A sound mastering engineer says to avoid MP3 and use FLAC. He says this because in his line of work (mixing and editing), the errors due to MP3 compression would accumulate and grow with each edit and mix. So yes a sound engineer wants to work in a non-lossy format.
The problem is a bunch of music listeners read this, don't really understand the details, but conclude that they too must need FLAC for music playback. After all if a sound engineer says he needs it, then I must need it too, right? No you don't. 99.9% of people can't tell the difference between FLAC and a good quality MP3 unless you're doing blind A/B tests (allow them to switch between the two to compare), and even then the difference is slight. If you're just listening to a song, it's not enough to matter.
Do your editing and mixing, and save your final mixes in a non-lossy format. But for saving on a portable music player, convert it to a lossy format at a good bitrate. Same thing for photos - process them and store them in a non-lossy format. But for uploading to the web, convert them to JPEG as the final step.
informing the Conservative party pollster that I was deeply offended that they would even ask who I'm going to vote for (because it's an invasion of my right to a secret vote), and thereby would definitely NOT be voting Conservative
So you said you were offended at being asked how you were going to vote, and told him anyway? You let your emotion and righteous indignation override your sensibility, and gave him exactly the info he wanted when he called you.
The iocane powder routine from The Princess Bride only works when there's plausible deniability. You have to refuse to confirm or deny. The U.S. Navy has this policy regarding nuclear weapons carried aboard its ships - they will neither confirm nor deny if a ship carries such weapons. If they only refused to confirm which ships carried nuclear weapons, you could ask them about a bunch of ships. No nukes, no nukes, no nukes, no comment, no nukes. i.e. Same thing as a confirmation.
And with so many calls, has there been any attempt to cross-reference them with phone logs to try to figure out where the calls originated from?
Tossing $20 and 1789 into an inflation calculator (which only goes back to 1800) comes out to about $250 in 2010. Most people's annual Netflix subscriptions fall below that, and one could argue that it's the monthly fee which has to fall below $250 since you can cancel the service any month if you're unhappy with it.
Second, hate crimes are added on to other charges because hate crimes are actually a seperate crime. If you were driving drunk with a black friend in the car and crashed it's different than if you went and lynched someone. In the second case, you not only wanted to hurt the person directly involved but you wanted to send a message of intimidation to people like them.
You're conflating pre-meditation with hate. The drunk driving case doesn't involve intent to kill your black friend in the car. The comparison you want is lynching someone because you don't like him as an individual, vs. lynching someone you've never met before just because he's black. The former is a murder. The latter is murder + a hate crime.
The thing most people (including your example) are dancing around is that hate crimes are inherently unfair. That doesn't automatically mean they're a bad thing. I mean that, like affirmative action, they treat people in identical circumstances differently in order to focus corrective action against a pervasive undesirable bias. Blacks are discriminated against more as a race, so from a purely systems engineering perspective punishing that pervasive bias more harshly results in a quicker equalization of the system even though it is temporarily unfair.
The best example I can think of is right after Obama was elected as President. Some bookstore had set up a display on books about monkeys and chipms, and someone had slipped Obama's biography into it. This was soundly criticized as racist and discriminatory by... the very same people who had been gleefully referring to Bush as "Chimp" for years. Why is it ok to refer to Bush as a chimp, but not ok to refer to Obama as a chimp?
Neither is an acceptable thing to do. It's a double standard - just accept and admit that. But like affirmative action, it's a double standard we've adopted to try to hasten the process of equalizing and eliminating a pre-existing social bias. We're doing a little evil to achieve a greater good. We're destroying a village to help save a nation. Philosophically these sorts of situations do come up. You can either be an idealistic absolutist and demand that no biases exist period, or you can be a flexible pragmatist and accept a smaller injustice to help right a greater wrong. What you cannot be is an absolutist only when it conveniences you, and a pragmatist at other times.
I have a Nexus pass (expedited crossing at US/Canada borders), which according TFA also qualifies me for Precheck. I got it when I used to cross the border to work in Canada. I wasn't happy about the requirements, but it was pretty much necessary for me to avoid multi-hour waits at the border lines.
Getting the pass required disclosing/documenting all my international travel for a certain number of years (don't remember how many), my work and residence history, list of family members, I think a list of my bank accounts, list of vehicles I own/drive, all 10 fingerprints, and a ~20 min interview with a CBP agent. I also traveled by air frequently enough that I got the air travel option, which required adding my iris scans to their central database (at least I assume they're iris scans - they could've been retina scans). The application fee covers the work needed to process all this and (I assume) run their own background check to verify the info you submit.
In exchange for selling my soul to the government, I got through the border in 5-15 minutes. At the major airports I can skip the regular immigration lines, and take the automated Nexus/Global Entry lanes which typically have no line. You scan your card into a machine, which takes pictures of your eyes and compares to what they have on file, then spits out a card saying you're legit. You then give this card to a Customs agent who typically waves you through. They whole point of the program is to pre-screen you to determine if you're a low-risk traveler, then not have to waste time scrutinizing you as closely every time you cross the border.
It is ridiculously easy to lose this pass. There were horror stories of people losing it for trivial things like failing to declare to Customs that they had an eaten apple core in a bag they were using for garbage in their car. In theory you're allowed to appeal if you lose it, but nobody had ever heard of an appeal succeeding. And once you lose the pass, you are banned from the program for life.
So no, it's not as simple as just paying $100. For the typical slashdotter, I think the fingerprint and iris scans would be dissuasive enough.
