I went to a drive-in a couple years ago. Most of the cars were SUVs or trucks, and half of them parked backwards. They lowered the tailgate (or lifted it depending on the vehicle) and basically had a family tailgate party. A couple of them even had an air mattress in the back, though most of them opted for just blankets and had a picnic while watching the movie.
That is exactly why costs are going up. A bank knows when they make the student loan, that it can't be dispensed in bankruptcy. It is a form of modern day slavery.
Slaves don't get paid. A loan is slavery only if you didn't receive any money up-front, at which point it isn't a loan anymore.
Make those loans subject to bankruptcy and the prices will eventually drop.
Sure tuition prices will drop, but only because fewer students will be applying. If you make student loans subject to bankruptcy, their interest rate will rise to match or even exceed that of regular loans, defeating the purpose of trying to make schools affordable.
You're erring by trying to paint the traditional bogeymen (banks) as the bad guys here. They're not. Tuitions are rising because of the schools. If you simply try to make college "affordable" by giving students access to cheap money, then demand exceeds supply and schools will simply increase prices until demand diminishes to equal the supply.
If you want to reduce tuitions, eliminate student loans. Put the money into public universities instead - public universities which charge little to no tuition for qualified students, while still paying professors competitive salaries. That will put downward price pressure on private universities to match what public universities offer at a given price point.
I think neural network algorithms give some insight here - they start off very flexible and prone to "leaping to conclusions", but gradually grow more stable, then become so fixed in their ways that they almost completely ignore inputs. If people didn't grow old and die, we'd turn into a society of stodgy, inflexible people lacking dreams and unwilling to compromise over anything. We'd probably end up killing each other over stupid things like Coke vs Pepsi. Aging and dying is the way the species keeps its innovative edge - by systematically eliminating individuals whose neural nets have become too inflexible, so make way for younger people who are willing to try and risk new things.
It's not just a myth. There's already been at least two people who've had a mutation granting them immortality. Though not quite in the way that people would want to be immortal.
Alternatively, the most straightforward way to stop criticism from disaffected "fans" would be to give them what they want, rather than assuming that some designer somewhere knows better.
That's easy. Just implement a god mode in the game.
The problem is the players want themselves to be in god mode, while other players are not.
... from the F2P scam, DRM, and taking away peoples ability to own games by making everything F2P or online, where Diablo 3 introduced us to the DEFECT of SINGLE PLAYER LAG. The entire industry at present and the corrupt whiny little bastard game devs (those who are among the corrupt) deserve everything they get.
I'm pretty sure those "features" were put in because management dictated that they be implemented. Not because game devs thought they would be cool things to put in the game.
Assuming my understanding is correct, then this isn't about ad revenue; this is about user experience. Microsoft wants a good Youtube app on their phones because they know their users want one; not having it makes them look bad.
This is one trend I hate about smartphones and tablets. Why does every site need its own app? Over the course of a year, I'll visit about two dozen sites regularly, about a hundred sites frequently, and probably close to a thousand sites infrequently. I don't want to install hundreds of apps on my phone just so I can access all of these sites' info. Unless your site is doing something which is extraordinarily difficult to do with a web browser, you don't need an app.
The beauty of the web browser, and indeed the WWW when it was first implemented was that you could use a single app to view everyone's content. No more having to learn a separate UI for each site, each with its individual idiosyncrasies. It was a huge simplification which made life easier. Instead of hundreds of millions of people having to learn how to use thousands of interfaces, the thousands of sites (at the time) standardized on a single interface. Then those hundreds of millions of people only had to learn a single interface to use those thousands of sites.
But now that you can harvest personal info (for marketing purposes!) stored on the phone if you can get someone to install your app on their phone without reading the full list of permissions they're granting you, we're going backwards. Every company and site out there is falling over themselves to abandon the convenience and simplicity of the web to implement their own app, purposefully making it better than their mobile site to "encourage" you to install their app.
Top-ups are nearly as hard on lithiums as run-downs. Ideally you should only completely top-up (and run down) the laptop battery once every couple months for a battery calibration. Failure to do that is what killed Li-ion battery longevity in the old days. The laptop would charge the battery to 100%, it would self-discharge to 99%, and the laptop would charge it right back to 100%. Several times a day. Within a year the battery's longevity was down to an hour, and after 2 years it would last 5 minutes. This is why removing the battery from the laptop worked - it prevented the laptop from immediately recharging it the moment it self-discharged below 100%.
Most new laptops have features to prevent this (so removing the battery is unnecessary). They prevent full charges or full discharges, either in hardware or in software. If it's done at the hardware (firmware) level, the capacity written on the battery or in the specs will be about 20% higher than the capacity reported by the OS. If it's done in software, there should be a setting which limits the max charge you can give the battery, and/or how much the battery can self-discharge before it will be recharged. e.g. On Thinkpads you can set the battery to charge to (say) 90% max, and prevent recharge until the battery drops to (say) 80% charge (both % can be set by the user). My daily use laptop for nearly 3 years has been a Sony which I immediately limited to 80% max charge after buying it. Its battery life has dropped only slightly over those 3 years (from about 2h45m on 80% charge to about 2h30m) despite daily use on and off AC.
