I dunno if 1Password does this, but the better password managers do it right and encrypt your password before storing it locally. If they also have a cloud storage feature, only that encrypted blob is stored on the cloud. Keepass does this - it stores your passwords in a database file which is encrypted, either with a password (passphrase), or a key stored on the device, or both (your choice). You can then copy the database to unencrypted services like Dropbox to share it between devices. The password managers which have a cloud storage feature do the same thing, except they provide their own cloud service instead of having you rely on Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.
Whether the eyeballs are paid is irrelevant. One of the interesting findings from the investigation of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster was that NASA triple-checked components. But it turned out the three (paid) inspectors often assumed the other two were doing their job, and regularly skipped inspections on more-difficult-to-access parts. Since all three were biased to skip the same parts, those parts frequently went uninspected before launch. So in that particular case, having more eyeballs actually led to less security, than having a single inspector who knew the entire burden of security was resting on his/her shoulders.
Basically, it's a combination of high income and market penetration. "How many rich people own this product?" versus "How many people who own this product are rich?" I'm pretty sure it's also limited to the U.S. (which has the highest iPhone market penetration).
The guy (Deroir I think is his name) replied to this with a suggestion so insultingly simple it deserved scorn. He was polite, but it was a REALLY condescending response. Imagine you drive a truck on a really tricky route and write about all the things you contend with. You've been doing this successfully for years. Then someone says, politely, but meaning to educate you, "if you turned the wheel and used the gas at the same time, how about that?" That's a thing deserving only scorn.
He made the insultingly simple suggestion because ArenaNet wasn't doing it. By your analogy, it's like you've been driving a truck successfully for years while operating the wheel or the gas one at a time, but never at the same time. Then someone suggests why not try using both at the same time.
The problem the guy was getting at (the dialog choices don't have any consequences in the plot) is much older than MMORPGs and even CRPGs. It existed back in pen-and-paper RPGing. It's called railroading. The GM (or devs) have a set idea for how the plot should progress, and forces your character down that path. Pretty much all computer RPGs do it, with free-form games like Skyrim or Fallout (outside the main plot) being the rare exception. Mainly because it's a helluva lot easier to write one plotline, than to write a choose-your-own-adventure type plotline with multiple branches and possible endings. A proper, respectful reply would've been simply to state that while a branching plotline is desirable, it would require an order of magnitude more resources to produce. And so it becomes an economic choice between players getting only one new branching plotline each year, or multiple linear plotlines throughout the year.
I discussed RPGs a lot with Raph Koster when he was working on Ultima Online. I threw a lot of suggestions at him, some good, many dumb. I developed a tremendous respect for him because he always responded to my suggestions politely (the dumb ones only needed a short reply to shoot down). He was never insulting, and always provided thought-provoking responses which usually demonstrated why the problem was much deeper than it seemed at first glance. He didn't view dumb suggestions as an insult. He saw them as an opportunity to teach the person making the suggestion, so they themselves could perhaps become better game developers in the future. And that ultimately is what allows our civilization to advance - by helping pull people up to your level if you're clearly higher up. Not by getting offended and trying to tear them down because you think their suggestion is insultingly simple.
I think that's actually part of the "problem" (if you can call it that) with C++ (and by extension, C). It's too flexible. You can use it to program at an extremely high abstraction level, relying on pre-built libraries to do all the heavy lifting for you. Or you can use it to drill down to do register- and memory address-level operations. Or anything in between. It's like giving someone a car, and all the wires, gears, switches, levers, nuts, and bolts are all exposed so you can tinker with them, but there's no easy way to distinguish which of those components are the basic controls (steering, shift, accelerator, brake).
More experienced people want the flexibility of being able to drill down and modify or recreate basic functions. Beginners will want a high level of abstraction so they can get the ball rolling with minimal effort. C++ can do both, but unfortunately it doesn't try to delineate between these abstraction levels. It's easy for a beginner to get tied up writing minutiae code and writing it badly because they're a beginner, not realizing that a function or library written by an expert already exists for what they're trying to do. And it's easy for an advanced programmer to use a pre-existing library because "the work has already been done", then get upset that the function in the library doesn't do exactly what they want to do or performs poorly.
String handling is a good example. If you use the string library, it "knows" that strings have a length, and provides protection against buffer overruns. But if you're a beginner and don't know about the library, it's easy to fall into the trap of handling strings yourself since they're just a pointer to a sequence of characters in memory. And the beginner doesn't know to keep track of the max string length, and ends up writing code vulnerable to a buffer overrun exploit. Maybe what C++ IDEs need is some sort of menu setting where you tell it your programming skill level, and it hides or exposes different functions based on that setting.
The largest container ships are 400m long by 59m wide. Their engines produce a max of about 75,000 kW of power. If you assume the engines normally operate at 80% peak generating capacity, that's 60,000 kW.
If you covered the entire top of the ship with solar panels, that would be 400m*59m = 23,600 m^2 of solar panels (actually a bit less due to curvature at the bow and stern).
