The TRUTH is, Spotify is ruining music in many ways by paying fractions of pennies in royalties. Some artists with millions of song plays have received on $80 for a year of royalties.
I wonder how much their publisher received though. I bet it was a lot more than $80.
Spotify pays $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream to the holder of music rights. That works out to $6000 to $8400 in royalty payments per million song plays. If the artist is only getting $80 for a song that's listened to millions of times in a year, their publisher is the one screwing them over. The publisher is keeping more than 99% of the royalty payments, passing on less than 1% to the artist.
(Sanity check: Spotify averaged 1.7 billion listening hours per month in 2015. At 3.5 minutes per song, that's 29 billion song plays per month, or 350 billion song plays per year. At the above royalty rates, they'd be paying about $2-$3 billion in royalties per year. And indeed that's about how much they pay in royalties - $3.9 billion in 2018. So yes, it is in fact the record labels who are screwing the artists over, not Spotify.)
It's a foggy day. Your car is approaching a bridge. Someone standing besides the road waves his arms and yells that the bridge has collapsed. You continue driving. You pass more people waving at you trying to get you to stop, exclaiming the bridge is out. You continue driving. Eventually you get close enough that you can kinda see the bridge, and indeed it does seem to be out. Do you:
A. Ignore the warnings and continue driving at full speed.
B. Step on the brakes and stop.
C. Refuse to use the brakes because they generate harmful brake dust, and decide some new technology for stopping cars needs to be developed to prevent you from hurtling off the collapsed bridge. You always thought it would be a neat idea to construct a giant fan connected to a generator and a battery to slow down cars by recapturing its kinetic energy, without generating brake dust, so you immediately get all the passengers in your car to begin construction of a giant fan. Some of the passengers yell at you to just hit the brakes, we can build the fan later. But you yell back that they're stupid and that'll just kill everyone anyway through brake dust. Meanwhile the car is getting closer and closer to the bridge (which now definitely appears to be out) and the preliminary fan construction is barely slowing you down.
If you really, truly believed the bridge was out, you'd obviously pick B. Environmentalists have forced us to pick C. We've had a solution to man-made climate change for over half a century - nuclear power. The only reason we haven't switched from fossil fuels to nuclear power is because of opposition by environmentalists. They suffer what I call just right-itis. To them there's just the right amount of global warming going on. Enough that we need to ditch fossil fuels and switch to renewable power to ensure the survival of the human race, but not enough that we need to switch immediately to nuclear power to buy us more time to work on developing renewable power technologies.
If you really, truly believed global warming was a threat to the human race, you'd accept that nuclear power was the lesser of two evils, and that the obvious smartest course of action is to switch immediately from fossil fuels to nuclear power. Thus giving ourselves decades if not centuries to work on developing renewable power technology to replace nuclear power. That these environmentalists and liberals completely reject nuclear power suggests that they themselves don't really believe global warming is a real threat, and instead they just see it as a way to pressure others into implementing their preferred power solution faster.
perfectly circular, average distance from any planet to any planet should be equal to the center of their path circle, which is, drum roll please, the center of the sun.
No. Distance is a scalar, not a vector. So the average distance doesn't work out to the center of the sun. It works out to the the sum of all points along the circular orbit. For Venus' case, since its orbit is bigger, the scalar distance to each equivalent point in Mercury's orbit is on average bigger because it's at a greater angle from the Earth (with Earth-to-sun line being the shortest distance).
e.g. Pretend Mercury is located in the sun, and Venus has the same orbit as Earth. Consider four points on each orbit spaced 90 degrees apart.
When Earth, Venus, and Mercury are in line with the sun all on the same side, Mercury is as far as the sun from the Earth (call it R), Venus is on top of the Earth, so its distance is zero.
When Venus and Mercury are on opposite sides of the sun from Earth, Again, Mercury is distance R, Venus is 2R.
When Venus and Mercury are at 90 degrees to the right of the sun from Earth, this creates a 45 degree right triangle. Mercury is still at R, Venus is at 2sin(45)R, or 1.414R.
Likewise when Venus and Mercury are at 90 degrees to the left of the sun, you have the same 45 degree right triangle flipped. And Mercury is at R, Venus is at 1.414R.
Average these four points. The first two cancel out (both average a distance R). The second two result in Mercury being at distance R, Venus at 1.414R. And hence Mercury is on average closer than Venus, even though we're pretending Venus has the same orbit as the Earth.
Quantum computing is useless against a one-time pad. It would just come up with all possible pads which convert the ciphertext into all possible plaintexts which makes sense. e.g. It would come up with decryption ciphers which convert the ciphertext to "one of by land, two if by sea" and "two if by land, one if by sea", leaving the code breaker no better off than not being able to break it.
The only reason we use public key encryption is because it's a lot easier than meeting up in person to exchange a one-time pad before you can exchange secure communications. In public key encryption, you can exchange the key publicly yet still have encrypted communication. Also, it's slow enough that it's generally not used for the communications itself. It's used to exchange AES key(s) (basically one-time pads) securely. The encryption of the plaintext is then done using AES.
All breaking public key encryption would do is put us back to the pre-1970s state of encryption, where secure communications required pre-sharing keys in some way. Difficult for random people/sites who have never spoken to each other before. But trivial for things like chipped credit cards, where the credit card company first has to physically mail you the credit card. (The one-time use rule for a one-time pad could be maintained by pre-loading thousands of one-time pads onto the chip, and replacing the credit card before they're all used up. Unthinkable a couple decades ago, but trivial today with modern storage capacities.)
