Congratulations. You have "discovered" what space programs have already known for decades - the Gibbs free energy change of elemental aluminum converted to aluminum chloride or aluminum oxide is massive. Among the largest there is for a chemical reaction. Several times greater than that of hydrogen converted to water or carbon dioxide (which is the basis for energy release in hydrocarbon fuels). That's why aluminum is a popular fuel in solid rocket boosters. On a per-mole basis, it's much better at storing energy. And it's still pretty competitive on a per-weight basis.
Actually, the Challenger disaster hinged on a different failure in statistics. Originally the SRB segments were mated with 2 O-rings. Inspection of the SRBs after launch revealed the O-rings were failing at a higher than expected rate. So to mitigate the risk they redesigned the system and... added a 3rd O-ring. The reasoning was that if a single O-ring had a (say) 1% chance of failure, then two would have a.01^2 =.01% chance of failure, and three would have a.01^3 =.0001% chance of failure.
Unfortunately, that reasoning only works when the failures are independent events. If a single event (like cold weather) can cause the failure of one O-ring, it can also cause the failure of the other O-rings, so that failure mode is not independent. And your chance of all three O-rings failing is closer to 1% instead of 0.0001%.
Same thing happened at the Fukushima nuclear plant. They had something like a dozen diesel generators under the theory that even if a few failed to start, it was highly unlikely that all would fail to start. They completely missed the possibility that a single common event could cause all the generators to fail the same way.
...we've switched from calculating rggb values based on attenuated rggb values sensed, to calculating rgb values from sensing cyan (usually a color of reflected light with red subtracted, white+blue ?, white+red ?, and yellow (again reflected white light minus the blue spectral light.)
Your eyes actually aren't sensitive to red, green, and blue. Here are the spectral sensitivities of the red, green, and blue cones in your eye. The red cones are actually most sensitive to orange, green most sensitive to yellow-green, and blue most sensitive to green-blue. There's also a wide range of colors that each type of cone is sensitive to, not a single frequency. When your brain decodes this into color, it uses the combined signal it's getting from all three types of cones to figure out which color you're seeing. e.g. Green isn't just the stimulation of your green-yellow cones. It's that plus the low stimulation of your orange cones and blue-green cones in the correct ratio.
RGB being the holy trinity of color is a display phenomenon, not a sensing one. In order to be able to stimulate the entire range of colors you can perceive, it's easiest if you pick three colors which stimulate the orange cones most and the other two least (red), the green-blue cones most and the others least (blue), and the green-yellow cones most but the other two least (green). (I won't get into purple/violet - that's a long story which you can probably guess if you look at the left end of the orange cones' response curve.) You could actually pick 3 different colors as your primaries, e.g. orange, yellow, and blue. They'd just be more limited in the range of colors you can reproduce because their inability to stimulate the three types of comes semi-independently. Even if you pick non-optimal colors, it's possible to replicate the full range if you add a 4th or 5th display primary. It's just more complex and usually not economical (Panasonic I think made a TV with extra yellow primary to help bolster that portion of the spectrum).
But like your eyes, for the purposes of recording colors, you don't have to actually record red, green, and blue. You can replicate the same frequency response spectrum using photoreceptors sensitive to any 3 different colors. All that matters is that their range of sensitivity covers the full visible spectrum, and their combined response curves allow you to uniquely distinguish any single frequency of light within that range. It may involve a lot of math, but hey computational power is cheap nowadays.
It's also worth noting that real-world objects don't give off a single frequency of light. They give off a wide spectrum, which your eyes combine into the 3 signal strengths from the 3 types of cones. This is part of the reason why some objects can appear to shift relative colors as you put them under different lighting. A blue quilt with orange patches can appear to be a blue quilt with red patches under lighting with a stronger red component. The "orange" patches are actually reflecting both orange and red light. So the actual color you see is the frequency spectrum of the light source, times the frequency emission response (color reflection spectrum) of the object, convolved with the frequency response of the cones in your eyes. And when you display a picture of that object, your monitor is simply doing its best using three narrow-band frequencies to stimulate your cones in the same ratio as they were with the wide-band color of the object. So a photo can never truly replicate the appearance of an object; it can only replicate its appearance under a specific lighting condition.
Cell phone radiation is non-ionizing. There is no known, plausible mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer. That puts the burden of proof on the people who claim there's harm.
There are two commonly-held contradictory beliefs at play here.
From a science standpoint, you can't prove a negative so the burden of proof should be on those claiming the product is harmful.
From a consumer safety standpoint, you're supposed to prove your product is safe before it can be brought to market. (e.g. UL testing)
The FCC is trapped in the middle here (as is frequently the FTC, FAA, NTSB, FDA, NIH, etc). They're trying their best to satisfy both by using scientific principles to come up with safety standards that products can be tested against.
There are certain issues where the common opinion on slashdot favors the second instead of the first. I won't mention what they are because lately that's a quick and easy way to get your post modded down into oblivion (that wasn't the case 10 years ago - nowadays too many people ignore the moderating guidelines and use their mod points as "dislike" votes). But if you think about it I'm sure you can figure them out.
It's depressing that funding agencies such as NIH continue to give money to this type of junk science, and that scientific journals continue to publish it.
If the burden of proof is on the people who claim there's harm, and you prohibit funding of any further attempts to find such harm, that subverts the scientific process. For a long time people suspected that electricity and magnetism were somehow related, but were unable to figure out how. How would things have turned out if those who believed they weren't related pointed to all the early failures and cited them as reason to cut off all funding for attempts to find a relationship between the two? I completely agree with you that there's no danger from these levels of non-ionizing radiation. But those who claim there is a danger must be allowed to continue trying to prove their viewpoint. Otherwise you've turned science into one big circle jerk of confirmation bias.
