That's a common error made by people who don't understand opportunity cost. Unless you installed those panels specifically because you bought the Tesla, your Tesla is being charged from the grid, not the panels. The Tesla represents an increase in your electricity consumption. And if the panel installation is not coincidental with the Tesla purchase to offset that increase in electricity consumption, you're getting that extra electricity to charge your Tesla from the grid.
Before your Tesla: Your panels provided power for your home. You got zero power from the grid.
After your Tesla: Your panels continue to provide power for your home. The energy to charge your Tesla comes from the grid.
The only way the panels can truly power the Tesla is if you installed the panels specifically to charge the Tesla.
Before your Tesla. You had no panels. Your home got power from the grid.
After your Tesla. Your home is still powered from the grid. The panels you installed charge your Tesla.
If you don't properly account for opportunity cost in this way, you could hook up a 12V battery and claim it powers your entire house. When you look at your TV's power consumption, you say it's powered by the 12V battery, everything else is powered by the grid. If you consider your electric heater's power consumption, you say it's powered by the 12V battery, everything else is powered by the grid. If you consider your electric oven's power consumption, you say it's powered by the 12V battery, everything else is powered by the grid. And so on for every electrical device in your house. And by ignoring opportunity cost this way, you can erroneously claim everything in your home is powered by a single 12V battery.
This is why I keep stressing that converting energy sources away from fossil fuels is much more important than switching energy consumption to electric. If you just convert a bunch of devices to electric, that increases the electrical load on the grid. And the power companies are probably going to respond to that by building more coal and gas plants since renewables are yet unable to cope with base load, and environmentalists are blocking nuclear at every opportunity.
YouTube's biggest advantage is that anyone on the planet can make a video and upload it for viewing. As opposed to Netflix which only carries content created by an elite 0.05% of the population.
YouTube's biggest disadvantage is also that anyone on the planet can make a video and upload it for viewing, meaning that there are a ton of crappy videos on it not worth viewing. How successful YouTube is thus depends, as you point out, on how well it's able to help viewers sort the wheat from the chaff. It's interesting that Netflix has actually moved backwards in this respect, dropping the viewer ratings for movies (probably at the behest of the majority of the 0.05% who make mediocre to bad movies, and were upset their movies weren't getting as many views).
However, the delta-v needed to barely traverse from Mars to Earth is only 2.9 km/s. The delta-v needed to leave the solar system from Earth is a minimum 12.3 km/s, or 18x as much energy. And that's on top of the higher ejecta velocity needed to escape Earth's gravity well (more than twice that of Mars).
Shooting was probably first included by association with athletic endeavours. In the 1800's there were probably few people for whom shooting involved going to the gun range or resting in a deer stand waiting for a deer to pass. It frequently involved a military occupation and athletic association.
Er no, in the 1700s and 1800s, shooting was the primary means by which you put meat on the table for your family. The reason the U.S. figured it could get away with a militia instead of a standing army was because pretty much every able-bodied male of fighting age already owned a musket or rifle for hunting. It's only natural that it would develop into a competitive sport where people tried to figure out who was the best shot.
I think it's this association with a necessity for life which distinguishes what we now consider sports. The running/swimming/skiing/skating sports are obvious, since you needed to get from place to place. Same with the throwing and lifting sports, since there were no forklifts or cranes to lift or throw things for you when you were building or harvesting. Likewise the fighting sports like fencing since combat was an unavoidable part of life. In fact pretty much all the team sports (soccer, hockey, basketball, etc) are just combat moderated with extensive rules and specific goals which don't involve killing your opponents. And shooting/archery were included because you needed to be able to do those things to feed your family.
The judged sports like gymnastics, figure skating, diving are kinda borderline. Many people don't consider them real sports, but they have a tenuous connection with activities which were necessities to life - combat fitness, skating, swimming. You'll note that sailing has also always been an Olympic sport even though most of the hard work is done by the wind, and the primary role of the "athlete" is to plot a route through a constantly changing course. It too used to be a requirement for life, but has since lapsed into a recreational activity. (Yes I know the grinders on the larger craft work hard, but all their work is secondary to the ability to predict the wind shifts and plot a course to take advantage of them).
eSports aren't considered sports by most people since its roots come from entertainment - it was never a necessity for life. For the same reason, we wouldn't consider a piano competition a sport either, even though it requires a level of skill, accuracy, and practice on par with any Olympic sport and has been around for nearly as long. Or for something more reliant on physical strength, arm wrestling isn't really considered a sport by most people. Even though it's definitely physical, it's so abstracted from the necessities for life which relied on arm strength, that most people consider it straight up entertainment rather than a competition.
Dunno if the Democrats will succeed at it, but that's the way it's supposed to work. The legislature passes potential changes in the law for the President to approve. This whole mess began when the Democrat-appointed Chair of the FCC tried to short-circuit the legislative process and unilaterally implemented a new policy. When a new President got elected, his appointed Chair of the FCC unilaterally changed the policy. It's hypocritical to support the former but be upset about the latter. In terms of process, they're the same thing. Either both are wrong, or both are OK.
The legislature crafts and votes on potential new policies. If both branches pass it, it goes to the President, who can sign it or veto it. Only if a bill passes this convoluted process does it become law and a new policy. The whole point of having to go through that lengthy and difficult process to implement a new policy is that it then requires we have to go through that lengthy and difficult process again to change that policy. You don't get this idiotic flip-flopping where one appointed individual single-handedly implements a new policy, the next appointed individual reverses that policy, the next individual re-implements it again, repeat. It needs to be hard to change policy. If it's too easy, nothing will get done because we'll be wasting our time changing it back and forth all the time.