How much power would the panels need to produce to replace the diesel engines? 60,000 kW / 23,600 m^2 = 2.5 kW/m^2, or 2500 Watts/m^2.
The solar constant at the Earth's orbit is only 1361 Watts/m^2. Best case on earth (sun directly overheat) gets you about 1000 Watts/m^2. Typical commercial-grade solar panels can convert this into about 150-200 Watts/m^2. Solar capacity factor (which takes into account night, weather, seasons, movement of the sun through the sky) at the latitudes commonly used for shipping is around 0.15 (Western Europe is worse at close to 0.1). Which lowers the average panel production (for a year) down to 22.5 - 30 Watts/m^2.
So basically covering an entire container ship with solar panels will only produce about 1% of the power it needs to propel itself.
Legal cases should be decided based on the merits of the law. Not based on factors which aren't relevant to the legal issue at hand, like the nationality or personality of the accused.
New Zealand needs to decide if a legal resident in their country can be extradited to face copyright infringement charges abroad when he has (apparently) broken no New Zealand laws. Nothing more, nothing less. Ask yourself if the case would still be at trial if he were a NZ citizen with an upstanding civil record. If so, then everything negative about Kim Dotcom is irrelevant. Only his legal presence in the country, and his business activities with respect to copyright.
Chess and Go are games that require thought. Quake require twitch.
Chess and Go are deterministic. The same set of moves always results in the same outcome, meaning there is always a "right" answer to "what's the best move?"
Quake, by virtue of being a twitch game (and multi-player) is non-deterministic. That makes it a much harder problem for AI to solve, because a rule which works the first time may not work in subsequent trials. That is, the effectiveness of a rule is not the binary success/fail like you get in deterministic systems. The effectiveness spans the entire range from 0% to 100% probability of success, and the probability is constantly updated with new trials, and that probability can change if opponents start to use different strategies.
Give me a couple minutes and I can script up a bot that dominates players. That's not hard. And it's not even fun.
That's the whole point. They didn't script up a bot. Heck, they didn't even teach it the rules of the game. They programmed an AI, and let it come up with scripts on its own by playing the game and "discovering" for itself what actions resulted in a win vs a loss. You're correct that the AI has a huge advantage over human players (unless they had it play by pointing a camera at the screen, and using a mechanical arm to move a mouse). But that's tangential to what makes this research interesting.
Drilling tunnels goes faster if you can drill from both sides at the same time. But doing so requires precise positioning and alignment so that the two ends of the tunnel will meet in the middle. If they opt to drill a tunnel down into the chamber from the top of the mountain, they first need to precisely locate the position of the lost team inside the mountain. And a company experienced in drilling tunnels from both sides is exactly what you want for that task.
Didn't read TFA, but the basic principle is sound. Personally owned cars are utilized only about 5%-10% of the time (1 to 2.5 hours out of the day). The rest of the time they take up often-valuable parking space along streets and in parking garages. Space utilization is also bad, with a large percentage of the vehicles transporting only a single person at any given time. Call it 30% on average (1.5 occupants in a car able to carry 5 people). That yields a total utilization of only 1.5%-3%, which is abysmal. Logistically, their only benefit is they shave a small percentage off your commute time as you (1) don't have to wait for a taxi or bus or subway train, and (2) go directly from your origination point to your destination, instead of a stop a couple blocks away. The magnitude of these benefits decreases (and can even go negative, becoming drawbacks) if the number of personal vehicles exceeds the capacity of the roads and parking spaces.
Switching to ridesharing (whether it be driverless cars, Uber, taxis, buses, or subways) increases utilization. They're in use roughly 12 hours/day (50%), and occupancy is up around 50%. That yields an overall utilization of 25% - much better than personally owned cars. A great example of this was South Korea. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the Korean government imposed a heavy tax on cars, more than doubling the price. This resulted in a few rich people owning cars, and everyone else using taxis (the taxi companies and individual taxi drivers could amortize the high vehicle cost over thousands of passengers each year). Then in the 1988 Presidential campaign, one of the candidates ran ads criticizing South Korea for selling Hyundais in the U.S. for $10,000, while an equivalent Ford Escort cost $25,000 in Korea. He conveniently left out that the Hyundai also cost $25,000 in Korea. But the damage was done and the U.S. pressured South Korea to repeal its tax on cars. Suddenly a huge percentage of the Korean population could afford their own car, and the streets immediately became gridlocked. A 300 km trip across the country during the busiest holidays can regularly take 24 hours by car. Parking on the sidewalks became commonplace in cities.
Ridesharing is superior if you can deal with the drawbacks - slightly longer commute times due to having to wait for a ride, coping with frequent stops instead of traveling directly, and having to walk to/from the stop to your actual origination/destination. If these conditions can be met, ridesharing requires fewer vehicles (meaning lower purchase and annual maintenance cost per rider), less road space, and less parking space. It only falls out of favors if one or more of these conditions are not met, and the lost time imposes an economic cost on the individual rider greater than the economic cost of buying and owning a personal vehicle. That's why public transport tends to work in cities, but not in rural communities.