While a customs agent can send you to the more thorough search if he's suspicious of anything (how the guy trying to carry out the millenium bombing in the US was caught), they're usually random searches. I crossed the border every day to get to work in Canada for about 3 years. Usually I got through with a quick look at my passport and a wave through. But about once every couple months I'd be diverted to the more in-depth search. That was usually a 30-45 min search - double-check all my papers, search my car, search my bag. Entering the U.S. was a breeze by comparison, probably because I'm a U.S. citizen. My Canadian friends reported the reverse - for them, entering Canada was easy but entering the U.S. was a pain.
I used to keep all sorts of junk in my car - maps, gas receipts, housing development floorplans (I was house shopping at the time), printed emails with driving directions, emergency and first aid kits, a bunch of miscellaneous computer equipment and cables if a friend needed a quick fix, tennis and badminton rackets and balls/birdies, even some magazines I'd never removed after a move. The first time I was diverted to the in-depth search, the agent went through everything. Every paper, every map, every magazine, every flap of the first aid kit, every receipt, unzipped the rackets, opened the ball/birdie cans and took them all out, etc. That inspection took over an hour and after I got home I took everything out of the car which wasn't absolutely necessary.
They only searched my laptop once, but it was cursory (I was just asked to turn it on and login, basically verifying that it was a functional laptop which belonged to me). Although I was entering on a work permit as a software engineer, so they may have given the laptop less scrutiny figuring it was a work tool.
"I don't sell my software for profit, I contribute it to the community." but instead insist on adding, "And I think that's what you should do, also."
I disagree with RMS on lots of things, but that's not how it works at all. I'm all for selling software. Most people sell it for money. GNU FOSS folks sell it for the rights to derivative works being put under the same license. It's not "And I think that's what you should do, also." It's "And if you want to incorporate my software into yours, the price is going to be that you have to release your software under the same license as mine."
There's nothing inherently wrong or unfair about this. It's their software. You don't have to use it. If you don't like the idea of releasing your derivative software under a GNU license, then don't use GNU software. It's as simple as that. Go buy a commercial library which does the same thing and pay whatever licensing fees they ask. Don't like that? Then hire someone to write an equivalent library for you. Still too much? Then write it yourself. Can't be bothered to do that? Well the answer isn't to take GNU FOSS and incorporate it into your software without following their license requirements. That's the same as pirating commercial libraries and incorporating it into your software without paying.
Remember, nobody is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to incorporate GNU software into your project. Yeah they let you use their software for free (as in beer) if you don't plan to make any derivative works. So what? Just because they have one set of terms for end-users doesn't mean they can't have different terms for redistribution use. Pay software does the same thing. If you just want to use it as a user, there's one price. If you want to incorporate it into your own software product, you'll have to negotiate a completely different licensing fee. Or do you think you can buy a single copy of Photoshop off the shelf, incorporate it into your "deluxe artist's software pack," and sell that for $50 each?
Samsung really did make their product look identical to Apple's, whether it was on purpose or not.
Actually I think Samsung's tablet design is a copy of the digital picture frame they released in 2006. Given that was released nearly 4 years before the iPad, if anything I'd say Apple copied Samsung's design. Apple is just safe in that regard because tablets and digital photo frames aren't really competitors. But there's something seriously wrong if Apple can copy Samsung's picture frame design for use on an Apple tablet, then sue Samsung for using their own design on their own tablet.
If one of these plants has a serious accident, it could harm millions of people. [...] There is no other energy source that can create problems on such scale in such a short time.
Obviously you haven't looked at the statistics on coal. It's estimated to kill about a million people a year worldwide. But since the deaths are distributed and not attributable to a single accident, people's emotional reasoning considers it safe.
Yes worst-case scenarios do have to be considered. But for some reason they seem to be considered only for nuclear. If we considered them equally for other power technologies, hydro would be regarded as the most dangerous power source, and we'd subject it to more scrutiny and safeguards than nuclear. And worst-case scenarios need to be considered in perspective. If you over-emphasis them, you come to irrationally fear flying and drive instead, even though statistically you are much more likely to die from driving.
In terms of people killed on average, nuclear is the safest technology. In terms of worst-case scenarios, nuclear is not the worst. And in fact our current most-popular technology is worse than the nuclear worst-case. What exactly is the problem?
Look at Japan, where they considered evacuating Tokyo last year. They didn't make this public until recently, but think about that. What if they had to leave Tokyo and stay out for the next 50 years?
Of course they were considering evacuating Tokyo. Considering it is the responsible thing to do. That doesn't mean the scenario is realistic, it just means that the people in charge (government officials) didn't have the background to answer the question, and did the responsible thing and were advised by those who could answer it. Nagasaki and Hiroshima each had an uncontained nuke go off directly above them. They were never abandoned, and both are thriving cities today. There is being cautious about worst-case scenarios (e.g. don't build a nuclear plant near Tokyo). And there is making up reckless and unrealistic sky is falling scenarios to fit your desired conclusion.
I think this is spot-on. We already went through it when PDAs converged with phones to make smartphones. The technophiles sneered at the early smartphones, pointing to everything we could do with our PDAs. In retrospect it was obvious the two would converge (similar size, similar capability, and at the end of the day they are both small computers).
The same thing is happening now with tablets. The public is buying them up in droves, while the technophiles sneer at them as lacking the full functionality of a laptop. I use a wireless mouse with my laptop, and frequently a wireless keyboard. Between better displays showing up on tablets first and SSDs replacing HDDs on laptops which are getting thinner and thinner, it's pretty obvious to me the laptop and tablet are going to converge. You can tote along a wireless keyboard for your tablet if you want the full laptop experience.
I don't particularly want them to converge, especially with the walled garden approach to apps being pushed by both Apple and Google. But it looks inevitable to me. Looking to the future, the phone and tablet/laptop are going to converge too. The tablet will be relegated to just a display, while the processing and storage will be on your phone. Carry your phone for computing, bring along a bigger screen for tablet mode, add a wireless keyboard for laptop mode, and a wireless mouse for desktop mode. Either that or storage will move to the cloud (another thing technophiles sneer at) and it won't matter what device you use.
