Would you pay ten times more? That's the kind of factor you'd be looking at for that kind of speedup.
I paid $100 for a 512MB compact flash card in late 2004, or $200 per GB. I just ordered a 32GB USB 3.0 flash drive for $13, or $0.41 per GB. A 500-fold decrease in cost in just 10 years.
The affordability also hinges on income (productivity per person), which has more than doubled since the 1940s. Energy prices are much more stable than RAM prices. But my point is, just because 10x more expensive is prohibitively expensive today doesn't mean it will continue to be so into the future.
Just as one shouldn't prognosticate by extrapolating current rates of progress into the future, neither should one assume that progress will come to a screeching halt and extrapolate into the future by using a horizontal line. Is hypersonic transport impractical today? Yes. Will it become practical in the future? I'm inclined to disagree with TFA and think it will become affordable. To believe otherwise is to concede we're going to be stuck on this rock forever. Excuse me for being the type who doesn't like to just give up.
Be sure to keep a set of backups not connected to your PC/Network PRIOR to notifying you've been had.
Is there some straightforward way to give a Windows backup program a different user/priority, so that the backup files it generates can only be accessed/modified by itself? That way a rogue virus or even user stupidity cannot delete or encrypt the backups. It know how to do this with Unix, but my Windows-fu is not as strong.
Yes I know keeping an offline backup is best, but we're talking about my mom and dad here. They're not gonna hook up an external drive once a week. If the backup isn't completely automated, it's not going to get made.
Basically it works out that he'd recycled the drive prior to being aware that he personally was being sued for copyright infringement. He also didn't run out and recycle all his drives as soon as he got a letter from Comcast saying that some sort of lawsuit was in progress. I assume the guy had some evidence to back up the dates in his claims.
You have this backwards. The accused is presumed innocent until proven otherwise (the wishes of copyright holders notwithstanding). The burden of proof is thus upon Malibu Media to prove he knew about their intent to sue before he had the drive recycled.
Personally I would say a mailed notice from Comcast is insufficient - lots of us have gotten those, whether correctly or in error, and nothing has happened. So it's insufficient to act as a notice to preserve evidence. I'd say a certified notification letter which must be followed through with an actual lawsuit or settlement is the minimum. Another party should not have the power to compel me to modify my behavior (hang onto equipment I'd otherwise throw out) for the mere cost of a 49 cent stamp.
Is that everyone has some skeletons in the closet they're hiding. Yours might not be as severe as someone else's, or it may be from back when you were a stupid teen. But there's something that would embarrass you or tarnish your reputation if it were made public. Maybe you tried smoking weed in college, or you had sex with your high school GF when she (and you) were technically underage, or all manner of other things.
So if facts uncovered by doxing becomes accepted as legitimate grounds for disqualification, then the only people who will get the good job positions or get elected will be the liars who are exceptionally good at covering up their history or shifting blame onto others.
Instead, what needs to happen is for people to stop demanding perfection from others. Everyone is human, and humans are fallible. Someone who claims to have never failed, to have always done the right thing, is almost certainly a liar, a con artist.. That's what should raise suspicion about someone's fitness for a job or elected office - the absence of any skeletons in the closet. If society can change to where we accept that we're all flawed and that a few flaws shouldn't automatically disqualify us, then doxing largely becomes irrelevant and IMHO our world will become a much nicer place.
They do. It's part of that 16GB that they advertise. This is how pretty much all devices are advertised. Do laptops and desktops come with a separate disk for the OS? When they advertise the size of the hard drive do they subtract the size of the OS? How about other brands of phones or tablets?
These people are completely ignorant about what they are suing for
One of the wrinkles that possibly justifies a lawsuit for this is that Apple doesn't give regular users a way to downgrade the iOS version. So if your device had a "comfortable" amount of free space, an auto-update could put you into a "critically short of space" state with no way for most owners to revert the device to the old iOS. Thus forcing you to upgrade to a new device sooner than you expected. Relevant quote from TFA:
"These misrepresentations and omissions cause these consumers to 'upgrade' their Devices from iOS 7 (or other operating systems) to iOS 8," it said. "Apple fails to disclose that upgrading from iOS 7 to iOS 8 will cost a Device user between 600 MB and 1.3 GB of storage space - a result that no consumer could reasonably anticipate."
