Agreed. The only thing that's going to replace a keyboard is voice recognition. And that still has a ways to go (needs to understand context). Though for simple messages, I usually resort to the voice recognition on my phone's text messaging app.
There actually is a good reason not to be annoyed by this resolution race. Holograms require about 1500 dots per mm. So an 8192x4096 display would actually be sufficient to generate holograms if you were able to shrink the display down to 5mm x 3mm. I figure in 20-40 years, display technology and GPU technology will have advanced enough to generate real-time holographic displays.
At 3840x2160, the jagged edges of fonts are almost gone. I can still see them but at such a low level that it is almost subconscious. A doubling of resolution should make that all go away PERMANENTLY.
Jagged font edges can be "fixed" by anti-aliasing. Your brain is incredibly good at making up details that aren't there if it helps it make better sense of what it's seeing. So if it sees what looks like the smooth curve of the letter O, then it will see a smooth curve even if it's actually made up of different-brightness dots. The illusion is only broken when other info (non-aliased pixels) makes it obvious that the curve isn't smooth.
If you don't believe anti-aliasing fixes it, then prepare to have your mind blown. Every TV image you've seen has been displayed at non-native resolution. When you watch a 1920x1080 TV, you're actually only seeing about 1890x1060 pixels. For obscure historical reasons, TVs overscan the video image. So if a show is recorded at 1920x1080, the image that's displayed on your 19201080 TV is actually a crop of the center portion of the original image, enlarged to fit the 1920x1080 pixels of your TV screen. That breaks the 1:1 correspondence between image pixels and display pixels. But it's fixed by anti-aliasing. Usually bicubic interpolation, although lately Lanczos has been becoming more popular (it's more processor intensive, but processing power is cheap nowadays). So every TV image you've seen since we moved to digital TVs has had jaggies, they're just hidden from view by good anti-aliasing.
The real problem with modern displays is that the pixels are square. Pixels aren't supposed to be square. They're supposed to represent an infinitesimally small point, so the most accurate representation is a round blob called a point spread function. Brightest (greatest representation of the pixel's color) in the center, with the edges fading out (color info mixing with that of adjacent pixels). This is actually how the old CRT monitors and TVs displayed pixels, which is why you could use them to display any screen resolution.
But modern displays typically use a LCD grid with fixed-sized square pixels. Those squares add nonexistent information to each pixel (the sharp edges and the corners). This extraneous information makes the display appear sharper when displaying perfectly vertical or horizontal lines. But that sharpness is an illusion, and you pay the price in jaggies whenever displaying anything that's not perfectly vertical or horizontal. It also doesn't work when the underlying pixel grid of the image doesn't fall exactly on the physical pixel grid of the monitor. Which is why LCD monitors look fuzzy when displaying a non-native resolution which isn't divided by an integer multiple (which are the only resolutions which maintain the correspondence between image pixel edges and display pixel edges).
Anti-aliasing can help, but it's just a band-aid rather than a real fix. Moving to higher resolutions makes the band-aid less noticeable, and from a technical standpoint may be easier than a true fix (which I'm not sure can even be done with LCDs or even OLEDs). I use a 1080p projector to display a 150" image. And the reason I'm anxious to move up to a 4k projector is that I can actually see the pixel grid. It's easy to zone out and ignore it when watching a movie, but every now and then I notice it and it becomes annoying.
*sigh* Inflation doesn't happen because people think it will happen. It happens because the government is printing too much money. If you double the amount of currency in the system, everyone figures it's worth half what it used to be, so prices double to compensate. Usually, governments resort to this if they're spending more than they're bringing in via tax revenue. Germany did this in the 1930s to try to pay back war debt. Venezuela does it to try to maintain their socialist paradise ("free" services for everyone). A government spending more than it brings in has two options - keep the debt on the books, or print money to pay for it. When a government prints more money, it's basically stealing from its citizens by devaluing the currency. The money a citizen has in his wallet is worth half of what it used to be, and the value of the other half gets transferred to the government in the form of extra currency it has printed. It's a way to tax people without actually needing them to actually hand over the money to a tax collection agency.
What saved Brazil was reforms that got government spending under control. Their new currency may have helped people put more faith in the currency, but it's not what stopped inflation. As Venezuela is finding out. Same thing nearly happened to Greece, except they were on the Euro. So their government over-spending ended up being paid for by other countries using the Euro. Which is why they banded together and gave Greece an ultimatum - adopt spending and economic reforms ("austerity"), or be kicked out of the Eurozone.
Everything that's consumed has to be produced, so productivity is the true fundamental currency of an economy. The money you choose to use is just a representation of that productivity. If you manipulate your monetary currency only to the extent necessary to keep its value more or less constant relative to productivity (what governments do with a fiat currency), then it remains stable, leaving the economy free to operate on its own. But when you start screwing around with your money supply to try to fix other problems (like pay for massive government debt), it shows up as a deviation between your money's value and the value of productivity - the value of your currency changes by a large amount. Basically, manipulating your currency is like changing the markings on a ruler. It may change the number of your measurements (number of Bolivars needed to buy a dozen eggs), but the fundamental distance (productivity needed to raise chickens to produce a dozen eggs) does not change. All you do is create additional overhead as citizens have to spend more time and effort trying to keep track of and compensate for changing currency values (i.e. waste productivity on financial bookkeeping, rather than on producing actual goods and services).
U.S. sanctions have nothing to do with it. A healthy economy is mostly domestic - most trade happens inside the country (U.S. imports + exports are only about 20% of its domestic GDP), so can't really be hurt by foreign sanctions. U.S. sanctions end up hurting Venezuela only because its government has completely crippled its domestic economy with its boneheaded economic policies.
Facebook started to move toward renewable energy when it signed its first contract to buy wind power in 2013, a few years after Google pioneered a new way for corporations to buy renewable energy from utilities. By 2017, Facebook was buying 51% renewable energy for its facilities.
Buying renewable power does nothing. All it does is take renewable power away from another customer.
Before, other customers used x MWh of renewable powers, Facebook used x MWh of coal power.
After, Facebook uses x MWH of renewable power, other customers have to use x MWH of coal power because Facebook bought all the renewable power.
The only way using renewable power makes a difference is if you add new renewable power sources. Install solar panels on your building's roof. Help pay for a new wind farm for the power company. Help fund the construction of a new hydroelectric dam. But if you're not adding new renewable power, all you're doing is taking away renewable power from someone else who was going to buy it anyway.
