made almost 100 million spoofed robocalls over a three-month period
Phone numbers are spoofable so a company with a pool of phone lines (e.g. a customer service center) can make phone calls using any of those lines, and all those calls will show up as being from their single public-facing number on Caller ID.
If we're not going to update the phone system so this spoofed phone number is generated by the phone company instead of by the caller, then let's at least make it a crime to spoof the number to one that isn't yours.
There was actually an old check forging scheme which relied on this. The forger would alter the routing number on the check, then deposit it. The bank would note that it was a local check, and only put a 2-3 day hold on the deposited funds. The key was that checks were only considered bad if the issuing bank notified the deposit bank that it was bad (negative confirmation). So the fraud relied in preventing any such notification from being generated, which the depositing bank would take to mean the check was good, and release the funds to the depositor.
Although the check bore the name and address of the Chemical Bank in New York, the Federal Reserve data-processing system scanned only the magnetic-ink code on it, identified it as a Bank of America check, and routed it to Los Angeles. The check remained in transit for perhaps two days. At the end of that time, it was run through the computer mechanism at the Bank of America. The computer, instantly searching its memory for a Bank of America account number matching that of the magnetic-ink strip on the check, rejected the check, which then went into a clerical pool for manual handling. Since the printed logotype on the check clearly identified it as a check that belonged in the Chemical Bank in New York, the clerk handling the machine-rejected check sent it back to the Chemical Bank by mail, assuming that a simple routing error had been made. The check was then in transit for another two days. Back at the Chemical Bank, the check was put into the computerized sorting system for final clearance. But instead of that, it went into motion again: the Chemical Bank computing system passed it on to the Federal Reserve System, which routed it out to the Los Angeles bank again, which routinely sent it back to New York, and so on.
The fraud was uncovered only when checks issued by the depositor became so frayed from mechanical handling in the computer system that they could no longer be read automatically ⦠[b]y that time, according to an auditor who told me of the affair, the depositor had disappeared with more than $1 million in cash.
The IAU isn't an official body with any authority other than what they have taken on themselves. And if they are going to let historical politics cloud scientific thinking, they certainly aren't going to speak for me. I'd like to see some textbook publishers take a stand too.
The thing is, if you don't accept the IAU's authority, then whose authority are you going to accept? Textbook publishers? They're one notch above those scammers who sell you the "right" to name a star.
In the end, the definition of a planet is merely semantics. What's important is that whatever definition you decide to use is functional, allowing generalized statements to be made easily without running afoul of the terminology. In that respect, I don't have a problem with the division between "planet" and "trans-Neptunian object" and dwarf planet. They are different enough and the terms selected for them, although not perfect, are definitive enough to make statements and issue papers about them without tripping over the semantics.
Apple used to license a geographic map of WiFi SSIDs from Skyhook. Skyhook developed this map like Google did - by driving cars around the world and recording their GPS locations while sampling the SSIDs in range at that location. In 2010, Apple dropped Skyhook and began using their own SSID map database.
How did they develop this database without hiring people to drive cars all around the world? They simply recorded and downloaded iPhone users' location data, along with nearby WiFi SSIDs at each location.
Incidentally, Google was fined by various governments for accidentally recording too much WiFi data with their cars. Apple received very little scrutiny. i.e. Governments punished the company which hired people to go out there and collect this data for themselves, while doing nothing about the company who obtained it by lifting it from their users. Because of that precedent, I suspect pretty much all companies are now collecting this sort of data from their users whenever possible, instead of gathering it themselves.
It's no more gas chamber than the room you're currently sitting in is a gas chamber (because it has air - a gas - in it).. Nitrogen just happens to be the gas used because it's the most easily accessible and cheapest. But you could use any other gas as long as it's not oxygen. Even CO2 despite it triggering the short of breath reflex. Loss of consciousness from complete oxygen deprivation happens within about 15 seconds, and death within about a minute. That's why the safety briefing on planes tells you to don your own oxygen mask first before your try to put one on your children. if you put it on your kids first, you'll probably pass out before you finish and can put your own mask on.
So the characteristic that defines the chamber is the lack of oxygen, not that a particular type of gas is used.
The big innovation in tape decks was writing data at an angle instead of linearly. When you write data linearly, the only way to increase the amount of data per second is to increase the speed at which the tape moves past the read/write heads. That's why high quality tape recorders had to move the tape at high speeds like 15 inches/sec.
By angling the read/write heads slightly and spinning them, you can write magnetic data in diagonal strips on the tape. And so the relative speed of the magnetic media past the read/write heads is higher than the speed you're winding the tape, and you no longer need to pull tape past the heads at ridiculous speeds (which is the most common cause of tape breakage). This is the innovation which made VCRs possible.
Imagine that, Microsoft doing something correctly.