The problem with reducing intake is that our bodies are not wired for the small number of calories needed to live a modern lifestyle. About 15-20 years ago, PBS ran a reality show called Frontier House, where they put volunteers in a situation a typical pioneer would've faced in the late 1800s. They had to raise and harvest sufficient crops and livestock during the summer to hypothetically feed them through a winter. Halfway through, the volunteers demanded to see doctors because they were eating 5000+ calories a day heavily loaded with butter and fat, yet they were still losing weight. Something had to be wrong with their bodies. The doctors examined them, and pronounced them fit as a horse.
It turns out that without machines to do all the heavy lifting for you, you needed to eat that much just to survive back then. And it wasn't just the men working the fields who were burning prodigious amounts of calories. This extended to the women too - no washing machine, no dishwasher, no vacuum cleaner, no blender, no prepackaged meals. You had to do all those cleaning tasks by hand, make all your meals from scratch. The women remarked that as soon as they finished cleaning up after one meal, it was time to start preparing the next meal.
Even estimates for the diets of slaves (who were not the best-fed people) put their daily caloric intake between 3000-8000 calories/day (towards the high end during harvest season). So the problem isn't that we're eating too much and we just need to eat less. We've already substantially reduced our food intake from the historical levels that our bodies are wired for. The problem is that our physical activity has decreased much more than our appetites have.
Microsoft Marketing: Hey, we heard some tech news website is publishing a ranking of programming languages based on how often they come up in searches with the word "programming". Is that right?
Microsoft Engineering: Huh? Oh yeah, they do that every year.
Microsoft Marketing: Would it be possible to slip in an update that makes each copy of Windows run a search on all the major search engines for ".NET programming" say, once a week? Y'know, not often enough to be noticed by people monitoring network traffic, but enough to tilt the results our way.
Glad it worked out for you. A friend of mine is a contrasting example. He runs a rural hotel and and noticed that most of his business was on weekends, so during the week he had a lot of empty rooms and couldn't give his staff as many work hours. So he came up with the idea of a weekday camp program - urban elementary schools would send a class to spend a week at his hotel. The children would go on guided hikes of the surrounding countryside and playing outdoor games, learning about animals, plants, and the environment. He discussed it with the schools and they loved the idea, he just needed a curriculum the schools could review and approve, and people to run the camp. So he hired a half dozen people to develop a program and run it.
A year later, after he'd invested more than a half million dollars paying for materials and these people's wages to develop the program, it was complete. He just had to present it to the schools so they could sign up. Then overnight, all six of them quit. They left paper copies of the program he'd hired them to develop (teaching materials, curriculum, games, etc), so he spent a few months finding new staff to run it. After they were hired, he approached the schools and...
That's when he learned that the original six employees had completely poached his idea. They'd taken the program he'd paid them to develop, rented a nearby camp facility, and were running it themselves. They'd also poached his list of contacts at the schools, and with a 3 month head start they had already signed up the schools most interested in the idea, leaving scraps for him. He never recovered financially, and his hotel was on the brink of bankruptcy for close to a decade. Last time I visited, it was horribly run down because after losing his original investment and without the expected new revenue, he had had to put off repairs and updates. Basically those six employees fleeced him out of a half million dollars in R&D costs.
Yeah there are asshole companies who will abuse NCAs to grind employees under their heel. But there are also asshole employees who will steal whatever they can from the company without a NCA. Given that abuse can happen on both sides, I'm really not sure what the solution is.
Network neutrality by definition is regulation. If he opposes regulation for network neutrality then he opposes network neutrality.
No, Net Neutrality is by definition regulation to fix other regulation. ISPs are able to throttle Netflix because they have a monopoly granted to them by the local government. So even though they degrade Netflix quality, their customers cannot flee to another ISP because the local government has banned competition. They can then extort Netflix to pay for access to those customers.
Net Neutrality is an attempt to fix these regulatory monopolies by requiring they behave. It's regulation trying to fix problems caused by other regulation. Which begs the question - why not just fix the original regulation? Don't give out local Internet monopolies.
Network neutrality is achievable without regulation. Simply allow multiple companies to provide Internet service in all areas. If one ISP intentionally degrades Netflix as a ploy to try to make Netflix pay them, their customers will simply cancel and switch to a different ISP. And ISPs will strive for network neutrality because that's what their customers want.
We can argue about which approach is more effective. But it's erroneous to think the only way to achieve network neutrality is Net Neutrality regulation.
The only people who care that someone has an Apple product seems to be those who use Android.
The proliferation of iPhone cases with a cutout to show off the Apple logo contradicts your belief. Android users aren't buying those cases for iPhone owners. The iPhone owners are preferentially selecting those cases themselves. It's part and parcel of treating your phone as a (branded) fashion accessory, rather than as a technological tool.
Is the ability to use the apps you bought on any supported platform, regardless of whether you bought it on iOS or Android. Adobe does this for Mac/PC - if you buy a copy of Photoshop, you're allowed to use both the PC and Mac versions (they also let you install two copies - one on a desktop, one on a laptop).
The argument of everyone selling copyrighted stuff is that you're buying a license, not a product. Time for them to put their money where their mouth is and let you use that license on a different platform if you decide to switch.