The problem is, each turbine requires regular maintenance during its 20-year lifespan, with a requirement of one turbine technician for every 10 turbines on the ground.
This is the dirty little secret of the wind industry everyone seems to ignore when talking about it as an energy source with little to no down sides. More people have been killed in the U.S. maintaining wind turbines (or climbing improperly secured maintenance ladders) than in its entire history of nuclear power generation. This despite nuclear providing about 20% of our electricity while wind was below 1% for most of that time (it's up to 2.3% in 2010). If we extrapolated wind's fatality rate to the 45% of U.S. electricity provided by coal (1847 of 4125 TWh in 2010), it would work out to over 250 wind-related deaths per year.
Currently, wind is the second-best renewable energy source (after hydro), with cost per kWh within striking distance of that of coal and nuclear (less than twice the cost). But its proponents have got to stop advocating it with rose-colored glasses, and start addressing some of its real problems. This is the reason marketers make terrible engineers - they prefer to ignore and gloss over the problems rather than fix them. Right now, wind is doing what fossil fuels do - reducing their operating costs by offloading risk and damage onto others (mainly their workers). They need to pay these turbine maintenance guys better for the higher risk, provide more robust safety training, and develop and install more safety systems.
The FCC needed to stop this over a decade ago. Carriers should be required to treat this as a loan (they already check your credit for service anyway). If you pay $200 for a $600 phone, that's a $400 loan. Over a 2-year contract, the principal + interest should work out to an extra $20/mo or so on your bill. This should appear on your monthly bill as a separate loan repayment item. Once your loan is repaid, the item disappears from your bill.
This also solves the thorny issue of early termination fees and requirement for a contract. But the carriers call it a subsidy and hide it into your regular service charges specifically so (1) they'll have an excuse to put you on a multi-year contract when really service should be month-to-month like with my gas or electric bill, and (2) they're making free money once your subsidy has been paid off but they still bill you at the subsidy-repayment rate.
He's not "kicking back" doing this. He's always been a deep sea aficionado. Before Titanic, he directed The Abyss. Rather than going the easy route by using sets and pretending everything was going on underwater, he actually filmed it underwater. In a way, I think filming Titanic was just an excuse for him to play around with submersibles and visit the actual resting place of the Titanic. I mean he didn't have to use real footage of the Titanic in his film - a model or CGI or footage of a different wreck would've sufficed. But he insisted on using real footage, and it was the first part of the movie he shot.
While his film-making endeavors haven't directly helped deep ocean science, it hasn't been without merit. His movies have contributed greatly to awareness (his movies have educated more people about the effects of deep ocean diving on the body than any classroom), often serving as inspiration for students to pursue the field as a career. And the cameras, lights, and housings he's had to develop to film at depth are directly transferable to the cameras and lights used aboard scientific submersibles.
It's been over a decade since I worked on this stuff. I had to look up the formula again. The stress inside a spherical shell in compression is equal to the (pressure x diameter) / (4 x thickness).
The diameter term on top means that your multi-shell design will actually use more metal than simply making a single metal sphere thick enough to withstand the target pressure. Essentially, the optimized form of your multi-shell design is one in which each sphere fits perfectly inside the next, and there is no water in between - i.e. a single solid sphere. If you have to make the outer spheres bigger to allow some water in between, that increases required diameter, which also increases the required thickness, both of which increases the amount of metal required.
Also, these things are not pretty when they implode. Yes your multi-shell design spreads out the risk from implosion by breaking up the pressure gradient into multiple parts. But the energy released by an implosion is pressure x volume. So since your design (assuming the same interior passenger volume as a single solid sphere) requires a larger outermost sphere than a single-sphere design, it's actually holding back a greater amount of potential implosion energy. You'd think multiple smaller shells would be easier to manufacture. But bear in mind that they have to be contained one inside the other, making manufacturing, inspection, and testing more difficult. You'll also need valves and fittings on each sphere, increasing the likelihood of an implosion in one sphere causing a cascade failure in other spheres.
In this particular case, I think the KISS principle wins out. Just make it a single sphere. If you need it to withstand a higher pressure, make that sphere thicker. It's easier to build, easier to inspect for flaws, and there are fewer points of failure.
However, to be fair to your stated point, the iPad line really is the first time that Apple has made an inexpensive product relative to the market. Pre-iPad, tablet PCs were slabs that were more expensive than laptops, typically starting in the $1500-2000 range. The iPad came out far cheaper than any competitor could have hoped to (due to price lock-ins from suppliers as prices were increasing), and pulled off a good form factor. Things have normalized more nowadays, but Apple actually had an undercutting product.
There's a simple explanation for that. Intel and Microsoft had a lock-grip on the PC market. They actively tried to steer the market away from any personal computing device which didn't use an expensive Intel CPU or couldn't run some version of Windows. When manufacturers were trying to design tablets, Wintel actively steered them towards PCs which ran full Windows on mainstream Intel CPUs. Combine that with the requirement for a digitizer and swivel screen, and you ended up with the tablet PC costing more than a laptop. (I recognized what was going on, and simply bought my tablet PCs after they'd been on the market for about 2 years, for around $400.)
