Ever since the Slashdot redesign a few years back, the main link to TFA appears to the right of the title, where it's easy to miss and not at all obvious that it's a link. But I imagine they paid some designer handsomely to make the site less usable.
Sprint already bought and merged with Nextel years ago. Nextel used iDEN - the only other major network type which used TDMA like GSM.
At this point in time, there's very little difference between GSM and CDMA networks.
The only major difference is in how voice is handled. GSM uses TDMA, CDMA use CDMA.
Both GSM and CDMA use CDMA for 3G data (GSM uses wideband CDMA).
Both GSM and CDMA uses LTE for 4G data. LTE is predominantly OFDMA, though a few bands are dynamically assigned TDMA (including one of Sprint's LTE bands)
Both GSM and CDMA use SIM cards, since they're required for LTE. The CDMA networks just don't use them for non-LTE functions.
The standard line of reasoning for most people seems to be:
if (you like the President)
{ .. giveHimCreditForEverythingGoodThatHappens(); .. blameHisStaffForEverythingBadThatHappens();
}
else if (you dislike the President)
{ .. blameHimForEverythingBadThatHappens(); .. giveHisStaffCreditForEverythingGoodThatHappens();
}
This isn't the first President who's taken undue credit or shirked deserved blame, nor will he be the last. And it works the same across the entire political spectrum. e.g. Clinton got credit for balancing the budget, while blaming the Republican Congress for making the budget cuts which actually balanced the budget.
Any other company, the first thing people would suspect is that it's unsafe working conditions which are causing the unusual number of fires, and the company/management is at fault for not devoting enough funds nor attention to worker safety. But since it's Tesla, it must be arson by a disgruntled employee, or sabotage by a competitor.
The thing most people don't realize is that Tesla is not the reason the industry is pushing towards electric cars. The California Air Resources Board is. CARB has a zero emissions vehicle mandate - every year a certain percentage of vehicles each manufacturer sells has to be a ZEV. The formula is a bit complicated, but for 2018 it's a little over 2%. For 2025 it's supposed to be 8%. If an automaker fails to hit the target percentage, they have to buy ZEV credits from someone who surpassed the target (e.g. Tesla). If they fail to do that, they are banned from selling cars in California and about a dozen other states which automatically adopt CARB's guidelines. These states comprise about a third of the U.S. by population, and no auto manufacturer wants to be cut off from a third of the U.S. market. So they are all rolling out EVs to comply with the ZEV mandate.
Tesla has nothing to do with it. Because of the ZEV mandate, all the other automakers would be working hard to make EVs even if Tesla didn't exist. If anything, Tesla allows manufacturers to delay rolling out their own EV, since they can just buy ZEV credits from Tesla instead (many low-volume high-end exotic car makers are choosing to do this). So it would actually be against the other automakers' self interest to sabotage Tesla since that would raise the market price of ZEV credits, and they'd have to pay more (mostly to Tesla) if they should fail to hit their CARB-mandated ZEV percentage. The only time sabotage would make sense is if they're selling enough of their own EVs that they don't need to buy Tesla ZEV credits (and feel they won't need to in the future), in which case there's no need to sabotage Tesla since they'd already be beating Tesla in the market. Musk didn't start Tesla because he thought EVs were the future and wanted to get in on it early (he may believe that, but that's not the reason he started Tesla). He started it because he realized that CARB's ZEV mandate would give an automaker who made only EVs an economic advantage in the market (other automakers would have to pay him for every EV he sold).
So there's no incentive for the rest of the auto industry to sabotage Tesla, or EVs in general. That's a self-victimization delusion created by EV advocates who can't comprehend why regular people don't want to buy EVs. Because they can't understand the motivations of regular people, they come up with a conspiracy theory about how the industry is responsible for holding EVs back. Believe me, the industry wants to sell EVs so they can comply with CARB's ZEV mandate, since California is in absolutely no danger of switching from a blue state to a red state. This is also the reason I'm not shorting Tesla stock. 8% ZEVs by 2025 is an extremely aggressive target. I'm not sure the other automakers can hit it. If they can't, and Tesla can survive that long, its current stock valuation may in fact be justified.
Drinking straight from the cup became a nuisance once they began putting ice into drinks (so around the 1940s, when electric freezers became commonplace). Not only would the ice chill your lips, but sometimes it would spill out all over you. The straw solved these problems. The straw combined with the lid also allowed you to drink inside a moving car without spilling anything.