I suspect it wasn't a matter of doing things correctly, but rather had more to do with the limitations of computer technology at the time. Unix was written in the 1970s, when RAM and storage space were measured in single digit kilobytes or less. Some developer probably counted how many rows of text there were in all the text files of code he had written, and figured out that ~3% of the memory and storage space would be wasted holding the extra byte in the CR/LF combo. So he shortened it to just LF.
By the time DOS rolled out in 1981, 16-64 kB of RAM and 160 kB floppies were the norm. So DOS could afford to be more profligate with the space occupied by text files.
the iMac proved that computers, other than being a useful tool, could be a fashion statement and an extension of your (purported, at least) personality.
Exactly. The iMac's contribution (if you can call it that) to computing wasn't technical. It was psychological. It was available in a variety of colors, and the buyer got to choose which color theirs would be. Similar to the original Ford model T being available only in black, while all cars today are available in your choice of colors. For the non-technical masses, it turned the computer from "a" computer into "my" computer.
While I'm a technical guy and think that's mostly pointless, I don't deny the influence it's had on how many people buy and treat computers. The trend of people pimping out their PC case with LED lights traces its roots back to the iMac. Same for all the custom cases available for phones - people put a disproportionate amount of thought and care into that $10 purchase because they want it to reflect themselves.
Computers can remove the extra space too. HTML does that - any multiple-whitespaces in the coded text for a web page are automatically shortened into a single space when displayed.
So this is really a stupid thing to be arguing over. I'm a two-space guy. Screens get dirty, and to me having the extra space makes it easier to distinguish a period from a speck of dirt which happens to fall right where a period could be. But I don't care if someone else types using one or two spaces. Even if it's a document in a fixed-width font which benefits more from the double space, it's trivial to do a search and replace of period-space to period-space-space. Likewise for the other way. If you get a document with double spaces which you find annoying, it's trivial to do a search and replace of space-space to just space if the final form (e.g. web page) doesn't already do it for you.
Back when RAM cost $200 for 16 kB, you could make an argument for single-spacing to reduce the memory footprint by a long document. But today, it just doesn't matter if someone uses single or double spaces.
A car I rented last year still had the bluetooth connection info for at least two previous renters. Including parts of their phone contact list, and text messages (car had a feature which would read your texts out loud to you while you were driving).
Fortnite's metascore (average of reviews) is 77 for PS4, 78 for PC. Its user ratings are 4.7 (out of 10) for PS4, 3.4 for PC. That sort of divergence between review and user ratings is usually a pretty good indication that reviewers are being paid to promote the game.
For there to be risk, there has to be a way to detect it. If you're not doing anything which could detect voter fraud, like checking people's ID to confirm that they're actually who they say they are and confirming they're actually allowed to vote, then there's zero risk.
Pretty much any other means of vote manipulation (e.g. rigging voting machines, altering ballot counts, foreigners running ads) leaves some evidence of the misdeed, and thus is higher risk. But voter fraud is pretty near impossible to detect because we've passed a bunch of laws making it illegal to collect any evidence which might detect it. So it carries little to no risk. The only person I've heard of charged with it was a reporter who filmed himself doing it to demonstrate how trivially easy it was (he registered and voted at multiple precincts, though he tore up the ballot in all precincts except his real one to invalidate all his illegal votes).
Today's Wall Street investor doesn't give a crap if you're a super genius with world-changing ideas you're trying to gear up to sell to the world. They only care about profit and loss statements and projections for the next quarter's revenue.
And they're right. Whether your ideas generate a profit or a loss is what distinguishes if they're super genius world-changing ideas, or deceptively seductive ideas which sound good in theory but turn out not to work in the real world due to factors its proponents are glossing over or fudging. Merely proclaiming an idea to be super genius world-changing does not automatically entitle it to profit (or in Tesla's case, investment). The idea has to pan out in real life, which is what Tesla's operating statements tell us. Dig through all the past slashdot stories about revolutionary breakthroughs in battery technology which ended up not panning out. That's the difference between how well people think an idea should work, versus how well it actually does (or doesn't) work in real life.
On the other hand, Tesla's stock price is meaningless to its operations except if Musk wants to sell more shares to raise capital. In that respect, the rantings and ravings of financial analysts are irrelevant. What matters is Tesla's revenues vs expenditures. i.e. How much they're spending to build their products, and how much/how many customer are paying to buy those products. The stock price merely reflects shareholders' confidence in the company to continue to survive and grow while making money.
Personally, I think Musk knows Tesla stock is overvalued. Its market cap exceeds Ford's while its unit sales are less than 2% of Ford's. So as long as he's got confidence in handling Tesla's debt, he's not afraid to say things which might bring that irrationally exuberant stock valuation back down to earth. That'll rankle investors who bought Tesla stock as a baseball card investment (i.e. they're hoping to sell after its value increases), while not upsetting any true believers who bought Tesla stock because they think it's the future of auto-making.
