Not necessarily. If the car is burning hydrogen, inhaling the exhaust is just going to make you damp.
NOx is produced by the combination of atmospheric nitrogen (N2) with atmospheric oxygen (O2) at high temperatures. So yes, in fact, an engine which burns hydrogen will produce NOx. NOx production is not an inherent property of the fuel, just the combustion temperature. This is why diesel engines have a greater problem with NOx emissions than gasoline engines - they burn more efficiently, but that higher efficiency means higher temperatures, which means more NOx produced.
Hydrogen fuel cells do not produce NOx because they combine the hydrogen fuel with atmospheric oxygen electrochemically, instead of via combustion.
You say that like it's a bad thing. When you fire redundant staff, you improve the efficiency of the remaining staff, which will eventually result in higher pay for them. The staff who were fired are freed up to find other jobs where they can be productive elsewhere. The overall result is a net increase in aggregate productivity.
It's like if a bridge was designed with 15 supports but only needs 12. If you can figure out a way to remove the 3 extra supports, you can re-use that material to help build something else. Net result being more stuff for the same cost (higher GDP per capita).
The problem with companies merging is loss of competition in the marketplace. If there are sufficient competitors, this isn't a problem. But if there are only a few major players, you need to be careful and keep the antitrust bat handy.
I wouldn't characterize it as perceiving faces as nondescript blurs. You can see the face and it's features just fine when you're looking at it. But a few seconds after looking away you don't really remember it. It's like you mind has a much harder time developing a visual fingerprint of a specific face which would make it easier to recall, or develops a much less sophisticated fingerprint. I have no problem comparing pictures of faces side by side and picking out matches. But if you showed me a picture of a face for 5 seconds, then asked me to pick it out from a dozen photos of similar faces, that would be really hard to impossible for me. (I think the nondescript blurs is specific to people who've suffered brain damage in the part of the brain which recognizes faces. The same part of the brain that makes you see the front of your car as a face, or see a face in a Mars photo.)
A lot of our perception of "beauty" is simply facial symmetry and average features. i.e. Attractive celebrities aren't beautiful because they're unusual. They're beautiful because their faces have less deviation from the average. So you don't need to recognize faces to tell that they're attractive. I'm actually really good at taking flattering portraits of people, probably because I concentrate a lot more on non-facial features like lighting, posing, and expression. And hiding things which make a face appear unattractive is more a mechanical process for me, rather than instinctive.
This. Like you, I've gotten very good at recognizing people by non-facial features - voice, gait, stance, and the clothes they like to wear. This has resulted in some what to others are impressive displays of recognition. I can frequently recognize uncredited and minor voice actors in animated movies simply by the timbre and intonations, sometimes if they've only got a single line. I've located a friend we were searching for from the opposite side of a soccer stadium by his gait. I can often pick out friends in a crowd from behind (clothes, stance), especially if they're walking (gait). And during a winter party when everyone had tossed their coats onto a bed in a big pile, I was able to pick out which coat belonged to which person.
But I couldn't draw people's faces or give a description to police if my life depended on it. Often someone changing their hairstyle is enough so I can't recognize their face anymore (or the converse - I don't notice they've changed their hairstyle). Makeup is another easy way to fool me if I'm only looking at a photo of someone I haven't seen in a while (so their clothes are no longer a giveaway).
Less government, more free market is only helpful when there's competition in the free market. Back in the 3G days and before, there was competition (GSM/TDMA, CDMA, DAMPS). 4G saw all the carriers adopting LTE. That's a pretty good sign the technology has matured and competition has found the best solution. At that point, the best course of action is usually to turn it into a public utility. Build a single set of wires (or towers in this case), but don't run any service over them. Let multiple companies provide that service, paying for use of those wires/towers. That competition keeps prices low, as well as keeps a finger in the free market pie in case someone comes up with some new breakthrough.
Electricity is a good example. When it was first developed, nobody knew if AC or DC was better for long-distance transmission. Edison (DC) and Westinghouse/Tesla (AC) built competing electrical systems - entire cities were wired up with AC or DC electricity. Since the government didn't know which was better either, the smart thing for it to do was to stay out of it and not try to regulate it.* Both systems competed, and it soon became clear that AC was superior. Pretty soon all electrical systems were AC, and that's when the government stepped in and converted it into a utility. Your local power company built, owns, and maintains the wires. But in most jurisdictions you can purchase your power from any number of electricity providers. Those providers pay the owner of the wires a fixed rate, set by the local or state's public utilities commission.
* GSM is a good example of how to screw this up. The EU government regulated too quickly when it developed GSM and mandated it as the standard all EU phone companies had to adopt. GSM was based on TDMA - each phone took turns talking to the tower. That worked fine in low-bandwidth applications like voice, but once cellular data became the hot commodity, it was terrible. GSM wasted data bandwidth by allocating it to phones which didn't some or all of it. Fortunately the US didn't adopt GSM and let cell phone companies come up with their own systems. A few tried CDMA - each phone transmits simultaneously, and the tower tells them apart via orthogonal coding (kinda like writing on a sheet of paper, then turning it 90 degrees and writing on it some more - the letters are orthogonal enough that you can distinguish the vertical ones from the horizontal ones). With CDMA, each phone sees the transmissions of the other phones as noise, which raises the noise floor and reduces the signal to noise ratio, automatically dividing the available data bandwidth between all transmitting phones. It completely blew GSM out of the water. Enough so that within a year GSM threw in the towel and was amended to include wideband CDMA for data. That's why CDMA networks got 3G data about a year before GSM networks. That's why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a second CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones only had a single radio for both voice and data.
