Assume an energy cost of $0.1/kWh. Assume an average of 12 hours of sunlight per day and a 50% of maximum average intensity.
$0.1/kWh * 1 year / 12 * 50% * 12 hours/24 hours = $0.01826
The monthly value that a solar cell generates is $0.01826/watt month.
Average capacity factor for solar in the U.S. is about 0.145. That is, a 100 Watt nominal panel will on average generate 14.5 Watts throughout the year after factoring in everything - night, weather, angle of the sun, etc. In the desert Southwest it's about 0.18 (0.195 in extreme desert regions), but for the country overall it's about 0.145. The NREL assumes a capacity factor of 0.17 for PV installations in the U.S., which are predominantly in the desert Southwest.
Your quick "12 hours a day, 50% max average" assumes a capacity factor of 0.25. Almost twice the actual value.
Correct for this in the rest of your math and you get n = 120, or 10 years payback. That sounds about right as the test cases I've calculated usually wind up between 7 and 15 years.
Tell them they are putting their company at risk by forcing IE6
[...]
As a web developer I can tell you very few developers still cater to IE6. Many have even dropped IE7.
The companies requiring IE6 don't require it because they take some perverse joy in forcing their employees to browse the web with a prehistoric browser. They require it because they have some custom in-house app which runs on a local intranet web server that works only with IE6. The expectation is that the employees will use IE6 to run that app, nothing more. In such an environment, there is very little risk from using IE6.
The problem comes about when employees want to surf the Internet and reach for the nearest browser. In most cases they're not even supposed to be surfing the Internet from that machine. Updating the web app to run on something newer than IE6 as you propose is not the only solution. Other possible (and likely cheaper) solutions include strict enforcement of the "no surfing" rules, or a more pragmatic approach which allows employees to surf the net using a different machine or a different approved browser.
You can block/allow network access on an app-by-app basis. If the permissions on the app indicate it's not delving into my private info but it needs network access to show ads, I can always give it network access. OTOH if the app needs network access for ads, but also requires all sorts of unnecessary permissions like my contact list and location, I have no qualms about blocking it.
The waste water will have lots of sulfer, but that also occurs naturally.
Well, there's a serious concern right there. Dose makes the poison.
Ideally, your primary water loop is self-contained and thus never leaves the system (volcano and primary geothermal equipment in this case). You send the water down, it picks up heat and sulfur and other stuff, it comes up. Then you run it through a heat exchanger where the heat (and only the heat) is transferred to a second water loop. That second loop is what drives your turbine generators. The reason for this isn't environmental protection. It's to protect the generators from corrosion and all sorts of crud that might be in the primary loop water.
Well if you block them and word gets around that stolen cell phones are useless, people stop stealing cell phones and police won't have to track down who has your phone now. Blocking stolen phones addresses the problem (phones are valuable to steal). Tracking down phone thieves merely addresses the symptom.
Dunno why it would be unbelievable. Solar-powered aircraft have been made. They're ultralight, are covered in solar panels, have practically no payload, and fly at about 20 mph. But if you insist...
Passenger plane fuel consumption is on the order of 5-7 gallons per mile. Call it 6 gal/mi.
Airspeed is about 550 mph, or 0.153 miles per second.
Fuel consumption is thus (6 gal/mi) * (0.153 mi/s) = 0.918 gal/s.
Jet fuel has about 35 MJ/L of energy, or 132.5 MJ/gal.
At 0.918 gal/s, that's 121.6 MJ/s or 121.6 megawatts.
Solar constant in space is about 1361 Watts/m^2. On Earth it's about 750 Watts/m^2.
Air pressure at 35,000 ft is about 25% that of sea level.
So figure with only 25% of the atmosphere intercepting sunlight, you get 1208 Watts/m^2 at cruising altitude.
To generate 121.6 MW with 100% efficient panels producing 1208 Watts/m^2, you need 100,660 m^2, or about a tenth of a square km. A roughly 320x320 meter patch, or about 5-10 city blocks. I suppose a really small town could fit in that area.
You could quibble about gas turbines only being 40%-50% efficient, but then real-world commercial solar panels are only 15%-20% efficient. And we're ignoring clouds, night, and angle to the sun (all the above assumes the sun is directly overhead). So more realistically you're probably looking anywhere from a quarter of square km to over 1 square km of solar panels needed to propel a passenger plane.
The lack of a standard in the U.S. (and Japan/Korea) is what gave us 3G speeds. The GSM standard uses TDMA - basically each phone takes turns talking to the tower. That works ok for voice, but sucks for data - even if your phone isn't communicating, it still eats up its timeslice.
CDMA allows every phone to transmit simultaneously. Each phone transmits using an orthogonal code - kinda like writing on a sheet of paper, while someone else writes on the same sheet rotated 90 degrees from your writing. If some phones aren't communicating, that decreases noise floor thus allowing higher bandwidth use by the phones which are communicating. That's why the CDMA carriers rolled out 3G service before the GSM carriers. Ramping up data bandwidth on CDMA was trivial. GSM on the other hand was stuck with its timeslices. GSM had to graft on an extra radio using a non-TDMA spec in order to compete with CDMA (which incidentally is the reason you can talk and use data at the same time on GSM - it has two separate radios for these functions vs CDMA's one). If the US hadn't allowed CDMA to compete with GSM, we would've all been stuck at 2G speeds simply because it was normal everywhere, and there would've been no competitive pressure to improve it.
