SSNs aren't the problem. If SSNs didn't exist, the companies would just figure out a different way to tag you with a unique and permanent ID. That's what happens in web browsers - your SSN is not available, so they've come up with all sorts of cookie and cross-referencing schemes to uniquely identify each individual (or at least the computer they use).
What's needed is some kind of new three-party encryption system (vs public key cryptography which is two-party). One party (the government or credit bureaus) act as a repository for the information, acting as a neutral third party which maintains and validates the consistency of the data. They can also strike certain records if authorized (presumably with the agreement of the two other parties). Another party (lenders) should have keys granting write-access to the repository, so they can report good/bad creditworthiness. And finally only you should have the key to grant read-access to your personal record in the repository.
This would serve the needs currently filled by credit reports, while also allowing the individual to control read privileges thus preventing the current situation of credit agencies selling your info to anyone they please. The lenders can just assign you the worst possible credit risk status if you ask them for a loan and refuse to give them read-access to your credit record.
There might be a way to make this work with public key cryptography. But upon cursory examination the part which seems to not work is that with public key encryption if you control read-access (by giving out your public key), then you must control write-access (with your private key). So if a lender wanted to post a negative item to your report, you'd be able to veto it by refusing to encode it with your private key. Come up with a three-party encryption system and it should work. Only party A can grant write-access. Only party B has write-access. Only party C can grant read-access. And for good measure party C's read-access should be on a one-time-use rolling key, so if you give the bank permission to read your credit report once to open up an account, they cannot read it again any time they want in the future without your permission.
That's the official (and only) government site for getting your free credit reports. All the sites asking for your credit card are scam sites (usually run by the credit bureaus themselves) which automatically sign you up for a credit monitoring service and charge your card if you forget to cancel.
All of this confusion and scamming could be eliminated if the government would just move the real site to the.gov domain. Then it'd be easy..gov = real,.com = fake.
On the other hand, I bought only Intels since the day the G2 series hit the market. Every single one is still in use and none of them have had any problems.
Intel has released their own turkey SSDs too. And the thing about anecdotal evidence is, every OCZ, Kingston, Intel, Samsung, and Sandisk SSD I've bought and put into systems I've built are still in use and none of them have had any problems.
While I do believe OCZ had a higher failure rate, I also think their poor return figures were mostly a self-fulfilling prophecy. Note that return rates are returns to the store of purchase - they reflect product dissatisfaction within a few days/weeks of purchase, not due to a failure months down the road (which was the common complaint in forums about OCZ drives). People have problems getting the SSD installed, check online for help, see lots of reports of problems with OCZ drives, and elect to return it. With other brand drives, they stick with it until they get the drive sorted out and working. If the manufacture of the SSDs is anything like other electronics, they're all actually made by the same ODMs in Taiwan/China, and the "manufacturer" just slaps their name on it. The problems with OCZ drives failing after a few months of use actually seemed to affect all Sandforce-based drives. (Ironically, I bought the Intel 320s in an effort to avoid the Sandforce drives.)
In fact, I haven't had to reinstall windows as often as I've had to in the past. Not sure if its because Win7 is better than WinXP, the SSDs are more reliable than platter based disks, or both.
If you have both an SSD and a HDD, reliability absolutely should not be an issue. Just clone the SSD to the HDD, then create a data partition in the remaining space on the HDD for regular use. Update the clone every day or two as your backup. If the SSD ever fails, you can just remove it and boot off the HDD while you send the SSD back for a warranty replacement.
(I should note that this works fine under Windows 7. I've had problems getting it to work with Windows 8 and secure boot.)
The same was true (and still is to a lesser extent) for Asians. With typical gamma response curves of film and digital sensors, black hair with white skin turns into a nondescript, flat uniform black. I usually try to make sure there's a rim light (light from above and slightly behind) to give black hair some 3D depth.
The problem doesn't just show up due to racial features. The tradition of a bride wearing white and a groom wearing black was murder for film. Special low-contrast films were made to handle these situations.
Now we just wait until they finally figure out to employ a smarter protocol than sending the whole frame buffer over the wire when only a tiny part of the screen has changed.
Wouldn't that depend on whether it's faster to just send the entire framebuffer over the wire, or do a pixel-by-pixel compare between the current framebuffer with the previous one to figure out which parts have changed?
This sort of streaming compression makes sense when bandwidth is limited, like back when people used dialup to access the Internet. Compressing photos on the fly back then could speed up web browsing. But HDMI 1.2 has sufficient bandwidth to transmit 1080p @ 60 Hz, 1.3 has 2.5x as much bandwidth, and 1.4 can transmit 3840x2160 @ 30 Hz. The latency your compression method adds would be acceptable if you're trying to do something like view a computer's screen on your tablet over wifi via remote desktop. But for a monitor connected to a computer by an HDMI cable, it's presently unnecessary.
