That's security through obscurity. It works for music and video, where you can introduce small, regular bit changes without perceptibly altering the music or video. It doesn't work for eBooks, where a single bit change will change the letter or punctuation mark.
And even if you did introduce a regular, distinctive, and unique pattern of punctuation changes to an eBook, it'd be trivial to compare two of the same eBook and eliminate them or scramble them. The same is not true for music an video, where you can add stenographic marks which can survive re-encoding, but the re-encode makes it impossible to do a simple diff between two copies.
Most of the music videos on YouTube are put out by the studios or artists themselves. The vast majority of illegitimate uploads get flagged and removed for copyright infringement by the time they hit a couple hundred thousand views.
I later tried to create an MP3 of the file myself to check whether it was some obscure reason why it "has to" end up with that glitch when converted and no, at least my converter managed to encode it flawlessly.
CDs are rather interesting in that they don't store the audio data as digital files. Yes your ripping program creates digital WAV files, but that's not the way the music is encoded on the disc (in contrast to DVDs which store digital files). The music's waveform is encoded digitally, but as a stream. So ripping the same CD on two different drives will usually produce slightly different files depending on exactly how the drive positions the read head relative to the start of the disc.
That said, it may have been an encoder bug which created the glitch you noticed. And by the time you ran your tests the bug had been fixed.
The microUSB charger port on phones take 5 V. AA batteries are 1.5 V. Put four of them together and you have 6 V - more than enough to charge a phone. A phone battery is about 3.7 V and 1600 mAh, or 21,000 Joules. Four alkaline AA batteries are 4 * 1.5 V * 750 mAh, or 16,000 Joules. The heavy-duty ones are twice that. So they can completely or almost completely charge your phone.
They're a helluva lot more practical - you're not tied to the charging station for 2 hours. More durable - AA batteries are much more likely to survive a hurricane than solar panels. Substantially cheaper - I see them going on eBay for $2, batteries not included, whereas the solar charging stations are supposed to cost $12k-$20k each. Each station sports three 15 Watt panels, so using the 0.145 average capacity factor for solar in the U.S., each station will on average generate 564,000 Joules/day, or equivalent to 17-35 sets of 4 AA batteries. Just pass batteries and battery packs out after a disaster instead of chaining people to a charging station for 2 hours every day.
If you want to be green, use rechargeable AAs and have citizens drop by to swap them with a freshly charged set every day. Charge them with a generator, or a more practical array of solar panels if you like. Figure worst case you're paying $15 per charger pack, $8 for 4 rechargable AA batteries, and $2/Watt for a solar panel and regulation electronics (1.7 Watts needed per phone). For $12k-$20k you can buy enough to of these to fully charge 450-750 phones every day. Versus the 27 phones per day these charging stations are limited to due to having only 45 Watts of solar panels.
Once, an engineer heading a canal project was flabbergasted to find hundreds more diggers than he had requested, with most of them standing around idle. When he complained to the government official in charge of hiring, he was told the main purpose of the project was to create jobs, and building the canal was secondary. "Why didn't you just say so in the first place," he replied. "I would've specified that they were supposed to dig with spoons instead of shovels then." If you want to build public solar charging stations, just build them and call them that. Don't try to justify their existences with a task for which they are clearly unsuited and overpriced.
I *slightly* disagree. It's entirely appropriate that construction companies be required to preserve historic artifacts. What's not appropriate is that *particular* construction companies be so required. That's, as mentioned, counter productive, and places the burden on those who are conscientious.
Costs should be borne by the beneficiaries. If it's the public which is going to benefit from an archeological find, then it's the public which should bear the cost, not the construction company. It is not just inappropriate, but also immoral and dysfunctional to require a non-beneficiary to bear the costs of a situation they did not create.
Once you start making someone other than the beneficiary bear the cost, you get into all sorts of trouble. Whether it be bailouts for bankers who took too many risks, or people living perennially on welfare. The moment cost is decoupled from benefit, you can lose all sense of scale between cost and benefit. The beneficiaries don't bear the cost so it becomes a game of seeing how much they can get away with, and those bearing the cost start to get upset at taxation without representation and threaten to revolt.
Having the beneficiary bear the cost also makes the cost-benefit analysis crystal clear. If each discovered archeological site costs $5 million to process, but only yields $1 million worth of cultural preservation, then clearly the processing method needs to be refined to lower its cost. If it's the public footing the bill, then the government agency paying for it has an incentive to streamline the processing and their costs. If the construction companies are footing the bill, then there's no incentive for the government agency to do any streamlining.
That said, I'm not sure it should be legal to sell or rent properties lacking a tornado shelter in areas where a tornado is likely. You may not be able to install it due to lack of finances, but this doesn't mean you should be able to transfer the problem to someone else. Perhaps sale should be allowed if the purchaser signed a clear statement in 14 point type saying (approximately) "I understand that the state believes living in this place is unsafe due to the lack of a tornado shelter.".
Despite the recent news, tornadoes and especially injuries and deaths from tornadoes are actually pretty rare. If tornadoes kill 75 people per year on average, and you require all ~50 million residences in the tornado-prone areas to build $5000 shelters, and the average home lasts 50 years, you're mandating a cost of ($5000 per home * 50 million homes / (50 years * 75 people/year) ) = $67 million per life saved.
Given that the lifetime productivity of an average person is only $2-$3 million, a tornado shelter requirement would result in a net decrease in the standard of living. i.e. About 22-33 lifetimes' worth of productivity is being spent to save one life, instead of being used on other things which could save a lot more lives.
Renting is, however, a separate problem. Landlords have a long history of totally ignoring the safety of their tennants, so I don't think they should be granted ANY slack.
