I suspect the entire public vs. private health care debate was just a red herring, meant to occupy and distract the voting public. The real problem is probably government corruption which passes laws and awards contracts based on cronyism and bribes, and thus inflates our health care costs. I suspect the ACA is just going to be more of the same, and won't help bring down our health care costs.
Also, I didn't know the stats on the sort of power they were getting out of that well... 36MWe of 450C steam from a single geothermal well is bloody insane. Hopefully this will prove to be economical and thus an incentive to stop destroying all of our rivers one after the next for hydroelectric power.
The number of places where you can do this above sea level is vanishingly small. Iceland sits on a rift where two continental plates meet (theorized to be where an asteroid made a lucky hit and punctured the seam between the plates). Consequently there's very little rock you have to drill through to break through the Earth's crust and reach a good-sized magma pocket. It's also why geothermal is so viable there (it practically heats the entire nation).
They only had to drill 2 km down. For most of the world, the crust is thinnest under the ocean floor - about 6 km thick. And the floating deep ocean drilling platforms you have to use makes this idea economically unfeasible. Even a lot of oil is too expensive to be extracted from down there (for comparison, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill released about 4.9 million barrels of oil in 87 days, or about 0.65 barrels/sec. 1 barrel of oil contains a bit more than 6 billion joules of energy, so at a 50% conversion efficiency that's about 2 GWe from a single well). On land you're typically looking at a crust thickness of 30-50 km. Even if you limit your selection to shallow magma pockets like beneath active volcanoes (e.g. Yellowstone), the number of places on earth where a geothermal well would be viable is a few hundred, maybe a few thousand. Far short of what's needed to power the world.
For geothermal to become viable on a global scale, you have to hope the oil companies continue to advance the state of the art in drilling technology to the point where a 30 km bore hole is cheap and easy.
And I think you should have paid more attention in your one class: literally doesn't mean what you think it does.
Actually, that was supposed to be the funny I was making (glad the mods got it). Prior to this study, one could only figuratively say that the course filled my brain up. Now we can say it literally filled my brain up.
Now that I re-read what I wrote, I can see the reason for your misunderstanding. I was attempting to use "fill up" as a verb, rather than "fill" as the verb and "up" as the adjective. This is pretty clear in the present tense because there is no endpoint for "up" in the present so the former is the only possible interpretation. But for consistency with English writing norms, I changed it to past tense. When you do that, "filled up" implies the latter meaning. So you interpreted what I wrote as "filled up completely," in which case "literally" is the wrong term.
But I meant it as "the course was filling up" my brain. As in there's a finite amount of space there, and taking the course reduced the amount of remaining space. It just happened in the past. Which is why "literally" is used correctly. If I had it to do over, I'd drop the "up". It works in present tense, but can lead to misinterpretation like yours in the past tense.
And my apologies to fans of Victorian-era English lit. I had to pick a course to be the bad guy to make the funny, and it's the course I've found least useful in my life. I can see people who go into fashion design making the same argument against the science or math classes they took.
*nods* litigation, while it has a wonderful DIY feel to it, puts the burden of enforcement on people with slim resources. Regulation on the other hand involves a funded group who's full time job involves ensuring entities are obeying the law.
Clearly you haven't tried to run a business in California. The amount of regulation here is ridiculous.
As with most things, either extreme is bad. And casting the argument by picking a data point far from the extreme you support can cause you to arrive at misleading conclusions. Too much regulation leads to wasted resources as everyone tries to comply with silly rules (why do I need a sign saying there are substances in my store known to cause cancer, when sunlight causes cancer?). A fair assessment of the situation will be based on the effectiveness/availability of litigation vs regulation. i.e. if a citizen litigating with 1% of his income can achieve better results than a business having to spend 1% of his income complying with a regulation, then probably litigation is the more cost-effective solution for that particular case.
Any time you see an argument which attempts to show one method is better than another in all cases, that should set off warning bells that either the argument is overreaching, or is deliberately ignoring mitigating factors. Proofs that apply to all cases are exceedingly rare, and typically end up enshrined in textbooks as fundamental theorems and natural laws. That certainly is not the case for business regulation.
The reason these things happen is because the real world is an immensely complex system - to say that significant acts of violence are "easily prevented" is to indulge in the fallacy of perfect knowledge after the fact.
Exactly. With perfect hindsight, it's "easy" to come up with a solution which would have caught the 9/11 hijackers when applied to that specific problem.
But you can't just look at the true positives. You also have to consider false positives, false negatives, and true negatives. The huge security framework that's been developed since 9/11 is justifiable if you look only at the true positives. But when you consider the damage caused by the false positives, the still very-large possibility of missing an attack via a false negative, the violations of privacy you do to the huge number of true negatives, and compare to the small benefit gained from the handful of true positives you catch, it is simply not worth it. You have to consider all the effects of the security measures, not just the effects when the measures work and catch a terrorist.
The gizmo they're describing is for acoustic transmission along a single axis. i.e. you have a pipe between points A and B, and A can hear B but B can't hear A.