Convincing PC makers like Dell and HP to join a program where they got special access and prices to Intel CPUs, in exchange for an exclusivity contract which prohibited the PC maker from selling AMD computers?
Most U.S. states require workers compensation insurance, whose premiums are based on the type of work an employee does. A "clerical" worker like a professor "dirtying his hands" and fixing a shelf would be doing something more risky and outside the scope of his job description. If the insurance company caught wind of it, the school could lose its insurance, or worse yet all its professors could be reclassified as a different type of employee with a higher rate, and the school's insurance premiums would go up. So yes, being in academia may in fact mean you're not allowed to work with your hands.
I ran into exactly this type of situation at a previous job. We had a restaurant on our resort, and all the restaurant employees were categorized as restaurant workers with about a 8% insurance rate (i.e. we paid the workers comp insurance company 8% of their wages as a premium). Someone in another department began a school camp program - urban elementary schools would send a class for a week-long stay at our resort (located in a rural area), learning about nature and the environment. They ate meals at our restaurant. When the state workers comp insurance board caught whiff of this, to our astonishment they reclassified all of our restaurant staff as camp workers at a 15% insurance rate, even though there was nothing camp-related about their duties. The vast majority of the restaurant staff weren't even preparing meals for the camp kids, and the ones who were weren't doing anything they wouldn't normally do for regular restaurant customers. But the board insisted that because the kids were there for a camp and eating meals prepared in our restaurant, our restaurant workers were camp workers.
I appealed and lost. There's a single state government insurance board which decides these things, so after your appeal is decided, that decision is final. But I did manage to convince them to charge camp rates for our restaurant workers only on days when this camp program was present (weekdays, vs most of our regular customers being on weekends). This increased my workload considerably since I now had to record the restaurant payroll day-by-day and cross-reference against days when camps were present. But the difference in insurance premium was over $10k/mo. I did this for close to a year, while we worked to spin off the camp program into a separate company. Then this new camp company became a "customer" of our resort, thus allowing us to legitimately tell the insurance board to rescind their ridiculous classification change because we weren't running any camps and didn't have any camp employees on our payroll.
Apple has always been seen as the higher "quality" product for one very important reason: Apple makes everything and only has higher-end products. In the PC/Android world, there are high-end devices, mid-tier, low-end, extreme-budget devices.
Um, have you even looked inside a Macbook? CPU and chipset by Intel, memory by Samsung, SSD by Toshiba, networking by Broadcomm, display by LG, etc. Apple doesn't even make the Macbooks - Quanta does. And Quanta also makes laptops for nearly every other brand. There is no magical unicorn fairy dust inside the Macbooks.
The only hardware Apple makes is their Ax SoCs used in their phones and tablets (and those are manufactured at the same fabs other companies use). Everything else is outsourced, just like every other major computer brand does. The thing that distinguishes Apple products is the software - all that is created in-house. And they do a very good job of it.
This is why Apple has always seem as "superior" in the multiemedia creation department, despite PCs having absolutely amazing high quality top-tier hardware.
The multimedia creation market is tiny. The global movie + TV industry is less than $300 billion. The global music industry is less than $20 billion. Less than half a percent of world GDP. Walmart alone is bigger than those industries combined. Toyota and VW come close. The market for equipment to distribute and watch movies and TV and listen to music is bigger than the markets for content. The MPAA and RIAA are just very vocal about their complaints, since they literally have peoples eyes and ears watching and listening to them. This creates an extremely distorted sense of their importance to the overall economy.
That's why Windows was able to exist without features like color profiles for decades. And when they finally added it natively (Vista) they didn't bother fixing a persistent bug (Windows would lose the profile any time a UAC elevation prompt popped up) until Windows 8. It simply wasn't an important feature to the vast majority of their customers, so the companies which made color profiling equipment and software had to write work-arounds to the bug.
the first time I repaired a Mac computer as a kid, and shocked to see that it used SCSI HDDs instead of IDE. Contrast this to the Microsoft world where the absolute top reason a Windows box will crash will either be faulty hardware or faulty drivers from the hardware manufacturer (both out of MS control, but only reflects upon them and not the hardware vendors)
Windows crashes more often because it has to be designed to be universal - able to work with millions of different pieces of hardware. Apple tightly controls the hardware so only has to design and test their software against a few dozen hardware configurations. The price you pay for this reduced flexibility is (much) higher prices, and having to pay for features you may not need nor want. I've used SCSI drives in many of my PC builds since the early 1990s. SCSI is pointless in single-drive systems, and in many smaller multi-drive systems it adds unnecessary complexity.