And what will all our fine corporate interests do when they run out of wage slaves?
Expect a thank you for lifting the undeveloped world out of poverty?
Think about it. Why are people wage slaves? Because they're paid what we in developed nations would consider to be less-than-starvation wages. Why do they stop being wage slaves? Because the industrialization those wage slave jobs brought modernized the country and kick-started their economy, causing wages to rise until they were no longer considered wage slaves.
That's how a market economy eliminates poverty. It interprets low wages in a region as an economic inefficiency, and sends jobs there until the resulting development causes wages to rise to match wages in other regions. A minimum wage works in an already-developed country, but forcing a minimum wage on an undeveloped country just guarantees they'll remain undeveloped until they can lift themselves out of poverty on their own (a process that took hundreds of years in the West). That's why China has been artificially keeping the value of the Yuan low - to effectively lower the wages its citizens are making, which attracts more western investment and development, which helps their economy industrialize and grow even faster. The fact that they're losing jobs to other countries with lower wages means this strategy has worked.
They're more common than you'd think. This isn't the first movie to be sent to North Korea. These groups (many of them staffed and financially backed by North Korean defectors) have been sending a steady diet of South Korean dramas and K-pop to North Korea for several years now. It's actually what convinced many of them to defect - it made them realize their government had been lying to them about South Korea being a pauper nation.
Not really. The fair use provision here is if the copyrighted work is newsworthy. The fact that the emails have been leaked is big news, but the emails themselves are not necessarily newsworthy.
If the emails are just boring everyday emails of people at work, then copyright would still apply. Ironically, if the email were scandalous or embarrassing to Sony, then it would be fair use to publish them because the revelation would be newsworthy. So all a DMCA notice accomplishes is forcing people to dig through the emails for dirt before publishing. Not necessarily the effect Sony wants.
Re:"extensive measures" taken...
on
NVIDIA Breached
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· Score: 2
My hopes also include isolation of DMZ boxes so that unless they are intended to communicate with each other, they can't. Isolation between departments would be nice as well.
The problem with isolation is that some twit of an employee decides it's inconvenient, sneaks in a couple wifi routers, and sets up an authorized bridge.
Proper security relies not just on IT locking everything down. IT has to be willing to go the extra mile to do so in a way which minimally hampers other employees from doing their jobs. Fail at that and you get employees setting up rogue bridges and networks. Unfortunately, some IT people I've encountered act like they're on a power trip and control "their" network with an iron fist. One place I visited wouldn't even let you plug in flash drives to transfer data (we tried to get authorization and were told it was never allowed). So that data ended up being sent as an oh-so-secure email attachment. Unencrypted since the system interpreted an encrypted zip file as malware and auto-deleted it.
Putting a super-secure lock on a door is pointless if it makes getting around the workplace so difficult that everyone just uses a trash can to hold door open all the time. IT needs to make things secure while minimally impeding other employees from doing their jobs. No that's not easy. If it were easy, it wouldn't be a high-paying job.
I suspect on a $/MB basis, the remaining functional flash memory cells are much cheaper than plated wire memory. And tape suffers from moving parts and degradation over time.
I think the real solution to this will be developing methods to identify failing cells and have the controller write around them. Kinda like HDDs mark bad sectors. Heck, you could probably buy dozens of banks of flash memory for the same cost as plated wire memory, and switch to a new bank as soon as the old one developed too many failures. (System code isn't usually a problem, as that's written to ROM or EEPROM.)
There's actually a way to do this while complying with the airlines' rules. If you know you need to make two trips to the same destination, you simply book two cross-flights. The airlines let you book one year in advance. Say you need to make a two one-day trips from L.A. to NYC, one in February, one in November. You book two flights as such:
Flight 1 on airline A
LA -> NYC in February
NYC -> LA in November
Flight 2 on airline B
NYC -> LA in February
LA -> NYC in November
In February, you take the first leg of flight 1 and first leg of flight 2. In November you take the second legs. A variant on this uses a refundable fare - those let you change the dates of the second leg, in case you aren't sure when you're going to make the second trip. Lately though, most refundable fares have risen to more than 2x discount fares, making that strategy pointless. You can use nonrefundable fares and pay the ~$100 fee to change the second leg flight date, but usually $200 ends up being more than you save by booking a weekend stay.