Generally, the government agencies funding those types of studies do a pretty good job of it. They don't just keep funding the same study over and over. In order for the applicant to get funding, s/he has to propose something new and novel - either something which hasn't been studied before, or some way to conduct the study which hasn't been tried before and could give different insight.
I have interest-bearing Canadian and US bank accounts and asked my CPA that question (international tax attorney since I was getting paid in CAD at the time). The way he explained it is that the Canadian interest is income, and I am taxed on it. I get the equivalent of a 1099 from the Canadian bank saying how much interest in CAD I made last year, convert it to USD using the exchange rate on the last day of the year, and report it on my US taxes as interest income in USD.
OTOH if I move money into the Canadian account, the CAD goes up vs the USD, and I move it back to my USD account, the extra counts as capital gains and I pay capital gains taxes on it. This can get complicated if the amount I move to Canada doesn't equal the amount I move back to the US in a year. But theoretically any money (in USD) you get back in excess of what you put in is capital gains. I presume any money I lose due to the CAD going down could likewise be reported as losses. Think of it as investing in a stock which can go up or down in value. The day-to-day exchange rate doesn't matter in this case, just the rates when you bought and sold (i.e. how much USD you made/lost).
As for your flower example, it's normally taxed when you convert it into USD (sell it). But if you barter it (e.g. I exchange a bouquet of roses grown in my backyard for a copy of Skyrim), it's taxed as income at an equivalent value (the USD value of a copy of Skyrim). At least that's the way it's supposed to work. Obviously enforcement of reporting of bartered items is difficult.
Two packages sent on the same day, and under normal conditions expected to arrive on the same day. Exactly which weather conditions and other natural causes are you thinking of that could make one of them arrive days later than the other?
Correlation does not imply causation. Unfortunately the experiment was poorly designed and doesn't actually support the conclusion the website and most of the people here are drawing. The strongest conclusion you can draw from this experiment is that packages with labels avowing strong socio-political beliefs are more likely to be lost/delayed by the USPS.
If you want to support the conclusion that the USPS is anti-atheist, you need to send at least three packages. One control package in plain wrapping. One package with strong atheist markings. And one package with equivalent strong theist markings.
It could just be that USPS employees just don't like package markings which serve no purpose other than to advertising a strong belief (as postal employees are really the only audience for such advertising), and those aren't handled as carefully. When I moved a decade ago, I shipped a bunch of my stuff in boxes via the USPS (they had the lowest rate). I ran out of boxes while packing, so I ordered more from UPS (since they'd deliver to my home). Those boxes had "UPS" and the UPS logo prominently marked on the sides. At the destination, I did receive all my boxes. But a few of the UPS boxes showed up late, and two had clearly been abused - apparently dropped and crushed, and one had most of the UPS markings scratched off.
As an atheist, I don't have "faith" in the absence of god - I just look at the available evidence and realise that gods are equivalent to invisible pink unicorns. I don't have faith that invisible pink unicorns don't exist, I just haven't seen any evidence to support their existence (and thus I believe that only fools would think they exist).
That reasoning only works when there are two possible answers - true or false. You categorize things as false by default, and move them to the true category when you have evidence.
There are actually three possible answers - true, false, and cannot be determined. At its simplest level, things like division by zero fall into the third category. Or if you want a non-mathematical example, the liar ("this sentence is false") also falls into the third category. Or if you want a interrogative example, "does a parallel universe exist inside of a black hole?" works too (light and therefore information cannot escape a black hole, so we can never determine the answer).
In the general case, Goedel's incompleteness theorems say that there will always exist things which fall into the third category. Agnosticism properly recognizes that the last category exists and is the category which draws the fewest conclusions, and thus puts things in there by default until evidence exists to move them into one of the first two categories.
The proper logical answers to the question "is there a god?" are, true (theism), false (atheism), and cannot be determined (agnosticism). Unfortunately most self-proclaimed atheists conflate the last two, not realizing they're committing a logical error by doing so. Unless you can eliminate the third category (cannot be determined) as an answer, it is improper to place something in the false category simply because you have not found evidence to place it into the true category.
Science gets around the problem by deliberately setting up experiments (or at least trying to) which have two possible outcomes (confirmation or rejection of a hypothesis). In the general case however, you must first eliminate the "cannot be determined" category from consideration before you can apply scientific principles.
If the US military turns against its own population, it will be much more like Syria or Libya.
It's worth pointing out that the rebels won in Libya. And when the Soviet Union was collapsing and everything was unraveling, the old fogeys in the Kremlin ordered the military to attack those protesting in a last-ditch effort to hang on to power. The soldiers refused to fire on their own fellow citizens. In Tienanmen, the army units initially occupying the city (i.e. the ones driving the tanks) were from the Beijing area. They too refused to fire on their fellow citizens. The massacre didn't happen until the government replaced them with army units from the rural provinces who'd been nursing a grudge over pampered, rich city folks getting most of the government's funding for a decades.
For this type of disincentive to work, it has to be possible for both sides to become bloodied. If one side holds all the cards, the other side just folds. That's what kept the Communists and the Nazis in power for so long - citizens opposed had no hope of winning, so they didn't even bother trying. It's only when faced with the prospect of a real battle with both sides taking casualties, that both sides start to ask each other "Is this really worth it? Wouldn't it be better to negotiate a civilized peace?"
That's the real point of the Second Amendment - it's not there to allow the citizens to win an outright war against the military. It's there to give them enough teeth so that if the government should ever order the military to fire on the people, those in the military don't simply choose to follow orders because it's the easiest choice.
In the context of using guns against people, the gun's primary purpose is to intimidate people. The vast, vast majority of the time police and criminals use a gun, no bullet is ever fired. But the person it's pointed at is intimidated into standing down (either give up to the police, or give up their wallet to the criminal). And the gun has served its purpose without firing a single shot, and most certainly without killing anyone.