The summary doesn't make it clear, but while the seats are getting closer, your legroom is remaining the same because the reduced inch is coming out of the seat's thickness. What's more worrying is the switch to narrower seats. 10-abreast seating in 777s was the normal configuration in Asia, where people tend to have narrower waists (there was an uproar at the 1988 Seoul Olympics because some of the stadium seating was too narrow for Western behinds).
If you want more legroom and the bulkhead seating is taken, arrive for your flight early and ask to be moved to an emergency exit row. In the U.S. at least, the airlines are not allowed to assign people to this row until the agent can visually confirm that the person is fit and capable of opening and lifting the emergency exit door (weighs about 35-50 lbs). The seats don't recline, but you'll get tons of legroom as they're spaced far enough apart to make an aisle for people to exit the aircraft through.
While most of the water landings included fatalities, I'm confident the fatality rate would have been higher without the life jackets.
Actually, I suspect the life jackets have killed more people than they've saved. Survivable water landings by large commercial aircraft are relatively rare. Most of them are runway overruns into shallow water, making ones where the passengers would actually need life jackets even rarer. Let me put it this way - when's the last time you heard of a plane crash-landing on land away from an airport with a substantial number of survivors? Now figure that overland flights are much more common than overseas flights.
I can think of only two recent survivable water landings by larger aircraft (there have been a handful of incidents with commuter aircraft). US Air 1549 where the water was so cold the people who did inflate their life jackets and jump in had to be fished out before they froze to death. Most of the passengers ended up waiting on the wings and in liferafts for rescue to arrive. And Ethiopian Air 961 where hijackers forced the plane to fly until it ran out of fuel, and the captain almost succeeded in a soft deadstick landing in the water. The majority of the passengers survived the crash, but roughly half of those who survived the crash didn't listen to or ignored instructions not to inflate their lifejackets until they were outside the plane. Their bodies were found floating at the ceiling of the cabin. The plane broke apart and the fuselage sank and rapidly filled with water. Those who had pre-inflated their jackets were then pinned against the ceiling, unable to swim down to the doors or over to the breaks in the fuselage to escape, and drowned.
In theory, if life jackets were always used properly and people didn't make stupid decisions like jumping into freezing water simply because they have a life jackets on, I'd agree with you that they save lives. But in reality I'm not sure that they do. Most people will float in water without any aid if they kick off any heavy shoes and don't thrash around (exceptionally fit people will sink due to low body fat). Life jackets are required in boating primarily because if you're knocked unconscious, your body tends to float face-down. The life jacket forces you to float face-up, allowing you to breathe until you wake up. But this functionality is rendered useless by the requirement to not inflate the life jackets until after leaving the aircraft.
One of the annoyances I have with the legal system is that it doesn't follow conservation and reciprocity laws like physics, allowing self-contained loopholes to develop. This is one of those cases. There should be some top-level law made which declares that any evidence which can be used to convict you, you automatically have standing to challenge.
Also, while all those factors you mentioned pose problems, the underwater acoustic channel is still more volatile. Imagine a temperature shift of one degree, i.e. from morning to evening, completely changing your delay factor.
It's worse than that. The water temperature (and pressure) changes with depth, which means the speed of sound does as well. This causes sound initially heading down to arc back up, until it hits the surface and heads back down again and repeats (fig 12). Consequently, any sound which isn't traveling a short enough distance that it can travel straight to the target gets smeared out over time due to multipath.
It leads to some interesting phenomena. A thermocline (layer of water with an abrupt temperature change) can refract the sound enough to prevent it reaching anything underneath. Submarines sometimes use this to hide from sonar, but it will also block any listening devices you have from hearing what a surface station is broadcasting. And a SOFAR channel where the temperature forms an acoustic waveguide, allowing you to transmit sounds around the globe with little loss (though it adds a lot of distortion due to the multipath). Whales use this to "broadcast" their songs for thousands of miles.
While I'm all for good headphones for listening to music, here's a cautionary tale about using them for gaming. Back in 2000 my sister got me a set of Sony MDR-7506 studio monitors as a birthday present. They've been eclipsed by modern designs, but back then they were a classic and a mainstay in the audio world whose only drawback was somewhat weak bass. They were exceptional when listening to music, so I eagerly plugged them into my computer to play some games.