There's nothing wrong with steam engines. Steam engines are still used because heat is the only way we have to transfer energy with 100% efficiency. All other forms of energy transfer and transformation incur energy losses (as heat). Charging a battery loses about 20%-30% of the energy as heat. Discharging a battery does the same. Transforming electricity from one voltage to another loses a few percent as heat. A geared mechanical linkage loses about a percent as heat. A chain linkage more. etc. A steam engine saves you from having to worry about minimizing such parasitic losses. You just toss the fuel in and burn it any which way, and the heat will still make it to the boiler.
Unless you can figure out a more efficient way to convert thermal energy into mechanical energy, we will continue to use steam engines. In the case of nuclear reactors, the energy produced by the reactor is primarily heat. The radioactive decay particles fly away from their atoms with high kinetic energy in random directions - i.e. heat. And a steam engine is the most effective means of converting that heat into mechanical energy. Just because it's centuries-old tech doesn't change the fact that it's the optimal solution to this particular problem. You can get higher (real-world) efficiencies with a Stirling engine, but the mechanical components end up being so much larger than a steam engine that the trade-off in cost and logistics isn't worth it for the slightly higher efficiency.
I was thinking something similar: How much CO2 would the next best alternative to concrete emit if we replaced all concrete with it? And how much more (in terms of money and energy) would it cost? Without knowing that, you can't say if 5% of global CO2 emissions is a bad or good thing.
There are two categories of sunscreens - absorbers and blockers.
Blockers physically block sunlight from penetrating. They are by far more effective, and don't need to be reapplied. But their big drawback is that they're visible when applied to the skin, so people don't want to use them. Zinc oxide and titanium dioxide are the most common ones.
Absorbers absorb the energy of UV light and change chemically, instead of letting the UV light get through to your skin and change your DNA chemically. So they "wear out" with exposure to sunlight, and need to be reapplied every 2 hours or so. Oxybenzone and octinoxate fall into this category. Oxybenzone is one of the more effective chemical absorbers at absorbing the most harmful UV rays (UVB, short UVA). And it functions as a photostabilizer, allowing other ingredients to last longer. Without it, you may need to reapply the sunscreen every 30-60 minutes to remain protected, instead of 2 hours.
So no, it's not a matter of using the cheapest ingredient, screw the reefs. It's a trade-off between using a potentially more harmful chemical, or having more people get skin cancer because they forgot to reapply their sunscreen every hour instead of every 2 hours. If we were to approach this strictly from a standpoint of environmental and health safety, absorbing type sunscreens would be banned and only blockers would be allowed. And people would just have to get used to everyone having white powder on their skin when at the beach.
No, that's not what the report shows at all. The first chart you're basing that on is the stats for this quarter alone. Seagate drives failed the most simply because Backblaze uses a lot more Seagate drives than other brand drives.
The chart you want to look at is the last one in the report - lifetime failure rates. Mainly the annualized failure rate and confidence interval high/low columns. Those percentages take into account the number of drives in the sample, and how many days they've been in service. WD drives are by far the worst, with the highest annualized failure rate. Only a single Seagate drive model performs worse than the best WD drive model (which has a small sample size so the confidence interval is large - i.e. the uncertainty in its failure rate is large).
Past Backblaze reports also tried to normalize by years in service (under the assumption that drives which have been in use longer have a higher chance of failing). But they don't seem to be doing that anymore.
Oh, and they're participating in an outreach program to encourage under-represented demographics to participate in open source project.
It upsets some people because you're assuming that the under-representation is due to some flaw which needs to be corrected. i.e. You're assuming correlation implies causation. Applying the scientific method, the under-representation merely suggests that discrimination may be to blame, but is not proof in itself. One would need to first prove that the under-representation is caused by discrimination, before corrective action is justified. But instead, the under-representation itself is incorrectly being used as "evidence" that corrective action is necessary.
Also your corrective action is blatant favoritism which would be decried as evil and discriminatory if it went the other way. i.e. You're trying to fight one type of discrimination by encouraging a different type of discrimination. This accomplishes the primary goal, e.g. getting people to realize it's wrong to discriminate against women. But it has the unfortunate side-effect of making some people conclude it's OK to discriminate against men. So you're not exactly reducing discrimination, you just replacing one type with another. And your corrective action will result in a long-term oscillation between different forms of discrimination, with no real reduction in the absolute total amount of discrimination. If you want to teach people that discrimination is wrong, you can't do it with programs which encourage different types of discrimination.
I've had similar problems after major Win 10 updates with network access for my virtual machines in VMWare Workstation. The problem is the update seems to invalidate certain virtual network adapters (which is also how a VPN sets up a tunnel). In my case, restoring the default network adapters with Workstation's virtual network manager tool clears up the problem (had to deal with it twice so far).
