While the cost of providing SMS is very cheap, what Verizon is doing is exactly the most popular anti-spam measure advocated by people: Charge a token fee per message, small enough not to inconvenience regular messaging to individuals, but large enough so that spamming becomes uneconomical.
Not only that, but I've had 2FA on my Dreamhost account for years. Real 2FA, not "we'll send a text to your phone." To login to my account, I have to enter my username, password, and a rolling code generated by Authy that changes every 30 seconds. Resetting my password doesn't get you anything, other than inconveniencing me.
What's even funnier is that what Qualcomm wants Apple to pay, is what Apple wanted Samsung to pay. Samsung's patents were FRAND so Apple could license them for a few cents (basically a percentage of the component cost). But they wanted Samsung to pay them a % of the total phone price (about $10-$15 if I remember) to license Apple's patents.
The problem is vertical integration. The studio making/offering the movie should be prohibited from also being a streaming company (which in turn should be prohibited from being an ISP). Fluidity in the market is maximized when each studio to offer its movies for sale/rent on multiple streaming services, and those streaming services are available on multiple ISPs. When you start integrating these components vertically is when you start to get into all this exclusivity nonsense which is anti-consumer and anti-free market.
Occasionally, vertical integration removes superfluous extra work (e.g. a big tool shop may find it cheaper/better to manufacture their own tools).. But usually it just leads to the company trying to entrap customers. The cell phone industry is a good example, where the carriers have entered exclusive contracts with phone manufacturers. So they own the towers, the cell service, and the phones. And you cannot move your investment in a phone to a different carrier if your current one raises prices. Ideally you'd buy a phone, and be able to use it on any carrier (switch). And carriers would not own tower networks so they could switch to/from networks which provide better/worse service.
From Ford, GM, Chrysler, and AMC pulling a "fuck you plebs, you'll buy what we make" in the 1970's
The Arab Oil Embargo happened rather suddenly. Ford, GM, Chrysler, AMC were making big cars because that's what people wanted. The Japanese were making small cars because that market niche was mostly ignored by the other automakers, making it easier for them to be competitive there. When the oil embargo doubled gas prices, suddenly those small fuel-efficient cars became a much bigger share of the market, and Ford, GM, Chrysler, AMC were caught flat-footed by the market shift.
But it should also be noted that the vast majority of buyers wanted, and still want bigger cars. Truck sales are approaching 2x car sales. And the shift away from cars and towards trucks began in the 1970s when the CAFE fuel efficiency standards were introduced, forcing automakers to make smaller more fuel-efficient cars.
It's a myth that automakers had to be forced by regulators to produce the type of cars that people wanted. If anything, regulations are preventing them from producing the vehicles people want, with the looser light truck CAFE standards being a loophole that people are using to buy a bigger less fuel-efficient vehicle. Regulating the supply side like CAFE does isn't very effective because people just find a different way to get what they want. If you want to encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles, you have to manipulate the demand side - crank up fuel taxes so they want to get a more fuel-efficient vehicle.
The reason planes supplanted dirigibles is because cargo capacity isn't how many tons you can carry at once. It's how many tons your vehicle can carry over how many miles in a given period of time. Yeah planes can't carry as much at once. But they're so much faster that a single small plane can haul more cargo further than a big dirigible during a year of operation.
The variable operating costs of the dirigible would seem to make it cheaper (much less fuel per mile, probably less per ton-mile). But the fixed costs (crew labor, housing and maintenance facilities) end up multiplied by its reduced ton-mile/hour capacity, making it more expensive overall. You'll note that the uses you cited have zero crew labor costs (advertising billboard) or greatly reduced crew labor cost (PR attraction means a flight of just a few hours). That does suggest unmanned autonomous cargo blimps might be economically viable.
As a gym user I prefer not to have messy cable bouncing around when I'm working out.
That would be an issue if you had a phone/MP3 player with a headphone jack but no Bluetooth. AFAIK no such device exists. Everything comes with Bluetooth nowadays.
That's the real issue here. Having both a headphone jack and Bluetooth gives the user the full range of options to use the device as they wish. Removing the headphone jack or Bluetooth artificially and needlessly limits how you can use the device.
USB-C isn't really a good alternative because (1) it's not yet universal so not everything can pipe audio out through a USB-C port yet, and (2) designers aren't taking its use as an audio port into account, resulting in the USB-C port being on the bottom or side of many devices, where it's awkward to plug in USB-C headphones if you want to carry the device in your pocket.
