It's both an aural warning and an indicator light. But they ignored about 70 aural stall warnings; they probably ignored the dual input warnings too. Remember, the pilots didn't know they were suffering an instrumentation failure due to iced up pitot tubes. All they knew was that they were getting inconsistent, contradictory, and in some cases impossible readings from their instruments. While trying to figure out what the hell was going on, they got the plane into a high angle of attack, low speed configuration which caused the stall warnings to stop (even though the plane was still in a stall) due to the computer being programed to discount aerodynamic data as unreliable in that state.
When the pilot then gave the plane the correct input (nose down), the plane picked up speed and the stall warnings began again. Completely the opposite of what's actually going on, and probably confused the hell out of the pilots. At that point they probably guessed they were experiencing an electronic/computer problem, and probably began disregarding all the alarms they were hearing.
It's tempting to blame the accident on how easy it is to miss the "dual input" warning during a confusing and dangerous situation where all sorts of warnings are going off, and say that a force-feedback system like Boeing uses is superior. But with Boeing's system, one pilot slumped over or deliberately pushing his control column to crash the plane would hinder the other pilot from controlling the aircraft, possibly causing an accident. With Airbus' system, the conscious pilot just pushes a button and he has complete control. It's not that one method is better than the others, they're just different, and vulnerable to different failure modes. AF447 just happened to hit upon a failure mode of the Airbus system.
It's also worth pointing out that the other two major crashes caused by disorientation following instrument failure were 757s. So while the dual inputs probably added to the confusion, it's still highly likely AF447 would have crashed anyway even without the dual input problem. The overwhelming cause of the accident was spatial disorientation coupled with reluctance to believe the instruments after a systemic failure (the airspeed inputs feed into multiple other systems that update the pilots on the state of the plane).
3,142 people have summited Everest a total of 5,104 times. Two hundred and nineteen people have lost their lives, with a quarter dying after reaching the summit. That's a 6.97% fatality rate.
No it's not. You're using the wrong denominator. If you're going to use the number of times Everest has been summitted as the denominator, then you need to compare to deaths among those who reached the summit. A quarter of 219 = 55. 55/5104 = 1.1% fatality rate.
If you're going to calculate a fatality rate based on the total 219 people who died (regardless of whether they failed or succeeded), then you need to compare it to the total number of people who've attempted to summit Everest (regardless of whether they failed or succeeded).
Pictures show the aircraft sat on the ground with the tail missing and the forward roof burnt out but it certainly did NOT cartwheel or bits would be scattered down the runway.
There are actually bits of debris on the runway starting almost with the rocks separating the runway from the bay. The integrity of the fuselage says it did not cartwheel (objects this big don't move in one piece like the movies - they'll disintegrate with just moderate lateral forces). But the debris trail and missing tail suggest it came down at a high angle of attack hitting tail-first possibly from a stall (in a regular landing you hit landing gear-first), then hit the ground hard enough to collapse its landing gear and skid off the runway. The jagged yellow partial dome you see at the tail end of the fuselage is the plane's aft pressure bulkhead - the end of the pressurized section of the fuselage. So nobody was in the tail portion which broke off.
The high AOA suggests the pilot was pulling up trying to gain altitude (or at least decrease the rate he was losing it). Possible reasons are an engine problem (with inadequate thrust, pilot was trying desperately to glide a little further to make the runway) or some failure of the flaps (if they retract, they increase the plane's stall speed possibly causing the plane to drop out of the air). Or wind shear (sudden tailwind deprives the plane of lift and pilot pulls up to try to maintain altitude - unlikely given the weather). Or pilot error (was coming in too high and tried to bleed altitude too quickly, instead of declaring a missed approach and trying again), though the tail striking short of the runway makes this unlikely unless the pilot accidentally put the plane into a stall.
Second, they've often negotiated contracts with local governments that end up appearing one-sided during downturns, making the unions look unwilling to scale back in hard times. The problem is that local governments often think short-term because of election cycles, and unions take advantage of this stance in negotiations.
Honest question: Why do public employees need a union?
I can totally see the need for people to be free to unionize in private jobs. The employer is a private entity which can act entirely in its own self-interest - each dollar they spend on wages is a dollar that could have been profit. A union can act as a counterbalance to that consolidation of power.
But for public jobs, the employer is the electorate (either directly, via an elected representative, or via someone appointed by an elected representative). If you're unable to convince the electorate that your job is worth a certain amount of money, then unionizing to thwart the will of the electorate seems pretty undemocratic to me. In terms of motive, each dollar the employer spends is no skin off their nose since it's all coming from tax revenue, and the election cycle means there's little to no long-term consequences for the employer to concede to concede to the union's every demand. It seems like unions in public jobs puts all the cards in the union's hand for no reason other than just the idea of having a union.
it is extremely doubtful that governments will be any more successful in preventing the proliferation of "illegal 3D patterns" online and preventing people from printing them on their personal 3D printers.
It's worth noting that one of the first applications of Copyright law outside of books was to the proliferation of illegal 2D patterns. Weave patterns used in cloth textiles were determined to be protected by copyright (technically they still are, but most common patterns are in the public domain now). And the fact that you can "program" an automated loom to produce a certain pattern laid the framework for the application of Copyright law to computer software. These, not mechanical calculators, were the first programmable mechanical computers.
So yeah, you and I know it's a practical impossibility to try to stop the proliferation. But that won't stop people from trying.
