The range of the fast key for the trunk sensor is very short, not more than 2 or 3 feet centered in the back of the trunk.
The MO of the thieves unlocking the cars with keyless entry FOBs is that they're using some kind of transmitter/amplifier. It basically acts like a man in the middle, rebroadcasting signals from the car and FOB at higher power to greatly increase the range.
It all boils down to a foolish decision by automakers that there was always a 100% correlation between signal strength and distance. If the thief watches you walking away from your car and they've got a directional antenna mounted to this thing (and your car is parked in a location where the antenna wouldn't attract attention), then you could be hundreds of meters away and they can still get into your car.
The problem is, something like 90% of people think they're above average. So you'd end up with 90% of the employees demanding that they be paid more than the average for their position.* Which would raise the average, which would lead a bunch of people who used to get paid more than average now getting paid less, which would lead to them demanding more pay, which would raise the average, etc. At some point the company would draw the line, leaving ~40% of their employees dissatisfied and convinced that they're being underpaid even if they are in fact being paid the correct amount for their abilities.
The market can't solve something like this because it relies on people making rational decisions. 90% of people believing they're above average is irrational. Rather than try to confront that irrationality, employers choose to side-step it by keeping employees ignorant of where their pay stands.
* (I truly hope I am wrong about this, since the taboo against discussing your salary always seemed weird to me. But watching the risks people take while driving because they think they're a better than average driver, I'm not optimistic.)
because they haven't yet paid for the eventual disposal of the waste
France reprocesses spent nuclear fuel. So unlike countries where the anti-nuclear lobby has made sure that spent fuel gets classified as "waste" with huge disposal costs to try to make nuclear unattractive and uneconomical, France just turns it into more fuel for its nuclear plants. Only about 3% of what other countries call "nuclear waste" gets turned into actual waste. The rest is converted back into more fuel.
I know that XP -> Vista and XP->7 felt like backward steps at times in terms of performance, and were accompanied by a similar ramp-up in terms of realistic minimum specs. It just seems that in 8 (which is as fast as 7, if not faster, as far as I can tell) and 10 are actually coming back to what they should always have been?
Do note that XP only needed 64 MB of RAM (128 MB recommended). The last XP system I supported was a couple years back, but the requirement had bloated to about 128 MB (256 MB recommended) because anti-virus software had gotten so much bigger (usually takes 30-50 MB of RAM).
For decades, software companies hadn't controlled bloat. They counted on performance gains in hardware to compensate for how much slower their software was getting due to bloat. This began to change after Prescott (around 2004), when the clock speed wars came to a screeching halt due to heat generated by power leakage at those higher frequencies, and for a time Intel lost the fastest CPU title crown to AMD. Intel and AMD began placing a greater emphasis on power efficiency rather than pure performance, and as a result the bloat in software began to outstrip increase in hardware speeds.
That's a large part of the reason Vista (2007) was such a dog. It was coded assuming the performance level of generally available hardware would be higher than it actually turned out to be. Consequently it felt like it ran a lot slower than XP (compared to when XP was new), and most users opted to stick with XP. Around 2010 we hit the point where all but the discount CPUs were "fast enough" for most people's needs, and advancements in CPU design since then have been directed mostly at reducing power consumption (a Core 2 Duo system at idle burns about 75 Watts, a Broadwell system burns about 20-30 Watts idle).
Software companies have had to come to grips with this performance stagnation, and are finally beginning to get bloat under control. Since they can no longer count on their newer software "feeling" faster because of hardware upgrades, they're forced to go through and optimize their software to make it actually run faster. Which is resulting in this curious inversion, where newer software actually runs better old systems than the previous versions of that software.
The industry is in for a major shake-up because of this in the next decade (arguably it's already been experiencing it the past 5 years). As the need to upgrade your computer every 2-3 years decreases, computers will be used for longer times. That means on an annual basis, hardware companies will have reduced sales (if people go from replacing their computer every 3 years to every 6 years, that means half the annual sales even though the same number of people are still using computers). And software companies will be expected to support their products for longer.
Mobile (phones) is the one area this hasn't really taken hold because the sector has been developing so quickly you feel obligated to upgrade your smartphone every 1-2 years. But eventually it too will plateau. Long-term, we're probably looking at computers having to last 7-10 years before being replaced. Which interestingly enough is about the timescale for console systems (6-7 years between refreshes).
While you may disagree with the price exacted by advertisers, they are still providing you with something in exchange. They help pay for the website you are visiting. Without their ads, the site likely wouldn't exist, or would exist in a considerably less useful form.
Ad fraud steals money from advertisers, period. They are taking money from the advertisers without providing a good or service in exchange. This is theft.
When I managed a small business, I took the annual increase of the CPI for my area, and that would be the increase in payroll for the year (adjusted for growth in number of employees). Depending on if an employee was good or bad, they might get a bigger or smaller raise than the CPI. But the average per employee increase company-wide was always very close to CPI.
