There was no need to infer. You specifically referred to Bhopal, which was the Indian subsidiary of a U.S. company.
Also, I disagree with your assertion that the Chinese are simply parroting what they learned from the West. I'm Asian, and the widespread Confucian ideals mean that it's very common for Asians to prioritize the group (be it family, company, or country) over the individual. What you see going on in Chinese companies is what happens when you take the Western concept of capitalism, and remove the West's strong sense of protecting individual liberties. Heck, the Chinese government's entire premise driving their rapid industrialization in the last 20 years is that by sacrificing protections for individual laborers, they can keep wages and costs artificially low, which will attract more foreign business and investments, thus allowing the country to modernize more quickly. That is, the needs of the country in the future mean the needs of the individuals today can be overlooked.
A civilized country is a country that follows some widely accepted precepts for a modern civilization, like having a justice system that actually enforces its law code equally for all people, not one that works only for the highest bidder.
In other words, nobody's actually attained civilization yet.
The problem with trying to link a definition of civilization to justice is that it's highly probable that justice/fairness is an impossible goal. It's been proven that you can't create a perfectly fair election system. And that's a very specific case of justice/fairness. In the general case, it's very likely that any justice system will be flawed in some way. The best you can do is pick which flaws you're willing to live with.
If you compare subpixel density, the SGS4 is 882 subpixels per inch, my lumia 920 is 1280x768 with a pixel density of 332, comprising three sub pixels and 4.5 inches, therefore the subpixel density is 996 per inch, therefore if it was pentile it would be 498 ppi.
No, because your eyes suck at seeing blue. Your eyes have very poor resolution in blue, moderately better resolution in red, and sharpest resolution in green. The whole point of a pentile display is not to waste subpixels on blue and red that your eyes can't even see. So you put in more green subpixels than red or green.
Put another way, even though the Lumina has 996 subpixels per inch, 67% of them are much higher resolution than your eyes can resolve, while 33% (green) are lower resolution than your eyes can resolve. So you're actually wasting a lot of subpixels. With a pentile RGBG display, the ratio of subpixels better matches your eye's resolving ability. 50% of the pixels are devoted to green, 25% for red, 25% for blue. So pentile can produce a sharper looking picture than RGB while using fewer subpixels. Pentile only looks bad if you unrealistically put your eye right up to the screen or take a magnified photo.
And before anyone starts rebutting that they can see the difference, no you can't. This trick is not new nor did it start with Android pentile displays. It's been used in NTSC TV broadcasts, color film formulation, and JPEG and MPEG compression. All of those store and display red and blue at a lower resolution than green. That you never noticed this before is proof that it works. It's just new to computer displays because until recently we didn't have spare computing power to waste on converting RGB data for a single pixel into a RGBG subpixel array millions of times in real time.
So if you and the noise source are separated by a one-inch thick solid concrete wall, splitting it into two half-inch concrete walls and putting a layer of foam in the middle would reduce the amount of sound transmitted. (The foam tends to absorb the reflected sound energy, so less of the reflection does a second bounce.)
Exactly. We're addressing the wrong end of the problem. Too much emphasis on developing super-high MPG vehicles, not enough on improving the MPG of trucks (both commercial and personal). In terms of fuel saved, single person switching from an SUV to a sedan is worth about two people switching from sedans to hybrids.
The other place where MPG trips people up is when they calculate average fuel efficiency. If they've got a 14 MPG SUV and a 50 MPG hybrid which they use equally, they figure the average MPG for the household is (14+50)/2 = 32 MPG, and hey that's pretty good! The proper calculation is 2/MPG_avg = 1/MPG_suv + 1/MPG_hybrid, or an average of 21.9 MPG. The vehicle which uses more fuel dominates the average.
I like this idea. You can't make it legal to unlock phones, but you can probably make it illegal to sell locked phones in the first place.
I don't understand why this is even an issue. It never should've been about "allowing" us to unlock our phones in the first place. I bought it, and once my contract is up (subsidy paid off) I've fully paid for it. It's mine. The carriers have absolutely no business saying what I can or can't do with it, and it should be illegal for them to keep it locked.
That is the real issue here - whether a seller can place usage restrictions on something entirely bought, paid for, and owned by someone else (as opposed to leased, rented, or licensed). If you let the carriers have their way with this, you're opening the door to car companies requiring you to buy gas only from their partner gas stations, grocery stores prohibiting you from mixing food bought at their store with food bought at a different store when preparing a meal, PC hardware manufacturers saying you're not allowed to install Linux on their systems, etc. We already went through all this with the Cue Cat (which was ostensibly licensed, so they had more of a legal leg to stand on than the carriers in this case).
The lack of concrete action against NK might be a lesson for Iran.
North Korea didn't have nukes for over 50 years and there was never concrete action against it. Suddenly they get nukes, and now it's because of the nukes that nobody is taking concrete action against them?
I have a rock which protects you from suffering a heart attack. I'll sell it to you cheap.
Nuclear warheads are pretty much only good to make other people not want to attack you because they fear getting nuked.
The targets of the nukes built during the Cold War were predominantly other nukes, not cities. The huge arsenals were built because guidance and accuracy was poor back then. Each side felt they needed to be able to lob 2-3 nukes at each enemy missile silo to stand a good chance of one landing close enough to reliably take out the single ICBM contained within. So they kept trying to leapfrog each other in number of nukes. Once the arms race began, it was difficult to stop because if the other side had 1000 nukes and you decided to unilaterally cut yours to 300, suddenly they had enough nukes to conceivably take out all your nukes in a surprise first strike.