So 5G is a good candidate for converting the cellular network into the utility model.
This got me curious how a dollar earned by Spotify is split up.
58.32% sound recording owners
29.38% Spotify
6% mechanicals
6.12% performance
It looks like Spotify's share will go down from 29.38% to 24.78%. (The details of the 10.5% "mechanical" rate that's being increased are in footnote 3, which I've read twice and still don't really get.)
the Powerpack system enabling Neoen to sell electricity at up to $14,000 AUD per MWh
The average price of electricity in Australia is AU$0.28/kWh, which is just $28 AUD per MWh. If they're really able to sell the electricity back at $14,000 AUD per MWh, then that points to serious, serious problems with the electrical infrastructure of the country. So serious that incidents like this are almost worthless as a data point for the viability and usefulness of such a system. Other solutions used in other countries are much more cost-effective.
Turkey has much bigger problems than a secular vs religious divide. The country is hodgepodge of different cultures. You see, the end of the first World War saw the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (who fought on the losing side). The European victors carved up the territory into most of the modern Middle Eastern countries we know today. They did so completely oblivious to the cultural boundaries of the indigenous people, which is the root cause of much of the instability in the Middle East today e.g. Iraq is three disparate groups of Shia, Sunni, and Kurds who more or less hate each other, trying to form a single unified government to represent a "country" formed along arbitrary geographic lines drawn by people thousands of miles away who'd never even heard of the words Shia, Sunni, and Kurd. This is why dictatorships work so well there - through brutality they manage to suppress the cultural differences enough to hold the "country" together.
What became Turkey rebelled against the allied occupation after WWI, and won their freedom. But theirs was an alliance formed to eject an occupying force. As a country, the cultural differences still remain. It really would be much better off split into 3-5 smaller countries.
The problem is title bars were introduced when 4:3 and 5:4 aspect ratio monitors were the norm. The screen was much closer to a square and so had a lot more vertical space.
The ubiquity of 16:9 and even 21:9 monitors today means vertical space is a lot more valuable than horizontal space. If 16:9 monitors had been the norm when these UIs were first being developed, I suspect the title bar would've been placed along the left side, not on the top (reversible to the right side for languages written from right to left). I use the Tree-style Tabs extension in Firefox for this reason. Instead of my tabs taking up valuable vertical space, they're shoved off to the side where I have plenty of extra space. (Although Firefox recently moved the tabs into the title bar space. Chrome half-does this too.)
This is what I consider the greatest irony in the debate over how to help the poor and working class. Those who purport to want to help and protect them most also have the lowest opinion of their intellect and capabilities. Those who say they should help themselves do so because they have a higher opinion of the intellect and capability of these people, and believe they can learn how to do a new, better job.
For those too young to remember, the Teamsters and AFL/CIO mostly successfully blocked robots from being introduced into factories in the 1980s as a ploy to protect assembly line jobs. As a result, when China offered manufacturing with lower-cost assembly line labor in the 1990s, most of those jobs left the U.S. for China.
If the U.S. factories had automated in the 1980s, maybe our factories would've been cost-competitive with cheap Chinese labor, and our manufacturing base would've remained here. Some assembly line jobs would've been lost, but many would still remain (look at auto manufacturing today), and other new ones would've been created. Instead, entire factories were shuttered with every job being lost.
Vague and misleading clauses in contracts are interpreted to favor the party which did not draft the contract. So even without privacy protection laws, it'll be interpreted in the car buyer's favor.
Most satellites and junk is invisible. They only flare up when they're at a specific angle between the sun (or moon) and your location. This thing is intentionally designed with multiple facets to reflect sunlight/moonlight from multiple angles, thereby greatly increasing the odds that it'll screw up the photograph or measurements you're taking of a patch of sky.
Who gives a shit if one piece of space junk floats up there... at least it's only ONE PIECE of space junk.
Who gives a shit if one piece of trash is thrown into the environment. At least its only ONE PIECE of trash.
Either something is wrong or it's not. The amount of pieces can scale the degree of wrongness, but cranking it all the way down to one piece doesn't turn a wrong into a right.
Things like the ISS and Iridium flares are from satellites which serve some practical purpose. This disco ball serves no practical purpose, and just adds another item to the thousands of items astronomers have to check for which may possibly intrude on their observations for the night.
It's the difference between someone accidentally shining a laser at your eyes just because they thought it was fun and cool to play around with a laser pointer, and someone accidentally shining a laser at your eyes while setting up equipment designed to give advance warning of an arriving earthquake. The latter is unfortunate but understandable, the former is inexcusable.
Fortunately its orbit is low enough it'll decay and burn up soon. But even that is assuming it doesn't hit some other piece of debris and shatter, kicking up pieces of junk into a higher orbit which could end up circling the Earth for decades if not millenia. It's a really bad risk to be taking for something whose purpose is entirely artistic. Astronomers are making a big deal about it because they're trying to nip the problem in the bud. Since we currently have no means of capturing and removing space junk from orbit, once something gets stuck up there, it's potentially up there forever.
One of the big factors the IRS uses in determining if someone is an employee or a contractor is whether or not they receive benefits like health insurance, retirement savings, etc. If you receive such benefits, you are almost always classified as an employee.
This determination is important because for all practical purposes, a dollar received by a contractor is worth less than a dollar received by an employee. Payroll tax rates (Social Security and Medicare) are 12.4% and 2.9% respectively (there's a ceiling of $128,400 for social security, but it doesn't affect most people).