Sprint dropped Google Voice integration at the start of this month (your Sprint phone number used to be your Google Voice number). I've been suffering withdrawal symptoms ever since. It was so convenient being able to answer texts on my phone, or do it from my tablet if my phone was on its charger, or do it from my laptop if I needed to type a lengthy response. It'll be nice to get some of this capability back.
The part about a prison environment per se turning guards into monsters is a sham.
The part about people willing to do questionable and immoral things to please an authority figure, things that they normally would never even consider doing on their own, is real and has been replicated in many different experiments (many of which are banned today for being unethical).
So this experiment is discredited in its support of the hypothesis it was trying to prove. But the way the experiment was manipulated makes it inadvertently join a large body of evidence supporting a different hypothesis - that people can be manipulated by authority figures into doing things they normally would consider immoral.
That stuff is classified as low-level nuclear waste. Generally, you just dig a big hole and bury it, because after a few hundred years it'll decay to background levels of radiation. (France would classify it as intermediate-level waste, though with similar disposal requirements.)
High-level nuclear waste is spent fuel. That's the stuff which can remain "hot" for tens of thousands of years if it's not reprocessed.
This. The U.S. uses a common law system. The decision in a case sets a precedent which can influence future cases. So when a high-profile case like this shows up, you want it to set a good precedent. It's the same reason Google bought YouTube when Google Video failed to dethrone it - they just knew YouTube was going to get sued for copyright infringement, but didn't have the finances to adequately defend itself in court. And a lopsided court case where high-paid Hollywood attorneys squared off against some YouTube employee's cousin's in-law's nephew who had just graduated from law school, could've set an extremely damaging precedent against the ability to distribute copyrighted materials over the Internet.
Look at the levelized cost of electricity (unit cost of electricity after factoring in all lifetime costs) for nuclear in the U.S. versus other countries like France and Japan. Globally, nuclear power is the cheapest. The high cost of nuclear power in the U.S. is self-inflicted by poor and over-regulation, not due to any inherent engineering problems.
The randomization errors were not inconsequential. The results were the same, but the statistical certainty is now weaker. The reduction in sample size due to non-randomized samples results in a weakening of the statistical confidence interval of the findings. On top of that, they are now no longer able to eliminate (to the same degree of statistical certainty) other factors than diet as potential causes for the health improvements they found.
Basically, it turned the study's conclusion from "we're sure the diet helps" into "this diet seems to help." Same result, but weaker. The main reason doctors had been recommending the diet based on this study had been the certainty.
Powell didn't have a private server. He had a private email account (accessed via dialup on a laptop no less), and used both it and his official state.gov email account.
Hillary set up a private server and used it for all her official email. She never used her state.gov email account.
Comparing the two is like comparing someone who occasionally drives over the speed limit, with someone who always drives 100+ MPH.
So what? From a human perspective (arguably the thing that matters most to you and me), normal is what we have now, and any deviations from that are going to cause us pain and suffering.
In this context, "normal" means the difference between "We need to do everything we can to stop climate change" and "Climate change is inevitable, so let's get busy moving our infrastructure away from the coasts." Opportunity cost is measured against the possible alternatives, not against what you used to have in the past.
If climate change is man-made due to our emissions, then we need to do what we can to stop it or slow it down by reducing our emissions.
If it's natural, then changing our emissions is pointless - it's going to happen no matter what we do about our emissions. We need to stop worrying about emissions and start worrying about moving our infrastructure to be able to survive the change. Slowing it down only increases the time we have to move our infrastructure, it doesn't alter the fact that we need to move it. So changing our emissions then only becomes worthwhile if the extra time to move our infrastructure would reduce the overall cost to move it. In fact speeding it up may actually be preferable since if the change is visible in the short term, it elicits a sense of urgency that gets people to prepare. If there's no visible change, it breeds complacency and skepticism, and we end up doing nothing about the problem. The long-term changes just become stories your great-grandfather told you and what you read about in history books, easy to dismiss as fabricated.
It might be inevitable, but it's absolutely in our best interest to have it happen as slowly as possible. Cities, industries, and crops are where they are; moving them or hardening them is gonna be hella expensive and would be better done over long periods of time
You're confusing a rate with an amount. While spreading the cost of a move over more years decreases its cost per year (a rate), it doesn't change the total cost of the move (an amount).
Our infrastructure's lifespan is on the order of 50-100 years. Most concrete and steel structures wear out and need to be refurbished or replaced within that timeframe. So that's the timeframe within which a move will have the lowest total cost. If you go faster, you end up abandoning infrastructure which still has usable lifespan. If you go slower, people (both the complacent and skeptics) end up building new infrastructure in the areas you're trying to abandon long-term.