The reason is pretty simple. CPI actually tracks pretty closely with wages. If you really wanted, I suppose you could try to force your wages to the absolute minimum where you still get enough applicants to fill all your positions. But if your wages don't keep up with CPI, you're going to lose your good employees to better-paying companies, while a disproportionate share of your applicants will be bad employees who quit or were fired from their former job (because the better ones take one look at your wages and shop elsewhere). That management philosophy may work at low-end jobs where the quality of the employee doesn't really matter. But any employer whose company does anything more than menial labor knows that the employees are the company, and will try to get good employees.
You have a very distorted view of how to run a business if you think lowering costs (wages) is the only or even primary motivation of an employer. I suggest you try starting a company of your own, and learn from the school of hard knocks. You'll find out pretty quickly that low wages = low performing employees, and will leave you stuck with low-end clients and low-end jobs. The trick isn't just to flat-out minimize cost. It's to minimize costs in ways that have the least impact on productivity - i.e. make the company more efficient to operate, not just cheaper to operate.
The problem with the broken car window analogy is that it's pretty obvious when a car is parked illegally in front of a fire hydrant. It's not at all obvious when there's a tiny drone in the way of firefighting aircraft. So the analogy would be more like the fire truck driving up to park in front of a fire hydrant, and suddenly an unseen mine someone has planted blows up, engulfing the fire truck and killing everyone on board.
Telling the fire department that they have permission to destroy any mines (drones) they see doesn't really solve the problem. The problem is not just that these things are in the way, but that these things are in the way and you can't really see them. That's why all the ideas to shoot them down, as satisfying as that would be, won't work. If you could be assured you knew where each drone was, then it's not really a problem because you can just fly around them. It's the unseen drone which will make for a very bad day.
It's worth noting that Picasaweb pre-dates Google+. In fact when they made the photos section of G+, they just copied Picasaweb's front-end, and dumbed it down to a Facebook level. The back-end was still the same so you could post albums on Google+, and still edit/modify them on Picasaweb (with a lot more options than the G+ interface). So in that respect, absolutely nothing has changed.
Basically, Obama and the advisers he picked decided that the only way to pass a health care bill was to give the Republicans and the corporations everything they wanted.
Riiiight. Which is why every single Republican Senator and Congressman voted against it.
What really happened was the exact opposite of what you say. Obama and his advisors crafted a heath care bill which was so liberal, not only did it lose all the Republicans, it was in danger of losing a good chunk of the moderate-center Democrats as well. All the compromises you claim were made to appease Republicans, were in fact put in to appease moderate Democrats. Most of them didn't like it either, but were under enormous pressure by the far-left wing of the Democrat party to get this passed while they still had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (10 months from 2009-2010).
You can't blame this one on the Republicans. Its legacy will rest entirely upon the Democrats because it was 100% Democrat-drafted, passed, and signed.
Not sure why Linus and you are complaining. Gmail already has a tool for eliminating false positives. You set up a filter to automatically give any email from a particular mailing list a label for that list. It's actually a great tool for auto-organizing your email if you subscribe to multiple lists like he does.
When setting up the filter, you make sure to check the "Never send it to spam" option.
The average lifetime productivity of an American is about $2 million. Why should we spend 5000 lifetimes worth of productivity to go to the moon? A place we've already been to before, and which is close enough that we can just carry all needed supplies from Earth. There's practically nothing left to learn from such an endeavor which we cannot already learn from the ISS. The only proposed moon project I've heard of worth a damn is to put a radio telescope on the far side, shielded from all the EM noise from Earth.
Manned space exploration already has a terrible return on investment compared to unmanned. But if we're going to do it, focus on solving new problems - long term space travel for a mission to Mars. The R&D into constructing a self-contained ecosystem and recycling water and oxygen will actually have some practical applications here on Earth.
I'd hazard a guess that this is a disgruntled insider, based in part on the fact that they claimed knowledge of internal practices (charging for profile deletion, but then retaining the information anyway)
My wifi is near unusable at the extremes of my own house. When I go outside, I can't usefully hitch to it more than a few feet from the house. Any drone that wants to inject something would have fly really close.
The point of doing this from a drone is that it'll have unhindered line of sight to the target wifi network. Once you have line of sight, it's just a matter of cranking up the signal (both transmit and received) with a directional antenna until you can hear and be heard by the wifi router. With a good enough antenna, distance is irrelevant. You might have heard in the news that we're picking up signals from a robot spacecraft that's currently 3 billion miles away. It's done by using a really big directional antenna here on Earth. The transmitter on the spacecraft itself only uses about 20-30x more power than your home router.
Man, they've got you snookered real good. Advertising's entire purpose is to remove money from your wallet.