You can figure out the impact of weather on PV panel production via something called capacity factor. That's the percentage of the panel's rated capacity it can actually produce over a month or a year. The NREL put out a website which incorporates weather data to calculate your expected capacity factor for any zip code in the U.S.
Solar sucks in Germany because of its latitude. Germany spans from about 43 to 53 degrees latitude, which only yields a capacity factor of around 0.11 (take the actual GWh generated, divided by installed MW * 8766 hours/year / 1000 MW/GW to skip over all the marketing BS). The continental U.S. spans from about 27 to 48 degrees latitude, and has an average capacity factor of 0.145.
I'm generally against adding PV panels to existing homes (only makes economic sense with government subsidies). I am for requiring them on new homes.
Unlike other power sources whose costs are spread out over the useful lifetime due to the need to buy fuel, PV solar's costs are incredibly front-loaded. You pay for everything up front, then the annual costs are zero and you eventually (hopefully) make back the purchase price and interest expenses after a decade or two of power savings. That front-loading of cost is what's discouraged people from adding solar panels to their homes. States have tried to entice people over that hump by subsidizing PV panels, but that amounts to a straight money giveaway. It artificially lowers the price of PV panels, screwing up their market.
If you require them on new homes, that incorporates the price into another big front-loaded purchase - paying to buy a new home. It also avoids subsidizing the price so the full cost is passed through to the homebuyer (who can vote against legislators who voted for this requirement if they're upset by the additional cost).
It also makes for a better match between home longevity and panel longevity. Most PV panels are good for 25-35 years. The median age of houses is about 36 years. So by adding the panels when the house is constructed, you decrease the chances of panels with usable life being thrown away when a house is torn down to build a new house on the lot.
My main concern would actually be technical. The inverter and circuitry combining panel power and grid power needs to be maintained and functional. Otherwise maintenance personnel repairing a downed power line can be electrocuted because even though they cut off power coming from "upstream" (the power plant), the line could still be live because of power coming from downstream (homes whose PV panel circuitry is malfunctioning). Everyone seems to rave about the advantages of distributing your power source, but never consider the disadvantages. In general, maintenance costs are lower and accidents fewer when you can combine all of something into a few or one big production facility.
OP is conflating cycle life with deep cycle life. Li-ion batteries typically only last about 300-500 deep cycles (full charge to full discharge back to full charge). But by limiting the operating range (say, between 20%-80% of a full charge, which is what most EVs do), you can avoid the deep cycles and lengthen battery endurance considerably. That's how EVs are managing to go 10+ years on the same battery pack. Most of the automakers limit the battery's operating charge between 25%-75% or 20%-80%. Tesla is hush hush about their numbers, but it seems to be between 15%-85%. (This is why they could give owners additional range during hurricane evacuations - they simply sent out a temporary software patch allowing you to drain the battery below 15%.)
The drawback of using only partial discharges is that you need significantly more battery capacity than you're actually using. Consequently, the cost of using batteries for load leveling is highly dependent on the variability in how much load leveling is needed day-to-day. If the same amount of power needs to be time-shifted every day, that's the ideal case. If the amount of power you need to time-shift varies by a lot (a little to none one day, close to max the next day), you end up having to pay for a huge battery but use only a tiny bit of its capacity most of its capacity most of the time
This is different from something like pumped storage (pumping water uphill), where the bulk of the cost is in the pump and turbine, while reservoir capacity is nearly free. With batteries, most of your cost is in the capacity, so it ends up being price-sensitive to variability in required capacity. From what I understand, Tesla picked this location partly because of the consistency of the capacity shortfall/excess.
For improved handling, you want the mass towards the center, as close as possible to midway between the two axles. That'll minimize the moment of inertia, allowing the car to "turn on a dime." That's why most of the famous sports cars are rear-engine two seaters, and tend to spin out in the hands of an inexperienced driver (rear wheel drive + small moment of inertia = easy to spin out).
Tesla did it right with the battery pack under the floor. Putting some batteries in the trunk indicates they needed to counterbalance excessive weight towards the front, meaning the two combine for a higher moment of inertia. The car will not react as quickly as it could to steering input (doesn't handle as well as it could).
I think the confusion is that a noun class != gender. In many languages noun classes tend to follow gendered lines, but usually not exclusively or even always predictably. In some cases this practice can lead to cultural associations that see a particular object as "male" or "female"--such as in medieval Latin the Church (ecclesia) is pretty consistently seen as female. In other cases, however, it's purely semantic and people don't necessarily even think of the object as "having" a gender even though its noun is gendered. Hence in Spanish pan ("bread") is masculine, but I don't recall ever seeing it treated as something intrinsically male.
The languages which do this are less reliant on word order. You're free to switch around word order, and the article ("the") in front of the noun and how you conjugate the verb give you hints as to which noun is the subject, which is the object. For whatever reason, a lot of the European languages settled on three different groupings of nouns as a good number to get this system working. Three is probably a popular choice because it's the closest integer to e (2.718...), and when you minimize the complexity of a system, the optimal number of groupings tends to converge on e. (e.g. Computers would actually make slightly more efficient use of memory if each bit could represent 3 different values, not 2). Anyhow, if you've got three groupings, masculine / feminine / neuter are kind of natural labels.