You can do the same with impedance changes if A and B are in different mediums. The impedance difference due to the density change causes asymmetrical transmission to reflection ratios (bottom two animations). Consequently, if you're underwater in a swimming pool, you can hear all the noise from people talking in the air. But if you're outside the water, you can't hear sound originating in the water. (You can hear it a little, but nowhere near as well as sound from the air transmitted into the water.)
You can also do it with refraction changes if sound is allowed to propagate along two or more axes. The ocean creates a natural acoustic waveguide this way. If you're in the middle of the waveguide, you can easily hear things at the edge of the waveguide. Sound from the thing at the edge of the waveguide spreads radially, and consequently about half of it captured by the waveguide. Whereas sound from the middle of the waveguide reaches that point at the edge only at a very specific angle. Consequently the listener inside the waveguide gets greater amplification. (A conceptually easier example is a megaphone if you use it to try to communicate with someone standing far away. If you speak through it, all your acoustic energy is directed in one direction, before it reaches the end of the megaphone and is allowed to spread radially. Most of it continues in the direction you pointed the megaphone. If you listen through it though, the acoustic energy from the other person spreads radially first, then the tiny bit captured by the broad end of the megaphone is concentrated. Consequently the megaphone is much more effective as a speaking amplifier than it is as a listening amplifier.)
I don't think any of these methods allow for a perfect "one-way mirror" though, where someone at A can hear B, but B cannot hear anything from A.. I can see the device in TFA getting close. It uses moving air to guide sound one way - move the air faster than the speed of sound and in theory it can't go backwards. But I have to think there will be some sound transmission back along the stationary frame used to contain the moving air (not to mention in their device the air is moving in a circle).
For requiring me to take a course on Victorian-era English literature as part of my engineering degree graduation requirements? By forcing me to take the course, they literally filled my brain up with useless stuff which will accelerate the onset of age-related dementia.
BS. I have had at least 2/3 of my newer seagates fail. From 500 gigs to 2TB drives. At LEAST 10 in the last 3 years. In the same time I have had 1 of 6 hitachi and 2 of 18 western digital. I will NEVER buy another seagate drive.
The manufacturer who fared best in the Blackblaze report was Hitachi. Hitachi bought their hard drive division from IBM. IBM produced the Deskstar series of hard drives. The 75GXP had such an abysmally high failure rate it was nicknamed the Deathstar. Lots of folks swore they would never buy another IBM drive again.
Hard drive reliability varies a lot by model. The 60GXP which replaced the 75GXP was one of the more reliable drives out there at the time. You're really crippling yourself if you swear to boycott a manufacturer entirely.
There are larger capacity BDs, but they still don't amount to much storage. As others are speculating, this is probably a pre-emptive action by Facebook, so when they eventually get sued for not deleting someone's data, they can truthfully testify in court that it's logistically "too hard" to comply with a single user's delete request.
I really doubt that lawsuit would get very far. The only evidence against Paypal is the written testimony of a known criminal (the guy who conducted the attack). For all we know, the attacker could be a worker at Starbucks who lifted Mr. Hiroshima's credit card number when he bought coffee there. And he hates Paypal (like most of us do) so he's setting up a false trail leading to Paypal.
The real problem is using the credit card number as authentication of anything other than a credit card purchase. It's something that's seen by dozens if not hundreds of people in a month, and trivial to record with a quick photo. Absolutely silly to use it for identity verification.
Bingo. I think a lot of people too young to remember the Cold War look at China, see that it's Communist, and figure the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain was like that. It wasn't. The Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War was more like North Korea.
There is not a teacher shortage- there is an ability to pay teachers shortage. I know of plenty of teachers with state credentials who cannot find work because there either is not enough room in the schools or schools are pinching their budgets so tight that increasing class room size and decreasing teachers is a way to pay for it.
The problem is is an overabundance of administrators who siphon away money from teachers and kids. In the few school budgets I was able to dig up, administration payroll accounted for over half of total payroll.
As soon as the cost of chip and pin is less than the cost of security breaches they will switch.
That's just it. The credit card companies have shifted the cost of fraud to the merchants, so chip and pin will probably never be cheaper than the cost of a security breach to them.
That's the real fundamental problem here. The credit card companies have made the merchants pay for fraud, and the merchants have no leverage to improve the security of credit card machines or networks. Heck, most merchants don't even know how the machines work, they're a magic black box to them.
Any time you decouple profit from costs, you're just asking for trouble. Market solutions fail in these cases because there is no cost incentive for the person creating the problem to fix it. The classic example is pollution - the polluter reaps the profits from an activity while society bears the cost. Same thing is going on with credit cards. The credit card issuers create the card system, its network, and its (lack of) security, and reap the per-transaction profit; but the merchants pay for fraud. Consequently there is no economic incentive for the credit card issuers to improve the security of the system - doing so just increases their costs.
Full disclosure, I've purchased 2 HP laptops in the last two years, so I'm not bashing on HP.