SAC (keeping nuclear-armed bombers aloft 24/7), mobile ICBM launchers, ballistic missile submarines, and building multiple silos and shuffling your ICBMs around between them were all developed as counters to this first strike strategy. If the enemy doesn't know where some of your nukes are, then a first strike wouldn't be able to take out all of them. Enough would survive to guarantee the enemy's cities would be destroyed in the retaliatory strike. And thus began Mutually Assured Destruction.
GPS and GLONASS were birthed from all this - increase the accuracy of our missiles so we only need to lob 1 nuke per enemy missile silo. As was in-flight refueling - keep the SAC bombers aloft and give them enough range to reach targets in the Soviet Union even if they've been loitering over the US for 5 hours.
If the arms race had only been about holding the major cities hostage in MAD, it never would've gone past about a hundred nukes apiece.
Right now, for example, Japan sits underneath the American nuclear umbrella. They easily have the capability to build their own, but do not, because they trust that America will protect them. Other countries are in a similar situation. Once the American stockpile shrinks too much, the Japanese will start to get worried and want to build their own.
As a consequence of its defeat in WWII, Japan is prohibited by its Constitution from building or using military forces outside the country. That's why its military is called the Self Defense Forces (of anime fame) - they're only intended to be used to repel an invader who has already landed on Japanese soil. In exchange, the U.S. agreed to provide for Japan's national defense in the event of an attack by a third party.
Also, being as Japan is the only nation to actually have had cities nuked, I seriously doubt they would ever seek nuclear armament. It's just too socio-politically reprehensible to them, like dishonoring those who died to the bombs. And I say that as someone whose grandmother was forced to watch Japanese soldiers rape and kill her sister and niece during WWII, and who thinks the atomic bombings were completely justified. The Japanese people have done pretty much a 180 since WWII and are probably among if not the most pacifist country on the planet. It even took decades of cajoling to get them to agree to assign some of the SDF soldiers to UN peace duty.
Given how infrequently they're used (.mobi is probably the most successful, and it isn't really necessary as most sites simply redirect you from site.mobi to mobile.site.com), it's pretty clear we don't need new TLDs. And this is just a money grab by ICANN.
For example AOLâ(TM)s market value went from $226 billion to about $20 billion now.
The money did not evaporate like water, so who got the $$$ that millions of american lost by "investing" in Silicon Valley companies?
The money was given to previous stockowners who sold their shares. If AOL IPOs at $10, gets sold to person A for $20, sold to person B for $40, sold to person C for $75, and sold to person D for $100, then the stock crashes to $10, the $90 person D lost was distributed as:
$25 to person C
$35 to person B
$20 to person A
$10 to person AOL
Note that the company is not the beneficiary of its own high stock price (unless it held onto and decides to sell additional stock at a later date). The capital AOL received for its IPO was (number of IPO shares sold) * (stock price at IPO). $10 in the above example even though its stock peaked at $100. Also, don't make the mistake of thinking from the above example that the economy is zero-sum. It's not. But increases in the valuation of stock have to be linked to real increases in productivity for everyone to get "richer". If AOL had introduced real long-term productivity gains to the economy, their stock wouldn't have have crashed, and person D would still be holding onto $100 of real value instead of $10.
Furthermore, money is a representation of value/productivity. In fiat monetary systems like ours, it's created out of thin air to try to keep its value proportional to the size of the economy. If you do this right, the price of goods stays relatively constant (though you want a small amount of inflation to encourage people to use money to try to improve their productivity, instead of hiding it under a mattress waiting for its value to go up). If you do it wrong and make too much money, or a bunch of money is made and its value evaporates due to an economic bubble popping, the economy normalizes for this by increasing the price of goods (the money becomes worth less because there's more of it per unit of productivity than there used to be, though weak economic growth replacing some of the lost valuation can also help the normalization). This process of normalization is what causes a recession (slowdown in velocity of money).
This is the same reason why simply increasing the minimum wage to make it a living wage doesn't work. The value of the work done by minimum wage workers - the productivity their jobs add to the economy - has to be sufficient to live off of before it can be paid a living wage. If its not, then raising the minimum wage doesn't magically make it possible to make a living doing those jobs. It simply eliminates those jobs from the market since the employer would be paying the worker more than the value they get for the job being done.
I'm of the opinion that there's no one right answer to this. Some companies will treat their employees like prisoners and monitor them every minute they're at work (and maybe even try to when they're not at work). Some will give them complete privacy. And the rest will do something in between. IMHO you do not have a fundamental right to privacy when someone is paying you for that time. But you are free to negotiate with the person writing the checks exactly how much privacy you wish to have. Companies with unusually strict monitoring hurt themselves by decreasing the pool of prospective employees. People with unusually high expectations of privacy hurt themselves by decreasing the number of prospective employers.
Privacy of government employees OTOH is something where the electorate needs to decide what constitutes the "one right answer".
Advertising is grease for the market. They don't just serve to help the seller make more sales. They help inform buyers that a product that they might want/find helpful actually exists and is available for purchase. So in that respect ads are good.
The problem is unwanted, intrusive, or excessive ads. For advertising to be effective, not only must it be cost-effective for the seller, it has to be cost-effective for the buyer. That is, the total increase in quality of life due to buying stuff you learned about from ads has to be worth the distraction of ads in content you're trying to enjoy. If the ads are not cost-effective for the buyer, the buyer is better off blocking them. That's what happens with email spam.