Even in a military context, the main purpose of a gun isn't to kill people. It's to wound them. A dead soldier is just a body, and possibly an incentive for seeking revenge. A wounded soldier is baggage which has to be carried back for medical treatment (thus tying up two more soldiers - one to carry him back, and one to treat the wounds). And while he's laying there screaming in pain, he's demoralizing his fellow soldiers.
we have no scientific evidence of any interplay between avionics and solid state mobile devices. All the evidence is anecdotal in nature. This is not sufficient for limiting the freedoms of people.
People get upset at the FAA and criticize it all the time for being a reactionary agency. That it only requires the airlines and aircraft manufacturers to fix things or change procedures after it causes a crash.
The one time the FAA does something precautionary, people get upset at it and criticize it for safeguarding against something that hasn't caused a crash.
I'm all for continuing to fund research into improving photovoltaics - they're going to get better eventually. But people have to get it through their heads that the dream of powering our society with sunlight is at present just that - a dream. There are specialized applications (particularly off-grid) where solar is competitive or even ideal. But for powering our society? The reality is that it's currently just about the worst possible choice. And trying to force it into market acceptance with big government incentives will result in a net economic loss, meaning its contribution to the standard of living is negative.
If you want to insist on clean renewables, wind is far more viable.
the current system puts brick and mortar at an enormous disadvantage, especially with commodities such as TVs with really thin margins.
The current system does not put brick and mortar businesses at a disadvantage. States which have high sales taxes put their own brick and mortar businesses at a disadvantage. It's possible right now for every state complaining about Amazon to solve this issue without violating the interstate commerce clause - simply repeal their sales taxes. Then their brick and mortar businesses can charge the same amount as Amazon, and won't be at a disadvantage.
I don't really understand why they won't do that. They don't have to give up the tax revenue, they can simply shift it over to different taxes like income tax. The sales tax is reviled by liberals as regressive (it's actually flat, but once you factor in living expenses it acts like it's regressive). And it's reviled by conservatives as being a burden business and discouraging commerce (by raising effective prices). It seems like everyone should be in favor of getting rid of sales taxes. But noooo, we have to go through this whole charade of passing a law which pretends not to violate the Constitutional prohibition on taxes on interstate commerce, even though it clearly does violate it.
Why not blame the people actually doing the firing?
Speaking as an employer who's had to make these sorts of decisions, it's tough to blame the people actually doing the firing because there are no black and white rules regarding sexual harassment. The law does not define a clear line at which point a remark crosses from being somewhat lewd to being outright offensive. But the law does make the employer liable if it does not take sufficient action in response to a sexual harassment claim. It's like having a speed limit which says "Don't drive too fast" without actually saying what speed is considered too fast.
In that situation, your best (safest) option is to have a zero tolerance policy. Any remark which could in some way be construed as sexual harassment is prohibited, and grounds for firing (or at least warnings which can lead to termination). In practice it's not really zero tolerance - you have to weigh the potential for possible repercussions either way. But since the incident went public it's already in the "worst case repercussions" category and the employer probably felt they had no choice but to fire.
Richards' firing is a bit different. It depends on her ex-company's policies. But most companies aren't out to make martyrs of themselves over political issues. Unless her position was one which gave her the authority to put her company (which presumably paid for her to be at the conference) into the spotlight over this issue, she overstepped her authority by publicizing this over her personal twitter feed. In most companies, that could be grounds for termination. (Note the parallel here - two guys making personal remarks at a company-funded trip, Richards making posts to her personal twitter feed about a company-funded trip. Moral of the story: Don't mix personal and work things. You ask companies not to butt into your personal life, but likewise you have to not mix your personal stuff with the company's.)
If she did want to publicize it, she should've run it by her employers first. Then if they agreed, they could've then put out a press release or something saying this sort of thing going on a tech conferences created an uncomfortable environment for women, and really shouldn't be tolerated. Or she could've anonymized it on her personal twitter feed, saying that it happened at "a past conference" with no identifying details, thus insulating her current employer. Or she could've posted it here as Anonymous Coward since her identity is irrelevant to the incident she wished to publicize.
Round here, I'm pretty sure the process would be
1. Verbal warning from a manager
2. Written warning, if behaviour doesn't change
3. Final written warning
That's pretty much the deal here too, in California at least. One of our workers had a reputation for slacking on the job, making the others pick up after him. We spoke with some employment attorneys about it (our annual liability insurance package included free limited access to them for questions like this) and that's almost exactly what they told us. Verbal warning, wait for a repeat, written warning, wait for a repeat, final written warning stating the next time would lead to termination, wait for a repeat, then fire. And all of it had to be documented, preferably with a third person witness (i.e. I couldn't give the warning in a meeting just between me and him).
If you just make a knee-jerk reaction to fire, and/or there's little to no documentation supporting that it's a recurring problem, you (the employer) open yourself up to a potential wrongful termination lawsuit. Unless it's for something absolutely unacceptable (like embezzling) or explained in the employment agreement as something that warrants immediate termination.
Sexual harassment is taken pretty seriously though, so depending on the seriousness of the remark (I don't get the "dongle" reference, and I'm not sure I want to) it could be grounds for immediate termination.
No alternative is 100% safe either. Wind turbines kill several people every year (mostly maintenance workers falling to their deaths). Falls from roofers are a leading cause of death among home contractors, and installing rooftop solar panels on every home would increase this number. The occasional hydroelectric dam failure kills people via flooding (in fact the worst power plant-related accident in history is the failure of a series of hydroelectric and flood control dams - nearly 200,000 killed). Oil and gas plants occasionally have fires. And everyone knows the staggering number of deaths caused by smoke from coal plants. If your threshold for safety is that an electric power source must be 100% safe before it can be used, then that's equivalent to saying we cannot generate electricity.