These tricks work because airlines know companies don't have a choice when it comes to business travel - they must travel. So they can get away with charging business travelers a higher fare. Consequently the fares are set up in order to single out business travelers from regular travelers. The lower fares for a Saturday night stay and Tue-Wed-Thu travel are all a part of this. Business travelers hate staying the weekend (they'd rather be home with their family). And most businesses try to get the most bang for the buck from the trip by making it a Monday through Friday trip.
Cheaper way would be a large high altitude jet to carry the rocket to the edge of space. Use the oxygen in the air as long as possible and not carry the oxygen aboard. [...]
Get the whole thing up to 500mph and then 500 ft up. The jet engine takes over and goes up to 60000+ ft. 700 mph, not quite mach 1.
Then the rocket can kick in and go to the station.
The great irony of the space age is that is precisely what the U.S. was working on in parallel to Sputnik. Before Sputnik ever went up, clearer-thinking people analyzed the problem, and came to the same conclusion you just did - it's cheaper to strap your rocket to a plane, haul it up to 45,000 ft, and launch it into space from there.
But then the Soviets put a man into orbit, Kennedy said we should land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, and suddenly doing it quickly took precedence over doing it economically. That's led us 5 decades down the "wrong" technology path (simpler, quicker, but more expensive). And only in the last decade have we been seriously reconsidering the cheaper technology path. I often wonder where we would be if there had been no space race. Would we already have hypersonic transports taking you halfway around the world in an hour? Would space travel be more commonplace because it'd be so much cheaper?
Couldn't it also be that Tablets are a question of reaching market saturation, and that they fall more into the PC life cycle rather than the Cell Phone life cycle of being replaced yearly? From my personal experience, everywhere I go, I see people with tablets that are a year or two old because they are "good enough", lack compelling reasons to upgrade and also are typically appear significantly more expensive than their cell phone counterparts as they are typically sold unsubsidized.
This. Phones need to be upgraded every 2-3 years to keep up with the new cellular standards which roll out (moar speed). Laptops need to be upgraded every 3-5 years to run the latest software or games.
Tablets are consumption devices. You bought it to read an ebook or browse a website. It'll still be able to do those things 10 years from now. The early tablets (single core, unable to handle 1080p video) were upgraded much more quickly because there were compelling performance gains. But the current crop of tablets are going to last until they break.
The only compelling reason to upgrade a tablet that I can think of in the near future is a bigger screen (12"-13" screen allows you to replicate letter- or A4-sized paper at full size) without extra weight (the 12" tablets are still around 1.5 pound, vs 1 pound for the 10" tablets). And even there, they're in danger of being displaced by PCs like the Surface Pro 3. I've been waiting for a good 12" tablet so I can haul around all my sheet music - you can't compensate for a smaller screen by holding the tablet closer to your face when you're reading sheet music. But compared to a Galaxy Tab 12.2 (12.2", 1.62 lbs, A15, 3GB RAM, 32GB storage, $550), the low-end Surface Pro 3 (12", 1.76 lbs, i3, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage, $699 on sale over the holidays) is awfully tempting.
Unlike mining or drilling (which permanently removes the minerals or petroleum from the ground), deforestation only happens when the rate at which you're harvesting trees exceeds the rate at which they grow back. If Canada is properly managing their forests and they're not losing tree biomass, then there is no deforestation occurring regardless of how much wood the U.S. buys from Canada. (Deforestation in Brazil has much more to do with them trying to increase agricultural land than exporting wood to the U.S.)
Along the same lines, we need to stop recycling paper ASAP. Throwing away paper in landfills is a form of sequestering carbon underground. Drilling and burning oil removes carbon from the ground. Throwing away paper puts it back. (This assumes a proportional increase in reforestation efforts to satisfy the greater demand for new paper. If you throw it away without planting more trees than you did before, then recycling is in fact better.)