Blame the banks for that. They're attaching fees to electronic transactions which are higher than for processing paper checks. In all likelihood their fees were a lot higher than $1 per paycheck. I had to pick the banks for my personal accounts carefully because many of them don't allow or charge you for using ACH to move money between your own accounts. Sure the employer can pick a bank which allows free or low-cost ACH transactions for direct deposit. But if the employee's bank refuses or charges a high fee to ACH money in, the business is SOL.
Yeah in general a business which can't pay up to a few hundred dollars extra per employee per year probably isn't on solid financial footing. But on principle, electronic funds transfers should be cheaper than a printed paycheck, not more expensive.
As best as I can tell, that section of the criminal code has been there since 1996. So no, it wouldn't have been retroactive.
It was probably added in response to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Being "just" a fertilizer bomb, it did not constitute a "weapon of mass destruction" in the military sense (nuclear, biological, chemical).
This doesn't seem like a very impressive surveillance program though. San Diego County has a population of about 3.1 million. There are about 243 million cars in the U.S. vs 313 million people, or a 0.776 ratio. Apply that to San Diego and you get 2.4 million cars. They've scanned 36 million plates in 3 years, or 12 million per year. So on average each car is scanned 5 times a year. One scan every 10.4 weeks.
Like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the scans tell you a lot about a car's exact position at a very specific instance in time. But virtually nothing about its movement (where it's going). There are legitimate privacy issues with which to challenge this program. But it's pretty damn ineffective as a "surveillance and data mining" program. About the only data mining info I could see you getting out of this is after a few years, you could localize the neighborhood where a car tends to be, to figure out where the person lives/works. But the government already has that info - your home address is on your vehicle registration and tax return, and your work address is on your W2.
Disagree. There's no harm in this, and in my experience (like what everyone else's comment is based on, but no one is disclaiming) you can only benefit. Yes I slept through most of my Psychology lectures and still got an A, but there were interesting bits that made me think from time to time.
I majored in engineering and did a minor in psychology. I picked cognitive psychology courses - how the brain processes sense information, comes to decisions, etc. Optical illusions are a good example, as they take advantages of shortcuts your brain takes in processing visual information, to make it arrive at the incorrect conclusion.
Cognitive psychology is basically approaching AI from the opposite direction. Whereas computer scientists are trying to figure out AI starting purely with rules and axioms, cognitive psychologists are trying to figure out AI by analyzing the AI we already have - the brain - and analyzing it as a black box. I've found being able to see AI problems from both sides to be enormously useful throughout my career.
This war on humanities is mostly derived from a preconceived notion that "they're stupid and we're smart" that a lot of students in the sciences have towards those in the humanities.
Science and engineering tend to take a singular systematic approach to problems. (If you don't know what I mean, the fundamental premise if the scientific method is that it requires an infinite number of experiments to prove a negative, so assume the negative is true and try to prove the positive. That assumption however leads to the wrong conclusion in cases where the positive is unprovable. Nobody can prove what exists in the middle of a black hole because it's impossible to get experimental data out of one, but that does not mean there's nothing there.) Humanities are more likely to explore cases which transcend the limitations of the scientific method. While both can learn from each other, if I had to pick who could learn more from the field they're ignoring, I'd say it's the humanities students who should be required to take more math, science, and engineering.
That said, TFA is correct that humanities helps teach you how to handle unsolvable problems. But it's barking up the wrong tree. Engineers already deal with unsolvable problems all the time. Any problem with multiple degrees of freedom with unspecified prioritization of those DOF is unsolvable. I need to pick an alloy for a strut in a spacecraft which needs x tensile strength, y deflection under load, z temperature resistance, w resistance to fatigue failure, v weight, and u thermal conductivity, t electrostatic potential (to reduce galvanizic corrosion), and s cost. How do I pick the "best" alloy for the job? There is no one single right answer. How do I prioritize which criteria are more important? What the acceptable trade-offs are?
Engineers have to solve real-world problems so they're forced to deal with these types of situations all the time. If they didn't have to solve these types of problems, you could replace all engineers with computer programs. Just punch in your requirements, and the computer will spit out the best answer. So some humanities might help engineers more quickly learn how to deal with these open-ended problems, but even without humanities they'll be forced to learn how to deal with them anyway. It's intrinsic to the job - making stuff which works (reliably) in the real world, outside of the lab.
It's the math and science folks who need humanities. Their approach to having too many degrees of freedom is to reduce the number of degrees of freedom. Alter the proof or the experiment to eliminate the annoying extra variables. That works fine in a lab, but you almost never have that luxury in the real world where engineers have to work.
The solution to the "separate but equal" problem isn't to force churches to accept gay marriages. That prioritizes an implied right in the 14th amendment over an explicit right in the 1st amendment. If we do it that way, we arrive at gay couples successfully suing a church because the church refuses to allow them to marry there. That's a clear violation of one of the founding principles of the country - the freedom to practice whatever religion you wish.
The solution is to shift all federal statutes regarding married couples over to civil unions. Turn "marriage" into a purely ceremonial term. Let churches retain use of the term "marriage" for their purposes however they wish, it will just be inconsequential for legal or tax purposes.
Ballast is used to provide righting moment. By putting a large weight on the bottom, if the ship rolls, the weight gets lifted sideways, and gravity generates a moment pushing the weight back to the bottom.
But mass isn't the only way to generate a righting moment. Catamaran and trimaran designs eschew ballast. They generate their righting moment by increasing the lever arm - they put pontoons as far from the axis of roll as possible. As the ship rolls, one pontoon gets dunked further into the water, creating excess buoyancy. The large lever arm then multiplies that buoyancy into a larger righting moment than you could ever generate with a ballasted ship which can still float.
Did you RTFA? Despite covering the entire ship with 18% efficient solar panels, it produces a whopping 27 hp and averages only 5 knots. The fastest open-water sailboat can go more than 10x faster.
