I will add that the 1.62 / 0.27 example, despite being horribly worded, resolves into (0.25 + 0.02) * 6 = 1.5 + 0.12. The problem is set up to be easy with the answer being an integer, but the methodology is exactly what I use to either estimate or solve exactly more complex division in my head. Turn it into a simpler multiplication problem, estimate what number you need to multiply by to get the two to match, then account for any error introduced by the simplification.
0.25 * n = 1.62; what's a good value for n? 6 seems like it might work since 0.25 * 6 = 1.5. Then figure out the error. 0.02 * 6 = 0.12, add that to 1.5 and the exact value is 1.62, which happens to be the number I was trying to get. As the problem is worded, n is the number of groupings.
This is the sort of stuff which is easy if you approach math by understanding what the numbers represent, rather than view numbers as something to punch into an algorithm or calculator. I'm surprised and glad to hear they're teaching it.
... good to see that others have finally followed apple's lead (and google's with the chromebook) and realised that 16x9 isn't the be all and end all, and closer-to-square aspect can actually fit more content. It's not just about movies.
Closer-to-square absolutely sucks for content. If you look at any publications which actually approach square (e.g. magazines), you'll see that although the page is close to square, they break up the text into columns. Because square sucks for the actual content.
4:3 is the old NTSC TV standard, which Apple uses on their iPad for some reason. In portrait mode it closely matches a letter-sized sheet of paper, but only if you include the margins (the parts of the paper where there is no content). I don't know about you, but I don't want any of my expensive screen space being taken up by empty margins. If you consider the screen bezel to be analogous to the margins, then a 3:2 is a closer match for letter-sized content-bearing area, and 16:10 is a closer match for A4-sized content-bearing area.
16:9 or 16:10 works better on larger devices, as a compromise between displaying one document/video and displaying two documents side-by-side. The golden ratio,1.618, which many art formats aim for, sits right between 16:10 and 16:9. That's the reason you see so much content produced which best fits those aspect ratios.
3:2 is the old 35mm film standard. It's probably a good target for smaller devices where you won't be putting two documents side-by-side.
That's the criticism, well maybe that's too strong a word... That's the critique I've had of Slashdot's moderating system. By allowing both up-votes and down-votes, you create a system where the voice of the majority can drown out the voice of the minority. I've often seen people here express the mistaken belief that if a minority viewpoint is introspective or informative, it will survive the unfair downvotes and rise to the top. It doesn't work that way.
The average ranking is not rank = up - down. It's rank = p1*up - p2*down. Where p1 is the size of the population which would rank it up, and p2 is the size of the population which would rank it down. A minority viewpoint consequently gets a disproportionate number of unfair downvotes simply because it's a minority viewpoint, and thus has to garner a lot more upvotes just to obtain an equal ranking to a majority viewpoint.
For an apolitical, non-religious example, consider Windows vs. Linux. Say Windows users outnumber Linux users 50:1. Now imagine if a search engine let you rate search results based on whether they were useful or not useful, which is then used to prioritize subsequent search results. In every population, there's going to be an idiot segment who votes stuff down simply because they don't like it, not because it was inaccurate or irrelevant it was to their query. Consequently, if a search for hard disk repartitioning brings up four Windows sites and one Linux site as the top results, the Linux site is going to have 50x as many downvotes from those idiot users who never specified Windows in their search but were upset that an "irrelevant" Linux site was included in the search results. If the idiot segment of the Windows population exceeds 2% (numerically equivalent to 100% of the Linux population), that Linux site will end up with a negative rating regardless of how useful or informative it is.
I say "criticism" is too strong a word because neither way is the "right" way to do it. They are just different. A moderating/ranking system which only allows upvotes simply generates different results from a moderating system which allows both upvotes and downvotes. Sometimes the former is more useful; sometimes the latter is more useful. The important thing is to understand the limitations of both and how it will bias the rankings, and not fall into the mistaken belief that a minority viewpoint has just as easy a time reaching +5 on Slashdot as a majority viewpoint. If a contrary viewpoint reaches +5 on Slashdot, it must be making a helluva good point.
3D gaming is starting to look like just another "Gold plated speaker wire" guy hobby as everyone moves to mobile devices.
Only for the short-term. In a 25-year timeframe, the tech needed for 3D gaming is going to become the most important branch in the computer industry. Why? Because we'll need it to drive holographic display technology. To generate a hologram in real-time, you need to convert a virtual 3D scene to a 2D interference pattern. Transmit that pattern to a display, shine the appropriate light at it, and you have yourself a hologram. Holographic film is about 4000 lines per mm, so the 3D hardware will have to be good enough to drive a display on the order of a million by million pixels in order to generate a hologram. We still have a lot of R&D to do in 3D graphics to make this a reality.
Just to put some perspective on this, the Shuttle was designed to launch NRO spy satellites. The entire reason its cargo bay was as large as it was was so it could carry a spy satellite into orbit. Hubble was also designed to fit in this bay, so coincidentally ended up being almost the exact same size as a spy satellite.