That's right - CDMA won. If you use HSPA+ on AT&T or T-mobile, you're using wideband CDMA. GSM simply integrated it into its spec, resulting in people not knowing that it's CDMA and thinking that it's still vanilla GSM. The only part of GSM which is still TDMA is its voice comms.
LTE uses OFDMA, which functions similarly to CDMA except in the frequency domain. It requires more processing power than CDMA to untangle the overlapping signals from each individual phone. Processing power which until recently consumed too many Watts for use on a mobile platform like a phone.
Whether or not pentile sucks depends on the PPI. If the PPI is too low, then you can see the individual sub-pixels and pentile (RGBG) sucks relative to RGB. But if the PPI is high enough, then you cannot see the individual sub-pixels and RGBG is indistinguishable from RGB while using fewer sub-pixels. The reason is a quirk in the human visual system - our eyes' resolution in green is much better than in red and especially blue.
Pretty much every recorded image we see takes advantage of this. Nearly all digital cameras use a Bayer filter (RGBG overlay), so the images they capture have half the red and blue resolution as they do green. Unless you flip certain JPEG options, a JPEG image you create from a pure RGB scan will do the same thing - reduce the red and blue information that's stored relative to green. Same for MPEG and NTSC. Basically, nearly all the recorded images you've ever encountered in your life were brought to you in RGBG. That you never noticed is proof that it's indistinguishable.
It's only displays which were typically RGB, but that was because there were no "pixels" on CRTs, and LCDs typically had low PPI. Once the display's PPI becomes high enough, RGB becomes a waste. When the G sub-pixels in an RGB array are dense enough to surpass the the threshold of visual acuity, the R and B sub-pixels are far too dense and way past that point. That is, you have way more R and B sub-pixels than are actually needed. If you're at this point, then an RGBG display like pentile with the same pixel density (but lower sub-pixel density) will create an image that's indistinguishable from RGB but using fewer sub-pixels.
By this interview, Ballmer proves what I had suspected: that Microsoft doesn't understand why tablets are popular, and what tablets are for. And this failure to understand is why they are ruining Windows, by trying to make it a "universal" OS.
Tablets are not a substitute for a laptop or desktop PC, nor do most people want them to be.
I'm a long-time Microsoft foe, but I think they're heading in the right direction on this. People saying tablets are not a substitute for a laptop are trapped in the present. Most of my past laptops have been in the thin and light category.
19 years ago I had a Thinkpad 700. 6.5 lbs, 2.2 inches thick.
13 years ago I had a Thinkpad 560E. 4.2 lbs, 1.2 inches thick
10 years ago I had a Toshiba 3440CT. 3.4 lbs, 0.8 inches thick
A couple years ago I bought a Sony Z1. 2.9 lbs, 1 inch thick on average (it has a DVD drive which the 3440CT lacked)
The Surface Pro's specs are 2 lbs, 0.53 inches thick (0.65-0.8 inches with keyboard).
If you extrapolate the long-term trend of this category of laptop, you pretty much arrive at the Surface Pro. I think it's inevitable that in the next 5 years the ultralight end of the laptop market will converge with tablets (no point making two devices when the only thing which distinguishes them is with or without keyboard). And going even further into the future, it'll converge with all but the large-screen laptop market.
The Surface Pro may turn out to be premature, but I think Microsoft made the right call. Tablets are not a substitute for PCs only if you limit yourself to the paradigm the iPad created - an oversized smartphone with clumsy keyboard input. If you look at them for what they truly are - a large screen with computer guts and a battery - the only thing really distinguishing them from a laptop PC is the keyboard. They're gonna converge.
Microsoft has had their OS in tablets for years and they never took off. The reason: They tried to be both a tablet and a PC.
The iPad showed tablets work great as tablets, not PCs, and vice-versa, and in one year probably sold more than all other tablets combined in history.
I'm not convinced by this line of reasoning. If Tablet PCs had been $500 and the iPad $3000, I'm pretty sure the sales figures would have been reversed. The problem wasn't that the Tablet PC market had no legs, it was that Microsoft and Intel gamed it so that Tablet PCs retailed for over $3000 to try to maximize their per-unit profit. With the Surface Pro and Samsung Series 7 Slate weighing in at just $1200, I don't see how anyone can be certain they'll fail just because $3000 Tablet PCs failed.
Now Ballmer wants to do the combined tablet/PC again. Honest, it'll work this time.
Like it or not, the ultralight end of the laptop PC market is converging with tablets. Much like when PDAs converged with cell phones, the two are just growing too similar in size (11"-12" screen), weight (2 lbs), specs, and capability. The Surface Pro may turn out to be a flop, but I think 5 years from now it's going to be a given that if you want an ultralight laptop, you just buy a tablet with a PC processor and stick a keyboard onto it.
That was my impression too (I worked for a bit in the shipbuilding business). It looks like what you get when you give artistic designers too much control - a triumph of form over function. It may appeal to people's tastes in aesthetics, but no way would I want to ride it out in moderate to heavy seas.