The problem for websites is that if the ads on one website annoys visitors to the point of installing an ad-blocker, all of them now have their ad revenue cut off.
Disclaimer: I don't really know who's telling the truth here. Some of the NY Times article author's claims sound dubious, but I also spotted some problems with Musk's interpretation of the logs.
1. 550 miles over 2 days. If the NYT journalist had charged properly and as instructed, then it would have been 3 charges, but even with 4 charges, eating for 1-2 hours over a 2 day period isn't "not good" it's normal. If I stop at a charging point, plug in and go to a cafe for lunch, it's going to take 45mins to over and hour to complete lunch. I don't think Tesla were suggesting you eat solidly for 2 hours without a pause.
A Supercharge will realistically give you approx 150-200 miles of range. If you're driving at 50 mph, that's a 30-45 min pit stop every 3-4 hours, less if you're driving faster. I do not eat every 3-4 hours. Also, my lunches are typically 15-20 minutes. A dinner at a restaurant will be 45 min to 1.5 hours. But not lunch.
2. The temperature is irrelevant. The NYT journalist claimed he turn the heat down to extend range, the logs show he increased the temperature from 72F to 74F. The actual temperatures don't matter, it's the lie that matters.
If you look at the beginning of the speed and charge logs, there's a little slop there. It looks like the logs start with when the car left Tesla's showroom. The author then drove it home and charged it overnight. The day of the trip it looks like he drove it around town for 15-20 miles. Then the highway speeds start. If you assume the start of the trip is when the highway speeds begin, then the miles into the trip where the temperature is decreased matches exactly with the author's claims. Musk's claim that the author raised the temperature only fit the logs if you assume the trip began at the beginning of the logs.
3. Same with speed. The journalist claimed he had cruise control on at 55, logs show him travelling at 62-81MPH. Again, it's the lie that matters no the actual speeds.
It's exceedingly rare to find a car review by a major publication done on public roads where the author admits to driving above the speed limit.
4. It's well know batteries perform worse in low temperatures, if the journalist had used common sense and charged his battery sufficiently then there wouldn't have been an issue. Most cars, no matter the power source, get 10-20% less than the claimed economy figures. Is this right, no, but to single out one company seems to smack of double standards.
No it's not well known. And (barring the development of technology which can charge a battery in a few minutes) if EVs ever hope to become accepted by the general population, the public won't ever have to know this. The computer will have to measure the ambient temperature, location, weather reports, and do its best to accurately report how many miles in range it can realistically deliver.
The initial charges at the Supercharge stations were exactly how you'd want to charge an EV if you want to maximize distance traveled while minimizing time spent charging and risk of damaging the battery. It's the disputed third charge (which was not a Supercharge) that is key, and it's a he-said/she-said. The author claims Tesla staff told him to undercharge because as the battery warmed up it would recover some of the reported range it lost while parked overnight. Musk claims his staff told him no such thing.
The logs don't lie. The logs of that trip have been published. As the Wannabe King has already posted, Broder deliberately undercharged the car, repeatedly. The logs indicate that he intentionally sabotaged the test, so that the car would fail the tests.
Charging a Lithium-ion battery isn't like filling a gas tank. It doesn't happen linearly, especially if you're doing a high-amperage quick-charge (which is what the Supercharge is). It starts off charging quickly, but when you get to a certain point close to full you have to slow down or risk destroying the battery. The whole point of the Supercharge isn't to give you a full charge in 1 hour (which I doubt it can do without crossing this danger threshold). It's to give you approximately a half charge in half an hour. Ideally you don't want to quick-charge above maybe 80% full charge.
Which is precisely what Broder did - giving the car approx 150-200 miles in range at the two Supercharge stations. Which not so coincidentally was a little more than needed to get to the next Supercharge station. This isn't evidence of trying to sabotage the test. This is exactly how you would want to charge the car if you want to maximize distance traveled while minimizing the time spent charging and potential for battery damage. If you insist on charging the car to full at each Supercharge station, you're going to spend more time charging per distance traveled, and you're risking damaging the battery.
The disputed third charge was not at a Supercharge station. Broder claims Tesla staff told him the car would regain some of the reported range it lost while parked overnight, so he didn't need to charge until the miles remaining showed enough to get to the next Supercharge station (he spent ~45 minutes charging trying to add enough range to get to the nearest Supercharge station). Musk claims Tesla staff told him no such thing.
The key point isn't whether or not they are influenced by graphic imagery. It's how much they're influenced by it. Even if you assume/accept that young impressionable minds are influenced by violent imagery, if the magnitude of the effect is on the same scale as viewing pictures of bacon, then it's not really a concern.
If the magnitude of the effect of using a cell phone while driving were similar to that of changing the station on the radio, then that's really not worth worrying about. But it turns out the magnitude of the effect is similar to or greater than driving while drunk, which warrants laws prohibiting the behavior.
Android is Linux after Google removed all the "give the user every conceivable and obscure-to-use option under the sun" put there by enthusiasts. That's why it's succeeded wildly while regular Linux projects have yet to crack 2% market share among regular users (i.e. desktop/mobile). Same thing with Apple's OS X vs. BSD Unix.