Since the Shuttle began operating, 16 such spy satellites have been launched into orbit (not all aboard the shuttle - some go into polar orbits and are launched from Vandenberg AFB). 13 KH-11, 2 Misty, 1 EIS. So that's basically 16 Hubble-like satellites for spying vs. 1 Hubble for exploration (though to be fair there have been 5 service missions to Hubble). And I'm not including the spy satellites which used film and were operational until the 1980s. The NRO even donated two Hubble-sized optical assemblies (main and secondary mirrors) believed to be from unused or canceled spy satellites to NASA.
This probably comes across like an anti-NRO rant. I don't mean it that way - the NRO is simply doing the job it's been tasked with by our politicians. I'm just pointing out that our mistrust and suspicion of each other consumes a helluva lot more of our time and money than our desire to explore and discover new things (not created by other people).
Actually, I think there's a simple solution to this for Google. I think this is a terrible decision, but if the only thing Google has to do is comply, well... Next time you do a search on Google, try clicking on the little button that says "Search Tools". That drops down an additional set of options, one of which is to limit your search by date. Mind you this isn't 100% accurate (I'm not sure how they figure out the date, whether it's based on what the page reports, or whether Google is recording when the page changes.
It seems to me all Google has to do is restrict EU searches so everything older than 10 years or whatever period the EU data retention laws specify is simply unsearchable there. You will never get a document older than the law allows as a search result. No need to respond to individual requests, simply remove everything which could be challenged under this decision. Google gets a quick and cheap way to comply with the ruling. The EU gets to deal with the consequences of this court-induced historical amnesia (e.g. I suspect the Internet Wayback Machine is just outright illegal in the EU now).
The thing is, if you are heavily tied to Adobe products, paying $50/month to ALWAYS have the latest version is actually a good deal, from a usability perspective.
That's true if you were always using the latest version. I usually skipped a version or two before upgrading though. That lowered my monthly amortized cost for the software to considerably below the CC monthly fees.
I haven't yet decided what I'll do. Ever since I bought Lightroom, I haven't used Photoshop anywhere near as much. But when I use it, it's because I really need it. Adobe's answer is that I should pay for a month of PS when I happen to need it. But sometimes all I need it for is to make a 5 second change to some work I'd previously done. It'd really stick in my craw to have to pay for a month just for that. I suspect I'll just toss CS6 onto a virtual machine and keep it around forever, rather than suffer artificial editing emergencies caused by Adobe's licensing demands.
FWIW, I have encountered a problem at a remote location without Internet, where I had to system restore and it undid the activation of my CS3 installation. The only other option I had would've been to make a long-distance call to Adobe to manually activate it. Fortunately I'd been anal and kept a virtual machine image of my previous laptop around, which happened to have PS CS1 on it. So this sort of stuff could happen pre-CC too. It's more a matter of degrees rather than a binary good/bad. Except VMs - those are always good to have around.
No, it only increases Adobe's control over their own software. This does not give them control over you. You can still do pretty much whatever you want with yourself or your own property.
More to the point, Creative Cloud is pretty obviously aimed at thwarting piracy of Photoshop and their other apps. Based on the few dozen people I know, the Adobe apps are the most-pirated software out there (aside from maybe pirated Windows installations). I think it was too extreme a response, swinging control too far in Adobe's favor. But it's rather disingenuous to claim with horror that it was about controlling their users. It was about controlling their illegitimate users.
That's been the problem all along. The U.S. spends more per student than any other OECD nation. The problem has never been lack of funding. The problem has always been administration sucking up so much money that an insufficient amount reaches the classroom and students.
The "we need to spend more money on education" wardrum is just manipulation by administrators. They starve the teachers of money, then encourage them to go out and proselytize to the public with sob stories about how they had to buy teaching materials with their own money because the school is so strapped for cash. When the public approves the spending increase, the administrators then siphon off even more money.
Google isn't the one presenting the data. They're just indexing it. If you prevent search engines from indexing the data, the out-of-date data is still out there. Readily available for anyone who's doing a background check using resources other than a public search engine to find and turn down your loan application.
So this decision actually makes it harder for the little guy to find out there's bad data about him floating around out there, so he can go about getting it fixed. The next guy in his shoes will just get his loan or credit card application denied. He'll have no clue he was denied because the actual data repositories have incorrect data on him, and he'll have no easy/free way to figure out what that bad data might be and who is housing it.
The question is would letting GM go bankrupt have resulted in more than 10 billion in losses in terms of lost payroll taxes and increased social assistance benefits for all of the GM workers and all of the assorted companies that also would have gone under?
The thing is, that's precisely the wrong argument to make. It's actually the opposite of how it works.
When a company goes bankrupt (chapter 7, liquidation), it doesn't vanish from the economic landscape leaving all its employees without jobs and its subcontractors without work. It gets chopped up and the parts get sold off to the highest bidder. The parts live on even though the whole does not - bought up by Ford, Toyota, Honda, etc. or even someone else wishing to start a new automaker, who would incorporate those factories and subcontractors into their own product lines. The relative value of those parts during a bankruptcy sale are correlated to the health of the original company. If the parts sell for close to the original value of the company, it was actually pretty healthy. And, say, 80%-90% of the employees and subcontractors would've retained their jobs and contracts as part of a new company. OTOH, if the parts bring in little money and lots of employees and subcontractors lose their jobs and contracts, the company was in poor health. You are better off killing it off now, rather than allowing it to continue operating, accruing more losses every day.