Actually, you've unintentionally pointed out the real meat to TFA, not the flamebait the summary added. This isn't about computers replacing teachers. This is about the inversion of teaching methodology.
It used to be the teacher gave lessons in school, then assigned homework for the students to puzzle out for themselves. What's being proposed isn't replacing teachers with computers. It's inverting how we teach. Just as the students gave each other lessons at your daughter's school, what's being proposed is that computers take over the traditional teacher's role of giving the lessons (e.g. Khan Academy).
Teachers then take on the role of helping students one-on-one with their homework. Providing additional guidance when needed, and pointing out and emphasizing particularly important parts of the lessons. The beauty is that because the students receive the lessons on their own and the teacher interaction is one-on-one, each student is free to proceed at his/her own pace. The smart student can blow through three years of lessons in a single year if he chooses. The slow student can receive extra teacher attention on the parts he's having trouble with.
The problem with giving control of the Internet to a world body like the UN is that only a minority of the world (either by number of countries or population) lives in democracies or flawed democracies. The majority of the world is completely or partially authoritarian. If you put the Internet under the democratic control of the world as a whole, the authoritarians win.
People like to badmouth the U.S. because it's a prominent target. But compare it to the rest of the world as a whole, and the U.S. comes out smelling like roses. Bashing the U.S. in this context is literally throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If you don't want the U.S. in sole control, OECD control is almost certainly preferable to UN control. The free and democratic nations of the Earth built up with a wonderful global tool. Just because it's "global" does not mean they're obligated to hand over control of it to the (mostly authoritarian) world as a whole. Do Open Source software projects give equal voice in decision-making to non-contributors and closed-source proponents?
Free market capitalism and globalism needs to go both ways. If a corporation is free to charge different prices, the consumers or middle men should be free to resell them - until the price points meet market demands.
I would abstract that principle even further. If a corporation is free to move manufacturing overseas where it's cheaper, then likewise people should be free to buy products overseas for cheaper and import them into the U.S. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
The reason for the failure to execute, in his words: 'During that time, Windows went through a difficult period where we had to shift a huge amount of our focus to security engineering.
You took an OS which effectively ran with superuser privileges (DOS) all the time, and added a graphical shell on top of it (Win95, Win98). You then tried to switch it to a more secure user / superuser model, but you made it so inconvenient that it was easier for everyone to just run as superuser all the time (NT, 2k, XP). Finally you started trying to enforce running as a regular user except when needed (Vista). But the industry had had a decade to acclimate to running as superuser, so you were met with so much resistance you had to scale it back (7). Of course you're going to have a huge security problem.
You should've just bitten the bullet and enforced the user / superuser paradigm as early as you could have. i.e. Back when the Internet became big, around when Windows 95 came out, you should've realized the future was for all computers to be networked, and that user vs. admin privileges were going to become very, very important. But no, you took the easy way out and stuck with the one-computer one-user model, and you've been paying the price for it for the last decade and half. You made your own bed; it's disingenuous to now blame someone else for having to lie in it.
Part of being a good leader (of a group, country, market, whatever) is to foresee and recognize what's going to become important or a problem in the future, long before your followers do. A good example is what the NSA did with DES. They had done enough secret research into DES that they knew of a vulnerability; and when DES was proposed as a standard they made some secret changes to it which eliminated that vulnerability before the public was even aware of it. Your job as a leader is to act on that foresight, even if your followers can't see what you see and complain about it. If you can't do that, you just aren't cut out to be a leader.
You can't convert all the waste into ethanol. Grape pomace is about 3-4% alcohol, so of that 100,000 tons of waste only about 3500 tons of it will be converted into ethanol. Probably less since there's probably a large amount of solid waste matter as well. So that's 500,000 gallons of ethanol produced by this per year vs. 139 billion gallons of gasoline consumed a year. I won't even bother factoring in ethanol's lower volumetric energy content vs gasoline. It's already a drop in the bucket.
Not exactly. I do agree that region-coding DRM sucks and should probably be banned. But that's not what's going on here.
The Australian dollar has gone up about 40% against the US dollar in the last 5 years. If you compare game prices in AUD vs USD and subtract ~40%, you'll find the prices are nearly identical.
International contracts involving two currencies are usually written to cover one year at a fixed exchange rate. Consequently there's a large lag between when a currency goes up, and when prices go down (time constant is on the order of a year). Especially if the seller is a large manufacturer (like Apple), while the buyer represents a small market (Australia). They may not have enough negotiating leverage to get next year's contract changed to better reflect the high rate of currency appreciation. (To be fair, the manufacturer may also be worried that a currency rapidly rising in a few years is a sign that it'll also rapidly fall in coming years. And they don't want to get stuck holding the bag if that happens.)
Then you have the same thing going on at the retail level, where the retailer (who got ripped off by the manufacturer) now realizes the shoe's on the other foot, and they now have the upper hand in negotiating prices with the individual buyer. So you end up seeing retail prices which reflect the exchange rate 5 years ago, with half the excess going into the pockets of retailers, the other half going into the pockets of the overseas manufacturer.