It isn't the companies or healthcare system trapping you. People who insist on health insurance as a job benefit trap themselves. There is no difference between:
Company pays you $x in salary + $y in health insurance
Company pays you $(x+y) in salary, you spend $y to get your own health insurance
In both cases the company pays out $(x+y), and you receive $(x+y) in compensation. But for some reason prospective employees consider $y in health insurance benefit as better than $y in additional salary, and opt for the job which offers health benefits over the one which offers the higher salary but no benefits.
The only possible difference is deductibility on your income taxes, which would be trivial to fix (add a 100% health insurance deduction, even for people taking the standard deduction).
That's exactly what the Moto Mods are for the Motorola Z phones. I'd argue those phones are actually more awkward without a mod. Unfortunately, that ecosphere seems to be dying, as pretty much all battery manufacturers have ceased making battery Moto Mods.
I'm gonna guess you had a big thick case on your phone. Wireless charging loses efficiency rapidly with distance. So if you've got a thick case on your phone, it will reduce the size of the sweet spot considerably, and force you to position the phone more precisely on the charging pad. I had researched this when I bought a case for my Nexus 5, so I made sure it was a thin case(I just needed the edges thickened up so I could hold it more reliably). For three years I basically just plopped it on the charger and it would work 95% of the time. 5% (once or twice a month) it would need a slight adjustment.
I placed it on the pad overnight so the slower charging never bothered me. If you need a quick rapid charge because your phone is about to die at 4 pm, then obviously wireless charging is going to be worse than wired. But I would argue the bigger fault is in the phone's design, trading off a bigger battery for thinness. I'm a function-over-form guy so I think this quest for thinner phones is idiotic. I'd actually prefer a 1.5 cm thick phone that would last me 2-3 days on battery. But it seems the vast majority of the population are form-over-function people, so I have to suffer with too-thin phones with insufficient battery life.
I thought wireless charging was for lazy people, and it wasn't on my list of desired features when I was shopping for a phone 5 years ago. It just happened that the Nexus 5 had it, and a store was running a sale on charging pads for $10 shortly after, so I grabbed one. What an eye-opener. $10-$15 for a charging pad is well worth not having to fiddle around to plug in a little connector every night for years. It's now a must-have feature for me.
They got laws passed to treat e-scooters like a human-powered bicycle, not a motorized vehicle. It's gotten to the point where the pro-electric crowd is overriding common sense laws created based on vehicle mass and velocity.
An interesting thing happened when AI researchers first developed neural nets. They were great at learning how to do new things, but if you let them learn for too long they'd become "set in their ways" and unable to adapt to slight deviations in the data they were receiving. So the trick became to pick a good time to freeze the neural net's learning. Too early and the neural net wasn't as effective as it could be. Too late and it was too inflexible and began excluding answers which were right but not quite exact. You had to freeze its learning and development at just the right moment to maximize effectiveness while minimizing inflexibility. Once frozen, it could be reproduced in hardware, like the Xbox's Kinect sensor. No more learning, but its effectiveness was pretty much optimal for the hardware.
Serious navigators use GPS, which is a gazillion times more accurate than figuring out where you are with a compass and sextant.
The Earth's magnetic field deflects charged particles from the sun, sending them to the polar regions where they become the aurora when they hit the atmosphere. This creates a low-radiation bubble up to a certain altitude above the Earth. GPS satellites orbit in between the two major belts where radiation is deflected.
A pole flip may be associated with a weakening magnetic field for a short time during the flip. In which case those charged particles will not be deflected towards the poles. They will strike all the satellites that were formerly protected, like GPS satellites. Those satellites have some radiation hardening to survive the occasional solar flare, but probably would not survive something this intense for too long.
What's the point of high res capture if you're just going to muddy the image in post processing?
In photography, the basic algorithm is to use a high-pass filter to identify high-contrast regions (places with lots of edges. Turn that into a mask and invert it. Apply a blurring algorithm to the picture, using the mask to exempt the high-contrast parts of the pic (places with lots of edges.) The final result is a pic where low-contrast surfaces (like skin and sky and blurred backgrounds) are blurred, but high-contrast edges which contain detail are untouched.
I never liked doing it (I prefer realistic photos), but it was sometimes necessary to counter a sharpening algorithm run across the entire picture, and prevent skin blemishes from being exaggerated. Also, I found that if I first showed my female friends their photo after running it through the above algorithm, they were much less likely to threaten to kill me if I ever released that photo to the public. Who says flattery never got you anywhere?