And if the thing you're buying with that money is worthwhile (increases your productivity - whether directly by helping you work or indirectly by helping you relax and recharge), then removing that money from your wallet is a good thing. Good economic transactions are ones where both the buyer and seller are better off after the sale. But without advertising, you cannot obtain the information you need to judge if something is a good purchase. Your old laptop breaks and you need to buy a new one. How do you pick the best laptop for your money if the manufacturers and stores don't advertise?.
OP is absolutely right. Fundamentally, advertising is dissemination of information. I didn't have a TV for 3 years. I didn't think I missed the ads, until I was hanging out with my friends and they decided we should watch a movie. I had absolutely no idea what movies were playing, and wasn't able to contribute at all to the discussion about what movie we should watch. Because I hadn't seen any ads for movies. In fact I wasted a lot of their time because they had to give me a brief plot synopsis of each movie they were discussing.
Where advertising crosses the line is when it becomes dishonest. Either disseminating false information, or trying to entice people to buy in ways which are completely orthogonal to the product being advertised (the brand of beer you drink will make sexy women hang out with you? Really?). But banning all advertising would break society as we know it. How are you going to find an apartment to rent if the landlord isn't allowed to advertise he has one available, and you're not allowed to advertise that you're looking for one?
Unlike email, which spammers send essentially for free, paper junk mail is paid for and in fact provides about 1/3rd of the funding for the US Postal Service.
Actually, when you put it like that, marketing (spam + selling marketing info) pays for 100% of most people's email. If you have a free email account with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc., it's not really free. It's being paid for by selling your info to marketers. Just like spam/junk mail.
That's the way electricity is sold in the U.S. The utility company maintains and charges for the wires. The electricity is sold by another company, and you get to pick which company you're buying it from. If you choose to get it from renewable sources, the cost is higher but the energy part of your bill gets sent to them. The individual electrons are not sorted, but the sum balance of them are.
That said, this is like diesel vs. gasoline, where the crude oil wants to break down into a certain fraction of diesel vs gasoline. As long as your demand for those two products equals the supplied amount, prices remain low. If demand gets skewed in one direction, then you end up having to do inefficient refining to convert diesel to gasoline (or vice versa), and the price goes up. Same thing here - as long as electrical demand for conventional vs. renewable sources remains about the same as the supply, the marginal price for renewables will remain rather low. But if you start pushing for 100% renewables, the price will skyrocket due to the inefficiency of matching renewable power generation profiles to power demand profiles.
Its a good thing my reason for wanting hybrid and electric vehicles is purely economical.
That's something I think a lot of people are missing about EVs, and which TFA touches upon. They look at the economic price per mile, and conclude that EVs must be vastly more efficient than ICE cars. In terms of energy consumed, they're actually almost the same.
ICE car gets 30 mpg. A gallon of gasoline has 120 MJ/gal. So (forgive the mixed units) you're consuming about 4 MJ/mile.
A Tesla S has a 85 kWh battery, and can go 253 miles. That's 1.2 MJ/mile. The EV is a lot more energy efficient!
But wait, what about energy production costs? Mining, refining, and transport adds about 15% to the energy consumption of gasoline. So the ICE vehicle is up around 4.6 MJ/mile.
The Tesla S has a charging efficiency of about 80%. It also has a discharge efficiency, but that is built into the EPA mileage figures which are calculated using battery capacity, not energy pulled out of the battery.
Electrical power lines have a transport efficiency of about 98%.
Coal power plants have an efficiency of about 40%
Coal mining and transport adds about 10% to the energy consumption cost.
The actual energy consumption of the Tesla then is 1.2 * 1.1 / (.8*.98*.4) = 4.2 MJ/mile (assuming 100% coal). Not much different from an ICE car. In fact if you converted these back to MPG, the ICE car actually gets 26 MPGe, the Tesla gets 28.6 MPGe (though obviously the latter would vary based on electricity generation source).
As it turns out, almost the entirety of the reason EVs are cheaper to operate than ICE cars is not because of energy efficiency - both use almost the same amount of energy per mile traveled. The EV is cheaper because coal is so much cheaper than gasoline. Coal costs about $55 per ton, and a ton of coal produces about 21 GJ of energy, for a final cost of 0.26 cents per MJ. Gasoline at $3/gal is about 2.5 cents per MJ. An order of magnitude more expensive than coal.
The only reason distilled petroleum is used as an energy source for transportation is that this huge cost disadvantage is more than offset by the high energy density - 42 MJ/kg for gasoline, 0.55 MJ/kg for the Tesla S battery (and 21 MJ/kg for coal if you're curious). You can carry more of it around (greater range), and you can load it up more quickly and easily (faster refueling). Those are the primary hurdles EVs have to jump to achieve widespread adoption, not economic. Gasoline was already a very poor economic choice in the first place, but that wasn't a big enough drawback to prevent it from being widely adopted in transportation.
Boats and especially planes are much more weight-sensitive than cars. Consequently, you will not see electric boat and plane motors becoming practical as primary propulsion until battery energy density increases substantially. Boats also suffer from much higher energy consumption per distance traveled, e.g. The battery that pushes a Tesla 300 miles would only push a boat for about 30 miles.