I own my own domain so I can create my own email addresses. I assign every company I deal with its own forwarding email address. So for example, I sign up for Microsoft services using microsoft@mydomain.com. Banks, online shopping sites, topical forums requiring an email address, services like Roku and Plex, etc. - they each get their own email address. I'm at over 700 different email address now. 700+ different companies I've signed up for services with over 15 years. The vast majority of them adhere to their privacy policy promising not to sell my email address to marketers.
The two notable exceptions are Microsoft and Adobe. I began receiving spam at both of the email addresses I'd assigned to them. The Adobe one began getting spam shortly after they were hacked, so I suspect they didn't sell me out (at least not deliberately). The Microsoft email however got several waves of spam, about 4-12 months apart, indicating it was continuously being sold. It's remained quiet the last few years, but after my past spam experience with them I've been assiduously avoiding signing up for anything with Microsoft (e.g. all my Win 10 accounts are local accounts).
So basically, DRM was added to games and buyers told to tolerate it because it prevented people who pirated the game from playing it. But it's now being used to prevent people who bought the game from playing it. Talk about mission creep. Guess I should dig up my 2000s URL bookmark archives for sites I used to convert games I bought into no-CD versions, and see if any of them are still around.
The bugs don't bother me - they're inevitable. It's the "features" that are deliberately put into Win 10 which annoy me most. I changed the program associated with several file types to non-Microsoft programs soon after upgrading to Win 10. After last week's patch, instead of launching the program when double-clicking on the associated file type, it popped up the standard "no associated program" dialog and asked if I wouldn't rather want to use the Microsoft product instead of the one I'd selected.
If I went to the trouble to change the default to a different program, that should be a pretty clear indication that I don't want to use the default Microsoft program. Please stop bugging me about it. This is supposed to be an operating system that I paid for, not an advertising platform. I'm worried we're headed down the same path as Cable TV - where originally you paid for cable so you wouldn't have to watch ads like on broadcast TV. But soon the cable channels figured out they could charge you for the channel AND put ads in their programming.
Solar had the largest share of newly installed capacity. But solar's capacity factor (ratio of actual energy produced to capacity) is abysmal. About 0.145 for the U.S. as a whole, 0.185 for the desert Southwest (these can be improved with panels which track the sun, at the cost of needing more land area). Contrast this with wind (0.2-0.35), hydro (0.4-0.5, mainly because it's used for peaking power rather than base load), natural gas (0.5, also used for peaking load), coal (0.6-0.7), and nuclear (0.9).
Put another way, 1 GW of PV solar capacity is worth about 600 MW of wind capacity, which is worth about 350 MW of hydro capacity, which is worth about 300 MW of natural gas capacity, which is worth about 230 MW of coal capacity, which is worth about 160 MW of nuclear capacity. Comparing power generation on the basis of installed capacity is like trying to eat enough to live based solely on the weight of food you're consuming completely ignoring the different caloric and nutritional content of the different foods.
The app, downloaded more than 10 million times
[...]
The broadcasting of football matches in public places without a paid licence cost the game an estimated 150 million euros ($177m) a year, it said.
Data plan on biggest Spanish carrier is 15 Euro for 1.5 GB. Or 1 Euro per 100 MB. That's probably about the size of the sound samples which would need to be transmitted back each month.
(10 million devices) * (1 Euro/mo) * (12 months/year) = 120 million Euros a year.
So the value of the data bandwidth they stole to do this monitoring is probably within an order of magnitude of the purported losses due to piracy. If they want to pay you to run this app to help their anti-piracy monitoring, that's not a problem. But secretly eavesdropping and stealing bandwidth is unethical if not downright illegal.
In modern terminology, the difference between "discrete" and "integrated" graphics is not whether it's a standalone plug-in card. It's the presence of VRAM - high-speed, high-bandwidth RAM dedicated for use by the video card for 3D rendering. Discrete GPUs come with their own VRAM. Integrated GPUs use system RAM (though they're increasingly showing up with their own small buffer of high-speed RAM that acts more like a cache), with a much smaller amount of dedicated RAM for framebuffers.
The video cards from the era you've linked either used system RAM, or only did 2D graphics using a few MB of onboard RAM for the framebuffer. So they are analogous to today's integrated graphics. The need for the GPU to have gobs of its own high-speed VRAM didn't arise until 3D graphics began pushing frames faster than you could transfer needed data across the bus from system RAM to the video card. Most of that VRAM is taken up by textures used for 3D graphics, so only 3D graphics cards have large amounts of it. A framebuffer, found on both 3D and 2D graphics cards, is only 8 MB for 1080p 32-bit color. So there's no need for large amounts of VRAM in an integrated video card.