This was why netbooks took off like wildfire when they were first introduced. They were priced substantially lower than a Wintel laptop, used one of Intel's lowest-priced CPUs, and ran Linux rather than Windows. The price was about $300 and frequently flirted with sub-$200. The general public wanted small, simple, and cheap, and the netbook delivered. It was Intel's and Microsoft's worst nightmare. Their conspiracy to force low-end portable buyers into paying for mainstream Intel CPUs and a full-blown license for Windows was thwarted. Intel quickly came out with Atom CPUs, and Microsoft created the cheaper Windows Starter. Those successfully reverted this new class of PCs to mainstream Wintel control, and the next few years saw their specs creeping upwards, rather than holding steady with technology improvements going into decreasing the price. By 2010, "netbooks" were no longer simple, super-cheap computing platforms which could only do a limited number of tasks but could do them very well. They had morphed into small laptops, and were priced accordingly.
Then Apple came along and introduced a new type of PC which didn't use Intel nor Windows, was simple to use, and was slow but had limited functionality so the slowness didn't hurt it. Despite losing the keyboard, hard drive, and most of the ports while only gaining a touch-sensitive screen, the price was actually higher than netbooks. So it's not really true that Apple had an undercutting product. Their $500 tablet partly succeeded because Microsoft's and Intel's efforts had turned netbooks into mini-Windows laptops with inferior screens and a complex OS costing $300-$500 (a large portion of that cost going to the Intel CPU and Windows OS). If netbooks had remained simple computers running Linux with only simple functionality, they probably would've been sub-$200 by the time the iPad was released. I doubt the iPad would have been anywhere near as successful as it was if it had been competing with $100-$200 netbooks..
Anyway, that's the real market analogue you should be comparing. Netbook iPad, not Tablet PC iPad. The people buying tablet PCs for the most part weren't the people who switched to iPads. The people buying netbooks were the ones who switched to iPads.
Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle
on
The eBook Backlash
·
· Score: 2
Backlights are absolutely not a problem if you have them set properly. If you set them so their brightest white is no brighter than any other white object in the room, it's impossible to tell that it's actually backlit, and there's no eyestrain.
What causes eyestrain is setting the backlight too bright indoors, or the backlight being unable to compete with the brightness of sunlight outdoors. Outdoors, the transreflective displays I've used were easy to read in sunlight. Indoors, people have somehow been sold the notion that brighter = better. No it's not. Set the brightness to match the ambient lighting and your screen can be indistinguishable from a piece of paper.
You've probably seen this already with LED billboards along the freeway. When they're set too bright, they hurt your eyes, especially at night. But if their brightness is set just right, they're indistinguishable from a regular printed billboard. Until the picture moves.
Doesn't really matter. If half its mass ablated away, a rock 50m in diameter would be 40m in diameter at impact. 0.5^(1/3) = 0.7937, or half the mass = 79.4% the original diameter.
The asteroid which made Meteor Crater in Arizona is estimated to have been about 50 meters across. About half of it is thought to have burned up before impact.
As TFA says, "more than half of the $45.8 million, about $25 million, would be spent to replace the districtâ(TM)s computers â" both laptops and desktops.". So that comes down to 1520/student.
Is that really the right metric? The quote you cite doesn't state those computers are necessarily for student use. The TFA lists it as: "Replacing 8,142 of the district's approximately 8,250 computers." So it sounds like the $25 million is going to replace nearly all of the computers the administration uses at an average cost of $3070 each.
Seems like it would require an awful lot of force just to float a small house.
People's intuition often fails them when it comes to pressure (hydraulic or air). Yes it requires a lot of force to raise a house, but the beauty of using a pressure instead is that you divide that force by an area. P = F/A.
e.g. an M1A2 tank weighs 61,000 kg, which is 9.81 m/s^2 * 61000 = 598410 Newtons.
Its wheelbase is approximately 3.5x7 meters = 24.5 m^2
If you drove it on top of one of these devices, the air pressure you'd need to lift it is:
598410 N / 24.5 m^2 = only 24,400 Pascal
which in English units is a mere 3.5 psi
Pressure is basically the 2-dimensional analogue to the 1-dimensional lever. You greatly reduce the forces needed in exchange for increasing the amount of movement required. In this case, you need to be able to quickly pump a large amount of air at a relatively small pressure to replace pressurized air which is lost around the edges of the two plates.
Cloud services are great for hundreds of thousands of small businesses which are big enough to need centralized computing and file-storage services, but not big enough to have full-time IT staff to support it. You basically outsource your email server support to Google, your file server maintenance to Amazon, etc. and pay by the account or GB. The analogy to the mainframe/dummy terminal doesn't work for these companies because back in the day they never could've afforded a mainframe much less an IT staff to maintain it. That's what the cloud does - it takes something which used to only be accessible to larger businesses, and puts it within reach of smaller businesses by eliminating the need for equipment and IT staff to be physically located at the small business.
A better analogy is back when PBXs (phone switching equipment) used to cost tens of thousands of dollars making it a huge expense for a company with just 3-5 employees. Then some phone company got the bright idea of selling the company multiple phone lines with a virtualized PBX. The PBX equipment would stay at the phone company, but the small company could get PBX-like features for about $20/mo extra per line.
Yeah, the summary left out these key points in TFA:
When participants were manipulated into thinking of themselves as belonging to a higher class than they did, the poorer ones, too, began to behave unethically.
In another test, participants were asked to list several benefits of greed; they were given the example that greed can help further one's professional goals, then asked to come up with three additional benefits. Again, lower-class subjects whose attitudes toward greed had been nudged in this way became just as likely as their wealthier counterparts to sympathize with dishonest behavior (taking home office supplies, laying off employees while increasing their own bonuses, overcharging customers to drive up profits).
So the real take-home point from all this is not that wealthier people are more dishonest as the summary phrases it. It's that people tend to become more dishonest when they become wealthier. i.e. The rich guy didn't become rich because he's an asshole. He's an asshole because he became rich. And if you became rich, you'd probably become an asshole too.