It said receipts annually generate 686 million pounds of waste and 12 billion pounds of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent of 1 million cars on the road...
Trees pull CO2 from the air to produce wood. The tree is cut down and the wood is pulped to form paper, which is then used to print the receipt. If the receipt is subsequently thrown away in a landfill, doesn't that remove CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it underground?
They looked at 1km squares and if anything in it has been changed by man then that whole 1Km sq has been affected. So you have someone in a 4 wheeler run across a patch of desert and leave a mark the whole 1 Km square has been affected. Technically they are right however in all practical ways they are misleading.
The way to prevent these sorts of measures from being misleading is to use the same criteria in both directions and give both numbers. i.e. Look at 1x1 km blocks and see what percentage contains some human encroachment (say 95%). Then look at 1x1 km blocks and see what percentage contains some areas without human encroachment. (say 95%).
The you combine the two numbers to say that by your measurements, "the percentage of land untouched by humans is somewhere between 5% and 95%." If those error margins are so large that the statement sounds ridiculous, then you need to go back to the drawing board and work on developing a better way to measure which reduces your error margins so they're not laughable.
Couple things. Paul Ryan delivered on the $5.7 but the Senate didn't have enough votes (10 democrats).
10 Democrats what? The Republicans had a clear Senate majority, as well as the tie-breaking vote. The bill could have been passed without a single Democrat voting for it, they could even have survived four defections... but they had a lot more than that, didn't they?
Spending bills require the affirmative vote of 61 senators to pass.
The election of the President in the US has always been, for 200+ years, by electoral college
Which was necessary when calculating the national vote was not a practical thing to do in a short amount of time (days, even). We can tally the national vote in hours or less now. Results don't have to be transported on foot, by horse, or even by rail.
The Electoral College was set up as a buffer between the regular voter and political office. The Founders were afraid The People would elect some clueless idiot (hah) as President. So rather than give The People direct power to choose the President, they added an in-between group of Electors - politically savvy people who presumably would be more knowledgeable about the qualifications of office, and thus be able to select a more competent person in lieu of a poor choice by The People.
Ironically, it's the more populous states which are responsible for the current "winner take all" situation in the Electoral college. The original assumption was each state would be divided into a number of districts of equal population, and each district would choose its own elector. Pennsylvania and Maryland (the #2 and #6 most populated states of the 13 at the time) began the winner-takes-all system in their state as an attempt to gain more influence in Presidential elections. That forced the other states to follow suit to maintain equal influence.
Numerically, a winner-takes-all system of a state-wide vote actually favors more populous states. A winner-takes-all system in a less-populated state works pretty closely to the original district idea (a winner only gets 3 electoral votes). In a state with a larger population, a winner-takes-all vote results in a huge bounty of electoral votes (whoever wins California currently gets 55 electoral votes). So it has the effect of giving a more populated state more influence in the Presidential elections, since it becomes much more important for candidates to campaign in the more populated states.
What's changed is the demographics of the country has shifted over time, from the majority of people living in rural areas to the majority living in urban areas. And voters in urban areas are skewed substantially towards the left compared to the average for the country. This has the effect of lessening the benefit of winner-takes-all in urban states, since its biggest advantage comes from the a candidate just barely winning a state (a candidate who wins a state 51% to 49% gains a net bounty of an additional 49% of electors). The more your state's vote deviates from 50%, the less power it has in the Electoral College (if a candidate wins a state by 65%, s/he only gets a net bounty of an additional 35% electors). And the demographics of urban voters makes this scenario much more likely in states with heavy urban populations than in more competitive rural states.
So the more populous states have been hoisted by their own petard. Their shenanigans to leverage the Electoral College to their advantage hundreds of years ago have now become their undoing, and is giving disproportionate power to the less-populated rural states.
Anyhow it's a moot point. The majority of popular votes in the 2016 election were cast for conservative candidates. 50.06% for conservative candidates vs 49.38% for liberal candidates (the remainder of votes were for "other" candidates). So if you take the "elections would be fairer if they reflected how the population voted" philosophy to the extreme in the 2016 election, then Trump was the correct winner. Awarding it to Clinton just because she got the biggest plurality would be less than fair because it discards the votes of people who didn't vote for Clinton or Trump. (IMHO, the plurali
Radar and sonar overcome this problem by constantly varying the frequency in a series of chirps. It's highly unlikely that there's another radar/sonar transmitting at the same frequency at near the same time. And even if there is, it's unlikely to be varying the frequency at the same rate/range.