All EV manufacturers adopt the same strategy of preventing a full charge or full discharge. The Volt only uses 10.3 kWh of its 16 kWh capacity. The Leaf only uses about 21 kWh of its 24 kWh capacity, and there are still complaints about losing bars of capacity. Numbers for the Tesla S are a bit hard to come by as they're pretty tight-lipped about the specs, but the mix of numbers I've seen suggest they're limiting the operating range to about 90% of the battery's real capacity.
So ignoring that a sample of one sucks and assuming this guy's finding is legit, it's possible Apple tweaked the max charge point and when the battery would recharge. They might have raised the max charge % to try to squeeze more life out of the battery, and the cost is that the max capacity is dropping more quickly.
best plants are convert 1.5% of incoming sunlight when factoring length of growing cycle and planting density.
Energy harvested per area covered isn't the proper metric here, at least not until we start running out of land area where we can put plants or solar panels.
The proper metric is energy harvested per dollar spent to produce the harvester. And plants self-replicate and grow all by themselves, making that cost close to zero or even negative (people want weeds cleared). Right now the cost of the plants matter because we're concentrating on just a few crops with high sugar yield (which corn is not, which is why corn ethanol is such a bad idea)*. But if there's a breakthrough in cellulostic ethanol (cellulose is just sugar molecules glued together into long chains), it's basically game over for PV solar. No need to build expensive solar panels when we can convert the dead plant matter we already throw away into fuel.
* The reason we even have a corn ethanol program is because there were food shortages during the Great Depression. In response, the government started subsidizing farms to ensure there was always an oversupply of food. That leaves us with an excess amount of corn every year. What to do with that excess corn has always been a problem. Some was sent overseas as foreign aid. Some is converted to meat, by using it as cattle feed. Early on some chemists figured out a way to make high fructose corn syrup out of it. And in the 1970s around the time of the Arab oil embargo someone thought, "What if we converted it to ethanol and used it in place of gasoline?" So corn ethanol is a great idea for getting rid of the excess corn we have. But it's a colossally stupid idea to grow corn solely for the purpose of converting it into ethanol. If you want to do that, sugar cane is the best choice, but it doesn't grow well outside of Hawaii and Florida. For most of the U.S., sugar beets are far superior to corn if you're going to make ethanol.
You clearly weren't around when Microsoft released Windows 95. There were long lines for that - at midnight, no less. I think what Microsoft needs to ask themselves is why that's no longer true.
That's pretty easy. Back then, they gave users what they wanted. Today, Apple gets it. Contrary to GP, their products are not top-notch. They're frequently missing features commonly found on competing products (which is what elicited the "lame" reaction to the iPod here when it was first release). But Apple doesn't try to cater to the tech geek. They cater to the average person (who outnumbers the tech geek about 10:1), and concentrate on the core features the average person wants. In other words: they give people what they want.
Microsoft hasn't been doing that lately. They dream up an idea of what they want, then try to force it down their customers' throats. Even when the customers complain that it's not what they want, they give the customer a big f-you and force it on them (e.g. putting back the Start button but having it pop up the Metro tiles). It's a complete reversal of the 1980s, when Apple said you could get your Macintosh in any color as long as it was beige, while Microsoft bent over backwards to get DOS and then Windows to work on any hardware platform out there.
and many cell phone users want this functionality because auto-connecting to unsecured wifi allows for data transmission without incurring fees from their provider.
Saying people want to auto-connect to unsecured wifi networks is like saying people want to be able to drive at 150 mph. Yeah everyone would like to do it, but they realize it's such a stupid thing to do that almost nobody willingly does so. A random unsecured wifi net in a public area is the perfect setup for a man-in-the-middle attack to harvest your email and bank login and passwords. At a minimum, automatically connecting to them should be disabled by default on all devices, and preferably there should be no way to enable such a "feature".
If you want to connect to an unsecured wifi network, you should have to make a conscious decision and take a deliberate action to do it. Auto-connecting to them is colossally stupid. So there is no need for your phone to be automatically scanning wifi nets in a manner which exposes its MAC address. If you find yourself in a random location and would like to manually connect to an open wifi net which you feel you can trust, then the phone should give up its MAC address.
If a probe request to identify nearby wifi nets requires a MAC address, that's a deficiency in the wifi handshaking standard IMHO. The phone should generate a random one just for that probe request to bypass that deficiency.
I'm actually on the company's side here (I believe it should be as easy/hard for a company to fire you as it is for you to quit a job). But I disagree with you. You're using the ends to justify the means - that if the woman did abuse her sick time for a vacation, then the employer has the right to that information.
The company fired the woman - that has already happened. The question isn't whether the dismissal was in actuality justified. It's whether the dismissal was justified on the basis of the information the company had at the time. So whether the woman actually took a vacation is irrelevant. What matters is why the company concluded that she had, and whether the reasoning and evidence for that conclusion at the time was sufficient justification to fire her. If they used her refusal to give them access to her FB page as "evidence", then that's pretty flimsy grounds regardless of whether or not she actually took a vacation.