Where electric boat motors can make sense today is as a secondary motor. Unlike cars where the wheels have direct contact with solid ground, boat propellers have to gain traction from a yielding liquid. Consequently, the "gearing" of the propeller (pitch vs rpm) matters, and it's most efficient at one point. A propeller designed for full speed may be inefficient at trolling or maneuvering speed. Many boats use a second, smaller motor for this purpose. Depending on how much it weighs and how often it's used, this could potentially be replaced by an electric motor.
As for letting off the brakes when getting rear-ended, that may not be a good idea - the guy in front of you may not appreciate turning a 2 car wreck into a 3 car wreck. Especially if said impact pushed them into crossing traffic.
I've actually been in this exact scenario. I was on the freeway when traffic in front suddenly stopped due to an accident. I stopped, but noticed in my rearview mirror that the two teenage girls in the car behind me were busy yammering away with each other. They got closer and closer, before finally noticing that I was stopped and slamming on the brakes.
Here's the crucial part. Based on their distance, how fast they were going, and how quickly the brakes were slowing them down, I could estimate that they were going to stop about a meter past my rear bumper. As it turned out I had stopped with a good 3 meters between me and the car in front. So I just scooted forward a couple meters (this is the reason you're supposed to stop far enough back that you can see the rear tires of the car in front). The girls came to a screeching halt just behind me, heads flung forward against their seat belts, bounced up, and they started nervously laughing at each other. No collision, nobody got hurt, nothing got damaged.
A computer-controlled car which knows exactly the distance to the car in front, distance to the car in the rear is, how fast it's approaching, and how quickly it's decelerating. It can easily make this kind of calculation and decide if its better to let off the brakes and scoot forward, or press down hard on the brake to absorb the rear collision but avoid hitting the car in front. I lucked out because I happened to be watching the entire situation develop in the rearview mirror, and could accurately estimate their speed and rate of deceleration. But a computer could calculate this at any time. And if you watch the video, the Google car had enough situational awareness that it could've easily detected cross traffic - it wasn't just tracking the cars immediately next to it.
Chris Langdon has created a new strain of the weed which looks like a translucent red lettuce. An excellent source of minerals, vitamins and antioxidants, the "superfood" contains up to 16 per cent protein in dry weight.... It has twice the nutritional value of kale." Langdon says, "When you fry it, which I have done, it tastes like bacon, not seaweed. And it's a pretty strong bacon flavor."
It's people. Translucent Red is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. That's why it tastes like bacon - we taste like pork. Next thing, they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them! You tell everybody. Listen to me. Hatcher. You've gotta tell 'em! TRANSLUCENT RED IS PEOPLE! We gotta stop them! Somehow! Listen! Listen to me... PLEASE!!!
Yeah that statement left me scratching my head too. It was added by the editor, not the submitter, so it's probably not surprising that it was poorly phrased. If you follow the link, you find that it's about people not trusting banks, so they're using their mobile phone carrier to handle small monetary transactions.
Incidentally, 1/1063 the brightness would put the sun at about magnitude -19.2, or about 400x brighter than the full moon, 2.5 million times brighter than Venus at its brightest.
The main imager (LORRI) is a 208mm diameter telescope with a 2630mm focal length, or f/12.6. The spider and secondary obscure 11% of the area, so that's equivalent to f/13.4 in terms of light gathering for photographic purposes. Exposure times are 50-200 ms, or 1/20 to 1/5 sec.
On Earth, the sunny 16 rule says on a sunny day the proper exposure at f/16 is when your shutter speed is 1/ISO. So f/16, 100 ISO, 1/100 sec. The atmosphere absorbs roughly half the sunlight, so in earth orbit that would become f/16, 100 ISO, and 1/200 sec.
Pluto is about 32.6 AU from from the sun right now, so the sun's brightness there is 1/32.6^2 = 1/1063 what it is at Earth.
Going from f/16 to f/13.4 gets you about 1.43x more light.
Increasing exposure time from 1/200 sec to 1/10 sec gets you 20x more light.
That leaves a deficit of 37.2x, which you can get by increasing CCD sensitivity to ISO to 3,720.
ISO 3200 was easily attainable by high-end consumer digital camera sensors 10 years ago, much less a commercial one specially designed for scientific purposes.
You probably saw a lot of news coverage during the weekend of Independence Day - July 4th. The 4th is the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence when the U.S. colonies began their revolt against the British Empire, so is considered the nation's birthday. It's a great big party over here. Everyone gets the day off (got July 3rd off since the 4th was a Saturday), puts up flags and dresses up in red, white, and blue, fires up the barbecue grill for a big family picnic with hot dogs and hamburgers, and watches fireworks at night. I hear those fireworks companies do over half their annual business on that one day alone.