So if GM going bankrupt would have resulted in minor losses and little effect on the economy, then it was a prime candidate for a bailout. In that case, the company was more or less healthy, and was just having a short-term cashflow problem. A prime candidate for a bailout to help tide it over during this rough patch.
But if GM going bankrupt would have resulted in massive losses and huge detrimental effects on the economy, that's a sign the company was incredibly unhealthy with massive waste and inefficiencies. Keeping it running is detrimental to the economy, and you want to kill it off ASAP with a bankruptcy. So claiming that a bankruptcy would've caused widespread devastation to the economy is actually an argument for a bankruptcy and against a bailout.
Fortunately, the Democrats happened to be wrong. GM was actually pretty healthy and only needed some cashflow to tide it over while it scaled down its operations and trimmed its product lines. GM going bankrupt would not have devastated the economy, which meant that a bailout was the proper thing to do.
These vehicles typically use glass spheres (containing air) for buoyancy. We also experimented with a ceramic "foam" - basically millions of tiny hollow glass beads glued together and molded to fit into unused portions of the vehicle. They're more reliable, but don't provide as much floatation for a given volume. Any equipment and electronics you have on board has to go inside the larger glass spheres, so you always have some of those aboard.
The founder of Benthos gave us a lecture on the tech. When one of them implodes, the energy released is the ambient pressure at depth times the volume. This is why you can't simulate an implosion in a tank - the moment the implosion begins, the pressure drops, and the energy release stops But at depth, the water simply fills in any lost volume with more water at the same pressure, and the energy release continues until the entire volume of air is crushed. The smaller sphere in the link (13 inch or 33 cm diameter) has an air volume of about 15 liters. At 9000 meters, the pressure is 90.57 MPa. So its implosion releases 1.36 MJ - about as much energy as 2/3rds of a stick of dynamite. The glass spheres which implode basically revert back to sand. You can imagine how much more energetic it is if something as large as a submarine implodes.
A typical sedan gets about 30 mpg. Figure the average car travels 15000 miles in a year, or 41 miles per day on average. That means it burns 1.37 gallons of gas each day.
A gallon of gas has about 120 MJ. Gasoline engines are about 25% efficient, so the 1.37 gallons of gas consumed represents 123.3 MJ lost as heat, and about 41 MJ of energy used to push the car each day.
Charging a battery is about 75%-85% efficient; call it 80%. Realistically you'd need another battery to sit at the carport charging (leaving the car parked there all day to charge means you can't drive it). This battery would also help even out the cloudy days with the sunny days. So since you're charging from battery-to-battery, you're hitting this 80% efficiency loss twice. Electric motors are about 90% efficient (that's peak, but then so is the 25% efficiency for an ICE). So for an EV to put 41 MJ into pushing the car, it needs 41/(.8*.8*.9) = 71.2 MJ sent to the carport's battery.
PV panels generate about 150 W/m^2 peak. Multiply by the average capacity factor for the U.S. of 0.145 to get 22 W/m^2 on average. Multiply by 24 hours and you get 1.9 MJ/m^2 per day.
So to charge your typical sedan EV entirely with solar power to drive it 41 miles per day, your carport would need 71.2/1.9 = 37.5 square meters of solar panels. Or 404 square feet for those in the U.S. That's a mighty big carport.
Why is such an emergency stop feature being added as a secondary function to a pre-existing button? Sure, use the Start button to turn off the engine under normal circumstances. But underneath it should be a mechanical switch which physically breaks the circuit carrying power to the fuel pump.
Yeah, anticipation or expectation is probably a big part of it. I was shopping at a supermarket and needed to check the price of some small jars of jam on the top shelf. The jars were sold in pairs, one atop the other and shrink-wrapped together, with the price printed on top. So I tipped one over to check the price.
In the back of my mind, I recall thinking "gee, wouldn't it be funny if I was imagining the shrink-wrap and they weren't sold in pairs, and by tipping it I would cause the top one to fall off. And then, that's exactly what happened. I had an image of a jar of jam hitting the floor, breaking, and making a mess, and a part of my brain screamed "NO, that's not gonna happen!" Before I even knew it, I had ducked down and caught the jar in mid-air at about shin level. A couple people who'd seen it happen gasped because of how quickly I reacted.