If you've actually been a landlord, you would also know that it's equally true that renters have a long history of totally ignoring the integrity and safety of the landlord's property. I've seen everything from tenants painting over a mold problem caused by a leak they didn't want to bother to fix or report, to cutting structural beams and "repairing" them in an unsound manner, to adding plumbing and electrical wiring which didn't comply with code without telling the landlord, to just plain leaving a mess when they leave which costs the landlord far more than the security deposit to dispose of in a way which complies with local environmental regulations.
Airbus wasn't caught off guard, and the A380 was not an ego measure - Boeings new 747 proposals were being rejected by customers at the time as they wanted an all new airframe design which would encompass modern aerodynamic efficiency increases over the 747s 1960s vintage. Go and google the 747-500, -600 and -700 concepts as they all existed on paper. Airbus responded to the market demands by supplying a design for an all new VLA airframe.
Airbus basically have the VLA market now, as Boeings response, the 747-800, has seen lukewarm reception at best.
There was no market demand for a VLA airframe. Boeing has been trying to sell a stretch version of the 747 since its inception in the 1960s. The 747 was originally supposed to be a full double-decker like the A380, but Boeing decided to go with a partial second deck to get it to market quicker. Since 1966, they've tried every few years to sell a full double-deck 747 to the airlines, and never found enough demand to green-light the project. Airbus ignored these same market signals and built the A380 anyway. They gambled that increased air travel in Asia as China modernized would drive demand for such a large-capacity aircraft. They may still end up right, and the A380 could go on to commercial success.
Right now though, its sales are pretty anemic. If you take the 1528 747s ordered since 1966 and divide by the 47 years it's been for sale, you get an average of 32.5 per year. During its heyday from 1966-1990, Boeing managed 42 orders per year on average. Airbus has managed just 262 A380 sales in 13 years, or 20 per year.
The lukewarm reception of the 747-8 (106 orders since 2005) isn't because the A380 displaced it. It's because smaller 2-engine widebodies like the 777 (789 orders since the A380 went on sale) and A350 (616 orders before it even flew) have cannibalized most of the market which used to be owned exclusively by the 747. As I said, the A380 very well may still go on to commercial success. But it's not where the meat of the market is at. By the time the market is there for the A380, technological improvements may make a larger 2-engine plane feasible which renders the 747 and A380 obsolete. That's the risk you take when you try to build for tomorrow's market using today's technology.
My understanding of why they didn't want to do the A350 was because between the A320, A330, and A340, all the service areas covered by this A350 were already covered
They needed the A350. The 777 has been beating the A340 into a bloody pulp in the market. 1452 orders since 1995 vs 377 orders since 1993. The A340 is a 4-engine plane vs. the 777's 2-engines, and fewer engines is more efficient.
It's not that Airbus didn't want to do the A350. The original A350 they proposed would've been a slightly upgraded A330 and straight competitor to the 787 (low- to high-200s seating in 3-class arrangement). The airlines didn't want that. They wanted something which could compete with the 777 (low- to high-300s seating in 3-class arrangement), and used the 787's launch as an opportunity to complain and get Airbus to build it for them. So Airbus scrapped their original A350 plans and designed something a little larger like the airlines wanted. The A350 will have high-200s to mid-300s seating, competing with the larger-sized 787 models, and the smaller 777 models.
Microsoft has been reluctant to release Office for iOS and Android because Office on an ARM platform cuts into their Windows sales. People and businesses will ask themselves, "Why should I pay $100 for Windows when the only thing I use it for is Office and web browsing, and now I can get Office on my non-Windows ARM device?" Microsoft's preference is that you buy a PC so they can double-dip (sale of Windows + Office), so they're trying to slow down the transition to ultra-portable ARM platforms. Either until Intel figures out a way to make x86 competitive at the low-power end, or until they can figure out a way to leverage their PC market dominance into ARM market dominance.
Windows RT is another facet of the same thing. They ported the Windows API to ARM so that if the world does transition from Intel to ARM, they're set and ready to continue to sell Windows licenses. That it isn't selling now doesn't really matter. What matters is that they've got their bases covered regardless of whether x86 or ARM wins on the hardware front.
This inter-department loyalty is really hobbling their business. It's rather ironic that Microsoft would've been better off if they'd lost the anti-trust trials of the 1990s, and the FTC had split them into a separate OS company and an apps company. A Microsoft apps-only company would've put out a version of Office for iOS/Android years ago. By trying to use Office to preserve their Windows franchise, they're doubling down their bets. Their delay opens up the possibility that if ARM wins, something else will replace Office as the de facto productivity suite. Much like Office replaced WordPerfect and Lotus 123 during the DOS -> Windows transition. Then they'll be stuck without Windows nor Office.
This. I've been telling people this even before the iPad came out - tablets are going to replace the clipboard. Think of every task you or a business does which involves writing something down on paper while walking around, then entering it into a computer later when you're sitting at your desk. A tablet will let you just enter it straight into the computer while walking around. No more double data entry (once on paper, once in the computer). That's why tablets are not going to be some passing fad. Once the price of a decent one drops below the ~$100 range, the clipboard is doomed.
The K-series parts lack the support for transactional memory extensions and VT-d device virtualization
Yeah, well, fun fact... a lot of enthusiasts like myself like things like VMWare, which depend on this kind of thing. Deleting those features from the unlocked line means I just won't buy them... one of the big drivers for overclocking is to run virtualization.
None of the K processors have ever had VT-d. Also, VMWare ESXi is about the only virtualization product which uses VT-d (direct hardware access for virtualized I/O), and it's somewhat unstable (I turned it off after too many mysterious network errors). VMWare Workstation, Player, and Fusion don't offer it as an option. Dunno about Virtualbox.
The important one for virtualization is VT-x, which is needed to run 64-bit guests.