The suggestion to buy from overseas is a good one. Typically the currency exchange fees and overseas shipping fees will more than offset any advantage you gain from lower pricing from buying overseas. But when the disparity is this pronounced, its sufficient to exert downward pressure on prices. The last thing you want to be doing in this sort of situation is grudgingly pay the higher prices.
You do know why these "must keep a distance" laws are in place right? Once upon a time, kooky people in white pointed hats would stand around polling stations. They wouldn't actually do anything and thus weren't breaking any laws, they'd just stand there and take notes whenever a black person came to vote. If said black person later turned up dead shortly after a bunch of other kooky people in white pointed hats had gathered and burned a cross during the night, well there was no connection was there?
The presence of such laws enhances the legitimacy of an election. Most local jurisdictions have exceptions allowing for registered neutral observers to observe the polling. But you have to fill out the appropriate forms first, crossing the t's and dotting the i's as a way to insure that you're really observers and not just kooks setting out to unduly influence an election. More than likely, the observing organization failed to file the appropriate paperwork.
And this is not one of those situations where you want local authorities to use their best judgment and let slide just because it's a "good" organization. That used to happen in the South too. And any complaints by blacks about intimidation at the polls were summarily dismissed, while complaints about voting irregularity on ballots cast by blacks were thoroughly investigated. You don't want that. You want this to be done by the book, no exceptions.
This one's a bit different from the quakes caused by fracking. In fracking, they just fracture the rocks and inject a fluid, basically lubricating the ground. There's almost no energy added to the system. So while the fracking may trigger a quake, it is not the root cause (all the energy released was already there). Any energy released from a fracking quake is energy which was already there.
In this one they removed large quantities of water from the aquifer. While technically no energy was added to the system, the water's removal lowered the potential energy floor, essentially adding the potential energy of the now-too-high ground to any stress energy which had already been built up (if any).
An analogue to this case would be sinkholes caused by extracting or receding water from underground aquifers/caves. The removal of the water itself directly causes the sinkhole, or in this case the quake. Depending on the quantity of water removed (and thus the distance the ground above had to "settle"), there might not even have been any natural fault slippage involved, and this quake could have been entirely manmade.
The cost of the five songs downloaded is NZ$11.95 but RIANZ wanted NZ$1,075.50 because it estimated the music was shared/downloaded 90 times in total.
That line of reasoning only works if this one guy is the only person they're going to punish for the filesharing. i.e. Once he's fined, the other 90 people who downloaded songs are free and clear, since the punishment for sharing 90 songs has already been meted out.
If instead they're also planning to go after the 90 others who downloaded the song, and slap them with fines for it being downloaded 90 times, then they're effectively fining for 90*90 = 8100 songs being illegally downloaded. Clearly erroneous since it was only downloaded 90 times.
That's what this boils down to. Either fine each filesharer for a single download (the copy the downloaded for themselves). Or fine one filesharer for all the downloads, but in the process give up your rights to prosecute the other filesharers. The "making available" argument is so mathematically nonsensical it can fabricate fines for billions of downloads when there were in fact fewer than 100,000 downloads.
However, I have yet to hear about a single terrorist caught by the TSA.
It looks to me like the TSA is committing more criminal activity than they are preventing.
Far be it from me to defend the TSA - I think it represents a ridiculous misprioritization of security theater over civil rights. However, your criticism here is misguided. You're assuming the only success case for the TSA is if they catch a terrorist red-handed. It's not.
As you say in your last sentence, a success case for the TSA is when a terrorist incident is prevented. That's both when they catch a terrorist red-handed, and when they discourage a terrorist from even trying. The latter is rather difficult to pin a number on, which gets into the whole security theater-ness of it all. But it's highly unlikely to be zero.
They should start paying website owners and creators too. If we didn't make websites, they would have nothing to link in their main search either.
There are basically two types of websites: Free and paywalled.
If your website is free, you're publishing it for people to read without any expectation of payment (except perhaps from ads run on your site). Why should Google have to pay you for viewing your site when nobody else does?
If you website is paywalled, then Google can't index it, so it's not going to show up in their search results and you have nothing to complain about.
And if you're one of those people with a free website but still don't want Google to index it, then just drop a robots.txt file in it.
It is not like there is some mutual relationship that benefits both otherwise...
There is a mutual relationship that benefits both. It's just that the "both" aren't the people you think it is. Google's relationship is with the person searching the web. The person gets the benefit of finding stuff on the web more easily, and Google gets the benefit of advertising dollars. Once Google delivers the viewer to your site, what you do with him and how you monetize it is entire up to you. Google has no relationship with the content provider beyond what a regular viewer has (they read the content).
Given that nobody (except Iceland) is at 100% renewable energy, yes it does matter. Say you consume 100 TWh a year. Say 25 TWh of that comes from renewables, the rest from fossil fuels (ignore nuclear to keep this simple). Say petrol (gasoline) accounts for 10 TWh of your energy use. And say this process requires 2x as much energy as it creates in petrol.
If you create all your petrol using renewables to power this process, then you're reducing your fossil fuel consumption by 10 TWh, but increasing your renewable consumption by 20 TWh. However, you only have 25 TWh of installed renewables capacity. So the 20 TWh of renewables this process consumes displaces 20 TWh of other consumption which used to come from renewables. To make up for that shortfall, you have to burn 20 TWh more fossil fuels.