How did this get modded up? Net neutrality is the principle of treating data equally regardless of originating source on the Internet. e.g. You can't throttle Netflix while prioritizing your own video streaming service.
What you're proposing is content neutrality - treating all data the same regardless of the type of data. If we mandated content neutrality, the Internet would die a horrible death as filesharing, spam, and DDoS attacks got equal priority to video streaming, web browsing, and online game traffic. The only reason the Internet is able to function despite the terabytes of illegitimate traffic being dumped on it is because ISPs and backbones are allowed to lower its priority via traffic shaping to give legitimate traffic first crack at the available bandwidth.
The term seems to be a play on man-spreading. The tendency for men to sit with their legs spread, thus taking up more than one seat.
Power strips are designed to mimic wall outlets. AC adapters with the transfer stuck onto the plug are a cost-cutting measure. The manufacturer didn't want to pay for a second cable between the outlet and the transformer, so built the plug into the transformer. In low-volume usage this actually makes sense, as it keeps the transformer off the ground where it's out of the way and able to cool better. But in high-volume usage it ends up blocking other outlet sockets.
TFA is worthless though. Putting the plug on the transformer is arguably the "right" solution to the problem. If you required all AC adapters to have a second cable between the outlet and transformer (like most laptop adapters), the only place you could put the transformer is on the floor. With the plug built into the transformer, you have the option of having the transformer on the wall if you need it off the floor, or you can buy one of the short extensions others have linked to and have the transformer on the floor. Having the plug on the transformer gives you have the option of doing it either way. Requiring a second cable takes away the wall option, so is the worse solution.
That's not exactly a fair comparison. A 1970's era subsonic airliner would use a lot more fuel than the 787 as well.
Yes it is a fair to compare a modern subsonic airliner to Concorde.
Subsonic airliners have gotten much more fuel efficient since the 1970s by switching to higher bypass ratios. Basically, instead of the engine operating as a turbojet and blasting air out the back to push the plane forward, part of the power generated by the engines (more than 90% in modern designs) is diverted to spin ducted propellers, which push air back to push the plane forward. This is why so many commuter planes "still" use propellers - their engines are actually jet engines (instead of piston engines), but they drive a large unducted propeller and derive almost none of their thrust from shooting air out the back.
A ducted bypass turbofan is not possible with a supersonic aircraft because the airflow through the engine also needs to be supersonic, meaning propellers (which rely on generating low air pressure on one side) don't work. You have to rely on the turbine blades compressing the air, which is pretty much what a turbojet does, so there's no point doing a bypass. And the only way to fly at supersonic speeds is to blast air out the back of the engine.
One of the reasons why Concorde was so expensive was that there were only a few built, to fly very specific routes that were mostly over water, and even so, there were generally fairly long subsonic legs at the beginning and end. Those are expensive because supersonic aircraft tend to drink fuel when flying subsonic, and if you have to do it at the end of your flight you have to carry all that extra fuel all the way.
They use a helluva lot more fuel (per passenger mile) when flying supersonic. That they use more fuel than a regular airliner while flying subsonic is another negative, not a mitigating factor.
Good luck with that. This isn't some new problem which only popped up recently with the advent of social media. It's been happening since the beginning of civilization. Social media is what happens when you dial up the rumor and gossip mill to 11.
It's forcing us to deal with all sorts of ethical issues, such as personal responsibility for repeating a false rumor, which we previously were able to ignore because they happened much less frequently. But the issues themselves are not new. In most fields (e.g. medicine, law, engineering) the issue is mitigated by accrediting individuals after they've proven to some regulatory body that they know what they're doing. But accrediting the media falls afoul of the concept of freedom of the press and freedom of speech, so it remains in a Wild West-like state where pretty much everyone can do whatever they want, including the rumor-mongers and gossips.
That's not price gouging though because Nvidia didn't raise the wholesale price of their GPUs. Even when retail high-end GPUs were ridiculously overpriced, it was still possible to buy a pre-built system with a high-end GPU at a reasonable price because the company building it was able to get the GPUs at uninflated wholesale prices. eBayers would buy these systems and part it out, selling the GPU separately from the rest of the system (which they resold as using integrated graphics), to take advantage of the discrepancy between the system price and component market price.
What most people don't seem to understand about market pricing is that prices for a commodity do not rise because sellers raise the price. It rises because buyers buy out all the inventory of sellers offering the item at a low price. That leaves only sellers offering it at a higher price with inventory, which buyers then perceive as an increase in market price. Sellers can then take note that the items are selling out at the lower price, and may choose to raise the price at that point (the sweet spot is when you're just barely able to keep an item in stock). But it's the buyers who cause the price increase (by depleting the market of lower-priced inventory), not the sellers.
Generally, everything that's produced is sold. People have this fanciful misconception that unsold merchandise is disposed of in landfils, probably due to journalists trying to make their stories sound more dramatic. It doesn't work like that.