This is the biggest problem I've seen with the open source philosophy. People like to think it's altruistic, but it's really not. All it's done is shift the selfishness from profit to contribution. Developers in open source projects typically contribute what they want, not what end users want. In fact I've frequently seen OSS developers openly hostile to user requests and suggestions, as if the opinion of someone who doesn't know how to code is worthless. It's like a blacksmith who likes making horseshoes thinking he's being generous by giving free horseshoes to poor people, when the poor people don't own horses and what they really want are farming tools. Feedback from end-users is vital to shaping the software into something more productive for end-users, but that feedback loop is frequently crippled in OSS.
With paid software, the reward for your selfishness is directly linked to the opinions of end users (they buy your software). So your selfishness (desire for profit) actually achieves results similar to altruism by getting you to implement stuff which you would never want to do on your own, but which your users want. (That's not to say OSS is without merit. The zero cost of duplication means RMS is correct that society is less effective if the basic snippets of code all have to be bought. It's just that OSS works best when most of the users are also developers. Not so well when the set of developers and users have very little intersection - in these types of OSS projects the relationship often looks more like lord/serf than it does developer/user.)
what strikes me is this: the exact same list can easily be levied against youtube, which I content is also a business, like megaupload, fundamentally built upon copyright infringement. YouTube is slightly more clever in that they attract non-infringing users to better mask their infringing activities, but still fundamentally the vast bulk of youtube advertising dollars come from showing copyright infringing content.
The vast majority of the "copyright infringing material" you see on YouTube is put there by the copyright holders themselves. Full National Geographic episodes? Uploaded by National Geographic. Various anime full episodes? FUNimation - the company who bought distribution rights from the anime creators. The excerpts from the Planet Earth series? Uploaded by the BBC. Mythbusters excerpts? Discovery Networks. PSY's Gangnam Style video? Uploaded by PSY himself. The #2 and #3 most viewed music videos? Uploaded by VEVO (joint venture between Sony, Universal, and EMI), the distributor for Justin Bieber and Jennifer Lopez.
Yeah there are unauthorized excerpts and full movies, but the excerpts fall under fair use and the full movies usually have only a few hundred thousand views at most. Most infringing videos get pulled from YouTube before they hit 1 million views. So the vast bulk of YouTube advertising dollars come from showing authorized copyrighted content. It's why a lot of videos are 360p or 480p - the creators are using YouTube as advertising to encourage you to watch the show on TV or go out and buy the blu-ray after you've seen it.
The key difference with Megaupload? Google shares advertising revenue with video uploaders.
Ah, a perfect candidate for charm school. It started as an IAP course the year before I arrived at MIT. It's meant for people exactly like you and me - those who see no redeeming value in the web of social customs, rituals, and taboos which 95% of society adheres to. While it's certainly possible to reject these social norms (Hughes, Zuckerberg, Elvis in the years before he died, Liberace, etc), you usually have to be important, rich, or famous to get away with it. For most people, even MIT grads, not conforming to these norms will get people thinking you're eccentric or weird at best, a misfit or an outcast at worst. Even if they treat you like a peer to your face, they'll still be saying that about you behind your back.
The examples cited in TFA were a bit toward the officious end. Most of it is pretty mundane stuff, like the importance of daily hygiene, what's expected on a date, when you're expected to wear a tie, etc. Stuff that "normal" folks all picked up during K-12, but people like you and me always considered unimportant so never bothered learning in our 18 years before arriving at college.
Because most of this stuff is learned from interacting with other people as you're growing up, it's difficult to find it all consolidated into one place for quick and easy consumption. That's what charm school does - it's a crash course in everything we ignored our friends gossiping about while we were growing up. We may think these social rules are silly and pointless, but we are the exception. The vast majority of the population thinks it's important for some reason. So you can either reject it and be an outcast, or you can learn to emulate the less annoying parts of it and fit in better.
Fast forward to protests held during Obama's tenure, the Occupy Wall Street movement. This time it wasn't a single day, but weeks, and months, of protest camps across hundreds of cities. The end result: ? How many bankers have been arrested? How many laws have changed? What impact has it had aside from a media sideshow?
IMHO, the fact that the Occupy Wall Street protests went on for more than a few weeks undermined its credibility with the public. The vast majority of the American public have jobs and need to work to put food on the table. They can take a few days off for a protest, or a few weeks if they decide to use their vacation time. But when OWS protesters are camping out for months, the public started to think of them as "them" rather than "us". And the protests lost the hearts and minds of the public.
Holding protests every weekend or every evening for a span of months would've been much more effective than camping out at a park 24/7 for months.
I note that the key phrase of the filibuster is about "killing Americans on American soil". So neither Republicans nor Democrats have a problem with killing Americans abroad?
It's been 20+ years since I took the course in Constitutional law (elective - I was an engineering major), so I can't cite the exact SCotUS case which established it. But U.S. Constitutional protections are limited to U.S. territory. That's why Bush sent prisoners to Guantanamo - it's Cuban territory, not U.S. The U.S. just has a perpetual lease on it (we pay Cuba about $4000/yr for it, though Castro felt the treaty was invalid and refused to cash the checks). That freed the administration from pesky things like the Constitution when it came to dealing with the prisoners. The SCotUS eventually decided the lease effectively made it U.S. territory and thus the prisoners had Constitutional rights, but both administrations seem to be ignoring that decision.
So the key phrase is actually "on American soil." Foreigners visiting the U.S. also gain Constitutional protection while they're in the U.S. -- even illegal immigrants, which is what the whole flap about the law passed in Arizona was about. The concept of a drone strike taking out someone within the U.S. appears to violate the Due Process clause because it's difficult to think of a situation involving a drone where there's an immediate threat to life thus warranting the use of deadly force. To use a drone to kill someone, you pretty much have to have decided to execute the person without apprehending him, and thus without having put him on trial. Very different from a cop who kills a suspect who points a gun at him.