Difference is Amazon was forging into unexplored territory. Nobody had built an Internet-based store of that scale before. Everything was new, so it was imperative for Amazon to burn lots of cash to search the solution space to quickly figure out the optimal way to organize the store, website, warehouses, and delivery before competitors could figure it out and grab market share. If Amazon found a better solution first, it won. If it didn't find a better solution, as long as competitors hadn't found a better solution, it didn't lose ground. It would only be a loss if your new solution isn't better AND competitors find a better solution.
The solution space for building cars is well-explored. Has been for nearly a century. Musk gambled that a high level of automation would yield a better solution, allowing him to produce cars for cheaper than other automakers. He turned out to be wrong. In this case, because of the existence of well-established competitors, if your new solution isn't better than theirs, then you automatically lose.
A string by itself wouldn't. But a rubber band stretched taught between two points would try to shrink to the shortest possible length between those points along the surface of the globe, which is always a great circle arc. Think of how soap bubbles floating in the air always try to form spheres - the soap tries to pull itself tight, resulting in a structure with the least surface area for the amount of enclosed air. Same idea - a rubber band band tries to pull itself tight, resulting in the shortest distance between those two points (along the surface of the globe).
The problem with the string/rubber band idea though is that once you exceed half the Earth's circumference, it will try to snap to a path on the opposite side of the one you're trying to trace since that's shorter. And this particular route is about 80% of the Earth's circumference, so the string/rubber band will prefer the 20% circumference path.
Slashdot Mirror
Phone numbers are spoofable so a company with a pool of phone lines (e.g. a customer service center) can make phone calls using any of those lines, and all those calls will show up as being from their single public-facing number on Caller ID.
If we're not going to update the phone system so this spoofed phone number is generated by the phone company instead of by the caller, then let's at least make it a crime to spoof the number to one that isn't yours.
The thing is, if you don't accept the IAU's authority, then whose authority are you going to accept? Textbook publishers? They're one notch above those scammers who sell you the "right" to name a star.
The IAU's membership is over 12,000 professional astronomers, which as best as I can tell is a pretty good percentage of the people with careers in astronomy. The next largest professional group is the American Astronomical Society, with about 7,000 members all in the Americas. Their stance on the issue is decidedly neutral.
In the end, the definition of a planet is merely semantics. What's important is that whatever definition you decide to use is functional, allowing generalized statements to be made easily without running afoul of the terminology. In that respect, I don't have a problem with the division between "planet" and "trans-Neptunian object" and dwarf planet. They are different enough and the terms selected for them, although not perfect, are definitive enough to make statements and issue papers about them without tripping over the semantics.
Apple used to license a geographic map of WiFi SSIDs from Skyhook. Skyhook developed this map like Google did - by driving cars around the world and recording their GPS locations while sampling the SSIDs in range at that location. In 2010, Apple dropped Skyhook and began using their own SSID map database.
How did they develop this database without hiring people to drive cars all around the world? They simply recorded and downloaded iPhone users' location data, along with nearby WiFi SSIDs at each location.
Incidentally, Google was fined by various governments for accidentally recording too much WiFi data with their cars. Apple received very little scrutiny. i.e. Governments punished the company which hired people to go out there and collect this data for themselves, while doing nothing about the company who obtained it by lifting it from their users. Because of that precedent, I suspect pretty much all companies are now collecting this sort of data from their users whenever possible, instead of gathering it themselves.
It's no more gas chamber than the room you're currently sitting in is a gas chamber (because it has air - a gas - in it).. Nitrogen just happens to be the gas used because it's the most easily accessible and cheapest. But you could use any other gas as long as it's not oxygen. Even CO2 despite it triggering the short of breath reflex. Loss of consciousness from complete oxygen deprivation happens within about 15 seconds, and death within about a minute. That's why the safety briefing on planes tells you to don your own oxygen mask first before your try to put one on your children. if you put it on your kids first, you'll probably pass out before you finish and can put your own mask on.
So the characteristic that defines the chamber is the lack of oxygen, not that a particular type of gas is used.
The big innovation in tape decks was writing data at an angle instead of linearly. When you write data linearly, the only way to increase the amount of data per second is to increase the speed at which the tape moves past the read/write heads. That's why high quality tape recorders had to move the tape at high speeds like 15 inches/sec.
By angling the read/write heads slightly and spinning them, you can write magnetic data in diagonal strips on the tape. And so the relative speed of the magnetic media past the read/write heads is higher than the speed you're winding the tape, and you no longer need to pull tape past the heads at ridiculous speeds (which is the most common cause of tape breakage). This is the innovation which made VCRs possible.
I suspect it wasn't a matter of doing things correctly, but rather had more to do with the limitations of computer technology at the time. Unix was written in the 1970s, when RAM and storage space were measured in single digit kilobytes or less. Some developer probably counted how many rows of text there were in all the text files of code he had written, and figured out that ~3% of the memory and storage space would be wasted holding the extra byte in the CR/LF combo. So he shortened it to just LF.