Wind power is solar power. Why put expensive solar collectors on the boat itself, when you can let the ocean collect the solar energy for free, and siphon that power off of the wind it creates.
So what curve is the Laffer curve? It can have multiple maxima, it can be asymmetric, the peak can range between 32% and 70%. If physical science were based on such curves the Moon landing would miss the Moon and fly to the Sun, and probably miss the Sun and fly to Jupiter.
Hate to break it to you, but that's how physical sciences work two. The multiple minima and maxima in gravitational potential curves are called Lagrange points. L1, L2, and L3 are unstable (maxima), L4 and L5 are stable (minima) for certain ratios of masses. Asymmetry in the curves (in the reference frame you're moving in) are what allow gravitational slingshots. In fact, there's a new field of orbital mechanics called weak stability boundary trajectories based on this, which can be used to get from point A to point B in space using less energy than if you went straight from A to B. And no it's not just theory - it's already been used on several spacecraft.
The endpoints don't have to be zero in the Laffer curve. As long as there's at least one point between the two endpoints which is higher than the endpoints, the Laffer curve holds. You concede that when you say:
Yes, it's a shit system
about 100% taxation. So you agree there's a maximum (or maxima) between the two endpoints, and the Laffer curve holds. The Laffer curve is just a specific case of the Mean Value Theorem from calculus.
It's probably a double bluff. The Chinese government has a hard time breaking into Chinese citizens' networks built on Cisco gear. So they piggy-back off recent news and make up a plausible story about Cisco stuff being compromised by the NSA, and so you should use Huawai and ZTE stuff instead. In fact it is the Huawai and ZTE stuff which is compromised - with backdoors (or lax security) put in by the Chinese government. Chinese citizens switch away from Cisco and to Huawai and ZTE hardware, and the Chinese government has an easier time spying on their own citizens.
They're relying on the recent Snowden/NSA spying scandal to make people forget that what the NSA did/does is child's play compared to the massive privacy intrusion the Chinese government already carries out against its own people. Remember, the U.S. government wants to be authoritarian. The Chinese government is authoritarian.
Even asking questions about factual discussion of long term nuclear power ACTUAL cost will prolly cost me Karma.
There are plenty of studies on actual generating cost by power source. If you don't know about them, it's probably because the people in the circles you hang out in ignore them because they don't say want you want them to say. Unregulated fossil fuels are cheapest. Nuclear is perfectly viable. Wind is viable or becoming so. And solar is not viable.
But when the AC comes back on, it has to work harder because now the room is warmer. Sure, you saved that 15 minutes of AC usage but instead of the AC cycling on and off every few minutes as it would normally do to maintain a room at a given temperature it will come on and stay on until it's made up the difference.
No energy has been saved in the long run, all thats happened is a tall thin peak of energy consumption has been flattened and made wider.
Heat transfer rate is proportional to the temperature difference between two objects (e.g. your room and the outside). So shutting off the AC for a 15 minute cycle would in fact save power vs. shutting it off for a 5 min cycle.
That said, the power savings comes about because the average room temperature is higher for the 15 min cycle case. If you assume the thermostat is set to the same temp in both cases, then that's the min temp. During a 15 min cycle the room temp will go higher than if it were on a 5 min cycle. So the average temp is higher for the 15 min cycle. Not really a fair comparison.
If you lower the 15 min cycle's thermostat to maintain the same average temp as the 5 min cycle, what happens really depends on the AC equipment. Assuming ideal equipment, running the AC continuously would be the most efficient. (Same reason as why swimming straight across a river is quickest if you angle yourself to cancel out the relative motion of the river. If you try to increase your crossing speed by not angling yourself and letting the river carry you downstream, then at the end swim straight upstream to the original target spot, you end up covering a lot more relative distance through the water.) But real-world AC equipment isn't ideal. ACs have a certain heat pump flowrate at which they're most efficient. An AC which works hard in spurts closer to this efficiency peak can be more efficient than an AC which is constantly on at a low setting far from this peak. An AC which is constantly on close to this peak is more efficient than an AC which works harder in spurts far from this peak. It all depends at what rate of cooling the AC is most efficient at, and how much temperature drop that level of cooling corresponds to (i.e. room vs outside temp, and size/energy efficiency of the room).
tl;dr version: In the ideal case, running the AC continuously is most efficient. For real-world ACs, cycles will be more efficient. However, merely increasing the cycle time while using the same AC equipment and same thermostat setting is equivalent to tricking people into raising their thermostat. That's where the power savings comes from, not because it's using the AC more efficiently. Despite the thermostat being at the same temp, the longer cycle results in a higher average temp.
I've seen it written that Google themselves blew the whistle on this issue, but I don't know that for a fact myself (the origins of its discovery are missing details).
Sort of. It went down like this:
Random conspiracy theorists to the EU: Google is eavesdropping on wifi communications while driving around taking Street View pics!
Google: We are not eavesdropping.
EU: Hmm, are you sure you're not eavesdropping?
Google: We're not. See, we can prove it.
Google:...
Google: Ok, we checked our records and it turns out we did eavesdrop on wifi communications. But it was accidental!
EU: I'm investigating.
US: Me too!