Another advantage of this is that you don't need as strong a sweep signal. With a single frequency, you're emitting a pulse, then waiting for the reflections of the pulse. In order to avoid the possibility of spurious noise from another source being interpreted as a reflection, your pulse has to be high-power (basically make the reflected signal stronger in strength than any noise). 1000 to 5000 Watts was typical for boat radars using pulse beams. But when you use a varying frequency, you can compare reflections at one frequency with subsequent reflections at a different frequency (there's no need to wait for return reflections - subsequent pulses will not interfere with previous pulses, so can be sent before reflections from previous pulses arrive). Noise will show up at just one frequency, making it easy to spot and trivial to filter out. Consequently newer frequency sweeping boat radars only need to emit at a few tens of Watts.
That said, the parking sensors in your car use this frequency varying sonar. And I've noticed other cars' parking sensors trigger mine about once a day. So some more work needs to be done on standardizing frequency sweeps and noise filtering to reduce signal collisions. But the problem is not as insurmountable as you'd think from your LIDAR experience.
Although you can arguably say that Apple invented the smartphone as we know it, they are now mired in an endless game of tug-of-war with their rivals Samsung and the rest of the Android clan. This is unfortunate because I feel they are pumping the lions share of their considerable resources into simply keeping up with the competitors that originally copied their ground breaking concept of what a phone could be.
I feel Apple needs to somehow break free of this endless 'boring' update cycle and release their newest earth shattering product.
The thing is, Apple didn't actually invent the smartphone-as-we-know-it. It was an evolutionary development that other phone manufacturers had slowly been migrating towards. LG was actually the first out the door with a smartphone with a capacitive touch display as its primary interface. And the Samsung evidence which was disallowed in the iPhone case (because they missed a filing deadline) showed that they had been working on similar iPhone-like phones before the introduction of the iPhone.
What Apple did (very successfully) was guess where this evolutionary development would lead in the future, and bet the house on a phone design further along this development path than any other phone manufacturer's at the time. And that bet rightly led to a massive financial windfall for them.
Since then, they have missed pretty much every other major evolutionary change to smartphone design. They openly ridiculed the trend towards larger phones (a phone with a 3.5" screen looks like a toy today). They missed the trend towards a wider aspect ratio. They've been hostile to a universal phone charging connector. They were late to follow the trend towards capacitive control buttons (instead of physical buttons). They were slower than the rest of the industry in adding LTE capability. They were late to incorporate NFC. They missed the trend towards OLED displays on flagship devices. They missed the trend towards bezel-less displays. They've played catch-up on all of these features.
They did get the trend to high-resultion displays right (though I'd argue that was obvious, and they just did it quicker than anyone else due to a design flaw in iOS). They helped make fingerprint sensors (which first showed up on a Motorola phone but was a niche product) standard. And I applaud their approach to security and privacy. But pretty much all their other "innovations" have been hostile to customers (glass back, non-swappable battery, removing the headphone jack, lack of expandable memory, lack of a way to directly transfer files between devices, walled garden for apps).
If the series (I haven't watched it) used the phrase "choose your own adventure" to quickly get across the concept of a story where the audience determines the progression of the plot, that actually sounds like a pretty good argument that the trademarked term has become genericized, and grounds for rescinding the trademark.
Normally you want to compare stats like these against the general population as a basis for comparison, to figure out if an organization (the government in this case) deviates substantially from the average for the population. Failing that, you can compare a subset of the population (government workers) against itself in past years. That won't tell you where that subset stands relative to the general population, but it will tell you changes (first derivative).
The 2018 report has historical results for the same survey questions from 2014-2018, and 2013 report show results from 2010-2013 (it appears the questions in the summary were introduced in 2010).
"willing to put in extra effort" has remained consistent at 96%. "look for ways to do job better" consistently between 90%-91%. "work is important" consistently between 90%-91%. Basically, government employees' attitudes about these factors has not changed in 8 years (which takes us through one change in President's party, control of the House, and control of the Senate). And there is no evidence to indicate they are changing.
The survey questions whose results did change are:
"I am given a real opportunity to improve my skills in my organization." Dipped from 66% in 2010 to 59% in 2014, back up to 66% by 2018.
"I feel encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing things." Same trend as above. 60% to 55% to 61% in 2010, 2014, and 2018
"My training needs are assessed." 54% in 2010, dropping to 50% in 2014, rising to 55% by 2018.