Laptops don't count. Almost none of the laptops sold today are designed or made by the brand name they carry (including Apple). They're almost all made by a handful of little-known Taiwanese companies called ODMs (D is for design, as they also do the design work, not just the manufacturing like an OEM). Based on unit sales, they are the biggest PC companies, not HP or Lenovo or Dell. Even the 5th largest is bigger than HP.
As far as making personal computers before Apple and still doing it, I think it's a stretch to count HP because of a calculator, and I'm not even counting HP's attempt to get out of the PC market recently. The HP-150 that came out after they started working on the Mac... is that even in the same ballgame as the 1984 Mac, I don't think so.
HP and Compaq merged; they just decided to go with the HP name instead of Compaq. This wasn't like DEC, which atrophied to a fraction of its former self before being bought by Compaq. Or SGI which went bankrupt and the remains were bought by Rackable Systems who changed their name to Silicon Graphics. Compaq was suffering like all computer companies due to the dot-com bubble bursting, but it was still fundamentally sound and capable of running on its own when it merged with HP in 2002. HP even changed its stock ticker to HPQ to reflect that the new company was a combination of the two, not HP taking over Compaq.
Other systems such as railways and telephony are 'historical,' but have advanced into the current age, too. I think not being aware of the science behind such yesteryear technologies (or their histories) is not right. I feel it would be most beneficial to encourage kids to explore old technologies and perhaps even try simple simulations at home or school.
Do you know how:
your car's transmission works?
a steam engine works?
how to cultivate a farm crop?
how to butcher a cow?
how paper is made?
how ink is made?
how to weave cloth?
how to create a mortise and tenon joint?
how to track wild game?
how to start a fire without matches or a lighter?
A substantial portion of our increased standard of living is due to productivity gains from specialization. Instead of everyone having to waste time learning and become experts at making fire, hunting, farming, weaving clothes, etc., we specialized and traded the resulting goods amongst ourselves. The extra time saved allowed us to become even more expert in our specialization, advancing the state of the art for even more productivity gains. And freed us to have more free time for leisure and entertainment activities.
Reversing this and forcing kids to waste time learning stuff they don't need to know will decrease productivity and lower the standard of living. If the kid wants to go into the transportation industry, then he should learn about horse carriages and how the parts worked. If the kid wants to become a network/communications engineer, then he should learn about telephony. If the kid wants to learn about electron beams and phospor displays, then he should learn how old TV sets worked. Forcing all kids to learn this stuff just wastes time they could be spending learning what they will eventually do for a job.
So... an automatic system created an error, then an automated system fixed it.
The real fun starts when the first automatic system insists the change it created wasn't an error, and that in fact the "fix" created by the second automatic system is an error. The second system then starts arguing about all the problems caused by the first change, the first system argues how the benefits are worth the additional problems, etc. Eventually the exchange ends up with one system insulting the other system's programmer, and the other invoking an analogy to Hitler.
When that happens, then we can sit back and marvel at our own creation.
You have the right idea, but your numbers make no economical sense. Installing a bloatware app does not make the carrier 50% of your monthly service fee. It will be difficult to justify that if a carrier sues.
Instead, institute a common-sense rule. If the phone's owner does not have complete control of the phone and his monthly fee does not decrease when his contract is up, the phone is not truly his and he doesn't really own it. The carrier is still considered to be leasing it to the customer, and is liable for any warranty/repair costs. Much like when you lease an apartment, the landlord has to pay to repair anything that breaks down from regular use. Do this and the carriers will be tripping over themselves to be the first to unlock your phone, delete any uninstallable bloatware, and reduce your monthly service fee to remove the "phone subsidy" the moment you're out of contract.
I remember doing my physics papers on it and being able to put in math symbols and format and a bunch of other font and formatting things - all with a click of the mouse!
The scalable fonts also meant you could print banners by printing sideways on a dot-matrix printer, and not separating the individual pages. Perfect for printing title boards for posters or your science fair project.
I still don't understand why after practically inventing scalable fonts (Postscript) and scalable GUI elements in a drive for resolution independent displays (a 12-point font was always the same physical size regardless of your screen size or resolution setting), Apple abandoned them with iOS. It's like they deliberately chose to go backwards. Come to think of it, if you look at their 1984 commercial, they've pretty much become the monolithic overlord preaching conformity that they promised to overthrow in the commercial.
Gas cars are terribly [in]efficient. Even with 100% efficiency the carnot cycle limits efficiency of an ICE to around 30%, tack in all the other inefficiencies in the system and you only need to store about 20% of the energy in a gallon of gas to equal the people and goods moving power of a gasoline powered car.
Gasoline: 30% efficiency, 20% efficiency from fuel to wheels.
Electric: Coal plant 45% efficient, power line transmission 97% efficient, battery charging 75% efficient (in theory you can get this over 90% but not with quick charges), battery discharging efficiency unknown, electric motor efficiency 90%. Overall fuel to wheels efficiency: 0.45*0.97*0.75*0.90 = 0.295 or 30% without battery discharge efficiency losses.