If only there were some way to send a message containing the exact audio of what you said. That way you wouldn't have to look down at your screen while typing your message. And it couldn't be mangled by some voice recognition software, requiring you to take your eyes off the road to confirm that it parsed your speech correctly. You could simply speak your message. The recipient could then listen to the audio and use his/her highly sophisticated speech recognition center of the brain to discern what it is you were trying to tell them. We could call it something like, oh I dunno, Voice Mail.
Alas, such capability is beyond the reach of our current technology.
Population growth has also slowed to pretty much replacement only, so the current increases are only from industrialization of previously undeveloped populations.
In the 1970s and 1980s it made a lot of sense to be anti-nuke just as it now makes sense to be anti-GMO. Those people did us a huge favor. They forced these industries to account for the unpaid externality costs that they were free ridiing on. The nuke industry was a headlong rush to market paid for with public bonds going into private investors pockets with very little accounting for the costs of downstream waste disposal, the risks of faclities
Southern California Edison recently announced they were shutting down the San Onofre nuclear plant. It was built in the 1970s, and went critical in 1982. It was expected to operate for ~50 years, but shut down in 2012 after 29 years due to problems with an upgrade to pipes carrying cooling water. SCE had been trying to fix it to restart it, but they finally threw in the towel last week.
Decomissioning and disposal costs are estimated to be $3 billion. SCE has $2.7 billion in a trust fund, built up with money from a small portion of 29 years worth of electric bills set aside specifically for decomissioning costs. Factor in they were expecting the plant to operate another ~20 years, and it sounds like they accounted for these costs pretty damn accurately.
and under appreciated environmental costs (such as the tennessee rivers being sterilized by excessive heating).
The heating of the river was caused by a natural heat wave. The nuclear plant's output was reduced so as not to exacerbate it, not because the plant caused the excessive heating. If one takes the "burning fossil fuels cause global warming" line of reasoning, the nuclear plant on the river was actually reducing the possibility of a heat wave heating up the river, but was overwhelmed by all the fossil fuels which were being burned because anti-nuke activists in the 1970s and 1980s blocked nuclear plants.
The protestors forced the nuke industry to face a large regulatory and captical risk hurdle to develop new plants. This forced a better accounting even if the actual costs they were including were only proxies for the real costs. IN the mean time the technology has advanced remarkably.
That they did, but they far, far overshot the desirable target. We've had until recently no nuclear plant construction for nearly 40 years. That isn't forcing a better accounting, that's shutting the industry down.
Yes, and you're still allowed to "just be on a movie set", because "just being" isn't working. It's the working that's the problem, because there you are, in front of people making millions of dollars, and they're trying to save $10 an hour on a runner by getting you to do it instead...? That's pathetic, really....
You're actually right, but not in the way you think you are. $10/hr is trivial. So trivial that they'll just pay the $10/hr and stick with their old runner whom they know and trust thank you very much. The point of the intern being cheap/free is to give the employer an incentive to bring a young, inexperienced, and potentially immature individual into the workplace. A business has got to be pretty desperate to abuse it for free labor. We took on kids from the local high school as volunteers for an event, at the school's request. Despite supposedly being from the school's honor society (i.e. best grades), the quality of their work was so low we never did it again.
While the judge was correct that the measure of benefit to the intern vs to the company was subjective, the company was correct that that's really what matters here. If you have to pay interns $10/hr, suddenly they're not competing with other interns. They're competing with young adult job applicants who probably already have work experience doing the job. Why would a company hire the intern instead of the experienced applicant? This decision will not just cause interns to be paid. It will cause a reduction in the number of internships available. Effectively, the subjective decision the judge complained about will be taken out of the court's hands, and be made within the company before they ever offer an internship.
Even high IOPS is starting to become meaningless. Here's an Anandtech comparison of top SSDs from two years ago of typical tasks which stressed IOPS. He played it straight for this one page and showed benchmarks in units that matter to people's perception of speed - seconds to complete a task. The result is utterly uninteresting. The HDD is substantially slower. The SSDs are for all practical purposes identical.
But boring graphs are bad for review sites. If the reviews are boring, people won't read them, and the sites lose out on ad revenue. So they invert the metric to make smaller differences appear bigger. Instead of the practical sec/MB, they use the more ephemeral MB/sec. That makes the graphs more interesting and gets people coming back to the sites before buying, instead of just buying some random cheap SSD without really caring about the max speed.
"But sec/MB and MB/sec are the same number! Why should inverting it make a difference?" Because when you invert a metric, the big numbers become small numbers, and the small numbers become big numbers. e.g. Say you have a HDD which can read 100 MB/s, a cheap SSD which can read 200 MB/s, and an expensive SSD which can read 500 MB/s. So in 1 second, the HDD reads 100 MB, the cSSD 200 MB, and eSSD 500 MB. Expressed in MB/s you gain 100 MB/s switching from HDD->cSSD, and a whopping 300 MB/s switching from cSSD->eSSD. Switching from cSSD->eSSD gives you 3x the benefit of switching from HDD->cSSD! So the extra money for the expensive SSD is definitely worth it! Right?
Hold on. Invert to s/MB and say you need to read 1 GB. The HDD takes 10 sec, the cSSD 4 sec, and the eSSD 2 sec. Switching from HDD->cSSD saves you 6 seconds. Switching from cSSD->eSSD only saves you 2 sec. So in terms of time you spend waiting, the HDD->cSSD switch saves you 3x as much time as the cSSD->eSSD switch. The vast majority of your time saved can actually be obtained from the switch to the cheaper SSD. The next step switching to the expensive SSD only gives you a marginal improvement. (Even if you insist on using relative measures of time, the cheap SSD still wins. 10 sec to 4 sec is a 60% reduction in time. 4 sec to 2 sec is only a 50% reduction in time. Or if you want to be a purist, of the 8 sec saved going from 10 sec to 2 sec, the cheap SSD gets you 75% of that speedup, the expensive SSD gives only the remaining 25%)
Unless you're regularly doing tasks where you find yourself twiddling your thumbs for several seconds or minutes waiting for the SSD to finish reading/writing several GB of data, the difference between 600 MB/s and 1.25 GB/s is imperceptible despite being a 2x speedup. Twice as fast as the blink of an eye is still as fast as a blink of an eye to our perception.