People who only know a little telecom think every copper line is a home run to the CO. People who worked in telecom know that 20 years ago SLC market penetration was at least 1 in 10 residential lines, and now, I would not be surprised if the majority of copper lines are run to a SLC.
It does depend on your neighborhood. If there's a homeless panhandler on the sidewalk, thats urban and probably 100 years old and you probably have copper homerun, unless its a "factory to condo conversion" and the telco put a SLC in. If its a "1950s baby boomer house" like mine then its 50/50 and in fact mine is on a SLC (which was a nightmare to get DSL back in ye olden DSL era). If its a modern mcmansion I guarantee the LEC installed a SLC, they're not going to home run copper all they way from each house to the CO.
It's a bit different in the U.S. due to the government granting local phone monopolies. Competition matters more than how old/rich the area is. In the areas where there's no competing cable service (e.g. where I work), it's obvious all the phone runs are copper to the CO because the best ADSL speeds you can buy are 1.5 Mbps down / 384 kbps up. But because there's no competition, the phone company charges $50/mo for that 1.5 Mbps. It's been like this for 10 years so it's pretty obvious they're just absorbing the extra money as profit with zero put into improving the phone lines (if anything they've been getting worse - we frequently lose service when it rains).
Contrast this with my home which has one phone company providing both DSL and fiber, and two cable companies. For $50/mo, I get 50 Mbps down / 15 Mbps up over fiber.
Slashdot Mirror
A sound mastering engineer says to avoid MP3 and use FLAC. He says this because in his line of work (mixing and editing), the errors due to MP3 compression would accumulate and grow with each edit and mix. So yes a sound engineer wants to work in a non-lossy format.
The problem is a bunch of music listeners read this, don't really understand the details, but conclude that they too must need FLAC for music playback. After all if a sound engineer says he needs it, then I must need it too, right? No you don't. 99.9% of people can't tell the difference between FLAC and a good quality MP3 unless you're doing blind A/B tests (allow them to switch between the two to compare), and even then the difference is slight. If you're just listening to a song, it's not enough to matter.
Do your editing and mixing, and save your final mixes in a non-lossy format. But for saving on a portable music player, convert it to a lossy format at a good bitrate. Same thing for photos - process them and store them in a non-lossy format. But for uploading to the web, convert them to JPEG as the final step.
"Slightly rotting" is how meat is best prepared.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging_(meat)
So you said you were offended at being asked how you were going to vote, and told him anyway? You let your emotion and righteous indignation override your sensibility, and gave him exactly the info he wanted when he called you.
The iocane powder routine from The Princess Bride only works when there's plausible deniability. You have to refuse to confirm or deny. The U.S. Navy has this policy regarding nuclear weapons carried aboard its ships - they will neither confirm nor deny if a ship carries such weapons. If they only refused to confirm which ships carried nuclear weapons, you could ask them about a bunch of ships. No nukes, no nukes, no nukes, no comment, no nukes. i.e. Same thing as a confirmation.
And with so many calls, has there been any attempt to cross-reference them with phone logs to try to figure out where the calls originated from?
Tossing $20 and 1789 into an inflation calculator (which only goes back to 1800) comes out to about $250 in 2010. Most people's annual Netflix subscriptions fall below that, and one could argue that it's the monthly fee which has to fall below $250 since you can cancel the service any month if you're unhappy with it.
You're conflating pre-meditation with hate. The drunk driving case doesn't involve intent to kill your black friend in the car. The comparison you want is lynching someone because you don't like him as an individual, vs. lynching someone you've never met before just because he's black. The former is a murder. The latter is murder + a hate crime.
The thing most people (including your example) are dancing around is that hate crimes are inherently unfair. That doesn't automatically mean they're a bad thing. I mean that, like affirmative action, they treat people in identical circumstances differently in order to focus corrective action against a pervasive undesirable bias. Blacks are discriminated against more as a race, so from a purely systems engineering perspective punishing that pervasive bias more harshly results in a quicker equalization of the system even though it is temporarily unfair.
The best example I can think of is right after Obama was elected as President. Some bookstore had set up a display on books about monkeys and chipms, and someone had slipped Obama's biography into it. This was soundly criticized as racist and discriminatory by... the very same people who had been gleefully referring to Bush as "Chimp" for years. Why is it ok to refer to Bush as a chimp, but not ok to refer to Obama as a chimp?
Neither is an acceptable thing to do. It's a double standard - just accept and admit that. But like affirmative action, it's a double standard we've adopted to try to hasten the process of equalizing and eliminating a pre-existing social bias. We're doing a little evil to achieve a greater good. We're destroying a village to help save a nation. Philosophically these sorts of situations do come up. You can either be an idealistic absolutist and demand that no biases exist period, or you can be a flexible pragmatist and accept a smaller injustice to help right a greater wrong. What you cannot be is an absolutist only when it conveniences you, and a pragmatist at other times.
I have a Nexus pass (expedited crossing at US/Canada borders), which according TFA also qualifies me for Precheck. I got it when I used to cross the border to work in Canada. I wasn't happy about the requirements, but it was pretty much necessary for me to avoid multi-hour waits at the border lines.
Getting the pass required disclosing/documenting all my international travel for a certain number of years (don't remember how many), my work and residence history, list of family members, I think a list of my bank accounts, list of vehicles I own/drive, all 10 fingerprints, and a ~20 min interview with a CBP agent. I also traveled by air frequently enough that I got the air travel option, which required adding my iris scans to their central database (at least I assume they're iris scans - they could've been retina scans). The application fee covers the work needed to process all this and (I assume) run their own background check to verify the info you submit.