Back then, we called them a 3D video card vs a 2D video card. That nomenclature was abandoned once even low-end 2D video cards became capable of rudimentary 3D graphics. The distinction then shifted to whether it was a "serious" 3D graphics card with its own dedicated VRAM, or whether it was a 2D video card (commonly integrated into the motherboard) which could do 3D graphics in a pinch by borrowing system RAM to use as VRAM.
While that's true, if Excel's RNG results in a pattern (e.g. cell A2534 is always assigned a low number and thus selected), it could result in immigration employees who know of this gaming the system, to do an immigrant friend a favor or even auctioning the spot to the highest bidder.
The bigger question to me is why are they using Excel for this? Spreadsheets are for calculating things. They are absolutely the wrong tool if you need the data you're working on to remain consistent or auditable. An immigration employee could take the spreadsheet after the random numbers were assigned, and copy-paste names or random numbers around to move people to/from the selected and denied categories, and there'd be no way to detect they'd done this.
From Amazon's point of view, if it's cheaper to dispose of the goods rather than repair or refurbish them, then that's the smart move.
Technically, it wouldn't cost Amazon any more to repair/refurbish them. They'd end up just passing the cost on to other customers via higher prices anyway, just like you're already paying for the items they dispose of.
The problem happens when one company decides to "do the right thing" and repair/refurbish these items, while a second company decides to just dispose of them. The second company then ends up being able to charge lower prices while maintaining the same profit margin. Customers will buy from them no matter how much the first company advertises or publicizes that "hey, that other company is destroying the environment by telling you to throw defective items away instead of sending it back for repair." That sets up a race to the bottom where all companies have to adopt the disposal policy used by the worst company, just to compete on a level playing field.
The standard was set by the same morons who brought you "USB high speed" vs "USB full speed". To this day, I still don't know off the top of my head which one is USB 1.1 and which USB 2.0. I always have to google it.
In addition to all the madness with charging, they also screwed up the USB 3.x nomenclature. We had a golden opportunity here to leave USB 3.0 referring to USB-A ports (add an extra revision for higher speeds), and have USB 3.1 ref to USB-C ports. That way if you saw USB 3.0 in the specs, you'd know it was a type A port. If you saw USB 3.1 in the specs, you'd know it was a type -C.
Instead they decided to rename USB 3.0 as USB 3.1. So if you see just "USB 3.1" it's referring to a older USB-A style port. If you see "USB 3.1 type C" it's referring to a USB-C port. Unless of course the manufacturer decides to omit "type C" and just call it USB 3.1 in the specs which it's actually a USB-C port. I've had to resort to looking up laptop reviews and viewing pictures of the ports on the sides to confirm exactly what ports it has and doesn't have.
It's like they intentionally trying to make it more confusing.
I managed to grab a first-name email address for MIT's alumni email forwarding service, by virtue of randomly happening to be online and checking out the alumni website a few minutes after the service went live. It ends up getting a boatload of spam (apparently one of spammers' algorithms is to blindly send spam to [common name]@[domain]), and misdirected emails intended for other alumni with the same first name. What's even more fun is when one of those alumni signs up for a mailing list website and forgets to add their last name or whatever to their email address, resulting in them signing me up.
It's just an alumni forwarding service so I can tolerate it. I just whitelist the emails I expect to get at that address and set my spam filtering to really aggressive. But if it were going to be my main email address, I'd much prefer firstname.lastname@domain or firstname123@domain or something similarly easy to remember but more obscure. I own my own domain and run my main email through it. But I've long since abandoned firstname@mydomain.com to spam, and just redirect that to/dev/null.
Having a larger pool of companies in the fund changes the probability distribution function. The bell curve gets narrower and taller in the middle the more stocks you put in the fund, meaning you're more likely to get an outcome closer to average, less likely to get an extreme outcome.
It's a consequence of statistics, nothing to do with stocks. If you roll a 1d6, every number between 1 and 6 has an equal chance of appearing. If you roll a 2d6, the bell "curve" becomes a triangle, with 2 and 12 being the least likely outcome (1 in 36 chance), and 7 being the most likely. A 3d6 turns flat sides of the triangle into a true bell curve. Increasing the number of dice results in the curve narrowing even further. By the time you get to 10d6, it's virtually impossible to get either of the extreme outcomes (1 in 60 million chance of getting a 10 or a 60).