It was a request from German regulators which got Google to do its initial internal investigation. But following that investigation Google self-reported that it had violated EU law, instead of trying to cover it up. That's largely why I don't have a problem with these no-fine or small-fine "don't do it again" judgments against Google. It's not like other violations where the company claims all along that it did nothing wrong. Google already admitted they screwed up; they're just saying that it was an accidental screw-up not an intentionally malicious one.
c.f. Apple which basically did the same thing to build their wifi map database - pulled location and wifi data off of iPhones without notifying iPhone owners. But they just denied everything (the only way you know they did this was because they soon dropped their licensing contract with their wifi map provider), attributing it to an erroneous configuration setting. And pretty much got away with it because they didn't willingly provide regulators with evidence to make a case of it as Google has done.
While you don't want the type of mistake Google made to go unpunished, you also don't want the punishment to be so harsh as to create a big incentive for companies to cover this sort of stuff up in the future. It's easier for everyone if they self-report this stuff.
USB is non-proprietary. It was developed by Compaq, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC and Nortel. You may be thinking of Intel's southbridge chipsets which have a USB controller built into them, and are ubiquitous on motherboards taking Intel CPUs. Well, AMD has their own southbridge and it does USB just fine.
Thunderbolt is proprietary - owned solely by Intel. Mini-Displayport was proprietary too (Apple). VESA finally incorporated it into the (full-sized) Displayport standard a few years back.
The MacBook is decent and the magnetic power port is an elegant design. It was a major pain when I somehow ended up with a tiny piece of metal stuck in it though. Had a challenging time trying to get it out. Can't shake it out because the magnet holds it on.
That sounds like a very inelegant design. Common sense would dictate it should be designed with a magnet on the male end, mating to a paramagnetic or non-permanent ferromagnetic material on the female end. That way only the protruding male part is magnetic, and any metal pieces it picks up can easily be scraped off. While the recessed female part is non-magnetic until in the proximity of a magnet.
I just checked my Zojirushi water boiler and that's the way its magnetic power cord is designed - magnet on the protruding end, metal in the receptacle.
We can't see it with the naked eye, but the fluorescents are also flickering at 60hz and I've had it happen in the past that if the CRTs I was using were out of sync, (running at 75hz or similar)
I'm one of those people who can see the flicker. The fluorescent ceiling lights with the old magnetic ballasts actually flickered at 120 Hz. If you draw a 60 Hz sine wave, it crosses 0 V twice every cycle. So the fluorescent lights would turn off twice per AC cycle, and flicker at 120 Hz.
LED PWM frequencies are FAR higher than the old CRT refresh rates.
I'm highly sensitive to this - I can see the flicker of the old fluorescent lights. It's not a placebo. Most cheap LED PWM frequencies (up to about 250 Hz) are blindingly obvious. Above about 250 Hz I have to look for the effect to see it, though I can detect it up to a bit over 1 kHz.
The old CRT refresh rates were mitigated by having phosphors, so they slowly dimmed in between refreshes, never turning off (when you turned the CRT off, the length of time it took for the screen to go completely black was how long the phosphors stayed lit). So if you scanned your vision side-to-side, even though the CRT scan image might not remain constant in brightness, it was still a continuously scrolling image.
By contrast, LED PWM is almost binary - totally on to totally off. If you scan side-to-side while viewing an LED PWM screen, you see multiple individual images instead of one continuously scrolling one. It's like watching a poorly animated cartoon from the 1970s - easy to lose track of which parts are supposed to be static and which are supposed to be moving. (Well, I assume those of you with normal vision can tell 1970s cartoons were more poorly animated.)
I have a friend who is extremely photosensitive - the flicker of fluorescent lights without high frequency ballasts make him begin feeling sick almost immediately, and before he was on seizure medications, would cause seizures.
In static applications like a computer screen it doesn't make me sick. In fact, for me at least, it's pretty easy to ignore since I rarely have to scan side to side. Most of the scanning I do is just slightly side to side or slightly up and down. I'm just aware it's flickering. Then again I rarely get seasick so perhaps I'm not as sensitive to contradictory signals from my eyes and other senses.
Where it kills me is in mobile applications. Certain cars are using LEDs with low refresh rate PWM (I'd estimate around 50 Hz) on their tail lights. When I'm driving at night, I'm not staring straight ahead. I scan side-to-side every few seconds to maintain situational awareness. If one of these cars is ahead of me, the act of scanning turns my field of vision into a sea of individual sets of lights making it difficult to pick apart separate cars. With the old continuous lighting, I could count the light trails and tell you how many cars there were. But if there are multiple cars ahead of me with the PWM lights, it's nearly impossible for me to tell how many cars there are while I'm scanning. I have to wait a couple tenths of a second to finish scanning, regain a static image, and see individual car lights. The lower the frequency of the PWM, the further the individual images of the lights are, and the harder it is to "connect the dots" and rationalize that they all represent one car.
To use a PC monitor, he had to always have ultra-high-refresh rate CRTs - until LCDs became common. He has NEVER had ANY issues with any LCD monitor, regardless of whether the backlight was LED or CCFL. They have been a godsend for him.
I never had much problem with CCFL - either they didn't use PWM or used it at such a high frequency it didn't bother me. Most LED screens however use PWM to decrease brightness. If you use the monitor at or near max brightness, you're unlikely to notice the PWM. But if you lower the brightness a lot like a laptop screen used indoors, the PWM becomes pretty obvious. I've learned to slow down how quickly I scan my eyes across the screen to compensate. Also, your peripheral vision is more sensitive to the flickering than your central vision, so avoid brightly-colored or cluttered desktop backgrounds.
Microsoft had to make RT to hedge their bets. Regardless of whether it succeeds or fails, it needed to be made.
10 years ago everyone knew PDAs and phones were going to converge. They just didn't know if PDAs would gain phone calling capabilities, or if phones would get a PDA grafted onto them. It turned out to be the latter.