Actually I'm not sure if this was a double-troll by Tyson, or if he's making the same mistake as those he's (and you are) criticizing - jumping to conclusions which support your pre-established beliefs because of your ignorance. Newton was deeply religious. People just assume he was atheist because, hey, father of modern science and all. And we all know it's impossible for anyone who is rational to be religious too, right?
In that respect, a more enlightened viewpoint would be that religion and science are mostly orthogonal, and it's possible to be a strong supporter of both. Oh, and that people make mistakes, and a simple mistake doesn't automatically mean you should be offended, nor does it immediately invalidate everything else they say or believe. The world would be a much nicer place if people (both religious fundies and ardent atheists) would get that.
Why do you need to evaluate the credibility of something that's obvious? A similar technique was already used to confirm the identity of the woman in the famous National Geographic photo of the Afghan Girl. The photo was taken before iris scanning was practical as biometric security. But the photo contained enough detail (on 35mm Kodachrome slide) that in 2002 they used her iris pattern in the photo to verify that they had found the correct woman.
Any photograph with sufficient resolution and contrast to show fingerprints will work. The point being that although the prints may not show up to the eye in the photo, processing it to enhance the size and contrast may make the prints stand out. I myself have taken a photo of a lecturer using a telephoto, and noticed in post-processing that the photo had sufficient resolution that I could barely discern fingerprint ridges he'd left on the cup he'd been drinking from.
Biometric security based on something you're leaving copies of everywhere is a pretty stupid idea. It just hasn't been exploited enough for the general public to realize that it's stupid.
For one, a Hohmann Transfer is actually the least energy direct trajectory between two orbits. It was used for all interplanetary missions before Mariner 10, Pioneer 11, and the two Voyager spacecraft, when people got the idea and computing power made possible the calculation of gravity assist orbits which could get you there for even less energy. This has culminated in the discovery of the Interplanetary Transport network.
If you're willing to use more energy than a Hohmann Transfer (accelerating away from Earth, decelerating as you approach Mars) you can, resulting in an even shorter trip time. It's all about how much energy you're willing to burn.
Logically, if you tabulate the expected remaining years of life lost, rather than simply count the number of lives lost, then children and infants increase the degree of the tragedy. For this reason, 20 children dying because a preschool burned down is a greater tragedy than 20 elderly patients dying because a nursing home burned down.
Unlikely. It is extraordinarily difficult to crash a plane because you hit the coffin corner. The moment you stall, you lose altitude, and you're no longer in the coffin corner. A simple stall recovery, and you're back in normal flight. The A320 in particular is designed so the computer will automatically recover from stalls if the pilots simply release all controls. It takes severe disorientation or stupidity (e.g. one of the pilots on AF447 kept directing the plane to pitch up without telling the other pilot what he was doing, as the other pilot was trying to pitch it down to recover from the stall) for a plane to crash because of this.
That would leave them scratching their heads trying to figure out what was wrong, as it looks just like the normal command prompt but produces the same "error" message after every command typed.
Well, I don't know about that, but at least it was better than Oculus Rift, if images in TFA are anything to go by. Something like semi-spherical 320 by 240 degrees with 3D zone of maybe 120 by 240 degrees in the middle, or thereabouts.
20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair separated by 1 arc-minute. So at 2 pixels per minute, your 320x240 degree angle of view translates into 38,400 x 28,800 pixels.
The human eye gets away with it because only a tiny amount of the center of your vision has that resolution. The rest is a blurry, indistinct mess. Alas, Oculus Rift does not know where in that 320x240 degree field you are looking at so it can't take advantage of this fact. In the future, maybe we'll have head-mounted projector displays which track where your eyes are looking, and project a high-resolution image only at that spot, while the rest of the field is projected at low-resolution. It would certainly reduce the burden on 3D graphics hardware.
Lemme guess - you're a guy who carries his smartphone in his pocket, and is incapable of imagining any other use scenario.
The phone is designed with the Asian market in mind. Phablets are insanely popular there among women, who put a cover on them and carry them in their purses. The problem is that if you get a text, you have to pull the phone out of your purse and flip open the cover to read it. A cover with a cutout for the screen is one solution, but still requires taking out the phone to read the text. Putting a display on the edge allows you to read the text while the phone is still in the purse.