In exchange for selling my soul to the government, I got through the border in 5-15 minutes. At the major airports I can skip the regular immigration lines, and take the automated Nexus/Global Entry lanes which typically have no line. You scan your card into a machine, which takes pictures of your eyes and compares to what they have on file, then spits out a card saying you're legit. You then give this card to a Customs agent who typically waves you through. They whole point of the program is to pre-screen you to determine if you're a low-risk traveler, then not have to waste time scrutinizing you as closely every time you cross the border.
It is ridiculously easy to lose this pass. There were horror stories of people losing it for trivial things like failing to declare to Customs that they had an eaten apple core in a bag they were using for garbage in their car. In theory you're allowed to appeal if you lose it, but nobody had ever heard of an appeal succeeding. And once you lose the pass, you are banned from the program for life.
So no, it's not as simple as just paying $100. For the typical slashdotter, I think the fingerprint and iris scans would be dissuasive enough.
While a customs agent can send you to the more thorough search if he's suspicious of anything (how the guy trying to carry out the millenium bombing in the US was caught), they're usually random searches. I crossed the border every day to get to work in Canada for about 3 years. Usually I got through with a quick look at my passport and a wave through. But about once every couple months I'd be diverted to the more in-depth search. That was usually a 30-45 min search - double-check all my papers, search my car, search my bag. Entering the U.S. was a breeze by comparison, probably because I'm a U.S. citizen. My Canadian friends reported the reverse - for them, entering Canada was easy but entering the U.S. was a pain.
I used to keep all sorts of junk in my car - maps, gas receipts, housing development floorplans (I was house shopping at the time), printed emails with driving directions, emergency and first aid kits, a bunch of miscellaneous computer equipment and cables if a friend needed a quick fix, tennis and badminton rackets and balls/birdies, even some magazines I'd never removed after a move. The first time I was diverted to the in-depth search, the agent went through everything. Every paper, every map, every magazine, every flap of the first aid kit, every receipt, unzipped the rackets, opened the ball/birdie cans and took them all out, etc. That inspection took over an hour and after I got home I took everything out of the car which wasn't absolutely necessary.
They only searched my laptop once, but it was cursory (I was just asked to turn it on and login, basically verifying that it was a functional laptop which belonged to me). Although I was entering on a work permit as a software engineer, so they may have given the laptop less scrutiny figuring it was a work tool.
I disagree with RMS on lots of things, but that's not how it works at all. I'm all for selling software. Most people sell it for money. GNU FOSS folks sell it for the rights to derivative works being put under the same license. It's not "And I think that's what you should do, also." It's "And if you want to incorporate my software into yours, the price is going to be that you have to release your software under the same license as mine."
There's nothing inherently wrong or unfair about this. It's their software. You don't have to use it. If you don't like the idea of releasing your derivative software under a GNU license, then don't use GNU software. It's as simple as that. Go buy a commercial library which does the same thing and pay whatever licensing fees they ask. Don't like that? Then hire someone to write an equivalent library for you. Still too much? Then write it yourself. Can't be bothered to do that? Well the answer isn't to take GNU FOSS and incorporate it into your software without following their license requirements. That's the same as pirating commercial libraries and incorporating it into your software without paying.
Remember, nobody is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to incorporate GNU software into your project. Yeah they let you use their software for free (as in beer) if you don't plan to make any derivative works. So what? Just because they have one set of terms for end-users doesn't mean they can't have different terms for redistribution use. Pay software does the same thing. If you just want to use it as a user, there's one price. If you want to incorporate it into your own software product, you'll have to negotiate a completely different licensing fee. Or do you think you can buy a single copy of Photoshop off the shelf, incorporate it into your "deluxe artist's software pack," and sell that for $50 each?
Actually I think Samsung's tablet design is a copy of the digital picture frame they released in 2006. Given that was released nearly 4 years before the iPad, if anything I'd say Apple copied Samsung's design. Apple is just safe in that regard because tablets and digital photo frames aren't really competitors. But there's something seriously wrong if Apple can copy Samsung's picture frame design for use on an Apple tablet, then sue Samsung for using their own design on their own tablet.
Obviously you haven't looked at the statistics on coal. It's estimated to kill about a million people a year worldwide. But since the deaths are distributed and not attributable to a single accident, people's emotional reasoning considers it safe.
Yes worst-case scenarios do have to be considered. But for some reason they seem to be considered only for nuclear. If we considered them equally for other power technologies, hydro would be regarded as the most dangerous power source, and we'd subject it to more scrutiny and safeguards than nuclear. And worst-case scenarios need to be considered in perspective. If you over-emphasis them, you come to irrationally fear flying and drive instead, even though statistically you are much more likely to die from driving.
In terms of people killed on average, nuclear is the safest technology. In terms of worst-case scenarios, nuclear is not the worst. And in fact our current most-popular technology is worse than the nuclear worst-case. What exactly is the problem?
Of course they were considering evacuating Tokyo. Considering it is the responsible thing to do. That doesn't mean the scenario is realistic, it just means that the people in charge (government officials) didn't have the background to answer the question, and did the responsible thing and were advised by those who could answer it. Nagasaki and Hiroshima each had an uncontained nuke go off directly above them. They were never abandoned, and both are thriving cities today. There is being cautious about worst-case scenarios (e.g. don't build a nuclear plant near Tokyo). And there is making up reckless and unrealistic sky is falling scenarios to fit your desired conclusion.
I think this is spot-on. We already went through it when PDAs converged with phones to make smartphones. The technophiles sneered at the early smartphones, pointing to everything we could do with our PDAs. In retrospect it was obvious the two would converge (similar size, similar capability, and at the end of the day they are both small computers).