Same thing happened with Mars Pathfinder, which landed on 4 July 1997. The two really had little to do with each other, but with the news focused on both the nation's birthday and the pictures coming back from Mars' surface, it was inevitable that the connection between the two was oft mentioned, and most of NASA's staff were in national party mode when on camera.
Downlink speed is limited to 1 kbps (bits, not bytes). 2 kbps if they use a trick involving shutting down power to instruments to boost transmit power.
Reminds me of the early 1990s when JPEG images first started showing up. Full-color 640x480 GIF photo scans were a couple hundred kB and could take 10+ minutes to download over my 2400 baud modem. I was astounded that a 30-40 kB JPEG could look just as good to the eye. Course the JPEG took over half a minute to decode and display back then, but combined with download time it was still faster. (Yes computers and network speeds used to be that slow - it's why the early web made extensive use of thumbnail pics.)
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The MO of the thieves unlocking the cars with keyless entry FOBs is that they're using some kind of transmitter/amplifier. It basically acts like a man in the middle, rebroadcasting signals from the car and FOB at higher power to greatly increase the range.
It all boils down to a foolish decision by automakers that there was always a 100% correlation between signal strength and distance. If the thief watches you walking away from your car and they've got a directional antenna mounted to this thing (and your car is parked in a location where the antenna wouldn't attract attention), then you could be hundreds of meters away and they can still get into your car.
The problem is, something like 90% of people think they're above average. So you'd end up with 90% of the employees demanding that they be paid more than the average for their position.* Which would raise the average, which would lead a bunch of people who used to get paid more than average now getting paid less, which would lead to them demanding more pay, which would raise the average, etc. At some point the company would draw the line, leaving ~40% of their employees dissatisfied and convinced that they're being underpaid even if they are in fact being paid the correct amount for their abilities.
The market can't solve something like this because it relies on people making rational decisions. 90% of people believing they're above average is irrational. Rather than try to confront that irrationality, employers choose to side-step it by keeping employees ignorant of where their pay stands.
* (I truly hope I am wrong about this, since the taboo against discussing your salary always seemed weird to me. But watching the risks people take while driving because they think they're a better than average driver, I'm not optimistic.)
France reprocesses spent nuclear fuel. So unlike countries where the anti-nuclear lobby has made sure that spent fuel gets classified as "waste" with huge disposal costs to try to make nuclear unattractive and uneconomical, France just turns it into more fuel for its nuclear plants. Only about 3% of what other countries call "nuclear waste" gets turned into actual waste. The rest is converted back into more fuel.
Do note that XP only needed 64 MB of RAM (128 MB recommended). The last XP system I supported was a couple years back, but the requirement had bloated to about 128 MB (256 MB recommended) because anti-virus software had gotten so much bigger (usually takes 30-50 MB of RAM).
For decades, software companies hadn't controlled bloat. They counted on performance gains in hardware to compensate for how much slower their software was getting due to bloat. This began to change after Prescott (around 2004), when the clock speed wars came to a screeching halt due to heat generated by power leakage at those higher frequencies, and for a time Intel lost the fastest CPU title crown to AMD. Intel and AMD began placing a greater emphasis on power efficiency rather than pure performance, and as a result the bloat in software began to outstrip increase in hardware speeds.
That's a large part of the reason Vista (2007) was such a dog. It was coded assuming the performance level of generally available hardware would be higher than it actually turned out to be. Consequently it felt like it ran a lot slower than XP (compared to when XP was new), and most users opted to stick with XP. Around 2010 we hit the point where all but the discount CPUs were "fast enough" for most people's needs, and advancements in CPU design since then have been directed mostly at reducing power consumption (a Core 2 Duo system at idle burns about 75 Watts, a Broadwell system burns about 20-30 Watts idle).
Software companies have had to come to grips with this performance stagnation, and are finally beginning to get bloat under control. Since they can no longer count on their newer software "feeling" faster because of hardware upgrades, they're forced to go through and optimize their software to make it actually run faster. Which is resulting in this curious inversion, where newer software actually runs better old systems than the previous versions of that software.
The industry is in for a major shake-up because of this in the next decade (arguably it's already been experiencing it the past 5 years). As the need to upgrade your computer every 2-3 years decreases, computers will be used for longer times. That means on an annual basis, hardware companies will have reduced sales (if people go from replacing their computer every 3 years to every 6 years, that means half the annual sales even though the same number of people are still using computers). And software companies will be expected to support their products for longer.
Mobile (phones) is the one area this hasn't really taken hold because the sector has been developing so quickly you feel obligated to upgrade your smartphone every 1-2 years. But eventually it too will plateau. Long-term, we're probably looking at computers having to last 7-10 years before being replaced. Which interestingly enough is about the timescale for console systems (6-7 years between refreshes).
While you may disagree with the price exacted by advertisers, they are still providing you with something in exchange. They help pay for the website you are visiting. Without their ads, the site likely wouldn't exist, or would exist in a considerably less useful form.