The shelves were about 6 ft, and the jars another 3 inches. So 75 inches in all, or about 1.9 meters up, and I caught it at about 0.25 meters off the ground. So total distance fallen was 1.65 meters. d = 0.5gt^2, so t = sqrt (2d/g) = sqrt(2*1.65/9.8) = 0.58 seconds. Figure 0.15 sec to react to the fall, and that leaves 0.43 sec to formulate a plan to catch the jar, move to position, and catch it. With horizontal movement I can see that being enough time, but this was a falling object. You cannot move your torso down - you have to stop supporting it and wait for gravity to pull it down. My hand rests about 75 cm off the ground, so my torso had to fall 0.5 meters before my hand could catch the jar where it did. sqrt(2*0.5/9.8) = 0.32 seconds minimum to drop to position. Probably more because I recall shooting my hand forward beneath the jar and letting it fall into my palm, indicating my torso had dropped more than 0.5 meters. I'll assume I was coordinated enough to guide my hand as my torso was dropping, so the catch itself didn't take any extra time.
0.58 - 0.15 - 0.32 = 0.11. Just 0.11 seconds at most for my brain to realize what was happening, formulate this plan to catch the jar in mid-air, and put it into action by beginning to drop my torso. I don't think my brain is that fast. It has to have been the anticipation, the "what if" scenario my brain had already thought through just before the jar began falling. The moment it realized the jar really was falling, it simply kicked in this plan that it had already thought up.
I had a friend who would always exaggerate the weight of the fish he caught. After years of listening to hist boasts, then weighing the fish later when we got home, I developed a heuristic of simply dividing any weight he claimed by 1.7 to get the actual weight.
The weird thing was, it was incredibly accurate. He may have exaggerated a lot, but he exaggerated consistently. After dividing by 1.7, his claimed weight was almost always within 10% of the actual weight.
If you're rooted, you can install XPrivacy. It doesn't try to block these apps, it just spoofs the data. So if I haven't given Swype permission to access location data, it will just get fed random locations all over the world every time it thinks it's getting my location.
Cell phone cameras have their place. However, if you're actually going someplace to take photos, they're not the tool you should be reaching for.
I have a leatherman for situations where I just need a bunch of tools handy, but when I do maintenance on my car, I grab my toolbox and not my leatherman. Sure, I could probably manage to get the oil plug out using the pliers tool on it, but I own a socket wrench and a set of metric sockets for a reason. When I'm going to change tires, I grab my breaker bar too, and my torque wrench for putting them back on.
It doesn't work like that. Your tires and the lug nuts are always the same size.
With a camera, if you pair a small lens with a small sensor, you can produce the exact same image size upon viewing. So long as the minimum conditions of diffraction/resolution, optical quality, and sufficient photons per pixel to keep noise below a threshold level are met, the images from a small camera (your leatherman) and a large camera (the socket wrench set) are indistinguishable. It's only in the more extreme cases (low light, telephoto) where the larger camera starts to pull ahead.
The images from a modern cell phone camera are competitive with the images from a DSLR from about 15 years ago. Sensor noise has been reduced and sensitivity increased. You can apply these improvements by either holding the sensor size (and pixel pitch) constant and getting much higher ISOs (we've gone from 1600 ISO as a max to 256,000 ISO as a max on DSLRs). Or you can hold ISO constant and reduce sensor size. Cell phone cameras just do the latter. As long as you aren't trying to make a telephoto or shoot in low light, the tiny lens size doesn't hurt you because we aren't yet close to the diffraction and resolution limits for the 20-40mm equivalent that's typically found on cell phone cameras. We still have some size reduction that's possible before we'll hit diffraction limits.
Because I'd rather shoot video on a dSLR which has far better optics and real physical zoom than a smartphone that has to cram everything into 7mm or less of space
The smaller lenses are actually easier and cheaper to grind to closer optical tolerances, simply because their surface area is so much smaller. With the larger optics of a DSLR lens, the costs either become astronomical for good optical quality ($1k+ minimum, $4k+ not uncommon), or you have to cut costs by sacrificing optical quality.
The practical limit really is how much light the sensor needs, at least for the focal lengths on most cell phone cameras. When you start to get to telephotos, the bigger lens is necessary due to the Rayleigh criterion. But at the typical 20-40mm equivalent focal lengths, the tiny lens on a cell phone camera is just fine; the ultimate manifestation being a pinhole camera which can take pictures despite not even having a lens. In fact, the only reason wide-angle lenses on DSLRs are so big is because you need to make room for the mirror to flip up. That mandates a retrofocus design (basically two lenses stacked on top of each other: a wide-angle + a projector to refocus that wide angle image at a further distance than the focal length). When you eliminate the mirror and turn the camera into a MLC (mirrorless equivalent of a DSLR) or film rangefinder, the wide-angle lenses are comparatively tiny. Exactly the same aperture to sensor size ratio as with cell phone cameras.
I've converted several old family VHS (and Beta/Hi8) tapes to digital. In my experience, s-video output makes a much bigger quality difference than the type or quality of player. Composite video (the yellow plug in the yellow, red, white RCA triplet) combines both luminosity (brightness) and chroma (color) into one signal, resulting in a lot of crosstalk (the shimmering "marching ants" when you display high-contrast lines and borders). S-video keeps these signals separate so there is no cross-talk. Makes for a much cleaner transfer to digital.
Of course if the original tape was recorded using a composite signal, then there's nothing you can do.