The same thing is happening now with tablets. The public is buying them up in droves, while the technophiles sneer at them as lacking the full functionality of a laptop. I use a wireless mouse with my laptop, and frequently a wireless keyboard. Between better displays showing up on tablets first and SSDs replacing HDDs on laptops which are getting thinner and thinner, it's pretty obvious to me the laptop and tablet are going to converge. You can tote along a wireless keyboard for your tablet if you want the full laptop experience.
I don't particularly want them to converge, especially with the walled garden approach to apps being pushed by both Apple and Google. But it looks inevitable to me. Looking to the future, the phone and tablet/laptop are going to converge too. The tablet will be relegated to just a display, while the processing and storage will be on your phone. Carry your phone for computing, bring along a bigger screen for tablet mode, add a wireless keyboard for laptop mode, and a wireless mouse for desktop mode. Either that or storage will move to the cloud (another thing technophiles sneer at) and it won't matter what device you use.
This is the dirty little secret of the wind industry everyone seems to ignore when talking about it as an energy source with little to no down sides. More people have been killed in the U.S. maintaining wind turbines (or climbing improperly secured maintenance ladders) than in its entire history of nuclear power generation. This despite nuclear providing about 20% of our electricity while wind was below 1% for most of that time (it's up to 2.3% in 2010). If we extrapolated wind's fatality rate to the 45% of U.S. electricity provided by coal (1847 of 4125 TWh in 2010), it would work out to over 250 wind-related deaths per year.
Currently, wind is the second-best renewable energy source (after hydro), with cost per kWh within striking distance of that of coal and nuclear (less than twice the cost). But its proponents have got to stop advocating it with rose-colored glasses, and start addressing some of its real problems. This is the reason marketers make terrible engineers - they prefer to ignore and gloss over the problems rather than fix them. Right now, wind is doing what fossil fuels do - reducing their operating costs by offloading risk and damage onto others (mainly their workers). They need to pay these turbine maintenance guys better for the higher risk, provide more robust safety training, and develop and install more safety systems.
The FCC needed to stop this over a decade ago. Carriers should be required to treat this as a loan (they already check your credit for service anyway). If you pay $200 for a $600 phone, that's a $400 loan. Over a 2-year contract, the principal + interest should work out to an extra $20/mo or so on your bill. This should appear on your monthly bill as a separate loan repayment item. Once your loan is repaid, the item disappears from your bill.
This also solves the thorny issue of early termination fees and requirement for a contract. But the carriers call it a subsidy and hide it into your regular service charges specifically so (1) they'll have an excuse to put you on a multi-year contract when really service should be month-to-month like with my gas or electric bill, and (2) they're making free money once your subsidy has been paid off but they still bill you at the subsidy-repayment rate.
He's not "kicking back" doing this. He's always been a deep sea aficionado. Before Titanic, he directed The Abyss. Rather than going the easy route by using sets and pretending everything was going on underwater, he actually filmed it underwater. In a way, I think filming Titanic was just an excuse for him to play around with submersibles and visit the actual resting place of the Titanic. I mean he didn't have to use real footage of the Titanic in his film - a model or CGI or footage of a different wreck would've sufficed. But he insisted on using real footage, and it was the first part of the movie he shot.
While his film-making endeavors haven't directly helped deep ocean science, it hasn't been without merit. His movies have contributed greatly to awareness (his movies have educated more people about the effects of deep ocean diving on the body than any classroom), often serving as inspiration for students to pursue the field as a career. And the cameras, lights, and housings he's had to develop to film at depth are directly transferable to the cameras and lights used aboard scientific submersibles.
It's been over a decade since I worked on this stuff. I had to look up the formula again. The stress inside a spherical shell in compression is equal to the (pressure x diameter) / (4 x thickness).
The diameter term on top means that your multi-shell design will actually use more metal than simply making a single metal sphere thick enough to withstand the target pressure. Essentially, the optimized form of your multi-shell design is one in which each sphere fits perfectly inside the next, and there is no water in between - i.e. a single solid sphere. If you have to make the outer spheres bigger to allow some water in between, that increases required diameter, which also increases the required thickness, both of which increases the amount of metal required.
Also, these things are not pretty when they implode. Yes your multi-shell design spreads out the risk from implosion by breaking up the pressure gradient into multiple parts. But the energy released by an implosion is pressure x volume. So since your design (assuming the same interior passenger volume as a single solid sphere) requires a larger outermost sphere than a single-sphere design, it's actually holding back a greater amount of potential implosion energy. You'd think multiple smaller shells would be easier to manufacture. But bear in mind that they have to be contained one inside the other, making manufacturing, inspection, and testing more difficult. You'll also need valves and fittings on each sphere, increasing the likelihood of an implosion in one sphere causing a cascade failure in other spheres.
In this particular case, I think the KISS principle wins out. Just make it a single sphere. If you need it to withstand a higher pressure, make that sphere thicker. It's easier to build, easier to inspect for flaws, and there are fewer points of failure.
There's a simple explanation for that. Intel and Microsoft had a lock-grip on the PC market. They actively tried to steer the market away from any personal computing device which didn't use an expensive Intel CPU or couldn't run some version of Windows. When manufacturers were trying to design tablets, Wintel actively steered them towards PCs which ran full Windows on mainstream Intel CPUs. Combine that with the requirement for a digitizer and swivel screen, and you ended up with the tablet PC costing more than a laptop. (I recognized what was going on, and simply bought my tablet PCs after they'd been on the market for about 2 years, for around $400.)