Similarly, everyone today knows these mobile computing devices and PCs are going to converge. Well, a portion of the PC fanbase is in denial. But I think everyone else, at least in the back of their minds, realizes that soon everything they do on a PC could be done on a tablet or phone if you just interface a real keyboard, mouse, and display to it. They're just unsure if the winner is going to be ARM (increasing the performance of its low-Wattage processors) or Intel (decreasing the Wattage of their high-performance processors).
As an OS company, Microsoft doesn't really care who wins that particular hardware war. So they had to hedge their bets and make a version of Windows for ARM - aka Windows RT. That way regardless of whether ARM or Intel wins, Microsoft can continue to sell Windows.
MP3 players were becoming the in thing. Sony, which dominated the analog portable music player market with the Walkman, was expected to dominate the MP3 market. But somehow their $0.15 billion/yr music division pulled rank on their $35 billion/yr electronics division, and forced their initial MP3 player to be designed so that it couldn't play MP3s at all. It had to use a proprietary, DRM-encrusted format. (Yes it's advertised as an MP3 player, but you had to convert your MP3 collection into their proprietary format first.)
They flopped in the market, and Apple went on to dominate the MP3 player market in 2001 with an MP3 player which had DRM if you bought from iTunes but could still play MP3s you copied to the player manually. Microsoft corrected themselves much more quickly than Sony did back then (it took them years to finally add MP3 support, and they didn't give up on ATRAC until 2007), so we'll have to wait and see how bad the damage is.
Slashdot Mirror
It's both an aural warning and an indicator light. But they ignored about 70 aural stall warnings; they probably ignored the dual input warnings too. Remember, the pilots didn't know they were suffering an instrumentation failure due to iced up pitot tubes. All they knew was that they were getting inconsistent, contradictory, and in some cases impossible readings from their instruments. While trying to figure out what the hell was going on, they got the plane into a high angle of attack, low speed configuration which caused the stall warnings to stop (even though the plane was still in a stall) due to the computer being programed to discount aerodynamic data as unreliable in that state.
When the pilot then gave the plane the correct input (nose down), the plane picked up speed and the stall warnings began again. Completely the opposite of what's actually going on, and probably confused the hell out of the pilots. At that point they probably guessed they were experiencing an electronic/computer problem, and probably began disregarding all the alarms they were hearing.
It's tempting to blame the accident on how easy it is to miss the "dual input" warning during a confusing and dangerous situation where all sorts of warnings are going off, and say that a force-feedback system like Boeing uses is superior. But with Boeing's system, one pilot slumped over or deliberately pushing his control column to crash the plane would hinder the other pilot from controlling the aircraft, possibly causing an accident. With Airbus' system, the conscious pilot just pushes a button and he has complete control. It's not that one method is better than the others, they're just different, and vulnerable to different failure modes. AF447 just happened to hit upon a failure mode of the Airbus system.
It's also worth pointing out that the other two major crashes caused by disorientation following instrument failure were 757s. So while the dual inputs probably added to the confusion, it's still highly likely AF447 would have crashed anyway even without the dual input problem. The overwhelming cause of the accident was spatial disorientation coupled with reluctance to believe the instruments after a systemic failure (the airspeed inputs feed into multiple other systems that update the pilots on the state of the plane).
No it's not. You're using the wrong denominator. If you're going to use the number of times Everest has been summitted as the denominator, then you need to compare to deaths among those who reached the summit. A quarter of 219 = 55. 55/5104 = 1.1% fatality rate.
If you're going to calculate a fatality rate based on the total 219 people who died (regardless of whether they failed or succeeded), then you need to compare it to the total number of people who've attempted to summit Everest (regardless of whether they failed or succeeded).
There are actually bits of debris on the runway starting almost with the rocks separating the runway from the bay. The integrity of the fuselage says it did not cartwheel (objects this big don't move in one piece like the movies - they'll disintegrate with just moderate lateral forces). But the debris trail and missing tail suggest it came down at a high angle of attack hitting tail-first possibly from a stall (in a regular landing you hit landing gear-first), then hit the ground hard enough to collapse its landing gear and skid off the runway. The jagged yellow partial dome you see at the tail end of the fuselage is the plane's aft pressure bulkhead - the end of the pressurized section of the fuselage. So nobody was in the tail portion which broke off.
The high AOA suggests the pilot was pulling up trying to gain altitude (or at least decrease the rate he was losing it). Possible reasons are an engine problem (with inadequate thrust, pilot was trying desperately to glide a little further to make the runway) or some failure of the flaps (if they retract, they increase the plane's stall speed possibly causing the plane to drop out of the air). Or wind shear (sudden tailwind deprives the plane of lift and pilot pulls up to try to maintain altitude - unlikely given the weather). Or pilot error (was coming in too high and tried to bleed altitude too quickly, instead of declaring a missed approach and trying again), though the tail striking short of the runway makes this unlikely unless the pilot accidentally put the plane into a stall.
That's too obvious. A better ambiguity test case is:
Good luck.
Honest question: Why do public employees need a union?
I can totally see the need for people to be free to unionize in private jobs. The employer is a private entity which can act entirely in its own self-interest - each dollar they spend on wages is a dollar that could have been profit. A union can act as a counterbalance to that consolidation of power.
But for public jobs, the employer is the electorate (either directly, via an elected representative, or via someone appointed by an elected representative). If you're unable to convince the electorate that your job is worth a certain amount of money, then unionizing to thwart the will of the electorate seems pretty undemocratic to me. In terms of motive, each dollar the employer spends is no skin off their nose since it's all coming from tax revenue, and the election cycle means there's little to no long-term consequences for the employer to concede to concede to the union's every demand. It seems like unions in public jobs puts all the cards in the union's hand for no reason other than just the idea of having a union.