It was terrible. The sound was so clear I could tell the musical instrument sounds were synthesized. I could hear when the sound samples looped. In some of the samples I could even hear background noise from the original recording (which becomes really annoying when looped). They completely broke suspension of disbelief and distracted from my immersion into the game. After a week of trying to like them for gaming, I sadly unplugged them and went back to the crappy desktop speakers. Yes the sound through them was muddy and muffled. But they just sounded like I had bad speakers, not like the sound was fake.
Bissio adds that the people in these countries aren't really contributing to climate change in the first place: 'Why? Because poor people, whose carbon emissions these technologies would reduce, produce very little carbon in the first place.
That's an incredibly short-sighted and static viewpoint. Which two countries increased their greenhouse gas emissions the most in the past few years? China and India - both developing countries. Unless you intend to keep these poor countries poor for the foreseeable future, they're going to modernize at some point. The logical way to proceed is to get them hooked on clean energy from the onset is to prevent growth in carbon emissions in the future. If you just say they don't pollute enough to matter, you're eventually going to arrive at a state where the rich nations drop their carbon emissions to near zero but global emissions are still increasing because those formerly-poor nations are now burning coal.
There's a tremendous opportunity here in developing nations. Like many of them skipped landline phone networks and jumped straight to cellular, they can skip the coal and oil plants and jump straight to hydro, nuclear, wind, and eventually solar.
The horrible part of the design is that the orientation is something you can only tell with good eyes in clear light.
Run your finger across both edges of a micro-USB connector. One side is smooth, the other has two raised metal ridges which will scratch your fingertip. It's trivial to feel them, even in the dark, and get the orientation right on the first try. A couple weeks ago I was half asleep and suddenly remembered I hadn't plugged my charger into my phone. I forgot to feel for the ridges, and for the first time in over a year I got the orientation wrong. The orientation is absolutely not a problem - detecting it is as easy as detecting whether you have the plug oriented vertically or horizontally in the dark.
I'd say the sole problem with the current crop of tiny USB connectors is purely that whole four dimensional thing (where you have to turn it around twice to get it to fit.)
The micro-USB plug has two raised ridges on one side. It's trivial to run your fingertip across them to feel them, even in the dark, and plug it in the correct orientation on the first try. I do agree orientation is a problem with the regular full-size USB-A connectors.
There's a tendency for slashdotters to think that all advertising is bad (usually coupled with the notion that making money is evil).
Advertising is a two-way street. It isn't just a way for a retailer to make more money. It's also a way for the shopper to learn about products which may better suit his/her needs. I found this out after living without a TV for a year. My friends and I decided to go see a movie and... I realized that because I hadn't seen any TV ads in a year I had absolutely no idea what any of the currently playing movies were about. I had to spend 10 minutes in a crash course at Rotten Tomatoes on my phone to catch up. My friends patiently waited, then we could finally discuss movie choices. I still had trouble following though, because the titles didn't lead to instant recollection of what the movie was about. My friends though had had title and subject ingrained into them from repeatedly seeing the ads.
A properly designed targeted ad system could actually be very beneficial for the shopper. You won't be subjected to the same inane ad over and over - advertisers will want to keep it below the annoyance threshold. More importantly, you'll learn about products specific to what you're looking for - brands and choices you probably didn't even know existed much less had considered as a choice. One of the most useful things when I shop at Amazon are the little lists of "customers who bought this item also bought..." and "What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?" If you think about it, those are just targeted ads placed underneath the shelf of the product I'm looking at. They just happen to be good ads because they help me as much as they do the advertiser.
A well-functioning market requires that buyers be well-informed, and targeted ads do a better job at this. (This is orthogonal to truth in advertising, which I think is where many of the legitimate complaints against ads come from.)
No, OP is correct. Most people who think they've had the flu have actually only had a cold. They're different types of viruses which just share some similar symptoms.
The flu tends to be much worse. One key difference is that whereas a cold will just stuff up your nose and make your head feel miserable, the flu will make you feel like you just ran a marathon and then a truck ran over you. It also tends to last a lot longer. I was bedridden for 10 days, and it was 3 weeks before I felt normal again. It was so bad that even though I wanted to go back to work, I was afraid to because I didn't want to pass it on to a coworker and make them go through the same misery I had just been through. Totally the opposite of the guy who's only had a cold and thinks you should just tough it out and come to work.
Google, for all their cleverness, has never produced anything that's safety critical. I seriously doubt their culture is suited to it. It's very different from "let's play with this cool new idea". That's why progress in cars and airliners is slower than with non-safety critical software.