Because it was so obvious, everyone (or almost everyone) thought it was sure to be rejected by the USPTO so they didn't bother trying. I mean seriously, searching the device and the web at the same time? That's something you do any time you look for something. Yes you do it sequentially (because there's only one of you), but so does the computer. It just does it sequentially a whole lot faster so it appears to be simultaneously.
If the winner tends to stick with the same hand, while the loser tends to switch, doesn't that imply the loser will tend to win the next round? I mean, the only way the winner can win the next round by sticking with the same hand is if the loser also sticks with the same hand.
Slashdot Mirror
I will add that the 1.62 / 0.27 example, despite being horribly worded, resolves into (0.25 + 0.02) * 6 = 1.5 + 0.12. The problem is set up to be easy with the answer being an integer, but the methodology is exactly what I use to either estimate or solve exactly more complex division in my head. Turn it into a simpler multiplication problem, estimate what number you need to multiply by to get the two to match, then account for any error introduced by the simplification.
0.25 * n = 1.62; what's a good value for n? 6 seems like it might work since 0.25 * 6 = 1.5. Then figure out the error. 0.02 * 6 = 0.12, add that to 1.5 and the exact value is 1.62, which happens to be the number I was trying to get. As the problem is worded, n is the number of groupings.
This is the sort of stuff which is easy if you approach math by understanding what the numbers represent, rather than view numbers as something to punch into an algorithm or calculator. I'm surprised and glad to hear they're teaching it.
Closer-to-square absolutely sucks for content. If you look at any publications which actually approach square (e.g. magazines), you'll see that although the page is close to square, they break up the text into columns. Because square sucks for the actual content.
4:3 is the old NTSC TV standard, which Apple uses on their iPad for some reason. In portrait mode it closely matches a letter-sized sheet of paper, but only if you include the margins (the parts of the paper where there is no content). I don't know about you, but I don't want any of my expensive screen space being taken up by empty margins. If you consider the screen bezel to be analogous to the margins, then a 3:2 is a closer match for letter-sized content-bearing area, and 16:10 is a closer match for A4-sized content-bearing area.
16:9 or 16:10 works better on larger devices, as a compromise between displaying one document/video and displaying two documents side-by-side. The golden ratio,1.618, which many art formats aim for, sits right between 16:10 and 16:9. That's the reason you see so much content produced which best fits those aspect ratios.
3:2 is the old 35mm film standard. It's probably a good target for smaller devices where you won't be putting two documents side-by-side.
That's the criticism, well maybe that's too strong a word... That's the critique I've had of Slashdot's moderating system. By allowing both up-votes and down-votes, you create a system where the voice of the majority can drown out the voice of the minority. I've often seen people here express the mistaken belief that if a minority viewpoint is introspective or informative, it will survive the unfair downvotes and rise to the top. It doesn't work that way.
The average ranking is not rank = up - down. It's rank = p1*up - p2*down. Where p1 is the size of the population which would rank it up, and p2 is the size of the population which would rank it down. A minority viewpoint consequently gets a disproportionate number of unfair downvotes simply because it's a minority viewpoint, and thus has to garner a lot more upvotes just to obtain an equal ranking to a majority viewpoint.
For an apolitical, non-religious example, consider Windows vs. Linux. Say Windows users outnumber Linux users 50:1. Now imagine if a search engine let you rate search results based on whether they were useful or not useful, which is then used to prioritize subsequent search results. In every population, there's going to be an idiot segment who votes stuff down simply because they don't like it, not because it was inaccurate or irrelevant it was to their query. Consequently, if a search for hard disk repartitioning brings up four Windows sites and one Linux site as the top results, the Linux site is going to have 50x as many downvotes from those idiot users who never specified Windows in their search but were upset that an "irrelevant" Linux site was included in the search results. If the idiot segment of the Windows population exceeds 2% (numerically equivalent to 100% of the Linux population), that Linux site will end up with a negative rating regardless of how useful or informative it is.
I say "criticism" is too strong a word because neither way is the "right" way to do it. They are just different. A moderating/ranking system which only allows upvotes simply generates different results from a moderating system which allows both upvotes and downvotes. Sometimes the former is more useful; sometimes the latter is more useful. The important thing is to understand the limitations of both and how it will bias the rankings, and not fall into the mistaken belief that a minority viewpoint has just as easy a time reaching +5 on Slashdot as a majority viewpoint. If a contrary viewpoint reaches +5 on Slashdot, it must be making a helluva good point.
Only for the short-term. In a 25-year timeframe, the tech needed for 3D gaming is going to become the most important branch in the computer industry. Why? Because we'll need it to drive holographic display technology. To generate a hologram in real-time, you need to convert a virtual 3D scene to a 2D interference pattern. Transmit that pattern to a display, shine the appropriate light at it, and you have yourself a hologram. Holographic film is about 4000 lines per mm, so the 3D hardware will have to be good enough to drive a display on the order of a million by million pixels in order to generate a hologram. We still have a lot of R&D to do in 3D graphics to make this a reality.