If you're an employee, half of these taxes are taken out of your paycheck, half paid for by our employer. If your pay is $50k/yr, the company is actually paying $53,825 on your behalf. You just never see the extra $3,825 because it's sent straight to the IRS. After subtracting your share of the payroll taxes, your take-home paycheck for a $50k job (before income taxes) is $46,175.
If you're a contractor, you have to pay all of the payroll tax - both the employee's share and employer's share - as the so-called self-employment tax. Your take-home paycheck for a $50k job is then $42,350. (You also have to pay for your own business liability insurance, but that's just an extra expense for you, not a cost savings for the company.)
The net result is that a dollar paid to a contractor is worth 7.65% less than a dollar paid to an employee, because the contractor has to pay an extra 7.65% of it to the IRS as what would otherwise be the employer's share of these payroll taxes. This is one of the big mistakes people make when they first start working for themselves. They used to be paid $70k as an employee with $10k worth of benefits. The company offers to pay them $85k as a contractor and they jump at it. Only to discover later that they now owe an extra $6500 in payroll taxes which means their net take-home pay is less than before, plus the company can now fire them at any time without termination benefits. Meanwhile the company pats themselves on the back for turning an employee who used to cost them $86.5k ($70k salary, $10k benefits, $6.5k employer's share of payroll taxes) into a $85k contractor.
What Uber is asking for is basically a loosening up of the IRS classification guidelines, so contractors can be given benefits. That would allow them to exploit the fact that most people don't grok that contractor pay is worth 7.65% less than employee pay, and they mistakenly equate $50k as an employee with $50k as a contractor. So by doing this, Uber can appear to be paying their contractors the same as employees and even offering them benefits, when in reality they'd be paying them less than if they just bit the bullet and made them an employee.
The situation wouldn't have arisen if the government had just been up-front and deducted all of the payroll taxes from the employee's paycheck, instead of trying to be cute and hide some of it by having the employer pay for it. But that's water under the bridge now, and the system we have today is the system we're stuck with. And one of the consequences of that system is that a dollar received by a contractor is worth less than a dollar received by an employee.
That's kinda ironic in that if Verhoeven had actually read the book and based the movie on it, the soldiers would've been "super" only because of the powered armor they wore. That is, all individuals start off equal (equally weak). You can choose to empower yourself (gain power armor), but only on the condition that you use that power to protect society. There is no master race, only certain people (who could be from any race) that choose to empower themselves (enlist) to protect others (willing to die to defend the rest of society). And only after such service do you end superior (able to vote) to how you began. It's basically a political meritocracy in which the only merit is demonstrating a willingness to put the lives of others before your own.
From the context of a superhero movie, it'd be like if anyone could become superman, but only if they used them to serve and protect others without those powers. It's an interesting concept simply because it's so different from what we normally see in the real world. And it's rather unfortunate that someone who was so self-centered on his own views that he perceived anything different to be the same thing as the worst thing out there (Nazi fascism), was assigned to make a movie "adaptation" of the book.
Tesla is deliberately delaying the Model 3. CARB (California Air Resources Board) created a ZEV mandate. A certain percentage of each car company's sales have to be ZEV - zero emissions vehicles. Right now that's almost entirely EVs (Toyota has a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle on the market). The percentage increases each year - the details are a bit complex but bottom line it's about 2% for 2018. If an automaker fails to reach the required percentage, they have to buy ZEV credits from an automaker which exceeded it. If they fail that too, they are banned from selling cars in California and the approx dozen states which automatically adopt CARB's guidelines. That's about 1/3 of the U.S. by population.
Since Tesla produces only EVs, they always have excess ZEV credits. Part of their finances is selling those ZEV credits. But the closer the other automakers come to meeting their ZEV requirement in a year, the lower the price for ZEV credits. So if Tesla produces too many EVs in a year in which other car companies sold enough of their own EVs, they get little to nothing for their ZEV credits, and they have to bear a larger fraction of the Tesla 3 production cost themselves.
You can tell how well EVs are selling by how good the discounts are at the end of the year. 2015, sales were really poor (relative to the ZEV mandate that year) and there were incredible discounts on EVs (in California - the only state where CARB counts sales/leases). Dec 2015 I almost picked up a 3-year lease on an e-Golf for $79/mo, no money down (there was also a $49/mo with $1500 down offer, but that's more money overall). The EV deals in late 2017 were close to nonexistent, which is a pretty good indicator that the automakers were hitting their ZEV mandate percentages. That means there wasn't much of a market for ZEV credits in 2017, which meant Tesla had to delay Model 3 production to try to push some of those credits into 2018. And that's exactly what they did.
The problem for Tesla is that they set the pre-order price of their EVs based on assumptions for how much they'll receive for selling the ZEV credits. If the other automakers consistently hit their ZEV percentage every year (or come close to it), Tesla is in a world of trouble - all those Tesla 3 pre-orders could have been "sold" for less than what it cost to manufacture because they'd assumed selling the ZEV credit would've made up the difference. So paradoxically, the better EVs sell, the worse off Tesla is financially.
The banks have figured out how to make it (relatively) safe. If a cryptocurrency exchange hasn't figured it out, the fault is theirs.
The point of putting your money (or crypto coins) in a bank or exchange service is because it's become too valuable to keep on hand. Your advice to keep it in your own wallet makes sense if you have a couple hundred bucks in coins. But if you've got (say) $100,000 in coins, you'd be an idiot to keep it in your own wallet where a fire or burglar or forgetting your password could potentially cause you to lose the coins. We put valuables (money, coins, jewelry, important papers, etc) in a bank because they've paid millions of dollars to put together secure storage, and will lease space in it to you for a nominal fee.