People are just adding the "killing Americans" part to it to generate a stronger reaction. If you just say "killing people on American soil", some people who think terrorists shouldn't have Constitutional rights will say "yeah, I can see that being justified some time." Even though they're wrong, it dilutes opposition and distracts from the central issue. So they're narrowing it down to the one case pretty much the entire public will have a problem with - killing Americans on American soil.
Outside the U.S., the Constitution doesn't apply, and the government is free (legally) to kill people left and right (morally is another question). Killing U.S. citizens abroad seems to be kinda iffy, but as I understand the legal precedent there's no Constitutional restriction against the government doing it especially during a state of war.
Step 1: Flag the person as a criminal.
That's all the steps. The chance of false positive is very small. Most people either have already done something illegal, or will do something illegal at some point of their lives.
Step 0: Make laws which redefine things most people do as criminal behavior.
There was a near miss between a German UAV and an Airbus A300 over Kabul, Afghanistan in 2004. And just like with midair collisions between piloted aircraft there's going to be a collision eventually. Put enough planes (of any type) into the air and give them enough time, and eventually two will collide.
Slashdot Mirror
There was no need to infer. You specifically referred to Bhopal, which was the Indian subsidiary of a U.S. company.
Also, I disagree with your assertion that the Chinese are simply parroting what they learned from the West. I'm Asian, and the widespread Confucian ideals mean that it's very common for Asians to prioritize the group (be it family, company, or country) over the individual. What you see going on in Chinese companies is what happens when you take the Western concept of capitalism, and remove the West's strong sense of protecting individual liberties. Heck, the Chinese government's entire premise driving their rapid industrialization in the last 20 years is that by sacrificing protections for individual laborers, they can keep wages and costs artificially low, which will attract more foreign business and investments, thus allowing the country to modernize more quickly. That is, the needs of the country in the future mean the needs of the individuals today can be overlooked.
In other words, nobody's actually attained civilization yet.
The problem with trying to link a definition of civilization to justice is that it's highly probable that justice/fairness is an impossible goal. It's been proven that you can't create a perfectly fair election system. And that's a very specific case of justice/fairness. In the general case, it's very likely that any justice system will be flawed in some way. The best you can do is pick which flaws you're willing to live with.
can you guys remove the motorcycle from this picture?
Here's another link with a more detailed handling of what the link I included shows. Including the same pic with red pixels enlarged.
No, because your eyes suck at seeing blue. Your eyes have very poor resolution in blue, moderately better resolution in red, and sharpest resolution in green. The whole point of a pentile display is not to waste subpixels on blue and red that your eyes can't even see. So you put in more green subpixels than red or green.
Put another way, even though the Lumina has 996 subpixels per inch, 67% of them are much higher resolution than your eyes can resolve, while 33% (green) are lower resolution than your eyes can resolve. So you're actually wasting a lot of subpixels. With a pentile RGBG display, the ratio of subpixels better matches your eye's resolving ability. 50% of the pixels are devoted to green, 25% for red, 25% for blue. So pentile can produce a sharper looking picture than RGB while using fewer subpixels. Pentile only looks bad if you unrealistically put your eye right up to the screen or take a magnified photo.
And before anyone starts rebutting that they can see the difference, no you can't. This trick is not new nor did it start with Android pentile displays. It's been used in NTSC TV broadcasts, color film formulation, and JPEG and MPEG compression. All of those store and display red and blue at a lower resolution than green. That you never noticed this before is proof that it works. It's just new to computer displays because until recently we didn't have spare computing power to waste on converting RGB data for a single pixel into a RGBG subpixel array millions of times in real time.
It's not the mass per se which blocks sound. It's the density change. Going from low density to high density or vice versa (assuming speed of sound in the medium is proportional to density) reflects a large portion of sound wave back.
http://www.ndt-ed.org/EducationResources/CommunityCollege/Ultrasonics/Physics/reflectiontransmission.htm
So if you and the noise source are separated by a one-inch thick solid concrete wall, splitting it into two half-inch concrete walls and putting a layer of foam in the middle would reduce the amount of sound transmitted. (The foam tends to absorb the reflected sound energy, so less of the reflection does a second bounce.)
Exactly. We're addressing the wrong end of the problem. Too much emphasis on developing super-high MPG vehicles, not enough on improving the MPG of trucks (both commercial and personal). In terms of fuel saved, single person switching from an SUV to a sedan is worth about two people switching from sedans to hybrids.
The other place where MPG trips people up is when they calculate average fuel efficiency. If they've got a 14 MPG SUV and a 50 MPG hybrid which they use equally, they figure the average MPG for the household is (14+50)/2 = 32 MPG, and hey that's pretty good! The proper calculation is 2/MPG_avg = 1/MPG_suv + 1/MPG_hybrid, or an average of 21.9 MPG. The vehicle which uses more fuel dominates the average.
I don't understand why this is even an issue. It never should've been about "allowing" us to unlock our phones in the first place. I bought it, and once my contract is up (subsidy paid off) I've fully paid for it. It's mine. The carriers have absolutely no business saying what I can or can't do with it, and it should be illegal for them to keep it locked.