(The requirement is even stricter. The renewable power you add to power your offices needs to be renewable power which otherwise wouldn't have been added. So adding solar panels to your house to power your new EV only results in a solar-powered EV if you wouldn't have installed the solar panels if you didn't get the EV. If you were planning to install the solar panels anyway, then the EV ends up taking solar power away from your home and other customers. i.e. Without the EV you would've used x kWH of solar power for your home, and 0 kWh of coal power. After you get the EV you use x kWh of solar power for your EV, and another x kWh of coal power for your home. Which is the same thing as the EV being powered entirely by coal.)
These areas have only one ISP because local governments awarded a monopoly, and prohibit competition. These ISPs are not natural monopolies created by the market. There is no invisible hand of the market at work here because government regulation eliminated market forces.
The only areas free of the problem are the ones where government got out of the way and allowed multiple ISPs to compete.
Most flu strains originate in Asia, where there's much more interaction and contact between people and animals. The vast majority of flu strains mutate to jump species (usually from birds to people, sometimes from pigs). So the place where that's most likely to happen is where large numbers of people are still farmers raising animals in close quarters - i.e. the more densely populated regions of Asia.
In the five years since launch, GTA V and GTA Online gamers have listened to more than an estimated 75 billion minutes of music from the game's 18 radio stations
Why'd they stop at minutes? They could've made the metric sound even more fantastic by listing it as "4.5 trillion seconds of music."
For comparison:
GTA V's 75 billion minutes = 1.25 billion hours. Divide by 5 years and you get 0.25 billion hours per year on average.
There are two ways to build a radio telescope. One is to maximize its size by creating an interferometer. This is done by mounting two or more radio dishes as far apart as possible, then synchronizing the signals they receive. That gives you the resolving power of a radio dish as large as the separation of the dishes. In other words, you get a radio telescope able to resolve extremely fine detail at radio wavelengths.
The other is to maximize surface area. A circle actually has the smallest diameter for a given area, so this gives you the minimum resolving power. But the large surface area maximizes sensitivity - it can pick out especially faint signals. So for this radio telescope to effectively leverage its strength, its surroundings need to be very quiet at radio frequencies.
In areas with seasons like Japan, wind turbines introduce the risk of ice throws. The danger zone works out to about 350 meters in radius. Most countries have opted for exclusion zones around 500 meters just to be safe. You're not allowed to approach closer to a wind turbine than this unless you're a maintenance worker. So the land around a wind turbine is for all practical purposes uninhabitable by humans. For a given amount of average MW generated, the area of this mandated exclusion zone for wind farms far exceeds the evacuation zone caused by the Fukushima accident. The exclusion zones are usually retained outside of winter due to the danger of blade throws (they have come apart before), and to get people used to the idea of not getting to close to spinning wind turbines. You can reduce the size of the exclusion zone by putting turbines closer together, but it's still far worse than nuclear.
The Fukushima plant had a nominal production capacity of 4696 MW. Multiplied by nuclear's average 90% capacity factor and that's 4226 MW average for the year. It currently has a 371 km^2 evacuation zone. So the evacuation zone (which is by no means permanent, nor likely to be permanent) works out to 0.088 km^2 per MW average.
The largest wind farm in Europe is Whitelee Wind farm in Scotland. It has a nominal generating capacity of 539 MW. Onshore wind typically has a 20%-25% capacity factor, but Scotland's winds are strong and consistent, yielding an average capacity factor around 40%. So that's 215.6 MW average for the year. The farm covers 55 km^2 in a 13x8 km rectangle. Add a half km exclusion zone around the periphery and you get a total area of 76 km^2. So its exclusion zone works out to 0.353 km^2 per MW on average.
So MW for MW, just the regular operation of the largest wind farm in Europe renders about 4x as much land uninhabitable as the second-worst nuclear accident in history. Hydroelectric dams create a lake behind them, rendering that land uninhabitable. Itaipu dam has a 1350 km^2 reservoir. It generates 91.6 TWh annually, which works out to 10449 MW on average, for an uninhabitable area of 0.129 km^2 per MW average. Solar (pretty much the most expensive power source) actually fares well by this metric. At 125 W/m^2 and a 15% capacity factor, it weighs in at a featherweight 0.053 km^2 per MW on average.
But wait, we looked at pretty much the worst case for nuclear, while looking at average or better-than-average cases for other technologies. What happens if you look at nuclear on average? After all, the vast majority of nuclear plants have operated safely for decades. The world's nuclear capaicty is 351 GW. The evacuation zones around Fukushima (371 km^2) and Chernobyl (2600 km^2) work out to 2971 km^2. So the average land area rendered uninhabitable by nuclear works out to 0.008 km^2 per MW on average.
353 km^2 per GW - wind
129 km^2 per GW - hydro
53 km^2 per GW - solar
8 km^2 per GW - nuclear
In other words, nuclear is the technology which renders the least amount of land uninhabitable per MW generated. If you replaced all nuclear power capacity with solar, you'd render 6.6x as much land area as Fukushima + Chernobyl uninhabitable (though I suppose you could be sure to mount all those panels on top of buildings). Hydro would render 16x as much land uninhabitable by converting it into reservoirs. And wind about 44x as much land area uninhabitable (about 80x for a more typical wind far than Whitelee due to lower capacity factor) as a safety zone around the turbines.
Per MWh of power generated, wind is actually more dangerous than nuclear. The month of the Great Tokoku Earthquake, a high school student in Ohio was killed when he climbed and fell off a wind turbine at his school which had been improperly locked up. So the month of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, wind power actually killed more people than nuclear power.
The deaths due to wind (and solar) just fly under the news radar because their power production is so small compared to other energy sources. But if we're going to scale them up to provide double digit percentages of our power, their industries really need to address the high fatality rate. The problem with sparse power sources like wind and solar is that you need a lot more infrastructure to generate the same amount of power as concentrated sources like nuclear. So it requires a lot more manpower to maintain (with a corresponding higher risk to maintenance workers), and it's much more difficult to keep all that infrastructure secure against thrill seekers who might get themselves killed. Everyone is paranoid about something going wrong at a nuclear plant, so those are guarded with almost military-grade security. Not so for the wind turbine in Ohio, which some teacher or custodian probably forgot to padlock.
That said, nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro are far, far safer than fossil fuels.