That is, your renewables consumption remained at 25 TWh. Your fossil fuel first went down by 10 TWh, but then increased by 20 TWh. So powering this process with renewables resulted in a net 10 TWh increase in the consumption of fossil fuels.
Don't make the mistake of mixing up consumption with production. You cannot pick and choose where your power comes from. If your renewables production is static and less than 100%, then nothing you do on the consumption side matters. Once you exceed that static amount of renewables production capacity, every new power drain you add comes entirely from fossil fuels.
The thought of "ethical" or "good for the customers" isn't in their vocabulary, is it?
How quaint. You still think their cell phone users are customers. When it comes to data like this, advertising agencies are the customer. Cell phone users are a resource to be mined.
We need to take the laws requiring opt-out forms for credit card and bank accounts, and expand it to cover all services which wish to sell customer data.
Slashdot Mirror
Average capacity factor for solar in the U.S. is about 0.145. That is, a 100 Watt nominal panel will on average generate 14.5 Watts throughout the year after factoring in everything - night, weather, angle of the sun, etc. In the desert Southwest it's about 0.18 (0.195 in extreme desert regions), but for the country overall it's about 0.145. The NREL assumes a capacity factor of 0.17 for PV installations in the U.S., which are predominantly in the desert Southwest.
Your quick "12 hours a day, 50% max average" assumes a capacity factor of 0.25. Almost twice the actual value.
Correct for this in the rest of your math and you get n = 120, or 10 years payback. That sounds about right as the test cases I've calculated usually wind up between 7 and 15 years.
The companies requiring IE6 don't require it because they take some perverse joy in forcing their employees to browse the web with a prehistoric browser. They require it because they have some custom in-house app which runs on a local intranet web server that works only with IE6. The expectation is that the employees will use IE6 to run that app, nothing more. In such an environment, there is very little risk from using IE6.
The problem comes about when employees want to surf the Internet and reach for the nearest browser. In most cases they're not even supposed to be surfing the Internet from that machine. Updating the web app to run on something newer than IE6 as you propose is not the only solution. Other possible (and likely cheaper) solutions include strict enforcement of the "no surfing" rules, or a more pragmatic approach which allows employees to surf the net using a different machine or a different approved browser.
You can block/allow network access on an app-by-app basis. If the permissions on the app indicate it's not delving into my private info but it needs network access to show ads, I can always give it network access. OTOH if the app needs network access for ads, but also requires all sorts of unnecessary permissions like my contact list and location, I have no qualms about blocking it.
Ideally, your primary water loop is self-contained and thus never leaves the system (volcano and primary geothermal equipment in this case). You send the water down, it picks up heat and sulfur and other stuff, it comes up. Then you run it through a heat exchanger where the heat (and only the heat) is transferred to a second water loop. That second loop is what drives your turbine generators. The reason for this isn't environmental protection. It's to protect the generators from corrosion and all sorts of crud that might be in the primary loop water.
Well if you block them and word gets around that stolen cell phones are useless, people stop stealing cell phones and police won't have to track down who has your phone now. Blocking stolen phones addresses the problem (phones are valuable to steal). Tracking down phone thieves merely addresses the symptom.
The generators are on the roof or in the middle of the building close to the data center.
The fuel is stored underground due to fire safety regulations. The problem is fuel pumps don't work very well when submerged underwater.
Dunno why it would be unbelievable. Solar-powered aircraft have been made. They're ultralight, are covered in solar panels, have practically no payload, and fly at about 20 mph. But if you insist...
Passenger plane fuel consumption is on the order of 5-7 gallons per mile. Call it 6 gal/mi.
Airspeed is about 550 mph, or 0.153 miles per second.
Fuel consumption is thus (6 gal/mi) * (0.153 mi/s) = 0.918 gal/s.
Jet fuel has about 35 MJ/L of energy, or 132.5 MJ/gal.
At 0.918 gal/s, that's 121.6 MJ/s or 121.6 megawatts.
Solar constant in space is about 1361 Watts/m^2. On Earth it's about 750 Watts/m^2.
Air pressure at 35,000 ft is about 25% that of sea level.
So figure with only 25% of the atmosphere intercepting sunlight, you get 1208 Watts/m^2 at cruising altitude.
To generate 121.6 MW with 100% efficient panels producing 1208 Watts/m^2, you need 100,660 m^2, or about a tenth of a square km. A roughly 320x320 meter patch, or about 5-10 city blocks. I suppose a really small town could fit in that area.
You could quibble about gas turbines only being 40%-50% efficient, but then real-world commercial solar panels are only 15%-20% efficient. And we're ignoring clouds, night, and angle to the sun (all the above assumes the sun is directly overhead). So more realistically you're probably looking anywhere from a quarter of square km to over 1 square km of solar panels needed to propel a passenger plane.
The lack of a standard in the U.S. (and Japan/Korea) is what gave us 3G speeds. The GSM standard uses TDMA - basically each phone takes turns talking to the tower. That works ok for voice, but sucks for data - even if your phone isn't communicating, it still eats up its timeslice.