When you over-produce something (supply exceeds demand), the cost to produce that inventory is a sunk cost. You've already paid for it, meaning there's no way to get it back (you can't go back in time and not spend the money to produce the items). So the cost to manufacture the product becomes a non-factor. Even recovering part of the production cost is preferable to recovering none of it. So when supply exceeds demand, you simply lower the price (below manufacturing cost if necessary) until the demand increases to match the supply you've got. And eventually everything you've produced gets sold.
I had a run-in with a store owner who didn't understand this. He'd bought some Intel 80286 laptops for resale. When they didn't sell as well as he'd hoped, he refused to lower their price below what he'd paid for them. Two years later when 80486 laptops were the norm, he was still trying to sell the 80286 laptops for the same price as 80486 laptops, so of course nobody was buying. He ended up losing his entire investment in those laptops. If he'd ignored the sunk costs and priced the laptops below his purchase price, he might have been able to sell them losing only 20%-30%. Instead he lost 100%.
I doubt the shorters are that worried. Tesla stock has a market cap close to GM's right now. GM produces more than 8,000 cars per day. So there's still a huge chasm between Tesla's valuation and reality.
You do realize that if the shorters are correct and Tesla stock (eventually) comes back down to earth, then the stock price for Tesla was overvalued because of lies and misinformation spread by Tesla fans, right?
How do you know the percentage of corporations who don't give you a courtesy rejection call, isn't the same as the percentage of applicants who ghost employers?
Most people only see one side of this. If you're an employee, you only experience HR from companies you've applied to not telling you you've been rejected. If you work in HR, you mostly experience applicants not telling you that they've gone with a different offer. This creates the skewed perception in both parties that others are not being courteous to them, which can lead to the flawed reasoning that they're justified "returning" that discourteous behavior onto others who may be innocent.
I've been on both sides of this. Once I make it to the interview stage, most employers called to tell me if they gave the job to someone else. Likewise, most applicants we had made an offer to called to tell us if they'd accepted a competing offer. Resist the temptation to turn this into a race to the bottom. That's just letting the few bad employers and applicants set the standard of behavior.
Recruiters are often independent agencies who act as a middleman, earning a commission equal to a few months' salary if a company decides to hire an applicant that the recruiter puts them in contact with. No affiliation with the company, they're just willing to make cold calls which employers/applicants are often uncomfortable doing. I've seen all sorts of scummy behavior from recruiters. If you're trying to punish employers for the had behavior of recruiters, you're targeting the wrong people.
Some of them don't even let you know that you didn't get it, let alone why.
Turnabout's fair play.
Turnabout is ghosting an employer who has a history of not telling applicants that they've been rejected.
Ghosting an innocent employer because a different employer didn't do you the courtesy of letting you know, is a race to the bottom which hurts everyone. You're just inflicting bad behavior onto other innocents, under the justification that because it was done to you it's OK for you to do it to others even if they're innocent. The employer who didn't tell you they'd gone with someone else for the job probably felt justified in not informing you because too many candidates were no-shows for scheduled interviews. And turnabout is fair play after all, right?
Agreed. But it does bring up the issue that TFA codes probably need a warning placed alongside the code. "This code is for your personal use only. Nobody should ever ask you for this code. Never give the code to another person, even if they claim to be from [company] or [government]."
TFA is great, but not everyone understands how it works. And as a corollary, you shouldn't have to understand how TFA codes work in order to use them. Rather than putting a gun to your own head and pulling the trigger, a better analogy is putting a complicated piece of machinery whose function you don't entirely understand to your head. Such machinery needs to be designed with warnings and safeguards to prevent people who don't understand exactly how it works from hurting themselves.
People like you are the reason I have to travel with either a crappy mouse with not enough buttons, or a bulky gaming mouse with extra buttons. Logitech used to make a small travel mouse with 4 buttons on the side, but they reduced it to 2 buttons because people like you complained. The only wireless mouse I've been able to find with more than two programmable side buttons was a larger gaming mouse.
If you don't like the extra buttons, don't use them. Simply program them to do nothing. Let those of us who like or need the extra buttons continue to use them. Don't do things which get the product changed to make it unusable by those with a different preference than you. What you're doing is like complaining that restaurants should stop selling chicken because you don't like chicken. If you don't like chicken, just don't order the chicken dishes. Don't try to get the restaurants to drop chicken from their menu, depriving people who like chicken of the opportunity to order chicken.
And globally, the increase in energy production by renewables has pretty much been canceled out by the reduction in nuclear power, meaning the percentage of energy produced by fossil fuels has remained about the same. So if you want someone to blame, blame the anti-nuclear activists.
The business owners will be able to make as much as $300,000 a year in profit running a full-sized fleet of 40 vans and managing 100 employees, according to Amazon.
That works out to a profit margin (net income) of just $3000/yr per employee.
Most businesses have a net income per employee of tens of thousands of dollars ($28k/yr average for the fortune 500), with the best ones pulling in well over $100,000/yr per employee. Most of the companies with a net income per employee below $10,000/yr are huge corporations who gain economic stability from having 100,000+ employees (erratic performance by a single employee does not affect their bottom line much), and are able to leverage economies of scale to turn those meager profit margins into something worth doing.