The majority of the operational cost savings from EVs is not due to higher efficiency. It's because coal is so much cheaper than gasoline. Coal = 24 MJ/kg @ ~$65/short ton = $0.003/MJ. Gasoline = 26 MJ/L @ $4/gal = $0.041/MJ. About 10x more expensive per joule than coal.
In the future if we can get most of our electricity from nuclear or wind/solar, then things might look better for EVs from an energy efficiency standpoint. But based on our current electricity generation profile, EVs aren't really that much more environmentally friendly than gasoline. They're just cheaper to operate.
The best checking accounts are not only free, they actually pay you. Most of these accounts have no fees, no minimums (in fact they have a maximum). The banks/credit unions make money off of them when you use your debit card for purchases. The merchant pays part of the purchase price as a transaction fee to the bank/credit union (more than for a credit card). You just have to make a certain minimum number of debit card transactions each month. The hardest part is typically a direct deposit requirement, but if your employer doesn't offer direct deposit that requirement can usually be met with a monthly ACH transfer from another account at another bank (can be a savings account so no fee there too).
I know the prevailing thought here is that the poor are the victims and the banks/businesses are keeping them down. But in this case it really is the result of laziness. Not laziness as in unwillingness to work, but unwillingness to research simple ways like this to save (or make) money. The vast majority of people (not just the poor) are too lazy to fully investigate what bank account options are out there. They listen long enough to understand the concept of a "checking account", and just assume they're all the same and grab the most convenient one so they can get back to watching Oprah or playing WoW.
The banks literally make a mint because of this type of laziness. Here's the rule you have to remember: convenient = expensive. When the bank hands you a pamphlet listing their checking accounts, the simplest one they list first is going to be their biggest money-maker. Because it's convenient and it's first, the bank knows most people will go for it, so they make sure to load it up with fees or gotchas which will help them make money. You have to dig if you want to find the accounts which are more favorable to you.
If you RTFA, they break down the failure rates by model (no pun intended). There's a pretty huge variation between models (or at least the Seagate models). That's also what I saw in the StorageReview reliability database back when people were actively updating it (unfortunately you have to add a drive to the database to get access to it, so it was never very popular). The same manufacturer can make a gem and a stinker of a model. e.g. the IBM 75GXP (aka Deathstar) drives had one of the highest failure rates in the database. The drive which replaced it (60GXP I think) had one of the lowest failure rates in the database.
So it's more nuanced than "Seagate stinks, Hitachi rules." (Hitachi is a subsidiary of WD now, operating separately only because that was a condition China placed on them before they'd OK the merger.)
He's still an idiot, because I'm sure he had corrective lenses before Google Glass existed, and I'd wager that he still has that set somewhere.
I have both prescription glasses and prescription sunglasses. It is very easy to forget the other when I'm wearing one. When I go into restaurants and such at lunch, I often have to walk back out to my car to get my regular glasses after I notice how dark it is inside the restaurant.
Everyone knows that taking a video camera into a theater is a very stupid thing to do. It's about as dumb as "forgetting" that.380 in your belt as you walk into the airport.
Apparently you've "forgotten" that every smartphone has a video camera, and everyone brings those into the theater with them.
Microsoft should know it is screwing up when many nontech people actually start using 3rd party start menus/shells, HP does this Windows 7 thing and Lenovo bundles an alternative start menu for their Windows 8 machines that one of my bosses actually thought was part of Windows 8!
Microsoft is not screwing up, at least not in the way you think they are. Microsoft is doing what they've always done - try to leverage their dominance in one market into dominance of another market. This worked for the office suite market, the browser market, and the corporate email market. In all of those, they used their computer OS dominance as leverage to gain a foothold and grow share in those other markets.
They're now trying to do the same thing for the store-based software market. That's why Windows 8 pushes you to use Metro mode and Metro apps even if you don't want it - because Microsoft gets a percentage of every Metro app sold through their Store. They are hoping they can grab 30% of Adobe's, Oracle's, SAP's, CA's, Intuit's, Symantec's, etc's Windows software revenue by forcing that software to be sold through their Store. If all Windows users are using Metro, those companies will have no choice but to sell their software through the Store, and pay Microsoft a 30% cut. That financial windfall is so tempting that Microsoft is more than willing to inflict inconvenience and suffering onto Windows 8 users to achieve it.
Where they're screwing up is that Windows is no longer the dominant computer OS. Android devices in use (went from 500 million activations to 1 billion in the last 1.5 years, so there are at least a half billion in use) are well on track to soon eclipse the number of PCs in use (estimated at a bit over a billion). And Apple has a pretty lucrative iOS device market too (about 700 million sold thus far). Leveraging Windows to break into new markets worked in the past because there was no viable alternative for customers to switch to. But now people can switch to something else if Windows frustrates them enough. (Ironically Android and iOS already use the 30% cut captive store model of software sales, but the difference is people want to use those devices and interfaces. They don't want to use Metro, at least not on PCs.)