Ad fraud steals money from advertisers, period. They are taking money from the advertisers without providing a good or service in exchange. This is theft.
When I managed a small business, I took the annual increase of the CPI for my area, and that would be the increase in payroll for the year (adjusted for growth in number of employees). Depending on if an employee was good or bad, they might get a bigger or smaller raise than the CPI. But the average per employee increase company-wide was always very close to CPI.
The reason is pretty simple. CPI actually tracks pretty closely with wages. If you really wanted, I suppose you could try to force your wages to the absolute minimum where you still get enough applicants to fill all your positions. But if your wages don't keep up with CPI, you're going to lose your good employees to better-paying companies, while a disproportionate share of your applicants will be bad employees who quit or were fired from their former job (because the better ones take one look at your wages and shop elsewhere). That management philosophy may work at low-end jobs where the quality of the employee doesn't really matter. But any employer whose company does anything more than menial labor knows that the employees are the company, and will try to get good employees.
You have a very distorted view of how to run a business if you think lowering costs (wages) is the only or even primary motivation of an employer. I suggest you try starting a company of your own, and learn from the school of hard knocks. You'll find out pretty quickly that low wages = low performing employees, and will leave you stuck with low-end clients and low-end jobs. The trick isn't just to flat-out minimize cost. It's to minimize costs in ways that have the least impact on productivity - i.e. make the company more efficient to operate, not just cheaper to operate.
The problem with the broken car window analogy is that it's pretty obvious when a car is parked illegally in front of a fire hydrant. It's not at all obvious when there's a tiny drone in the way of firefighting aircraft. So the analogy would be more like the fire truck driving up to park in front of a fire hydrant, and suddenly an unseen mine someone has planted blows up, engulfing the fire truck and killing everyone on board.
Telling the fire department that they have permission to destroy any mines (drones) they see doesn't really solve the problem. The problem is not just that these things are in the way, but that these things are in the way and you can't really see them. That's why all the ideas to shoot them down, as satisfying as that would be, won't work. If you could be assured you knew where each drone was, then it's not really a problem because you can just fly around them. It's the unseen drone which will make for a very bad day.
It's worth noting that Picasaweb pre-dates Google+. In fact when they made the photos section of G+, they just copied Picasaweb's front-end, and dumbed it down to a Facebook level. The back-end was still the same so you could post albums on Google+, and still edit/modify them on Picasaweb (with a lot more options than the G+ interface). So in that respect, absolutely nothing has changed.
Riiiight. Which is why every single Republican Senator and Congressman voted against it.
What really happened was the exact opposite of what you say. Obama and his advisors crafted a heath care bill which was so liberal, not only did it lose all the Republicans, it was in danger of losing a good chunk of the moderate-center Democrats as well. All the compromises you claim were made to appease Republicans, were in fact put in to appease moderate Democrats. Most of them didn't like it either, but were under enormous pressure by the far-left wing of the Democrat party to get this passed while they still had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (10 months from 2009-2010).
You can't blame this one on the Republicans. Its legacy will rest entirely upon the Democrats because it was 100% Democrat-drafted, passed, and signed.
Not sure why Linus and you are complaining. Gmail already has a tool for eliminating false positives. You set up a filter to automatically give any email from a particular mailing list a label for that list. It's actually a great tool for auto-organizing your email if you subscribe to multiple lists like he does.
When setting up the filter, you make sure to check the "Never send it to spam" option.
The average lifetime productivity of an American is about $2 million. Why should we spend 5000 lifetimes worth of productivity to go to the moon? A place we've already been to before, and which is close enough that we can just carry all needed supplies from Earth. There's practically nothing left to learn from such an endeavor which we cannot already learn from the ISS. The only proposed moon project I've heard of worth a damn is to put a radio telescope on the far side, shielded from all the EM noise from Earth.
Manned space exploration already has a terrible return on investment compared to unmanned. But if we're going to do it, focus on solving new problems - long term space travel for a mission to Mars. The R&D into constructing a self-contained ecosystem and recycling water and oxygen will actually have some practical applications here on Earth.
Hey, they were only keeping open the possibilities for future business models.
The point of doing this from a drone is that it'll have unhindered line of sight to the target wifi network. Once you have line of sight, it's just a matter of cranking up the signal (both transmit and received) with a directional antenna until you can hear and be heard by the wifi router. With a good enough antenna, distance is irrelevant. You might have heard in the news that we're picking up signals from a robot spacecraft that's currently 3 billion miles away. It's done by using a really big directional antenna here on Earth. The transmitter on the spacecraft itself only uses about 20-30x more power than your home router.
And if the thing you're buying with that money is worthwhile (increases your productivity - whether directly by helping you work or indirectly by helping you relax and recharge), then removing that money from your wallet is a good thing. Good economic transactions are ones where both the buyer and seller are better off after the sale. But without advertising, you cannot obtain the information you need to judge if something is a good purchase. Your old laptop breaks and you need to buy a new one. How do you pick the best laptop for your money if the manufacturers and stores don't advertise?.