The main question is misleading too. "NSA getting secret court orders to track calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism..." That makes it sound like they had reason to suspect those people and got individual court orders to track the calls of each of them, who just happened to number in the millions.
The question should have made clear that it was a blanket court order which allowed surveillance of millions of people who had never done anything suspicious, unless you count talking with foreigners as being suspicious. It's the presumption of innocence which is being eroded here.
In all seriousness, I'm sure O'Reilly supported programs like this under Bush and is only opposed to them now because Obama's doing it.
That's probably the most sickening thing about the survey, and it's not just Republicans.
2006:
75% of Republicans thought NSA surveillance was acceptable, 23% did not.
37% of Democrats thought NSA surveillance was acceptable, 61% did not.
2013:
52% of Republicans thought NSA surveillance was acceptable, 47% did not
64% of Democrats thought NSA surveillance was acceptable, 34% did not.
So it's actually Democrats who were more partisan (27% shift, vs 23%-24% shift for Republicans, though the difference is right on the cusp of the margin of error of the poll). We're gradually turning into a country where whether a D or R will be helped by an issue is more important than the issue itself.
China has been very generous to these small latin countries, donating stadiums, highways and bridges. Like the US used to do back in the bad old days. The US nowadays though only threatens. Threatens will sanctions, threatens with cutting aid programs, etc. Guess who is popular and who isn't in latin America now?
So China is the good guy for previously giving nothing, then giving something. But the U.S. is the bad guy for previously giving something, but considering giving less?
Your problem is you're assuming you're entitled to the aid the U.S. is already giving, and thus you value current U.S. contribution at zero and see a reduction in contribution as a negative (a threat). You need to compare from an equal basis - assume you're entitled to zero aid and measure any contribution as a positive.
Despite the fact that ship owners are faced with a bad market, the PCA (Panama Canal Administration) keeps needlessly inflating the costs to transit at least once or twice per year. Our larger vessels can easily cost ~USD$200,000.00 and more to transit.
Regardless of how much they inflate the cost, if it costs less than a trip around South America, it's still a good deal.
The industry has long been awaiting some competition to mitigate these over-inflated costs and it is high time it materialised.
That's what makes me wonder how viable this really is. I suspect the financial viability reports just used the Panama's current transit rates to estimate the potential financial payoff from this. It may very well end up being built, but then taking over 100 years to pay for itself due to Panama and Nicaragua underbidding each other to try to attract more traffic.
My hunch is the bigger payoff will be global shipping transitioning to larger-than-Panamax cargo ships. And that Panama and Nicaragua won't see as much benefit (Panama has had multiple plans to add more locks. If you look at their geography, it'd be a helluva lot cheaper for them to do it than Nicaragua too. They just haven't had much incentive to do it quickly since there's no competition.)
Just to head off any "Look what great new shiny Apple invented" by drooling fanboys: Finder tabs are a copy of QTTabBar for Windows - an extension written around 2004 by a Japanese guy who supposedly died in a traffic accident (nobody knows his real name). It's since been decompiled and updated to work with Windows 7. Obviously he got the idea from tabbed browsing in Firefox, but credit where credit is due.
Nice link. Take San Onofre's annual power generation from that site. Average retail price of electricity in California per year is here. Adjust it for inflation (divide by GDP multiplier) to get 2010 dollars. Copy the power generation per year and multiply by electricity price per year, sum up the total and you get $26.8 billion.
So during its lifetime San Onofre generated $26.8 billion in revenue (2010 dollars) during the lifetime of the plant. Figure double that if the plant had lived out a full 50-60 years instead of being cut short at just over 29 years. TFA says decommissioning is estimated to cost $3 billion, or about 11% the plant's lifetime revenue (about 6% if it had lived a full life). There's a trust fund set up specifically for decommissioning the plant (part of your monthly electric bill goes into it) which contains $2.7 billion, so it sounds like the planning for paying for decommissioning worked out almost exactly as intended. If anything there's too much money being saved for decommissioning since the plant only operated about half its expected lifetime.
Manning upheld his oath to support the Constitution in maybe 0.01% of the files he released. He violated that oath on the other 99.99%. When you whistleblow, you release evidence/data of crimes being committed in secret. You do not do a data dump of everything being done in secret, much of which is legitimately being kept secret. Satisfaction of your curiosity is not a sufficient standard for categorizing something as whistleblowing.
The world at large did not believe that Iraq had WMDs, which is why the UN did not authorize the use of force.
The world at large was not sure if Iraq had WMDs. The demonstrative quote I remember was from head of the UN weapons inspection program Hans Blix, shortly after U.S. tanks started rolling: Something like "It will be interesting to see if the WMDs are really there." Outside of high-level Iraqi officials, he was the one person best situated in the world to know whether or not there were WMDs. If he truly did believed there were no WMDs, he would have made a strong contrary statement.
What's happened since then is hindsight. Schroedinger's box was opened and the cat was found to be very much alive, and those who claimed all along that it had been alive have been retconned as prophets for "knowing" the "truth". If they had really known the truth, their arguments and evidence would have swayed Hans Blix into making a stronger insistence that there were no WMDs. I see the same thing happen all the time with people deifying sports prognosticators and stock managers who are essentially making "random" guesses (i.e. based on things other than solid evidence). At some point, their predictions have to resolve into being right or wrong, and those who are wrong are vilified while those who are right are put on a pedestal. For what's essentially an unknowable choice.