We've seen what needs to happen with Google happen in reverse with console games. It used to be that if you released a console game, it had to be bulletproof. Your code was going to be burned into ROM or a CD for all eternity, and updating it would basically amount to a product recall. Then as consoles picked up hard drives, then network capability, the standards dropped. You could fix a bug or add a feature after the fact relatively easily, resulting in standards for the initial release dropping. The quality of console games upon release is now pretty much indistinguishable from PC games.
No, you don't want round. The big problem with round is that it's perfectly symmetric. With a rectangle, or even a pentagon, there are distinct segments and directions to the building. You know where you're at, you know to get somewhere else you need to head in a certain direction until you see a wall or corner, then head in another direction. e.g. To get from one place to another in a pentagon, you know you need to walk one way, pass 1 or 2 corners, then walk a certain distance to your destination.
In a circle, every part of the building you're in looks the same. You may know you have to travel 37 degrees around the arc, but after walking for a bit you aren't quite sure how many degrees you've traveled because there are no references - it all looks the same. To overcome this you need either really good labeling, or you have to add architectural landmarks to (virtually) break up the circle into physically "different" segments.
It was the first hit on my Google search that included the full IDC report (with manufacturer-by-manufacturer sales figures). Ignore the BGR editorializing if you like, the same data is in the IDC report.
Each phone already has a unique IMEI or IMSI to distinguish it from other phones, so no it's not very new.
What makes this different is it means an app could uniquely identify your phone even if you blocked it from accessing your IMEI or refused to install apps which access the IMEI, in a bid to stay anonymous.
Actually, Apple's share of the tablet market has dropped to 32% this year, with Android now commanding 63%. Almost an exact reversal of 2012. These are sales of new units though, so Apple may still have >50% of the tablets which are currently in use. But the trend is pretty clear. (I'd mention the stats on tablet browser usage, except Apple tends to use unique visitors per month which distorts actual use statistics. On phones, Apple leads 2:1 in unique visitors per month, but Android leads 2:1 in page hits, indicating lots of iPhone users use the web but not very much, while fewer Android users use the web but they use it a lot. I'm still trying to find data on what the situation is exactly with tablets.)
Actually, I think this is what's going to make cloud services viable. The problem with data storage on the cloud right now boils down to two major things: Someone else has all your data. And that someone else might not be online at a crucial moment when you need your data. (If you're not online and access to your data is that important, you shouldn't have been storing it in the cloud or you should've had redundant network trunks installed.)
If cloud services became a commodity, you wouldn't need to be beholden to a single cloud service provider. You could buy storage space from several services, and link them together in something like a SAS RAID array. No one service would have all your data, and if you put an encryption layer on top of it the fragmented nature of what they did have would make it virtually impossible for them (or NSA) to extract anything meaningful from what you're storing remotely at a single or even two or three sites (depending on the number of virtual drives in your array). And because the data is stored with parity redundancy, one or even two services could go down and your data would still be accessible.
The problems with having virtual drives in different geographic locations are bandwidth and latency. Bandwidth is constantly improving, and in many places already exceeds the 10-20 MB/s of local SCSI drives 15 years ago. Latency will always be there, but the 20-100 ms ping times across a continent are within an order of magnitude of the latency of mechanical hard drives. Obviously if you're running some high speed service which needs instant responsiveness this isn't going to work. But for simple data storage on the cloud, it should be fine.
I actually came up with this idea a decade ago when Napster was shut down by the RIAA and decentralized services like Grokster sprang up. I started thinking of how binaries distributed on USENET were split into (say) 20 packets with 5 parity packets, and you could reconstruct the original binary as long as you got at least 20 of the 25 packets. Then I realized the atomic size of the decentralization didn't have an individual user - it could be a fraction of a user. The entire song could be hosted and downloadable from the cloud, but any one particular person could onnly be hosting 5% of the song and thus couldn't be accused of making the entire song available for download. (Hey if they can play semantics with the law to fine individuals downloading a single song hundreds of thousands of dollars as if they were commercial copyright infringers, so can I.) And parity redundancy means even if lots of people stop hosting, the song still remains available. Alas my career moved away from software so I haven't really been able to do anything with this.
Well if you're going to require a glass plate in front, then no there's not much value here. Maybe being able to fix a broken display by just replacing the glass cover instead of the entire display.
But long-term, I think this is the future. No glass, just a plastic display. You can cover it with a cheap screen protector to ward off scratches. When the protector gets too scratched up, just peel it off and put on a new one. If you drop it, it'll flex instead of shatter. Many laptop screens are plastic instead of glass for this reason, and the decision to make phone displays glass was in many ways a step backwards. Form ("premium" feel) taking priority over function (impact resistance).
If some one would do that with my mugshot in my country he had bad luck. Surprising that in gods own country people obviously have no rights at all and need a new law every year to combat such exploits.