I'm skeptical it was North Korea too. But they do in fact have a huge motive. You know how Thailand's government gets their panties in a bunch every time a foreigner somehow mocks their king? Multiply that by a hundred. That's how much North Korea reveres their leader. Not just their government, but a good fraction of their people. They've had it drilled into their heads since birth that their leader is a god. They got upset at this commercial. Sony was gonna release a whole movie.
Fake reviews can be eliminated by forcing the reviewers to post a key code along with the review.
So many ways to break this... Someone mad that his morning coffee was cold could lie and say the room was dirty, the bed uncomfortable, the hotel noisy, and the food was bad. Or a restaurant could give out $10 discounts for any customer coming back with proof that they posted a 5 star review (yes I have actually seen a store offering this). All the key codes would do is assure that the review was written by someone who'd actually been there. It doesn't thwart fake reviews.
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I paid $100 for a 512MB compact flash card in late 2004, or $200 per GB. I just ordered a 32GB USB 3.0 flash drive for $13, or $0.41 per GB. A 500-fold decrease in cost in just 10 years.
The affordability also hinges on income (productivity per person), which has more than doubled since the 1940s. Energy prices are much more stable than RAM prices. But my point is, just because 10x more expensive is prohibitively expensive today doesn't mean it will continue to be so into the future.
Just as one shouldn't prognosticate by extrapolating current rates of progress into the future, neither should one assume that progress will come to a screeching halt and extrapolate into the future by using a horizontal line. Is hypersonic transport impractical today? Yes. Will it become practical in the future? I'm inclined to disagree with TFA and think it will become affordable. To believe otherwise is to concede we're going to be stuck on this rock forever. Excuse me for being the type who doesn't like to just give up.
Is there some straightforward way to give a Windows backup program a different user/priority, so that the backup files it generates can only be accessed/modified by itself? That way a rogue virus or even user stupidity cannot delete or encrypt the backups. It know how to do this with Unix, but my Windows-fu is not as strong.
Yes I know keeping an offline backup is best, but we're talking about my mom and dad here. They're not gonna hook up an external drive once a week. If the backup isn't completely automated, it's not going to get made.
You have this backwards. The accused is presumed innocent until proven otherwise (the wishes of copyright holders notwithstanding). The burden of proof is thus upon Malibu Media to prove he knew about their intent to sue before he had the drive recycled.
Personally I would say a mailed notice from Comcast is insufficient - lots of us have gotten those, whether correctly or in error, and nothing has happened. So it's insufficient to act as a notice to preserve evidence. I'd say a certified notification letter which must be followed through with an actual lawsuit or settlement is the minimum. Another party should not have the power to compel me to modify my behavior (hang onto equipment I'd otherwise throw out) for the mere cost of a 49 cent stamp.
Is that everyone has some skeletons in the closet they're hiding. Yours might not be as severe as someone else's, or it may be from back when you were a stupid teen. But there's something that would embarrass you or tarnish your reputation if it were made public. Maybe you tried smoking weed in college, or you had sex with your high school GF when she (and you) were technically underage, or all manner of other things.
So if facts uncovered by doxing becomes accepted as legitimate grounds for disqualification, then the only people who will get the good job positions or get elected will be the liars who are exceptionally good at covering up their history or shifting blame onto others.
Instead, what needs to happen is for people to stop demanding perfection from others. Everyone is human, and humans are fallible. Someone who claims to have never failed, to have always done the right thing, is almost certainly a liar, a con artist.. That's what should raise suspicion about someone's fitness for a job or elected office - the absence of any skeletons in the closet. If society can change to where we accept that we're all flawed and that a few flaws shouldn't automatically disqualify us, then doxing largely becomes irrelevant and IMHO our world will become a much nicer place.
One of the wrinkles that possibly justifies a lawsuit for this is that Apple doesn't give regular users a way to downgrade the iOS version. So if your device had a "comfortable" amount of free space, an auto-update could put you into a "critically short of space" state with no way for most owners to revert the device to the old iOS. Thus forcing you to upgrade to a new device sooner than you expected. Relevant quote from TFA:
"These misrepresentations and omissions cause these consumers to 'upgrade' their Devices from iOS 7 (or other operating systems) to iOS 8," it said. "Apple fails to disclose that upgrading from iOS 7 to iOS 8 will cost a Device user between 600 MB and 1.3 GB of storage space - a result that no consumer could reasonably anticipate."