Just to put some perspective on this, the Shuttle was designed to launch NRO spy satellites. The entire reason its cargo bay was as large as it was was so it could carry a spy satellite into orbit. Hubble was also designed to fit in this bay, so coincidentally ended up being almost the exact same size as a spy satellite.
Since the Shuttle began operating, 16 such spy satellites have been launched into orbit (not all aboard the shuttle - some go into polar orbits and are launched from Vandenberg AFB). 13 KH-11, 2 Misty, 1 EIS. So that's basically 16 Hubble-like satellites for spying vs. 1 Hubble for exploration (though to be fair there have been 5 service missions to Hubble). And I'm not including the spy satellites which used film and were operational until the 1980s. The NRO even donated two Hubble-sized optical assemblies (main and secondary mirrors) believed to be from unused or canceled spy satellites to NASA.
This probably comes across like an anti-NRO rant. I don't mean it that way - the NRO is simply doing the job it's been tasked with by our politicians. I'm just pointing out that our mistrust and suspicion of each other consumes a helluva lot more of our time and money than our desire to explore and discover new things (not created by other people).
Actually, I think there's a simple solution to this for Google. I think this is a terrible decision, but if the only thing Google has to do is comply, well... Next time you do a search on Google, try clicking on the little button that says "Search Tools". That drops down an additional set of options, one of which is to limit your search by date. Mind you this isn't 100% accurate (I'm not sure how they figure out the date, whether it's based on what the page reports, or whether Google is recording when the page changes.
It seems to me all Google has to do is restrict EU searches so everything older than 10 years or whatever period the EU data retention laws specify is simply unsearchable there. You will never get a document older than the law allows as a search result. No need to respond to individual requests, simply remove everything which could be challenged under this decision. Google gets a quick and cheap way to comply with the ruling. The EU gets to deal with the consequences of this court-induced historical amnesia (e.g. I suspect the Internet Wayback Machine is just outright illegal in the EU now).
That's true if you were always using the latest version. I usually skipped a version or two before upgrading though. That lowered my monthly amortized cost for the software to considerably below the CC monthly fees.
I haven't yet decided what I'll do. Ever since I bought Lightroom, I haven't used Photoshop anywhere near as much. But when I use it, it's because I really need it. Adobe's answer is that I should pay for a month of PS when I happen to need it. But sometimes all I need it for is to make a 5 second change to some work I'd previously done. It'd really stick in my craw to have to pay for a month just for that. I suspect I'll just toss CS6 onto a virtual machine and keep it around forever, rather than suffer artificial editing emergencies caused by Adobe's licensing demands.
FWIW, I have encountered a problem at a remote location without Internet, where I had to system restore and it undid the activation of my CS3 installation. The only other option I had would've been to make a long-distance call to Adobe to manually activate it. Fortunately I'd been anal and kept a virtual machine image of my previous laptop around, which happened to have PS CS1 on it. So this sort of stuff could happen pre-CC too. It's more a matter of degrees rather than a binary good/bad. Except VMs - those are always good to have around.
More to the point, Creative Cloud is pretty obviously aimed at thwarting piracy of Photoshop and their other apps. Based on the few dozen people I know, the Adobe apps are the most-pirated software out there (aside from maybe pirated Windows installations). I think it was too extreme a response, swinging control too far in Adobe's favor. But it's rather disingenuous to claim with horror that it was about controlling their users. It was about controlling their illegitimate users.
The U.S. spends just shy of $15k/yr on education per student, which is more than any other developed nation on earth. A quick google search shows that your $4221 figure is already in 2010 dollars. So spending per student has actually almost quadrupled since 1969.
That's been the problem all along. The U.S. spends more per student than any other OECD nation. The problem has never been lack of funding. The problem has always been administration sucking up so much money that an insufficient amount reaches the classroom and students.
The "we need to spend more money on education" wardrum is just manipulation by administrators. They starve the teachers of money, then encourage them to go out and proselytize to the public with sob stories about how they had to buy teaching materials with their own money because the school is so strapped for cash. When the public approves the spending increase, the administrators then siphon off even more money.
Google isn't the one presenting the data. They're just indexing it. If you prevent search engines from indexing the data, the out-of-date data is still out there. Readily available for anyone who's doing a background check using resources other than a public search engine to find and turn down your loan application.
So this decision actually makes it harder for the little guy to find out there's bad data about him floating around out there, so he can go about getting it fixed. The next guy in his shoes will just get his loan or credit card application denied. He'll have no clue he was denied because the actual data repositories have incorrect data on him, and he'll have no easy/free way to figure out what that bad data might be and who is housing it.
The thing is, that's precisely the wrong argument to make. It's actually the opposite of how it works.
When a company goes bankrupt (chapter 7, liquidation), it doesn't vanish from the economic landscape leaving all its employees without jobs and its subcontractors without work. It gets chopped up and the parts get sold off to the highest bidder. The parts live on even though the whole does not - bought up by Ford, Toyota, Honda, etc. or even someone else wishing to start a new automaker, who would incorporate those factories and subcontractors into their own product lines. The relative value of those parts during a bankruptcy sale are correlated to the health of the original company. If the parts sell for close to the original value of the company, it was actually pretty healthy. And, say, 80%-90% of the employees and subcontractors would've retained their jobs and contracts as part of a new company. OTOH, if the parts bring in little money and lots of employees and subcontractors lose their jobs and contracts, the company was in poor health. You are better off killing it off now, rather than allowing it to continue operating, accruing more losses every day.