If someone posts about the great vacation they had while "sick", they get fired
Well yeah, that's a confession straight from the horse's mouth.
but I'll bet if they post about how they worked 120 hours/week last month
Presumably the company already knows how many hours/week you worked.
saving the company from their incompetent boss who may actually be working for the competition on the side, they don't seem to get a new boss or a performance bonus.
That would be you making an unsubstantiated claim. If higher-up managers thought there might be a basis for it, they'd investigate your boss. And if you were found to be correct, you'd most likely get a new boss and a performance bonus, and an apology they didn't detect the situation sooner.
Or if you want an analogous situation to you posting about your great vacation while "sick", it would be your boss posting that he has no idea what's going on so he makes you do all the work and takes all the credit for it while he's secretly working for the competition on the side. If your employer saw that post, they'd fire your boss, and probably give you a promotion and pay raise. Like the "vacation while sick" post, that would also be a confession straight from the horse's mouth.
There's a huge credibility difference between stating things that you did, and stating things that others did.
Do you think it's Fair for Samsung to demand 2.4% of the total price of the phone -- somewhere around $16 per unit -- for a tweak to the standard implemented by the Infineon baseband processor?
Based on what I've read about the industry and patents, yes it's fair. Here's a PDF on licensing fees for LTE patents, which are also standards-essential patents. Licensing rates for each company's patent portfolio ranges from 0.8% to 3%. And yes that's a percent of the handset price, not for the radio - the paper makes it pretty clear that percentage of handset price is the norm. The "not more than $1 per handset" Apple was insisting on would be less than 0.2%, which is ridiculously low by market standards.
They need:
Clean water
Toilets/Sanitation
birth control
Basic Edgucation (litteracy)
It's precisely because of people thinking like you do that Africa is in the state it's in. If you look at population growth vs. economic development, there's a strong negative correlation - the more developed your country becomes, the fewer kids the citizens tend to have. The vast majority of the world's population growth is in developing countries, while industrialized countries are near zero population growth.
So what's going on in Africa is "humanitarian" efforts are putting the cart before the horse. They're trying to give Africans clean water, more food, sanitation, and medicine. All of these things are well-intentioned, but they treat the symptoms, not the problem. And in fact they reduce the death rate which increases the population growth rate, thus exacerbating the problem. So next year instead of 10 million people who need foreign food/medical assistance, you have 12 million; whereas without the humanitarian aid you might only have 11 million. The additional 1 million people makes it even harder to implement the changes which really need to happen to modernize Africa.
What they need, in order are:
Basic education
Political stability (stop the wars, stop supporting the warlords)
Assistance in setting up a functional economy (incentives for locals to start their own business)
Assistance in constructing basic infrastructure like roads, plumbing, electrical grids
Foreign investment in industries (yes, this means sweat shops when you're first starting out - they are preferable to starving)
Once you have these things, clean water, sanitation, medical care, birth control, and labor protection will happen on their own because the Africans will want these things, and will have enough income to pay for them. Fundamentally, food, water, and medicine are counterproductive if you lack the basic economic infrastructure to form a self-sufficient society.
We tend to think of the Internet as Facebook and social forums like slashdot. But it's also the gateway to education. Anyone anywhere in the world can watch lectures and take the coursework for classes at Stanford or MIT because of the Internet. In that respect, it'll be a whole lot more useful than controlling malaria. What good is saving someone from malaria if they have no marketable skills, there are no jobs, and they just wind up dependent on foreign food and medical aid all their lives while they spend their time making babies?
Outsourcing is driven by nothing but greed. Outsourcing is enabled by nothing but corruption funded by that greed. Outsourcing serves two purposes to weaken the power of the majority and to increase the short term profitability of the minority. It is a grossly anti-social activity.
While I agree the program has become corrupted, it's important to remember that the original rationale for the H1B program was to import the brightest and the best from overseas, and put them on a path to U.S. citizenship. i.e. It was a tool for improving the average quality of immigrants.
Without some sort of highly-skilled immigrant work visa program, you'll end up with a net drain of professional talent out of the U.S. They'll leave because other countries all have H1B-like visa programs aimed at attracting talent away from places like the U.S. So condemn the corruption in the program, but condemning all "outsourcing" is a xenophobic attitude which puts the U.S. on a path to unskilled mediocrity.
I'm not sure what is wrong with your math since you don't show any calcs, but it is horribly wrong.
Assuming an industry standard 92.1% uptime for the plant, an industry standard 0.85 CENTS per KWH operating & refueling cost and a 60 year lifespan, this plant with its two AP1000 reactors would generate 19.6 Billion KWH per year for 60 years. That works out to an installed cost of $6.91 per KWH of capacity.
First of all, there is no such thing as kWh of installed capacity. kWh is a unit of energy. kW is a unit of power. Installed capacities for a power plant are given in terms of power. (Unless you're talking about batteries, in which case the installed capacity is given as the maximum amount of energy it can store.)
2 * 1000 MW * 0.921 * 8766 hours/year * 60 years = 968.8 billion kWh generated over the 60 years.