That is the real issue here - whether a seller can place usage restrictions on something entirely bought, paid for, and owned by someone else (as opposed to leased, rented, or licensed). If you let the carriers have their way with this, you're opening the door to car companies requiring you to buy gas only from their partner gas stations, grocery stores prohibiting you from mixing food bought at their store with food bought at a different store when preparing a meal, PC hardware manufacturers saying you're not allowed to install Linux on their systems, etc. We already went through all this with the Cue Cat (which was ostensibly licensed, so they had more of a legal leg to stand on than the carriers in this case).
North Korea didn't have nukes for over 50 years and there was never concrete action against it. Suddenly they get nukes, and now it's because of the nukes that nobody is taking concrete action against them?
I have a rock which protects you from suffering a heart attack. I'll sell it to you cheap.
The targets of the nukes built during the Cold War were predominantly other nukes, not cities. The huge arsenals were built because guidance and accuracy was poor back then. Each side felt they needed to be able to lob 2-3 nukes at each enemy missile silo to stand a good chance of one landing close enough to reliably take out the single ICBM contained within. So they kept trying to leapfrog each other in number of nukes. Once the arms race began, it was difficult to stop because if the other side had 1000 nukes and you decided to unilaterally cut yours to 300, suddenly they had enough nukes to conceivably take out all your nukes in a surprise first strike.
SAC (keeping nuclear-armed bombers aloft 24/7), mobile ICBM launchers, ballistic missile submarines, and building multiple silos and shuffling your ICBMs around between them were all developed as counters to this first strike strategy. If the enemy doesn't know where some of your nukes are, then a first strike wouldn't be able to take out all of them. Enough would survive to guarantee the enemy's cities would be destroyed in the retaliatory strike. And thus began Mutually Assured Destruction.
GPS and GLONASS were birthed from all this - increase the accuracy of our missiles so we only need to lob 1 nuke per enemy missile silo. As was in-flight refueling - keep the SAC bombers aloft and give them enough range to reach targets in the Soviet Union even if they've been loitering over the US for 5 hours.
If the arms race had only been about holding the major cities hostage in MAD, it never would've gone past about a hundred nukes apiece.
As a consequence of its defeat in WWII, Japan is prohibited by its Constitution from building or using military forces outside the country. That's why its military is called the Self Defense Forces (of anime fame) - they're only intended to be used to repel an invader who has already landed on Japanese soil. In exchange, the U.S. agreed to provide for Japan's national defense in the event of an attack by a third party.
Also, being as Japan is the only nation to actually have had cities nuked, I seriously doubt they would ever seek nuclear armament. It's just too socio-politically reprehensible to them, like dishonoring those who died to the bombs. And I say that as someone whose grandmother was forced to watch Japanese soldiers rape and kill her sister and niece during WWII, and who thinks the atomic bombings were completely justified. The Japanese people have done pretty much a 180 since WWII and are probably among if not the most pacifist country on the planet. It even took decades of cajoling to get them to agree to assign some of the SDF soldiers to UN peace duty.
Here's a list of the TLDs added last time ICANN did this:
.aero
.asia
.biz
.cat
.coop
.info
.int
.jobs
.mobi
.museum
.name
.post
.pro
.tel
.travel
.xxx
Given how infrequently they're used (.mobi is probably the most successful, and it isn't really necessary as most sites simply redirect you from site.mobi to mobile.site.com), it's pretty clear we don't need new TLDs. And this is just a money grab by ICANN.
The money was given to previous stockowners who sold their shares. If AOL IPOs at $10, gets sold to person A for $20, sold to person B for $40, sold to person C for $75, and sold to person D for $100, then the stock crashes to $10, the $90 person D lost was distributed as:
$25 to person C
$35 to person B
$20 to person A
$10 to person AOL
Note that the company is not the beneficiary of its own high stock price (unless it held onto and decides to sell additional stock at a later date). The capital AOL received for its IPO was (number of IPO shares sold) * (stock price at IPO). $10 in the above example even though its stock peaked at $100. Also, don't make the mistake of thinking from the above example that the economy is zero-sum. It's not. But increases in the valuation of stock have to be linked to real increases in productivity for everyone to get "richer". If AOL had introduced real long-term productivity gains to the economy, their stock wouldn't have have crashed, and person D would still be holding onto $100 of real value instead of $10.
Furthermore, money is a representation of value/productivity. In fiat monetary systems like ours, it's created out of thin air to try to keep its value proportional to the size of the economy. If you do this right, the price of goods stays relatively constant (though you want a small amount of inflation to encourage people to use money to try to improve their productivity, instead of hiding it under a mattress waiting for its value to go up). If you do it wrong and make too much money, or a bunch of money is made and its value evaporates due to an economic bubble popping, the economy normalizes for this by increasing the price of goods (the money becomes worth less because there's more of it per unit of productivity than there used to be, though weak economic growth replacing some of the lost valuation can also help the normalization). This process of normalization is what causes a recession (slowdown in velocity of money).
This is the same reason why simply increasing the minimum wage to make it a living wage doesn't work. The value of the work done by minimum wage workers - the productivity their jobs add to the economy - has to be sufficient to live off of before it can be paid a living wage. If its not, then raising the minimum wage doesn't magically make it possible to make a living doing those jobs. It simply eliminates those jobs from the market since the employer would be paying the worker more than the value they get for the job being done.