Some languages use more groupings. Some use none (one). English is one of the languages which uses none ("the" is the same for all nouns). As a consequence, English is much more restrictive in how you're allowed to arrange the words, and the word order tells you which noun is the subject, which the object. So in English, "The dog bit the man" relies on word order to tell you that the dog was the one doing the biting. In other languages, you could phrase it "the man bit the dog" and the verb conjugation and articles would tell you that it was the dog doing the biting. It might sound funny, bit it's perfectly understandable. Whereas in English, switching the word order around completely changes the meaning of the sentence.
Other languages which use no groupings use helper words to denote which noun is the subject or object (e.g. Japanese 'wa'). So the word order remains flexible.
Chess and Go are deterministic. You can perfectly know the entire state of the game universe. And for a given system state, any one action always results in the exact same outcome, every time.
Almost no systems in the real world are deterministic. That's why stochastic approaches to AI (develops a statistical model based on multiple repetitions - e.g. fuzzy logic, machine learning) have been much more successful in real world tasks.
The issue is who should get control over what you decide to watch. Like the old flash websites which locked you into 800x600 resolution and annoying low-contrast fonts, the movie industry wants complete control over the appearance of movies in your home on your TV. I hate motion interpolation, but it really should be up to the viewer to decide whether they want it on or off.
The movie studio's control over their product should end the moment you fork over your payment. Just like it's not the printer manufacturer's business whether you decide to use their OEM ink or third party ink. And cellular carriers should not be installing apps you can't uninstall from phones they're selling you. Or Apple bricking phones which were repaired with non-Apple screens. Once they sell it, it's yours not theirs, and they have no business sticking their nose in how you use it (aside from restricting distribution for copyrighted works).
Any product giving the manufacturer post-sale control of this sort should come with a money-back guarantee for as long as that control exists. The user is entitled to a full, unrestricted refund if they decide at any time that they don't like the control the manufacturer is exerting post-sale. That should keep such modifications limited to ones which indisputably benefit the buyer (security updates and bug fixes).
Hangouts worked. You could use it to send texts on your phone. It integrated with Google Voice allowing you to make VoIP calls from your phone, tablet, or computer using your Google Voice number. That integration also meant you could send and receive texts from a computer or tablet logged into your Google account (great for typing faster and copy/pasting URLs). That's right, all your devices could simultaneously send/receive the texts allowing you to hop between them without having to switch to your phone just to respond to a text. You could make video calls with it, including conference video calls with 3+ people. And because of the integration, those people could join the video conference call via their phone, tablet, or computer. It was the one app to rule them all.
Then for some mysterious reason they announced they were dropping Hangouts, and splitting all its features into a confusing array of apps, one for SMS, one for VoIP, one for video calls (which only works with 2 people, no conference calls). Except the SMS app (Allo) also had a counterpart which duplicated its functionality and was installed as default SMS app in Android (Messages). Which makes it not at all surprising that they're dropping it too now.
If everyone is honest, then there's no problem with a perfect lie detector.
The problem with a perfect lie detector arises when it's only ever used on certain people. The people in power will never subject themselves to it, while gleefully using it on the people they rule over to assure obedience. That's how it becomes dystopian. It's fine in an already-free society. But it becomes a tool for those in power to prevent a non-free society from becoming free. And since no society is really ever completely free, one can argue that the such a tool can always be used in a dystopian way.
When it's convenient for them. Rather than pay to use someone else's SSID map database, or pay people to roam around the world and record the SSIDs for them, Apple simply lifted visible SSIDs and GPS data from iPhone users' phones.
This happened about the same time Google was caught accidentally recording more than SSID with their street view cars. Google admitted they did wrong, and the EU fined them. Apple never admitted any wrongdoing, and the EU never did anything about them. What we have today is a consequence of that dichotomy in regulatory reaction. Google tried to be open about their data collection so you could avoid it if you wanted, and were punished more harshly than companies being secret about their data collection so you were unwittingly subjected to it.
Consequently, now all companies collect information secretly, and don't admit anything even when they're caught. I salute all of you and the brave new world you've created for yourselves.
This problem extends to Windows as well. When Microsoft tried to get everyone to switch to Metro apps, they moved a lot of Windows configuration settings to the Metro-like Settings dialog. These were settings which had been in the same place since Windows 2000, so every IT person knew where it was. When they changed it, not only did every IT person have to learn the new location, but every online instruction guide was immediately made obsolete. Then people rebelled against Metro so Microsoft moved some of the settings back. Except their hearts weren't really into it, so now Windows is left with its configuration settings in two different places - in the Metro-like Settings (Windows key=>gear icon), and Control Panel.
The solution to this is simple. Let the user select the layout. If you want to add a snazzy new Ribbon interface, knock yourself out. But there should be a simple menu option which lets you easily and immediately select "Layout - Office 97 classic, Office 2003 (bubbly), Office 2007 (with ribbons), Office 2013 (with rearranged buttons), Office 2016 (I don't know what's new because I haven't yet found the buttons I lost track of in 2013), custom." Then each user can easily and immediately select the UI layout that works best for them. But it seems like UI designers' egos can't stand the idea of people not using the snazzy new interface they designed. So they force everyone to use the new interface with no way to revert to the old one.
And it's not just Microsoft. Google has been vacillating between allowing or blocking Dark Mode in its Android apps (it's currently blocked). This isn't even a user preference thing. OLED displays use more power when displaying white, which seems to be the predominant theme with Google's apps. So switching to Dark Mode can add several hours of battery life. It's a functional change which objectively impacts the usability of many devices. But some Google designer with a stick up his/her ass can't stand the thought of people using the apps in a way that looks different from the way they designed it to look so keeps getting Dark Mode blocked.