"I can disclose a suspected violation of any law, rule or regulation without fear of reprisal." 61% from 2010-2014, but rising to 66% by 2018
" In my most recent performance appraisal, I understood what I had to do to be rated at different performance levels (for example, Fully Successful, Outstanding)." 67% from 2010-2014, but rising to 71% by 2018.
These are the survey questions which indicate changes in government employee attitude (apparently there was more doom and gloom around 2014). That TFA focuses instead on three survey questions whose results have not changed, and discussed them with respect to a current event which could not yet have influenced the survey results, suggests the authors of TFA were just looking for an excuse to write an opinion piece, not report the news.
What's amusing is that the data mining Amazon does to better guess customers' preferences that TFA is complaining about, is exactly what websites like the one that published TFA do with viewer clicks to try to show them ads more likely to get click-throughs. Classic pot calling the kettle black.
Your reasoning works for jobs whose entirety can be automated - e.g. assembly line worker. The problem occurs when some idiot manager starts trying to apply it to jobs which mostly can be automated. If you decide to eliminate a job because statistically 99% of it can be automated, but fail to account for how to accomplish the 1% of the time which requires human intervention, you're just setting up your business for failure.
IT is a good example 95%-99% of it can be automated by writing a bunch of scripts. But woe unto the manager who decides that once the scripts have been written, there's no more need to pay for an IT department to sit around waiting for a new problem to show up. Or replace the IT guy with his 14 year old nephew who "plays around with computers a lot." You pay IT guys to sit around waiting for a problem when the cost of downtime would exceed their salary.
Slashdot Mirror
While the cost of providing SMS is very cheap, what Verizon is doing is exactly the most popular anti-spam measure advocated by people: Charge a token fee per message, small enough not to inconvenience regular messaging to individuals, but large enough so that spamming becomes uneconomical.
Not only that, but I've had 2FA on my Dreamhost account for years. Real 2FA, not "we'll send a text to your phone." To login to my account, I have to enter my username, password, and a rolling code generated by Authy that changes every 30 seconds. Resetting my password doesn't get you anything, other than inconveniencing me.
What's even funnier is that what Qualcomm wants Apple to pay, is what Apple wanted Samsung to pay. Samsung's patents were FRAND so Apple could license them for a few cents (basically a percentage of the component cost). But they wanted Samsung to pay them a % of the total phone price (about $10-$15 if I remember) to license Apple's patents.
The problem is vertical integration. The studio making/offering the movie should be prohibited from also being a streaming company (which in turn should be prohibited from being an ISP). Fluidity in the market is maximized when each studio to offer its movies for sale/rent on multiple streaming services, and those streaming services are available on multiple ISPs. When you start integrating these components vertically is when you start to get into all this exclusivity nonsense which is anti-consumer and anti-free market.
Occasionally, vertical integration removes superfluous extra work (e.g. a big tool shop may find it cheaper/better to manufacture their own tools).. But usually it just leads to the company trying to entrap customers. The cell phone industry is a good example, where the carriers have entered exclusive contracts with phone manufacturers. So they own the towers, the cell service, and the phones. And you cannot move your investment in a phone to a different carrier if your current one raises prices. Ideally you'd buy a phone, and be able to use it on any carrier (switch). And carriers would not own tower networks so they could switch to/from networks which provide better/worse service.
The Arab Oil Embargo happened rather suddenly. Ford, GM, Chrysler, AMC were making big cars because that's what people wanted. The Japanese were making small cars because that market niche was mostly ignored by the other automakers, making it easier for them to be competitive there. When the oil embargo doubled gas prices, suddenly those small fuel-efficient cars became a much bigger share of the market, and Ford, GM, Chrysler, AMC were caught flat-footed by the market shift.
But it should also be noted that the vast majority of buyers wanted, and still want bigger cars. Truck sales are approaching 2x car sales. And the shift away from cars and towards trucks began in the 1970s when the CAFE fuel efficiency standards were introduced, forcing automakers to make smaller more fuel-efficient cars.
It's a myth that automakers had to be forced by regulators to produce the type of cars that people wanted. If anything, regulations are preventing them from producing the vehicles people want, with the looser light truck CAFE standards being a loophole that people are using to buy a bigger less fuel-efficient vehicle. Regulating the supply side like CAFE does isn't very effective because people just find a different way to get what they want. If you want to encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles, you have to manipulate the demand side - crank up fuel taxes so they want to get a more fuel-efficient vehicle.
The reason planes supplanted dirigibles is because cargo capacity isn't how many tons you can carry at once. It's how many tons your vehicle can carry over how many miles in a given period of time. Yeah planes can't carry as much at once. But they're so much faster that a single small plane can haul more cargo further than a big dirigible during a year of operation.