If you take up Amazon's offer, you're basically dead meat. Especially since you're in the precarious position of only having a single customer, and have no leverage to negotiate prices - you either accept what Amazon says they'll pay you or they'll bankrupt you overnight. This is basically Amazon outsourcing the delivery business, where they take the lion's share of the profit for themselves, while offloading all the risk (fewer deliveries due to an economic downturn) onto the poor schmucks who took out loans to buy all those delivery vans and have to pay payroll and unemployment regardless of how poorly business goes.
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I dunno if 1Password does this, but the better password managers do it right and encrypt your password before storing it locally. If they also have a cloud storage feature, only that encrypted blob is stored on the cloud. Keepass does this - it stores your passwords in a database file which is encrypted, either with a password (passphrase), or a key stored on the device, or both (your choice). You can then copy the database to unencrypted services like Dropbox to share it between devices. The password managers which have a cloud storage feature do the same thing, except they provide their own cloud service instead of having you rely on Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.
Whether the eyeballs are paid is irrelevant. One of the interesting findings from the investigation of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster was that NASA triple-checked components. But it turned out the three (paid) inspectors often assumed the other two were doing their job, and regularly skipped inspections on more-difficult-to-access parts. Since all three were biased to skip the same parts, those parts frequently went uninspected before launch. So in that particular case, having more eyeballs actually led to less security, than having a single inspector who knew the entire burden of security was resting on his/her shoulders.
People are lazy.
Basically, it's a combination of high income and market penetration. "How many rich people own this product?" versus "How many people who own this product are rich?" I'm pretty sure it's also limited to the U.S. (which has the highest iPhone market penetration).
He made the insultingly simple suggestion because ArenaNet wasn't doing it. By your analogy, it's like you've been driving a truck successfully for years while operating the wheel or the gas one at a time, but never at the same time. Then someone suggests why not try using both at the same time.
The problem the guy was getting at (the dialog choices don't have any consequences in the plot) is much older than MMORPGs and even CRPGs. It existed back in pen-and-paper RPGing. It's called railroading. The GM (or devs) have a set idea for how the plot should progress, and forces your character down that path. Pretty much all computer RPGs do it, with free-form games like Skyrim or Fallout (outside the main plot) being the rare exception. Mainly because it's a helluva lot easier to write one plotline, than to write a choose-your-own-adventure type plotline with multiple branches and possible endings. A proper, respectful reply would've been simply to state that while a branching plotline is desirable, it would require an order of magnitude more resources to produce. And so it becomes an economic choice between players getting only one new branching plotline each year, or multiple linear plotlines throughout the year.
I discussed RPGs a lot with Raph Koster when he was working on Ultima Online. I threw a lot of suggestions at him, some good, many dumb. I developed a tremendous respect for him because he always responded to my suggestions politely (the dumb ones only needed a short reply to shoot down). He was never insulting, and always provided thought-provoking responses which usually demonstrated why the problem was much deeper than it seemed at first glance. He didn't view dumb suggestions as an insult. He saw them as an opportunity to teach the person making the suggestion, so they themselves could perhaps become better game developers in the future. And that ultimately is what allows our civilization to advance - by helping pull people up to your level if you're clearly higher up. Not by getting offended and trying to tear them down because you think their suggestion is insultingly simple.
I think that's actually part of the "problem" (if you can call it that) with C++ (and by extension, C). It's too flexible. You can use it to program at an extremely high abstraction level, relying on pre-built libraries to do all the heavy lifting for you. Or you can use it to drill down to do register- and memory address-level operations. Or anything in between. It's like giving someone a car, and all the wires, gears, switches, levers, nuts, and bolts are all exposed so you can tinker with them, but there's no easy way to distinguish which of those components are the basic controls (steering, shift, accelerator, brake).
More experienced people want the flexibility of being able to drill down and modify or recreate basic functions. Beginners will want a high level of abstraction so they can get the ball rolling with minimal effort. C++ can do both, but unfortunately it doesn't try to delineate between these abstraction levels. It's easy for a beginner to get tied up writing minutiae code and writing it badly because they're a beginner, not realizing that a function or library written by an expert already exists for what they're trying to do. And it's easy for an advanced programmer to use a pre-existing library because "the work has already been done", then get upset that the function in the library doesn't do exactly what they want to do or performs poorly.
String handling is a good example. If you use the string library, it "knows" that strings have a length, and provides protection against buffer overruns. But if you're a beginner and don't know about the library, it's easy to fall into the trap of handling strings yourself since they're just a pointer to a sequence of characters in memory. And the beginner doesn't know to keep track of the max string length, and ends up writing code vulnerable to a buffer overrun exploit. Maybe what C++ IDEs need is some sort of menu setting where you tell it your programming skill level, and it hides or exposes different functions based on that setting.
The largest container ships are 400m long by 59m wide. Their engines produce a max of about 75,000 kW of power. If you assume the engines normally operate at 80% peak generating capacity, that's 60,000 kW.