The problem happens when you store your coins in an online exchange, under the assumption that because they're big and online they must have spent millions of dollars to put together secure storage.
While that's most likely what's going on, it would be interesting to do this type of statistical analysis on identical twins adopted by different families as a counter-case. It's possible some of the mother's non-passed genes influence the development of a fetus, and could influence twins in a similar manner even if they're raised by completely different families.
Movie critics (and other types of critics like food critics) date back from the newpaper days of communications. Only a limited amount of one-to-multi communications was possible (one per newspaper), so the best approach to reviews was to get critics with generic, average taste. Their reviews would then serve as a good guide for most people, thus serving the needs of the newspaper to generate mass appeal. The type of people who like to review films (generally people with backgrounds in the industry) introduced a bias which over-emphasized artistry, deep symbolism, and references to other movies and literature, over what the general public likes, but it was an acceptable tradeoff. You can't turn people who enjoy watching movies but not thinking too much about them into critics and reviewers.
Today, the Internet makes one-to-multi communications trivial, and vast amounts of computing power and database technology makes it possible to compile millions of reviews to generate multi-to-multi communication. The "one point of view which works for most people" approach to reviewing movies from the newspaper days is obsolete. The correct method for reviewing today is for you to enter a bunch of movies you like and dislike into a database, and a computer matches you to other people with similar tastes. Then the computer can recommend to you movies those other people have seen and liked, but you haven't seen yet. Likewise it recommends you avoid movies which those people didn't like. If one of those people with tastes like yours also happens to enjoy writing movie reviews, that's the movie critic you should follow.
Perhaps not surprisingly, this is what Netflix does. Based on what movies you've watched, it recommends other similar movies. If you rate the movies you've watched, it fingerprints your ratings, finds other viewers with similar ratings fingerprints, and their ratings carry a heavier weight on the movies Netflix recommends to you.
It's a really bad analogy because when you're buying fast food, you're paying not just for food, but also for the speed at which it'll be prepared. In that regard, opting to pay extra to get your burger faster is pretty much the whole point for the fast food industry existing. People seeing net neutrality portrayed in this manner might conclude it's not such a bad thing.
The problem that net neutrality tries to address is that the customer has already paid for a certain level of service. You've paid for 100 Mbps, and the ISP should be required to deliver it to the best of its ability. Period. There should be no fast lanes because what specific site data the customer wants included in their 100 Mbps is none of the ISP's business. By throttling Netflix, the ISP is defrauding the customer by not delivering the 100 Mbps the customer paid for.
The correct fast food analogy to internet fast lanes is that if you order a cheeseburger, you will have to wait longer for it to be prepared than if you ordered a hamburger. Because the dairy farm has not paid Burger King a fee for selling the slice of cheese, the restaurant is deliberately making it more inconvenient for customers ordering dairy products. This makes clear what the ISPs are trying to do - extorting suppliers by delaying delivery of something the customer has already paid for.
Pretty much every CPU maker was affected by Spectre. It was an oversight in how speculative execution could be abused and thus affected all CPU designs, it wasn't an accidental implementation bug like the FDIV bug. So now that "we know better" yes future CPUs are going to be superior in this regard. Just like once we realized making car bodies stronger was actually causing more occupants to be killed, newer cars designed with crumple zones were safer. No specific company was at fault here - human knowledge was.
Meltdown was more specific to Intel, and fixing it eliminates a good chunk of Intel's performance advantage over AMD. So it will cost them in lost CPU sales to AMD.
Police might object that the number of tickets they write would diminish. But isn't that the whole point? If you think that ticketing is a source of revenue then you've already gone down the wrong side of a slippery slope that leads to all kinds of crooked behavior by police.
All traffic fines, parking tickets, non-compliance fines, court-imposed fines, late fees for payments to governments, and other penalties collected by the government should go into a specific fund. These are payments for crimes against society, so should be returned to society at large, not the government. At the end of the year, the sum total of this fund should be calculated, then divided by the number of taxpayers in the country. Every taxpayer should then get a credit for that amount on their taxes. (Any underestimate should be rolled into next year's fund. Any underestimate subtracted from next year's fund.)
That would stop government agencies from prioritizing enforcement of laws based on how good a revenue source they are, and start prioritizing them in a more important order - like public safety, or maximizing compliance. Liberals should love it because these types of fines tend to be flat or regressive, and hurt the poor disproportionately. Conservatives should love it because it reduces the size of government (no extra revenue source other than taxes).
While they are mechanically identical, game cards and grab bags generate a stack of cards and pile of trash. The more you open, the taller the stack and bigger the pile, giving you a sense of "wow, maybe I've bought enough of these and should stop."
Loot boxes just generate a bunch of icons which always take up the same amount of space. The only indicator that maybe you've bought too many is a little number in the corner of the icon.
Remember, the problem with gambling isn't the act of gambling itself. Nearly everything in life requires a gambling-like risk/benefit tradeoff analysis - whether you want fish or steak for dinner depends on you evaluating their relative price vs. how much you enjoy eating the two. The problem with gambling is that it's easy for people to get sucked into doing it to excess. And hiding how much money you've actually spent is one trick to ease people into excessive gambling.