While more people are killed by guns (intentional homicide, not suicide) in the U.S. than in Western Europe, the number of gun fatalities is relatively small compared to other causes. The annual death rate for various causes (Table 7, p 35-36) works out to:
258.9 per 100,000 - Heart disease
185.4 per 100,000 - Malignant neoplasms (cancer)
48.2 per 100,000 - Chronic lower respiratory diseases
45.6 per 100,000 - Accidents (unintentional injuries)
Breaks down to 14.8 for poison and drug overdoses, 11.7 for motor vehicle accidents, 10.4 for falls
43.7 per 100,000 - Cerebrovascular diseases (stroke)
34.4 per 100,000 - Alzheimerâ(TM)s disease
24.7 per 100,000 - Diabetes mellitus (diabetes)
17.8 per 100,000 - Influenza and pneumonia
15.5 per 100,000 - Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis (kidney disease)
13.7 per 100,000 - Intentional self-harm (suicide)
12.7 per 100,000 - Septicemia
12.5 per 100,000 - Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis
Breaks down to 6.5 for alcoholic liver disease
10.0 per 100,000 - Essential hypertension and hypertensive renal disease(hypertension)
8.7 per 100,000 - Parkinsonâ(TM)s disease
6.2 per 100,000 - Pneumonitis due to solids and liquids
5.5 per 100,00 - Assault (homicide)
Breaks down to 4.0 for homicide by gun
So being killed (murdered) by gun is pretty far down the list. 4.0 per 100,000 works out to a 1 in 25,000 chance of being murdered by gun in any given year Any of the above causes are more likely to kill you.
I assume you've replaced games with some other form of entertainment. Could be TV or movies, or going to concerts, or playing ball with your kids, or gambling, or reading and responding on slashdot. Or if you're one of a lucky few, it could be your side projects if you find doing those things relaxing. (Only a small percentage of people fit into this last category, as the vast majority of relaxing activities are productivity-consuming rather than productivity-generating. So it serves no purpose for these lucky people to lecture everyone else on how they should spend their free time, since the things they find relaxing, other people just find to be stressful work. One of my millionaire friends is that rich because he finds it relaxing to read and learn about better ways to run a company, and applying what he reads to his company. His wife has to constantly pull laptops, tablets, and phones out of his hands when they go on vacation, because he finds reading that stuff more fun and relaxing than vacation.)
Entertainment helps to relieve stress, making your work hours more productive than if you did nothing but work, eat, and sleep. So the time and money spent on entertainment can be worth it. Entertainment only becomes a problem when you become so obsessed with it, it begins to detract from your ability to be productive at work.
So games can be beneficial if they function as stress-relieving entertainment, but only if they're played in moderation. I figured this out when I decided I was playing too many games and quit cold turkey. A month later I evaluated my progress, and found that the time I used to spend playing games, I was now spending on other "time-wasting" activities. I needed to relieve my work-related stress some other way if it wasn't via gaming.
Since I enjoyed gaming more than the other replacement activities, I went back to gaming. But I kept a mindful eye on how much I was enjoying the game. Most of the MMORPGs I played got dropped, because they typically required dozens or hundreds of hours of boring grinding, just so your character could be capable of participating in a few hours of excitement (raiding, or dungeon delving). They got replaced with RPGs which focused on campaigns, since those are tuned so your progress through the campaign levels your character appropriately without you having to waste time grinding. So the games I play now aren't black holes designed to suck up as much of my time as possible in exchange for as little progress as possible. They're like interactive movies, which if paced well with a good plot are enormously entertaining without sucking up more of my time than needed to tell the story.
The problem is trying to use a plain string of numbers and/or characters as an ID. That basically forces you to transmit the ID in cleartext any time you use it, so anyone can pretend to be you by copying it (SSN) or requesting the number be transferred to a new device (phone number). What's needed is some type of encrypted challenge-response as a form of ID. With two-factor encryption, this would be
A challenge sent to you encrypted with the challenger's private key and your advertised public key.
You look up the public key of who the challenger claims they are, and use that and your private key to decrypt the challenge. This guarantees the challenge was really sent by the challenger (since only someone with the challenger's private key could make it decryptable with their public key), and is intended for you (since anything encrypted with your public key is only decryptable by you).
You answer the challenge, encrypt your answer with the challenger's public key and your private key, then send your response back.
That response can then only be decrypted by the person or company who holds the challenger's private key.
Anyone intercepting the messages in-transit cannot learn the contents of these messages. Your public key (or rather, your ability to decrypt messages encrypted with your public key, since only you hold the corresponding private key) serves as your ID.
Unfortunately, the entire process is rather unwieldy, and you can't memorize your private key. You have to keep it written or stored somewhere, making it vulnerable to theft. (The public key can be indexed in a public database, so you can give it via an index number.) The easiest-to-use solution I've seen to the problem is Chip & PIN used on newer credit cards. The Chip stores your private key and handles the encryption and decryption. Your PIN helps to prevent the Chip from being used without your knowledge, but isn't foolproof. It hopefully works long enough for you to get a new Chip in the event you discover it's lost or stolen. In this case, the Chip would serve as your ID, and the PIN your private passcode to access the ID. Using the ID requires both the physical Chip and your memorized PIN. (The process is still vulnerable at the "replace a lost/stolen Chip card" stage - the longer it takes to confirm your ID and issue you a new Chip, the more time a thief has to figure out your PIN.)
The banned gamblers just need to start a website where they sell memberships, and provide their recommendations for bets. Subscribers then win in their stead, and pass some of their winnings on to the banned gamblers as subscription fees. Basically the same reason why voting in elections is anonymous - so some rich person can't pay people to vote for the candidates they choose.
The fundamental problem that's causing this to happen is that gambling is not a productive economic activity.
A mining company sells iron ore to a refinery because the refinery pays them more than it cost them to mine the ore.
The refinery turns the ore into steel, and sells it to the tool manufacturer, because the tool manufacturer pays more for the steel than it cost to buy the ore and refine it.
The tool manufacturer turns the steel into a hammer, and sells it to the hardware store because the hardware store pays them more than the cost of the steel and tooling.
The hardware store sells the hammer to you, because you pay more than it cost them to buy the hammer from from the tool manufacturer.
You buy the hammer because you figure you can get more value out of its use than what you paid for it.
In each of these steps, both buyer and seller profit from the economic transaction. Both parties benefit, so both parties want the transaction to occur. That's what productive economic activity does - increases net economic activity by increasing productivity for both sides of each transaction. It's net positive sum.