It's worth noting that one of the first applications of Copyright law outside of books was to the proliferation of illegal 2D patterns. Weave patterns used in cloth textiles were determined to be protected by copyright (technically they still are, but most common patterns are in the public domain now). And the fact that you can "program" an automated loom to produce a certain pattern laid the framework for the application of Copyright law to computer software. These, not mechanical calculators, were the first programmable mechanical computers.
So yeah, you and I know it's a practical impossibility to try to stop the proliferation. But that won't stop people from trying.
Blame the banks for that. They're attaching fees to electronic transactions which are higher than for processing paper checks. In all likelihood their fees were a lot higher than $1 per paycheck. I had to pick the banks for my personal accounts carefully because many of them don't allow or charge you for using ACH to move money between your own accounts. Sure the employer can pick a bank which allows free or low-cost ACH transactions for direct deposit. But if the employee's bank refuses or charges a high fee to ACH money in, the business is SOL.
Yeah in general a business which can't pay up to a few hundred dollars extra per employee per year probably isn't on solid financial footing. But on principle, electronic funds transfers should be cheaper than a printed paycheck, not more expensive.
As best as I can tell, that section of the criminal code has been there since 1996. So no, it wouldn't have been retroactive.
It was probably added in response to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Being "just" a fertilizer bomb, it did not constitute a "weapon of mass destruction" in the military sense (nuclear, biological, chemical).
This doesn't seem like a very impressive surveillance program though. San Diego County has a population of about 3.1 million. There are about 243 million cars in the U.S. vs 313 million people, or a 0.776 ratio. Apply that to San Diego and you get 2.4 million cars. They've scanned 36 million plates in 3 years, or 12 million per year. So on average each car is scanned 5 times a year. One scan every 10.4 weeks.
Like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the scans tell you a lot about a car's exact position at a very specific instance in time. But virtually nothing about its movement (where it's going). There are legitimate privacy issues with which to challenge this program. But it's pretty damn ineffective as a "surveillance and data mining" program. About the only data mining info I could see you getting out of this is after a few years, you could localize the neighborhood where a car tends to be, to figure out where the person lives/works. But the government already has that info - your home address is on your vehicle registration and tax return, and your work address is on your W2.
I majored in engineering and did a minor in psychology. I picked cognitive psychology courses - how the brain processes sense information, comes to decisions, etc. Optical illusions are a good example, as they take advantages of shortcuts your brain takes in processing visual information, to make it arrive at the incorrect conclusion.
Cognitive psychology is basically approaching AI from the opposite direction. Whereas computer scientists are trying to figure out AI starting purely with rules and axioms, cognitive psychologists are trying to figure out AI by analyzing the AI we already have - the brain - and analyzing it as a black box. I've found being able to see AI problems from both sides to be enormously useful throughout my career.
Science and engineering tend to take a singular systematic approach to problems. (If you don't know what I mean, the fundamental premise if the scientific method is that it requires an infinite number of experiments to prove a negative, so assume the negative is true and try to prove the positive. That assumption however leads to the wrong conclusion in cases where the positive is unprovable. Nobody can prove what exists in the middle of a black hole because it's impossible to get experimental data out of one, but that does not mean there's nothing there.) Humanities are more likely to explore cases which transcend the limitations of the scientific method. While both can learn from each other, if I had to pick who could learn more from the field they're ignoring, I'd say it's the humanities students who should be required to take more math, science, and engineering.
That said, TFA is correct that humanities helps teach you how to handle unsolvable problems. But it's barking up the wrong tree. Engineers already deal with unsolvable problems all the time. Any problem with multiple degrees of freedom with unspecified prioritization of those DOF is unsolvable. I need to pick an alloy for a strut in a spacecraft which needs x tensile strength, y deflection under load, z temperature resistance, w resistance to fatigue failure, v weight, and u thermal conductivity, t electrostatic potential (to reduce galvanizic corrosion), and s cost. How do I pick the "best" alloy for the job? There is no one single right answer. How do I prioritize which criteria are more important? What the acceptable trade-offs are?
Engineers have to solve real-world problems so they're forced to deal with these types of situations all the time. If they didn't have to solve these types of problems, you could replace all engineers with computer programs. Just punch in your requirements, and the computer will spit out the best answer. So some humanities might help engineers more quickly learn how to deal with these open-ended problems, but even without humanities they'll be forced to learn how to deal with them anyway. It's intrinsic to the job - making stuff which works (reliably) in the real world, outside of the lab.
It's the math and science folks who need humanities. Their approach to having too many degrees of freedom is to reduce the number of degrees of freedom. Alter the proof or the experiment to eliminate the annoying extra variables. That works fine in a lab, but you almost never have that luxury in the real world where engineers have to work.
The solution to the "separate but equal" problem isn't to force churches to accept gay marriages. That prioritizes an implied right in the 14th amendment over an explicit right in the 1st amendment. If we do it that way, we arrive at gay couples successfully suing a church because the church refuses to allow them to marry there. That's a clear violation of one of the founding principles of the country - the freedom to practice whatever religion you wish.
The solution is to shift all federal statutes regarding married couples over to civil unions. Turn "marriage" into a purely ceremonial term. Let churches retain use of the term "marriage" for their purposes however they wish, it will just be inconsequential for legal or tax purposes.
Ballast is used to provide righting moment. By putting a large weight on the bottom, if the ship rolls, the weight gets lifted sideways, and gravity generates a moment pushing the weight back to the bottom.