Microsoft is starting to realize that being just a software company in a shrinking market is a bad position to be in. They want to get people stuck in their Microsoft account/Microsoft app store/Bing/Skype/Outlook.com mail/Office 365 subscriptions in order to generate revenue off of people in the long term instead of just the initial sale.
Subscriptions are fine if you consistently roll out product improvements. In the case of a magazine subscription, this is a new magazine every month.
Microsoft really screwed the pooch when they tried to move their business customers to a subscription plan circa 2003. They usually rolled out a new version of Windows every 3 years, and XP had already been out for almost 2 years (general availability in late 2001). Their typical business support plan subscriptions were for 3 years and included free OS upgrades during that time.
Well, Vista didn't roll out until 2007, 5.5 years after XP and long after most of those business support plans had expired. I think they tossed in an extra year of OS upgrades to compensate, but many businesses felt they'd paid for the subscription service expecting an OS upgrade to be included, and Microsoft took their money to the bank rather than spending it on pushing out an OS update. That is The Best Way to kill off a subscription service and make people want to just pay a one-time fee for software.
Microsoft has to repair that damage to its development cycle and reputation if it wants its software subscriptions to succeed. If they don't consistently roll out new updates and improvements in their subscription software, coercing people to subscribe instead of buy will just result in customers switching to alternative software rather than subscribe to their services.
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No it isn't. The US government has been involved in health care since Medicare began in 1966. In 2009, the year before the ACA was signed into law, the U.S. government (i.e. excluding private health care spending) spent as percent of GDP more on Medicare and its ancillary health programs than the government of Canada spent for its universal health care program. If the U.S. government truly wanted universal health coverage, it was already spending enough to provide it before the ACA.
I suspect the entire public vs. private health care debate was just a red herring, meant to occupy and distract the voting public. The real problem is probably government corruption which passes laws and awards contracts based on cronyism and bribes, and thus inflates our health care costs. I suspect the ACA is just going to be more of the same, and won't help bring down our health care costs.
The number of places where you can do this above sea level is vanishingly small. Iceland sits on a rift where two continental plates meet (theorized to be where an asteroid made a lucky hit and punctured the seam between the plates). Consequently there's very little rock you have to drill through to break through the Earth's crust and reach a good-sized magma pocket. It's also why geothermal is so viable there (it practically heats the entire nation).
They only had to drill 2 km down. For most of the world, the crust is thinnest under the ocean floor - about 6 km thick. And the floating deep ocean drilling platforms you have to use makes this idea economically unfeasible. Even a lot of oil is too expensive to be extracted from down there (for comparison, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill released about 4.9 million barrels of oil in 87 days, or about 0.65 barrels/sec. 1 barrel of oil contains a bit more than 6 billion joules of energy, so at a 50% conversion efficiency that's about 2 GWe from a single well). On land you're typically looking at a crust thickness of 30-50 km. Even if you limit your selection to shallow magma pockets like beneath active volcanoes (e.g. Yellowstone), the number of places on earth where a geothermal well would be viable is a few hundred, maybe a few thousand. Far short of what's needed to power the world.
For geothermal to become viable on a global scale, you have to hope the oil companies continue to advance the state of the art in drilling technology to the point where a 30 km bore hole is cheap and easy.
Actually, that was supposed to be the funny I was making (glad the mods got it). Prior to this study, one could only figuratively say that the course filled my brain up. Now we can say it literally filled my brain up.
Now that I re-read what I wrote, I can see the reason for your misunderstanding. I was attempting to use "fill up" as a verb, rather than "fill" as the verb and "up" as the adjective. This is pretty clear in the present tense because there is no endpoint for "up" in the present so the former is the only possible interpretation. But for consistency with English writing norms, I changed it to past tense. When you do that, "filled up" implies the latter meaning. So you interpreted what I wrote as "filled up completely," in which case "literally" is the wrong term.
But I meant it as "the course was filling up" my brain. As in there's a finite amount of space there, and taking the course reduced the amount of remaining space. It just happened in the past. Which is why "literally" is used correctly. If I had it to do over, I'd drop the "up". It works in present tense, but can lead to misinterpretation like yours in the past tense.
And my apologies to fans of Victorian-era English lit. I had to pick a course to be the bad guy to make the funny, and it's the course I've found least useful in my life. I can see people who go into fashion design making the same argument against the science or math classes they took.
Clearly you haven't tried to run a business in California. The amount of regulation here is ridiculous.
As with most things, either extreme is bad. And casting the argument by picking a data point far from the extreme you support can cause you to arrive at misleading conclusions. Too much regulation leads to wasted resources as everyone tries to comply with silly rules (why do I need a sign saying there are substances in my store known to cause cancer, when sunlight causes cancer?). A fair assessment of the situation will be based on the effectiveness/availability of litigation vs regulation. i.e. if a citizen litigating with 1% of his income can achieve better results than a business having to spend 1% of his income complying with a regulation, then probably litigation is the more cost-effective solution for that particular case.