So if GM going bankrupt would have resulted in minor losses and little effect on the economy, then it was a prime candidate for a bailout. In that case, the company was more or less healthy, and was just having a short-term cashflow problem. A prime candidate for a bailout to help tide it over during this rough patch.
But if GM going bankrupt would have resulted in massive losses and huge detrimental effects on the economy, that's a sign the company was incredibly unhealthy with massive waste and inefficiencies. Keeping it running is detrimental to the economy, and you want to kill it off ASAP with a bankruptcy. So claiming that a bankruptcy would've caused widespread devastation to the economy is actually an argument for a bankruptcy and against a bailout.
Fortunately, the Democrats happened to be wrong. GM was actually pretty healthy and only needed some cashflow to tide it over while it scaled down its operations and trimmed its product lines. GM going bankrupt would not have devastated the economy, which meant that a bailout was the proper thing to do.
These vehicles typically use glass spheres (containing air) for buoyancy. We also experimented with a ceramic "foam" - basically millions of tiny hollow glass beads glued together and molded to fit into unused portions of the vehicle. They're more reliable, but don't provide as much floatation for a given volume. Any equipment and electronics you have on board has to go inside the larger glass spheres, so you always have some of those aboard.
The founder of Benthos gave us a lecture on the tech. When one of them implodes, the energy released is the ambient pressure at depth times the volume. This is why you can't simulate an implosion in a tank - the moment the implosion begins, the pressure drops, and the energy release stops But at depth, the water simply fills in any lost volume with more water at the same pressure, and the energy release continues until the entire volume of air is crushed. The smaller sphere in the link (13 inch or 33 cm diameter) has an air volume of about 15 liters. At 9000 meters, the pressure is 90.57 MPa. So its implosion releases 1.36 MJ - about as much energy as 2/3rds of a stick of dynamite. The glass spheres which implode basically revert back to sand. You can imagine how much more energetic it is if something as large as a submarine implodes.
A typical sedan gets about 30 mpg. Figure the average car travels 15000 miles in a year, or 41 miles per day on average. That means it burns 1.37 gallons of gas each day.
A gallon of gas has about 120 MJ. Gasoline engines are about 25% efficient, so the 1.37 gallons of gas consumed represents 123.3 MJ lost as heat, and about 41 MJ of energy used to push the car each day.
Charging a battery is about 75%-85% efficient; call it 80%. Realistically you'd need another battery to sit at the carport charging (leaving the car parked there all day to charge means you can't drive it). This battery would also help even out the cloudy days with the sunny days. So since you're charging from battery-to-battery, you're hitting this 80% efficiency loss twice. Electric motors are about 90% efficient (that's peak, but then so is the 25% efficiency for an ICE). So for an EV to put 41 MJ into pushing the car, it needs 41/(.8*.8*.9) = 71.2 MJ sent to the carport's battery.
PV panels generate about 150 W/m^2 peak. Multiply by the average capacity factor for the U.S. of 0.145 to get 22 W/m^2 on average. Multiply by 24 hours and you get 1.9 MJ/m^2 per day.
So to charge your typical sedan EV entirely with solar power to drive it 41 miles per day, your carport would need 71.2/1.9 = 37.5 square meters of solar panels. Or 404 square feet for those in the U.S. That's a mighty big carport.
Why is such an emergency stop feature being added as a secondary function to a pre-existing button? Sure, use the Start button to turn off the engine under normal circumstances. But underneath it should be a mechanical switch which physically breaks the circuit carrying power to the fuel pump.
Yeah, anticipation or expectation is probably a big part of it. I was shopping at a supermarket and needed to check the price of some small jars of jam on the top shelf. The jars were sold in pairs, one atop the other and shrink-wrapped together, with the price printed on top. So I tipped one over to check the price.
In the back of my mind, I recall thinking "gee, wouldn't it be funny if I was imagining the shrink-wrap and they weren't sold in pairs, and by tipping it I would cause the top one to fall off. And then, that's exactly what happened. I had an image of a jar of jam hitting the floor, breaking, and making a mess, and a part of my brain screamed "NO, that's not gonna happen!" Before I even knew it, I had ducked down and caught the jar in mid-air at about shin level. A couple people who'd seen it happen gasped because of how quickly I reacted.
The shelves were about 6 ft, and the jars another 3 inches. So 75 inches in all, or about 1.9 meters up, and I caught it at about 0.25 meters off the ground. So total distance fallen was 1.65 meters. d = 0.5gt^2, so t = sqrt (2d/g) = sqrt(2*1.65/9.8) = 0.58 seconds. Figure 0.15 sec to react to the fall, and that leaves 0.43 sec to formulate a plan to catch the jar, move to position, and catch it. With horizontal movement I can see that being enough time, but this was a falling object. You cannot move your torso down - you have to stop supporting it and wait for gravity to pull it down. My hand rests about 75 cm off the ground, so my torso had to fall 0.5 meters before my hand could catch the jar where it did. sqrt(2*0.5/9.8) = 0.32 seconds minimum to drop to position. Probably more because I recall shooting my hand forward beneath the jar and letting it fall into my palm, indicating my torso had dropped more than 0.5 meters. I'll assume I was coordinated enough to guide my hand as my torso was dropping, so the catch itself didn't take any extra time.
