at best, designed to deliberately mislead you to a desired conclusion at worst. From the blog post:
The vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn't specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate.
Rather, the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum -- touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.
About one-quarter of these ads were geographically targeted, and of those, more ran in 2015 than 2016.
The behavior displayed by these accounts to amplify divisive messages was consistent with the techniques mentioned in the white paper we released in April about information operations.
Considering the U.S. has elections every 2 years, if running ads a year before the election counts as attempting to influence the election, then every ad run at any time is attempting to influence the upcoming election.
The journal who happens to hold the copyright because the authors willingly transferred it to them in exchange for being published.
That's the real problem here - journals bribing scientists with publication in exchange for transfer of copyright. It corrupts the scientific process and makes anything published in those journals suspect (presumably they auto-reject anything submitted by scientists who refuse to transfer copyright). Prohibit the transfer of copyright, or the granting of exclusive licenses, and the problem goes away on its own.
On average, 10.1 named storms occur each season, with an average of 5.9 becoming hurricanes and 2.5 becoming major hurricanes (Category 3 or greater).
So far this season, we've had 9 named storms, 4 of which have become hurricanes, 2 major hurricanes. While we've still got 3 more months, but the end of September is the end of the peak, with a few storms in October, and almost none in November. Predictions at the start of the season were for about 14 named storms, 6-7 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes. So we're on track for a really boring, average year in terms of Atlantic hurricanes.
The only reason both storms seem unusual is because until Harvey, the U.S. hadn't been hit by a major hurricane since 2005. Contrary to the doom and gloom scenario painted by climate change alarmists after Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, who warned us that 2005 was going to become the new norm for Atlantic hurricanes. Sometimes outliers are nothing more than outliers.
Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the web was that the server would transmit the relevant info (pictures and text) to your browser, and your browser would format it in the manner which was most readable on your device.
Graphic designers and page layout artists went nuts over this because it basically put them out of work. Unfortunately most web designers started off as graphic designers and page layout artists. Their first salvo against reader-control of content formatting was the Flash website. The entire page and navigation was in Flash so the user wasn't able to change, resize, or reformat any of it. They fought for and won the inclusion of immutable formatting tools in the HTML standard. So now we're stuck with idiotic designs like Slashdot's homepage where the "supplemental" sidebar on the right actually has formatting priority over the useful text on the left. If you try to shrink your browser horizontally (like viewing on a phone in portrait mode), the text becomes unreadable in order to preserve the full width of the sidebar.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, who previously (and privately) pressed Trump on the issue, said on Sunday that 250 of his "co-workers" would be affected by the change.
So he's basically admitted that Apple has hired illegal aliens. (Or if you prefer, non-citizens without proper work authorization documents.) That's a violation of Federal law punishable by fines and imprisonment.
The DACA wasn't a law. It was just the Obama administration saying they wouldn't prosecute for violations of the actual law which mandates fines for hiring non-citizens without Federal work permits. The law is still there, and Cook has now admitted in public that his company is knowingly in violation of it. If he'd kept his mouth shut and only expressed an opinion, he could've feigned ignorance and kept the affected workers in Apple's payroll. But because he tried to publicly use their plight as leverage, he's now put himself into a position where Apple has to fire them or face fines and imprisonment.
You could be fairly certain movies shared via torrenting were pirated. You could be sure of the same to a lesser extent on YouTube. But movies shared via Google Drive - which is tied in with Google Photos, which automatically backs up all photos and videos shot by Android devices - are going to be predominantly home videos.
Say 0.1% of DMCA requests on YouTube are overreaching and block a home video because of something like a copyrighted song being heard playing in the background. If YouTube hosts a ratio of 10 home videos per pirated movie, then that means only 1 home video is improperly blocked (false positive) for every 100 pirated movies blocked (true positive). That ratio means the false positives are few and far between relative to the positive impact of the DMCA requests (getting pirated videos pulled).
But if they start applying those same algorithms to Google Drive, where there are probably 100,000 home videos per pirated movie, suddenly they'll be blocking 100 home videos for each single pirated movie blocked. The false positive rate relative to the true positive rate is now 10,000x higher. The annoyance factor will be that much higher, and they're risking raising the ire of the public, and getting the parts of the DMCA they bought and paid for rolled back by new legislation.
Using accelerometers to detect motion (actually changes in motion) is blindingly obvious because that's what they're designed to do.
But if you want to be a stickler about where they're used and for what purpose, crash test dummies have been using accelerometers for this purpose in human body analogues since at least 1997, pre-dating and invalidating this patent.