Clue to designers: Your design is not successful when you force people to use it. Your design is successful when you give people a choice and they willingly choose your design.
Except for my email (which runs on a browser in a virtual machine), I browse completely in incognito mode. I notice searches start to become biased depending on what else I've searched for or browsed in that tab. The fact that the suggested search terms (which pop up as you type in your search request) seemed to "know" what I was browsing recently was a pretty big clue what was going on. Closing the tab and running the search again in a new tab clears this up and reverts the search to its default (which sometimes means different search results compared to the old tab)
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The only way the panels can truly power the Tesla is if you installed the panels specifically to charge the Tesla.
If you don't properly account for opportunity cost in this way, you could hook up a 12V battery and claim it powers your entire house. When you look at your TV's power consumption, you say it's powered by the 12V battery, everything else is powered by the grid. If you consider your electric heater's power consumption, you say it's powered by the 12V battery, everything else is powered by the grid. If you consider your electric oven's power consumption, you say it's powered by the 12V battery, everything else is powered by the grid. And so on for every electrical device in your house. And by ignoring opportunity cost this way, you can erroneously claim everything in your home is powered by a single 12V battery.
This is why I keep stressing that converting energy sources away from fossil fuels is much more important than switching energy consumption to electric. If you just convert a bunch of devices to electric, that increases the electrical load on the grid. And the power companies are probably going to respond to that by building more coal and gas plants since renewables are yet unable to cope with base load, and environmentalists are blocking nuclear at every opportunity.
YouTube's biggest advantage is that anyone on the planet can make a video and upload it for viewing. As opposed to Netflix which only carries content created by an elite 0.05% of the population.
YouTube's biggest disadvantage is also that anyone on the planet can make a video and upload it for viewing, meaning that there are a ton of crappy videos on it not worth viewing. How successful YouTube is thus depends, as you point out, on how well it's able to help viewers sort the wheat from the chaff. It's interesting that Netflix has actually moved backwards in this respect, dropping the viewer ratings for movies (probably at the behest of the majority of the 0.05% who make mediocre to bad movies, and were upset their movies weren't getting as many views).
I think OP was thinking of the few martian rocks which have fallen to Earth as meteors. Those were ejected from Mars via meteor or asteroid impacts, and eventually found their way to Earth.
However, the delta-v needed to barely traverse from Mars to Earth is only 2.9 km/s. The delta-v needed to leave the solar system from Earth is a minimum 12.3 km/s, or 18x as much energy. And that's on top of the higher ejecta velocity needed to escape Earth's gravity well (more than twice that of Mars).
Er no, in the 1700s and 1800s, shooting was the primary means by which you put meat on the table for your family. The reason the U.S. figured it could get away with a militia instead of a standing army was because pretty much every able-bodied male of fighting age already owned a musket or rifle for hunting. It's only natural that it would develop into a competitive sport where people tried to figure out who was the best shot.
I think it's this association with a necessity for life which distinguishes what we now consider sports. The running/swimming/skiing/skating sports are obvious, since you needed to get from place to place. Same with the throwing and lifting sports, since there were no forklifts or cranes to lift or throw things for you when you were building or harvesting. Likewise the fighting sports like fencing since combat was an unavoidable part of life. In fact pretty much all the team sports (soccer, hockey, basketball, etc) are just combat moderated with extensive rules and specific goals which don't involve killing your opponents. And shooting/archery were included because you needed to be able to do those things to feed your family.
The judged sports like gymnastics, figure skating, diving are kinda borderline. Many people don't consider them real sports, but they have a tenuous connection with activities which were necessities to life - combat fitness, skating, swimming. You'll note that sailing has also always been an Olympic sport even though most of the hard work is done by the wind, and the primary role of the "athlete" is to plot a route through a constantly changing course. It too used to be a requirement for life, but has since lapsed into a recreational activity. (Yes I know the grinders on the larger craft work hard, but all their work is secondary to the ability to predict the wind shifts and plot a course to take advantage of them).
eSports aren't considered sports by most people since its roots come from entertainment - it was never a necessity for life. For the same reason, we wouldn't consider a piano competition a sport either, even though it requires a level of skill, accuracy, and practice on par with any Olympic sport and has been around for nearly as long. Or for something more reliant on physical strength, arm wrestling isn't really considered a sport by most people. Even though it's definitely physical, it's so abstracted from the necessities for life which relied on arm strength, that most people consider it straight up entertainment rather than a competition.
Dunno if the Democrats will succeed at it, but that's the way it's supposed to work. The legislature passes potential changes in the law for the President to approve. This whole mess began when the Democrat-appointed Chair of the FCC tried to short-circuit the legislative process and unilaterally implemented a new policy. When a new President got elected, his appointed Chair of the FCC unilaterally changed the policy. It's hypocritical to support the former but be upset about the latter. In terms of process, they're the same thing. Either both are wrong, or both are OK.
The legislature crafts and votes on potential new policies. If both branches pass it, it goes to the President, who can sign it or veto it. Only if a bill passes this convoluted process does it become law and a new policy. The whole point of having to go through that lengthy and difficult process to implement a new policy is that it then requires we have to go through that lengthy and difficult process again to change that policy. You don't get this idiotic flip-flopping where one appointed individual single-handedly implements a new policy, the next appointed individual reverses that policy, the next individual re-implements it again, repeat. It needs to be hard to change policy. If it's too easy, nothing will get done because we'll be wasting our time changing it back and forth all the time.