The variable operating costs of the dirigible would seem to make it cheaper (much less fuel per mile, probably less per ton-mile). But the fixed costs (crew labor, housing and maintenance facilities) end up multiplied by its reduced ton-mile/hour capacity, making it more expensive overall. You'll note that the uses you cited have zero crew labor costs (advertising billboard) or greatly reduced crew labor cost (PR attraction means a flight of just a few hours). That does suggest unmanned autonomous cargo blimps might be economically viable.
That would be an issue if you had a phone/MP3 player with a headphone jack but no Bluetooth. AFAIK no such device exists. Everything comes with Bluetooth nowadays.
That's the real issue here. Having both a headphone jack and Bluetooth gives the user the full range of options to use the device as they wish. Removing the headphone jack or Bluetooth artificially and needlessly limits how you can use the device.
USB-C isn't really a good alternative because (1) it's not yet universal so not everything can pipe audio out through a USB-C port yet, and (2) designers aren't taking its use as an audio port into account, resulting in the USB-C port being on the bottom or side of many devices, where it's awkward to plug in USB-C headphones if you want to carry the device in your pocket.
In both cases the company pays out $(x+y), and you receive $(x+y) in compensation. But for some reason prospective employees consider $y in health insurance benefit as better than $y in additional salary, and opt for the job which offers health benefits over the one which offers the higher salary but no benefits.
The only possible difference is deductibility on your income taxes, which would be trivial to fix (add a 100% health insurance deduction, even for people taking the standard deduction).
That's exactly what the Moto Mods are for the Motorola Z phones. I'd argue those phones are actually more awkward without a mod. Unfortunately, that ecosphere seems to be dying, as pretty much all battery manufacturers have ceased making battery Moto Mods.
I'm gonna guess you had a big thick case on your phone. Wireless charging loses efficiency rapidly with distance. So if you've got a thick case on your phone, it will reduce the size of the sweet spot considerably, and force you to position the phone more precisely on the charging pad. I had researched this when I bought a case for my Nexus 5, so I made sure it was a thin case(I just needed the edges thickened up so I could hold it more reliably). For three years I basically just plopped it on the charger and it would work 95% of the time. 5% (once or twice a month) it would need a slight adjustment.
I placed it on the pad overnight so the slower charging never bothered me. If you need a quick rapid charge because your phone is about to die at 4 pm, then obviously wireless charging is going to be worse than wired. But I would argue the bigger fault is in the phone's design, trading off a bigger battery for thinness. I'm a function-over-form guy so I think this quest for thinner phones is idiotic. I'd actually prefer a 1.5 cm thick phone that would last me 2-3 days on battery. But it seems the vast majority of the population are form-over-function people, so I have to suffer with too-thin phones with insufficient battery life.
I thought wireless charging was for lazy people, and it wasn't on my list of desired features when I was shopping for a phone 5 years ago. It just happened that the Nexus 5 had it, and a store was running a sale on charging pads for $10 shortly after, so I grabbed one. What an eye-opener. $10-$15 for a charging pad is well worth not having to fiddle around to plug in a little connector every night for years. It's now a must-have feature for me.
A.B. 1096
They got laws passed to treat e-scooters like a human-powered bicycle, not a motorized vehicle. It's gotten to the point where the pro-electric crowd is overriding common sense laws created based on vehicle mass and velocity.
An interesting thing happened when AI researchers first developed neural nets. They were great at learning how to do new things, but if you let them learn for too long they'd become "set in their ways" and unable to adapt to slight deviations in the data they were receiving. So the trick became to pick a good time to freeze the neural net's learning. Too early and the neural net wasn't as effective as it could be. Too late and it was too inflexible and began excluding answers which were right but not quite exact. You had to freeze its learning and development at just the right moment to maximize effectiveness while minimizing inflexibility. Once frozen, it could be reproduced in hardware, like the Xbox's Kinect sensor. No more learning, but its effectiveness was pretty much optimal for the hardware.
The Earth's magnetic field deflects charged particles from the sun, sending them to the polar regions where they become the aurora when they hit the atmosphere. This creates a low-radiation bubble up to a certain altitude above the Earth. GPS satellites orbit in between the two major belts where radiation is deflected.
A pole flip may be associated with a weakening magnetic field for a short time during the flip. In which case those charged particles will not be deflected towards the poles. They will strike all the satellites that were formerly protected, like GPS satellites. Those satellites have some radiation hardening to survive the occasional solar flare, but probably would not survive something this intense for too long.