In reality, the truth was that nobody was really sure either way. Those who were sure (either way) were basing their opinions more on what they wanted to believe rather than compelling evidence. But from a decision-making standpoint, knowing there is no threat and not being sure are equivalent in this context. You only go to war if you're sure there's a threat, so the U.S./Bush still erred in invading Iraq.
No they don't get more revenue from stolen phones. Each stolen phone which remains in use is a potential customer who no longer needs to buy a phone, and thus a lost sale. So the victim represents an extra phone sale, while the thief represents a lost sale, and the two cancel out. There's no change in overall phone sales.
Now say they decide to implement policies which brick any lost phone on the assumption that it's been stolen. So now when a phone is stolen the victim still needs to replace it, but it isn't usable so the thief still needs to buy a phone. On top of that, people who misplace and lose their phones still have to assume it's stolen and report it as such. So now anyone who under the old system thought their phone was stolen but then found it a few days later and thus didn't need to replace it, would under the new system find a bricked and useless phone and have to buy a replacement.
Surprise! Stolen phones don't increase sales. But bricking them does.
The court doc has a dramatic graphic which shows you exactly what happened to ebook prices while this was going on. All the colored lines are publishers who conspired with Apple to switch to agency pricing the first week of April 2010, except for Penguin (beige) who switched the end of May. The two grey lines are publishers who stuck with wholesale pricing (Random House and other non-majors).
Even if he bought a real one, the vast majority of them don't work very well. If you really want to prepare for the zombie apocalypse, stick with good old rechargeable AA or AAAs, a programmable charger, and either a generator or a large regulated solar panel.
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That's security through obscurity. It works for music and video, where you can introduce small, regular bit changes without perceptibly altering the music or video. It doesn't work for eBooks, where a single bit change will change the letter or punctuation mark.
And even if you did introduce a regular, distinctive, and unique pattern of punctuation changes to an eBook, it'd be trivial to compare two of the same eBook and eliminate them or scramble them. The same is not true for music an video, where you can add stenographic marks which can survive re-encoding, but the re-encode makes it impossible to do a simple diff between two copies.
Most of the music videos on YouTube are put out by the studios or artists themselves. The vast majority of illegitimate uploads get flagged and removed for copyright infringement by the time they hit a couple hundred thousand views.
CDs are rather interesting in that they don't store the audio data as digital files. Yes your ripping program creates digital WAV files, but that's not the way the music is encoded on the disc (in contrast to DVDs which store digital files). The music's waveform is encoded digitally, but as a stream. So ripping the same CD on two different drives will usually produce slightly different files depending on exactly how the drive positions the read head relative to the start of the disc.
That said, it may have been an encoder bug which created the glitch you noticed. And by the time you ran your tests the bug had been fixed.
The microUSB charger port on phones take 5 V. AA batteries are 1.5 V. Put four of them together and you have 6 V - more than enough to charge a phone. A phone battery is about 3.7 V and 1600 mAh, or 21,000 Joules. Four alkaline AA batteries are 4 * 1.5 V * 750 mAh, or 16,000 Joules. The heavy-duty ones are twice that. So they can completely or almost completely charge your phone.
They're a helluva lot more practical - you're not tied to the charging station for 2 hours. More durable - AA batteries are much more likely to survive a hurricane than solar panels. Substantially cheaper - I see them going on eBay for $2, batteries not included, whereas the solar charging stations are supposed to cost $12k-$20k each. Each station sports three 15 Watt panels, so using the 0.145 average capacity factor for solar in the U.S., each station will on average generate 564,000 Joules/day, or equivalent to 17-35 sets of 4 AA batteries. Just pass batteries and battery packs out after a disaster instead of chaining people to a charging station for 2 hours every day.
If you want to be green, use rechargeable AAs and have citizens drop by to swap them with a freshly charged set every day. Charge them with a generator, or a more practical array of solar panels if you like. Figure worst case you're paying $15 per charger pack, $8 for 4 rechargable AA batteries, and $2/Watt for a solar panel and regulation electronics (1.7 Watts needed per phone). For $12k-$20k you can buy enough to of these to fully charge 450-750 phones every day. Versus the 27 phones per day these charging stations are limited to due to having only 45 Watts of solar panels.
Once, an engineer heading a canal project was flabbergasted to find hundreds more diggers than he had requested, with most of them standing around idle. When he complained to the government official in charge of hiring, he was told the main purpose of the project was to create jobs, and building the canal was secondary. "Why didn't you just say so in the first place," he replied. "I would've specified that they were supposed to dig with spoons instead of shovels then." If you want to build public solar charging stations, just build them and call them that. Don't try to justify their existences with a task for which they are clearly unsuited and overpriced.
Costs should be borne by the beneficiaries. If it's the public which is going to benefit from an archeological find, then it's the public which should bear the cost, not the construction company. It is not just inappropriate, but also immoral and dysfunctional to require a non-beneficiary to bear the costs of a situation they did not create.
Once you start making someone other than the beneficiary bear the cost, you get into all sorts of trouble. Whether it be bailouts for bankers who took too many risks, or people living perennially on welfare. The moment cost is decoupled from benefit, you can lose all sense of scale between cost and benefit. The beneficiaries don't bear the cost so it becomes a game of seeing how much they can get away with, and those bearing the cost start to get upset at taxation without representation and threaten to revolt.
Having the beneficiary bear the cost also makes the cost-benefit analysis crystal clear. If each discovered archeological site costs $5 million to process, but only yields $1 million worth of cultural preservation, then clearly the processing method needs to be refined to lower its cost. If it's the public footing the bill, then the government agency paying for it has an incentive to streamline the processing and their costs. If the construction companies are footing the bill, then there's no incentive for the government agency to do any streamlining.