I could see trusted key escrow services popping up, which pre-share one-time pads with online sites and users. So if a user needs to communicate securely with some online site that they hadn't heard of until 5 minutes ago, they could go through the key escrow service to securely exchange keys with the site. User generates temporary key and securely transmits it to the key escrow service. Escrow service relays key to the site using their pre-shared key with the site. Escrow service immediately destroys their interim plaintext copy (the key the user generated). User uses that key to exchange a new key with the site. Then user can go about communicating securely with the site. It's not as secure as public key encryption since there's a third party involved. But it's still workable, and immune to quantum computing.
If your business model is based on numbers and traffic, (to show advertising) taking away content will normally bite back.
[...]
In general a cut in revenue is worse, then having a slow steady rise in revenue.
Ad revenue is (number of ad impressions)*(price per ad)
To measure tumblr's revenue, you have to factor in the number of advertisers they had. More advertisers results in bidding up the price per ad impression. So a decrease in number of ad impressions could actually result in an increase in revenue, if it also results in a greater increase in revenue per ad impression. (A bit more complicated here since keeping the porn would've resulted in a decrease in the number of advertisers, but that has the same net effect.) Unfortunately since the company is now a subsidiary (first Yahoo, now Verizon), it's impossible to know whether or not dumping the porn helped without being an insider.
Amazon lobbieslots of government branches because they do business in basically every jurisdiction in the U.S. in multiple industries. If you look at raw number of dollars spent lobbying, Amazon doesn't even make the top 10.
More to the point, can you cancel your 4G service and go with only 5G for no extra fee? I mean if Verizon is going to charge you like it's a la carte pricing, then the customer should be able to select services like it's a la carte, right?
From what I've been able to tell, 5G offers little benefit to the customer over 4G. At 5G speeds, you can blow through your monthly quota in a couple minutes. The benefit is mostly for the carrier - fewer bandwidth bottlenecks when lots of people are in the same tower cell (each person's data request takes less time to fulfill, getting them off the airwaves quicker and freeing up the bandwidth). Meaning Verizon won't get as many complaints about poor service when it's not due to technical problems.
I'm a PC gamer. Have been since probably before most of you were born (I played Zork I back when it was released, albeit the pirated version). But I admit I bought an XBox and PS4 controller, and eventually settled on a Steam Controller and Steam Link, so I could stream my PC games to my TV and play from my sofa. Sometimes I just want to lie back and chill on my sofa while playing games, and it's kinda hard to get comfortable using a keyboard and mouse on a small table when you do that.
Few people have a TV that is really good for gaming in the first place
The hardcore gamer crowd who gets high refresh rate monitors are a relatively small segment of the market. Around 5%-10% by unit sales, which means probably around 2%-3% by number of people since they upgrade much more frequently. The other 95%+ of gamers are perfectly content to play on their TV.
Regular TVs are actually very good for gaming if you're content with a 60 Hz refresh rate. TVs all cover 100% sRGB and have good viewing angles. And they're designed to show fast motion (TV shows and movies) so the panels were pre-selected by the manufacturer to have low pixel response times and thus minimal image smearing. The only issue you might encounter is processing lag as the TV tries to refine what it thinks is a video image. But that can usually be disabled by putting the TV into PC mode (direct or 1:1, which also turns off overscan).
I know US submariners that have talked vaguely about high tech cable-tapping missions since the 1990s.
1990s LOL. The U.S. built a nuclear powered deep-water submarine in the 1960s specifically to tap underwater communications cables. It was used publicly to recover parts from airliner crashes and shipwrecks from the ocean floor. But it's obvious from its capabilities (multi-week loiter capability with manipulator arms) that it was made for tapping undersea cables. The fact that they built the ultimate underwater cable tapping machine in the 1960s tells you they were playing around with tapping the cables for at least decades prior. The fact that they retired it in 2008 should make you think about what shiny new toys they have now for doing the same thing.
So it's not so much a "OMG they're vulnerable" as "crap those guys can perhaps do it now too" thing.,
That's exactly it. The U.S. has been doing this for decades, so it's actually in the best position to know what the vulnerabilities and technical challenges are. And despite the general anti-U.S. sentiment among western countries, their interests align much more closely with the U.S.' interests than with China's. So if the U.S. is going so far as to warn its allies about the threat, it's a pretty good bet that there's really something to this.
Copyright governs your ability to distribute copies of other people's work. There's no distribution going on here, so permission of the copyright holder (photographer) was not needed.
It might be governed by personality rights - your right to control how your image is used. You could argue the model's consent is needed before using their facial geometry. But personality rights are generally concerned with control over how others perceive your image. Since there's no public perception or exploitation here, it would be an uphill argument.
AFAIK, there is no basis for prohibiting people from using things you make publicly available (your face every time you walk out in public, unless you wear a burka) to train computer algorithms. Photographers and the press have worked pretty hard to enshrine their right to record images of people in public places. If we want there to be restrictions of using images of people in public places, it'll need to be a new law.
You don't have to stock your home from Amazon though. You an go the local department store, or walmart.com, or the Salvation Army to get stuff for your home. Same for Android. You can load a different store, or even download an Android app directly from the app-maker's website and install it directly onto your Android device.
Apple is the only one who forces you to use their store, and prohibits you from using anyone else's. That's the lack of competition we're talking about. In Amazon and the Google Play Store's case, their fees and markups are somewhat justified because if they were egregious, sellers would preferentially use a competitor's store. In Apple's case, they have no choice. It's Apple's way or the highway.
And your minimum fee per transaction for credit/debit cards is horrendously out of date. The last time our business paid 30 cents per transaction was back around 2000. Currently it's around 10 cents per transaction, and the big retail chains like Walmart have probably negotiated far less since they don't bat an eye if I use a credit card for a 50 cent piece of fruit. Care to guess why the price per transaction went down? That's right - competition. Precisely the thing Apple prohibits.