Really. Most people set their monitor and tablet too bright. For comfortable reading, the brightness of the backlight should match the ambient lighting. That is, if your display is showing pure white and you hold a white sheet of paper next to it, the display should only be slightly brighter than the paper. White paper reflects about 65% of the light which hits it, and the white of your screen shouldn't be much brighter than that.
Most people set their screens much brighter than that. This results in eyestrain as your pupils have to adjust in size every time they look at and away from the screen. A good example are those LED billboards you see along the highway. When they're set too bright, it hurts your eyes to look at them at night. But when their brightness is set to match the ambient lighting, you can't tell if it's a LED billboard or a traditional paper billboard. Set the backlight of your LCD or OLED tablet to about match the brightness of a piece of paper, and there's no difference between reading from the tablet, an ePaper reader, or a printed page. (ePaper actually has a lower reflectance than white paper, about 50%, which is why the ones with a dim backlight are more comfortable for reading.
Slashdot Mirror
NOx is produced by the combination of atmospheric nitrogen (N2) with atmospheric oxygen (O2) at high temperatures. So yes, in fact, an engine which burns hydrogen will produce NOx. NOx production is not an inherent property of the fuel, just the combustion temperature. This is why diesel engines have a greater problem with NOx emissions than gasoline engines - they burn more efficiently, but that higher efficiency means higher temperatures, which means more NOx produced.
Hydrogen fuel cells do not produce NOx because they combine the hydrogen fuel with atmospheric oxygen electrochemically, instead of via combustion.
You say that like it's a bad thing. When you fire redundant staff, you improve the efficiency of the remaining staff, which will eventually result in higher pay for them. The staff who were fired are freed up to find other jobs where they can be productive elsewhere. The overall result is a net increase in aggregate productivity.
It's like if a bridge was designed with 15 supports but only needs 12. If you can figure out a way to remove the 3 extra supports, you can re-use that material to help build something else. Net result being more stuff for the same cost (higher GDP per capita).
The problem with companies merging is loss of competition in the marketplace. If there are sufficient competitors, this isn't a problem. But if there are only a few major players, you need to be careful and keep the antitrust bat handy.
I wouldn't characterize it as perceiving faces as nondescript blurs. You can see the face and it's features just fine when you're looking at it. But a few seconds after looking away you don't really remember it. It's like you mind has a much harder time developing a visual fingerprint of a specific face which would make it easier to recall, or develops a much less sophisticated fingerprint. I have no problem comparing pictures of faces side by side and picking out matches. But if you showed me a picture of a face for 5 seconds, then asked me to pick it out from a dozen photos of similar faces, that would be really hard to impossible for me. (I think the nondescript blurs is specific to people who've suffered brain damage in the part of the brain which recognizes faces. The same part of the brain that makes you see the front of your car as a face, or see a face in a Mars photo.)
A lot of our perception of "beauty" is simply facial symmetry and average features. i.e. Attractive celebrities aren't beautiful because they're unusual. They're beautiful because their faces have less deviation from the average. So you don't need to recognize faces to tell that they're attractive. I'm actually really good at taking flattering portraits of people, probably because I concentrate a lot more on non-facial features like lighting, posing, and expression. And hiding things which make a face appear unattractive is more a mechanical process for me, rather than instinctive.
This. Like you, I've gotten very good at recognizing people by non-facial features - voice, gait, stance, and the clothes they like to wear. This has resulted in some what to others are impressive displays of recognition. I can frequently recognize uncredited and minor voice actors in animated movies simply by the timbre and intonations, sometimes if they've only got a single line. I've located a friend we were searching for from the opposite side of a soccer stadium by his gait. I can often pick out friends in a crowd from behind (clothes, stance), especially if they're walking (gait). And during a winter party when everyone had tossed their coats onto a bed in a big pile, I was able to pick out which coat belonged to which person.
But I couldn't draw people's faces or give a description to police if my life depended on it. Often someone changing their hairstyle is enough so I can't recognize their face anymore (or the converse - I don't notice they've changed their hairstyle). Makeup is another easy way to fool me if I'm only looking at a photo of someone I haven't seen in a while (so their clothes are no longer a giveaway).
Less government, more free market is only helpful when there's competition in the free market. Back in the 3G days and before, there was competition (GSM/TDMA, CDMA, DAMPS). 4G saw all the carriers adopting LTE. That's a pretty good sign the technology has matured and competition has found the best solution. At that point, the best course of action is usually to turn it into a public utility. Build a single set of wires (or towers in this case), but don't run any service over them. Let multiple companies provide that service, paying for use of those wires/towers. That competition keeps prices low, as well as keeps a finger in the free market pie in case someone comes up with some new breakthrough.
Electricity is a good example. When it was first developed, nobody knew if AC or DC was better for long-distance transmission. Edison (DC) and Westinghouse/Tesla (AC) built competing electrical systems - entire cities were wired up with AC or DC electricity. Since the government didn't know which was better either, the smart thing for it to do was to stay out of it and not try to regulate it.* Both systems competed, and it soon became clear that AC was superior. Pretty soon all electrical systems were AC, and that's when the government stepped in and converted it into a utility. Your local power company built, owns, and maintains the wires. But in most jurisdictions you can purchase your power from any number of electricity providers. Those providers pay the owner of the wires a fixed rate, set by the local or state's public utilities commission.
