way that phone will listen in on what you're doing and report it back to its master..
Don't fall for it. Unless the app includes some functionality which requires it to be an app (e.g. my banking app lets me deposit checks by securely taking a picture), insist on using the website. If the experience on your phone's browser sucks, that just means the website needs a better mobile site, or HTML needs to be extended to allow for a better mobile experience (theoretically the browser could be allowed access to your camera to let my bank's website take a picture allowing me to deposit checks). And if a site is so obnoxious as to block mobile browsers and insist you download their app, stop giving them your business and find an alternate.
The going rate for residential electricity in the U.S. is about $0.11/kWh. So basically if these batteries charge/discharge once per day (as the case would be for solar), and you want the batteries to only add (say) 20% to the price of the generated electricity in order for it to remain cost-competitive (note: wind is nearly cost-competitive, solar is still about 2x-3x more expensive), then it currently takes $550 per kWh / ($0.11 per kWh * 20% * 365 cycles/yr) = 68.5 years for these batteries to pay for themselves, but by 2020 it will take 27.4 years. Yay progress?
Unless the levelized price for renewable generation drops substantially below that of coal, I don't see how this will "spur renewable energy adoption" except for regions where electricity prices are substantially higher (e.g. Hawaii, $0.30/kWh)
I dunno. I could get behind naming newly discovered species of weasels, nuts, and parasites after politicians.
Dude, seek some professional help before you blow your stack.
I think most (all?) carriers have dropped unlimited data plans. Sprint is the only one I'm not sure about.
The remaining people with unlimited plans are grandfathered in (I'm one). Legally, the carrier is not required to continue to keep these people on those grandfathered unlimited plans. Once your multi-year contract is up, your service is month to month. You are free to cancel it at any time, but the carrier is also free to cancel it at any time. The carriers have, as a courtesy, just been allowing customers on the old plans to continue month-to-month under the terms of the old plan. There is no legal requirement for them to do so, and they could in theory just force you into a current data capped plan if they wanted.
I agree marketing data plans as "unlimited" in the first place was stupid. But it happened, and it's in the past. Carriers are now doing the right thing by specifying what your bandwidth limit is. The "my contract says unlimited" argument really carries little legal weight (unless a carrier still offers an unlimited data plan).
Understand that the typical Internet service you pay $50/mo for is actually a shared service. If you to try to buy (say) 20 Mbps for your sole, exclusive use, it would cost you around $2000-$5000/mo. The only way the ISP can offer it to you for $50/mo is by having you share it with about 100 other people. And the only way sharing it with about 100 other people works is if on average each of them uses about 65 GB/month.
The easy way is to set a bandwidth limit of about 100 GB/mo (most customers won't come anywhere near 65 GB/mo so you have some extra headroom). But you can't do that with unlimited plans. So you can either let the service go to hell with transmission rates slowing to a crawl due to everyone torrenting and P2Ping 24/7. Or you can selectively slow down services which most people don't care about in order to maintain speed in the services most people do care about (web browsing). If you're going to say they're not allowed to do that because of net neutrality, then that is equivalent to choosing the "go to hell" option.
There's no free lunch here. You can pay for a dedicated line and have no usage restrictions, or you can pay the shared rate and accept some usage restrictions and bandwidth limitations. The idea that you can pay the shared rate but use it as if were a dedicated line is a fantasy sold to you by unscrupulous marketers.
Tethering and unlimited data are an either/or. Either you can have unlimited data but no tethering, or you can have tethering but with data caps.
Frankly, I think the latter makes a lot more sense. Tethering is a very useful tool built into every wifi-capable Android phone by default (the carriers disable it). If you have it, it eliminates the need to get a separate cellular data plan for your laptop, tablet, etc, and you're no longer limited to using those devices only within earshot of a wifi hotspot. I show people how to tether with their phones, and they're flabbergasted when they realize the possibilities it opens up. e.g. Kids can watch a streamed movie on their tablet during a long road trip. You can navigate using a bigger tablet as your map, instead of the tiny screen on your phone).
Logically, it makes no sense to discriminate based on where the data will end up - your phone or your tablet/computer. That's like a restaurant saying you aren't allowed to share the food you buy with someone else - only you are allowed to eat it. You've paid for the food/data, why should they have any say over what you do with it? On unlimited plans, disallowing tethering is really just a roundabout way to limit bandwidth (like buffet restaurants don't allow you to share food with someone not buying the buffet). Why do that and suffer the collateral damage it causes, when you can just limit bandwidth directly with a cap?
I remember when the preliminary JPEG standard first showed up in the early 1990s, a 640x480 8-bit GIF would decode and display in about a second on my PC. A 640x480 24-bit JPEG took about 30 seconds. JPEG's strength back then was its much smaller file size. Aforementioned GIF was about 200 kB, while the JPEG was about 35 kB with better colors (if your video card could do 24-bit color). That was a huge deal when most of us were still using 14.4 kbps modems and hard drives were around 500MB - 2GB.