Most of the software functionality of the Pixel 3 has been hacked and extracted. You can install it on your Android device running Nougat or later if you're rooted with Magisk. If this offline voice recognition is done in software instead of dedicated hardware (like the original Moto X), expect it to be made available for other rooted devices as well.
Free-range and wild animals can get something called rice breast. While it's harmless (they're just cysts), it looks nasty and is enough to make you lose your appetite. Usually it's only hunters who encounter it since they butcher the animals themselves. When it shows up in free-range chicken meat, the meat is probably ground up and redirected to other uses like pet food. Raising the chickens in enclosed pens (to avoid the parasites spreading from feces of birds flying overhead), and closely regulating their food avoids the infection.
This would appear to support something I've suspected for a while now: That we seem to be hard-wired to reach conclusions based on faith. And that when people ditch faith in religion, it doesn't make them less "religious." They just put their faith into something else, be it anti-vaxx theories or 9/11 conspiracies or atheism. (Yes atheism is a faith. You cannot prove a negative, at least not without investigating every single possibility, so you cannot realistically prove there is no god. You can be agnostic without needing faith - uncertain or doubtful if there is a god. But to be atheist - convinced that there is no god - requires a leap of faith.)
Technically it's still there, just disabled by a switch in the Android settings. Unfortunately you have to root your device to turn that setting back on (in build.prop, change persist.debug.wfd.enable=0 to 1).
Miracast is an open standard, so there's no licensing cost associated with it. As best as I can tell, Google disabled it for performance reasons. Like Steam In Home Streaming, Miracast works by encoding everything showing on the device's screen in real-time into a h.264 stream, then streaming that to another device. To the other device, it's like it's playing a streamed movie. Unfortunately this requires quite of bit of power on the Android device doing the encoding (even though the encoding is done in hardware on the GPU), causing battery life to plummet to a few hours. This led to unfavorable comparisons with iOS devices, which don't really mirror the screen, they just redirect things like the incoming video stream from the phone to your TV. So it seems Google disabled it so the ignorant masses would stop comparing screen mirroring with stream redirection, and incorrectly claiming iOS was better at it.
Which makes me wonder how exactly Microsoft is going to pull off app mirroring. If they're going to write their own Android app which implements Miracast or their own proprietary version of it (like Remote Desktop), that may actually be a good thing. Apps on other devices can then be written to be compatible with the Microsoft app (like Windows SMB file sharing has become standard via SAMBA making compatible clients available on all other computer platforms). And people without rooted devices will have a way to mirror their screen to their TV again.
Usually there are 3+ pitot tubes. Looks like the 737 has 5, with 3 of them dedicated to measuring airspeed. It's incredibly rare that a single fault causes a crash. Reporters just like to write up their stories that way to give their stories more impact, even if it twists the truth.
This isn't the first time faulty airspeed readings led to a flight computer has led to a crash. It isn't even the second time. In all previous cases, the plane was flyable. It was the confusion as the pilots tried to diagnose the problem based on the bizarre behavior of the plane and the flight control software and alarms which doomed the flights. It requires a deep and thorough understanding of when different flight protection modes in the software are triggered and kick in, to work backwards from the behavior you're seeing, to what problem(s) could be triggering those modes. If you've debugged software, you've encountered this. Unlike natural laws like physics, software can be designed arbitrarily. So your intuitive feel for how things should work becomes useless for tracking down the problem. You're totally dependent on how thoroughly you understand the software's arbitrary design.
Bear in mind that the stall warning is pretty much a "you're gonna die if you ignore me" warning. So it takes quite a bit of convincing before pilots will decide it's the warning that's faulty, not something else that they're doing wrong. That may be the cause of the reluctance of pilots to simply shut it off and fly the plane "by the seat of their pants" based on how the throttle settings, altitude, and attitude. So while theoretically the stall warning triggering incorrectly is a recoverable problem, it may take pilots a long time to diagnose and clear up the problem. Long enough for the plane to crash.
If you try to sell a gift card to Cardpool for Amazon credit when they're all out of Amazon gift cards, they will delay processing your order for an eternity (most likely, due to waiting for people to sell them some unwanted Amazon gift cards).
The usual way you solve that is to allow bidding, with the highest bidder getting the exchange first instead of the first person to enter a bid. That way if there's a shortage of Amazon gift cards, the excess bids for Amazon gift cards makes them more valuable, encouraging people who have Amazon gift cards to give them up.
But that creates a free market, which apparently is taboo for some of the people running and participating in these exchanges. So they languish with queues and delays.
Actually, if even Trump is for ditching the time changes, it makes me wonder. Who the hell is it that likes it, and convinces our legislators not to get rid of it.
This type of 2FA relies on the two factors being (1) something you have, and (2) something you know. In the case of Chip and PIN, the chip (embedded in the card) is something you have, and the PIN is something you know. The orthogonality of these two factors means scenarios which result in the loss of one are unlikely to result in the loss of the other, and vice versa. Even if someone steals the card, they cannot use it because you have not revealed our PIN. Even if you tell someone your PIN, they cannot use it without physical possession of the card.
This new card they're trying changes the two factors to two things that you have. That makes fraud far more likely, because things which result in the loss of one are likely to result in the loss of the other. If you lose the card, a thief may be able to lift your fingerprint off the card itself. If someone dies and a person runs across the body, they have access to both the finger and the card.