So when you put thousands of stocks in a mutual fund like an index fund, it's virtually guaranteed to perform at the market average. Whereas if you buy stock from a single company it could perform average, or you could make a lot more money, or you could lose everything. Insurance companies and casinos rely on the same thing - by grouping lots of insured or gamblers together, the overall outcome becomes much more predictable. The increased accuracy of prediction (outcome closer to the average) allows them to make money despite decreasing their margin (offering a lower price for insurance than the competition).
Slashdot Mirror
Ever since the Slashdot redesign a few years back, the main link to TFA appears to the right of the title, where it's easy to miss and not at all obvious that it's a link. But I imagine they paid some designer handsomely to make the site less usable.
At this point in time, there's very little difference between GSM and CDMA networks.
The standard line of reasoning for most people seems to be:
.. giveHimCreditForEverythingGoodThatHappens();
.. blameHisStaffForEverythingBadThatHappens();
.. blameHimForEverythingBadThatHappens();
.. giveHisStaffCreditForEverythingGoodThatHappens();
if (you like the President)
{
}
else if (you dislike the President)
{
}
This isn't the first President who's taken undue credit or shirked deserved blame, nor will he be the last. And it works the same across the entire political spectrum. e.g. Clinton got credit for balancing the budget, while blaming the Republican Congress for making the budget cuts which actually balanced the budget.
Any other company, the first thing people would suspect is that it's unsafe working conditions which are causing the unusual number of fires, and the company/management is at fault for not devoting enough funds nor attention to worker safety. But since it's Tesla, it must be arson by a disgruntled employee, or sabotage by a competitor.
The thing most people don't realize is that Tesla is not the reason the industry is pushing towards electric cars. The California Air Resources Board is. CARB has a zero emissions vehicle mandate - every year a certain percentage of vehicles each manufacturer sells has to be a ZEV. The formula is a bit complicated, but for 2018 it's a little over 2%. For 2025 it's supposed to be 8%. If an automaker fails to hit the target percentage, they have to buy ZEV credits from someone who surpassed the target (e.g. Tesla). If they fail to do that, they are banned from selling cars in California and about a dozen other states which automatically adopt CARB's guidelines . These states comprise about a third of the U.S. by population, and no auto manufacturer wants to be cut off from a third of the U.S. market. So they are all rolling out EVs to comply with the ZEV mandate.
Tesla has nothing to do with it. Because of the ZEV mandate, all the other automakers would be working hard to make EVs even if Tesla didn't exist. If anything, Tesla allows manufacturers to delay rolling out their own EV, since they can just buy ZEV credits from Tesla instead (many low-volume high-end exotic car makers are choosing to do this). So it would actually be against the other automakers' self interest to sabotage Tesla since that would raise the market price of ZEV credits, and they'd have to pay more (mostly to Tesla) if they should fail to hit their CARB-mandated ZEV percentage. The only time sabotage would make sense is if they're selling enough of their own EVs that they don't need to buy Tesla ZEV credits (and feel they won't need to in the future), in which case there's no need to sabotage Tesla since they'd already be beating Tesla in the market. Musk didn't start Tesla because he thought EVs were the future and wanted to get in on it early (he may believe that, but that's not the reason he started Tesla). He started it because he realized that CARB's ZEV mandate would give an automaker who made only EVs an economic advantage in the market (other automakers would have to pay him for every EV he sold).
So there's no incentive for the rest of the auto industry to sabotage Tesla, or EVs in general. That's a self-victimization delusion created by EV advocates who can't comprehend why regular people don't want to buy EVs. Because they can't understand the motivations of regular people, they come up with a conspiracy theory about how the industry is responsible for holding EVs back. Believe me, the industry wants to sell EVs so they can comply with CARB's ZEV mandate, since California is in absolutely no danger of switching from a blue state to a red state. This is also the reason I'm not shorting Tesla stock. 8% ZEVs by 2025 is an extremely aggressive target. I'm not sure the other automakers can hit it. If they can't, and Tesla can survive that long, its current stock valuation may in fact be justified.
Drinking straight from the cup became a nuisance once they began putting ice into drinks (so around the 1940s, when electric freezers became commonplace). Not only would the ice chill your lips, but sometimes it would spill out all over you. The straw solved these problems. The straw combined with the lid also allowed you to drink inside a moving car without spilling anything.