$24.7 billion for the cost of the plant (ignoring interest since you ignored it in the solar case) works out to $24.7 / 968.8 = $0.0255 per kWh. Add the $0.0085 per kWh operating and refueling costs and you get $0.034 per kWh. Or 3.4 cents per kWh.
It makes no sense to state this in terms of kWh per year, because that would be the cost for constructing a $24.7 billion nuclear facility, using it one year, and replacing it each following year with a new $24.7 billion facility.
Meanwhile, I just installed a 6.2 KWH solar array for $24,000, (before any tax rebates and including all engineering, labor and other parts like inverters). Factoring in its 30 year life span (meaning factoring in that I'd need to buy TWO systems to equal the 60 year lifespan of the reactor) and factoring in average solar availability here in Florida, my cost per installed KWH is $4.00.
Your solar panels don't put out 6.2 kW (6.2 kWh for an array makes no sense, unless you mean 6.2 kWh per month or year, which is a pittance). Assuming it's a 6.2 kW array (about 45 m^2 - reasonable for a large home installation), PV solar has a capacity factor of about 0.145 for the U.S (about 0.11 in the northern U.S., 0.18 in the desert southwest, 0.10 for northern Europe). That is, if you have 1 kW of nameplate capacity installed, over the year it will on average generate 145 Watts. So a 6.2 kW array will over the year only generate an average of 899 Watts.
6.2 kW * 0.145 * 8766 hours/yr * 30 yrs = 236.4 thousand kWh generated over 30 years.
At a cost of $24,000, that's $24 / 236.4 = $0.1015 per kWh, or 10.2 cents per kWh. Exactly 3x more expensive than the nuclear plant.
That's irrelevant, what they are selling is bandwidth and there should be no restrictions on how you can use the bandwidth that you've paid for. What they want to do is charge you more because you want to use the same bandwidth for a different purpose.
The problem is the vast majority of "home servers" are botnet-infected computers generating spam emails. So this issue puts Google in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. If they follow your reasoning and let you run anything you want, then they're being evil for turning a blind eye to botnet-generated spam. If they say they have the right to prohibit servers (to stop spam), then they're being evil for not letting you do anything you want with the bandwidth you buy.
Nearly every cable internet provider I've used in the last 16 years has had a "no home servers" stipulation in their contract. Not a single one has blocked or raised a fuss over me running a personal ftp, ssh, or web server (though I've had paid hosting for nearly 10 years now so don't know if they're simply blocking port 80 requests now). They just put that limitation in the contract so they'll have the right to shut you down if they detect you doing anything nefarious on their service.
She was actually the perfect target audience for a Surface Pro. She wanted something tablet-sized but also a PC, high resolution, touchscreen, optional keyboard, and was willing to pay ultrabook prices for it. The Surface Pro checked off pretty much every box in what she was looking for and she was halfway out the door to buy one.
Then came ifixit's teardown and repairability review. Glue? Are you kidding me? If it breaks outside of warranty, you have a very, very expensive paperweight. They only offer a 1-year warranty, with an optional 3-year extended warranty (which includes accidental damage). And she's been burned by their extended warranty already (they refused to fix a cracked screen because they said since the laptop was out of production, the replacement screen cost exceeded her original purchase price and thus wouldn't be covered).
No matter how much I'm trying to train my brain it still thinks that insects and their larval forms are absolutely repulsive. You can't defeat that unless you have grown up eating those things and then it's the norm.
You have grown up eating insects. They're everywhere, so it's impossible to avoid them in mass food production. The FDA has guidelines for how much is allowable in food that's sold for consumption.
It's all in your head. Youtube is full of videos of people trying "sushi" for the first time, and gagging while eating California rolls. California rolls don't have any raw fish. It's (cooked) imitation crab meat, cucumber, avocado, seaweed, and rice.
Basically the scheme is the following: A gives code to B under a given license. B then gives the code to C in a way that violates A's license. C relies on B having followed A's license and figures out that redistribution in a certain way would not violate A's license. However since B's analysis rests on the false assumption that B complied, it turns out that C's redistribution of the code also violates A's license. But with a closer inspection, C could have found out that B didn't comply. The court ruling now says that C is responsible for violating the license.
That's how it's supposed to work. The next step is for C to sue B for breach of contract and/or damages suffered due to failure to comply with A's license, and (assuming B did their due diligence and put in a reasonable effort to make sure the code complied with A's license) for the court to find in C's favor and make B pay.
It shouldn't really be considered high risk. Brakes are important enough that engineers designed in a second redundant braking system. The parking brake is still connected to the brakes by a steel cable. It will work even if the electronics or hydraulics on the brake pedal fails.
The problem is most drivers don't know that it's a redundant system, and never think of trying the parking brake if the brake pedal fails. This is one area where linguistic drift has hurt us. They were originally called the emergency brake, whose name clearly implies they're to be used in an emergency if the regular brakes fail. But since they were also used to keep manual transmission cars from rolling when parked, they've colloquially been called parking brakes. To the point where most people refer to them as parking brakes now and don't know about their emergency braking function.