Gambling doesn't work like that. It's zero sum. For someone to win money, someone else has to lose it. That puts it in the same economic category as theft and scams. So gamblers will only want to participate in transactions where they think they can rip off the other participant. (Gambling as entertainment can be legit. The relaxation you get from entertainment can help increase your productivity in other tasks, offsetting the monetary cost of the entertainment. But for this to work for gambling, it has to be done in moderation.)
The whole point of Windows for ARM is that Microsoft gets a finger in both pies. When their software was x86-only, ARM presented a threat. But unlike Intel, Microsoft isn't beholden to x86. So they made Windows RT (now Windows for ARM).
Now that they have a horse in both races, it doesn't matter to them who wins. If Intel wins, they just continue as they are. If ARM wins, they're ready to shift their entire software base over to ARM. Windows for ARM could never sells more than a handful of copies, and it will have still done its job. It's Microsoft's hedge bet, protecting it against the "obvious" outcome (Intel dominance continuing) turning out to be wrong.
It seams like its only reruns because it's one of CBS' most popular shows. So rather than releasing new episodes on multiple streaming services, it's an exclusive to CBS's streaming service. Oh, you didn't know CBS had its own streaming service? Yeah, that's the problem. So the only time you'll see new episodes on TV is during live broadcasts. Everything else is reruns.
I ran across clips of the show on YouTube and found it amusing enough that I searched for a way to stream it legally. Aside from the early seasons and reruns available for a short time on services like Sling and Playstation Vue with a DVR feature, there's no way to stream it without subscribing to CSB All Access. Thus ended my interest in the show.
Efficiency is pretty meaningless for a nuclear power. The only thing it affects is the ratio of power generated to the amount of fuel used. Since the fuel used is minuscule, it doesn't make much difference to the reactor's operation. (The spent fuel generated by all its nuclear plants in the U.S. in a year would about fill a single tractor trailer; although you don't want to pack it that densely since it would start fissioning again. That's why they're still operating fine without a long-term waste storage solution. The amount of waste is small enough they're just storing decades worth of waste on-site.) The nuclear cargo ship NS Savannah saved an estimated 29 million gallons of fuel oil, while generating a little less than 2 gallons of nuclear waste. So we're talking 7.2 orders of magnitude less waste than fossil fuels by volume. Doesn't really matter if poor efficiency drops that to 7.0 orders of magnitude.
The reason we favor large nuclear plants is because they're very slow to ramp down in power generation. Many of the uranium fission byproducts take hours to weeks to go through their short-term decay chains and settle on materials with half lives on the order of decades or longer (low heat generation). So even if you completely shut a reactor off (halt uranium fissioning completely), it will still continue to generate substantial amounts of heat for weeks as the fission byproducts go through their decay chains. So you want to guarantee demand for power is consistent, which requires a population on the order of 1 million people, thus warranting gigawatt-capacity nuclear plants.
But these larger reactors generate an enormous amount of heat in a small volume. So the amount of cooling necessary is a lot higher. If the cooling fails, you end up with what happened at Fukushima. These mini nuclear reactors are small enough that their surface area-to-volume ratio is a lot higher, and they can simply shed excess energy as heat to the environment (usually the ground).
Committing suicide is one thing, but in do it in such a manner that you take other innocent lives with you, is fucking horribly twisted.
It sounds like typical psychological projection. He felt he was wrongly punished. So he lashed out, using the justification that if an "innocent" such as himself could be made to suffer, then it was OK for him to make another innocent suffer.
I've had to caution a couple of my friends who "struck it rich" from a single income source like he did. Don't blow your money on toys and transient things like fast cars and hot women. Save it, invest it, use it to diversify your income stream. That way if that original income source disappears, you're not left high and dry like he was. Worst case you just have to reintegrate into society like a regular person, except you have a huge nest egg saved up to help you.
The problem with making hypocrisy arguments like that is that the converse cases are usually also true. You have people supporting the right of NFL players to kneel during the national anthem, yet hypocritically think it's OK for social media companies to censor certain users. Which probably accurately describes the stance of most Trump opponents.
The only people who are not hypocrites are those who think it's OK for NFL players to kneel, and that social media companies shouldn't be censoring users. Or I suppose people who think NFL players shouldn't kneel, and that it's OK for social media companies to censor. (And yes I'm aware censorship typically refers to government blocking speech. But I don't know of a similar word which applies to private individuals blocking the speech of each other. It's the concept which is imporant here, not semantics.)
"Neither was there probable cause, nor a warrant [to search the phone]. Therefore, the search and seizure of Ms Lazoja's property violated her rights under the Fourth Amendment,"
CBP does these seizures under the legal rationale that when you are entering the U.S., you are initially outside U.S. soil, and thus Constitutional protections do not apply. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that U.S. law does not apply outside U.S. soil (nor should you want it to - that would give the CIA free reign to enforce U.S. law in other countries). That's the whole reason Bush put a prison in Guantanamo Bay. Because while it's a U.S. base, it's not on U.S. soil. It's on Cuban soil. And by holding prisoners there, he hoped to deny them protections provided by the U.S. Constitution (which the Supreme Court has ruled applies even to illegal aliens if they're on U.S. soil).
Unless/until the Supreme Court rules that U.S. law applies to people at U.S. border checkpoints but have not yet been admitted to the U.S., this stuff will continue.
Business travelers ferrying sensitive information in/out of the U.S. that they wish to keep out of the hands of the government typically wipe their devices clean. Then once they're out of the U.S., connect to their company's network via a VPN and restore backups of their devices. Repeat the process in reverse when entering the U.S. Connect to to their company via VPN, create a backup of their devices, then wipe their devices before going through customs. Restore from the backup once they're in the U.S. Any smart terrorist is going to use the same procedure, so I don't know what's really gained by all these searches and seizures. I guess they keep the dumb terrorists in check, but at the cost of inconveniencing hundreds of millions of travelers and leaving them feeling their privacy has been violated.
The spread of the tech to make alcohol in various forms predates christianity, and roughly follows the spread of civilization.
Alcohol correlates with the spread of civilization because water in skins, pots, or barrels goes bad after a few days. But people figured out that adding alcohol to the water kept it good for months (we now know that it's because alcohol inhibits the growth of bacteria).