Expect a thank you for lifting the undeveloped world out of poverty?
Think about it. Why are people wage slaves? Because they're paid what we in developed nations would consider to be less-than-starvation wages. Why do they stop being wage slaves? Because the industrialization those wage slave jobs brought modernized the country and kick-started their economy, causing wages to rise until they were no longer considered wage slaves.
That's how a market economy eliminates poverty. It interprets low wages in a region as an economic inefficiency, and sends jobs there until the resulting development causes wages to rise to match wages in other regions. A minimum wage works in an already-developed country, but forcing a minimum wage on an undeveloped country just guarantees they'll remain undeveloped until they can lift themselves out of poverty on their own (a process that took hundreds of years in the West). That's why China has been artificially keeping the value of the Yuan low - to effectively lower the wages its citizens are making, which attracts more western investment and development, which helps their economy industrialize and grow even faster. The fact that they're losing jobs to other countries with lower wages means this strategy has worked.
They're more common than you'd think. This isn't the first movie to be sent to North Korea. These groups (many of them staffed and financially backed by North Korean defectors) have been sending a steady diet of South Korean dramas and K-pop to North Korea for several years now. It's actually what convinced many of them to defect - it made them realize their government had been lying to them about South Korea being a pauper nation.
Not really. The fair use provision here is if the copyrighted work is newsworthy. The fact that the emails have been leaked is big news, but the emails themselves are not necessarily newsworthy.
If the emails are just boring everyday emails of people at work, then copyright would still apply. Ironically, if the email were scandalous or embarrassing to Sony, then it would be fair use to publish them because the revelation would be newsworthy. So all a DMCA notice accomplishes is forcing people to dig through the emails for dirt before publishing. Not necessarily the effect Sony wants.
The problem with isolation is that some twit of an employee decides it's inconvenient, sneaks in a couple wifi routers, and sets up an authorized bridge.
Proper security relies not just on IT locking everything down. IT has to be willing to go the extra mile to do so in a way which minimally hampers other employees from doing their jobs. Fail at that and you get employees setting up rogue bridges and networks. Unfortunately, some IT people I've encountered act like they're on a power trip and control "their" network with an iron fist. One place I visited wouldn't even let you plug in flash drives to transfer data (we tried to get authorization and were told it was never allowed). So that data ended up being sent as an oh-so-secure email attachment. Unencrypted since the system interpreted an encrypted zip file as malware and auto-deleted it.
Putting a super-secure lock on a door is pointless if it makes getting around the workplace so difficult that everyone just uses a trash can to hold door open all the time. IT needs to make things secure while minimally impeding other employees from doing their jobs. No that's not easy. If it were easy, it wouldn't be a high-paying job.
Why yes, I still have my 5 MB PCMCIA flash drive for my HP200LX from 20 years ago. In fact it still has a copy of Ultima 3 on it.
I suspect on a $/MB basis, the remaining functional flash memory cells are much cheaper than plated wire memory. And tape suffers from moving parts and degradation over time.
I think the real solution to this will be developing methods to identify failing cells and have the controller write around them. Kinda like HDDs mark bad sectors. Heck, you could probably buy dozens of banks of flash memory for the same cost as plated wire memory, and switch to a new bank as soon as the old one developed too many failures. (System code isn't usually a problem, as that's written to ROM or EEPROM.)
There's actually a way to do this while complying with the airlines' rules. If you know you need to make two trips to the same destination, you simply book two cross-flights. The airlines let you book one year in advance. Say you need to make a two one-day trips from L.A. to NYC, one in February, one in November. You book two flights as such:
Flight 1 on airline A
LA -> NYC in February
NYC -> LA in November
Flight 2 on airline B
NYC -> LA in February
LA -> NYC in November
In February, you take the first leg of flight 1 and first leg of flight 2. In November you take the second legs. A variant on this uses a refundable fare - those let you change the dates of the second leg, in case you aren't sure when you're going to make the second trip. Lately though, most refundable fares have risen to more than 2x discount fares, making that strategy pointless. You can use nonrefundable fares and pay the ~$100 fee to change the second leg flight date, but usually $200 ends up being more than you save by booking a weekend stay.