In the U.S., the people have a right to know who's broken the law or been accused of breaking the law. See, way back before the U.S. was a country, the government running the show had this nasty habit of secretly detaining people indefinitely without charges. So I think I'll side with the U.S. on this one. Yeah it sucks that your arrest photos are public, but it's the lesser of two evils.
Out of curiosity, has Google actually ever used a dubious patent to sue someone for patent infringement who didn't sue them first? I'm right there with you in rallying against stupid patents, but the reality is that the USPTO is giving out such stupid patents. If you're trying to run a business, there's little point in taking a principled stance which just makes you pay $millions in the future defending against a patent suit, when you can just pay $10,000 up front and get the patent in your own name.
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SSNs aren't the problem. If SSNs didn't exist, the companies would just figure out a different way to tag you with a unique and permanent ID. That's what happens in web browsers - your SSN is not available, so they've come up with all sorts of cookie and cross-referencing schemes to uniquely identify each individual (or at least the computer they use).
What's needed is some kind of new three-party encryption system (vs public key cryptography which is two-party). One party (the government or credit bureaus) act as a repository for the information, acting as a neutral third party which maintains and validates the consistency of the data. They can also strike certain records if authorized (presumably with the agreement of the two other parties). Another party (lenders) should have keys granting write-access to the repository, so they can report good/bad creditworthiness. And finally only you should have the key to grant read-access to your personal record in the repository.
This would serve the needs currently filled by credit reports, while also allowing the individual to control read privileges thus preventing the current situation of credit agencies selling your info to anyone they please. The lenders can just assign you the worst possible credit risk status if you ask them for a loan and refuse to give them read-access to your credit record.
There might be a way to make this work with public key cryptography. But upon cursory examination the part which seems to not work is that with public key encryption if you control read-access (by giving out your public key), then you must control write-access (with your private key). So if a lender wanted to post a negative item to your report, you'd be able to veto it by refusing to encode it with your private key. Come up with a three-party encryption system and it should work. Only party A can grant write-access. Only party B has write-access. Only party C can grant read-access. And for good measure party C's read-access should be on a one-time-use rolling key, so if you give the bank permission to read your credit report once to open up an account, they cannot read it again any time they want in the future without your permission.
That's the official (and only) government site for getting your free credit reports. All the sites asking for your credit card are scam sites (usually run by the credit bureaus themselves) which automatically sign you up for a credit monitoring service and charge your card if you forget to cancel.
.gov domain. Then it'd be easy. .gov = real, .com = fake.
All of this confusion and scamming could be eliminated if the government would just move the real site to the
Intel has released their own turkey SSDs too. And the thing about anecdotal evidence is, every OCZ, Kingston, Intel, Samsung, and Sandisk SSD I've bought and put into systems I've built are still in use and none of them have had any problems.
While I do believe OCZ had a higher failure rate, I also think their poor return figures were mostly a self-fulfilling prophecy. Note that return rates are returns to the store of purchase - they reflect product dissatisfaction within a few days/weeks of purchase, not due to a failure months down the road (which was the common complaint in forums about OCZ drives). People have problems getting the SSD installed, check online for help, see lots of reports of problems with OCZ drives, and elect to return it. With other brand drives, they stick with it until they get the drive sorted out and working. If the manufacture of the SSDs is anything like other electronics, they're all actually made by the same ODMs in Taiwan/China, and the "manufacturer" just slaps their name on it. The problems with OCZ drives failing after a few months of use actually seemed to affect all Sandforce-based drives. (Ironically, I bought the Intel 320s in an effort to avoid the Sandforce drives.)
If you have both an SSD and a HDD, reliability absolutely should not be an issue. Just clone the SSD to the HDD, then create a data partition in the remaining space on the HDD for regular use. Update the clone every day or two as your backup. If the SSD ever fails, you can just remove it and boot off the HDD while you send the SSD back for a warranty replacement.
(I should note that this works fine under Windows 7. I've had problems getting it to work with Windows 8 and secure boot.)
The same was true (and still is to a lesser extent) for Asians. With typical gamma response curves of film and digital sensors, black hair with white skin turns into a nondescript, flat uniform black. I usually try to make sure there's a rim light (light from above and slightly behind) to give black hair some 3D depth.
The problem doesn't just show up due to racial features. The tradition of a bride wearing white and a groom wearing black was murder for film. Special low-contrast films were made to handle these situations.
Wouldn't that depend on whether it's faster to just send the entire framebuffer over the wire, or do a pixel-by-pixel compare between the current framebuffer with the previous one to figure out which parts have changed?