Sprint dropped Google Voice integration at the start of this month (your Sprint phone number used to be your Google Voice number). I've been suffering withdrawal symptoms ever since. It was so convenient being able to answer texts on my phone, or do it from my tablet if my phone was on its charger, or do it from my laptop if I needed to type a lengthy response. It'll be nice to get some of this capability back.
The part about a prison environment per se turning guards into monsters is a sham.
The part about people willing to do questionable and immoral things to please an authority figure, things that they normally would never even consider doing on their own, is real and has been replicated in many different experiments (many of which are banned today for being unethical).
So this experiment is discredited in its support of the hypothesis it was trying to prove. But the way the experiment was manipulated makes it inadvertently join a large body of evidence supporting a different hypothesis - that people can be manipulated by authority figures into doing things they normally would consider immoral.
That stuff is classified as low-level nuclear waste. Generally, you just dig a big hole and bury it, because after a few hundred years it'll decay to background levels of radiation. (France would classify it as intermediate-level waste, though with similar disposal requirements.)
High-level nuclear waste is spent fuel. That's the stuff which can remain "hot" for tens of thousands of years if it's not reprocessed.
This. The U.S. uses a common law system. The decision in a case sets a precedent which can influence future cases. So when a high-profile case like this shows up, you want it to set a good precedent. It's the same reason Google bought YouTube when Google Video failed to dethrone it - they just knew YouTube was going to get sued for copyright infringement, but didn't have the finances to adequately defend itself in court. And a lopsided court case where high-paid Hollywood attorneys squared off against some YouTube employee's cousin's in-law's nephew who had just graduated from law school, could've set an extremely damaging precedent against the ability to distribute copyrighted materials over the Internet.
Look at the levelized cost of electricity (unit cost of electricity after factoring in all lifetime costs) for nuclear in the U.S. versus other countries like France and Japan. Globally, nuclear power is the cheapest. The high cost of nuclear power in the U.S. is self-inflicted by poor and over-regulation, not due to any inherent engineering problems.
The writer of TFA is a hack.
The randomization errors were not inconsequential. The results were the same, but the statistical certainty is now weaker. The reduction in sample size due to non-randomized samples results in a weakening of the statistical confidence interval of the findings. On top of that, they are now no longer able to eliminate (to the same degree of statistical certainty) other factors than diet as potential causes for the health improvements they found.
Basically, it turned the study's conclusion from "we're sure the diet helps" into "this diet seems to help." Same result, but weaker. The main reason doctors had been recommending the diet based on this study had been the certainty.
Powell didn't have a private server. He had a private email account (accessed via dialup on a laptop no less), and used both it and his official state.gov email account.
Hillary set up a private server and used it for all her official email. She never used her state.gov email account.
Comparing the two is like comparing someone who occasionally drives over the speed limit, with someone who always drives 100+ MPH.
In this context, "normal" means the difference between "We need to do everything we can to stop climate change" and "Climate change is inevitable, so let's get busy moving our infrastructure away from the coasts." Opportunity cost is measured against the possible alternatives, not against what you used to have in the past.
If climate change is man-made due to our emissions, then we need to do what we can to stop it or slow it down by reducing our emissions.
If it's natural, then changing our emissions is pointless - it's going to happen no matter what we do about our emissions. We need to stop worrying about emissions and start worrying about moving our infrastructure to be able to survive the change. Slowing it down only increases the time we have to move our infrastructure, it doesn't alter the fact that we need to move it. So changing our emissions then only becomes worthwhile if the extra time to move our infrastructure would reduce the overall cost to move it. In fact speeding it up may actually be preferable since if the change is visible in the short term, it elicits a sense of urgency that gets people to prepare. If there's no visible change, it breeds complacency and skepticism, and we end up doing nothing about the problem. The long-term changes just become stories your great-grandfather told you and what you read about in history books, easy to dismiss as fabricated.
You're confusing a rate with an amount. While spreading the cost of a move over more years decreases its cost per year (a rate), it doesn't change the total cost of the move (an amount).
Our infrastructure's lifespan is on the order of 50-100 years. Most concrete and steel structures wear out and need to be refurbished or replaced within that timeframe. So that's the timeframe within which a move will have the lowest total cost. If you go faster, you end up abandoning infrastructure which still has usable lifespan. If you go slower, people (both the complacent and skeptics) end up building new infrastructure in the areas you're trying to abandon long-term.