These tricks work because airlines know companies don't have a choice when it comes to business travel - they must travel. So they can get away with charging business travelers a higher fare. Consequently the fares are set up in order to single out business travelers from regular travelers. The lower fares for a Saturday night stay and Tue-Wed-Thu travel are all a part of this. Business travelers hate staying the weekend (they'd rather be home with their family). And most businesses try to get the most bang for the buck from the trip by making it a Monday through Friday trip.
The great irony of the space age is that is precisely what the U.S. was working on in parallel to Sputnik. Before Sputnik ever went up, clearer-thinking people analyzed the problem, and came to the same conclusion you just did - it's cheaper to strap your rocket to a plane, haul it up to 45,000 ft, and launch it into space from there.
But then the Soviets put a man into orbit, Kennedy said we should land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, and suddenly doing it quickly took precedence over doing it economically. That's led us 5 decades down the "wrong" technology path (simpler, quicker, but more expensive). And only in the last decade have we been seriously reconsidering the cheaper technology path. I often wonder where we would be if there had been no space race. Would we already have hypersonic transports taking you halfway around the world in an hour? Would space travel be more commonplace because it'd be so much cheaper?
This. Phones need to be upgraded every 2-3 years to keep up with the new cellular standards which roll out (moar speed). Laptops need to be upgraded every 3-5 years to run the latest software or games.
Tablets are consumption devices. You bought it to read an ebook or browse a website. It'll still be able to do those things 10 years from now. The early tablets (single core, unable to handle 1080p video) were upgraded much more quickly because there were compelling performance gains. But the current crop of tablets are going to last until they break.
The only compelling reason to upgrade a tablet that I can think of in the near future is a bigger screen (12"-13" screen allows you to replicate letter- or A4-sized paper at full size) without extra weight (the 12" tablets are still around 1.5 pound, vs 1 pound for the 10" tablets). And even there, they're in danger of being displaced by PCs like the Surface Pro 3. I've been waiting for a good 12" tablet so I can haul around all my sheet music - you can't compensate for a smaller screen by holding the tablet closer to your face when you're reading sheet music. But compared to a Galaxy Tab 12.2 (12.2", 1.62 lbs, A15, 3GB RAM, 32GB storage, $550), the low-end Surface Pro 3 (12", 1.76 lbs, i3, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage, $699 on sale over the holidays) is awfully tempting.
Unlike mining or drilling (which permanently removes the minerals or petroleum from the ground), deforestation only happens when the rate at which you're harvesting trees exceeds the rate at which they grow back. If Canada is properly managing their forests and they're not losing tree biomass, then there is no deforestation occurring regardless of how much wood the U.S. buys from Canada. (Deforestation in Brazil has much more to do with them trying to increase agricultural land than exporting wood to the U.S.)
Along the same lines, we need to stop recycling paper ASAP. Throwing away paper in landfills is a form of sequestering carbon underground. Drilling and burning oil removes carbon from the ground. Throwing away paper puts it back. (This assumes a proportional increase in reforestation efforts to satisfy the greater demand for new paper. If you throw it away without planting more trees than you did before, then recycling is in fact better.)
Actually I'm not sure if this was a double-troll by Tyson, or if he's making the same mistake as those he's (and you are) criticizing - jumping to conclusions which support your pre-established beliefs because of your ignorance. Newton was deeply religious. People just assume he was atheist because, hey, father of modern science and all. And we all know it's impossible for anyone who is rational to be religious too, right?
In that respect, a more enlightened viewpoint would be that religion and science are mostly orthogonal, and it's possible to be a strong supporter of both. Oh, and that people make mistakes, and a simple mistake doesn't automatically mean you should be offended, nor does it immediately invalidate everything else they say or believe. The world would be a much nicer place if people (both religious fundies and ardent atheists) would get that.
Why do you need to evaluate the credibility of something that's obvious? A similar technique was already used to confirm the identity of the woman in the famous National Geographic photo of the Afghan Girl. The photo was taken before iris scanning was practical as biometric security. But the photo contained enough detail (on 35mm Kodachrome slide) that in 2002 they used her iris pattern in the photo to verify that they had found the correct woman.