The problem with reducing intake is that our bodies are not wired for the small number of calories needed to live a modern lifestyle. About 15-20 years ago, PBS ran a reality show called Frontier House, where they put volunteers in a situation a typical pioneer would've faced in the late 1800s. They had to raise and harvest sufficient crops and livestock during the summer to hypothetically feed them through a winter. Halfway through, the volunteers demanded to see doctors because they were eating 5000+ calories a day heavily loaded with butter and fat, yet they were still losing weight. Something had to be wrong with their bodies. The doctors examined them, and pronounced them fit as a horse.
It turns out that without machines to do all the heavy lifting for you, you needed to eat that much just to survive back then. And it wasn't just the men working the fields who were burning prodigious amounts of calories. This extended to the women too - no washing machine, no dishwasher, no vacuum cleaner, no blender, no prepackaged meals. You had to do all those cleaning tasks by hand, make all your meals from scratch. The women remarked that as soon as they finished cleaning up after one meal, it was time to start preparing the next meal.
Even estimates for the diets of slaves (who were not the best-fed people) put their daily caloric intake between 3000-8000 calories/day (towards the high end during harvest season). So the problem isn't that we're eating too much and we just need to eat less. We've already substantially reduced our food intake from the historical levels that our bodies are wired for. The problem is that our physical activity has decreased much more than our appetites have.
Microsoft Marketing: Hey, we heard some tech news website is publishing a ranking of programming languages based on how often they come up in searches with the word "programming". Is that right?
Microsoft Engineering: Huh? Oh yeah, they do that every year.
Microsoft Marketing: Would it be possible to slip in an update that makes each copy of Windows run a search on all the major search engines for ".NET programming" say, once a week? Y'know, not often enough to be noticed by people monitoring network traffic, but enough to tilt the results our way.
Description sounds similar to the Bloop Sound in 1997.
Glad it worked out for you. A friend of mine is a contrasting example. He runs a rural hotel and and noticed that most of his business was on weekends, so during the week he had a lot of empty rooms and couldn't give his staff as many work hours. So he came up with the idea of a weekday camp program - urban elementary schools would send a class to spend a week at his hotel. The children would go on guided hikes of the surrounding countryside and playing outdoor games, learning about animals, plants, and the environment. He discussed it with the schools and they loved the idea, he just needed a curriculum the schools could review and approve, and people to run the camp. So he hired a half dozen people to develop a program and run it.
A year later, after he'd invested more than a half million dollars paying for materials and these people's wages to develop the program, it was complete. He just had to present it to the schools so they could sign up. Then overnight, all six of them quit. They left paper copies of the program he'd hired them to develop (teaching materials, curriculum, games, etc), so he spent a few months finding new staff to run it. After they were hired, he approached the schools and...
That's when he learned that the original six employees had completely poached his idea. They'd taken the program he'd paid them to develop, rented a nearby camp facility, and were running it themselves. They'd also poached his list of contacts at the schools, and with a 3 month head start they had already signed up the schools most interested in the idea, leaving scraps for him. He never recovered financially, and his hotel was on the brink of bankruptcy for close to a decade. Last time I visited, it was horribly run down because after losing his original investment and without the expected new revenue, he had had to put off repairs and updates. Basically those six employees fleeced him out of a half million dollars in R&D costs.
Yeah there are asshole companies who will abuse NCAs to grind employees under their heel. But there are also asshole employees who will steal whatever they can from the company without a NCA. Given that abuse can happen on both sides, I'm really not sure what the solution is.
No, Net Neutrality is by definition regulation to fix other regulation. ISPs are able to throttle Netflix because they have a monopoly granted to them by the local government. So even though they degrade Netflix quality, their customers cannot flee to another ISP because the local government has banned competition. They can then extort Netflix to pay for access to those customers.
Net Neutrality is an attempt to fix these regulatory monopolies by requiring they behave. It's regulation trying to fix problems caused by other regulation. Which begs the question - why not just fix the original regulation? Don't give out local Internet monopolies.
Network neutrality is achievable without regulation. Simply allow multiple companies to provide Internet service in all areas. If one ISP intentionally degrades Netflix as a ploy to try to make Netflix pay them, their customers will simply cancel and switch to a different ISP. And ISPs will strive for network neutrality because that's what their customers want.
We can argue about which approach is more effective. But it's erroneous to think the only way to achieve network neutrality is Net Neutrality regulation.
The proliferation of iPhone cases with a cutout to show off the Apple logo contradicts your belief. Android users aren't buying those cases for iPhone owners. The iPhone owners are preferentially selecting those cases themselves. It's part and parcel of treating your phone as a (branded) fashion accessory, rather than as a technological tool.
Is the ability to use the apps you bought on any supported platform, regardless of whether you bought it on iOS or Android. Adobe does this for Mac/PC - if you buy a copy of Photoshop, you're allowed to use both the PC and Mac versions (they also let you install two copies - one on a desktop, one on a laptop).
The argument of everyone selling copyrighted stuff is that you're buying a license, not a product. Time for them to put their money where their mouth is and let you use that license on a different platform if you decide to switch.
You can figure out the impact of weather on PV panel production via something called capacity factor. That's the percentage of the panel's rated capacity it can actually produce over a month or a year. The NREL put out a website which incorporates weather data to calculate your expected capacity factor for any zip code in the U.S.