That's really the whole point of 2FA. It's not "throw a couple roadblocks in the way of thieves and hope one of the works." It's designing the two roadblocks so there's minimal intersection of their weaknesses. Switching it to two physical factors results in a system that's not much more secure than having just a single factor.
Probably not in this case. Right now, the likely culprit seems to be pilots being inadequately trained on the automated flight control systems. Airbus has had similar systems in their planes for decades (which can override pilot inputs, and require the pilots to turn them off if they decide it's malfunctioning). The FAA had no problem approving those, so this isn't a resistance to change on the part of the FAA.
Boeing stuck to the "pilot should always be in control" philosophy, and is only now adding automated safety systems which can override the pilots' inputs. It would appear they're going through some of the same early teething problems Airbus went through with such automated systems in the 1980s and 1990s. Where pilots don't know or don't understand why the plane won't do what they're trying to make it do, resulting in a crash.
There's a reason apple went with costly 3D imaging. Yes of course there's the prospect of spoofing it with a 3D mask but that's a pretty invasive and premeditated attack.
Why bother with a mask? The police or a mugger will just hold you down while they point your phone at you.
People forget that signing into a phone is not just validation of your ID, it's also your way of signaling that you actually want to sign in. Passive sign-ins like fingerprint or facial scans allow others to sign in on your behalf regardless of whether or not you actually want to sign in. (Of course they could just beat you with a wrench until you gave up your password, but that will at least leave physical bruising and scars as evidence of their wrongdoing. With passive sign-ins, there's no way to distinguish voluntary from involuntary logins. You file a lawsuit saying the police forced you to unlock your phone. They just say "no we didn't, you voluntarily unlocked it.")
We already have laws in the books prohibiting telemarketing calls to cell phones and numbers on the do not call list. My cell phone number is on the do not call registry, and I still get telemarketing calls to it. Adding more regulations blocking telemarketing calls are unlikely to help, when they're currently ignoring the laws that are already in the books. So while Oliver's tactic may tickle the humorous irony meter, it won't actually solve anything.
The problem is there's no reliable way to figure out who is actually calling you. I get a telemarketing call, and I have no way to file a complaint or lawsuit against the caller - because I have no way to accurately identify the caller. If you want to fix this problem, that's what you need to fix. Pass a law forcing the phone companies to provide a way to accurately trace who is calling you the moment you receive the call. It'll be an uphill road because the telecom companies will fight tooth and nail against it (they make a good chunk of their revenue from telemarketers). And even if we win it'll result in prices going up (lower utilization of the network does not decrease the flat cost to install and maintain the network, so the telecom companies will have to charge more per call to offset the loss of telemarketer revenue). But it'll be worth it not to miss an emergency call from my credit card about "unusual" activity on my account, because I didn't recognize the number and assumed it was a telemarketer, and didn't answer.
The "invisible hand" is actually buyers actively shopping for lower prices. They make prices go up by buying out all the cheaper-priced inventory. They make prices go down by refusing to buy overpriced (in their opinion) inventory, forcing sellers to lower prices to move stock.
The invisible hand only fails if there are no lower prices for buyers to find (monopoly), or if the buyers are too damn lazy to search for lower prices. Failure in those corner cases does not constitute evidence of capitalism's failure outside of these corner cases. Its failure in this case (monopoly) has already been addressed by anti-trust laws already in the books, so this is actually evidence of regulatory failure - governments not taking action to break up Luxottica.
This isn't the big bad government trying to take away your freedoms. I fully support the FCC on this (and I'm pretty close to Libertarian so that means something coming from me).
The issue is weather radar. Shortly after the FCC opened up the 5 GHz band for unlicensed use, terminal doppler weather radar was invented in response to several airliner crashes due to adverse weather conditions. Unfortunately, it relies on frequencies smack dab in the middle of the open 5 GHz band. So the FCC took the unusual step of revising their rules which opened up those frequencies
The intermediate 5 GHz channels were reclassified as DFS - dynamic frequency selection. Devices are allowed to use those frequencies, but they have to monitor for TDWR. If they detected weather radar in use, they had to switch to a different channel. A few devices actually do this and check to see if weather radar is in use. Most manufacturers just took the easy way out and blocked out channels 50-144 entirely in the firmware. That's why many 5 GHz devices only support channels 36-48 and 149-165. (This can cause the mysterious situation you might have encountered, where some devices can see your 5 GHz network while others can't. Your router supports DFS and has picked a channel between 50-144. Devices which support DFS can see the router. Devices which have blocked off channels 50-144 cannot.)
Early open source router firmwares completely ignored DFS. They would spam over the DFS frequencies, interfering with weather radar at airports if someone nearby happened to load the firmware onto their router. DD-WRT added support for DFS (it's the "weather radar" checkbox in the 5 GHz wireless settings, although it really should be checked by default).. If you install third party firmware and use the 5 GHz band, do the responsible thing and enable this functionality if you're going to enable channels 50-144. Unfortunately, some idiots didn't do this, degrading the effectiveness of hundreds of millions of dollars invested into TDWR equipment. It was enough of a concern that the FCC began investigating the need to regulate or ban third party firmware. That's what this is all about. The government doesn't hate you running third party firmware on your router, they're just trying to protect people flying in airplanes from needlessly being killed.
This is why we can't have nice things - a few idiots ruin it for everyone else. I had lots of fun with lawn darts as a kid, but we always treated the target area as if it were a shooting range. Here's an example of what happens to TDWR when an idiot blasts their router in the TDWR frequencies. The unauthorized broadcast shows up as a wedge-shaped area spanning a few degrees and extending to the edge of the radar image, completely obscuring any weather in the wedge. Multiply that by a few dozen open source routers near the airport and it becomes a major impediment.