This is the way the world works. The 50+ generation grew up in a world without computers. The 30+ generation grew up during the transition to widespread computer use. And anyone younger grew up when computers were ubiquitous.
As long as those (currently) 50+ people are alive, these laws will probably stay in the books for the reasons you cite. As they grow old and die, people will start talking about getting rid of the "silly" distinction of crimes using a computer. And when only those currently under 30 are alive, they'll see no point to these computer-specific laws and will repeal all of them.
In other words, people's opinions don't really change. They just grow old and die, causing a shift in the prevalent opinion of the electorate.
Yeah that's what I noticed too (my minor was in cognitive psychology - like trying to figure out AI from the opposite direction). When Fleischmann and Pons posted their cold fusion paper, every physics lab in every school grabbed it and tried to replicate it, just because of how cool it would be if it actually worked. I never saw the same zeal to replicate interesting results in psychology. In fact you are banned from trying to replicate some of the most notable experiments because of ethical issues. It always felt to me like "this other guy tried it and this is what happened, so it must be true."
Chrome plating is only about 70% reflective. A bathroom-variety mirror is only about 75% reflective. The remaining 25%-30% of energy from the laser would be absorbed by the drone as heat. Aluminum coatings used on telescope mirrors can get to about 90% reflectivity, about 98% with good coatings. But that's at a specific wavelength (visual spectrum), and they're very delicate (only about 100 nm thick) and degrade as cruft settles on them. That's why electroplated chrome is more popular for decorative reflectivity - it's much more durable. (Silver actually has better reflectivty, but it quickly tarnishes upon contact with the air. Aluminum does too, but the resulting aluminum oxide is transparent in the visible spectrum and forms an airtight barrier protecting the remaining aluminum.)
So all a mirrored drone would do is increase the amount of time it takes for a laser to shoot it down. If drones did start to go that route, the obvious countermeasure would be to make the laser more powerful. It's a lot easier to make the laser bigger than it is to keep the mirrored surface of a drone pristine.
Unrelated trivia: The best reflective surface is actually a prism, which relies on a phenomenon called total internal reflection - the same property which makes optical fibers work. Their biggest losses are actually at the air-prism interface where the light enters and exits the prism - typically 99.7%-99.8% transmission. They're highly directional though, so (unless someone can come up with an extremely clever design) wouldn't work omnidirectionally.
Solyndra was a scam. Their "technology" involved using half-cylinder solar panels (hence the name) laid out on a plane to get around the problem of lower solar production when sunlight hits at oblique angles. Anyone who's reasonably competent at geometry can tell you the problem right there. The effective collecting area is the projection of the surface of your collectors at a right angle to the direction of the incoming sunlight. That is, the planar area the sunlight sees - the cosine of the angle between the incoming sunlight and a normal from the plane of your collecting area. Doesn't matter whether your panels are flat, a cylinder, pyramids, or whatever - only the projection matters.
And since the largest planar area you can cover given a square meter of PV cells is flat, a cylindrical collector is actually less efficient than a flat panel. In fact it's efficiency is a factor of 2/pi (0.6366), since it's just the ratio of semi-circumference (half cylinder) to the diameter (flat). When some of the Solyndra generation data leaked out, they were indeed about 40% less effective at generating power than a flat panel.
Could they have arranged their half-cylinders in something other than a plane? Yes, but non-planar arrangements run into the problem of shadows from one collector covering up another collector at certain times of the day. The net result is worse than a plane. So flat panels are always best. If you want to capture oblique sunlight more effectively, the mathematically best solution is to tilt the panels to follow the sun (shadows from panel to panel will still interfere at extremely oblique angles). Or to raise reflectors at certain times of the day to reflect the sunlight into your static collectors.
This is classic misunderstanding of Republican ideals. They're not against renewables per se. They're against subsidizing the sale of technologies which can't self-support themselves. If/when the technology is able to compete economically on its own with existing technologies, they are more than happy to use it.
The error is actually in the environmentalists' thinking. They support wind and solar unconditionally regardless of cost. They then assume everyone else thinks like they do. Since the GOP opposed wind and solar in the past, they erroneously assume the GOP must oppose wind and solar unconditionally. (I narrow it down to environmentalists because most of the people on the left are aware of cost constraints.)
In fairness, there is a non-monetary cost associated with pollution which many GOPers leave out. But if you factor that in, then nuclear ends up being the best choice of power source at present. And most environmentalists oppose nuclear so I can't give them credit for correctly factoring in pollution costs.
The viability of solar and wind are highly dependent on geography. Just like you wouldn't build a hydroelectric dam in the desert, there are specific areas which are prime for solar and wind. Building solar or wind outside of those locations represents lower energy production for the same cost, so it's preferable to use that money to build elsewhere. The wind farms tend to get built where there's the most wind. The solar farms tend to get built where there's the most sunshine. It's pretty much only the southwestern U.S. where these two overlap (actually, wind is viable in lots of places, solar is pretty much only viable in the desert southwest + Hawaii).