If you accept that there will always be some risk, and sort the different power sources by deaths per unit of energy generated, it turns out nuclear is the safest power source man has ever invented. Yes the potential calamity when a nuclear plant goes out of control is big. But the amount of electricity that single plant can generate compared to other power sources is even bigger. Frankly, if there's going to be an accident, I'd rather have it all happen in one place, so we can just cordon it off and concentrate all our efforts into cleaning it up. I think that's preferable to having thousands of mini-accidents which as an aggregate kill more people, do more damage, and cost more to clean up. The only advantage of the mini-accidents is that they don't capture the attention of the press and thus never enter the public consciousness, meaning their perceived safety is just an illusion.
Flash was never intended to be a universal code interpreter to run across all systems (like Java was supposed to do). Flash was initially developed as an artist's animation tool to help create small-size low-bandwidth movies without making them full video files. It's still wildly popular among artists for that reason. That you could use Flash to do things like play video and make (clunky) websites was an accidental side benefit. It was never intended to do those things.
HTML5 was intended to do those things. So it was pretty much inevitable that sites would move to HTML5 for that sort of thing. However, as I said, Flash is still wildly popular among artists (so much so that it's been used to produce several animated TV shows and movies). I don't see it going away any time soon.
Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was very public in his condemnation of Flash as a tool for rich-content playback, denigrating it in an April 2010 letter posted on Apple's Website as flawed with regard to battery life, security, reliability and performance.
That was just PR to keep the masses thinking Apple was on their side. The real reason they ddin't support Flash was because it was a code interpreter. i.e. It let you run external code. That meant if iOS supported Flash, you could use it to run apps on your iOS device without having gotten them via the App Store.
At the time, Apple had a very strict policy against code interpreters. They've loosened their stance somewhat since then, but it's still pretty restrictive. It's their garden, and they want to keep it walled off. On the one hand this does improve the security of their devices somewhat. On the other it means all executables which are bought and sold for the device have to go through their App Store and 30% cut.
Battery life, reliability, and performance were all red herrings because in most Android browsers, the Flash plugin wouldn't play by default. If you went to a web page with embedded Flash, an image of a stylized F would show up in its place, and you had to click on it before the Flash would actually play. No hit to the device's performance unless you specifically wanted the Flash to play.
I don't see how it helps legal digital sales. If someone pirated X, they already have X, so why would they buy it?
Is it the case that once having pirated X, they buy X+1, not being able to find X+1 on the pirate sites?
People tend to expect others to act the way they themselves do.
The "everyone is a money-grubbing cheat and scoundrel like we are" RIAA view: Someone pirates X, likes it, so they go pirate X+1.
The "I just want what's fair for me and you" view: I heard a nice snippet of your music X in the elevator, and was curious what the whole thing sounded like. So I pirated X. I liked it and want more, but it's not fair for me to just take it without giving you anything. So I buy X+1.
Or my "why won't this do what I want it to do?" case: I bought X on blu-ray, but the movie was spread across two discs and I wasn't savvy enough with Handbrake to stitch them together with subtitles intact for my media server. So I downloaded a pirated version of X which had already been stitched together. Since I bought X, then pirated X, by the terms of their license (single copy for personal viewing - I can't watch both copies simultaneously) it's not really pirating X. But in their statistics it still counts as a pirated copy of X.
At this point I think it's fairly obvious that your phone is going to become your PC. Regular PCs (first desktops and now laptops) have gotten fast enough to where even a low-end version can do everything 99% of people want. The greatest optimization that's left on desktops and laptops is reducing size and power consumption. Whereas the optimizations that still matter on phones (nee PDAs) are speed, size, and power consumption.
So not it's not just a friggin phone. It's a computer. And it's well on its way to becoming your PC. The way I see it playing out is that your phone will carry the CPU, RAM, and storage. If you need a tablet, you can carry a bigger screen (probably a flexible one you can roll up into a pen-sized cannister) and the phone will transmit the display to it wirelessly. If you need a laptop, in addition to the screen you can tote along a bluetooth keyboard and mouse which will also connect to your phone.
Along the same lines, this is also why it must be illegal for a carrier to keep your cell phone locked after you've bought it and paid for it entirely via the 2-3 year contract.
Does the presence of these contaminants affect the pressure pumps? If not, there's no need to dispose of the water (which is incompressible so the up-to 80% which returns to the surface could just be sent down again instead of replaced with new water).
And when they're done fracking at one site, they can just haul the waste water to the next site for re-use. There are probably some sediments that come up with the water, but those should be pretty easy to filter out.
Yeah, the maneuverability part was supposition (it's not like they tested the birds with shorter wingspans to see how much more maneuverable they were).
Here's an alternative possible explanation. Older birds are bigger. Older birds have slower reactions. As overpasses became more common, it was predominantly older birds which were killed disproportionately by passing cars. Consequently the birds may have increased in number, but their population distribution is now skewed towards the younger, smaller end.
It's wrong to view this as "having the right" to unlock things we own.
This entire debate needs to be recast as: People who sell things shouldn't be allowed to put restrictions on how you can use them. If they lease, rent, or license something to you, then yeah go nuts with whatever restrictions both parties agree to. But if it's a sale, as in the previous owner gives up all rights and claims to the item, and the new owner gains all all those rights, then locking must be impossible and illegal.
If we allow the carriers to have their way on this, it opens up the door to all sorts of silliness: Cars you buy but are required to fill up with gas purchased only at "partner" gas stations. Computer hardware that you're not allowed to install Linux onto. Food purchased from one grocery store which you're not allowed to mix with food from a different grocery store while preparing a meal. etc.
To me it epitomizes irrational luddite environmentalism. The idea that our modern and technological ways are bad, and the old agrarian ways are good. A good example was when I was up in Vancouver. A restaurant announced that for Earth Hour they'd turn off the lights and use candles instead.