I own my own domain so I can create my own email addresses. I assign every company I deal with its own forwarding email address. So for example, I sign up for Microsoft services using microsoft@mydomain.com. Banks, online shopping sites, topical forums requiring an email address, services like Roku and Plex, etc. - they each get their own email address. I'm at over 700 different email address now. 700+ different companies I've signed up for services with over 15 years. The vast majority of them adhere to their privacy policy promising not to sell my email address to marketers.
The two notable exceptions are Microsoft and Adobe. I began receiving spam at both of the email addresses I'd assigned to them. The Adobe one began getting spam shortly after they were hacked, so I suspect they didn't sell me out (at least not deliberately). The Microsoft email however got several waves of spam, about 4-12 months apart, indicating it was continuously being sold. It's remained quiet the last few years, but after my past spam experience with them I've been assiduously avoiding signing up for anything with Microsoft (e.g. all my Win 10 accounts are local accounts).
Make of that what you will.
So basically, DRM was added to games and buyers told to tolerate it because it prevented people who pirated the game from playing it. But it's now being used to prevent people who bought the game from playing it. Talk about mission creep. Guess I should dig up my 2000s URL bookmark archives for sites I used to convert games I bought into no-CD versions, and see if any of them are still around.
The bugs don't bother me - they're inevitable. It's the "features" that are deliberately put into Win 10 which annoy me most. I changed the program associated with several file types to non-Microsoft programs soon after upgrading to Win 10. After last week's patch, instead of launching the program when double-clicking on the associated file type, it popped up the standard "no associated program" dialog and asked if I wouldn't rather want to use the Microsoft product instead of the one I'd selected.
If I went to the trouble to change the default to a different program, that should be a pretty clear indication that I don't want to use the default Microsoft program. Please stop bugging me about it. This is supposed to be an operating system that I paid for, not an advertising platform. I'm worried we're headed down the same path as Cable TV - where originally you paid for cable so you wouldn't have to watch ads like on broadcast TV. But soon the cable channels figured out they could charge you for the channel AND put ads in their programming.
Solar had the largest share of newly installed capacity. But solar's capacity factor (ratio of actual energy produced to capacity) is abysmal. About 0.145 for the U.S. as a whole, 0.185 for the desert Southwest (these can be improved with panels which track the sun, at the cost of needing more land area). Contrast this with wind (0.2-0.35), hydro (0.4-0.5, mainly because it's used for peaking power rather than base load), natural gas (0.5, also used for peaking load), coal (0.6-0.7), and nuclear (0.9).
Put another way, 1 GW of PV solar capacity is worth about 600 MW of wind capacity, which is worth about 350 MW of hydro capacity, which is worth about 300 MW of natural gas capacity, which is worth about 230 MW of coal capacity, which is worth about 160 MW of nuclear capacity. Comparing power generation on the basis of installed capacity is like trying to eat enough to live based solely on the weight of food you're consuming completely ignoring the different caloric and nutritional content of the different foods.
Data plan on biggest Spanish carrier is 15 Euro for 1.5 GB. Or 1 Euro per 100 MB. That's probably about the size of the sound samples which would need to be transmitted back each month.
(10 million devices) * (1 Euro/mo) * (12 months/year) = 120 million Euros a year.
So the value of the data bandwidth they stole to do this monitoring is probably within an order of magnitude of the purported losses due to piracy. If they want to pay you to run this app to help their anti-piracy monitoring, that's not a problem. But secretly eavesdropping and stealing bandwidth is unethical if not downright illegal.
In modern terminology, the difference between "discrete" and "integrated" graphics is not whether it's a standalone plug-in card. It's the presence of VRAM - high-speed, high-bandwidth RAM dedicated for use by the video card for 3D rendering. Discrete GPUs come with their own VRAM. Integrated GPUs use system RAM (though they're increasingly showing up with their own small buffer of high-speed RAM that acts more like a cache), with a much smaller amount of dedicated RAM for framebuffers.
The video cards from the era you've linked either used system RAM, or only did 2D graphics using a few MB of onboard RAM for the framebuffer. So they are analogous to today's integrated graphics. The need for the GPU to have gobs of its own high-speed VRAM didn't arise until 3D graphics began pushing frames faster than you could transfer needed data across the bus from system RAM to the video card. Most of that VRAM is taken up by textures used for 3D graphics, so only 3D graphics cards have large amounts of it. A framebuffer, found on both 3D and 2D graphics cards, is only 8 MB for 1080p 32-bit color. So there's no need for large amounts of VRAM in an integrated video card.