But mass isn't the only way to generate a righting moment. Catamaran and trimaran designs eschew ballast. They generate their righting moment by increasing the lever arm - they put pontoons as far from the axis of roll as possible. As the ship rolls, one pontoon gets dunked further into the water, creating excess buoyancy. The large lever arm then multiplies that buoyancy into a larger righting moment than you could ever generate with a ballasted ship which can still float.
Did you RTFA? Despite covering the entire ship with 18% efficient solar panels, it produces a whopping 27 hp and averages only 5 knots. The fastest open-water sailboat can go more than 10x faster.
Wind power is solar power. Why put expensive solar collectors on the boat itself, when you can let the ocean collect the solar energy for free, and siphon that power off of the wind it creates.
Hate to break it to you, but that's how physical sciences work two. The multiple minima and maxima in gravitational potential curves are called Lagrange points. L1, L2, and L3 are unstable (maxima), L4 and L5 are stable (minima) for certain ratios of masses. Asymmetry in the curves (in the reference frame you're moving in) are what allow gravitational slingshots. In fact, there's a new field of orbital mechanics called weak stability boundary trajectories based on this, which can be used to get from point A to point B in space using less energy than if you went straight from A to B. And no it's not just theory - it's already been used on several spacecraft.
about 100% taxation. So you agree there's a maximum (or maxima) between the two endpoints, and the Laffer curve holds. The Laffer curve is just a specific case of the Mean Value Theorem from calculus.
It's probably a double bluff. The Chinese government has a hard time breaking into Chinese citizens' networks built on Cisco gear. So they piggy-back off recent news and make up a plausible story about Cisco stuff being compromised by the NSA, and so you should use Huawai and ZTE stuff instead. In fact it is the Huawai and ZTE stuff which is compromised - with backdoors (or lax security) put in by the Chinese government. Chinese citizens switch away from Cisco and to Huawai and ZTE hardware, and the Chinese government has an easier time spying on their own citizens.
They're relying on the recent Snowden/NSA spying scandal to make people forget that what the NSA did/does is child's play compared to the massive privacy intrusion the Chinese government already carries out against its own people. Remember, the U.S. government wants to be authoritarian. The Chinese government is authoritarian.
There are plenty of studies on actual generating cost by power source. If you don't know about them, it's probably because the people in the circles you hang out in ignore them because they don't say want you want them to say. Unregulated fossil fuels are cheapest. Nuclear is perfectly viable. Wind is viable or becoming so. And solar is not viable.
Heat transfer rate is proportional to the temperature difference between two objects (e.g. your room and the outside). So shutting off the AC for a 15 minute cycle would in fact save power vs. shutting it off for a 5 min cycle.
That said, the power savings comes about because the average room temperature is higher for the 15 min cycle case. If you assume the thermostat is set to the same temp in both cases, then that's the min temp. During a 15 min cycle the room temp will go higher than if it were on a 5 min cycle. So the average temp is higher for the 15 min cycle. Not really a fair comparison.
If you lower the 15 min cycle's thermostat to maintain the same average temp as the 5 min cycle, what happens really depends on the AC equipment. Assuming ideal equipment, running the AC continuously would be the most efficient. (Same reason as why swimming straight across a river is quickest if you angle yourself to cancel out the relative motion of the river. If you try to increase your crossing speed by not angling yourself and letting the river carry you downstream, then at the end swim straight upstream to the original target spot, you end up covering a lot more relative distance through the water.) But real-world AC equipment isn't ideal. ACs have a certain heat pump flowrate at which they're most efficient. An AC which works hard in spurts closer to this efficiency peak can be more efficient than an AC which is constantly on at a low setting far from this peak. An AC which is constantly on close to this peak is more efficient than an AC which works harder in spurts far from this peak. It all depends at what rate of cooling the AC is most efficient at, and how much temperature drop that level of cooling corresponds to (i.e. room vs outside temp, and size/energy efficiency of the room).
tl;dr version: In the ideal case, running the AC continuously is most efficient. For real-world ACs, cycles will be more efficient. However, merely increasing the cycle time while using the same AC equipment and same thermostat setting is equivalent to tricking people into raising their thermostat. That's where the power savings comes from, not because it's using the AC more efficiently. Despite the thermostat being at the same temp, the longer cycle results in a higher average temp.
Sort of. It went down like this:
...
Random conspiracy theorists to the EU: Google is eavesdropping on wifi communications while driving around taking Street View pics!
Google: We are not eavesdropping.
EU: Hmm, are you sure you're not eavesdropping?
Google: We're not. See, we can prove it.
Google:
Google: Ok, we checked our records and it turns out we did eavesdrop on wifi communications. But it was accidental!
EU: I'm investigating.
US: Me too!
It was a request from German regulators which got Google to do its initial internal investigation. But following that investigation Google self-reported that it had violated EU law, instead of trying to cover it up. That's largely why I don't have a problem with these no-fine or small-fine "don't do it again" judgments against Google. It's not like other violations where the company claims all along that it did nothing wrong. Google already admitted they screwed up; they're just saying that it was an accidental screw-up not an intentionally malicious one.
c.f. Apple which basically did the same thing to build their wifi map database - pulled location and wifi data off of iPhones without notifying iPhone owners. But they just denied everything (the only way you know they did this was because they soon dropped their licensing contract with their wifi map provider), attributing it to an erroneous configuration setting. And pretty much got away with it because they didn't willingly provide regulators with evidence to make a case of it as Google has done.
While you don't want the type of mistake Google made to go unpunished, you also don't want the punishment to be so harsh as to create a big incentive for companies to cover this sort of stuff up in the future. It's easier for everyone if they self-report this stuff.