Solar sucks in Germany because of its latitude. Germany spans from about 43 to 53 degrees latitude, which only yields a capacity factor of around 0.11 (take the actual GWh generated, divided by installed MW * 8766 hours/year / 1000 MW/GW to skip over all the marketing BS). The continental U.S. spans from about 27 to 48 degrees latitude, and has an average capacity factor of 0.145.
I'm generally against adding PV panels to existing homes (only makes economic sense with government subsidies). I am for requiring them on new homes.
Unlike other power sources whose costs are spread out over the useful lifetime due to the need to buy fuel, PV solar's costs are incredibly front-loaded. You pay for everything up front, then the annual costs are zero and you eventually (hopefully) make back the purchase price and interest expenses after a decade or two of power savings. That front-loading of cost is what's discouraged people from adding solar panels to their homes. States have tried to entice people over that hump by subsidizing PV panels, but that amounts to a straight money giveaway. It artificially lowers the price of PV panels, screwing up their market.
If you require them on new homes, that incorporates the price into another big front-loaded purchase - paying to buy a new home. It also avoids subsidizing the price so the full cost is passed through to the homebuyer (who can vote against legislators who voted for this requirement if they're upset by the additional cost).
It also makes for a better match between home longevity and panel longevity. Most PV panels are good for 25-35 years. The median age of houses is about 36 years. So by adding the panels when the house is constructed, you decrease the chances of panels with usable life being thrown away when a house is torn down to build a new house on the lot.
My main concern would actually be technical. The inverter and circuitry combining panel power and grid power needs to be maintained and functional. Otherwise maintenance personnel repairing a downed power line can be electrocuted because even though they cut off power coming from "upstream" (the power plant), the line could still be live because of power coming from downstream (homes whose PV panel circuitry is malfunctioning). Everyone seems to rave about the advantages of distributing your power source, but never consider the disadvantages. In general, maintenance costs are lower and accidents fewer when you can combine all of something into a few or one big production facility.
OP is conflating cycle life with deep cycle life. Li-ion batteries typically only last about 300-500 deep cycles (full charge to full discharge back to full charge). But by limiting the operating range (say, between 20%-80% of a full charge, which is what most EVs do), you can avoid the deep cycles and lengthen battery endurance considerably. That's how EVs are managing to go 10+ years on the same battery pack. Most of the automakers limit the battery's operating charge between 25%-75% or 20%-80%. Tesla is hush hush about their numbers, but it seems to be between 15%-85%. (This is why they could give owners additional range during hurricane evacuations - they simply sent out a temporary software patch allowing you to drain the battery below 15%.)
The drawback of using only partial discharges is that you need significantly more battery capacity than you're actually using. Consequently, the cost of using batteries for load leveling is highly dependent on the variability in how much load leveling is needed day-to-day. If the same amount of power needs to be time-shifted every day, that's the ideal case. If the amount of power you need to time-shift varies by a lot (a little to none one day, close to max the next day), you end up having to pay for a huge battery but use only a tiny bit of its capacity most of its capacity most of the time
This is different from something like pumped storage (pumping water uphill), where the bulk of the cost is in the pump and turbine, while reservoir capacity is nearly free. With batteries, most of your cost is in the capacity, so it ends up being price-sensitive to variability in required capacity. From what I understand, Tesla picked this location partly because of the consistency of the capacity shortfall/excess.
For improved handling, you want the mass towards the center, as close as possible to midway between the two axles. That'll minimize the moment of inertia, allowing the car to "turn on a dime." That's why most of the famous sports cars are rear-engine two seaters, and tend to spin out in the hands of an inexperienced driver (rear wheel drive + small moment of inertia = easy to spin out).
Tesla did it right with the battery pack under the floor. Putting some batteries in the trunk indicates they needed to counterbalance excessive weight towards the front, meaning the two combine for a higher moment of inertia. The car will not react as quickly as it could to steering input (doesn't handle as well as it could).
The languages which do this are less reliant on word order. You're free to switch around word order, and the article ("the") in front of the noun and how you conjugate the verb give you hints as to which noun is the subject, which is the object. For whatever reason, a lot of the European languages settled on three different groupings of nouns as a good number to get this system working. Three is probably a popular choice because it's the closest integer to e (2.718...), and when you minimize the complexity of a system, the optimal number of groupings tends to converge on e. (e.g. Computers would actually make slightly more efficient use of memory if each bit could represent 3 different values, not 2). Anyhow, if you've got three groupings, masculine / feminine / neuter are kind of natural labels.
Some languages use more groupings. Some use none (one). English is one of the languages which uses none ("the" is the same for all nouns). As a consequence, English is much more restrictive in how you're allowed to arrange the words, and the word order tells you which noun is the subject, which the object. So in English, "The dog bit the man" relies on word order to tell you that the dog was the one doing the biting. In other languages, you could phrase it "the man bit the dog" and the verb conjugation and articles would tell you that it was the dog doing the biting. It might sound funny, bit it's perfectly understandable. Whereas in English, switching the word order around completely changes the meaning of the sentence.
Other languages which use no groupings use helper words to denote which noun is the subject or object (e.g. Japanese 'wa'). So the word order remains flexible.
Chess and Go are deterministic. You can perfectly know the entire state of the game universe. And for a given system state, any one action always results in the exact same outcome, every time.