0.58 - 0.15 - 0.32 = 0.11. Just 0.11 seconds at most for my brain to realize what was happening, formulate this plan to catch the jar in mid-air, and put it into action by beginning to drop my torso. I don't think my brain is that fast. It has to have been the anticipation, the "what if" scenario my brain had already thought through just before the jar began falling. The moment it realized the jar really was falling, it simply kicked in this plan that it had already thought up.
I had a friend who would always exaggerate the weight of the fish he caught. After years of listening to hist boasts, then weighing the fish later when we got home, I developed a heuristic of simply dividing any weight he claimed by 1.7 to get the actual weight.
The weird thing was, it was incredibly accurate. He may have exaggerated a lot, but he exaggerated consistently. After dividing by 1.7, his claimed weight was almost always within 10% of the actual weight.
Drat. I was hoping some naive programmer had used an unsigned int16 to store the plane's altitude in feet, and the U2 rolled it over. :D
If you're rooted, you can install XPrivacy. It doesn't try to block these apps, it just spoofs the data. So if I haven't given Swype permission to access location data, it will just get fed random locations all over the world every time it thinks it's getting my location.
It doesn't work like that. Your tires and the lug nuts are always the same size.
With a camera, if you pair a small lens with a small sensor, you can produce the exact same image size upon viewing. So long as the minimum conditions of diffraction/resolution, optical quality, and sufficient photons per pixel to keep noise below a threshold level are met, the images from a small camera (your leatherman) and a large camera (the socket wrench set) are indistinguishable. It's only in the more extreme cases (low light, telephoto) where the larger camera starts to pull ahead.
The images from a modern cell phone camera are competitive with the images from a DSLR from about 15 years ago. Sensor noise has been reduced and sensitivity increased. You can apply these improvements by either holding the sensor size (and pixel pitch) constant and getting much higher ISOs (we've gone from 1600 ISO as a max to 256,000 ISO as a max on DSLRs). Or you can hold ISO constant and reduce sensor size. Cell phone cameras just do the latter. As long as you aren't trying to make a telephoto or shoot in low light, the tiny lens size doesn't hurt you because we aren't yet close to the diffraction and resolution limits for the 20-40mm equivalent that's typically found on cell phone cameras. We still have some size reduction that's possible before we'll hit diffraction limits.
The smaller lenses are actually easier and cheaper to grind to closer optical tolerances, simply because their surface area is so much smaller. With the larger optics of a DSLR lens, the costs either become astronomical for good optical quality ($1k+ minimum, $4k+ not uncommon), or you have to cut costs by sacrificing optical quality.
The practical limit really is how much light the sensor needs, at least for the focal lengths on most cell phone cameras. When you start to get to telephotos, the bigger lens is necessary due to the Rayleigh criterion. But at the typical 20-40mm equivalent focal lengths, the tiny lens on a cell phone camera is just fine; the ultimate manifestation being a pinhole camera which can take pictures despite not even having a lens. In fact, the only reason wide-angle lenses on DSLRs are so big is because you need to make room for the mirror to flip up. That mandates a retrofocus design (basically two lenses stacked on top of each other: a wide-angle + a projector to refocus that wide angle image at a further distance than the focal length). When you eliminate the mirror and turn the camera into a MLC (mirrorless equivalent of a DSLR) or film rangefinder, the wide-angle lenses are comparatively tiny. Exactly the same aperture to sensor size ratio as with cell phone cameras.
I've converted several old family VHS (and Beta/Hi8) tapes to digital. In my experience, s-video output makes a much bigger quality difference than the type or quality of player. Composite video (the yellow plug in the yellow, red, white RCA triplet) combines both luminosity (brightness) and chroma (color) into one signal, resulting in a lot of crosstalk (the shimmering "marching ants" when you display high-contrast lines and borders). S-video keeps these signals separate so there is no cross-talk. Makes for a much cleaner transfer to digital.
Of course if the original tape was recorded using a composite signal, then there's nothing you can do.
Because it was so obvious, everyone (or almost everyone) thought it was sure to be rejected by the USPTO so they didn't bother trying. I mean seriously, searching the device and the web at the same time? That's something you do any time you look for something. Yes you do it sequentially (because there's only one of you), but so does the computer. It just does it sequentially a whole lot faster so it appears to be simultaneously.
If the winner tends to stick with the same hand, while the loser tends to switch, doesn't that imply the loser will tend to win the next round? I mean, the only way the winner can win the next round by sticking with the same hand is if the loser also sticks with the same hand.
Apple was never the market share leader. The press just fawns over them like they were/are.