This sort of streaming compression makes sense when bandwidth is limited, like back when people used dialup to access the Internet. Compressing photos on the fly back then could speed up web browsing. But HDMI 1.2 has sufficient bandwidth to transmit 1080p @ 60 Hz, 1.3 has 2.5x as much bandwidth, and 1.4 can transmit 3840x2160 @ 30 Hz. The latency your compression method adds would be acceptable if you're trying to do something like view a computer's screen on your tablet over wifi via remote desktop. But for a monitor connected to a computer by an HDMI cable, it's presently unnecessary.
The summary doesn't make it clear, but while the seats are getting closer, your legroom is remaining the same because the reduced inch is coming out of the seat's thickness. What's more worrying is the switch to narrower seats. 10-abreast seating in 777s was the normal configuration in Asia, where people tend to have narrower waists (there was an uproar at the 1988 Seoul Olympics because some of the stadium seating was too narrow for Western behinds).
If you want more legroom and the bulkhead seating is taken, arrive for your flight early and ask to be moved to an emergency exit row. In the U.S. at least, the airlines are not allowed to assign people to this row until the agent can visually confirm that the person is fit and capable of opening and lifting the emergency exit door (weighs about 35-50 lbs). The seats don't recline, but you'll get tons of legroom as they're spaced far enough apart to make an aisle for people to exit the aircraft through.
Actually, I suspect the life jackets have killed more people than they've saved. Survivable water landings by large commercial aircraft are relatively rare. Most of them are runway overruns into shallow water, making ones where the passengers would actually need life jackets even rarer. Let me put it this way - when's the last time you heard of a plane crash-landing on land away from an airport with a substantial number of survivors? Now figure that overland flights are much more common than overseas flights.
I can think of only two recent survivable water landings by larger aircraft (there have been a handful of incidents with commuter aircraft). US Air 1549 where the water was so cold the people who did inflate their life jackets and jump in had to be fished out before they froze to death. Most of the passengers ended up waiting on the wings and in liferafts for rescue to arrive. And Ethiopian Air 961 where hijackers forced the plane to fly until it ran out of fuel, and the captain almost succeeded in a soft deadstick landing in the water. The majority of the passengers survived the crash, but roughly half of those who survived the crash didn't listen to or ignored instructions not to inflate their lifejackets until they were outside the plane. Their bodies were found floating at the ceiling of the cabin. The plane broke apart and the fuselage sank and rapidly filled with water. Those who had pre-inflated their jackets were then pinned against the ceiling, unable to swim down to the doors or over to the breaks in the fuselage to escape, and drowned.
In theory, if life jackets were always used properly and people didn't make stupid decisions like jumping into freezing water simply because they have a life jackets on, I'd agree with you that they save lives. But in reality I'm not sure that they do. Most people will float in water without any aid if they kick off any heavy shoes and don't thrash around (exceptionally fit people will sink due to low body fat). Life jackets are required in boating primarily because if you're knocked unconscious, your body tends to float face-down. The life jacket forces you to float face-up, allowing you to breathe until you wake up. But this functionality is rendered useless by the requirement to not inflate the life jackets until after leaving the aircraft.
So yeti are time-traveling polar bears?
One of the annoyances I have with the legal system is that it doesn't follow conservation and reciprocity laws like physics, allowing self-contained loopholes to develop. This is one of those cases. There should be some top-level law made which declares that any evidence which can be used to convict you, you automatically have standing to challenge.
It's worse than that. The water temperature (and pressure) changes with depth, which means the speed of sound does as well. This causes sound initially heading down to arc back up, until it hits the surface and heads back down again and repeats (fig 12). Consequently, any sound which isn't traveling a short enough distance that it can travel straight to the target gets smeared out over time due to multipath.
It leads to some interesting phenomena. A thermocline (layer of water with an abrupt temperature change) can refract the sound enough to prevent it reaching anything underneath. Submarines sometimes use this to hide from sonar, but it will also block any listening devices you have from hearing what a surface station is broadcasting. And a SOFAR channel where the temperature forms an acoustic waveguide, allowing you to transmit sounds around the globe with little loss (though it adds a lot of distortion due to the multipath). Whales use this to "broadcast" their songs for thousands of miles.
While I'm all for good headphones for listening to music, here's a cautionary tale about using them for gaming. Back in 2000 my sister got me a set of Sony MDR-7506 studio monitors as a birthday present. They've been eclipsed by modern designs, but back then they were a classic and a mainstay in the audio world whose only drawback was somewhat weak bass. They were exceptional when listening to music, so I eagerly plugged them into my computer to play some games.