If you figure that each table had one bank of ceiling lights with four 36" T8 bulbs, that's 4*25 Watts = 100 Watts. 4*1950 lumens = 7800 lumens.
A candle on the table is about 80 Watts for 13 lumens. So basically they were burning 80% as much energy for 1/600th the light. Even if you ignore that Vancouver gets most of its electricity from hydro and assume the electricity for the bulbs came from a 40% efficient coal plant, that's less than 0.5% the light per Watt of entropic heat generated (with a corresponding amount of CO2 production). Burning candles for light is just about the worst possible thing you can do for the environment.
The technologically advanced choice is almost always the more environmentally sound choice. The problem isn't technology. It's Jevons' paradox - improved energy efficiency tends to increase overall energy consumption rather than decrease it.
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Congratulations. You have "discovered" what space programs have already known for decades - the Gibbs free energy change of elemental aluminum converted to aluminum chloride or aluminum oxide is massive. Among the largest there is for a chemical reaction. Several times greater than that of hydrogen converted to water or carbon dioxide (which is the basis for energy release in hydrocarbon fuels). That's why aluminum is a popular fuel in solid rocket boosters. On a per-mole basis, it's much better at storing energy. And it's still pretty competitive on a per-weight basis.
Actually, the Challenger disaster hinged on a different failure in statistics. Originally the SRB segments were mated with 2 O-rings. Inspection of the SRBs after launch revealed the O-rings were failing at a higher than expected rate. So to mitigate the risk they redesigned the system and... added a 3rd O-ring. The reasoning was that if a single O-ring had a (say) 1% chance of failure, then two would have a .01^2 = .01% chance of failure, and three would have a .01^3 = .0001% chance of failure.
Unfortunately, that reasoning only works when the failures are independent events. If a single event (like cold weather) can cause the failure of one O-ring, it can also cause the failure of the other O-rings, so that failure mode is not independent. And your chance of all three O-rings failing is closer to 1% instead of 0.0001%.
Same thing happened at the Fukushima nuclear plant. They had something like a dozen diesel generators under the theory that even if a few failed to start, it was highly unlikely that all would fail to start. They completely missed the possibility that a single common event could cause all the generators to fail the same way.
Your eyes actually aren't sensitive to red, green, and blue. Here are the spectral sensitivities of the red, green, and blue cones in your eye. The red cones are actually most sensitive to orange, green most sensitive to yellow-green, and blue most sensitive to green-blue. There's also a wide range of colors that each type of cone is sensitive to, not a single frequency. When your brain decodes this into color, it uses the combined signal it's getting from all three types of cones to figure out which color you're seeing. e.g. Green isn't just the stimulation of your green-yellow cones. It's that plus the low stimulation of your orange cones and blue-green cones in the correct ratio.
RGB being the holy trinity of color is a display phenomenon, not a sensing one. In order to be able to stimulate the entire range of colors you can perceive, it's easiest if you pick three colors which stimulate the orange cones most and the other two least (red), the green-blue cones most and the others least (blue), and the green-yellow cones most but the other two least (green). (I won't get into purple/violet - that's a long story which you can probably guess if you look at the left end of the orange cones' response curve.) You could actually pick 3 different colors as your primaries, e.g. orange, yellow, and blue. They'd just be more limited in the range of colors you can reproduce because their inability to stimulate the three types of comes semi-independently. Even if you pick non-optimal colors, it's possible to replicate the full range if you add a 4th or 5th display primary. It's just more complex and usually not economical (Panasonic I think made a TV with extra yellow primary to help bolster that portion of the spectrum).
But like your eyes, for the purposes of recording colors, you don't have to actually record red, green, and blue. You can replicate the same frequency response spectrum using photoreceptors sensitive to any 3 different colors. All that matters is that their range of sensitivity covers the full visible spectrum, and their combined response curves allow you to uniquely distinguish any single frequency of light within that range. It may involve a lot of math, but hey computational power is cheap nowadays.
It's also worth noting that real-world objects don't give off a single frequency of light. They give off a wide spectrum, which your eyes combine into the 3 signal strengths from the 3 types of cones. This is part of the reason why some objects can appear to shift relative colors as you put them under different lighting. A blue quilt with orange patches can appear to be a blue quilt with red patches under lighting with a stronger red component. The "orange" patches are actually reflecting both orange and red light. So the actual color you see is the frequency spectrum of the light source, times the frequency emission response (color reflection spectrum) of the object, convolved with the frequency response of the cones in your eyes. And when you display a picture of that object, your monitor is simply doing its best using three narrow-band frequencies to stimulate your cones in the same ratio as they were with the wide-band color of the object. So a photo can never truly replicate the appearance of an object; it can only replicate its appearance under a specific lighting condition.
There are two commonly-held contradictory beliefs at play here.
The FCC is trapped in the middle here (as is frequently the FTC, FAA, NTSB, FDA, NIH, etc). They're trying their best to satisfy both by using scientific principles to come up with safety standards that products can be tested against.
There are certain issues where the common opinion on slashdot favors the second instead of the first. I won't mention what they are because lately that's a quick and easy way to get your post modded down into oblivion (that wasn't the case 10 years ago - nowadays too many people ignore the moderating guidelines and use their mod points as "dislike" votes). But if you think about it I'm sure you can figure them out.
If the burden of proof is on the people who claim there's harm, and you prohibit funding of any further attempts to find such harm, that subverts the scientific process. For a long time people suspected that electricity and magnetism were somehow related, but were unable to figure out how. How would things have turned out if those who believed they weren't related pointed to all the early failures and cited them as reason to cut off all funding for attempts to find a relationship between the two? I completely agree with you that there's no danger from these levels of non-ionizing radiation. But those who claim there is a danger must be allowed to continue trying to prove their viewpoint. Otherwise you've turned science into one big circle jerk of confirmation bias.