Some city was suffering from reduced tourism because their beaches had been invaded by starfish. So they paid some kids to go to the beach and kill every starfish they found by cutting it in half...
The price premium for Macs is quite real. What people dismissing it fail to take into account is that Macs are rarely discounted. About 10%-15% is the most you'll see, and that'll be a few times a year usually when a model refresh is coming up.
Dell seems to run 20%-25% discount coupons every other week, and occasionally 30%-40% off when a model is about to be replaced. HP and Lenovo less often, but you can still get them at pretty steep discounts.
Apple is reaping the benefit of in-house design (instead of "show me what you got that we can slap our label on"), top-notch system architects, and aggressively securing rights with suppliers for major components to get the best stuff before everyone else.
Apple doesn't make the Macbook/MBA. Quanta does. Quanta also makes most of HP's laptops, and a fair number Dells and Lenovos. You ever wonder why Apple didn't sue HP and Dell for "copycat" notebooks which looked almost identical to a Mac? In all likelihood it was because they were also made by Quanta.
Almost nobody who sells notebooks actually makes notebooks. They're made by a handful of ODMs you've mostly never heard of. That's the industry's dirty little secret, and why buying a notebook based on brand is mostly futile. The brand will only tell you what your warranty service will be like. To accurately gauge build quality, you need to know which ODM made each particular model. And the ODMs and name brands won't willingly give you that info.
Exactly. My business is in an area where Verizon DSL is your only option. None of the cable companies service the area since it's a business district. Verizon charges $40/mo for 1 Mbps down / 128 kbps up, $50/mo for 1.5 Mbps down / 384 kbps up, and $90/mo for 3 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up. Add $10/mo if you sign up month-to-month instead of a 2 year contract. Half the lines can't even get the 3 Mbps because they're too far from the CO and Verizon doesn't want to bother installing a closer one.
Slashdot Mirror
I went to a drive-in a couple years ago. Most of the cars were SUVs or trucks, and half of them parked backwards. They lowered the tailgate (or lifted it depending on the vehicle) and basically had a family tailgate party. A couple of them even had an air mattress in the back, though most of them opted for just blankets and had a picnic while watching the movie.
Slaves don't get paid. A loan is slavery only if you didn't receive any money up-front, at which point it isn't a loan anymore.
Sure tuition prices will drop, but only because fewer students will be applying. If you make student loans subject to bankruptcy, their interest rate will rise to match or even exceed that of regular loans, defeating the purpose of trying to make schools affordable.
You're erring by trying to paint the traditional bogeymen (banks) as the bad guys here. They're not. Tuitions are rising because of the schools. If you simply try to make college "affordable" by giving students access to cheap money, then demand exceeds supply and schools will simply increase prices until demand diminishes to equal the supply.
If you want to reduce tuitions, eliminate student loans. Put the money into public universities instead - public universities which charge little to no tuition for qualified students, while still paying professors competitive salaries. That will put downward price pressure on private universities to match what public universities offer at a given price point.
I think neural network algorithms give some insight here - they start off very flexible and prone to "leaping to conclusions", but gradually grow more stable, then become so fixed in their ways that they almost completely ignore inputs. If people didn't grow old and die, we'd turn into a society of stodgy, inflexible people lacking dreams and unwilling to compromise over anything. We'd probably end up killing each other over stupid things like Coke vs Pepsi. Aging and dying is the way the species keeps its innovative edge - by systematically eliminating individuals whose neural nets have become too inflexible, so make way for younger people who are willing to try and risk new things.
It's not just a myth. There's already been at least two people who've had a mutation granting them immortality. Though not quite in the way that people would want to be immortal.
That's easy. Just implement a god mode in the game.
The problem is the players want themselves to be in god mode, while other players are not.
I'm pretty sure those "features" were put in because management dictated that they be implemented. Not because game devs thought they would be cool things to put in the game.
This is one trend I hate about smartphones and tablets. Why does every site need its own app? Over the course of a year, I'll visit about two dozen sites regularly, about a hundred sites frequently, and probably close to a thousand sites infrequently. I don't want to install hundreds of apps on my phone just so I can access all of these sites' info. Unless your site is doing something which is extraordinarily difficult to do with a web browser, you don't need an app.
The beauty of the web browser, and indeed the WWW when it was first implemented was that you could use a single app to view everyone's content. No more having to learn a separate UI for each site, each with its individual idiosyncrasies. It was a huge simplification which made life easier. Instead of hundreds of millions of people having to learn how to use thousands of interfaces, the thousands of sites (at the time) standardized on a single interface. Then those hundreds of millions of people only had to learn a single interface to use those thousands of sites.
But now that you can harvest personal info (for marketing purposes!) stored on the phone if you can get someone to install your app on their phone without reading the full list of permissions they're granting you, we're going backwards. Every company and site out there is falling over themselves to abandon the convenience and simplicity of the web to implement their own app, purposefully making it better than their mobile site to "encourage" you to install their app.