Long-term water storage thanks to alcohol is what enabled long-distance travel and exploration. Without it, you needed to find a potable water source or there had to be rain every 3 days, or you'd die. Which strongly discourages people from moving beyond familiar territory. Civilized people may have enjoyed getting drunk, but that wasn't why alcohol helped civilization to spread..
Credit card fees are only about 2%-2.5% for most small businesses. Larger corporations may be able to get below 2%. If you're paying above 3%, either you haven't bothered to get quotes from multiple processing companies, or your volume of credit card orders is extremely low.
I still think 2% is high for the minimal amount of work that's involved handling online payments. (Credit card companies have successfully shifted the cost of fraud onto merchants. And their exorbitant interest rates pay for delinquent cardholder payments. So the only thing the processing fee has to cover is the actual payment processing, and returns/disputes.) But it's nowhere near as obscene as the 15%-30% that Apple and Google take. eBay is around 10%. Amazon is around 15%, but they do a helluva lot more than Apple or Google, including warehousing your inventory and boxing and shipping it for you.
That said, if companies have a problem with the percentage, the proper response is to drop support for iOS. That's really the only thing that's going to make Apple change its policies. As long as companies continue to support iOS, there's no reason for Apple to lower its percentage take. It's like drug addicts complaining that to their dealer that his prices are too high.
I realize this is an attempt at a funny. But the mirror was only used for the viewfinder. The light path to the film/sensor was always straight from the lens. And if you really wanted a SLR without a mirror which needed to flip up, you could always get a rangefinder even back in the film days. (Actually, the B&H article on rangefinders is a lot more informative and interesting than the wiki article.)
Those use a small mirror or prism in the light path to generate the image in the viewscreen. Contrary to most people's concept of how light works, blocking the light path in an out-of-focus plane does not create a hard shadow at the in-focus plane. It creates a soft shadow (look at the edge of the shadow of your head vs your leg in sunlight). And if the obstruction is small enough, the soft shadow only appears as a slight dimming of the overall image.
This is actually the quasi-solution to a *lot* of problems. e.g.
If you've got a database full of your employee's info, populate it with made-up info for a bunch of fake employees. When you use the database, use some secret method to distinguish which employees are real (maybe the sum of their employee ID number and birthdate is divisible by 197). If you ever get hacked and the database is stolen, good luck to the hackers selling a database where 99.5% of the info is fake.
If you're a defense contractor, add a bunch of made-up project files for fake programs, complete with plans, designs, drawings, etc. If a foreign government manages to break in and steal them, they'll still have to try to figure out what's real and what's fake.
For press releases, it's a lot simpler. You compose the press release and pre-upload it for release after an embargo date. But the salient details are obfuscated. "Our net income for this quarter were [ $1 million dollars | $100,000 | a loss of $500,000 ]." "We will be [ constructing a new facility in Phoenix, AZ | purchasing and renovating a facility in Boise, ID | demolishing our warehouse in Denver, CO ]" etc. When the embargo is up, instead of just automatically releasing the pre-prepared press release, you simply edit out the fake info then give the OK to release it.
Security through obscurity isn't true protection. But it can make the thieves' jobs a lot harder.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. The only thing that's going to replace a keyboard is voice recognition. And that still has a ways to go (needs to understand context). Though for simple messages, I usually resort to the voice recognition on my phone's text messaging app.
There actually is a good reason not to be annoyed by this resolution race. Holograms require about 1500 dots per mm. So an 8192x4096 display would actually be sufficient to generate holograms if you were able to shrink the display down to 5mm x 3mm. I figure in 20-40 years, display technology and GPU technology will have advanced enough to generate real-time holographic displays.
Jagged font edges can be "fixed" by anti-aliasing. Your brain is incredibly good at making up details that aren't there if it helps it make better sense of what it's seeing. So if it sees what looks like the smooth curve of the letter O, then it will see a smooth curve even if it's actually made up of different-brightness dots. The illusion is only broken when other info (non-aliased pixels) makes it obvious that the curve isn't smooth.
If you don't believe anti-aliasing fixes it, then prepare to have your mind blown. Every TV image you've seen has been displayed at non-native resolution. When you watch a 1920x1080 TV, you're actually only seeing about 1890x1060 pixels. For obscure historical reasons, TVs overscan the video image. So if a show is recorded at 1920x1080, the image that's displayed on your 19201080 TV is actually a crop of the center portion of the original image, enlarged to fit the 1920x1080 pixels of your TV screen. That breaks the 1:1 correspondence between image pixels and display pixels. But it's fixed by anti-aliasing. Usually bicubic interpolation, although lately Lanczos has been becoming more popular (it's more processor intensive, but processing power is cheap nowadays). So every TV image you've seen since we moved to digital TVs has had jaggies, they're just hidden from view by good anti-aliasing.
The real problem with modern displays is that the pixels are square. Pixels aren't supposed to be square. They're supposed to represent an infinitesimally small point, so the most accurate representation is a round blob called a point spread function. Brightest (greatest representation of the pixel's color) in the center, with the edges fading out (color info mixing with that of adjacent pixels). This is actually how the old CRT monitors and TVs displayed pixels, which is why you could use them to display any screen resolution.
But modern displays typically use a LCD grid with fixed-sized square pixels. Those squares add nonexistent information to each pixel (the sharp edges and the corners). This extraneous information makes the display appear sharper when displaying perfectly vertical or horizontal lines. But that sharpness is an illusion, and you pay the price in jaggies whenever displaying anything that's not perfectly vertical or horizontal. It also doesn't work when the underlying pixel grid of the image doesn't fall exactly on the physical pixel grid of the monitor. Which is why LCD monitors look fuzzy when displaying a non-native resolution which isn't divided by an integer multiple (which are the only resolutions which maintain the correspondence between image pixel edges and display pixel edges).
Anti-aliasing can help, but it's just a band-aid rather than a real fix. Moving to higher resolutions makes the band-aid less noticeable, and from a technical standpoint may be easier than a true fix (which I'm not sure can even be done with LCDs or even OLEDs). I use a 1080p projector to display a 150" image. And the reason I'm anxious to move up to a 4k projector is that I can actually see the pixel grid. It's easy to zone out and ignore it when watching a movie, but every now and then I notice it and it becomes annoying.