This was why netbooks took off like wildfire when they were first introduced. They were priced substantially lower than a Wintel laptop, used one of Intel's lowest-priced CPUs, and ran Linux rather than Windows. The price was about $300 and frequently flirted with sub-$200. The general public wanted small, simple, and cheap, and the netbook delivered. It was Intel's and Microsoft's worst nightmare. Their conspiracy to force low-end portable buyers into paying for mainstream Intel CPUs and a full-blown license for Windows was thwarted. Intel quickly came out with Atom CPUs, and Microsoft created the cheaper Windows Starter. Those successfully reverted this new class of PCs to mainstream Wintel control, and the next few years saw their specs creeping upwards, rather than holding steady with technology improvements going into decreasing the price. By 2010, "netbooks" were no longer simple, super-cheap computing platforms which could only do a limited number of tasks but could do them very well. They had morphed into small laptops, and were priced accordingly.
Then Apple came along and introduced a new type of PC which didn't use Intel nor Windows, was simple to use, and was slow but had limited functionality so the slowness didn't hurt it. Despite losing the keyboard, hard drive, and most of the ports while only gaining a touch-sensitive screen, the price was actually higher than netbooks. So it's not really true that Apple had an undercutting product. Their $500 tablet partly succeeded because Microsoft's and Intel's efforts had turned netbooks into mini-Windows laptops with inferior screens and a complex OS costing $300-$500 (a large portion of that cost going to the Intel CPU and Windows OS). If netbooks had remained simple computers running Linux with only simple functionality, they probably would've been sub-$200 by the time the iPad was released. I doubt the iPad would have been anywhere near as successful as it was if it had been competing with $100-$200 netbooks..
Anyway, that's the real market analogue you should be comparing. Netbook iPad, not Tablet PC iPad. The people buying tablet PCs for the most part weren't the people who switched to iPads. The people buying netbooks were the ones who switched to iPads.
Backlights are absolutely not a problem if you have them set properly. If you set them so their brightest white is no brighter than any other white object in the room, it's impossible to tell that it's actually backlit, and there's no eyestrain.
What causes eyestrain is setting the backlight too bright indoors, or the backlight being unable to compete with the brightness of sunlight outdoors. Outdoors, the transreflective displays I've used were easy to read in sunlight. Indoors, people have somehow been sold the notion that brighter = better. No it's not. Set the brightness to match the ambient lighting and your screen can be indistinguishable from a piece of paper.
You've probably seen this already with LED billboards along the freeway. When they're set too bright, they hurt your eyes, especially at night. But if their brightness is set just right, they're indistinguishable from a regular printed billboard. Until the picture moves.
Doesn't really matter. If half its mass ablated away, a rock 50m in diameter would be 40m in diameter at impact. 0.5^(1/3) = 0.7937, or half the mass = 79.4% the original diameter.
The asteroid which made Meteor Crater in Arizona is estimated to have been about 50 meters across. About half of it is thought to have burned up before impact.
Is that really the right metric? The quote you cite doesn't state those computers are necessarily for student use. The TFA lists it as: "Replacing 8,142 of the district's approximately 8,250 computers." So it sounds like the $25 million is going to replace nearly all of the computers the administration uses at an average cost of $3070 each.
People's intuition often fails them when it comes to pressure (hydraulic or air). Yes it requires a lot of force to raise a house, but the beauty of using a pressure instead is that you divide that force by an area. P = F/A.
e.g. an M1A2 tank weighs 61,000 kg, which is 9.81 m/s^2 * 61000 = 598410 Newtons.
Its wheelbase is approximately 3.5x7 meters = 24.5 m^2
If you drove it on top of one of these devices, the air pressure you'd need to lift it is:
598410 N / 24.5 m^2 = only 24,400 Pascal
which in English units is a mere 3.5 psi
Pressure is basically the 2-dimensional analogue to the 1-dimensional lever. You greatly reduce the forces needed in exchange for increasing the amount of movement required. In this case, you need to be able to quickly pump a large amount of air at a relatively small pressure to replace pressurized air which is lost around the edges of the two plates.
Cloud services are great for hundreds of thousands of small businesses which are big enough to need centralized computing and file-storage services, but not big enough to have full-time IT staff to support it. You basically outsource your email server support to Google, your file server maintenance to Amazon, etc. and pay by the account or GB. The analogy to the mainframe/dummy terminal doesn't work for these companies because back in the day they never could've afforded a mainframe much less an IT staff to maintain it. That's what the cloud does - it takes something which used to only be accessible to larger businesses, and puts it within reach of smaller businesses by eliminating the need for equipment and IT staff to be physically located at the small business.
A better analogy is back when PBXs (phone switching equipment) used to cost tens of thousands of dollars making it a huge expense for a company with just 3-5 employees. Then some phone company got the bright idea of selling the company multiple phone lines with a virtualized PBX. The PBX equipment would stay at the phone company, but the small company could get PBX-like features for about $20/mo extra per line.
Not to mention you can accomplish the same thing with a $5 fresnel lens ($3 in bulk quantities).
So the real take-home point from all this is not that wealthier people are more dishonest as the summary phrases it. It's that people tend to become more dishonest when they become wealthier. i.e. The rich guy didn't become rich because he's an asshole. He's an asshole because he became rich. And if you became rich, you'd probably become an asshole too.
It's a bit different in the U.S. due to the government granting local phone monopolies. Competition matters more than how old/rich the area is. In the areas where there's no competing cable service (e.g. where I work), it's obvious all the phone runs are copper to the CO because the best ADSL speeds you can buy are 1.5 Mbps down / 384 kbps up. But because there's no competition, the phone company charges $50/mo for that 1.5 Mbps. It's been like this for 10 years so it's pretty obvious they're just absorbing the extra money as profit with zero put into improving the phone lines (if anything they've been getting worse - we frequently lose service when it rains).
Contrast this with my home which has one phone company providing both DSL and fiber, and two cable companies. For $50/mo, I get 50 Mbps down / 15 Mbps up over fiber.