By the time DOS rolled out in 1981, 16-64 kB of RAM and 160 kB floppies were the norm. So DOS could afford to be more profligate with the space occupied by text files.
These sorts of constraints on storage space and processing speed forced programmers of that era to resort to innovative shortcuts to save a little bit of space or time here or there.
Exactly. The iMac's contribution (if you can call it that) to computing wasn't technical. It was psychological. It was available in a variety of colors, and the buyer got to choose which color theirs would be. Similar to the original Ford model T being available only in black, while all cars today are available in your choice of colors. For the non-technical masses, it turned the computer from "a" computer into "my" computer.
While I'm a technical guy and think that's mostly pointless, I don't deny the influence it's had on how many people buy and treat computers. The trend of people pimping out their PC case with LED lights traces its roots back to the iMac. Same for all the custom cases available for phones - people put a disproportionate amount of thought and care into that $10 purchase because they want it to reflect themselves.
Computers can remove the extra space too. HTML does that - any multiple-whitespaces in the coded text for a web page are automatically shortened into a single space when displayed.
So this is really a stupid thing to be arguing over. I'm a two-space guy. Screens get dirty, and to me having the extra space makes it easier to distinguish a period from a speck of dirt which happens to fall right where a period could be. But I don't care if someone else types using one or two spaces. Even if it's a document in a fixed-width font which benefits more from the double space, it's trivial to do a search and replace of period-space to period-space-space. Likewise for the other way. If you get a document with double spaces which you find annoying, it's trivial to do a search and replace of space-space to just space if the final form (e.g. web page) doesn't already do it for you.
Back when RAM cost $200 for 16 kB, you could make an argument for single-spacing to reduce the memory footprint by a long document. But today, it just doesn't matter if someone uses single or double spaces.
A car I rented last year still had the bluetooth connection info for at least two previous renters. Including parts of their phone contact list, and text messages (car had a feature which would read your texts out loud to you while you were driving).
Fortnite's metascore (average of reviews) is 77 for PS4, 78 for PC. Its user ratings are 4.7 (out of 10) for PS4, 3.4 for PC. That sort of divergence between review and user ratings is usually a pretty good indication that reviewers are being paid to promote the game.
For there to be risk, there has to be a way to detect it. If you're not doing anything which could detect voter fraud, like checking people's ID to confirm that they're actually who they say they are and confirming they're actually allowed to vote, then there's zero risk.
Pretty much any other means of vote manipulation (e.g. rigging voting machines, altering ballot counts, foreigners running ads) leaves some evidence of the misdeed, and thus is higher risk. But voter fraud is pretty near impossible to detect because we've passed a bunch of laws making it illegal to collect any evidence which might detect it. So it carries little to no risk. The only person I've heard of charged with it was a reporter who filmed himself doing it to demonstrate how trivially easy it was (he registered and voted at multiple precincts, though he tore up the ballot in all precincts except his real one to invalidate all his illegal votes).
And they're right. Whether your ideas generate a profit or a loss is what distinguishes if they're super genius world-changing ideas, or deceptively seductive ideas which sound good in theory but turn out not to work in the real world due to factors its proponents are glossing over or fudging. Merely proclaiming an idea to be super genius world-changing does not automatically entitle it to profit (or in Tesla's case, investment). The idea has to pan out in real life, which is what Tesla's operating statements tell us. Dig through all the past slashdot stories about revolutionary breakthroughs in battery technology which ended up not panning out. That's the difference between how well people think an idea should work, versus how well it actually does (or doesn't) work in real life.
On the other hand, Tesla's stock price is meaningless to its operations except if Musk wants to sell more shares to raise capital. In that respect, the rantings and ravings of financial analysts are irrelevant. What matters is Tesla's revenues vs expenditures. i.e. How much they're spending to build their products, and how much/how many customer are paying to buy those products. The stock price merely reflects shareholders' confidence in the company to continue to survive and grow while making money.
Personally, I think Musk knows Tesla stock is overvalued. Its market cap exceeds Ford's while its unit sales are less than 2% of Ford's. So as long as he's got confidence in handling Tesla's debt, he's not afraid to say things which might bring that irrationally exuberant stock valuation back down to earth. That'll rankle investors who bought Tesla stock as a baseball card investment (i.e. they're hoping to sell after its value increases), while not upsetting any true believers who bought Tesla stock because they think it's the future of auto-making.
Convincing PC makers like Dell and HP to join a program where they got special access and prices to Intel CPUs, in exchange for an exclusivity contract which prohibited the PC maker from selling AMD computers?
Most U.S. states require workers compensation insurance, whose premiums are based on the type of work an employee does. A "clerical" worker like a professor "dirtying his hands" and fixing a shelf would be doing something more risky and outside the scope of his job description. If the insurance company caught wind of it, the school could lose its insurance, or worse yet all its professors could be reclassified as a different type of employee with a higher rate, and the school's insurance premiums would go up. So yes, being in academia may in fact mean you're not allowed to work with your hands.