*sigh* Inflation doesn't happen because people think it will happen. It happens because the government is printing too much money. If you double the amount of currency in the system, everyone figures it's worth half what it used to be, so prices double to compensate. Usually, governments resort to this if they're spending more than they're bringing in via tax revenue. Germany did this in the 1930s to try to pay back war debt. Venezuela does it to try to maintain their socialist paradise ("free" services for everyone). A government spending more than it brings in has two options - keep the debt on the books, or print money to pay for it. When a government prints more money, it's basically stealing from its citizens by devaluing the currency. The money a citizen has in his wallet is worth half of what it used to be, and the value of the other half gets transferred to the government in the form of extra currency it has printed. It's a way to tax people without actually needing them to actually hand over the money to a tax collection agency.
What saved Brazil was reforms that got government spending under control. Their new currency may have helped people put more faith in the currency, but it's not what stopped inflation. As Venezuela is finding out. Same thing nearly happened to Greece, except they were on the Euro. So their government over-spending ended up being paid for by other countries using the Euro. Which is why they banded together and gave Greece an ultimatum - adopt spending and economic reforms ("austerity"), or be kicked out of the Eurozone.
Everything that's consumed has to be produced, so productivity is the true fundamental currency of an economy. The money you choose to use is just a representation of that productivity. If you manipulate your monetary currency only to the extent necessary to keep its value more or less constant relative to productivity (what governments do with a fiat currency), then it remains stable, leaving the economy free to operate on its own. But when you start screwing around with your money supply to try to fix other problems (like pay for massive government debt), it shows up as a deviation between your money's value and the value of productivity - the value of your currency changes by a large amount. Basically, manipulating your currency is like changing the markings on a ruler. It may change the number of your measurements (number of Bolivars needed to buy a dozen eggs), but the fundamental distance (productivity needed to raise chickens to produce a dozen eggs) does not change. All you do is create additional overhead as citizens have to spend more time and effort trying to keep track of and compensate for changing currency values (i.e. waste productivity on financial bookkeeping, rather than on producing actual goods and services).
U.S. sanctions have nothing to do with it. A healthy economy is mostly domestic - most trade happens inside the country (U.S. imports + exports are only about 20% of its domestic GDP), so can't really be hurt by foreign sanctions. U.S. sanctions end up hurting Venezuela only because its government has completely crippled its domestic economy with its boneheaded economic policies.
Buying renewable power does nothing. All it does is take renewable power away from another customer.
The only way using renewable power makes a difference is if you add new renewable power sources. Install solar panels on your building's roof. Help pay for a new wind farm for the power company. Help fund the construction of a new hydroelectric dam. But if you're not adding new renewable power, all you're doing is taking away renewable power from someone else who was going to buy it anyway.
(The requirement is even stricter. The renewable power you add to power your offices needs to be renewable power which otherwise wouldn't have been added. So adding solar panels to your house to power your new EV only results in a solar-powered EV if you wouldn't have installed the solar panels if you didn't get the EV. If you were planning to install the solar panels anyway, then the EV ends up taking solar power away from your home and other customers. i.e. Without the EV you would've used x kWH of solar power for your home, and 0 kWh of coal power. After you get the EV you use x kWh of solar power for your EV, and another x kWh of coal power for your home. Which is the same thing as the EV being powered entirely by coal.)
These areas have only one ISP because local governments awarded a monopoly, and prohibit competition. These ISPs are not natural monopolies created by the market. There is no invisible hand of the market at work here because government regulation eliminated market forces.
The only areas free of the problem are the ones where government got out of the way and allowed multiple ISPs to compete.
Most flu strains originate in Asia, where there's much more interaction and contact between people and animals. The vast majority of flu strains mutate to jump species (usually from birds to people, sometimes from pigs). So the place where that's most likely to happen is where large numbers of people are still farmers raising animals in close quarters - i.e. the more densely populated regions of Asia.
Why'd they stop at minutes? They could've made the metric sound even more fantastic by listing it as "4.5 trillion seconds of music."
For comparison:
There are two ways to build a radio telescope. One is to maximize its size by creating an interferometer. This is done by mounting two or more radio dishes as far apart as possible, then synchronizing the signals they receive. That gives you the resolving power of a radio dish as large as the separation of the dishes. In other words, you get a radio telescope able to resolve extremely fine detail at radio wavelengths.
The other is to maximize surface area. A circle actually has the smallest diameter for a given area, so this gives you the minimum resolving power. But the large surface area maximizes sensitivity - it can pick out especially faint signals. So for this radio telescope to effectively leverage its strength, its surroundings need to be very quiet at radio frequencies.
The Fukushima plant had a nominal production capacity of 4696 MW. Multiplied by nuclear's average 90% capacity factor and that's 4226 MW average for the year. It currently has a 371 km^2 evacuation zone. So the evacuation zone (which is by no means permanent, nor likely to be permanent) works out to 0.088 km^2 per MW average.
The largest wind farm in Europe is Whitelee Wind farm in Scotland. It has a nominal generating capacity of 539 MW. Onshore wind typically has a 20%-25% capacity factor, but Scotland's winds are strong and consistent, yielding an average capacity factor around 40%. So that's 215.6 MW average for the year. The farm covers 55 km^2 in a 13x8 km rectangle. Add a half km exclusion zone around the periphery and you get a total area of 76 km^2. So its exclusion zone works out to 0.353 km^2 per MW on average.
So MW for MW, just the regular operation of the largest wind farm in Europe renders about 4x as much land uninhabitable as the second-worst nuclear accident in history. Hydroelectric dams create a lake behind them, rendering that land uninhabitable. Itaipu dam has a 1350 km^2 reservoir. It generates 91.6 TWh annually, which works out to 10449 MW on average, for an uninhabitable area of 0.129 km^2 per MW average. Solar (pretty much the most expensive power source) actually fares well by this metric. At 125 W/m^2 and a 15% capacity factor, it weighs in at a featherweight 0.053 km^2 per MW on average.
But wait, we looked at pretty much the worst case for nuclear, while looking at average or better-than-average cases for other technologies. What happens if you look at nuclear on average? After all, the vast majority of nuclear plants have operated safely for decades. The world's nuclear capaicty is 351 GW. The evacuation zones around Fukushima (371 km^2) and Chernobyl (2600 km^2) work out to 2971 km^2. So the average land area rendered uninhabitable by nuclear works out to 0.008 km^2 per MW on average.
In other words, nuclear is the technology which renders the least amount of land uninhabitable per MW generated. If you replaced all nuclear power capacity with solar, you'd render 6.6x as much land area as Fukushima + Chernobyl uninhabitable (though I suppose you could be sure to mount all those panels on top of buildings). Hydro would render 16x as much land uninhabitable by converting it into reservoirs. And wind about 44x as much land area uninhabitable (about 80x for a more typical wind far than Whitelee due to lower capacity factor) as a safety zone around the turbines.