CDMA allows every phone to transmit simultaneously. Each phone transmits using an orthogonal code - kinda like writing on a sheet of paper, while someone else writes on the same sheet rotated 90 degrees from your writing. If some phones aren't communicating, that decreases noise floor thus allowing higher bandwidth use by the phones which are communicating. That's why the CDMA carriers rolled out 3G service before the GSM carriers. Ramping up data bandwidth on CDMA was trivial. GSM on the other hand was stuck with its timeslices. GSM had to graft on an extra radio using a non-TDMA spec in order to compete with CDMA (which incidentally is the reason you can talk and use data at the same time on GSM - it has two separate radios for these functions vs CDMA's one). If the US hadn't allowed CDMA to compete with GSM, we would've all been stuck at 2G speeds simply because it was normal everywhere, and there would've been no competitive pressure to improve it.
That's right - CDMA won. If you use HSPA+ on AT&T or T-mobile, you're using wideband CDMA. GSM simply integrated it into its spec, resulting in people not knowing that it's CDMA and thinking that it's still vanilla GSM. The only part of GSM which is still TDMA is its voice comms.
LTE uses OFDMA, which functions similarly to CDMA except in the frequency domain. It requires more processing power than CDMA to untangle the overlapping signals from each individual phone. Processing power which until recently consumed too many Watts for use on a mobile platform like a phone.
Whether or not pentile sucks depends on the PPI. If the PPI is too low, then you can see the individual sub-pixels and pentile (RGBG) sucks relative to RGB. But if the PPI is high enough, then you cannot see the individual sub-pixels and RGBG is indistinguishable from RGB while using fewer sub-pixels. The reason is a quirk in the human visual system - our eyes' resolution in green is much better than in red and especially blue.
Pretty much every recorded image we see takes advantage of this. Nearly all digital cameras use a Bayer filter (RGBG overlay), so the images they capture have half the red and blue resolution as they do green. Unless you flip certain JPEG options, a JPEG image you create from a pure RGB scan will do the same thing - reduce the red and blue information that's stored relative to green. Same for MPEG and NTSC. Basically, nearly all the recorded images you've ever encountered in your life were brought to you in RGBG. That you never noticed is proof that it's indistinguishable.
It's only displays which were typically RGB, but that was because there were no "pixels" on CRTs, and LCDs typically had low PPI. Once the display's PPI becomes high enough, RGB becomes a waste. When the G sub-pixels in an RGB array are dense enough to surpass the the threshold of visual acuity, the R and B sub-pixels are far too dense and way past that point. That is, you have way more R and B sub-pixels than are actually needed. If you're at this point, then an RGBG display like pentile with the same pixel density (but lower sub-pixel density) will create an image that's indistinguishable from RGB but using fewer sub-pixels.
I'm a long-time Microsoft foe, but I think they're heading in the right direction on this. People saying tablets are not a substitute for a laptop are trapped in the present. Most of my past laptops have been in the thin and light category.
19 years ago I had a Thinkpad 700. 6.5 lbs, 2.2 inches thick.
13 years ago I had a Thinkpad 560E. 4.2 lbs, 1.2 inches thick
10 years ago I had a Toshiba 3440CT. 3.4 lbs, 0.8 inches thick
A couple years ago I bought a Sony Z1. 2.9 lbs, 1 inch thick on average (it has a DVD drive which the 3440CT lacked)
The Surface Pro's specs are 2 lbs, 0.53 inches thick (0.65-0.8 inches with keyboard).
If you extrapolate the long-term trend of this category of laptop, you pretty much arrive at the Surface Pro. I think it's inevitable that in the next 5 years the ultralight end of the laptop market will converge with tablets (no point making two devices when the only thing which distinguishes them is with or without keyboard). And going even further into the future, it'll converge with all but the large-screen laptop market.
The Surface Pro may turn out to be premature, but I think Microsoft made the right call. Tablets are not a substitute for PCs only if you limit yourself to the paradigm the iPad created - an oversized smartphone with clumsy keyboard input. If you look at them for what they truly are - a large screen with computer guts and a battery - the only thing really distinguishing them from a laptop PC is the keyboard. They're gonna converge.
I'm not convinced by this line of reasoning. If Tablet PCs had been $500 and the iPad $3000, I'm pretty sure the sales figures would have been reversed. The problem wasn't that the Tablet PC market had no legs, it was that Microsoft and Intel gamed it so that Tablet PCs retailed for over $3000 to try to maximize their per-unit profit. With the Surface Pro and Samsung Series 7 Slate weighing in at just $1200, I don't see how anyone can be certain they'll fail just because $3000 Tablet PCs failed.
Like it or not, the ultralight end of the laptop PC market is converging with tablets. Much like when PDAs converged with cell phones, the two are just growing too similar in size (11"-12" screen), weight (2 lbs), specs, and capability. The Surface Pro may turn out to be a flop, but I think 5 years from now it's going to be a given that if you want an ultralight laptop, you just buy a tablet with a PC processor and stick a keyboard onto it.
That was my impression too (I worked for a bit in the shipbuilding business). It looks like what you get when you give artistic designers too much control - a triumph of form over function. It may appeal to people's tastes in aesthetics, but no way would I want to ride it out in moderate to heavy seas.