It was terrible. The sound was so clear I could tell the musical instrument sounds were synthesized. I could hear when the sound samples looped. In some of the samples I could even hear background noise from the original recording (which becomes really annoying when looped). They completely broke suspension of disbelief and distracted from my immersion into the game. After a week of trying to like them for gaming, I sadly unplugged them and went back to the crappy desktop speakers. Yes the sound through them was muddy and muffled. But they just sounded like I had bad speakers, not like the sound was fake.
That's an incredibly short-sighted and static viewpoint. Which two countries increased their greenhouse gas emissions the most in the past few years? China and India - both developing countries. Unless you intend to keep these poor countries poor for the foreseeable future, they're going to modernize at some point. The logical way to proceed is to get them hooked on clean energy from the onset is to prevent growth in carbon emissions in the future. If you just say they don't pollute enough to matter, you're eventually going to arrive at a state where the rich nations drop their carbon emissions to near zero but global emissions are still increasing because those formerly-poor nations are now burning coal.
There's a tremendous opportunity here in developing nations. Like many of them skipped landline phone networks and jumped straight to cellular, they can skip the coal and oil plants and jump straight to hydro, nuclear, wind, and eventually solar.
Run your finger across both edges of a micro-USB connector. One side is smooth, the other has two raised metal ridges which will scratch your fingertip. It's trivial to feel them, even in the dark, and get the orientation right on the first try. A couple weeks ago I was half asleep and suddenly remembered I hadn't plugged my charger into my phone. I forgot to feel for the ridges, and for the first time in over a year I got the orientation wrong. The orientation is absolutely not a problem - detecting it is as easy as detecting whether you have the plug oriented vertically or horizontally in the dark.
The micro-USB plug has two raised ridges on one side. It's trivial to run your fingertip across them to feel them, even in the dark, and plug it in the correct orientation on the first try. I do agree orientation is a problem with the regular full-size USB-A connectors.
There's a tendency for slashdotters to think that all advertising is bad (usually coupled with the notion that making money is evil).
Advertising is a two-way street. It isn't just a way for a retailer to make more money. It's also a way for the shopper to learn about products which may better suit his/her needs. I found this out after living without a TV for a year. My friends and I decided to go see a movie and... I realized that because I hadn't seen any TV ads in a year I had absolutely no idea what any of the currently playing movies were about. I had to spend 10 minutes in a crash course at Rotten Tomatoes on my phone to catch up. My friends patiently waited, then we could finally discuss movie choices. I still had trouble following though, because the titles didn't lead to instant recollection of what the movie was about. My friends though had had title and subject ingrained into them from repeatedly seeing the ads.
A properly designed targeted ad system could actually be very beneficial for the shopper. You won't be subjected to the same inane ad over and over - advertisers will want to keep it below the annoyance threshold. More importantly, you'll learn about products specific to what you're looking for - brands and choices you probably didn't even know existed much less had considered as a choice. One of the most useful things when I shop at Amazon are the little lists of "customers who bought this item also bought..." and "What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?" If you think about it, those are just targeted ads placed underneath the shelf of the product I'm looking at. They just happen to be good ads because they help me as much as they do the advertiser.
A well-functioning market requires that buyers be well-informed, and targeted ads do a better job at this. (This is orthogonal to truth in advertising, which I think is where many of the legitimate complaints against ads come from.)
No, OP is correct. Most people who think they've had the flu have actually only had a cold. They're different types of viruses which just share some similar symptoms.
The flu tends to be much worse. One key difference is that whereas a cold will just stuff up your nose and make your head feel miserable, the flu will make you feel like you just ran a marathon and then a truck ran over you. It also tends to last a lot longer. I was bedridden for 10 days, and it was 3 weeks before I felt normal again. It was so bad that even though I wanted to go back to work, I was afraid to because I didn't want to pass it on to a coworker and make them go through the same misery I had just been through. Totally the opposite of the guy who's only had a cold and thinks you should just tough it out and come to work.
I get my flu shot every year now.
We've seen what needs to happen with Google happen in reverse with console games. It used to be that if you released a console game, it had to be bulletproof. Your code was going to be burned into ROM or a CD for all eternity, and updating it would basically amount to a product recall. Then as consoles picked up hard drives, then network capability, the standards dropped. You could fix a bug or add a feature after the fact relatively easily, resulting in standards for the initial release dropping. The quality of console games upon release is now pretty much indistinguishable from PC games.
No, you don't want round. The big problem with round is that it's perfectly symmetric. With a rectangle, or even a pentagon, there are distinct segments and directions to the building. You know where you're at, you know to get somewhere else you need to head in a certain direction until you see a wall or corner, then head in another direction. e.g. To get from one place to another in a pentagon, you know you need to walk one way, pass 1 or 2 corners, then walk a certain distance to your destination.