Per MWh of power generated, wind is actually more dangerous than nuclear. The month of the Great Tokoku Earthquake, a high school student in Ohio was killed when he climbed and fell off a wind turbine at his school which had been improperly locked up. So the month of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, wind power actually killed more people than nuclear power.
The deaths due to wind (and solar) just fly under the news radar because their power production is so small compared to other energy sources. But if we're going to scale them up to provide double digit percentages of our power, their industries really need to address the high fatality rate. The problem with sparse power sources like wind and solar is that you need a lot more infrastructure to generate the same amount of power as concentrated sources like nuclear. So it requires a lot more manpower to maintain (with a corresponding higher risk to maintenance workers), and it's much more difficult to keep all that infrastructure secure against thrill seekers who might get themselves killed. Everyone is paranoid about something going wrong at a nuclear plant, so those are guarded with almost military-grade security. Not so for the wind turbine in Ohio, which some teacher or custodian probably forgot to padlock.
That said, nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro are far, far safer than fossil fuels.
Breaks down to 14.8 for poison and drug overdoses, 11.7 for motor vehicle accidents, 10.4 for falls
Breaks down to 6.5 for alcoholic liver disease
Breaks down to 4.0 for homicide by gun
So being killed (murdered) by gun is pretty far down the list. 4.0 per 100,000 works out to a 1 in 25,000 chance of being murdered by gun in any given year Any of the above causes are more likely to kill you.
I assume you've replaced games with some other form of entertainment. Could be TV or movies, or going to concerts, or playing ball with your kids, or gambling, or reading and responding on slashdot. Or if you're one of a lucky few, it could be your side projects if you find doing those things relaxing. (Only a small percentage of people fit into this last category, as the vast majority of relaxing activities are productivity-consuming rather than productivity-generating. So it serves no purpose for these lucky people to lecture everyone else on how they should spend their free time, since the things they find relaxing, other people just find to be stressful work. One of my millionaire friends is that rich because he finds it relaxing to read and learn about better ways to run a company, and applying what he reads to his company. His wife has to constantly pull laptops, tablets, and phones out of his hands when they go on vacation, because he finds reading that stuff more fun and relaxing than vacation.)
Entertainment helps to relieve stress, making your work hours more productive than if you did nothing but work, eat, and sleep. So the time and money spent on entertainment can be worth it. Entertainment only becomes a problem when you become so obsessed with it, it begins to detract from your ability to be productive at work.
So games can be beneficial if they function as stress-relieving entertainment, but only if they're played in moderation. I figured this out when I decided I was playing too many games and quit cold turkey. A month later I evaluated my progress, and found that the time I used to spend playing games, I was now spending on other "time-wasting" activities. I needed to relieve my work-related stress some other way if it wasn't via gaming.
Since I enjoyed gaming more than the other replacement activities, I went back to gaming. But I kept a mindful eye on how much I was enjoying the game. Most of the MMORPGs I played got dropped, because they typically required dozens or hundreds of hours of boring grinding, just so your character could be capable of participating in a few hours of excitement (raiding, or dungeon delving). They got replaced with RPGs which focused on campaigns, since those are tuned so your progress through the campaign levels your character appropriately without you having to waste time grinding. So the games I play now aren't black holes designed to suck up as much of my time as possible in exchange for as little progress as possible. They're like interactive movies, which if paced well with a good plot are enormously entertaining without sucking up more of my time than needed to tell the story.
Anyone intercepting the messages in-transit cannot learn the contents of these messages. Your public key (or rather, your ability to decrypt messages encrypted with your public key, since only you hold the corresponding private key) serves as your ID.
Unfortunately, the entire process is rather unwieldy, and you can't memorize your private key. You have to keep it written or stored somewhere, making it vulnerable to theft. (The public key can be indexed in a public database, so you can give it via an index number.) The easiest-to-use solution I've seen to the problem is Chip & PIN used on newer credit cards. The Chip stores your private key and handles the encryption and decryption. Your PIN helps to prevent the Chip from being used without your knowledge, but isn't foolproof. It hopefully works long enough for you to get a new Chip in the event you discover it's lost or stolen. In this case, the Chip would serve as your ID, and the PIN your private passcode to access the ID. Using the ID requires both the physical Chip and your memorized PIN. (The process is still vulnerable at the "replace a lost/stolen Chip card" stage - the longer it takes to confirm your ID and issue you a new Chip, the more time a thief has to figure out your PIN.)
The fundamental problem that's causing this to happen is that gambling is not a productive economic activity.
In each of these steps, both buyer and seller profit from the economic transaction. Both parties benefit, so both parties want the transaction to occur. That's what productive economic activity does - increases net economic activity by increasing productivity for both sides of each transaction. It's net positive sum.
Gambling doesn't work like that. It's zero sum. For someone to win money, someone else has to lose it. That puts it in the same economic category as theft and scams. So gamblers will only want to participate in transactions where they think they can rip off the other participant. (Gambling as entertainment can be legit. The relaxation you get from entertainment can help increase your productivity in other tasks, offsetting the monetary cost of the entertainment. But for this to work for gambling, it has to be done in moderation.)
The whole point of Windows for ARM is that Microsoft gets a finger in both pies. When their software was x86-only, ARM presented a threat. But unlike Intel, Microsoft isn't beholden to x86. So they made Windows RT (now Windows for ARM).
Now that they have a horse in both races, it doesn't matter to them who wins. If Intel wins, they just continue as they are. If ARM wins, they're ready to shift their entire software base over to ARM. Windows for ARM could never sells more than a handful of copies, and it will have still done its job. It's Microsoft's hedge bet, protecting it against the "obvious" outcome (Intel dominance continuing) turning out to be wrong.
It seams like its only reruns because it's one of CBS' most popular shows. So rather than releasing new episodes on multiple streaming services, it's an exclusive to CBS's streaming service. Oh, you didn't know CBS had its own streaming service? Yeah, that's the problem. So the only time you'll see new episodes on TV is during live broadcasts. Everything else is reruns.
I ran across clips of the show on YouTube and found it amusing enough that I searched for a way to stream it legally. Aside from the early seasons and reruns available for a short time on services like Sling and Playstation Vue with a DVR feature, there's no way to stream it without subscribing to CSB All Access. Thus ended my interest in the show.