Top-ups are nearly as hard on lithiums as run-downs. Ideally you should only completely top-up (and run down) the laptop battery once every couple months for a battery calibration. Failure to do that is what killed Li-ion battery longevity in the old days. The laptop would charge the battery to 100%, it would self-discharge to 99%, and the laptop would charge it right back to 100%. Several times a day. Within a year the battery's longevity was down to an hour, and after 2 years it would last 5 minutes. This is why removing the battery from the laptop worked - it prevented the laptop from immediately recharging it the moment it self-discharged below 100%.
Most new laptops have features to prevent this (so removing the battery is unnecessary). They prevent full charges or full discharges, either in hardware or in software. If it's done at the hardware (firmware) level, the capacity written on the battery or in the specs will be about 20% higher than the capacity reported by the OS. If it's done in software, there should be a setting which limits the max charge you can give the battery, and/or how much the battery can self-discharge before it will be recharged. e.g. On Thinkpads you can set the battery to charge to (say) 90% max, and prevent recharge until the battery drops to (say) 80% charge (both % can be set by the user). My daily use laptop for nearly 3 years has been a Sony which I immediately limited to 80% max charge after buying it. Its battery life has dropped only slightly over those 3 years (from about 2h45m on 80% charge to about 2h30m) despite daily use on and off AC.
All EV manufacturers adopt the same strategy of preventing a full charge or full discharge. The Volt only uses 10.3 kWh of its 16 kWh capacity. The Leaf only uses about 21 kWh of its 24 kWh capacity, and there are still complaints about losing bars of capacity. Numbers for the Tesla S are a bit hard to come by as they're pretty tight-lipped about the specs, but the mix of numbers I've seen suggest they're limiting the operating range to about 90% of the battery's real capacity.
So ignoring that a sample of one sucks and assuming this guy's finding is legit, it's possible Apple tweaked the max charge point and when the battery would recharge. They might have raised the max charge % to try to squeeze more life out of the battery, and the cost is that the max capacity is dropping more quickly.
Energy harvested per area covered isn't the proper metric here, at least not until we start running out of land area where we can put plants or solar panels.
The proper metric is energy harvested per dollar spent to produce the harvester. And plants self-replicate and grow all by themselves, making that cost close to zero or even negative (people want weeds cleared). Right now the cost of the plants matter because we're concentrating on just a few crops with high sugar yield (which corn is not, which is why corn ethanol is such a bad idea)*. But if there's a breakthrough in cellulostic ethanol (cellulose is just sugar molecules glued together into long chains), it's basically game over for PV solar. No need to build expensive solar panels when we can convert the dead plant matter we already throw away into fuel.
* The reason we even have a corn ethanol program is because there were food shortages during the Great Depression. In response, the government started subsidizing farms to ensure there was always an oversupply of food. That leaves us with an excess amount of corn every year. What to do with that excess corn has always been a problem. Some was sent overseas as foreign aid. Some is converted to meat, by using it as cattle feed. Early on some chemists figured out a way to make high fructose corn syrup out of it. And in the 1970s around the time of the Arab oil embargo someone thought, "What if we converted it to ethanol and used it in place of gasoline?" So corn ethanol is a great idea for getting rid of the excess corn we have. But it's a colossally stupid idea to grow corn solely for the purpose of converting it into ethanol. If you want to do that, sugar cane is the best choice, but it doesn't grow well outside of Hawaii and Florida. For most of the U.S., sugar beets are far superior to corn if you're going to make ethanol.
That's pretty easy. Back then, they gave users what they wanted. Today, Apple gets it. Contrary to GP, their products are not top-notch. They're frequently missing features commonly found on competing products (which is what elicited the "lame" reaction to the iPod here when it was first release). But Apple doesn't try to cater to the tech geek. They cater to the average person (who outnumbers the tech geek about 10:1), and concentrate on the core features the average person wants. In other words: they give people what they want.
Microsoft hasn't been doing that lately. They dream up an idea of what they want, then try to force it down their customers' throats. Even when the customers complain that it's not what they want, they give the customer a big f-you and force it on them (e.g. putting back the Start button but having it pop up the Metro tiles). It's a complete reversal of the 1980s, when Apple said you could get your Macintosh in any color as long as it was beige, while Microsoft bent over backwards to get DOS and then Windows to work on any hardware platform out there.
Saying people want to auto-connect to unsecured wifi networks is like saying people want to be able to drive at 150 mph. Yeah everyone would like to do it, but they realize it's such a stupid thing to do that almost nobody willingly does so. A random unsecured wifi net in a public area is the perfect setup for a man-in-the-middle attack to harvest your email and bank login and passwords. At a minimum, automatically connecting to them should be disabled by default on all devices, and preferably there should be no way to enable such a "feature".
If you want to connect to an unsecured wifi network, you should have to make a conscious decision and take a deliberate action to do it. Auto-connecting to them is colossally stupid. So there is no need for your phone to be automatically scanning wifi nets in a manner which exposes its MAC address. If you find yourself in a random location and would like to manually connect to an open wifi net which you feel you can trust, then the phone should give up its MAC address.
If a probe request to identify nearby wifi nets requires a MAC address, that's a deficiency in the wifi handshaking standard IMHO. The phone should generate a random one just for that probe request to bypass that deficiency.