I'm of the opinion that there's no one right answer to this. Some companies will treat their employees like prisoners and monitor them every minute they're at work (and maybe even try to when they're not at work). Some will give them complete privacy. And the rest will do something in between. IMHO you do not have a fundamental right to privacy when someone is paying you for that time. But you are free to negotiate with the person writing the checks exactly how much privacy you wish to have. Companies with unusually strict monitoring hurt themselves by decreasing the pool of prospective employees. People with unusually high expectations of privacy hurt themselves by decreasing the number of prospective employers.
Privacy of government employees OTOH is something where the electorate needs to decide what constitutes the "one right answer".
Advertising is grease for the market. They don't just serve to help the seller make more sales. They help inform buyers that a product that they might want/find helpful actually exists and is available for purchase. So in that respect ads are good.
The problem is unwanted, intrusive, or excessive ads. For advertising to be effective, not only must it be cost-effective for the seller, it has to be cost-effective for the buyer. That is, the total increase in quality of life due to buying stuff you learned about from ads has to be worth the distraction of ads in content you're trying to enjoy. If the ads are not cost-effective for the buyer, the buyer is better off blocking them. That's what happens with email spam.
The problem for websites is that if the ads on one website annoys visitors to the point of installing an ad-blocker, all of them now have their ad revenue cut off.
A Supercharge will realistically give you approx 150-200 miles of range. If you're driving at 50 mph, that's a 30-45 min pit stop every 3-4 hours, less if you're driving faster. I do not eat every 3-4 hours. Also, my lunches are typically 15-20 minutes. A dinner at a restaurant will be 45 min to 1.5 hours. But not lunch.
If you look at the beginning of the speed and charge logs, there's a little slop there. It looks like the logs start with when the car left Tesla's showroom. The author then drove it home and charged it overnight. The day of the trip it looks like he drove it around town for 15-20 miles. Then the highway speeds start. If you assume the start of the trip is when the highway speeds begin, then the miles into the trip where the temperature is decreased matches exactly with the author's claims. Musk's claim that the author raised the temperature only fit the logs if you assume the trip began at the beginning of the logs.
It's exceedingly rare to find a car review by a major publication done on public roads where the author admits to driving above the speed limit.
No it's not well known. And (barring the development of technology which can charge a battery in a few minutes) if EVs ever hope to become accepted by the general population, the public won't ever have to know this. The computer will have to measure the ambient temperature, location, weather reports, and do its best to accurately report how many miles in range it can realistically deliver.
The initial charges at the Supercharge stations were exactly how you'd want to charge an EV if you want to maximize distance traveled while minimizing time spent charging and risk of damaging the battery. It's the disputed third charge (which was not a Supercharge) that is key, and it's a he-said/she-said. The author claims Tesla staff told him to undercharge because as the battery warmed up it would recover some of the reported range it lost while parked overnight. Musk claims his staff told him no such thing.
Charging a Lithium-ion battery isn't like filling a gas tank. It doesn't happen linearly, especially if you're doing a high-amperage quick-charge (which is what the Supercharge is). It starts off charging quickly, but when you get to a certain point close to full you have to slow down or risk destroying the battery. The whole point of the Supercharge isn't to give you a full charge in 1 hour (which I doubt it can do without crossing this danger threshold). It's to give you approximately a half charge in half an hour. Ideally you don't want to quick-charge above maybe 80% full charge.
Which is precisely what Broder did - giving the car approx 150-200 miles in range at the two Supercharge stations. Which not so coincidentally was a little more than needed to get to the next Supercharge station. This isn't evidence of trying to sabotage the test. This is exactly how you would want to charge the car if you want to maximize distance traveled while minimizing the time spent charging and potential for battery damage. If you insist on charging the car to full at each Supercharge station, you're going to spend more time charging per distance traveled, and you're risking damaging the battery.
The disputed third charge was not at a Supercharge station. Broder claims Tesla staff told him the car would regain some of the reported range it lost while parked overnight, so he didn't need to charge until the miles remaining showed enough to get to the next Supercharge station (he spent ~45 minutes charging trying to add enough range to get to the nearest Supercharge station). Musk claims Tesla staff told him no such thing.
The key point isn't whether or not they are influenced by graphic imagery. It's how much they're influenced by it. Even if you assume/accept that young impressionable minds are influenced by violent imagery, if the magnitude of the effect is on the same scale as viewing pictures of bacon, then it's not really a concern.
If the magnitude of the effect of using a cell phone while driving were similar to that of changing the station on the radio, then that's really not worth worrying about. But it turns out the magnitude of the effect is similar to or greater than driving while drunk, which warrants laws prohibiting the behavior.
Android is Linux after Google removed all the "give the user every conceivable and obscure-to-use option under the sun" put there by enthusiasts. That's why it's succeeded wildly while regular Linux projects have yet to crack 2% market share among regular users (i.e. desktop/mobile). Same thing with Apple's OS X vs. BSD Unix.
This is the biggest problem I've seen with the open source philosophy. People like to think it's altruistic, but it's really not. All it's done is shift the selfishness from profit to contribution. Developers in open source projects typically contribute what they want, not what end users want. In fact I've frequently seen OSS developers openly hostile to user requests and suggestions, as if the opinion of someone who doesn't know how to code is worthless. It's like a blacksmith who likes making horseshoes thinking he's being generous by giving free horseshoes to poor people, when the poor people don't own horses and what they really want are farming tools. Feedback from end-users is vital to shaping the software into something more productive for end-users, but that feedback loop is frequently crippled in OSS.