Almost no systems in the real world are deterministic. That's why stochastic approaches to AI (develops a statistical model based on multiple repetitions - e.g. fuzzy logic, machine learning) have been much more successful in real world tasks.
The issue is who should get control over what you decide to watch. Like the old flash websites which locked you into 800x600 resolution and annoying low-contrast fonts, the movie industry wants complete control over the appearance of movies in your home on your TV. I hate motion interpolation, but it really should be up to the viewer to decide whether they want it on or off.
The movie studio's control over their product should end the moment you fork over your payment. Just like it's not the printer manufacturer's business whether you decide to use their OEM ink or third party ink. And cellular carriers should not be installing apps you can't uninstall from phones they're selling you. Or Apple bricking phones which were repaired with non-Apple screens. Once they sell it, it's yours not theirs, and they have no business sticking their nose in how you use it (aside from restricting distribution for copyrighted works).
Any product giving the manufacturer post-sale control of this sort should come with a money-back guarantee for as long as that control exists. The user is entitled to a full, unrestricted refund if they decide at any time that they don't like the control the manufacturer is exerting post-sale. That should keep such modifications limited to ones which indisputably benefit the buyer (security updates and bug fixes).
Hangouts worked. You could use it to send texts on your phone. It integrated with Google Voice allowing you to make VoIP calls from your phone, tablet, or computer using your Google Voice number. That integration also meant you could send and receive texts from a computer or tablet logged into your Google account (great for typing faster and copy/pasting URLs). That's right, all your devices could simultaneously send/receive the texts allowing you to hop between them without having to switch to your phone just to respond to a text. You could make video calls with it, including conference video calls with 3+ people. And because of the integration, those people could join the video conference call via their phone, tablet, or computer. It was the one app to rule them all.
Then for some mysterious reason they announced they were dropping Hangouts, and splitting all its features into a confusing array of apps, one for SMS, one for VoIP, one for video calls (which only works with 2 people, no conference calls). Except the SMS app (Allo) also had a counterpart which duplicated its functionality and was installed as default SMS app in Android (Messages). Which makes it not at all surprising that they're dropping it too now.
If everyone is honest, then there's no problem with a perfect lie detector.
The problem with a perfect lie detector arises when it's only ever used on certain people. The people in power will never subject themselves to it, while gleefully using it on the people they rule over to assure obedience. That's how it becomes dystopian. It's fine in an already-free society. But it becomes a tool for those in power to prevent a non-free society from becoming free. And since no society is really ever completely free, one can argue that the such a tool can always be used in a dystopian way.
When it's convenient for them. Rather than pay to use someone else's SSID map database, or pay people to roam around the world and record the SSIDs for them, Apple simply lifted visible SSIDs and GPS data from iPhone users' phones.
This happened about the same time Google was caught accidentally recording more than SSID with their street view cars. Google admitted they did wrong, and the EU fined them. Apple never admitted any wrongdoing, and the EU never did anything about them. What we have today is a consequence of that dichotomy in regulatory reaction. Google tried to be open about their data collection so you could avoid it if you wanted, and were punished more harshly than companies being secret about their data collection so you were unwittingly subjected to it.
Consequently, now all companies collect information secretly, and don't admit anything even when they're caught. I salute all of you and the brave new world you've created for yourselves.
Hulu, AT&T test way to make pirated TV shows more popular.
This problem extends to Windows as well. When Microsoft tried to get everyone to switch to Metro apps, they moved a lot of Windows configuration settings to the Metro-like Settings dialog. These were settings which had been in the same place since Windows 2000, so every IT person knew where it was. When they changed it, not only did every IT person have to learn the new location, but every online instruction guide was immediately made obsolete. Then people rebelled against Metro so Microsoft moved some of the settings back. Except their hearts weren't really into it, so now Windows is left with its configuration settings in two different places - in the Metro-like Settings (Windows key=>gear icon), and Control Panel.
The solution to this is simple. Let the user select the layout. If you want to add a snazzy new Ribbon interface, knock yourself out. But there should be a simple menu option which lets you easily and immediately select "Layout - Office 97 classic, Office 2003 (bubbly), Office 2007 (with ribbons), Office 2013 (with rearranged buttons), Office 2016 (I don't know what's new because I haven't yet found the buttons I lost track of in 2013), custom." Then each user can easily and immediately select the UI layout that works best for them. But it seems like UI designers' egos can't stand the idea of people not using the snazzy new interface they designed. So they force everyone to use the new interface with no way to revert to the old one.
And it's not just Microsoft. Google has been vacillating between allowing or blocking Dark Mode in its Android apps (it's currently blocked). This isn't even a user preference thing. OLED displays use more power when displaying white, which seems to be the predominant theme with Google's apps. So switching to Dark Mode can add several hours of battery life. It's a functional change which objectively impacts the usability of many devices. But some Google designer with a stick up his/her ass can't stand the thought of people using the apps in a way that looks different from the way they designed it to look so keeps getting Dark Mode blocked.
Clue to designers: Your design is not successful when you force people to use it. Your design is successful when you give people a choice and they willingly choose your design.
Except for my email (which runs on a browser in a virtual machine), I browse completely in incognito mode. I notice searches start to become biased depending on what else I've searched for or browsed in that tab. The fact that the suggested search terms (which pop up as you type in your search request) seemed to "know" what I was browsing recently was a pretty big clue what was going on. Closing the tab and running the search again in a new tab clears this up and reverts the search to its default (which sometimes means different search results compared to the old tab)