I ran into exactly this type of situation at a previous job. We had a restaurant on our resort, and all the restaurant employees were categorized as restaurant workers with about a 8% insurance rate (i.e. we paid the workers comp insurance company 8% of their wages as a premium). Someone in another department began a school camp program - urban elementary schools would send a class for a week-long stay at our resort (located in a rural area), learning about nature and the environment. They ate meals at our restaurant. When the state workers comp insurance board caught whiff of this, to our astonishment they reclassified all of our restaurant staff as camp workers at a 15% insurance rate, even though there was nothing camp-related about their duties. The vast majority of the restaurant staff weren't even preparing meals for the camp kids, and the ones who were weren't doing anything they wouldn't normally do for regular restaurant customers. But the board insisted that because the kids were there for a camp and eating meals prepared in our restaurant, our restaurant workers were camp workers.
I appealed and lost. There's a single state government insurance board which decides these things, so after your appeal is decided, that decision is final. But I did manage to convince them to charge camp rates for our restaurant workers only on days when this camp program was present (weekdays, vs most of our regular customers being on weekends). This increased my workload considerably since I now had to record the restaurant payroll day-by-day and cross-reference against days when camps were present. But the difference in insurance premium was over $10k/mo. I did this for close to a year, while we worked to spin off the camp program into a separate company. Then this new camp company became a "customer" of our resort, thus allowing us to legitimately tell the insurance board to rescind their ridiculous classification change because we weren't running any camps and didn't have any camp employees on our payroll.
Um, have you even looked inside a Macbook? CPU and chipset by Intel, memory by Samsung, SSD by Toshiba, networking by Broadcomm, display by LG, etc. Apple doesn't even make the Macbooks - Quanta does. And Quanta also makes laptops for nearly every other brand. There is no magical unicorn fairy dust inside the Macbooks.
The only hardware Apple makes is their Ax SoCs used in their phones and tablets (and those are manufactured at the same fabs other companies use). Everything else is outsourced, just like every other major computer brand does. The thing that distinguishes Apple products is the software - all that is created in-house. And they do a very good job of it.
The multimedia creation market is tiny. The global movie + TV industry is less than $300 billion. The global music industry is less than $20 billion. Less than half a percent of world GDP. Walmart alone is bigger than those industries combined. Toyota and VW come close. The market for equipment to distribute and watch movies and TV and listen to music is bigger than the markets for content. The MPAA and RIAA are just very vocal about their complaints, since they literally have peoples eyes and ears watching and listening to them. This creates an extremely distorted sense of their importance to the overall economy.
That's why Windows was able to exist without features like color profiles for decades. And when they finally added it natively (Vista) they didn't bother fixing a persistent bug (Windows would lose the profile any time a UAC elevation prompt popped up) until Windows 8. It simply wasn't an important feature to the vast majority of their customers, so the companies which made color profiling equipment and software had to write work-arounds to the bug.
Windows crashes more often because it has to be designed to be universal - able to work with millions of different pieces of hardware. Apple tightly controls the hardware so only has to design and test their software against a few dozen hardware configurations. The price you pay for this reduced flexibility is (much) higher prices, and having to pay for features you may not need nor want. I've used SCSI drives in many of my PC builds since the early 1990s. SCSI is pointless in single-drive systems, and in many smaller multi-drive systems it adds unnecessary complexity.
There's nothing wrong with steam engines. Steam engines are still used because heat is the only way we have to transfer energy with 100% efficiency. All other forms of energy transfer and transformation incur energy losses (as heat). Charging a battery loses about 20%-30% of the energy as heat. Discharging a battery does the same. Transforming electricity from one voltage to another loses a few percent as heat. A geared mechanical linkage loses about a percent as heat. A chain linkage more. etc. A steam engine saves you from having to worry about minimizing such parasitic losses. You just toss the fuel in and burn it any which way, and the heat will still make it to the boiler.
Unless you can figure out a more efficient way to convert thermal energy into mechanical energy, we will continue to use steam engines. In the case of nuclear reactors, the energy produced by the reactor is primarily heat. The radioactive decay particles fly away from their atoms with high kinetic energy in random directions - i.e. heat. And a steam engine is the most effective means of converting that heat into mechanical energy. Just because it's centuries-old tech doesn't change the fact that it's the optimal solution to this particular problem. You can get higher (real-world) efficiencies with a Stirling engine, but the mechanical components end up being so much larger than a steam engine that the trade-off in cost and logistics isn't worth it for the slightly higher efficiency.
I was thinking something similar: How much CO2 would the next best alternative to concrete emit if we replaced all concrete with it? And how much more (in terms of money and energy) would it cost? Without knowing that, you can't say if 5% of global CO2 emissions is a bad or good thing.