If you covered the entire top of the ship with solar panels, that would be 400m*59m = 23,600 m^2 of solar panels (actually a bit less due to curvature at the bow and stern).
How much power would the panels need to produce to replace the diesel engines? 60,000 kW / 23,600 m^2 = 2.5 kW/m^2, or 2500 Watts/m^2.
The solar constant at the Earth's orbit is only 1361 Watts/m^2. Best case on earth (sun directly overheat) gets you about 1000 Watts/m^2. Typical commercial-grade solar panels can convert this into about 150-200 Watts/m^2. Solar capacity factor (which takes into account night, weather, seasons, movement of the sun through the sky) at the latitudes commonly used for shipping is around 0.15 (Western Europe is worse at close to 0.1). Which lowers the average panel production (for a year) down to 22.5 - 30 Watts/m^2.
So basically covering an entire container ship with solar panels will only produce about 1% of the power it needs to propel itself.
Legal cases should be decided based on the merits of the law. Not based on factors which aren't relevant to the legal issue at hand, like the nationality or personality of the accused.
New Zealand needs to decide if a legal resident in their country can be extradited to face copyright infringement charges abroad when he has (apparently) broken no New Zealand laws. Nothing more, nothing less. Ask yourself if the case would still be at trial if he were a NZ citizen with an upstanding civil record. If so, then everything negative about Kim Dotcom is irrelevant. Only his legal presence in the country, and his business activities with respect to copyright.
Chess and Go are deterministic. The same set of moves always results in the same outcome, meaning there is always a "right" answer to "what's the best move?"
Quake, by virtue of being a twitch game (and multi-player) is non-deterministic. That makes it a much harder problem for AI to solve, because a rule which works the first time may not work in subsequent trials. That is, the effectiveness of a rule is not the binary success/fail like you get in deterministic systems. The effectiveness spans the entire range from 0% to 100% probability of success, and the probability is constantly updated with new trials, and that probability can change if opponents start to use different strategies.
That's the whole point. They didn't script up a bot. Heck, they didn't even teach it the rules of the game. They programmed an AI, and let it come up with scripts on its own by playing the game and "discovering" for itself what actions resulted in a win vs a loss. You're correct that the AI has a huge advantage over human players (unless they had it play by pointing a camera at the screen, and using a mechanical arm to move a mouse). But that's tangential to what makes this research interesting.
Drilling tunnels goes faster if you can drill from both sides at the same time. But doing so requires precise positioning and alignment so that the two ends of the tunnel will meet in the middle. If they opt to drill a tunnel down into the chamber from the top of the mountain, they first need to precisely locate the position of the lost team inside the mountain. And a company experienced in drilling tunnels from both sides is exactly what you want for that task.
Didn't read TFA, but the basic principle is sound. Personally owned cars are utilized only about 5%-10% of the time (1 to 2.5 hours out of the day). The rest of the time they take up often-valuable parking space along streets and in parking garages. Space utilization is also bad, with a large percentage of the vehicles transporting only a single person at any given time. Call it 30% on average (1.5 occupants in a car able to carry 5 people). That yields a total utilization of only 1.5%-3%, which is abysmal. Logistically, their only benefit is they shave a small percentage off your commute time as you (1) don't have to wait for a taxi or bus or subway train, and (2) go directly from your origination point to your destination, instead of a stop a couple blocks away. The magnitude of these benefits decreases (and can even go negative, becoming drawbacks) if the number of personal vehicles exceeds the capacity of the roads and parking spaces.
Switching to ridesharing (whether it be driverless cars, Uber, taxis, buses, or subways) increases utilization. They're in use roughly 12 hours/day (50%), and occupancy is up around 50%. That yields an overall utilization of 25% - much better than personally owned cars. A great example of this was South Korea. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the Korean government imposed a heavy tax on cars, more than doubling the price. This resulted in a few rich people owning cars, and everyone else using taxis (the taxi companies and individual taxi drivers could amortize the high vehicle cost over thousands of passengers each year). Then in the 1988 Presidential campaign, one of the candidates ran ads criticizing South Korea for selling Hyundais in the U.S. for $10,000, while an equivalent Ford Escort cost $25,000 in Korea. He conveniently left out that the Hyundai also cost $25,000 in Korea. But the damage was done and the U.S. pressured South Korea to repeal its tax on cars. Suddenly a huge percentage of the Korean population could afford their own car, and the streets immediately became gridlocked. A 300 km trip across the country during the busiest holidays can regularly take 24 hours by car. Parking on the sidewalks became commonplace in cities.
Ridesharing is superior if you can deal with the drawbacks - slightly longer commute times due to having to wait for a ride, coping with frequent stops instead of traveling directly, and having to walk to/from the stop to your actual origination/destination. If these conditions can be met, ridesharing requires fewer vehicles (meaning lower purchase and annual maintenance cost per rider), less road space, and less parking space. It only falls out of favors if one or more of these conditions are not met, and the lost time imposes an economic cost on the individual rider greater than the economic cost of buying and owning a personal vehicle. That's why public transport tends to work in cities, but not in rural communities.