With paid software, the reward for your selfishness is directly linked to the opinions of end users (they buy your software). So your selfishness (desire for profit) actually achieves results similar to altruism by getting you to implement stuff which you would never want to do on your own, but which your users want. (That's not to say OSS is without merit. The zero cost of duplication means RMS is correct that society is less effective if the basic snippets of code all have to be bought. It's just that OSS works best when most of the users are also developers. Not so well when the set of developers and users have very little intersection - in these types of OSS projects the relationship often looks more like lord/serf than it does developer/user.)
The vast majority of the "copyright infringing material" you see on YouTube is put there by the copyright holders themselves. Full National Geographic episodes? Uploaded by National Geographic. Various anime full episodes? FUNimation - the company who bought distribution rights from the anime creators. The excerpts from the Planet Earth series? Uploaded by the BBC. Mythbusters excerpts? Discovery Networks. PSY's Gangnam Style video? Uploaded by PSY himself. The #2 and #3 most viewed music videos? Uploaded by VEVO (joint venture between Sony, Universal, and EMI), the distributor for Justin Bieber and Jennifer Lopez.
Yeah there are unauthorized excerpts and full movies, but the excerpts fall under fair use and the full movies usually have only a few hundred thousand views at most. Most infringing videos get pulled from YouTube before they hit 1 million views. So the vast bulk of YouTube advertising dollars come from showing authorized copyrighted content. It's why a lot of videos are 360p or 480p - the creators are using YouTube as advertising to encourage you to watch the show on TV or go out and buy the blu-ray after you've seen it.
The key difference with Megaupload? Google shares advertising revenue with video uploaders.
Ah, a perfect candidate for charm school. It started as an IAP course the year before I arrived at MIT. It's meant for people exactly like you and me - those who see no redeeming value in the web of social customs, rituals, and taboos which 95% of society adheres to. While it's certainly possible to reject these social norms (Hughes, Zuckerberg, Elvis in the years before he died, Liberace, etc), you usually have to be important, rich, or famous to get away with it. For most people, even MIT grads, not conforming to these norms will get people thinking you're eccentric or weird at best, a misfit or an outcast at worst. Even if they treat you like a peer to your face, they'll still be saying that about you behind your back.
The examples cited in TFA were a bit toward the officious end. Most of it is pretty mundane stuff, like the importance of daily hygiene, what's expected on a date, when you're expected to wear a tie, etc. Stuff that "normal" folks all picked up during K-12, but people like you and me always considered unimportant so never bothered learning in our 18 years before arriving at college.
Because most of this stuff is learned from interacting with other people as you're growing up, it's difficult to find it all consolidated into one place for quick and easy consumption. That's what charm school does - it's a crash course in everything we ignored our friends gossiping about while we were growing up. We may think these social rules are silly and pointless, but we are the exception. The vast majority of the population thinks it's important for some reason. So you can either reject it and be an outcast, or you can learn to emulate the less annoying parts of it and fit in better.
IMHO, the fact that the Occupy Wall Street protests went on for more than a few weeks undermined its credibility with the public. The vast majority of the American public have jobs and need to work to put food on the table. They can take a few days off for a protest, or a few weeks if they decide to use their vacation time. But when OWS protesters are camping out for months, the public started to think of them as "them" rather than "us". And the protests lost the hearts and minds of the public.
Holding protests every weekend or every evening for a span of months would've been much more effective than camping out at a park 24/7 for months.
It's been 20+ years since I took the course in Constitutional law (elective - I was an engineering major), so I can't cite the exact SCotUS case which established it. But U.S. Constitutional protections are limited to U.S. territory. That's why Bush sent prisoners to Guantanamo - it's Cuban territory, not U.S. The U.S. just has a perpetual lease on it (we pay Cuba about $4000/yr for it, though Castro felt the treaty was invalid and refused to cash the checks). That freed the administration from pesky things like the Constitution when it came to dealing with the prisoners. The SCotUS eventually decided the lease effectively made it U.S. territory and thus the prisoners had Constitutional rights, but both administrations seem to be ignoring that decision.
So the key phrase is actually "on American soil." Foreigners visiting the U.S. also gain Constitutional protection while they're in the U.S. -- even illegal immigrants, which is what the whole flap about the law passed in Arizona was about. The concept of a drone strike taking out someone within the U.S. appears to violate the Due Process clause because it's difficult to think of a situation involving a drone where there's an immediate threat to life thus warranting the use of deadly force. To use a drone to kill someone, you pretty much have to have decided to execute the person without apprehending him, and thus without having put him on trial. Very different from a cop who kills a suspect who points a gun at him.
People are just adding the "killing Americans" part to it to generate a stronger reaction. If you just say "killing people on American soil", some people who think terrorists shouldn't have Constitutional rights will say "yeah, I can see that being justified some time." Even though they're wrong, it dilutes opposition and distracts from the central issue. So they're narrowing it down to the one case pretty much the entire public will have a problem with - killing Americans on American soil.
Outside the U.S., the Constitution doesn't apply, and the government is free (legally) to kill people left and right (morally is another question). Killing U.S. citizens abroad seems to be kinda iffy, but as I understand the legal precedent there's no Constitutional restriction against the government doing it especially during a state of war.
Step 0: Make laws which redefine things most people do as criminal behavior.
There was a near miss between a German UAV and an Airbus A300 over Kabul, Afghanistan in 2004. And just like with midair collisions between piloted aircraft there's going to be a collision eventually. Put enough planes (of any type) into the air and give them enough time, and eventually two will collide.