Generally, the government agencies funding those types of studies do a pretty good job of it. They don't just keep funding the same study over and over. In order for the applicant to get funding, s/he has to propose something new and novel - either something which hasn't been studied before, or some way to conduct the study which hasn't been tried before and could give different insight.
I have interest-bearing Canadian and US bank accounts and asked my CPA that question (international tax attorney since I was getting paid in CAD at the time). The way he explained it is that the Canadian interest is income, and I am taxed on it. I get the equivalent of a 1099 from the Canadian bank saying how much interest in CAD I made last year, convert it to USD using the exchange rate on the last day of the year, and report it on my US taxes as interest income in USD.
OTOH if I move money into the Canadian account, the CAD goes up vs the USD, and I move it back to my USD account, the extra counts as capital gains and I pay capital gains taxes on it. This can get complicated if the amount I move to Canada doesn't equal the amount I move back to the US in a year. But theoretically any money (in USD) you get back in excess of what you put in is capital gains. I presume any money I lose due to the CAD going down could likewise be reported as losses. Think of it as investing in a stock which can go up or down in value. The day-to-day exchange rate doesn't matter in this case, just the rates when you bought and sold (i.e. how much USD you made/lost).
As for your flower example, it's normally taxed when you convert it into USD (sell it). But if you barter it (e.g. I exchange a bouquet of roses grown in my backyard for a copy of Skyrim), it's taxed as income at an equivalent value (the USD value of a copy of Skyrim). At least that's the way it's supposed to work. Obviously enforcement of reporting of bartered items is difficult.
Correlation does not imply causation. Unfortunately the experiment was poorly designed and doesn't actually support the conclusion the website and most of the people here are drawing. The strongest conclusion you can draw from this experiment is that packages with labels avowing strong socio-political beliefs are more likely to be lost/delayed by the USPS.
If you want to support the conclusion that the USPS is anti-atheist, you need to send at least three packages. One control package in plain wrapping. One package with strong atheist markings. And one package with equivalent strong theist markings.
It could just be that USPS employees just don't like package markings which serve no purpose other than to advertising a strong belief (as postal employees are really the only audience for such advertising), and those aren't handled as carefully. When I moved a decade ago, I shipped a bunch of my stuff in boxes via the USPS (they had the lowest rate). I ran out of boxes while packing, so I ordered more from UPS (since they'd deliver to my home). Those boxes had "UPS" and the UPS logo prominently marked on the sides. At the destination, I did receive all my boxes. But a few of the UPS boxes showed up late, and two had clearly been abused - apparently dropped and crushed, and one had most of the UPS markings scratched off.
That reasoning only works when there are two possible answers - true or false. You categorize things as false by default, and move them to the true category when you have evidence.
There are actually three possible answers - true, false, and cannot be determined. At its simplest level, things like division by zero fall into the third category. Or if you want a non-mathematical example, the liar ("this sentence is false") also falls into the third category. Or if you want a interrogative example, "does a parallel universe exist inside of a black hole?" works too (light and therefore information cannot escape a black hole, so we can never determine the answer).
In the general case, Goedel's incompleteness theorems say that there will always exist things which fall into the third category. Agnosticism properly recognizes that the last category exists and is the category which draws the fewest conclusions, and thus puts things in there by default until evidence exists to move them into one of the first two categories.
The proper logical answers to the question "is there a god?" are, true (theism), false (atheism), and cannot be determined (agnosticism). Unfortunately most self-proclaimed atheists conflate the last two, not realizing they're committing a logical error by doing so. Unless you can eliminate the third category (cannot be determined) as an answer, it is improper to place something in the false category simply because you have not found evidence to place it into the true category.
Science gets around the problem by deliberately setting up experiments (or at least trying to) which have two possible outcomes (confirmation or rejection of a hypothesis). In the general case however, you must first eliminate the "cannot be determined" category from consideration before you can apply scientific principles.
It's worth pointing out that the rebels won in Libya. And when the Soviet Union was collapsing and everything was unraveling, the old fogeys in the Kremlin ordered the military to attack those protesting in a last-ditch effort to hang on to power. The soldiers refused to fire on their own fellow citizens. In Tienanmen, the army units initially occupying the city (i.e. the ones driving the tanks) were from the Beijing area. They too refused to fire on their fellow citizens. The massacre didn't happen until the government replaced them with army units from the rural provinces who'd been nursing a grudge over pampered, rich city folks getting most of the government's funding for a decades.
For this type of disincentive to work, it has to be possible for both sides to become bloodied. If one side holds all the cards, the other side just folds. That's what kept the Communists and the Nazis in power for so long - citizens opposed had no hope of winning, so they didn't even bother trying. It's only when faced with the prospect of a real battle with both sides taking casualties, that both sides start to ask each other "Is this really worth it? Wouldn't it be better to negotiate a civilized peace?"
That's the real point of the Second Amendment - it's not there to allow the citizens to win an outright war against the military. It's there to give them enough teeth so that if the government should ever order the military to fire on the people, those in the military don't simply choose to follow orders because it's the easiest choice.
In the context of using guns against people, the gun's primary purpose is to intimidate people. The vast, vast majority of the time police and criminals use a gun, no bullet is ever fired. But the person it's pointed at is intimidated into standing down (either give up to the police, or give up their wallet to the criminal). And the gun has served its purpose without firing a single shot, and most certainly without killing anyone.
Even in a military context, the main purpose of a gun isn't to kill people. It's to wound them. A dead soldier is just a body, and possibly an incentive for seeking revenge. A wounded soldier is baggage which has to be carried back for medical treatment (thus tying up two more soldiers - one to carry him back, and one to treat the wounds). And while he's laying there screaming in pain, he's demoralizing his fellow soldiers.