OP is absolutely right. Fundamentally, advertising is dissemination of information. I didn't have a TV for 3 years. I didn't think I missed the ads, until I was hanging out with my friends and they decided we should watch a movie. I had absolutely no idea what movies were playing, and wasn't able to contribute at all to the discussion about what movie we should watch. Because I hadn't seen any ads for movies. In fact I wasted a lot of their time because they had to give me a brief plot synopsis of each movie they were discussing.
Where advertising crosses the line is when it becomes dishonest. Either disseminating false information, or trying to entice people to buy in ways which are completely orthogonal to the product being advertised (the brand of beer you drink will make sexy women hang out with you? Really?). But banning all advertising would break society as we know it. How are you going to find an apartment to rent if the landlord isn't allowed to advertise he has one available, and you're not allowed to advertise that you're looking for one?
Unlike email, which spammers send essentially for free, paper junk mail is paid for and in fact provides about 1/3rd of the funding for the US Postal Service.
Actually, when you put it like that, marketing (spam + selling marketing info) pays for 100% of most people's email. If you have a free email account with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc., it's not really free. It's being paid for by selling your info to marketers. Just like spam/junk mail.
That's the way electricity is sold in the U.S. The utility company maintains and charges for the wires. The electricity is sold by another company, and you get to pick which company you're buying it from. If you choose to get it from renewable sources, the cost is higher but the energy part of your bill gets sent to them. The individual electrons are not sorted, but the sum balance of them are.
That said, this is like diesel vs. gasoline, where the crude oil wants to break down into a certain fraction of diesel vs gasoline. As long as your demand for those two products equals the supplied amount, prices remain low. If demand gets skewed in one direction, then you end up having to do inefficient refining to convert diesel to gasoline (or vice versa), and the price goes up. Same thing here - as long as electrical demand for conventional vs. renewable sources remains about the same as the supply, the marginal price for renewables will remain rather low. But if you start pushing for 100% renewables, the price will skyrocket due to the inefficiency of matching renewable power generation profiles to power demand profiles.
That's something I think a lot of people are missing about EVs, and which TFA touches upon. They look at the economic price per mile, and conclude that EVs must be vastly more efficient than ICE cars. In terms of energy consumed, they're actually almost the same.
ICE car gets 30 mpg. A gallon of gasoline has 120 MJ/gal. So (forgive the mixed units) you're consuming about 4 MJ/mile.
A Tesla S has a 85 kWh battery, and can go 253 miles. That's 1.2 MJ/mile. The EV is a lot more energy efficient!
But wait, what about energy production costs? Mining, refining, and transport adds about 15% to the energy consumption of gasoline. So the ICE vehicle is up around 4.6 MJ/mile.
The Tesla S has a charging efficiency of about 80%. It also has a discharge efficiency, but that is built into the EPA mileage figures which are calculated using battery capacity, not energy pulled out of the battery.
Electrical power lines have a transport efficiency of about 98%.
Coal power plants have an efficiency of about 40%
Coal mining and transport adds about 10% to the energy consumption cost.
The actual energy consumption of the Tesla then is 1.2 * 1.1 / (.8*.98*.4) = 4.2 MJ/mile (assuming 100% coal). Not much different from an ICE car. In fact if you converted these back to MPG, the ICE car actually gets 26 MPGe, the Tesla gets 28.6 MPGe (though obviously the latter would vary based on electricity generation source).
As it turns out, almost the entirety of the reason EVs are cheaper to operate than ICE cars is not because of energy efficiency - both use almost the same amount of energy per mile traveled. The EV is cheaper because coal is so much cheaper than gasoline. Coal costs about $55 per ton, and a ton of coal produces about 21 GJ of energy, for a final cost of 0.26 cents per MJ. Gasoline at $3/gal is about 2.5 cents per MJ. An order of magnitude more expensive than coal.
The only reason distilled petroleum is used as an energy source for transportation is that this huge cost disadvantage is more than offset by the high energy density - 42 MJ/kg for gasoline, 0.55 MJ/kg for the Tesla S battery (and 21 MJ/kg for coal if you're curious). You can carry more of it around (greater range), and you can load it up more quickly and easily (faster refueling). Those are the primary hurdles EVs have to jump to achieve widespread adoption, not economic. Gasoline was already a very poor economic choice in the first place, but that wasn't a big enough drawback to prevent it from being widely adopted in transportation.
Boats and especially planes are much more weight-sensitive than cars. Consequently, you will not see electric boat and plane motors becoming practical as primary propulsion until battery energy density increases substantially. Boats also suffer from much higher energy consumption per distance traveled, e.g. The battery that pushes a Tesla 300 miles would only push a boat for about 30 miles.