Once their energy production costs drop to where you can plop a wind turbine or a solar panel pretty much anywhere and it'll cost less than buying power from the grid, then you'll see more overlap. Wind is almost there - its cost per kWh is about the same to 50% more than coal in the prime locations. Solar still has a ways to go, costing 2-4x more.
No, no keyboard please. I've been waiting for a reasonable 13+ inch tablet to replace my 3 foot stack of music books for my piano. I scanned my most-used music scores long ago (or downloaded from imslp.org), and used to use a 12.1" PC tablet a decade ago for this purpose (it had a 1440x1050 screen, vs the 1024x768 or 1366x768 which was common at the time). I'd consider that size the absolute minimum size and resolution - the notes are (barely) large enough to easily recognize at typical reading distance when placed on a piano, and the resolution is high enough to easily distinguish different types of notes from each other. 18" would be just awesome.
I realize this isn't exactly a prevalent use case. But those of you looking for a large laptop already have a lot of choices, and those of you looking for a small tablet already have a lot of choices. Don't ruin this for those of us who want a larger tablet just because you personally don't have a use for it.
Exactly. For a visual analogy, if you see a movie with good visual effects, you come out thinking that looked really good, without really understanding why it looked good. If you see a movie with bad visual effects, you come out and talk with all your friends about how this effect looked so fake because of A, and that effect was bad because of B. Once you understand a bunch of stuff which doesn't work, what's left over is mostly stuff which does work.
One of the greatest benefits of digital photography has been the instantaneous feedback. You see something interesting and take a picture. The picture doesn't look like you imagined it would, so you tweak some settings on your camera and take another picture. You repeat this process noting which changes seemed to improve the picture the most. And eventually (hopefully) you arrive at the picture as you imagined it would look. You have to crawl through all that stuff which doesn't work in order to learn what does work. Being presented only with the final successful picture does very little to teach you how the photographer arrived at that picture.
Yeah, that's the big difference I'm noticing from when I went to school and when I'm tutoring my nephews and nieces. When I was in K-12, they taught basic concepts and how you could build and apply them to solve problems and develop more complex concepts.
The kids I'm tutoring now are taught methods. If you have this type of problem, the method you use to solve it is to plug in this number here, that number there, and out pops the answer. No attempt is made to explain why the method works, or why this number has to go here, or why that number has to go there. Our educational system is putting a generation of kids on a career path where they'll only be qualified to push buttons in a specific pattern to solve problems, without understanding what the buttons do nor why that particular pattern of pushing buttons solves the problem. Never mind how to design such a machine with buttons.
From what I gather, the teachers don't have much choice in it too. It's the teaching method sanctioned by the school district, so they're required to teach it that way. It makes me think the people coming up with these teaching methods don't really understand the topic in the first place, and are imposing their naive approach to tackling something they don't understand onto all the kids. It seriously makes me consider home-schooling my kids or finding a decent private school.
Jobs didn't want Flash on iOS because it tore down the wall of their garden. In the iOS ecosystem, the only way to install an app is via the App Store, where Apple gets a 30% cut. If they had allowed flash, anyone could write a flash app, put it on any web site, and you could browse to that site and run that flash app on your iDevice without paying Apple their 30%. Apple also disallows compilers and tightly controls emulators for the same reason.
All that talk about flash draining battery life was just spin to put lipstick on this pig-headed decision. Flash on Android didn't run by default - any flash scripts on a web page were replaced by a stylized F. If you tapped on the F, only then would that flash script run. If you've used Flashblock on Firefox, exact same thing. So no excess battery drain from ads or whatnot unless you specifically allowed the flash app to run.
Flash was originally created as an artist's animation tool. It was never intended to be the web's de facto executable scripting language. That's why it has so many security holes - because it was being used in ways it was never originally intended. Now that HTML5 adds many features which previously could only be accomplished via flash, and more importantly are designed from the get-go for web use, it is natural that flash is being phased out. Jobs had nothing to do with it, and certainly his decision a decade ago when HTML5 wasn't around still makes no sense (until you recognize the financial reason).
Flash originally was an artist's tool for creating animations with a minimum of fuss, and more importantly for the web a minimum of bandwidth. It was born when someone asked, if I'm making an animation of a character walking in front of a static background, why does it need to be encoded as a single video? Why can't I just code (transmit) the background once, then overlay the moving character on top of it?
Its flexible nature allowed it to be hijacked by sites wishing to display video, because the folks in charge of the HTML sat on their collective asses when there was clearly a demand for more flexible scripting features to be added to the HTML standard. Once a critical mass of people had installed it to view movies, advertisers began to use it to create those annoying animated ads.
Flash never asked to be the de facto executable scripting language for the web (though I'm sure Macromedia/Adobe weren't displeased with that development). That's why it has so many security holes. For its original intended purpose as an artist's tool, it is not rubbish, and is arguably the best tool out there. And even if it's excised from web browsers it will continue to be used to create movies and TV shows.