In a circle, every part of the building you're in looks the same. You may know you have to travel 37 degrees around the arc, but after walking for a bit you aren't quite sure how many degrees you've traveled because there are no references - it all looks the same. To overcome this you need either really good labeling, or you have to add architectural landmarks to (virtually) break up the circle into physically "different" segments.
It was the first hit on my Google search that included the full IDC report (with manufacturer-by-manufacturer sales figures). Ignore the BGR editorializing if you like, the same data is in the IDC report.
Each phone already has a unique IMEI or IMSI to distinguish it from other phones, so no it's not very new.
What makes this different is it means an app could uniquely identify your phone even if you blocked it from accessing your IMEI or refused to install apps which access the IMEI, in a bid to stay anonymous.
Actually, Apple's share of the tablet market has dropped to 32% this year, with Android now commanding 63%. Almost an exact reversal of 2012. These are sales of new units though, so Apple may still have >50% of the tablets which are currently in use. But the trend is pretty clear. (I'd mention the stats on tablet browser usage, except Apple tends to use unique visitors per month which distorts actual use statistics. On phones, Apple leads 2:1 in unique visitors per month, but Android leads 2:1 in page hits, indicating lots of iPhone users use the web but not very much, while fewer Android users use the web but they use it a lot. I'm still trying to find data on what the situation is exactly with tablets.)
Actually, I think this is what's going to make cloud services viable. The problem with data storage on the cloud right now boils down to two major things: Someone else has all your data. And that someone else might not be online at a crucial moment when you need your data. (If you're not online and access to your data is that important, you shouldn't have been storing it in the cloud or you should've had redundant network trunks installed.)
If cloud services became a commodity, you wouldn't need to be beholden to a single cloud service provider. You could buy storage space from several services, and link them together in something like a SAS RAID array. No one service would have all your data, and if you put an encryption layer on top of it the fragmented nature of what they did have would make it virtually impossible for them (or NSA) to extract anything meaningful from what you're storing remotely at a single or even two or three sites (depending on the number of virtual drives in your array). And because the data is stored with parity redundancy, one or even two services could go down and your data would still be accessible.
The problems with having virtual drives in different geographic locations are bandwidth and latency. Bandwidth is constantly improving, and in many places already exceeds the 10-20 MB/s of local SCSI drives 15 years ago. Latency will always be there, but the 20-100 ms ping times across a continent are within an order of magnitude of the latency of mechanical hard drives. Obviously if you're running some high speed service which needs instant responsiveness this isn't going to work. But for simple data storage on the cloud, it should be fine.
I actually came up with this idea a decade ago when Napster was shut down by the RIAA and decentralized services like Grokster sprang up. I started thinking of how binaries distributed on USENET were split into (say) 20 packets with 5 parity packets, and you could reconstruct the original binary as long as you got at least 20 of the 25 packets. Then I realized the atomic size of the decentralization didn't have an individual user - it could be a fraction of a user. The entire song could be hosted and downloadable from the cloud, but any one particular person could onnly be hosting 5% of the song and thus couldn't be accused of making the entire song available for download. (Hey if they can play semantics with the law to fine individuals downloading a single song hundreds of thousands of dollars as if they were commercial copyright infringers, so can I.) And parity redundancy means even if lots of people stop hosting, the song still remains available. Alas my career moved away from software so I haven't really been able to do anything with this.
Well if you're going to require a glass plate in front, then no there's not much value here. Maybe being able to fix a broken display by just replacing the glass cover instead of the entire display.
But long-term, I think this is the future. No glass, just a plastic display. You can cover it with a cheap screen protector to ward off scratches. When the protector gets too scratched up, just peel it off and put on a new one. If you drop it, it'll flex instead of shatter. Many laptop screens are plastic instead of glass for this reason, and the decision to make phone displays glass was in many ways a step backwards. Form ("premium" feel) taking priority over function (impact resistance).
In the U.S., the people have a right to know who's broken the law or been accused of breaking the law. See, way back before the U.S. was a country, the government running the show had this nasty habit of secretly detaining people indefinitely without charges. So I think I'll side with the U.S. on this one. Yeah it sucks that your arrest photos are public, but it's the lesser of two evils.
Out of curiosity, has Google actually ever used a dubious patent to sue someone for patent infringement who didn't sue them first? I'm right there with you in rallying against stupid patents, but the reality is that the USPTO is giving out such stupid patents. If you're trying to run a business, there's little point in taking a principled stance which just makes you pay $millions in the future defending against a patent suit, when you can just pay $10,000 up front and get the patent in your own name.