Any time you see an argument which attempts to show one method is better than another in all cases, that should set off warning bells that either the argument is overreaching, or is deliberately ignoring mitigating factors. Proofs that apply to all cases are exceedingly rare, and typically end up enshrined in textbooks as fundamental theorems and natural laws. That certainly is not the case for business regulation.
Exactly. With perfect hindsight, it's "easy" to come up with a solution which would have caught the 9/11 hijackers when applied to that specific problem.
But you can't just look at the true positives. You also have to consider false positives, false negatives, and true negatives. The huge security framework that's been developed since 9/11 is justifiable if you look only at the true positives. But when you consider the damage caused by the false positives, the still very-large possibility of missing an attack via a false negative, the violations of privacy you do to the huge number of true negatives, and compare to the small benefit gained from the handful of true positives you catch, it is simply not worth it. You have to consider all the effects of the security measures, not just the effects when the measures work and catch a terrorist.
The gizmo they're describing is for acoustic transmission along a single axis. i.e. you have a pipe between points A and B, and A can hear B but B can't hear A.
You can do the same with impedance changes if A and B are in different mediums. The impedance difference due to the density change causes asymmetrical transmission to reflection ratios (bottom two animations). Consequently, if you're underwater in a swimming pool, you can hear all the noise from people talking in the air. But if you're outside the water, you can't hear sound originating in the water. (You can hear it a little, but nowhere near as well as sound from the air transmitted into the water.)
You can also do it with refraction changes if sound is allowed to propagate along two or more axes. The ocean creates a natural acoustic waveguide this way. If you're in the middle of the waveguide, you can easily hear things at the edge of the waveguide. Sound from the thing at the edge of the waveguide spreads radially, and consequently about half of it captured by the waveguide. Whereas sound from the middle of the waveguide reaches that point at the edge only at a very specific angle. Consequently the listener inside the waveguide gets greater amplification. (A conceptually easier example is a megaphone if you use it to try to communicate with someone standing far away. If you speak through it, all your acoustic energy is directed in one direction, before it reaches the end of the megaphone and is allowed to spread radially. Most of it continues in the direction you pointed the megaphone. If you listen through it though, the acoustic energy from the other person spreads radially first, then the tiny bit captured by the broad end of the megaphone is concentrated. Consequently the megaphone is much more effective as a speaking amplifier than it is as a listening amplifier.)
I don't think any of these methods allow for a perfect "one-way mirror" though, where someone at A can hear B, but B cannot hear anything from A.. I can see the device in TFA getting close. It uses moving air to guide sound one way - move the air faster than the speed of sound and in theory it can't go backwards. But I have to think there will be some sound transmission back along the stationary frame used to contain the moving air (not to mention in their device the air is moving in a circle).
For requiring me to take a course on Victorian-era English literature as part of my engineering degree graduation requirements? By forcing me to take the course, they literally filled my brain up with useless stuff which will accelerate the onset of age-related dementia.
The manufacturer who fared best in the Blackblaze report was Hitachi. Hitachi bought their hard drive division from IBM. IBM produced the Deskstar series of hard drives. The 75GXP had such an abysmally high failure rate it was nicknamed the Deathstar. Lots of folks swore they would never buy another IBM drive again.
Hard drive reliability varies a lot by model. The 60GXP which replaced the 75GXP was one of the more reliable drives out there at the time. You're really crippling yourself if you swear to boycott a manufacturer entirely.
There are larger capacity BDs, but they still don't amount to much storage. As others are speculating, this is probably a pre-emptive action by Facebook, so when they eventually get sued for not deleting someone's data, they can truthfully testify in court that it's logistically "too hard" to comply with a single user's delete request.
I really doubt that lawsuit would get very far. The only evidence against Paypal is the written testimony of a known criminal (the guy who conducted the attack). For all we know, the attacker could be a worker at Starbucks who lifted Mr. Hiroshima's credit card number when he bought coffee there. And he hates Paypal (like most of us do) so he's setting up a false trail leading to Paypal.
The real problem is using the credit card number as authentication of anything other than a credit card purchase. It's something that's seen by dozens if not hundreds of people in a month, and trivial to record with a quick photo. Absolutely silly to use it for identity verification.
Bingo. I think a lot of people too young to remember the Cold War look at China, see that it's Communist, and figure the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain was like that. It wasn't. The Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War was more like North Korea.
There is no shortage in ability to pay teachers. The U.S. spends more on education per student than any other country in the world. It's ludicrous to even suggest we're not spending enough on education.
The problem is is an overabundance of administrators who siphon away money from teachers and kids. In the few school budgets I was able to dig up, administration payroll accounted for over half of total payroll.
That's just it. The credit card companies have shifted the cost of fraud to the merchants, so chip and pin will probably never be cheaper than the cost of a security breach to them.
That's the real fundamental problem here. The credit card companies have made the merchants pay for fraud, and the merchants have no leverage to improve the security of credit card machines or networks. Heck, most merchants don't even know how the machines work, they're a magic black box to them.