* GSM is a good example of how to screw this up. The EU government regulated too quickly when it developed GSM and mandated it as the standard all EU phone companies had to adopt. GSM was based on TDMA - each phone took turns talking to the tower. That worked fine in low-bandwidth applications like voice, but once cellular data became the hot commodity, it was terrible. GSM wasted data bandwidth by allocating it to phones which didn't some or all of it. Fortunately the US didn't adopt GSM and let cell phone companies come up with their own systems. A few tried CDMA - each phone transmits simultaneously, and the tower tells them apart via orthogonal coding (kinda like writing on a sheet of paper, then turning it 90 degrees and writing on it some more - the letters are orthogonal enough that you can distinguish the vertical ones from the horizontal ones). With CDMA, each phone sees the transmissions of the other phones as noise, which raises the noise floor and reduces the signal to noise ratio, automatically dividing the available data bandwidth between all transmitting phones. It completely blew GSM out of the water. Enough so that within a year GSM threw in the towel and was amended to include wideband CDMA for data. That's why CDMA networks got 3G data about a year before GSM networks. That's why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a second CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones only had a single radio for both voice and data.
So 5G is a good candidate for converting the cellular network into the utility model.
It looks like Spotify's share will go down from 29.38% to 24.78%. (The details of the 10.5% "mechanical" rate that's being increased are in footnote 3, which I've read twice and still don't really get.)
The average price of electricity in Australia is AU$0.28/kWh, which is just $28 AUD per MWh. If they're really able to sell the electricity back at $14,000 AUD per MWh, then that points to serious, serious problems with the electrical infrastructure of the country. So serious that incidents like this are almost worthless as a data point for the viability and usefulness of such a system. Other solutions used in other countries are much more cost-effective.
Turkey has much bigger problems than a secular vs religious divide. The country is hodgepodge of different cultures. You see, the end of the first World War saw the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (who fought on the losing side). The European victors carved up the territory into most of the modern Middle Eastern countries we know today. They did so completely oblivious to the cultural boundaries of the indigenous people, which is the root cause of much of the instability in the Middle East today e.g. Iraq is three disparate groups of Shia, Sunni, and Kurds who more or less hate each other, trying to form a single unified government to represent a "country" formed along arbitrary geographic lines drawn by people thousands of miles away who'd never even heard of the words Shia, Sunni, and Kurd. This is why dictatorships work so well there - through brutality they manage to suppress the cultural differences enough to hold the "country" together.
What became Turkey rebelled against the allied occupation after WWI, and won their freedom. But theirs was an alliance formed to eject an occupying force. As a country, the cultural differences still remain. It really would be much better off split into 3-5 smaller countries.
The problem is title bars were introduced when 4:3 and 5:4 aspect ratio monitors were the norm. The screen was much closer to a square and so had a lot more vertical space.
The ubiquity of 16:9 and even 21:9 monitors today means vertical space is a lot more valuable than horizontal space. If 16:9 monitors had been the norm when these UIs were first being developed, I suspect the title bar would've been placed along the left side, not on the top (reversible to the right side for languages written from right to left). I use the Tree-style Tabs extension in Firefox for this reason. Instead of my tabs taking up valuable vertical space, they're shoved off to the side where I have plenty of extra space. (Although Firefox recently moved the tabs into the title bar space. Chrome half-does this too.)
This is what I consider the greatest irony in the debate over how to help the poor and working class. Those who purport to want to help and protect them most also have the lowest opinion of their intellect and capabilities. Those who say they should help themselves do so because they have a higher opinion of the intellect and capability of these people, and believe they can learn how to do a new, better job.
For those too young to remember, the Teamsters and AFL/CIO mostly successfully blocked robots from being introduced into factories in the 1980s as a ploy to protect assembly line jobs. As a result, when China offered manufacturing with lower-cost assembly line labor in the 1990s, most of those jobs left the U.S. for China.
If the U.S. factories had automated in the 1980s, maybe our factories would've been cost-competitive with cheap Chinese labor, and our manufacturing base would've remained here. Some assembly line jobs would've been lost, but many would still remain (look at auto manufacturing today), and other new ones would've been created. Instead, entire factories were shuttered with every job being lost.
Vague and misleading clauses in contracts are interpreted to favor the party which did not draft the contract. So even without privacy protection laws, it'll be interpreted in the car buyer's favor.
Who gives a shit if one piece of trash is thrown into the environment. At least its only ONE PIECE of trash.
Either something is wrong or it's not. The amount of pieces can scale the degree of wrongness, but cranking it all the way down to one piece doesn't turn a wrong into a right.
Things like the ISS and Iridium flares are from satellites which serve some practical purpose. This disco ball serves no practical purpose, and just adds another item to the thousands of items astronomers have to check for which may possibly intrude on their observations for the night.
It's the difference between someone accidentally shining a laser at your eyes just because they thought it was fun and cool to play around with a laser pointer, and someone accidentally shining a laser at your eyes while setting up equipment designed to give advance warning of an arriving earthquake. The latter is unfortunate but understandable, the former is inexcusable.
Fortunately its orbit is low enough it'll decay and burn up soon. But even that is assuming it doesn't hit some other piece of debris and shatter, kicking up pieces of junk into a higher orbit which could end up circling the Earth for decades if not millenia. It's a really bad risk to be taking for something whose purpose is entirely artistic. Astronomers are making a big deal about it because they're trying to nip the problem in the bud. Since we currently have no means of capturing and removing space junk from orbit, once something gets stuck up there, it's potentially up there forever.
This determination is important because for all practical purposes, a dollar received by a contractor is worth less than a dollar received by an employee. Payroll tax rates (Social Security and Medicare) are 12.4% and 2.9% respectively (there's a ceiling of $128,400 for social security, but it doesn't affect most people).