Where electric boat motors can make sense today is as a secondary motor. Unlike cars where the wheels have direct contact with solid ground, boat propellers have to gain traction from a yielding liquid. Consequently, the "gearing" of the propeller (pitch vs rpm) matters, and it's most efficient at one point. A propeller designed for full speed may be inefficient at trolling or maneuvering speed. Many boats use a second, smaller motor for this purpose. Depending on how much it weighs and how often it's used, this could potentially be replaced by an electric motor.
I've actually been in this exact scenario. I was on the freeway when traffic in front suddenly stopped due to an accident. I stopped, but noticed in my rearview mirror that the two teenage girls in the car behind me were busy yammering away with each other. They got closer and closer, before finally noticing that I was stopped and slamming on the brakes.
Here's the crucial part. Based on their distance, how fast they were going, and how quickly the brakes were slowing them down, I could estimate that they were going to stop about a meter past my rear bumper. As it turned out I had stopped with a good 3 meters between me and the car in front. So I just scooted forward a couple meters (this is the reason you're supposed to stop far enough back that you can see the rear tires of the car in front). The girls came to a screeching halt just behind me, heads flung forward against their seat belts, bounced up, and they started nervously laughing at each other. No collision, nobody got hurt, nothing got damaged.
A computer-controlled car which knows exactly the distance to the car in front, distance to the car in the rear is, how fast it's approaching, and how quickly it's decelerating. It can easily make this kind of calculation and decide if its better to let off the brakes and scoot forward, or press down hard on the brake to absorb the rear collision but avoid hitting the car in front. I lucked out because I happened to be watching the entire situation develop in the rearview mirror, and could accurately estimate their speed and rate of deceleration. But a computer could calculate this at any time. And if you watch the video, the Google car had enough situational awareness that it could've easily detected cross traffic - it wasn't just tracking the cars immediately next to it.
It's people. Translucent Red is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. That's why it tastes like bacon - we taste like pork. Next thing, they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them! You tell everybody. Listen to me. Hatcher. You've gotta tell 'em! TRANSLUCENT RED IS PEOPLE! We gotta stop them! Somehow! Listen! Listen to me... PLEASE!!!
Yeah that statement left me scratching my head too. It was added by the editor, not the submitter, so it's probably not surprising that it was poorly phrased. If you follow the link, you find that it's about people not trusting banks, so they're using their mobile phone carrier to handle small monetary transactions.
Incidentally, 1/1063 the brightness would put the sun at about magnitude -19.2, or about 400x brighter than the full moon, 2.5 million times brighter than Venus at its brightest.
The main imager (LORRI) is a 208mm diameter telescope with a 2630mm focal length, or f/12.6. The spider and secondary obscure 11% of the area, so that's equivalent to f/13.4 in terms of light gathering for photographic purposes. Exposure times are 50-200 ms, or 1/20 to 1/5 sec.
On Earth, the sunny 16 rule says on a sunny day the proper exposure at f/16 is when your shutter speed is 1/ISO. So f/16, 100 ISO, 1/100 sec. The atmosphere absorbs roughly half the sunlight, so in earth orbit that would become f/16, 100 ISO, and 1/200 sec.
Pluto is about 32.6 AU from from the sun right now, so the sun's brightness there is 1/32.6^2 = 1/1063 what it is at Earth.
Going from f/16 to f/13.4 gets you about 1.43x more light.
Increasing exposure time from 1/200 sec to 1/10 sec gets you 20x more light.
That leaves a deficit of 37.2x, which you can get by increasing CCD sensitivity to ISO to 3,720.
ISO 3200 was easily attainable by high-end consumer digital camera sensors 10 years ago, much less a commercial one specially designed for scientific purposes.
You probably saw a lot of news coverage during the weekend of Independence Day - July 4th. The 4th is the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence when the U.S. colonies began their revolt against the British Empire, so is considered the nation's birthday. It's a great big party over here. Everyone gets the day off (got July 3rd off since the 4th was a Saturday), puts up flags and dresses up in red, white, and blue, fires up the barbecue grill for a big family picnic with hot dogs and hamburgers, and watches fireworks at night. I hear those fireworks companies do over half their annual business on that one day alone.
Same thing happened with Mars Pathfinder, which landed on 4 July 1997. The two really had little to do with each other, but with the news focused on both the nation's birthday and the pictures coming back from Mars' surface, it was inevitable that the connection between the two was oft mentioned, and most of NASA's staff were in national party mode when on camera.
Downlink speed is limited to 1 kbps (bits, not bytes). 2 kbps if they use a trick involving shutting down power to instruments to boost transmit power.
Reminds me of the early 1990s when JPEG images first started showing up. Full-color 640x480 GIF photo scans were a couple hundred kB and could take 10+ minutes to download over my 2400 baud modem. I was astounded that a 30-40 kB JPEG could look just as good to the eye. Course the JPEG took over half a minute to decode and display back then, but combined with download time it was still faster. (Yes computers and network speeds used to be that slow - it's why the early web made extensive use of thumbnail pics.)