USB is non-proprietary. It was developed by Compaq, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC and Nortel. You may be thinking of Intel's southbridge chipsets which have a USB controller built into them, and are ubiquitous on motherboards taking Intel CPUs. Well, AMD has their own southbridge and it does USB just fine.
Thunderbolt is proprietary - owned solely by Intel. Mini-Displayport was proprietary too (Apple). VESA finally incorporated it into the (full-sized) Displayport standard a few years back.
That sounds like a very inelegant design. Common sense would dictate it should be designed with a magnet on the male end, mating to a paramagnetic or non-permanent ferromagnetic material on the female end. That way only the protruding male part is magnetic, and any metal pieces it picks up can easily be scraped off. While the recessed female part is non-magnetic until in the proximity of a magnet.
I just checked my Zojirushi water boiler and that's the way its magnetic power cord is designed - magnet on the protruding end, metal in the receptacle.
I'm one of those people who can see the flicker. The fluorescent ceiling lights with the old magnetic ballasts actually flickered at 120 Hz. If you draw a 60 Hz sine wave, it crosses 0 V twice every cycle. So the fluorescent lights would turn off twice per AC cycle, and flicker at 120 Hz.
I'm highly sensitive to this - I can see the flicker of the old fluorescent lights. It's not a placebo. Most cheap LED PWM frequencies (up to about 250 Hz) are blindingly obvious. Above about 250 Hz I have to look for the effect to see it, though I can detect it up to a bit over 1 kHz.
The old CRT refresh rates were mitigated by having phosphors, so they slowly dimmed in between refreshes, never turning off (when you turned the CRT off, the length of time it took for the screen to go completely black was how long the phosphors stayed lit). So if you scanned your vision side-to-side, even though the CRT scan image might not remain constant in brightness, it was still a continuously scrolling image.
By contrast, LED PWM is almost binary - totally on to totally off. If you scan side-to-side while viewing an LED PWM screen, you see multiple individual images instead of one continuously scrolling one. It's like watching a poorly animated cartoon from the 1970s - easy to lose track of which parts are supposed to be static and which are supposed to be moving. (Well, I assume those of you with normal vision can tell 1970s cartoons were more poorly animated.)
In static applications like a computer screen it doesn't make me sick. In fact, for me at least, it's pretty easy to ignore since I rarely have to scan side to side. Most of the scanning I do is just slightly side to side or slightly up and down. I'm just aware it's flickering. Then again I rarely get seasick so perhaps I'm not as sensitive to contradictory signals from my eyes and other senses.
Where it kills me is in mobile applications. Certain cars are using LEDs with low refresh rate PWM (I'd estimate around 50 Hz) on their tail lights. When I'm driving at night, I'm not staring straight ahead. I scan side-to-side every few seconds to maintain situational awareness. If one of these cars is ahead of me, the act of scanning turns my field of vision into a sea of individual sets of lights making it difficult to pick apart separate cars. With the old continuous lighting, I could count the light trails and tell you how many cars there were. But if there are multiple cars ahead of me with the PWM lights, it's nearly impossible for me to tell how many cars there are while I'm scanning. I have to wait a couple tenths of a second to finish scanning, regain a static image, and see individual car lights. The lower the frequency of the PWM, the further the individual images of the lights are, and the harder it is to "connect the dots" and rationalize that they all represent one car.
I never had much problem with CCFL - either they didn't use PWM or used it at such a high frequency it didn't bother me. Most LED screens however use PWM to decrease brightness. If you use the monitor at or near max brightness, you're unlikely to notice the PWM. But if you lower the brightness a lot like a laptop screen used indoors, the PWM becomes pretty obvious. I've learned to slow down how quickly I scan my eyes across the screen to compensate. Also, your peripheral vision is more sensitive to the flickering than your central vision, so avoid brightly-colored or cluttered desktop backgrounds.
Microsoft had to make RT to hedge their bets. Regardless of whether it succeeds or fails, it needed to be made.
10 years ago everyone knew PDAs and phones were going to converge. They just didn't know if PDAs would gain phone calling capabilities, or if phones would get a PDA grafted onto them. It turned out to be the latter.
Similarly, everyone today knows these mobile computing devices and PCs are going to converge. Well, a portion of the PC fanbase is in denial. But I think everyone else, at least in the back of their minds, realizes that soon everything they do on a PC could be done on a tablet or phone if you just interface a real keyboard, mouse, and display to it. They're just unsure if the winner is going to be ARM (increasing the performance of its low-Wattage processors) or Intel (decreasing the Wattage of their high-performance processors).
As an OS company, Microsoft doesn't really care who wins that particular hardware war. So they had to hedge their bets and make a version of Windows for ARM - aka Windows RT. That way regardless of whether ARM or Intel wins, Microsoft can continue to sell Windows.
MP3 players were becoming the in thing. Sony, which dominated the analog portable music player market with the Walkman, was expected to dominate the MP3 market. But somehow their $0.15 billion/yr music division pulled rank on their $35 billion/yr electronics division, and forced their initial MP3 player to be designed so that it couldn't play MP3s at all. It had to use a proprietary, DRM-encrusted format. (Yes it's advertised as an MP3 player, but you had to convert your MP3 collection into their proprietary format first.)
They flopped in the market, and Apple went on to dominate the MP3 player market in 2001 with an MP3 player which had DRM if you bought from iTunes but could still play MP3s you copied to the player manually. Microsoft corrected themselves much more quickly than Sony did back then (it took them years to finally add MP3 support, and they didn't give up on ATRAC until 2007), so we'll have to wait and see how bad the damage is.