Any time you decouple profit from costs, you're just asking for trouble. Market solutions fail in these cases because there is no cost incentive for the person creating the problem to fix it. The classic example is pollution - the polluter reaps the profits from an activity while society bears the cost. Same thing is going on with credit cards. The credit card issuers create the card system, its network, and its (lack of) security, and reap the per-transaction profit; but the merchants pay for fraud. Consequently there is no economic incentive for the credit card issuers to improve the security of the system - doing so just increases their costs.
Laptops don't count. Almost none of the laptops sold today are designed or made by the brand name they carry (including Apple). They're almost all made by a handful of little-known Taiwanese companies called ODMs (D is for design, as they also do the design work, not just the manufacturing like an OEM). Based on unit sales, they are the biggest PC companies, not HP or Lenovo or Dell. Even the 5th largest is bigger than HP.
HP and Compaq merged; they just decided to go with the HP name instead of Compaq. This wasn't like DEC, which atrophied to a fraction of its former self before being bought by Compaq. Or SGI which went bankrupt and the remains were bought by Rackable Systems who changed their name to Silicon Graphics. Compaq was suffering like all computer companies due to the dot-com bubble bursting, but it was still fundamentally sound and capable of running on its own when it merged with HP in 2002. HP even changed its stock ticker to HPQ to reflect that the new company was a combination of the two, not HP taking over Compaq.
Do you know how:
A substantial portion of our increased standard of living is due to productivity gains from specialization. Instead of everyone having to waste time learning and become experts at making fire, hunting, farming, weaving clothes, etc., we specialized and traded the resulting goods amongst ourselves. The extra time saved allowed us to become even more expert in our specialization, advancing the state of the art for even more productivity gains. And freed us to have more free time for leisure and entertainment activities.
Reversing this and forcing kids to waste time learning stuff they don't need to know will decrease productivity and lower the standard of living. If the kid wants to go into the transportation industry, then he should learn about horse carriages and how the parts worked. If the kid wants to become a network/communications engineer, then he should learn about telephony. If the kid wants to learn about electron beams and phospor displays, then he should learn how old TV sets worked. Forcing all kids to learn this stuff just wastes time they could be spending learning what they will eventually do for a job.
The real fun starts when the first automatic system insists the change it created wasn't an error, and that in fact the "fix" created by the second automatic system is an error. The second system then starts arguing about all the problems caused by the first change, the first system argues how the benefits are worth the additional problems, etc. Eventually the exchange ends up with one system insulting the other system's programmer, and the other invoking an analogy to Hitler.
When that happens, then we can sit back and marvel at our own creation.
You have the right idea, but your numbers make no economical sense. Installing a bloatware app does not make the carrier 50% of your monthly service fee. It will be difficult to justify that if a carrier sues.
Instead, institute a common-sense rule. If the phone's owner does not have complete control of the phone and his monthly fee does not decrease when his contract is up, the phone is not truly his and he doesn't really own it. The carrier is still considered to be leasing it to the customer, and is liable for any warranty/repair costs. Much like when you lease an apartment, the landlord has to pay to repair anything that breaks down from regular use. Do this and the carriers will be tripping over themselves to be the first to unlock your phone, delete any uninstallable bloatware, and reduce your monthly service fee to remove the "phone subsidy" the moment you're out of contract.
The scalable fonts also meant you could print banners by printing sideways on a dot-matrix printer, and not separating the individual pages. Perfect for printing title boards for posters or your science fair project.
I still don't understand why after practically inventing scalable fonts (Postscript) and scalable GUI elements in a drive for resolution independent displays (a 12-point font was always the same physical size regardless of your screen size or resolution setting), Apple abandoned them with iOS. It's like they deliberately chose to go backwards. Come to think of it, if you look at their 1984 commercial, they've pretty much become the monolithic overlord preaching conformity that they promised to overthrow in the commercial.
Gasoline: 30% efficiency, 20% efficiency from fuel to wheels.
Electric: Coal plant 45% efficient, power line transmission 97% efficient, battery charging 75% efficient (in theory you can get this over 90% but not with quick charges), battery discharging efficiency unknown, electric motor efficiency 90%. Overall fuel to wheels efficiency: 0.45*0.97*0.75*0.90 = 0.295 or 30% without battery discharge efficiency losses.
The majority of the operational cost savings from EVs is not due to higher efficiency. It's because coal is so much cheaper than gasoline. Coal = 24 MJ/kg @ ~$65/short ton = $0.003/MJ. Gasoline = 26 MJ/L @ $4/gal = $0.041/MJ. About 10x more expensive per joule than coal.