Despite the recent news, tornadoes and especially injuries and deaths from tornadoes are actually pretty rare. If tornadoes kill 75 people per year on average, and you require all ~50 million residences in the tornado-prone areas to build $5000 shelters, and the average home lasts 50 years, you're mandating a cost of ($5000 per home * 50 million homes / (50 years * 75 people/year) ) = $67 million per life saved.
Given that the lifetime productivity of an average person is only $2-$3 million, a tornado shelter requirement would result in a net decrease in the standard of living. i.e. About 22-33 lifetimes' worth of productivity is being spent to save one life, instead of being used on other things which could save a lot more lives.
If you've actually been a landlord, you would also know that it's equally true that renters have a long history of totally ignoring the integrity and safety of the landlord's property. I've seen everything from tenants painting over a mold problem caused by a leak they didn't want to bother to fix or report, to cutting structural beams and "repairing" them in an unsound manner, to adding plumbing and electrical wiring which didn't comply with code without telling the landlord, to just plain leaving a mess when they leave which costs the landlord far more than the security deposit to dispose of in a way which complies with local environmental regulations.
Yes there are bad
There was no market demand for a VLA airframe. Boeing has been trying to sell a stretch version of the 747 since its inception in the 1960s. The 747 was originally supposed to be a full double-decker like the A380, but Boeing decided to go with a partial second deck to get it to market quicker. Since 1966, they've tried every few years to sell a full double-deck 747 to the airlines, and never found enough demand to green-light the project. Airbus ignored these same market signals and built the A380 anyway. They gambled that increased air travel in Asia as China modernized would drive demand for such a large-capacity aircraft. They may still end up right, and the A380 could go on to commercial success.
Right now though, its sales are pretty anemic. If you take the 1528 747s ordered since 1966 and divide by the 47 years it's been for sale, you get an average of 32.5 per year. During its heyday from 1966-1990, Boeing managed 42 orders per year on average. Airbus has managed just 262 A380 sales in 13 years, or 20 per year.
The lukewarm reception of the 747-8 (106 orders since 2005) isn't because the A380 displaced it. It's because smaller 2-engine widebodies like the 777 (789 orders since the A380 went on sale) and A350 (616 orders before it even flew) have cannibalized most of the market which used to be owned exclusively by the 747. As I said, the A380 very well may still go on to commercial success. But it's not where the meat of the market is at. By the time the market is there for the A380, technological improvements may make a larger 2-engine plane feasible which renders the 747 and A380 obsolete. That's the risk you take when you try to build for tomorrow's market using today's technology.
They needed the A350. The 777 has been beating the A340 into a bloody pulp in the market. 1452 orders since 1995 vs 377 orders since 1993. The A340 is a 4-engine plane vs. the 777's 2-engines, and fewer engines is more efficient.
It's not that Airbus didn't want to do the A350. The original A350 they proposed would've been a slightly upgraded A330 and straight competitor to the 787 (low- to high-200s seating in 3-class arrangement). The airlines didn't want that. They wanted something which could compete with the 777 (low- to high-300s seating in 3-class arrangement), and used the 787's launch as an opportunity to complain and get Airbus to build it for them. So Airbus scrapped their original A350 plans and designed something a little larger like the airlines wanted. The A350 will have high-200s to mid-300s seating, competing with the larger-sized 787 models, and the smaller 777 models.
Microsoft has been reluctant to release Office for iOS and Android because Office on an ARM platform cuts into their Windows sales. People and businesses will ask themselves, "Why should I pay $100 for Windows when the only thing I use it for is Office and web browsing, and now I can get Office on my non-Windows ARM device?" Microsoft's preference is that you buy a PC so they can double-dip (sale of Windows + Office), so they're trying to slow down the transition to ultra-portable ARM platforms. Either until Intel figures out a way to make x86 competitive at the low-power end, or until they can figure out a way to leverage their PC market dominance into ARM market dominance.
Windows RT is another facet of the same thing. They ported the Windows API to ARM so that if the world does transition from Intel to ARM, they're set and ready to continue to sell Windows licenses. That it isn't selling now doesn't really matter. What matters is that they've got their bases covered regardless of whether x86 or ARM wins on the hardware front.
This inter-department loyalty is really hobbling their business. It's rather ironic that Microsoft would've been better off if they'd lost the anti-trust trials of the 1990s, and the FTC had split them into a separate OS company and an apps company. A Microsoft apps-only company would've put out a version of Office for iOS/Android years ago. By trying to use Office to preserve their Windows franchise, they're doubling down their bets. Their delay opens up the possibility that if ARM wins, something else will replace Office as the de facto productivity suite. Much like Office replaced WordPerfect and Lotus 123 during the DOS -> Windows transition. Then they'll be stuck without Windows nor Office.
This. I've been telling people this even before the iPad came out - tablets are going to replace the clipboard. Think of every task you or a business does which involves writing something down on paper while walking around, then entering it into a computer later when you're sitting at your desk. A tablet will let you just enter it straight into the computer while walking around. No more double data entry (once on paper, once in the computer). That's why tablets are not going to be some passing fad. Once the price of a decent one drops below the ~$100 range, the clipboard is doomed.
None of the K processors have ever had VT-d. Also, VMWare ESXi is about the only virtualization product which uses VT-d (direct hardware access for virtualized I/O), and it's somewhat unstable (I turned it off after too many mysterious network errors). VMWare Workstation, Player, and Fusion don't offer it as an option. Dunno about Virtualbox.
The important one for virtualization is VT-x, which is needed to run 64-bit guests.
If only there were some way to send a message containing the exact audio of what you said. That way you wouldn't have to look down at your screen while typing your message. And it couldn't be mangled by some voice recognition software, requiring you to take your eyes off the road to confirm that it parsed your speech correctly. You could simply speak your message. The recipient could then listen to the audio and use his/her highly sophisticated speech recognition center of the brain to discern what it is you were trying to tell them. We could call it something like, oh I dunno, Voice Mail.