How did this get modded up? Net neutrality is the principle of treating data equally regardless of originating source on the Internet. e.g. You can't throttle Netflix while prioritizing your own video streaming service.
What you're proposing is content neutrality - treating all data the same regardless of the type of data. If we mandated content neutrality, the Internet would die a horrible death as filesharing, spam, and DDoS attacks got equal priority to video streaming, web browsing, and online game traffic. The only reason the Internet is able to function despite the terabytes of illegitimate traffic being dumped on it is because ISPs and backbones are allowed to lower its priority via traffic shaping to give legitimate traffic first crack at the available bandwidth.
The term seems to be a play on man-spreading. The tendency for men to sit with their legs spread, thus taking up more than one seat.
Power strips are designed to mimic wall outlets. AC adapters with the transfer stuck onto the plug are a cost-cutting measure. The manufacturer didn't want to pay for a second cable between the outlet and the transformer, so built the plug into the transformer. In low-volume usage this actually makes sense, as it keeps the transformer off the ground where it's out of the way and able to cool better. But in high-volume usage it ends up blocking other outlet sockets.
TFA is worthless though. Putting the plug on the transformer is arguably the "right" solution to the problem. If you required all AC adapters to have a second cable between the outlet and transformer (like most laptop adapters), the only place you could put the transformer is on the floor. With the plug built into the transformer, you have the option of having the transformer on the wall if you need it off the floor, or you can buy one of the short extensions others have linked to and have the transformer on the floor. Having the plug on the transformer gives you have the option of doing it either way. Requiring a second cable takes away the wall option, so is the worse solution.
Yes it is a fair to compare a modern subsonic airliner to Concorde.
Subsonic airliners have gotten much more fuel efficient since the 1970s by switching to higher bypass ratios. Basically, instead of the engine operating as a turbojet and blasting air out the back to push the plane forward, part of the power generated by the engines (more than 90% in modern designs) is diverted to spin ducted propellers, which push air back to push the plane forward. This is why so many commuter planes "still" use propellers - their engines are actually jet engines (instead of piston engines), but they drive a large unducted propeller and derive almost none of their thrust from shooting air out the back.
A ducted bypass turbofan is not possible with a supersonic aircraft because the airflow through the engine also needs to be supersonic, meaning propellers (which rely on generating low air pressure on one side) don't work. You have to rely on the turbine blades compressing the air, which is pretty much what a turbojet does, so there's no point doing a bypass. And the only way to fly at supersonic speeds is to blast air out the back of the engine.
They use a helluva lot more fuel (per passenger mile) when flying supersonic. That they use more fuel than a regular airliner while flying subsonic is another negative, not a mitigating factor.
Good luck with that. This isn't some new problem which only popped up recently with the advent of social media. It's been happening since the beginning of civilization. Social media is what happens when you dial up the rumor and gossip mill to 11.
It's forcing us to deal with all sorts of ethical issues, such as personal responsibility for repeating a false rumor, which we previously were able to ignore because they happened much less frequently. But the issues themselves are not new. In most fields (e.g. medicine, law, engineering) the issue is mitigated by accrediting individuals after they've proven to some regulatory body that they know what they're doing. But accrediting the media falls afoul of the concept of freedom of the press and freedom of speech, so it remains in a Wild West-like state where pretty much everyone can do whatever they want, including the rumor-mongers and gossips.
That's not price gouging though because Nvidia didn't raise the wholesale price of their GPUs. Even when retail high-end GPUs were ridiculously overpriced, it was still possible to buy a pre-built system with a high-end GPU at a reasonable price because the company building it was able to get the GPUs at uninflated wholesale prices. eBayers would buy these systems and part it out, selling the GPU separately from the rest of the system (which they resold as using integrated graphics), to take advantage of the discrepancy between the system price and component market price.
What most people don't seem to understand about market pricing is that prices for a commodity do not rise because sellers raise the price. It rises because buyers buy out all the inventory of sellers offering the item at a low price. That leaves only sellers offering it at a higher price with inventory, which buyers then perceive as an increase in market price. Sellers can then take note that the items are selling out at the lower price, and may choose to raise the price at that point (the sweet spot is when you're just barely able to keep an item in stock). But it's the buyers who cause the price increase (by depleting the market of lower-priced inventory), not the sellers.
Generally, everything that's produced is sold. People have this fanciful misconception that unsold merchandise is disposed of in landfils, probably due to journalists trying to make their stories sound more dramatic. It doesn't work like that.
When you over-produce something (supply exceeds demand), the cost to produce that inventory is a sunk cost. You've already paid for it, meaning there's no way to get it back (you can't go back in time and not spend the money to produce the items). So the cost to manufacture the product becomes a non-factor. Even recovering part of the production cost is preferable to recovering none of it. So when supply exceeds demand, you simply lower the price (below manufacturing cost if necessary) until the demand increases to match the supply you've got. And eventually everything you've produced gets sold.