Actually, you've unintentionally pointed out the real meat to TFA, not the flamebait the summary added. This isn't about computers replacing teachers. This is about the inversion of teaching methodology.
It used to be the teacher gave lessons in school, then assigned homework for the students to puzzle out for themselves. What's being proposed isn't replacing teachers with computers. It's inverting how we teach. Just as the students gave each other lessons at your daughter's school, what's being proposed is that computers take over the traditional teacher's role of giving the lessons (e.g. Khan Academy).
Teachers then take on the role of helping students one-on-one with their homework. Providing additional guidance when needed, and pointing out and emphasizing particularly important parts of the lessons. The beauty is that because the students receive the lessons on their own and the teacher interaction is one-on-one, each student is free to proceed at his/her own pace. The smart student can blow through three years of lessons in a single year if he chooses. The slow student can receive extra teacher attention on the parts he's having trouble with.
The problem with giving control of the Internet to a world body like the UN is that only a minority of the world (either by number of countries or population) lives in democracies or flawed democracies. The majority of the world is completely or partially authoritarian. If you put the Internet under the democratic control of the world as a whole, the authoritarians win.
People like to badmouth the U.S. because it's a prominent target. But compare it to the rest of the world as a whole, and the U.S. comes out smelling like roses. Bashing the U.S. in this context is literally throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If you don't want the U.S. in sole control, OECD control is almost certainly preferable to UN control. The free and democratic nations of the Earth built up with a wonderful global tool. Just because it's "global" does not mean they're obligated to hand over control of it to the (mostly authoritarian) world as a whole. Do Open Source software projects give equal voice in decision-making to non-contributors and closed-source proponents?
I would abstract that principle even further. If a corporation is free to move manufacturing overseas where it's cheaper, then likewise people should be free to buy products overseas for cheaper and import them into the U.S. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
You took an OS which effectively ran with superuser privileges (DOS) all the time, and added a graphical shell on top of it (Win95, Win98). You then tried to switch it to a more secure user / superuser model, but you made it so inconvenient that it was easier for everyone to just run as superuser all the time (NT, 2k, XP). Finally you started trying to enforce running as a regular user except when needed (Vista). But the industry had had a decade to acclimate to running as superuser, so you were met with so much resistance you had to scale it back (7). Of course you're going to have a huge security problem.
You should've just bitten the bullet and enforced the user / superuser paradigm as early as you could have. i.e. Back when the Internet became big, around when Windows 95 came out, you should've realized the future was for all computers to be networked, and that user vs. admin privileges were going to become very, very important. But no, you took the easy way out and stuck with the one-computer one-user model, and you've been paying the price for it for the last decade and half. You made your own bed; it's disingenuous to now blame someone else for having to lie in it.
Part of being a good leader (of a group, country, market, whatever) is to foresee and recognize what's going to become important or a problem in the future, long before your followers do. A good example is what the NSA did with DES. They had done enough secret research into DES that they knew of a vulnerability; and when DES was proposed as a standard they made some secret changes to it which eliminated that vulnerability before the public was even aware of it. Your job as a leader is to act on that foresight, even if your followers can't see what you see and complain about it. If you can't do that, you just aren't cut out to be a leader.
You can't convert all the waste into ethanol. Grape pomace is about 3-4% alcohol, so of that 100,000 tons of waste only about 3500 tons of it will be converted into ethanol. Probably less since there's probably a large amount of solid waste matter as well. So that's 500,000 gallons of ethanol produced by this per year vs. 139 billion gallons of gasoline consumed a year. I won't even bother factoring in ethanol's lower volumetric energy content vs gasoline. It's already a drop in the bucket.
Not exactly. I do agree that region-coding DRM sucks and should probably be banned. But that's not what's going on here.
The Australian dollar has gone up about 40% against the US dollar in the last 5 years. If you compare game prices in AUD vs USD and subtract ~40%, you'll find the prices are nearly identical.
International contracts involving two currencies are usually written to cover one year at a fixed exchange rate. Consequently there's a large lag between when a currency goes up, and when prices go down (time constant is on the order of a year). Especially if the seller is a large manufacturer (like Apple), while the buyer represents a small market (Australia). They may not have enough negotiating leverage to get next year's contract changed to better reflect the high rate of currency appreciation. (To be fair, the manufacturer may also be worried that a currency rapidly rising in a few years is a sign that it'll also rapidly fall in coming years. And they don't want to get stuck holding the bag if that happens.)
Then you have the same thing going on at the retail level, where the retailer (who got ripped off by the manufacturer) now realizes the shoe's on the other foot, and they now have the upper hand in negotiating prices with the individual buyer. So you end up seeing retail prices which reflect the exchange rate 5 years ago, with half the excess going into the pockets of retailers, the other half going into the pockets of the overseas manufacturer.
The suggestion to buy from overseas is a good one. Typically the currency exchange fees and overseas shipping fees will more than offset any advantage you gain from lower pricing from buying overseas. But when the disparity is this pronounced, its sufficient to exert downward pressure on prices. The last thing you want to be doing in this sort of situation is grudgingly pay the higher prices.