I'm actually on the company's side here (I believe it should be as easy/hard for a company to fire you as it is for you to quit a job). But I disagree with you. You're using the ends to justify the means - that if the woman did abuse her sick time for a vacation, then the employer has the right to that information.
The company fired the woman - that has already happened. The question isn't whether the dismissal was in actuality justified. It's whether the dismissal was justified on the basis of the information the company had at the time. So whether the woman actually took a vacation is irrelevant. What matters is why the company concluded that she had, and whether the reasoning and evidence for that conclusion at the time was sufficient justification to fire her. If they used her refusal to give them access to her FB page as "evidence", then that's pretty flimsy grounds regardless of whether or not she actually took a vacation.
Well yeah, that's a confession straight from the horse's mouth.
Presumably the company already knows how many hours/week you worked.
That would be you making an unsubstantiated claim. If higher-up managers thought there might be a basis for it, they'd investigate your boss. And if you were found to be correct, you'd most likely get a new boss and a performance bonus, and an apology they didn't detect the situation sooner.
Or if you want an analogous situation to you posting about your great vacation while "sick", it would be your boss posting that he has no idea what's going on so he makes you do all the work and takes all the credit for it while he's secretly working for the competition on the side. If your employer saw that post, they'd fire your boss, and probably give you a promotion and pay raise. Like the "vacation while sick" post, that would also be a confession straight from the horse's mouth.
There's a huge credibility difference between stating things that you did, and stating things that others did.
Based on what I've read about the industry and patents, yes it's fair. Here's a PDF on licensing fees for LTE patents, which are also standards-essential patents. Licensing rates for each company's patent portfolio ranges from 0.8% to 3%. And yes that's a percent of the handset price, not for the radio - the paper makes it pretty clear that percentage of handset price is the norm. The "not more than $1 per handset" Apple was insisting on would be less than 0.2%, which is ridiculously low by market standards.
It's precisely because of people thinking like you do that Africa is in the state it's in. If you look at population growth vs. economic development, there's a strong negative correlation - the more developed your country becomes, the fewer kids the citizens tend to have. The vast majority of the world's population growth is in developing countries, while industrialized countries are near zero population growth.
So what's going on in Africa is "humanitarian" efforts are putting the cart before the horse. They're trying to give Africans clean water, more food, sanitation, and medicine. All of these things are well-intentioned, but they treat the symptoms, not the problem. And in fact they reduce the death rate which increases the population growth rate, thus exacerbating the problem. So next year instead of 10 million people who need foreign food/medical assistance, you have 12 million; whereas without the humanitarian aid you might only have 11 million. The additional 1 million people makes it even harder to implement the changes which really need to happen to modernize Africa.
What they need, in order are:
Basic education
Political stability (stop the wars, stop supporting the warlords)
Assistance in setting up a functional economy (incentives for locals to start their own business)
Assistance in constructing basic infrastructure like roads, plumbing, electrical grids
Foreign investment in industries (yes, this means sweat shops when you're first starting out - they are preferable to starving)
Once you have these things, clean water, sanitation, medical care, birth control, and labor protection will happen on their own because the Africans will want these things, and will have enough income to pay for them. Fundamentally, food, water, and medicine are counterproductive if you lack the basic economic infrastructure to form a self-sufficient society.
We tend to think of the Internet as Facebook and social forums like slashdot. But it's also the gateway to education. Anyone anywhere in the world can watch lectures and take the coursework for classes at Stanford or MIT because of the Internet. In that respect, it'll be a whole lot more useful than controlling malaria. What good is saving someone from malaria if they have no marketable skills, there are no jobs, and they just wind up dependent on foreign food and medical aid all their lives while they spend their time making babies?
While I agree the program has become corrupted, it's important to remember that the original rationale for the H1B program was to import the brightest and the best from overseas, and put them on a path to U.S. citizenship. i.e. It was a tool for improving the average quality of immigrants.
Without some sort of highly-skilled immigrant work visa program, you'll end up with a net drain of professional talent out of the U.S. They'll leave because other countries all have H1B-like visa programs aimed at attracting talent away from places like the U.S. So condemn the corruption in the program, but condemning all "outsourcing" is a xenophobic attitude which puts the U.S. on a path to unskilled mediocrity.
First of all, there is no such thing as kWh of installed capacity. kWh is a unit of energy. kW is a unit of power. Installed capacities for a power plant are given in terms of power. (Unless you're talking about batteries, in which case the installed capacity is given as the maximum amount of energy it can store.)
2 * 1000 MW * 0.921 * 8766 hours/year * 60 years = 968.8 billion kWh generated over the 60 years.
$24.7 billion for the cost of the plant (ignoring interest since you ignored it in the solar case) works out to $24.7 / 968.8 = $0.0255 per kWh. Add the $0.0085 per kWh operating and refueling costs and you get $0.034 per kWh. Or 3.4 cents per kWh.
It makes no sense to state this in terms of kWh per year, because that would be the cost for constructing a $24.7 billion nuclear facility, using it one year, and replacing it each following year with a new $24.7 billion facility.