I had a run-in with a store owner who didn't understand this. He'd bought some Intel 80286 laptops for resale. When they didn't sell as well as he'd hoped, he refused to lower their price below what he'd paid for them. Two years later when 80486 laptops were the norm, he was still trying to sell the 80286 laptops for the same price as 80486 laptops, so of course nobody was buying. He ended up losing his entire investment in those laptops. If he'd ignored the sunk costs and priced the laptops below his purchase price, he might have been able to sell them losing only 20%-30%. Instead he lost 100%.
I doubt the shorters are that worried. Tesla stock has a market cap close to GM's right now. GM produces more than 8,000 cars per day . So there's still a huge chasm between Tesla's valuation and reality.
You do realize that if the shorters are correct and Tesla stock (eventually) comes back down to earth, then the stock price for Tesla was overvalued because of lies and misinformation spread by Tesla fans, right?
How do you know the percentage of corporations who don't give you a courtesy rejection call, isn't the same as the percentage of applicants who ghost employers?
Most people only see one side of this. If you're an employee, you only experience HR from companies you've applied to not telling you you've been rejected. If you work in HR, you mostly experience applicants not telling you that they've gone with a different offer. This creates the skewed perception in both parties that others are not being courteous to them, which can lead to the flawed reasoning that they're justified "returning" that discourteous behavior onto others who may be innocent.
I've been on both sides of this. Once I make it to the interview stage, most employers called to tell me if they gave the job to someone else. Likewise, most applicants we had made an offer to called to tell us if they'd accepted a competing offer. Resist the temptation to turn this into a race to the bottom. That's just letting the few bad employers and applicants set the standard of behavior.
Recruiters are often independent agencies who act as a middleman, earning a commission equal to a few months' salary if a company decides to hire an applicant that the recruiter puts them in contact with. No affiliation with the company, they're just willing to make cold calls which employers/applicants are often uncomfortable doing. I've seen all sorts of scummy behavior from recruiters. If you're trying to punish employers for the had behavior of recruiters, you're targeting the wrong people.
Turnabout is ghosting an employer who has a history of not telling applicants that they've been rejected.
Ghosting an innocent employer because a different employer didn't do you the courtesy of letting you know, is a race to the bottom which hurts everyone. You're just inflicting bad behavior onto other innocents, under the justification that because it was done to you it's OK for you to do it to others even if they're innocent. The employer who didn't tell you they'd gone with someone else for the job probably felt justified in not informing you because too many candidates were no-shows for scheduled interviews. And turnabout is fair play after all, right?
Agreed. But it does bring up the issue that TFA codes probably need a warning placed alongside the code. "This code is for your personal use only. Nobody should ever ask you for this code. Never give the code to another person, even if they claim to be from [company] or [government]."
TFA is great, but not everyone understands how it works. And as a corollary, you shouldn't have to understand how TFA codes work in order to use them. Rather than putting a gun to your own head and pulling the trigger, a better analogy is putting a complicated piece of machinery whose function you don't entirely understand to your head. Such machinery needs to be designed with warnings and safeguards to prevent people who don't understand exactly how it works from hurting themselves.
People like you are the reason I have to travel with either a crappy mouse with not enough buttons, or a bulky gaming mouse with extra buttons. Logitech used to make a small travel mouse with 4 buttons on the side, but they reduced it to 2 buttons because people like you complained. The only wireless mouse I've been able to find with more than two programmable side buttons was a larger gaming mouse.
If you don't like the extra buttons, don't use them. Simply program them to do nothing. Let those of us who like or need the extra buttons continue to use them. Don't do things which get the product changed to make it unusable by those with a different preference than you. What you're doing is like complaining that restaurants should stop selling chicken because you don't like chicken. If you don't like chicken, just don't order the chicken dishes. Don't try to get the restaurants to drop chicken from their menu, depriving people who like chicken of the opportunity to order chicken.
The vast majority of countries are missing their Paris agreement targets.
And globally, the increase in energy production by renewables has pretty much been canceled out by the reduction in nuclear power, meaning the percentage of energy produced by fossil fuels has remained about the same. So if you want someone to blame, blame the anti-nuclear activists.
That works out to a profit margin (net income) of just $3000/yr per employee.
Most businesses have a net income per employee of tens of thousands of dollars ($28k/yr average for the fortune 500), with the best ones pulling in well over $100,000/yr per employee. Most of the companies with a net income per employee below $10,000/yr are huge corporations who gain economic stability from having 100,000+ employees (erratic performance by a single employee does not affect their bottom line much), and are able to leverage economies of scale to turn those meager profit margins into something worth doing.
If you take up Amazon's offer, you're basically dead meat. Especially since you're in the precarious position of only having a single customer, and have no leverage to negotiate prices - you either accept what Amazon says they'll pay you or they'll bankrupt you overnight. This is basically Amazon outsourcing the delivery business, where they take the lion's share of the profit for themselves, while offloading all the risk (fewer deliveries due to an economic downturn) onto the poor schmucks who took out loans to buy all those delivery vans and have to pay payroll and unemployment regardless of how poorly business goes.