The cleaner solution would've been for the FCC to simply close the 5 GHz band and reserve it entirely for TDWR. But that would've made billions of dollars of wireless equipment obsolete. So the FCC tried their best to find a compromise between the needs of people who already owned 5 GHz wireless equipment, and the flying public. It's the open source firmware authors who were (initially) acting like jerks here, not the FCC.
The crazy stupid thing is that Picasa was by far the best app I've seen for indexing photos locally. You'd install it and it would search your entire hard drive for all photos, then organize them all so you could flip through them in the app. No having to dig through hundreds or thousands of folders. Other apps required you to conform to the way they worked. Picasa conformed to the way you wanted to work (or not work - you could just dump the latest photos from the camera's memory card to some random folder, and Picasa would dutifully find and index them). And it was so simple to use. I'd just install it on a friend's computer, let it index enough photos so I could show them the basics of it, tell them to give it a few hours to finish indexing, then leave. I never got a "how do you..." call from them about it - they all figured out how to use it on their own. The ability to synchronize Picasa on your desktop with the cloud via picasa.google.com was just gravy.
But Google wants to force everyone onto the cloud, so they killed it. Picasa's stellar local desktop capabilities became a drawback to Google. Google Photos is fairly simple, but nowhere near as flexible nor quick. And Google's own storage policies force you to downgrade photos to 2048x2048 resolution unless you want to pay for more than 15 GB of storage (I have over 6 TB of family and travel photos).
I just hope the Picasa installer still works after they kill off support for it. And that it doesn't do something stupid like check for picasa.google.com and suicide if it can't find it.
Slashdot Mirror
Spotify pays $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream to the holder of music rights. That works out to $6000 to $8400 in royalty payments per million song plays. If the artist is only getting $80 for a song that's listened to millions of times in a year, their publisher is the one screwing them over. The publisher is keeping more than 99% of the royalty payments, passing on less than 1% to the artist.
(Sanity check: Spotify averaged 1.7 billion listening hours per month in 2015. At 3.5 minutes per song, that's 29 billion song plays per month, or 350 billion song plays per year. At the above royalty rates, they'd be paying about $2-$3 billion in royalties per year. And indeed that's about how much they pay in royalties - $3.9 billion in 2018. So yes, it is in fact the record labels who are screwing the artists over, not Spotify.)
If you really, truly believed the bridge was out, you'd obviously pick B. Environmentalists have forced us to pick C. We've had a solution to man-made climate change for over half a century - nuclear power. The only reason we haven't switched from fossil fuels to nuclear power is because of opposition by environmentalists. They suffer what I call just right-itis. To them there's just the right amount of global warming going on. Enough that we need to ditch fossil fuels and switch to renewable power to ensure the survival of the human race, but not enough that we need to switch immediately to nuclear power to buy us more time to work on developing renewable power technologies.
If you really, truly believed global warming was a threat to the human race, you'd accept that nuclear power was the lesser of two evils, and that the obvious smartest course of action is to switch immediately from fossil fuels to nuclear power. Thus giving ourselves decades if not centuries to work on developing renewable power technology to replace nuclear power. That these environmentalists and liberals completely reject nuclear power suggests that they themselves don't really believe global warming is a real threat, and instead they just see it as a way to pressure others into implementing their preferred power solution faster.
No. Distance is a scalar, not a vector. So the average distance doesn't work out to the center of the sun. It works out to the the sum of all points along the circular orbit. For Venus' case, since its orbit is bigger, the scalar distance to each equivalent point in Mercury's orbit is on average bigger because it's at a greater angle from the Earth (with Earth-to-sun line being the shortest distance).
e.g. Pretend Mercury is located in the sun, and Venus has the same orbit as Earth. Consider four points on each orbit spaced 90 degrees apart.
Average these four points. The first two cancel out (both average a distance R). The second two result in Mercury being at distance R, Venus at 1.414R. And hence Mercury is on average closer than Venus, even though we're pretending Venus has the same orbit as the Earth.
Quantum computing is useless against a one-time pad. It would just come up with all possible pads which convert the ciphertext into all possible plaintexts which makes sense. e.g. It would come up with decryption ciphers which convert the ciphertext to "one of by land, two if by sea" and "two if by land, one if by sea", leaving the code breaker no better off than not being able to break it.
The only reason we use public key encryption is because it's a lot easier than meeting up in person to exchange a one-time pad before you can exchange secure communications. In public key encryption, you can exchange the key publicly yet still have encrypted communication. Also, it's slow enough that it's generally not used for the communications itself. It's used to exchange AES key(s) (basically one-time pads) securely. The encryption of the plaintext is then done using AES.
All breaking public key encryption would do is put us back to the pre-1970s state of encryption, where secure communications required pre-sharing keys in some way. Difficult for random people/sites who have never spoken to each other before. But trivial for things like chipped credit cards, where the credit card company first has to physically mail you the credit card. (The one-time use rule for a one-time pad could be maintained by pre-loading thousands of one-time pads onto the chip, and replacing the credit card before they're all used up. Unthinkable a couple decades ago, but trivial today with modern storage capacities.)
I could see trusted key escrow services popping up, which pre-share one-time pads with online sites and users. So if a user needs to communicate securely with some online site that they hadn't heard of until 5 minutes ago, they could go through the key escrow service to securely exchange keys with the site. User generates temporary key and securely transmits it to the key escrow service. Escrow service relays key to the site using their pre-shared key with the site. Escrow service immediately destroys their interim plaintext copy (the key the user generated). User uses that key to exchange a new key with the site. Then user can go about communicating securely with the site. It's not as secure as public key encryption since there's a third party involved. But it's still workable, and immune to quantum computing.