Back then, we called them a 3D video card vs a 2D video card. That nomenclature was abandoned once even low-end 2D video cards became capable of rudimentary 3D graphics. The distinction then shifted to whether it was a "serious" 3D graphics card with its own dedicated VRAM, or whether it was a 2D video card (commonly integrated into the motherboard) which could do 3D graphics in a pinch by borrowing system RAM to use as VRAM.
While that's true, if Excel's RNG results in a pattern (e.g. cell A2534 is always assigned a low number and thus selected), it could result in immigration employees who know of this gaming the system, to do an immigrant friend a favor or even auctioning the spot to the highest bidder.
The bigger question to me is why are they using Excel for this? Spreadsheets are for calculating things. They are absolutely the wrong tool if you need the data you're working on to remain consistent or auditable. An immigration employee could take the spreadsheet after the random numbers were assigned, and copy-paste names or random numbers around to move people to/from the selected and denied categories, and there'd be no way to detect they'd done this.
Technically, it wouldn't cost Amazon any more to repair/refurbish them. They'd end up just passing the cost on to other customers via higher prices anyway, just like you're already paying for the items they dispose of.
The problem happens when one company decides to "do the right thing" and repair/refurbish these items, while a second company decides to just dispose of them. The second company then ends up being able to charge lower prices while maintaining the same profit margin. Customers will buy from them no matter how much the first company advertises or publicizes that "hey, that other company is destroying the environment by telling you to throw defective items away instead of sending it back for repair." That sets up a race to the bottom where all companies have to adopt the disposal policy used by the worst company, just to compete on a level playing field.
The standard was set by the same morons who brought you "USB high speed" vs "USB full speed". To this day, I still don't know off the top of my head which one is USB 1.1 and which USB 2.0. I always have to google it.
In addition to all the madness with charging, they also screwed up the USB 3.x nomenclature. We had a golden opportunity here to leave USB 3.0 referring to USB-A ports (add an extra revision for higher speeds), and have USB 3.1 ref to USB-C ports. That way if you saw USB 3.0 in the specs, you'd know it was a type A port. If you saw USB 3.1 in the specs, you'd know it was a type -C.
Instead they decided to rename USB 3.0 as USB 3.1. So if you see just "USB 3.1" it's referring to a older USB-A style port. If you see "USB 3.1 type C" it's referring to a USB-C port. Unless of course the manufacturer decides to omit "type C" and just call it USB 3.1 in the specs which it's actually a USB-C port. I've had to resort to looking up laptop reviews and viewing pictures of the ports on the sides to confirm exactly what ports it has and doesn't have.
It's like they intentionally trying to make it more confusing.
I managed to grab a first-name email address for MIT's alumni email forwarding service, by virtue of randomly happening to be online and checking out the alumni website a few minutes after the service went live. It ends up getting a boatload of spam (apparently one of spammers' algorithms is to blindly send spam to [common name]@[domain]), and misdirected emails intended for other alumni with the same first name. What's even more fun is when one of those alumni signs up for a mailing list website and forgets to add their last name or whatever to their email address, resulting in them signing me up.
/dev/null.
It's just an alumni forwarding service so I can tolerate it. I just whitelist the emails I expect to get at that address and set my spam filtering to really aggressive. But if it were going to be my main email address, I'd much prefer firstname.lastname@domain or firstname123@domain or something similarly easy to remember but more obscure. I own my own domain and run my main email through it. But I've long since abandoned firstname@mydomain.com to spam, and just redirect that to
Having a larger pool of companies in the fund changes the probability distribution function. The bell curve gets narrower and taller in the middle the more stocks you put in the fund, meaning you're more likely to get an outcome closer to average, less likely to get an extreme outcome.
It's a consequence of statistics, nothing to do with stocks. If you roll a 1d6, every number between 1 and 6 has an equal chance of appearing. If you roll a 2d6, the bell "curve" becomes a triangle, with 2 and 12 being the least likely outcome (1 in 36 chance), and 7 being the most likely. A 3d6 turns flat sides of the triangle into a true bell curve. Increasing the number of dice results in the curve narrowing even further. By the time you get to 10d6, it's virtually impossible to get either of the extreme outcomes (1 in 60 million chance of getting a 10 or a 60).
So when you put thousands of stocks in a mutual fund like an index fund, it's virtually guaranteed to perform at the market average. Whereas if you buy stock from a single company it could perform average, or you could make a lot more money, or you could lose everything. Insurance companies and casinos rely on the same thing - by grouping lots of insured or gamblers together, the overall outcome becomes much more predictable. The increased accuracy of prediction (outcome closer to the average) allows them to make money despite decreasing their margin (offering a lower price for insurance than the competition).