Any photograph with sufficient resolution and contrast to show fingerprints will work. The point being that although the prints may not show up to the eye in the photo, processing it to enhance the size and contrast may make the prints stand out. I myself have taken a photo of a lecturer using a telephoto, and noticed in post-processing that the photo had sufficient resolution that I could barely discern fingerprint ridges he'd left on the cup he'd been drinking from.
Biometric security based on something you're leaving copies of everywhere is a pretty stupid idea. It just hasn't been exploited enough for the general public to realize that it's stupid.
For one, a Hohmann Transfer is actually the least energy direct trajectory between two orbits. It was used for all interplanetary missions before Mariner 10, Pioneer 11, and the two Voyager spacecraft, when people got the idea and computing power made possible the calculation of gravity assist orbits which could get you there for even less energy. This has culminated in the discovery of the Interplanetary Transport network.
If you're willing to use more energy than a Hohmann Transfer (accelerating away from Earth, decelerating as you approach Mars) you can, resulting in an even shorter trip time. It's all about how much energy you're willing to burn.
Logically, if you tabulate the expected remaining years of life lost, rather than simply count the number of lives lost, then children and infants increase the degree of the tragedy. For this reason, 20 children dying because a preschool burned down is a greater tragedy than 20 elderly patients dying because a nursing home burned down.
Unlikely. It is extraordinarily difficult to crash a plane because you hit the coffin corner. The moment you stall, you lose altitude, and you're no longer in the coffin corner. A simple stall recovery, and you're back in normal flight. The A320 in particular is designed so the computer will automatically recover from stalls if the pilots simply release all controls. It takes severe disorientation or stupidity (e.g. one of the pilots on AF447 kept directing the plane to pitch up without telling the other pilot what he was doing, as the other pilot was trying to pitch it down to recover from the stall) for a plane to crash because of this.
That was too obvious, and the store employee would kill the program them moment they saw it.
10 PRINT ">";
20 INPUT A$
30 PRINT "ERROR: RADIO SHACK COMPUTER DETECTED"
40 PRINT "OPERATING SYSTEM DISABLED"
50 GOTO 10
That would leave them scratching their heads trying to figure out what was wrong, as it looks just like the normal command prompt but produces the same "error" message after every command typed.
20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair separated by 1 arc-minute. So at 2 pixels per minute, your 320x240 degree angle of view translates into 38,400 x 28,800 pixels.
The human eye gets away with it because only a tiny amount of the center of your vision has that resolution. The rest is a blurry, indistinct mess. Alas, Oculus Rift does not know where in that 320x240 degree field you are looking at so it can't take advantage of this fact. In the future, maybe we'll have head-mounted projector displays which track where your eyes are looking, and project a high-resolution image only at that spot, while the rest of the field is projected at low-resolution. It would certainly reduce the burden on 3D graphics hardware.
Lemme guess - you're a guy who carries his smartphone in his pocket, and is incapable of imagining any other use scenario.
The phone is designed with the Asian market in mind. Phablets are insanely popular there among women, who put a cover on them and carry them in their purses. The problem is that if you get a text, you have to pull the phone out of your purse and flip open the cover to read it. A cover with a cutout for the screen is one solution, but still requires taking out the phone to read the text. Putting a display on the edge allows you to read the text while the phone is still in the purse.
I'm skeptical it was North Korea too. But they do in fact have a huge motive. You know how Thailand's government gets their panties in a bunch every time a foreigner somehow mocks their king? Multiply that by a hundred. That's how much North Korea reveres their leader. Not just their government, but a good fraction of their people. They've had it drilled into their heads since birth that their leader is a god. They got upset at this commercial. Sony was gonna release a whole movie.
So many ways to break this... Someone mad that his morning coffee was cold could lie and say the room was dirty, the bed uncomfortable, the hotel noisy, and the food was bad. Or a restaurant could give out $10 discounts for any customer coming back with proof that they posted a 5 star review (yes I have actually seen a store offering this). All the key codes would do is assure that the review was written by someone who'd actually been there. It doesn't thwart fake reviews.