The net result is that a dollar paid to a contractor is worth 7.65% less than a dollar paid to an employee, because the contractor has to pay an extra 7.65% of it to the IRS as what would otherwise be the employer's share of these payroll taxes. This is one of the big mistakes people make when they first start working for themselves. They used to be paid $70k as an employee with $10k worth of benefits. The company offers to pay them $85k as a contractor and they jump at it. Only to discover later that they now owe an extra $6500 in payroll taxes which means their net take-home pay is less than before, plus the company can now fire them at any time without termination benefits. Meanwhile the company pats themselves on the back for turning an employee who used to cost them $86.5k ($70k salary, $10k benefits, $6.5k employer's share of payroll taxes) into a $85k contractor.
What Uber is asking for is basically a loosening up of the IRS classification guidelines, so contractors can be given benefits. That would allow them to exploit the fact that most people don't grok that contractor pay is worth 7.65% less than employee pay, and they mistakenly equate $50k as an employee with $50k as a contractor. So by doing this, Uber can appear to be paying their contractors the same as employees and even offering them benefits, when in reality they'd be paying them less than if they just bit the bullet and made them an employee.
The situation wouldn't have arisen if the government had just been up-front and deducted all of the payroll taxes from the employee's paycheck, instead of trying to be cute and hide some of it by having the employer pay for it. But that's water under the bridge now, and the system we have today is the system we're stuck with. And one of the consequences of that system is that a dollar received by a contractor is worth less than a dollar received by an employee.
That's kinda ironic in that if Verhoeven had actually read the book and based the movie on it, the soldiers would've been "super" only because of the powered armor they wore. That is, all individuals start off equal (equally weak). You can choose to empower yourself (gain power armor), but only on the condition that you use that power to protect society. There is no master race, only certain people (who could be from any race) that choose to empower themselves (enlist) to protect others (willing to die to defend the rest of society). And only after such service do you end superior (able to vote) to how you began. It's basically a political meritocracy in which the only merit is demonstrating a willingness to put the lives of others before your own.
From the context of a superhero movie, it'd be like if anyone could become superman, but only if they used them to serve and protect others without those powers. It's an interesting concept simply because it's so different from what we normally see in the real world. And it's rather unfortunate that someone who was so self-centered on his own views that he perceived anything different to be the same thing as the worst thing out there (Nazi fascism), was assigned to make a movie "adaptation" of the book.
Tesla is deliberately delaying the Model 3. CARB (California Air Resources Board) created a ZEV mandate. A certain percentage of each car company's sales have to be ZEV - zero emissions vehicles. Right now that's almost entirely EVs (Toyota has a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle on the market). The percentage increases each year - the details are a bit complex but bottom line it's about 2% for 2018. If an automaker fails to reach the required percentage, they have to buy ZEV credits from an automaker which exceeded it. If they fail that too, they are banned from selling cars in California and the approx dozen states which automatically adopt CARB's guidelines. That's about 1/3 of the U.S. by population.
Since Tesla produces only EVs, they always have excess ZEV credits. Part of their finances is selling those ZEV credits. But the closer the other automakers come to meeting their ZEV requirement in a year, the lower the price for ZEV credits. So if Tesla produces too many EVs in a year in which other car companies sold enough of their own EVs, they get little to nothing for their ZEV credits, and they have to bear a larger fraction of the Tesla 3 production cost themselves.
You can tell how well EVs are selling by how good the discounts are at the end of the year. 2015, sales were really poor (relative to the ZEV mandate that year) and there were incredible discounts on EVs (in California - the only state where CARB counts sales/leases). Dec 2015 I almost picked up a 3-year lease on an e-Golf for $79/mo, no money down (there was also a $49/mo with $1500 down offer, but that's more money overall). The EV deals in late 2017 were close to nonexistent, which is a pretty good indicator that the automakers were hitting their ZEV mandate percentages. That means there wasn't much of a market for ZEV credits in 2017, which meant Tesla had to delay Model 3 production to try to push some of those credits into 2018. And that's exactly what they did.
The problem for Tesla is that they set the pre-order price of their EVs based on assumptions for how much they'll receive for selling the ZEV credits. If the other automakers consistently hit their ZEV percentage every year (or come close to it), Tesla is in a world of trouble - all those Tesla 3 pre-orders could have been "sold" for less than what it cost to manufacture because they'd assumed selling the ZEV credit would've made up the difference. So paradoxically, the better EVs sell, the worse off Tesla is financially.
The banks have figured out how to make it (relatively) safe. If a cryptocurrency exchange hasn't figured it out, the fault is theirs.
The point of putting your money (or crypto coins) in a bank or exchange service is because it's become too valuable to keep on hand. Your advice to keep it in your own wallet makes sense if you have a couple hundred bucks in coins. But if you've got (say) $100,000 in coins, you'd be an idiot to keep it in your own wallet where a fire or burglar or forgetting your password could potentially cause you to lose the coins. We put valuables (money, coins, jewelry, important papers, etc) in a bank because they've paid millions of dollars to put together secure storage, and will lease space in it to you for a nominal fee.
The problem happens when you store your coins in an online exchange, under the assumption that because they're big and online they must have spent millions of dollars to put together secure storage.
While that's most likely what's going on, it would be interesting to do this type of statistical analysis on identical twins adopted by different families as a counter-case. It's possible some of the mother's non-passed genes influence the development of a fetus, and could influence twins in a similar manner even if they're raised by completely different families.