Ad revenue is (number of ad impressions)*(price per ad)
To measure tumblr's revenue, you have to factor in the number of advertisers they had. More advertisers results in bidding up the price per ad impression. So a decrease in number of ad impressions could actually result in an increase in revenue, if it also results in a greater increase in revenue per ad impression. (A bit more complicated here since keeping the porn would've resulted in a decrease in the number of advertisers, but that has the same net effect.) Unfortunately since the company is now a subsidiary (first Yahoo, now Verizon), it's impossible to know whether or not dumping the porn helped without being an insider.
Amazon lobbieslots of government branches because they do business in basically every jurisdiction in the U.S. in multiple industries. If you look at raw number of dollars spent lobbying, Amazon doesn't even make the top 10.
More to the point, can you cancel your 4G service and go with only 5G for no extra fee? I mean if Verizon is going to charge you like it's a la carte pricing, then the customer should be able to select services like it's a la carte, right?
From what I've been able to tell, 5G offers little benefit to the customer over 4G. At 5G speeds, you can blow through your monthly quota in a couple minutes. The benefit is mostly for the carrier - fewer bandwidth bottlenecks when lots of people are in the same tower cell (each person's data request takes less time to fulfill, getting them off the airwaves quicker and freeing up the bandwidth). Meaning Verizon won't get as many complaints about poor service when it's not due to technical problems.
The hardcore gamer crowd who gets high refresh rate monitors are a relatively small segment of the market. Around 5%-10% by unit sales, which means probably around 2%-3% by number of people since they upgrade much more frequently. The other 95%+ of gamers are perfectly content to play on their TV.
Regular TVs are actually very good for gaming if you're content with a 60 Hz refresh rate. TVs all cover 100% sRGB and have good viewing angles. And they're designed to show fast motion (TV shows and movies) so the panels were pre-selected by the manufacturer to have low pixel response times and thus minimal image smearing. The only issue you might encounter is processing lag as the TV tries to refine what it thinks is a video image. But that can usually be disabled by putting the TV into PC mode (direct or 1:1, which also turns off overscan).
1990s LOL. The U.S. built a nuclear powered deep-water submarine in the 1960s specifically to tap underwater communications cables. It was used publicly to recover parts from airliner crashes and shipwrecks from the ocean floor. But it's obvious from its capabilities (multi-week loiter capability with manipulator arms) that it was made for tapping undersea cables. The fact that they built the ultimate underwater cable tapping machine in the 1960s tells you they were playing around with tapping the cables for at least decades prior. The fact that they retired it in 2008 should make you think about what shiny new toys they have now for doing the same thing.
That's exactly it. The U.S. has been doing this for decades, so it's actually in the best position to know what the vulnerabilities and technical challenges are. And despite the general anti-U.S. sentiment among western countries, their interests align much more closely with the U.S.' interests than with China's. So if the U.S. is going so far as to warn its allies about the threat, it's a pretty good bet that there's really something to this.
Copyright governs your ability to distribute copies of other people's work. There's no distribution going on here, so permission of the copyright holder (photographer) was not needed.
It might be governed by personality rights - your right to control how your image is used. You could argue the model's consent is needed before using their facial geometry. But personality rights are generally concerned with control over how others perceive your image. Since there's no public perception or exploitation here, it would be an uphill argument.
AFAIK, there is no basis for prohibiting people from using things you make publicly available (your face every time you walk out in public, unless you wear a burka) to train computer algorithms. Photographers and the press have worked pretty hard to enshrine their right to record images of people in public places. If we want there to be restrictions of using images of people in public places, it'll need to be a new law.
You don't have to stock your home from Amazon though. You an go the local department store, or walmart.com, or the Salvation Army to get stuff for your home. Same for Android. You can load a different store, or even download an Android app directly from the app-maker's website and install it directly onto your Android device.
Apple is the only one who forces you to use their store, and prohibits you from using anyone else's. That's the lack of competition we're talking about. In Amazon and the Google Play Store's case, their fees and markups are somewhat justified because if they were egregious, sellers would preferentially use a competitor's store. In Apple's case, they have no choice. It's Apple's way or the highway.
And your minimum fee per transaction for credit/debit cards is horrendously out of date. The last time our business paid 30 cents per transaction was back around 2000. Currently it's around 10 cents per transaction, and the big retail chains like Walmart have probably negotiated far less since they don't bat an eye if I use a credit card for a 50 cent piece of fruit. Care to guess why the price per transaction went down? That's right - competition. Precisely the thing Apple prohibits.
Most of the software functionality of the Pixel 3 has been hacked and extracted. You can install it on your Android device running Nougat or later if you're rooted with Magisk. If this offline voice recognition is done in software instead of dedicated hardware (like the original Moto X), expect it to be made available for other rooted devices as well.
Free-range and wild animals can get something called rice breast. While it's harmless (they're just cysts), it looks nasty and is enough to make you lose your appetite. Usually it's only hunters who encounter it since they butcher the animals themselves. When it shows up in free-range chicken meat, the meat is probably ground up and redirected to other uses like pet food. Raising the chickens in enclosed pens (to avoid the parasites spreading from feces of birds flying overhead), and closely regulating their food avoids the infection.
Portland is actually the least religious city in the U.S.
This would appear to support something I've suspected for a while now: That we seem to be hard-wired to reach conclusions based on faith. And that when people ditch faith in religion, it doesn't make them less "religious." They just put their faith into something else, be it anti-vaxx theories or 9/11 conspiracies or atheism. (Yes atheism is a faith. You cannot prove a negative, at least not without investigating every single possibility, so you cannot realistically prove there is no god. You can be agnostic without needing faith - uncertain or doubtful if there is a god. But to be atheist - convinced that there is no god - requires a leap of faith.)