In photography, the basic algorithm is to use a high-pass filter to identify high-contrast regions (places with lots of edges. Turn that into a mask and invert it. Apply a blurring algorithm to the picture, using the mask to exempt the high-contrast parts of the pic (places with lots of edges.) The final result is a pic where low-contrast surfaces (like skin and sky and blurred backgrounds) are blurred, but high-contrast edges which contain detail are untouched.
I never liked doing it (I prefer realistic photos), but it was sometimes necessary to counter a sharpening algorithm run across the entire picture, and prevent skin blemishes from being exaggerated. Also, I found that if I first showed my female friends their photo after running it through the above algorithm, they were much less likely to threaten to kill me if I ever released that photo to the public. Who says flattery never got you anywhere?
Trees pull CO2 from the air to produce wood. The tree is cut down and the wood is pulped to form paper, which is then used to print the receipt. If the receipt is subsequently thrown away in a landfill, doesn't that remove CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it underground?
The way to prevent these sorts of measures from being misleading is to use the same criteria in both directions and give both numbers. i.e. Look at 1x1 km blocks and see what percentage contains some human encroachment (say 95%). Then look at 1x1 km blocks and see what percentage contains some areas without human encroachment. (say 95%).
The you combine the two numbers to say that by your measurements, "the percentage of land untouched by humans is somewhere between 5% and 95%." If those error margins are so large that the statement sounds ridiculous, then you need to go back to the drawing board and work on developing a better way to measure which reduces your error margins so they're not laughable.
Spending bills require the affirmative vote of 61 senators to pass.
The Electoral College was set up as a buffer between the regular voter and political office. The Founders were afraid The People would elect some clueless idiot (hah) as President. So rather than give The People direct power to choose the President, they added an in-between group of Electors - politically savvy people who presumably would be more knowledgeable about the qualifications of office, and thus be able to select a more competent person in lieu of a poor choice by The People.
Ironically, it's the more populous states which are responsible for the current "winner take all" situation in the Electoral college. The original assumption was each state would be divided into a number of districts of equal population, and each district would choose its own elector. Pennsylvania and Maryland (the #2 and #6 most populated states of the 13 at the time) began the winner-takes-all system in their state as an attempt to gain more influence in Presidential elections. That forced the other states to follow suit to maintain equal influence.
Numerically, a winner-takes-all system of a state-wide vote actually favors more populous states. A winner-takes-all system in a less-populated state works pretty closely to the original district idea (a winner only gets 3 electoral votes). In a state with a larger population, a winner-takes-all vote results in a huge bounty of electoral votes (whoever wins California currently gets 55 electoral votes). So it has the effect of giving a more populated state more influence in the Presidential elections, since it becomes much more important for candidates to campaign in the more populated states.
What's changed is the demographics of the country has shifted over time, from the majority of people living in rural areas to the majority living in urban areas. And voters in urban areas are skewed substantially towards the left compared to the average for the country. This has the effect of lessening the benefit of winner-takes-all in urban states, since its biggest advantage comes from the a candidate just barely winning a state (a candidate who wins a state 51% to 49% gains a net bounty of an additional 49% of electors). The more your state's vote deviates from 50%, the less power it has in the Electoral College (if a candidate wins a state by 65%, s/he only gets a net bounty of an additional 35% electors). And the demographics of urban voters makes this scenario much more likely in states with heavy urban populations than in more competitive rural states.
So the more populous states have been hoisted by their own petard. Their shenanigans to leverage the Electoral College to their advantage hundreds of years ago have now become their undoing, and is giving disproportionate power to the less-populated rural states.
Anyhow it's a moot point. The majority of popular votes in the 2016 election were cast for conservative candidates. 50.06% for conservative candidates vs 49.38% for liberal candidates (the remainder of votes were for "other" candidates). So if you take the "elections would be fairer if they reflected how the population voted" philosophy to the extreme in the 2016 election, then Trump was the correct winner. Awarding it to Clinton just because she got the biggest plurality would be less than fair because it discards the votes of people who didn't vote for Clinton or Trump. (IMHO, the plurali
Radar and sonar overcome this problem by constantly varying the frequency in a series of chirps. It's highly unlikely that there's another radar/sonar transmitting at the same frequency at near the same time. And even if there is, it's unlikely to be varying the frequency at the same rate/range.