I suspect someone, somewhere has already added up all the hours kids "waste" playing video games, and tallied up how many "lifetimes" it costs.
People get upset at the FAA and criticize it all the time for being a reactionary agency. That it only requires the airlines and aircraft manufacturers to fix things or change procedures after it causes a crash.
The one time the FAA does something precautionary, people get upset at it and criticize it for safeguarding against something that hasn't caused a crash.
Make up your minds, people!
You can make all the excuses you want about solar's poor market performance. The bottom line is that solar is far more expensive than other power sources. Frequently by a factor of 2 to 5.
I'm all for continuing to fund research into improving photovoltaics - they're going to get better eventually. But people have to get it through their heads that the dream of powering our society with sunlight is at present just that - a dream. There are specialized applications (particularly off-grid) where solar is competitive or even ideal. But for powering our society? The reality is that it's currently just about the worst possible choice. And trying to force it into market acceptance with big government incentives will result in a net economic loss, meaning its contribution to the standard of living is negative.
If you want to insist on clean renewables, wind is far more viable.
The current system does not put brick and mortar businesses at a disadvantage. States which have high sales taxes put their own brick and mortar businesses at a disadvantage. It's possible right now for every state complaining about Amazon to solve this issue without violating the interstate commerce clause - simply repeal their sales taxes. Then their brick and mortar businesses can charge the same amount as Amazon, and won't be at a disadvantage.
I don't really understand why they won't do that. They don't have to give up the tax revenue, they can simply shift it over to different taxes like income tax. The sales tax is reviled by liberals as regressive (it's actually flat, but once you factor in living expenses it acts like it's regressive). And it's reviled by conservatives as being a burden business and discouraging commerce (by raising effective prices). It seems like everyone should be in favor of getting rid of sales taxes. But noooo, we have to go through this whole charade of passing a law which pretends not to violate the Constitutional prohibition on taxes on interstate commerce, even though it clearly does violate it.
Speaking as an employer who's had to make these sorts of decisions, it's tough to blame the people actually doing the firing because there are no black and white rules regarding sexual harassment. The law does not define a clear line at which point a remark crosses from being somewhat lewd to being outright offensive. But the law does make the employer liable if it does not take sufficient action in response to a sexual harassment claim. It's like having a speed limit which says "Don't drive too fast" without actually saying what speed is considered too fast.
In that situation, your best (safest) option is to have a zero tolerance policy. Any remark which could in some way be construed as sexual harassment is prohibited, and grounds for firing (or at least warnings which can lead to termination). In practice it's not really zero tolerance - you have to weigh the potential for possible repercussions either way. But since the incident went public it's already in the "worst case repercussions" category and the employer probably felt they had no choice but to fire.
Richards' firing is a bit different. It depends on her ex-company's policies. But most companies aren't out to make martyrs of themselves over political issues. Unless her position was one which gave her the authority to put her company (which presumably paid for her to be at the conference) into the spotlight over this issue, she overstepped her authority by publicizing this over her personal twitter feed. In most companies, that could be grounds for termination. (Note the parallel here - two guys making personal remarks at a company-funded trip, Richards making posts to her personal twitter feed about a company-funded trip. Moral of the story: Don't mix personal and work things. You ask companies not to butt into your personal life, but likewise you have to not mix your personal stuff with the company's.)
If she did want to publicize it, she should've run it by her employers first. Then if they agreed, they could've then put out a press release or something saying this sort of thing going on a tech conferences created an uncomfortable environment for women, and really shouldn't be tolerated. Or she could've anonymized it on her personal twitter feed, saying that it happened at "a past conference" with no identifying details, thus insulating her current employer. Or she could've posted it here as Anonymous Coward since her identity is irrelevant to the incident she wished to publicize.
That's pretty much the deal here too, in California at least. One of our workers had a reputation for slacking on the job, making the others pick up after him. We spoke with some employment attorneys about it (our annual liability insurance package included free limited access to them for questions like this) and that's almost exactly what they told us. Verbal warning, wait for a repeat, written warning, wait for a repeat, final written warning stating the next time would lead to termination, wait for a repeat, then fire. And all of it had to be documented, preferably with a third person witness (i.e. I couldn't give the warning in a meeting just between me and him).
If you just make a knee-jerk reaction to fire, and/or there's little to no documentation supporting that it's a recurring problem, you (the employer) open yourself up to a potential wrongful termination lawsuit. Unless it's for something absolutely unacceptable (like embezzling) or explained in the employment agreement as something that warrants immediate termination.
Sexual harassment is taken pretty seriously though, so depending on the seriousness of the remark (I don't get the "dongle" reference, and I'm not sure I want to) it could be grounds for immediate termination.
No alternative is 100% safe either. Wind turbines kill several people every year (mostly maintenance workers falling to their deaths). Falls from roofers are a leading cause of death among home contractors, and installing rooftop solar panels on every home would increase this number. The occasional hydroelectric dam failure kills people via flooding (in fact the worst power plant-related accident in history is the failure of a series of hydroelectric and flood control dams - nearly 200,000 killed). Oil and gas plants occasionally have fires. And everyone knows the staggering number of deaths caused by smoke from coal plants. If your threshold for safety is that an electric power source must be 100% safe before it can be used, then that's equivalent to saying we cannot generate electricity.
If you accept that there will always be some risk, and sort the different power sources by deaths per unit of energy generated, it turns out nuclear is the safest power source man has ever invented. Yes the potential calamity when a nuclear plant goes out of control is big. But the amount of electricity that single plant can generate compared to other power sources is even bigger. Frankly, if there's going to be an accident, I'd rather have it all happen in one place, so we can just cordon it off and concentrate all our efforts into cleaning it up. I think that's preferable to having thousands of mini-accidents which as an aggregate kill more people, do more damage, and cost more to clean up. The only advantage of the mini-accidents is that they don't capture the attention of the press and thus never enter the public consciousness, meaning their perceived safety is just an illusion.