Technically it's still there, just disabled by a switch in the Android settings. Unfortunately you have to root your device to turn that setting back on (in build.prop, change persist.debug.wfd.enable=0 to 1).
Miracast is an open standard, so there's no licensing cost associated with it. As best as I can tell, Google disabled it for performance reasons. Like Steam In Home Streaming, Miracast works by encoding everything showing on the device's screen in real-time into a h.264 stream, then streaming that to another device. To the other device, it's like it's playing a streamed movie. Unfortunately this requires quite of bit of power on the Android device doing the encoding (even though the encoding is done in hardware on the GPU), causing battery life to plummet to a few hours. This led to unfavorable comparisons with iOS devices, which don't really mirror the screen, they just redirect things like the incoming video stream from the phone to your TV. So it seems Google disabled it so the ignorant masses would stop comparing screen mirroring with stream redirection, and incorrectly claiming iOS was better at it.
Which makes me wonder how exactly Microsoft is going to pull off app mirroring. If they're going to write their own Android app which implements Miracast or their own proprietary version of it (like Remote Desktop), that may actually be a good thing. Apps on other devices can then be written to be compatible with the Microsoft app (like Windows SMB file sharing has become standard via SAMBA making compatible clients available on all other computer platforms). And people without rooted devices will have a way to mirror their screen to their TV again.
Usually there are 3+ pitot tubes. Looks like the 737 has 5, with 3 of them dedicated to measuring airspeed. It's incredibly rare that a single fault causes a crash. Reporters just like to write up their stories that way to give their stories more impact, even if it twists the truth.
This isn't the first time faulty airspeed readings led to a flight computer has led to a crash. It isn't even the second time. In all previous cases, the plane was flyable. It was the confusion as the pilots tried to diagnose the problem based on the bizarre behavior of the plane and the flight control software and alarms which doomed the flights. It requires a deep and thorough understanding of when different flight protection modes in the software are triggered and kick in, to work backwards from the behavior you're seeing, to what problem(s) could be triggering those modes. If you've debugged software, you've encountered this. Unlike natural laws like physics, software can be designed arbitrarily. So your intuitive feel for how things should work becomes useless for tracking down the problem. You're totally dependent on how thoroughly you understand the software's arbitrary design.
Bear in mind that the stall warning is pretty much a "you're gonna die if you ignore me" warning. So it takes quite a bit of convincing before pilots will decide it's the warning that's faulty, not something else that they're doing wrong. That may be the cause of the reluctance of pilots to simply shut it off and fly the plane "by the seat of their pants" based on how the throttle settings, altitude, and attitude. So while theoretically the stall warning triggering incorrectly is a recoverable problem, it may take pilots a long time to diagnose and clear up the problem. Long enough for the plane to crash.
The usual way you solve that is to allow bidding, with the highest bidder getting the exchange first instead of the first person to enter a bid. That way if there's a shortage of Amazon gift cards, the excess bids for Amazon gift cards makes them more valuable, encouraging people who have Amazon gift cards to give them up.
But that creates a free market, which apparently is taboo for some of the people running and participating in these exchanges. So they languish with queues and delays.
Actually, if even Trump is for ditching the time changes, it makes me wonder. Who the hell is it that likes it, and convinces our legislators not to get rid of it.
This type of 2FA relies on the two factors being (1) something you have, and (2) something you know. In the case of Chip and PIN, the chip (embedded in the card) is something you have, and the PIN is something you know. The orthogonality of these two factors means scenarios which result in the loss of one are unlikely to result in the loss of the other, and vice versa. Even if someone steals the card, they cannot use it because you have not revealed our PIN. Even if you tell someone your PIN, they cannot use it without physical possession of the card.
This new card they're trying changes the two factors to two things that you have. That makes fraud far more likely, because things which result in the loss of one are likely to result in the loss of the other. If you lose the card, a thief may be able to lift your fingerprint off the card itself. If someone dies and a person runs across the body, they have access to both the finger and the card.
That's really the whole point of 2FA. It's not "throw a couple roadblocks in the way of thieves and hope one of the works." It's designing the two roadblocks so there's minimal intersection of their weaknesses. Switching it to two physical factors results in a system that's not much more secure than having just a single factor.
Probably not in this case. Right now, the likely culprit seems to be pilots being inadequately trained on the automated flight control systems. Airbus has had similar systems in their planes for decades (which can override pilot inputs, and require the pilots to turn them off if they decide it's malfunctioning). The FAA had no problem approving those, so this isn't a resistance to change on the part of the FAA.
Boeing stuck to the "pilot should always be in control" philosophy, and is only now adding automated safety systems which can override the pilots' inputs. It would appear they're going through some of the same early teething problems Airbus went through with such automated systems in the 1980s and 1990s. Where pilots don't know or don't understand why the plane won't do what they're trying to make it do, resulting in a crash.
Why bother with a mask? The police or a mugger will just hold you down while they point your phone at you.
People forget that signing into a phone is not just validation of your ID, it's also your way of signaling that you actually want to sign in. Passive sign-ins like fingerprint or facial scans allow others to sign in on your behalf regardless of whether or not you actually want to sign in. (Of course they could just beat you with a wrench until you gave up your password, but that will at least leave physical bruising and scars as evidence of their wrongdoing. With passive sign-ins, there's no way to distinguish voluntary from involuntary logins. You file a lawsuit saying the police forced you to unlock your phone. They just say "no we didn't, you voluntarily unlocked it.")