Another advantage of this is that you don't need as strong a sweep signal. With a single frequency, you're emitting a pulse, then waiting for the reflections of the pulse. In order to avoid the possibility of spurious noise from another source being interpreted as a reflection, your pulse has to be high-power (basically make the reflected signal stronger in strength than any noise). 1000 to 5000 Watts was typical for boat radars using pulse beams. But when you use a varying frequency, you can compare reflections at one frequency with subsequent reflections at a different frequency (there's no need to wait for return reflections - subsequent pulses will not interfere with previous pulses, so can be sent before reflections from previous pulses arrive). Noise will show up at just one frequency, making it easy to spot and trivial to filter out. Consequently newer frequency sweeping boat radars only need to emit at a few tens of Watts.
That said, the parking sensors in your car use this frequency varying sonar. And I've noticed other cars' parking sensors trigger mine about once a day. So some more work needs to be done on standardizing frequency sweeps and noise filtering to reduce signal collisions. But the problem is not as insurmountable as you'd think from your LIDAR experience.
The thing is, Apple didn't actually invent the smartphone-as-we-know-it. It was an evolutionary development that other phone manufacturers had slowly been migrating towards. LG was actually the first out the door with a smartphone with a capacitive touch display as its primary interface. And the Samsung evidence which was disallowed in the iPhone case (because they missed a filing deadline) showed that they had been working on similar iPhone-like phones before the introduction of the iPhone.
What Apple did (very successfully) was guess where this evolutionary development would lead in the future, and bet the house on a phone design further along this development path than any other phone manufacturer's at the time. And that bet rightly led to a massive financial windfall for them.
Since then, they have missed pretty much every other major evolutionary change to smartphone design. They openly ridiculed the trend towards larger phones (a phone with a 3.5" screen looks like a toy today). They missed the trend towards a wider aspect ratio. They've been hostile to a universal phone charging connector. They were late to follow the trend towards capacitive control buttons (instead of physical buttons). They were slower than the rest of the industry in adding LTE capability. They were late to incorporate NFC. They missed the trend towards OLED displays on flagship devices. They missed the trend towards bezel-less displays. They've played catch-up on all of these features.
They did get the trend to high-resultion displays right (though I'd argue that was obvious, and they just did it quicker than anyone else due to a design flaw in iOS). They helped make fingerprint sensors (which first showed up on a Motorola phone but was a niche product) standard. And I applaud their approach to security and privacy. But pretty much all their other "innovations" have been hostile to customers (glass back, non-swappable battery, removing the headphone jack, lack of expandable memory, lack of a way to directly transfer files between devices, walled garden for apps).
If the series (I haven't watched it) used the phrase "choose your own adventure" to quickly get across the concept of a story where the audience determines the progression of the plot, that actually sounds like a pretty good argument that the trademarked term has become genericized, and grounds for rescinding the trademark.
The 2018 report has historical results for the same survey questions from 2014-2018, and 2013 report show results from 2010-2013 (it appears the questions in the summary were introduced in 2010).
"willing to put in extra effort" has remained consistent at 96%. "look for ways to do job better" consistently between 90%-91%. "work is important" consistently between 90%-91%. Basically, government employees' attitudes about these factors has not changed in 8 years (which takes us through one change in President's party, control of the House, and control of the Senate). And there is no evidence to indicate they are changing.
The survey questions whose results did change are:
These are the survey questions which indicate changes in government employee attitude (apparently there was more doom and gloom around 2014). That TFA focuses instead on three survey questions whose results have not changed, and discussed them with respect to a current event which could not yet have influenced the survey results, suggests the authors of TFA were just looking for an excuse to write an opinion piece, not report the news.
What's amusing is that the data mining Amazon does to better guess customers' preferences that TFA is complaining about, is exactly what websites like the one that published TFA do with viewer clicks to try to show them ads more likely to get click-throughs. Classic pot calling the kettle black.
Your reasoning works for jobs whose entirety can be automated - e.g. assembly line worker. The problem occurs when some idiot manager starts trying to apply it to jobs which mostly can be automated. If you decide to eliminate a job because statistically 99% of it can be automated, but fail to account for how to accomplish the 1% of the time which requires human intervention, you're just setting up your business for failure.
IT is a good example 95%-99% of it can be automated by writing a bunch of scripts. But woe unto the manager who decides that once the scripts have been written, there's no more need to pay for an IT department to sit around waiting for a new problem to show up. Or replace the IT guy with his 14 year old nephew who "plays around with computers a lot." You pay IT guys to sit around waiting for a problem when the cost of downtime would exceed their salary.