Your solar panels don't put out 6.2 kW (6.2 kWh for an array makes no sense, unless you mean 6.2 kWh per month or year, which is a pittance). Assuming it's a 6.2 kW array (about 45 m^2 - reasonable for a large home installation), PV solar has a capacity factor of about 0.145 for the U.S (about 0.11 in the northern U.S., 0.18 in the desert southwest, 0.10 for northern Europe). That is, if you have 1 kW of nameplate capacity installed, over the year it will on average generate 145 Watts. So a 6.2 kW array will over the year only generate an average of 899 Watts.
6.2 kW * 0.145 * 8766 hours/yr * 30 yrs = 236.4 thousand kWh generated over 30 years.
At a cost of $24,000, that's $24 / 236.4 = $0.1015 per kWh, or 10.2 cents per kWh. Exactly 3x more expensive than the nuclear plant.
So your production costs are in-line with everything government and power company sources have been saying. PV solar costs about 2 to 5 times more than fossil fuels and nuclear.
The problem is the vast majority of "home servers" are botnet-infected computers generating spam emails. So this issue puts Google in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. If they follow your reasoning and let you run anything you want, then they're being evil for turning a blind eye to botnet-generated spam. If they say they have the right to prohibit servers (to stop spam), then they're being evil for not letting you do anything you want with the bandwidth you buy.
Nearly every cable internet provider I've used in the last 16 years has had a "no home servers" stipulation in their contract. Not a single one has blocked or raised a fuss over me running a personal ftp, ssh, or web server (though I've had paid hosting for nearly 10 years now so don't know if they're simply blocking port 80 requests now). They just put that limitation in the contract so they'll have the right to shut you down if they detect you doing anything nefarious on their service.
She was actually the perfect target audience for a Surface Pro. She wanted something tablet-sized but also a PC, high resolution, touchscreen, optional keyboard, and was willing to pay ultrabook prices for it. The Surface Pro checked off pretty much every box in what she was looking for and she was halfway out the door to buy one.
Then came ifixit's teardown and repairability review. Glue? Are you kidding me? If it breaks outside of warranty, you have a very, very expensive paperweight. They only offer a 1-year warranty, with an optional 3-year extended warranty (which includes accidental damage). And she's been burned by their extended warranty already (they refused to fix a cracked screen because they said since the laptop was out of production, the replacement screen cost exceeded her original purchase price and thus wouldn't be covered).
You have grown up eating insects. They're everywhere, so it's impossible to avoid them in mass food production. The FDA has guidelines for how much is allowable in food that's sold for consumption.
It's all in your head. Youtube is full of videos of people trying "sushi" for the first time, and gagging while eating California rolls. California rolls don't have any raw fish. It's (cooked) imitation crab meat, cucumber, avocado, seaweed, and rice.
That's how it's supposed to work. The next step is for C to sue B for breach of contract and/or damages suffered due to failure to comply with A's license, and (assuming B did their due diligence and put in a reasonable effort to make sure the code complied with A's license) for the court to find in C's favor and make B pay.
It shouldn't really be considered high risk. Brakes are important enough that engineers designed in a second redundant braking system. The parking brake is still connected to the brakes by a steel cable. It will work even if the electronics or hydraulics on the brake pedal fails.
The problem is most drivers don't know that it's a redundant system, and never think of trying the parking brake if the brake pedal fails. This is one area where linguistic drift has hurt us. They were originally called the emergency brake, whose name clearly implies they're to be used in an emergency if the regular brakes fail. But since they were also used to keep manual transmission cars from rolling when parked, they've colloquially been called parking brakes. To the point where most people refer to them as parking brakes now and don't know about their emergency braking function.
Some city was suffering from reduced tourism because their beaches had been invaded by starfish. So they paid some kids to go to the beach and kill every starfish they found by cutting it in half...
Dell seems to run 20%-25% discount coupons every other week, and occasionally 30%-40% off when a model is about to be replaced. HP and Lenovo less often, but you can still get them at pretty steep discounts.
Apple doesn't make the Macbook/MBA. Quanta does. Quanta also makes most of HP's laptops, and a fair number Dells and Lenovos. You ever wonder why Apple didn't sue HP and Dell for "copycat" notebooks which looked almost identical to a Mac? In all likelihood it was because they were also made by Quanta.
Almost nobody who sells notebooks actually makes notebooks. They're made by a handful of ODMs you've mostly never heard of. That's the industry's dirty little secret, and why buying a notebook based on brand is mostly futile. The brand will only tell you what your warranty service will be like. To accurately gauge build quality, you need to know which ODM made each particular model. And the ODMs and name brands won't willingly give you that info.
Exactly. My business is in an area where Verizon DSL is your only option. None of the cable companies service the area since it's a business district. Verizon charges $40/mo for 1 Mbps down / 128 kbps up, $50/mo for 1.5 Mbps down / 384 kbps up, and $90/mo for 3 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up. Add $10/mo if you sign up month-to-month instead of a 2 year contract. Half the lines can't even get the 3 Mbps because they're too far from the CO and Verizon doesn't want to bother installing a closer one.