We already have laws in the books prohibiting telemarketing calls to cell phones and numbers on the do not call list. My cell phone number is on the do not call registry, and I still get telemarketing calls to it. Adding more regulations blocking telemarketing calls are unlikely to help, when they're currently ignoring the laws that are already in the books. So while Oliver's tactic may tickle the humorous irony meter, it won't actually solve anything.
The problem is there's no reliable way to figure out who is actually calling you. I get a telemarketing call, and I have no way to file a complaint or lawsuit against the caller - because I have no way to accurately identify the caller. If you want to fix this problem, that's what you need to fix. Pass a law forcing the phone companies to provide a way to accurately trace who is calling you the moment you receive the call. It'll be an uphill road because the telecom companies will fight tooth and nail against it (they make a good chunk of their revenue from telemarketers). And even if we win it'll result in prices going up (lower utilization of the network does not decrease the flat cost to install and maintain the network, so the telecom companies will have to charge more per call to offset the loss of telemarketer revenue). But it'll be worth it not to miss an emergency call from my credit card about "unusual" activity on my account, because I didn't recognize the number and assumed it was a telemarketer, and didn't answer.
The "invisible hand" is actually buyers actively shopping for lower prices. They make prices go up by buying out all the cheaper-priced inventory. They make prices go down by refusing to buy overpriced (in their opinion) inventory, forcing sellers to lower prices to move stock.
The invisible hand only fails if there are no lower prices for buyers to find (monopoly), or if the buyers are too damn lazy to search for lower prices. Failure in those corner cases does not constitute evidence of capitalism's failure outside of these corner cases. Its failure in this case (monopoly) has already been addressed by anti-trust laws already in the books, so this is actually evidence of regulatory failure - governments not taking action to break up Luxottica.
This isn't the big bad government trying to take away your freedoms. I fully support the FCC on this (and I'm pretty close to Libertarian so that means something coming from me).
The issue is weather radar. Shortly after the FCC opened up the 5 GHz band for unlicensed use, terminal doppler weather radar was invented in response to several airliner crashes due to adverse weather conditions. Unfortunately, it relies on frequencies smack dab in the middle of the open 5 GHz band. So the FCC took the unusual step of revising their rules which opened up those frequencies
The intermediate 5 GHz channels were reclassified as DFS - dynamic frequency selection. Devices are allowed to use those frequencies, but they have to monitor for TDWR. If they detected weather radar in use, they had to switch to a different channel. A few devices actually do this and check to see if weather radar is in use. Most manufacturers just took the easy way out and blocked out channels 50-144 entirely in the firmware. That's why many 5 GHz devices only support channels 36-48 and 149-165. (This can cause the mysterious situation you might have encountered, where some devices can see your 5 GHz network while others can't. Your router supports DFS and has picked a channel between 50-144. Devices which support DFS can see the router. Devices which have blocked off channels 50-144 cannot.)
Early open source router firmwares completely ignored DFS. They would spam over the DFS frequencies, interfering with weather radar at airports if someone nearby happened to load the firmware onto their router. DD-WRT added support for DFS (it's the "weather radar" checkbox in the 5 GHz wireless settings, although it really should be checked by default).. If you install third party firmware and use the 5 GHz band, do the responsible thing and enable this functionality if you're going to enable channels 50-144. Unfortunately, some idiots didn't do this, degrading the effectiveness of hundreds of millions of dollars invested into TDWR equipment. It was enough of a concern that the FCC began investigating the need to regulate or ban third party firmware. That's what this is all about. The government doesn't hate you running third party firmware on your router, they're just trying to protect people flying in airplanes from needlessly being killed.
This is why we can't have nice things - a few idiots ruin it for everyone else. I had lots of fun with lawn darts as a kid, but we always treated the target area as if it were a shooting range. Here's an example of what happens to TDWR when an idiot blasts their router in the TDWR frequencies. The unauthorized broadcast shows up as a wedge-shaped area spanning a few degrees and extending to the edge of the radar image, completely obscuring any weather in the wedge. Multiply that by a few dozen open source routers near the airport and it becomes a major impediment.
The cleaner solution would've been for the FCC to simply close the 5 GHz band and reserve it entirely for TDWR. But that would've made billions of dollars of wireless equipment obsolete. So the FCC tried their best to find a compromise between the needs of people who already owned 5 GHz wireless equipment, and the flying public. It's the open source firmware authors who were (initially) acting like jerks here, not the FCC.
The crazy stupid thing is that Picasa was by far the best app I've seen for indexing photos locally. You'd install it and it would search your entire hard drive for all photos, then organize them all so you could flip through them in the app. No having to dig through hundreds or thousands of folders. Other apps required you to conform to the way they worked. Picasa conformed to the way you wanted to work (or not work - you could just dump the latest photos from the camera's memory card to some random folder, and Picasa would dutifully find and index them). And it was so simple to use. I'd just install it on a friend's computer, let it index enough photos so I could show them the basics of it, tell them to give it a few hours to finish indexing, then leave. I never got a "how do you..." call from them about it - they all figured out how to use it on their own. The ability to synchronize Picasa on your desktop with the cloud via picasa.google.com was just gravy.
But Google wants to force everyone onto the cloud, so they killed it. Picasa's stellar local desktop capabilities became a drawback to Google. Google Photos is fairly simple, but nowhere near as flexible nor quick. And Google's own storage policies force you to downgrade photos to 2048x2048 resolution unless you want to pay for more than 15 GB of storage (I have over 6 TB of family and travel photos).
I just hope the Picasa installer still works after they kill off support for it. And that it doesn't do something stupid like check for picasa.google.com and suicide if it can't find it.