Efficiency is pretty meaningless for a nuclear power. The only thing it affects is the ratio of power generated to the amount of fuel used. Since the fuel used is minuscule, it doesn't make much difference to the reactor's operation. (The spent fuel generated by all its nuclear plants in the U.S. in a year would about fill a single tractor trailer; although you don't want to pack it that densely since it would start fissioning again. That's why they're still operating fine without a long-term waste storage solution. The amount of waste is small enough they're just storing decades worth of waste on-site.) The nuclear cargo ship NS Savannah saved an estimated 29 million gallons of fuel oil, while generating a little less than 2 gallons of nuclear waste. So we're talking 7.2 orders of magnitude less waste than fossil fuels by volume. Doesn't really matter if poor efficiency drops that to 7.0 orders of magnitude.
The reason we favor large nuclear plants is because they're very slow to ramp down in power generation. Many of the uranium fission byproducts take hours to weeks to go through their short-term decay chains and settle on materials with half lives on the order of decades or longer (low heat generation). So even if you completely shut a reactor off (halt uranium fissioning completely), it will still continue to generate substantial amounts of heat for weeks as the fission byproducts go through their decay chains. So you want to guarantee demand for power is consistent, which requires a population on the order of 1 million people, thus warranting gigawatt-capacity nuclear plants.
But these larger reactors generate an enormous amount of heat in a small volume. So the amount of cooling necessary is a lot higher. If the cooling fails, you end up with what happened at Fukushima. These mini nuclear reactors are small enough that their surface area-to-volume ratio is a lot higher, and they can simply shed excess energy as heat to the environment (usually the ground).
It sounds like typical psychological projection. He felt he was wrongly punished. So he lashed out, using the justification that if an "innocent" such as himself could be made to suffer, then it was OK for him to make another innocent suffer.
I've had to caution a couple of my friends who "struck it rich" from a single income source like he did. Don't blow your money on toys and transient things like fast cars and hot women. Save it, invest it, use it to diversify your income stream. That way if that original income source disappears, you're not left high and dry like he was. Worst case you just have to reintegrate into society like a regular person, except you have a huge nest egg saved up to help you.
The problem with making hypocrisy arguments like that is that the converse cases are usually also true. You have people supporting the right of NFL players to kneel during the national anthem, yet hypocritically think it's OK for social media companies to censor certain users. Which probably accurately describes the stance of most Trump opponents.
The only people who are not hypocrites are those who think it's OK for NFL players to kneel, and that social media companies shouldn't be censoring users. Or I suppose people who think NFL players shouldn't kneel, and that it's OK for social media companies to censor. (And yes I'm aware censorship typically refers to government blocking speech. But I don't know of a similar word which applies to private individuals blocking the speech of each other. It's the concept which is imporant here, not semantics.)
CBP does these seizures under the legal rationale that when you are entering the U.S., you are initially outside U.S. soil, and thus Constitutional protections do not apply. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that U.S. law does not apply outside U.S. soil (nor should you want it to - that would give the CIA free reign to enforce U.S. law in other countries). That's the whole reason Bush put a prison in Guantanamo Bay. Because while it's a U.S. base, it's not on U.S. soil. It's on Cuban soil. And by holding prisoners there, he hoped to deny them protections provided by the U.S. Constitution (which the Supreme Court has ruled applies even to illegal aliens if they're on U.S. soil).
Unless/until the Supreme Court rules that U.S. law applies to people at U.S. border checkpoints but have not yet been admitted to the U.S., this stuff will continue. Business travelers ferrying sensitive information in/out of the U.S. that they wish to keep out of the hands of the government typically wipe their devices clean. Then once they're out of the U.S., connect to their company's network via a VPN and restore backups of their devices. Repeat the process in reverse when entering the U.S. Connect to to their company via VPN, create a backup of their devices, then wipe their devices before going through customs. Restore from the backup once they're in the U.S. Any smart terrorist is going to use the same procedure, so I don't know what's really gained by all these searches and seizures. I guess they keep the dumb terrorists in check, but at the cost of inconveniencing hundreds of millions of travelers and leaving them feeling their privacy has been violated.
Alcohol correlates with the spread of civilization because water in skins, pots, or barrels goes bad after a few days. But people figured out that adding alcohol to the water kept it good for months (we now know that it's because alcohol inhibits the growth of bacteria).
Long-term water storage thanks to alcohol is what enabled long-distance travel and exploration. Without it, you needed to find a potable water source or there had to be rain every 3 days, or you'd die. Which strongly discourages people from moving beyond familiar territory. Civilized people may have enjoyed getting drunk, but that wasn't why alcohol helped civilization to spread..
Credit card fees are only about 2%-2.5% for most small businesses. Larger corporations may be able to get below 2%. If you're paying above 3%, either you haven't bothered to get quotes from multiple processing companies, or your volume of credit card orders is extremely low.
I still think 2% is high for the minimal amount of work that's involved handling online payments. (Credit card companies have successfully shifted the cost of fraud onto merchants. And their exorbitant interest rates pay for delinquent cardholder payments. So the only thing the processing fee has to cover is the actual payment processing, and returns/disputes.) But it's nowhere near as obscene as the 15%-30% that Apple and Google take. eBay is around 10%. Amazon is around 15%, but they do a helluva lot more than Apple or Google, including warehousing your inventory and boxing and shipping it for you.
That said, if companies have a problem with the percentage, the proper response is to drop support for iOS. That's really the only thing that's going to make Apple change its policies. As long as companies continue to support iOS, there's no reason for Apple to lower its percentage take. It's like drug addicts complaining that to their dealer that his prices are too high.
I realize this is an attempt at a funny. But the mirror was only used for the viewfinder. The light path to the film/sensor was always straight from the lens. And if you really wanted a SLR without a mirror which needed to flip up, you could always get a rangefinder even back in the film days. (Actually, the B&H article on rangefinders is a lot more informative and interesting than the wiki article.)
Those use a small mirror or prism in the light path to generate the image in the viewscreen. Contrary to most people's concept of how light works, blocking the light path in an out-of-focus plane does not create a hard shadow at the in-focus plane. It creates a soft shadow (look at the edge of the shadow of your head vs your leg in sunlight). And if the obstruction is small enough, the soft shadow only appears as a slight dimming of the overall image.
Security through obscurity isn't true protection. But it can make the thieves' jobs a lot harder.