Alas, such capability is beyond the reach of our current technology.
This is a common misconception. Population growth in industrialized countries is near zero and in some cases negative. It's actually developing nations which are driving the world's rampant population growth.
So if you want to slow down the world's population growth, we need to get these 3rd world countries industrialized and modernized ASAP.
Southern California Edison recently announced they were shutting down the San Onofre nuclear plant. It was built in the 1970s, and went critical in 1982. It was expected to operate for ~50 years, but shut down in 2012 after 29 years due to problems with an upgrade to pipes carrying cooling water. SCE had been trying to fix it to restart it, but they finally threw in the towel last week.
Decomissioning and disposal costs are estimated to be $3 billion. SCE has $2.7 billion in a trust fund, built up with money from a small portion of 29 years worth of electric bills set aside specifically for decomissioning costs. Factor in they were expecting the plant to operate another ~20 years, and it sounds like they accounted for these costs pretty damn accurately.
The heating of the river was caused by a natural heat wave. The nuclear plant's output was reduced so as not to exacerbate it, not because the plant caused the excessive heating. If one takes the "burning fossil fuels cause global warming" line of reasoning, the nuclear plant on the river was actually reducing the possibility of a heat wave heating up the river, but was overwhelmed by all the fossil fuels which were being burned because anti-nuke activists in the 1970s and 1980s blocked nuclear plants.
That they did, but they far, far overshot the desirable target. We've had until recently no nuclear plant construction for nearly 40 years. That isn't forcing a better accounting, that's shutting the industry down.
You're actually right, but not in the way you think you are. $10/hr is trivial. So trivial that they'll just pay the $10/hr and stick with their old runner whom they know and trust thank you very much. The point of the intern being cheap/free is to give the employer an incentive to bring a young, inexperienced, and potentially immature individual into the workplace. A business has got to be pretty desperate to abuse it for free labor. We took on kids from the local high school as volunteers for an event, at the school's request. Despite supposedly being from the school's honor society (i.e. best grades), the quality of their work was so low we never did it again.
While the judge was correct that the measure of benefit to the intern vs to the company was subjective, the company was correct that that's really what matters here. If you have to pay interns $10/hr, suddenly they're not competing with other interns. They're competing with young adult job applicants who probably already have work experience doing the job. Why would a company hire the intern instead of the experienced applicant? This decision will not just cause interns to be paid. It will cause a reduction in the number of internships available. Effectively, the subjective decision the judge complained about will be taken out of the court's hands, and be made within the company before they ever offer an internship.
Even high IOPS is starting to become meaningless. Here's an Anandtech comparison of top SSDs from two years ago of typical tasks which stressed IOPS. He played it straight for this one page and showed benchmarks in units that matter to people's perception of speed - seconds to complete a task. The result is utterly uninteresting. The HDD is substantially slower. The SSDs are for all practical purposes identical.
But boring graphs are bad for review sites. If the reviews are boring, people won't read them, and the sites lose out on ad revenue. So they invert the metric to make smaller differences appear bigger. Instead of the practical sec/MB, they use the more ephemeral MB/sec. That makes the graphs more interesting and gets people coming back to the sites before buying, instead of just buying some random cheap SSD without really caring about the max speed.
"But sec/MB and MB/sec are the same number! Why should inverting it make a difference?" Because when you invert a metric, the big numbers become small numbers, and the small numbers become big numbers. e.g. Say you have a HDD which can read 100 MB/s, a cheap SSD which can read 200 MB/s, and an expensive SSD which can read 500 MB/s. So in 1 second, the HDD reads 100 MB, the cSSD 200 MB, and eSSD 500 MB. Expressed in MB/s you gain 100 MB/s switching from HDD->cSSD, and a whopping 300 MB/s switching from cSSD->eSSD. Switching from cSSD->eSSD gives you 3x the benefit of switching from HDD->cSSD! So the extra money for the expensive SSD is definitely worth it! Right?
Hold on. Invert to s/MB and say you need to read 1 GB. The HDD takes 10 sec, the cSSD 4 sec, and the eSSD 2 sec. Switching from HDD->cSSD saves you 6 seconds. Switching from cSSD->eSSD only saves you 2 sec. So in terms of time you spend waiting, the HDD->cSSD switch saves you 3x as much time as the cSSD->eSSD switch. The vast majority of your time saved can actually be obtained from the switch to the cheaper SSD. The next step switching to the expensive SSD only gives you a marginal improvement. (Even if you insist on using relative measures of time, the cheap SSD still wins. 10 sec to 4 sec is a 60% reduction in time. 4 sec to 2 sec is only a 50% reduction in time. Or if you want to be a purist, of the 8 sec saved going from 10 sec to 2 sec, the cheap SSD gets you 75% of that speedup, the expensive SSD gives only the remaining 25%)
Unless you're regularly doing tasks where you find yourself twiddling your thumbs for several seconds or minutes waiting for the SSD to finish reading/writing several GB of data, the difference between 600 MB/s and 1.25 GB/s is imperceptible despite being a 2x speedup. Twice as fast as the blink of an eye is still as fast as a blink of an eye to our perception.
The main question is misleading too. "NSA getting secret court orders to track calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism..." That makes it sound like they had reason to suspect those people and got individual court orders to track the calls of each of them, who just happened to number in the millions.
The question should have made clear that it was a blanket court order which allowed surveillance of millions of people who had never done anything suspicious, unless you count talking with foreigners as being suspicious. It's the presumption of innocence which is being eroded here.
That's probably the most sickening thing about the survey, and it's not just Republicans.
2006:
75% of Republicans thought NSA surveillance was acceptable, 23% did not.