Movie critics (and other types of critics like food critics) date back from the newpaper days of communications. Only a limited amount of one-to-multi communications was possible (one per newspaper), so the best approach to reviews was to get critics with generic, average taste. Their reviews would then serve as a good guide for most people, thus serving the needs of the newspaper to generate mass appeal. The type of people who like to review films (generally people with backgrounds in the industry) introduced a bias which over-emphasized artistry, deep symbolism, and references to other movies and literature, over what the general public likes, but it was an acceptable tradeoff. You can't turn people who enjoy watching movies but not thinking too much about them into critics and reviewers.
Today, the Internet makes one-to-multi communications trivial, and vast amounts of computing power and database technology makes it possible to compile millions of reviews to generate multi-to-multi communication. The "one point of view which works for most people" approach to reviewing movies from the newspaper days is obsolete. The correct method for reviewing today is for you to enter a bunch of movies you like and dislike into a database, and a computer matches you to other people with similar tastes. Then the computer can recommend to you movies those other people have seen and liked, but you haven't seen yet. Likewise it recommends you avoid movies which those people didn't like. If one of those people with tastes like yours also happens to enjoy writing movie reviews, that's the movie critic you should follow.
Perhaps not surprisingly, this is what Netflix does. Based on what movies you've watched, it recommends other similar movies. If you rate the movies you've watched, it fingerprints your ratings, finds other viewers with similar ratings fingerprints, and their ratings carry a heavier weight on the movies Netflix recommends to you.
It's a really bad analogy because when you're buying fast food, you're paying not just for food, but also for the speed at which it'll be prepared. In that regard, opting to pay extra to get your burger faster is pretty much the whole point for the fast food industry existing. People seeing net neutrality portrayed in this manner might conclude it's not such a bad thing.
The problem that net neutrality tries to address is that the customer has already paid for a certain level of service. You've paid for 100 Mbps, and the ISP should be required to deliver it to the best of its ability. Period. There should be no fast lanes because what specific site data the customer wants included in their 100 Mbps is none of the ISP's business. By throttling Netflix, the ISP is defrauding the customer by not delivering the 100 Mbps the customer paid for.
The correct fast food analogy to internet fast lanes is that if you order a cheeseburger, you will have to wait longer for it to be prepared than if you ordered a hamburger. Because the dairy farm has not paid Burger King a fee for selling the slice of cheese, the restaurant is deliberately making it more inconvenient for customers ordering dairy products. This makes clear what the ISPs are trying to do - extorting suppliers by delaying delivery of something the customer has already paid for.
Pretty much every CPU maker was affected by Spectre. It was an oversight in how speculative execution could be abused and thus affected all CPU designs, it wasn't an accidental implementation bug like the FDIV bug. So now that "we know better" yes future CPUs are going to be superior in this regard. Just like once we realized making car bodies stronger was actually causing more occupants to be killed, newer cars designed with crumple zones were safer. No specific company was at fault here - human knowledge was.
Meltdown was more specific to Intel, and fixing it eliminates a good chunk of Intel's performance advantage over AMD. So it will cost them in lost CPU sales to AMD.
All traffic fines, parking tickets, non-compliance fines, court-imposed fines, late fees for payments to governments, and other penalties collected by the government should go into a specific fund. These are payments for crimes against society, so should be returned to society at large, not the government. At the end of the year, the sum total of this fund should be calculated, then divided by the number of taxpayers in the country. Every taxpayer should then get a credit for that amount on their taxes. (Any underestimate should be rolled into next year's fund. Any underestimate subtracted from next year's fund.)
That would stop government agencies from prioritizing enforcement of laws based on how good a revenue source they are, and start prioritizing them in a more important order - like public safety, or maximizing compliance. Liberals should love it because these types of fines tend to be flat or regressive, and hurt the poor disproportionately. Conservatives should love it because it reduces the size of government (no extra revenue source other than taxes).
While they are mechanically identical, game cards and grab bags generate a stack of cards and pile of trash. The more you open, the taller the stack and bigger the pile, giving you a sense of "wow, maybe I've bought enough of these and should stop."
Loot boxes just generate a bunch of icons which always take up the same amount of space. The only indicator that maybe you've bought too many is a little number in the corner of the icon.
Remember, the problem with gambling isn't the act of gambling itself. Nearly everything in life requires a gambling-like risk/benefit tradeoff analysis - whether you want fish or steak for dinner depends on you evaluating their relative price vs. how much you enjoy eating the two. The problem with gambling is that it's easy for people to get sucked into doing it to excess. And hiding how much money you've actually spent is one trick to ease people into excessive gambling.
Really. Most people set their monitor and tablet too bright. For comfortable reading, the brightness of the backlight should match the ambient lighting. That is, if your display is showing pure white and you hold a white sheet of paper next to it, the display should only be slightly brighter than the paper. White paper reflects about 65% of the light which hits it, and the white of your screen shouldn't be much brighter than that.
Most people set their screens much brighter than that. This results in eyestrain as your pupils have to adjust in size every time they look at and away from the screen. A good example are those LED billboards you see along the highway. When they're set too bright, it hurts your eyes to look at them at night. But when their brightness is set to match the ambient lighting, you can't tell if it's a LED billboard or a traditional paper billboard. Set the backlight of your LCD or OLED tablet to about match the brightness of a piece of paper, and there's no difference between reading from the tablet, an ePaper reader, or a printed page. (ePaper actually has a lower reflectance than white paper, about 50%, which is why the ones with a dim backlight are more comfortable for reading.