You do know why these "must keep a distance" laws are in place right? Once upon a time, kooky people in white pointed hats would stand around polling stations. They wouldn't actually do anything and thus weren't breaking any laws, they'd just stand there and take notes whenever a black person came to vote. If said black person later turned up dead shortly after a bunch of other kooky people in white pointed hats had gathered and burned a cross during the night, well there was no connection was there?
The presence of such laws enhances the legitimacy of an election. Most local jurisdictions have exceptions allowing for registered neutral observers to observe the polling. But you have to fill out the appropriate forms first, crossing the t's and dotting the i's as a way to insure that you're really observers and not just kooks setting out to unduly influence an election. More than likely, the observing organization failed to file the appropriate paperwork.
And this is not one of those situations where you want local authorities to use their best judgment and let slide just because it's a "good" organization. That used to happen in the South too. And any complaints by blacks about intimidation at the polls were summarily dismissed, while complaints about voting irregularity on ballots cast by blacks were thoroughly investigated. You don't want that. You want this to be done by the book, no exceptions.
This one's a bit different from the quakes caused by fracking. In fracking, they just fracture the rocks and inject a fluid, basically lubricating the ground. There's almost no energy added to the system. So while the fracking may trigger a quake, it is not the root cause (all the energy released was already there). Any energy released from a fracking quake is energy which was already there.
In this one they removed large quantities of water from the aquifer. While technically no energy was added to the system, the water's removal lowered the potential energy floor, essentially adding the potential energy of the now-too-high ground to any stress energy which had already been built up (if any).
An analogue to this case would be sinkholes caused by extracting or receding water from underground aquifers/caves. The removal of the water itself directly causes the sinkhole, or in this case the quake. Depending on the quantity of water removed (and thus the distance the ground above had to "settle"), there might not even have been any natural fault slippage involved, and this quake could have been entirely manmade.
That line of reasoning only works if this one guy is the only person they're going to punish for the filesharing. i.e. Once he's fined, the other 90 people who downloaded songs are free and clear, since the punishment for sharing 90 songs has already been meted out.
If instead they're also planning to go after the 90 others who downloaded the song, and slap them with fines for it being downloaded 90 times, then they're effectively fining for 90*90 = 8100 songs being illegally downloaded. Clearly erroneous since it was only downloaded 90 times.
That's what this boils down to. Either fine each filesharer for a single download (the copy the downloaded for themselves). Or fine one filesharer for all the downloads, but in the process give up your rights to prosecute the other filesharers. The "making available" argument is so mathematically nonsensical it can fabricate fines for billions of downloads when there were in fact fewer than 100,000 downloads.
Far be it from me to defend the TSA - I think it represents a ridiculous misprioritization of security theater over civil rights. However, your criticism here is misguided. You're assuming the only success case for the TSA is if they catch a terrorist red-handed. It's not.
As you say in your last sentence, a success case for the TSA is when a terrorist incident is prevented. That's both when they catch a terrorist red-handed, and when they discourage a terrorist from even trying. The latter is rather difficult to pin a number on, which gets into the whole security theater-ness of it all. But it's highly unlikely to be zero.
There are basically two types of websites: Free and paywalled.
If your website is free, you're publishing it for people to read without any expectation of payment (except perhaps from ads run on your site). Why should Google have to pay you for viewing your site when nobody else does?
If you website is paywalled, then Google can't index it, so it's not going to show up in their search results and you have nothing to complain about.
And if you're one of those people with a free website but still don't want Google to index it, then just drop a robots.txt file in it.
There is a mutual relationship that benefits both. It's just that the "both" aren't the people you think it is. Google's relationship is with the person searching the web. The person gets the benefit of finding stuff on the web more easily, and Google gets the benefit of advertising dollars. Once Google delivers the viewer to your site, what you do with him and how you monetize it is entire up to you. Google has no relationship with the content provider beyond what a regular viewer has (they read the content).
Given that nobody (except Iceland) is at 100% renewable energy, yes it does matter. Say you consume 100 TWh a year. Say 25 TWh of that comes from renewables, the rest from fossil fuels (ignore nuclear to keep this simple). Say petrol (gasoline) accounts for 10 TWh of your energy use. And say this process requires 2x as much energy as it creates in petrol.
If you create all your petrol using renewables to power this process, then you're reducing your fossil fuel consumption by 10 TWh, but increasing your renewable consumption by 20 TWh. However, you only have 25 TWh of installed renewables capacity. So the 20 TWh of renewables this process consumes displaces 20 TWh of other consumption which used to come from renewables. To make up for that shortfall, you have to burn 20 TWh more fossil fuels.
That is, your renewables consumption remained at 25 TWh. Your fossil fuel first went down by 10 TWh, but then increased by 20 TWh. So powering this process with renewables resulted in a net 10 TWh increase in the consumption of fossil fuels.
Don't make the mistake of mixing up consumption with production. You cannot pick and choose where your power comes from. If your renewables production is static and less than 100%, then nothing you do on the consumption side matters. Once you exceed that static amount of renewables production capacity, every new power drain you add comes entirely from fossil fuels.
How quaint. You still think their cell phone users are customers. When it comes to data like this, advertising agencies are the customer. Cell phone users are a resource to be mined.
We need to take the laws requiring opt-out forms for credit card and bank accounts, and expand it to cover all services which wish to sell customer data.