37% of Democrats thought NSA surveillance was acceptable, 61% did not.
2013:
52% of Republicans thought NSA surveillance was acceptable, 47% did not
64% of Democrats thought NSA surveillance was acceptable, 34% did not.
So it's actually Democrats who were more partisan (27% shift, vs 23%-24% shift for Republicans, though the difference is right on the cusp of the margin of error of the poll). We're gradually turning into a country where whether a D or R will be helped by an issue is more important than the issue itself.
So China is the good guy for previously giving nothing, then giving something. But the U.S. is the bad guy for previously giving something, but considering giving less?
Your problem is you're assuming you're entitled to the aid the U.S. is already giving, and thus you value current U.S. contribution at zero and see a reduction in contribution as a negative (a threat). You need to compare from an equal basis - assume you're entitled to zero aid and measure any contribution as a positive.
Regardless of how much they inflate the cost, if it costs less than a trip around South America, it's still a good deal.
That's what makes me wonder how viable this really is. I suspect the financial viability reports just used the Panama's current transit rates to estimate the potential financial payoff from this. It may very well end up being built, but then taking over 100 years to pay for itself due to Panama and Nicaragua underbidding each other to try to attract more traffic.
My hunch is the bigger payoff will be global shipping transitioning to larger-than-Panamax cargo ships. And that Panama and Nicaragua won't see as much benefit (Panama has had multiple plans to add more locks. If you look at their geography, it'd be a helluva lot cheaper for them to do it than Nicaragua too. They just haven't had much incentive to do it quickly since there's no competition.)
Just to head off any "Look what great new shiny Apple invented" by drooling fanboys: Finder tabs are a copy of QTTabBar for Windows - an extension written around 2004 by a Japanese guy who supposedly died in a traffic accident (nobody knows his real name). It's since been decompiled and updated to work with Windows 7. Obviously he got the idea from tabbed browsing in Firefox, but credit where credit is due.
http://qttabbar.sourceforge.net/
Nice link. Take San Onofre's annual power generation from that site. Average retail price of electricity in California per year is here. Adjust it for inflation (divide by GDP multiplier) to get 2010 dollars. Copy the power generation per year and multiply by electricity price per year, sum up the total and you get $26.8 billion.
So during its lifetime San Onofre generated $26.8 billion in revenue (2010 dollars) during the lifetime of the plant. Figure double that if the plant had lived out a full 50-60 years instead of being cut short at just over 29 years. TFA says decommissioning is estimated to cost $3 billion, or about 11% the plant's lifetime revenue (about 6% if it had lived a full life). There's a trust fund set up specifically for decommissioning the plant (part of your monthly electric bill goes into it) which contains $2.7 billion, so it sounds like the planning for paying for decommissioning worked out almost exactly as intended. If anything there's too much money being saved for decommissioning since the plant only operated about half its expected lifetime.
Manning upheld his oath to support the Constitution in maybe 0.01% of the files he released. He violated that oath on the other 99.99%. When you whistleblow, you release evidence/data of crimes being committed in secret. You do not do a data dump of everything being done in secret, much of which is legitimately being kept secret. Satisfaction of your curiosity is not a sufficient standard for categorizing something as whistleblowing.
The world at large was not sure if Iraq had WMDs. The demonstrative quote I remember was from head of the UN weapons inspection program Hans Blix, shortly after U.S. tanks started rolling: Something like "It will be interesting to see if the WMDs are really there." Outside of high-level Iraqi officials, he was the one person best situated in the world to know whether or not there were WMDs. If he truly did believed there were no WMDs, he would have made a strong contrary statement.
What's happened since then is hindsight. Schroedinger's box was opened and the cat was found to be very much alive, and those who claimed all along that it had been alive have been retconned as prophets for "knowing" the "truth". If they had really known the truth, their arguments and evidence would have swayed Hans Blix into making a stronger insistence that there were no WMDs. I see the same thing happen all the time with people deifying sports prognosticators and stock managers who are essentially making "random" guesses (i.e. based on things other than solid evidence). At some point, their predictions have to resolve into being right or wrong, and those who are wrong are vilified while those who are right are put on a pedestal. For what's essentially an unknowable choice.
In reality, the truth was that nobody was really sure either way. Those who were sure (either way) were basing their opinions more on what they wanted to believe rather than compelling evidence. But from a decision-making standpoint, knowing there is no threat and not being sure are equivalent in this context. You only go to war if you're sure there's a threat, so the U.S./Bush still erred in invading Iraq.
No they don't get more revenue from stolen phones. Each stolen phone which remains in use is a potential customer who no longer needs to buy a phone, and thus a lost sale. So the victim represents an extra phone sale, while the thief represents a lost sale, and the two cancel out. There's no change in overall phone sales.
Now say they decide to implement policies which brick any lost phone on the assumption that it's been stolen. So now when a phone is stolen the victim still needs to replace it, but it isn't usable so the thief still needs to buy a phone. On top of that, people who misplace and lose their phones still have to assume it's stolen and report it as such. So now anyone who under the old system thought their phone was stolen but then found it a few days later and thus didn't need to replace it, would under the new system find a bricked and useless phone and have to buy a replacement.
Surprise! Stolen phones don't increase sales. But bricking them does.
Here's the DOJ site for the case and the DOJ court filing.
The court doc has a dramatic graphic which shows you exactly what happened to ebook prices while this was going on. All the colored lines are publishers who conspired with Apple to switch to agency pricing the first week of April 2010, except for Penguin (beige) who switched the end of May. The two grey lines are publishers who stuck with wholesale pricing (Random House and other non-majors).
Not if he bought a fake.
Even if he bought a real one, the vast majority of them don't work very well. If you really want to prepare for the zombie apocalypse, stick with good old rechargeable AA or AAAs, a programmable charger, and either a generator or a large regulated solar panel.