There are two categories of sunscreens - absorbers and blockers.
Blockers physically block sunlight from penetrating. They are by far more effective, and don't need to be reapplied. But their big drawback is that they're visible when applied to the skin, so people don't want to use them. Zinc oxide and titanium dioxide are the most common ones.
Absorbers absorb the energy of UV light and change chemically, instead of letting the UV light get through to your skin and change your DNA chemically. So they "wear out" with exposure to sunlight, and need to be reapplied every 2 hours or so. Oxybenzone and octinoxate fall into this category. Oxybenzone is one of the more effective chemical absorbers at absorbing the most harmful UV rays (UVB, short UVA). And it functions as a photostabilizer, allowing other ingredients to last longer. Without it, you may need to reapply the sunscreen every 30-60 minutes to remain protected, instead of 2 hours.
So no, it's not a matter of using the cheapest ingredient, screw the reefs. It's a trade-off between using a potentially more harmful chemical, or having more people get skin cancer because they forgot to reapply their sunscreen every hour instead of every 2 hours. If we were to approach this strictly from a standpoint of environmental and health safety, absorbing type sunscreens would be banned and only blockers would be allowed. And people would just have to get used to everyone having white powder on their skin when at the beach.
No, that's not what the report shows at all. The first chart you're basing that on is the stats for this quarter alone. Seagate drives failed the most simply because Backblaze uses a lot more Seagate drives than other brand drives.
The chart you want to look at is the last one in the report - lifetime failure rates. Mainly the annualized failure rate and confidence interval high/low columns. Those percentages take into account the number of drives in the sample, and how many days they've been in service. WD drives are by far the worst, with the highest annualized failure rate. Only a single Seagate drive model performs worse than the best WD drive model (which has a small sample size so the confidence interval is large - i.e. the uncertainty in its failure rate is large).
Past Backblaze reports also tried to normalize by years in service (under the assumption that drives which have been in use longer have a higher chance of failing). But they don't seem to be doing that anymore.
It upsets some people because you're assuming that the under-representation is due to some flaw which needs to be corrected. i.e. You're assuming correlation implies causation. Applying the scientific method, the under-representation merely suggests that discrimination may be to blame, but is not proof in itself. One would need to first prove that the under-representation is caused by discrimination, before corrective action is justified. But instead, the under-representation itself is incorrectly being used as "evidence" that corrective action is necessary.
Also your corrective action is blatant favoritism which would be decried as evil and discriminatory if it went the other way. i.e. You're trying to fight one type of discrimination by encouraging a different type of discrimination. This accomplishes the primary goal, e.g. getting people to realize it's wrong to discriminate against women. But it has the unfortunate side-effect of making some people conclude it's OK to discriminate against men. So you're not exactly reducing discrimination, you just replacing one type with another. And your corrective action will result in a long-term oscillation between different forms of discrimination, with no real reduction in the absolute total amount of discrimination. If you want to teach people that discrimination is wrong, you can't do it with programs which encourage different types of discrimination.
I've had similar problems after major Win 10 updates with network access for my virtual machines in VMWare Workstation. The problem is the update seems to invalidate certain virtual network adapters (which is also how a VPN sets up a tunnel). In my case, restoring the default network adapters with Workstation's virtual network manager tool clears up the problem (had to deal with it twice so far).
Difference is Amazon was forging into unexplored territory. Nobody had built an Internet-based store of that scale before. Everything was new, so it was imperative for Amazon to burn lots of cash to search the solution space to quickly figure out the optimal way to organize the store, website, warehouses, and delivery before competitors could figure it out and grab market share. If Amazon found a better solution first, it won. If it didn't find a better solution, as long as competitors hadn't found a better solution, it didn't lose ground. It would only be a loss if your new solution isn't better AND competitors find a better solution.
The solution space for building cars is well-explored. Has been for nearly a century. Musk gambled that a high level of automation would yield a better solution, allowing him to produce cars for cheaper than other automakers. He turned out to be wrong. In this case, because of the existence of well-established competitors, if your new solution isn't better than theirs, then you automatically lose.
A string by itself wouldn't. But a rubber band stretched taught between two points would try to shrink to the shortest possible length between those points along the surface of the globe, which is always a great circle arc. Think of how soap bubbles floating in the air always try to form spheres - the soap tries to pull itself tight, resulting in a structure with the least surface area for the amount of enclosed air. Same idea - a rubber band band tries to pull itself tight, resulting in the shortest distance between those two points (along the surface of the globe).
The problem with the string/rubber band idea though is that once you exceed half the Earth's circumference, it will try to snap to a path on the opposite side of the one you're trying to trace since that's shorter. And this particular route is about 80% of the Earth's circumference, so the string/rubber band will prefer the 20% circumference path.
In spherical geometry:
That last one is the rule you've come across.