In the future if we can get most of our electricity from nuclear or wind/solar, then things might look better for EVs from an energy efficiency standpoint. But based on our current electricity generation profile, EVs aren't really that much more environmentally friendly than gasoline. They're just cheaper to operate.
http://www.depositaccounts.com/blog/2007/12/introduction-high-yield-checking-deals.html
http://www.depositaccounts.com/us/checking/reward-checking-accounts.html
The best checking accounts are not only free, they actually pay you. Most of these accounts have no fees, no minimums (in fact they have a maximum). The banks/credit unions make money off of them when you use your debit card for purchases. The merchant pays part of the purchase price as a transaction fee to the bank/credit union (more than for a credit card). You just have to make a certain minimum number of debit card transactions each month. The hardest part is typically a direct deposit requirement, but if your employer doesn't offer direct deposit that requirement can usually be met with a monthly ACH transfer from another account at another bank (can be a savings account so no fee there too).
I know the prevailing thought here is that the poor are the victims and the banks/businesses are keeping them down. But in this case it really is the result of laziness. Not laziness as in unwillingness to work, but unwillingness to research simple ways like this to save (or make) money. The vast majority of people (not just the poor) are too lazy to fully investigate what bank account options are out there. They listen long enough to understand the concept of a "checking account", and just assume they're all the same and grab the most convenient one so they can get back to watching Oprah or playing WoW.
The banks literally make a mint because of this type of laziness. Here's the rule you have to remember: convenient = expensive. When the bank hands you a pamphlet listing their checking accounts, the simplest one they list first is going to be their biggest money-maker. Because it's convenient and it's first, the bank knows most people will go for it, so they make sure to load it up with fees or gotchas which will help them make money. You have to dig if you want to find the accounts which are more favorable to you.
If you RTFA, they break down the failure rates by model (no pun intended). There's a pretty huge variation between models (or at least the Seagate models). That's also what I saw in the StorageReview reliability database back when people were actively updating it (unfortunately you have to add a drive to the database to get access to it, so it was never very popular). The same manufacturer can make a gem and a stinker of a model. e.g. the IBM 75GXP (aka Deathstar) drives had one of the highest failure rates in the database. The drive which replaced it (60GXP I think) had one of the lowest failure rates in the database.
So it's more nuanced than "Seagate stinks, Hitachi rules." (Hitachi is a subsidiary of WD now, operating separately only because that was a condition China placed on them before they'd OK the merger.)
I have both prescription glasses and prescription sunglasses. It is very easy to forget the other when I'm wearing one. When I go into restaurants and such at lunch, I often have to walk back out to my car to get my regular glasses after I notice how dark it is inside the restaurant.
Apparently you've "forgotten" that every smartphone has a video camera, and everyone brings those into the theater with them.
Microsoft is not screwing up, at least not in the way you think they are. Microsoft is doing what they've always done - try to leverage their dominance in one market into dominance of another market. This worked for the office suite market, the browser market, and the corporate email market. In all of those, they used their computer OS dominance as leverage to gain a foothold and grow share in those other markets.
They're now trying to do the same thing for the store-based software market. That's why Windows 8 pushes you to use Metro mode and Metro apps even if you don't want it - because Microsoft gets a percentage of every Metro app sold through their Store. They are hoping they can grab 30% of Adobe's, Oracle's, SAP's, CA's, Intuit's, Symantec's, etc's Windows software revenue by forcing that software to be sold through their Store. If all Windows users are using Metro, those companies will have no choice but to sell their software through the Store, and pay Microsoft a 30% cut. That financial windfall is so tempting that Microsoft is more than willing to inflict inconvenience and suffering onto Windows 8 users to achieve it.
Where they're screwing up is that Windows is no longer the dominant computer OS. Android devices in use (went from 500 million activations to 1 billion in the last 1.5 years, so there are at least a half billion in use) are well on track to soon eclipse the number of PCs in use (estimated at a bit over a billion). And Apple has a pretty lucrative iOS device market too (about 700 million sold thus far). Leveraging Windows to break into new markets worked in the past because there was no viable alternative for customers to switch to. But now people can switch to something else if Windows frustrates them enough. (Ironically Android and iOS already use the 30% cut captive store model of software sales, but the difference is people want to use those devices and interfaces. They don't want to use Metro, at least not on PCs.)
Subscriptions are fine if you consistently roll out product improvements. In the case of a magazine subscription, this is a new magazine every month.
Microsoft really screwed the pooch when they tried to move their business customers to a subscription plan circa 2003. They usually rolled out a new version of Windows every 3 years, and XP had already been out for almost 2 years (general availability in late 2001). Their typical business support plan subscriptions were for 3 years and included free OS upgrades during that time.
Well, Vista didn't roll out until 2007, 5.5 years after XP and long after most of those business support plans had expired. I think they tossed in an extra year of OS upgrades to compensate, but many businesses felt they'd paid for the subscription service expecting an OS upgrade to be included, and Microsoft took their money to the bank rather than spending it on pushing out an OS update. That is The Best Way to kill off a subscription service and make people want to just pay a one-time fee for software.
Microsoft has to repair that damage to its development cycle and reputation if it wants its software subscriptions to succeed. If they don't consistently roll out new updates and improvements in their subscription software, coercing people to subscribe instead of buy will just result in customers switching to alternative software rather than subscribe to their services.