Flash was never intended to be a universal code interpreter to run across all systems (like Java was supposed to do). Flash was initially developed as an artist's animation tool to help create small-size low-bandwidth movies without making them full video files. It's still wildly popular among artists for that reason. That you could use Flash to do things like play video and make (clunky) websites was an accidental side benefit. It was never intended to do those things.
HTML5 was intended to do those things. So it was pretty much inevitable that sites would move to HTML5 for that sort of thing. However, as I said, Flash is still wildly popular among artists (so much so that it's been used to produce several animated TV shows and movies). I don't see it going away any time soon.
That was just PR to keep the masses thinking Apple was on their side. The real reason they ddin't support Flash was because it was a code interpreter. i.e. It let you run external code. That meant if iOS supported Flash, you could use it to run apps on your iOS device without having gotten them via the App Store.
At the time, Apple had a very strict policy against code interpreters. They've loosened their stance somewhat since then, but it's still pretty restrictive. It's their garden, and they want to keep it walled off. On the one hand this does improve the security of their devices somewhat. On the other it means all executables which are bought and sold for the device have to go through their App Store and 30% cut.
Battery life, reliability, and performance were all red herrings because in most Android browsers, the Flash plugin wouldn't play by default. If you went to a web page with embedded Flash, an image of a stylized F would show up in its place, and you had to click on it before the Flash would actually play. No hit to the device's performance unless you specifically wanted the Flash to play.
People tend to expect others to act the way they themselves do.
The "everyone is a money-grubbing cheat and scoundrel like we are" RIAA view: Someone pirates X, likes it, so they go pirate X+1.
The "I just want what's fair for me and you" view: I heard a nice snippet of your music X in the elevator, and was curious what the whole thing sounded like. So I pirated X. I liked it and want more, but it's not fair for me to just take it without giving you anything. So I buy X+1.
Or my "why won't this do what I want it to do?" case: I bought X on blu-ray, but the movie was spread across two discs and I wasn't savvy enough with Handbrake to stitch them together with subtitles intact for my media server. So I downloaded a pirated version of X which had already been stitched together. Since I bought X, then pirated X, by the terms of their license (single copy for personal viewing - I can't watch both copies simultaneously) it's not really pirating X. But in their statistics it still counts as a pirated copy of X.
At this point I think it's fairly obvious that your phone is going to become your PC. Regular PCs (first desktops and now laptops) have gotten fast enough to where even a low-end version can do everything 99% of people want. The greatest optimization that's left on desktops and laptops is reducing size and power consumption. Whereas the optimizations that still matter on phones (nee PDAs) are speed, size, and power consumption.
So not it's not just a friggin phone. It's a computer. And it's well on its way to becoming your PC. The way I see it playing out is that your phone will carry the CPU, RAM, and storage. If you need a tablet, you can carry a bigger screen (probably a flexible one you can roll up into a pen-sized cannister) and the phone will transmit the display to it wirelessly. If you need a laptop, in addition to the screen you can tote along a bluetooth keyboard and mouse which will also connect to your phone.
Along the same lines, this is also why it must be illegal for a carrier to keep your cell phone locked after you've bought it and paid for it entirely via the 2-3 year contract.
Does the presence of these contaminants affect the pressure pumps? If not, there's no need to dispose of the water (which is incompressible so the up-to 80% which returns to the surface could just be sent down again instead of replaced with new water).
And when they're done fracking at one site, they can just haul the waste water to the next site for re-use. There are probably some sediments that come up with the water, but those should be pretty easy to filter out.
Yeah, the maneuverability part was supposition (it's not like they tested the birds with shorter wingspans to see how much more maneuverable they were).
Here's an alternative possible explanation. Older birds are bigger. Older birds have slower reactions. As overpasses became more common, it was predominantly older birds which were killed disproportionately by passing cars. Consequently the birds may have increased in number, but their population distribution is now skewed towards the younger, smaller end.
It's wrong to view this as "having the right" to unlock things we own.
This entire debate needs to be recast as: People who sell things shouldn't be allowed to put restrictions on how you can use them. If they lease, rent, or license something to you, then yeah go nuts with whatever restrictions both parties agree to. But if it's a sale, as in the previous owner gives up all rights and claims to the item, and the new owner gains all all those rights, then locking must be impossible and illegal.
If we allow the carriers to have their way on this, it opens up the door to all sorts of silliness: Cars you buy but are required to fill up with gas purchased only at "partner" gas stations. Computer hardware that you're not allowed to install Linux onto. Food purchased from one grocery store which you're not allowed to mix with food from a different grocery store while preparing a meal. etc.
To me it epitomizes irrational luddite environmentalism. The idea that our modern and technological ways are bad, and the old agrarian ways are good. A good example was when I was up in Vancouver. A restaurant announced that for Earth Hour they'd turn off the lights and use candles instead.
If you figure that each table had one bank of ceiling lights with four 36" T8 bulbs, that's 4*25 Watts = 100 Watts. 4*1950 lumens = 7800 lumens.
A candle on the table is about 80 Watts for 13 lumens. So basically they were burning 80% as much energy for 1/600th the light. Even if you ignore that Vancouver gets most of its electricity from hydro and assume the electricity for the bulbs came from a 40% efficient coal plant, that's less than 0.5% the light per Watt of entropic heat generated (with a corresponding amount of CO2 production). Burning candles for light is just about the worst possible thing you can do for the environment.
The technologically advanced choice is almost always the more environmentally sound choice. The problem isn't technology. It's Jevons' paradox - improved energy efficiency tends to increase overall energy consumption rather than decrease it.