Android and iOS have adopted many of these patterns, but they still feel foreign. Why? because launching apps reigns supreme. Instead of multi-tasking being the default view, their default is showing apps on the home screen. To change tasks, you have to switch into another, secondary mode and then back out of it. Android's and iOS's UI paradigm is upside down.
I'd have to disagree. Once the app is running, tapping on it from the home screen is the same as switching to it. So on WebOS, the order of your running apps is constantly changing (based on which ones are running, which was used most recently). So you have to swipe up to bring up the multitasking view, then search for the app you want to switch to.
In Android and iOS, your app icons are always in the same place. So you just tap the home button, and you tap where you already know the app's icon is; you don't have to search for it. Android is actually the best because if you have a handful of apps which you switch between most frequently, you can put them on the same page. iOS auto-sorts them (though I suppose you could put your common apps into the same folder, but that represents an extra tap).
I wouldn't, except the renewables proponents keep making fundamental engineering errors which indicate they're clueless about power generation and are unqualified to be making decisions concerning it.
700 MW of nameplate solar capacity multiplied by Levy County's solar capacity factor of 0.161 yields an average annual production of just 112.7 MW.
By comparison, the scrapped nuclear plant's 2.2 GW multiplied by nuclear's capacity factor of 0.9 yields an average annual production of 1980 MW.
So this 700 MW of solar power represents just 5.7% the capacity of the scrapped nuclear plant. Guess where the other 94.3% of energy production is going to come from (hint: its initials are FF)?
To replace the nuclear plant entirely with solar, they'd have to build (1980 MW / 0.161) = 12,300 MW of panels. That's more than 8x larger than the largest existing solar plant in the world, more than 20x larger than the largest existing solar plant in the U.S. At the optimistic cost of $1/Watt, those solar panels (never mind the supporting infrastructure) would cost $12.3 billion. The nuclear plant was only going to cost $7.65 billion. They killed it because of regulatory delays.
Secondly, this is NOT an example of what happens to your eyes looking at the sun, unless you are looking at the sun through several layered magnifying glasses - which is essentially what a telephoto lens is.
It is exactly an example of what happens to your eyes when looking at the sun.
It isn't the size of the lens which matters, it's the f-ratio. The ratio of the lens aperture (diameter) to the focal length. While a larger diameter collects more light, a longer focal length focuses that light into a larger image. So regardless of lens size, if they have the same f-ratio then the intensity of the light at the focal plane is the same when pointed at the same light source.
The human eye has a f-ratio of about f/2.1 (night-adapted) to f/8.3 (daylight). While the 600mm telephoto gathers a lot more light than your eye, it also focuses the light into a much larger image of the sun, so the energy per mm^2 of sensor isn't as high as you'd think given the large lens diameter. F-ratio goes as the diameter of the lens, while amount of light gathered goes as the area of the lens, or diameter^2. So comparing the 600mm f/4.0 telephoto to your eye at f/8.0, the telephoto's light has only 4x as much energy per mm^2 of sensor as per mm^2 of retina. Consequently, it would only take 4x as long to cause similar damage to your eye than it would take with the 600mm telephoto. Probably a lot less time since biology tends to be much more sensitive to temperature than metal and silicon circuitry.
I took my nephew to volleyball practice a couple times, and noticed a marked gender difference. During practice the kids got into a line and the instructor tossed balls at them one at a time so they could hit it back. The girls were attentive and accurate. The boys were goofing off and frequently mis-hit the balls.
Then they started playing a game and kept score. Suddenly the boys were focused and accurate, while the girls stood around talking to each other and missed shots. One of them even got hit in the head by the ball because she wasn't even watching.
While both boys and girls were capable of playing well, there was a marked gender difference in the situation which caused them to use that capability to the fullest.
If you give the child no choice, of course he/she will play with whatever is provided to him/her. If a caretaker projects their cultural biases onto a child, they can force the child to play with whatever they think the child should be playing with. Nobody is debating that.
The point here is that given a choice, men and women (or boys and girls, or male and female monkeys) gravitate towards doing different things of their own free will. The argument here is actually the bigger nature vs nurture debate. And the overall conclusion of all the studies I've seen on it is that it's a little of both. Gender biases are partially genetic, partially enforced by cultural stereotypes. Unfortunately for the SJWs, their movement is based on the theory that gender biases are entirely rooted in cultural stereotypes and there is zero genetic basis. The science simply doesn't support their position.
I don't have a problem with the megapixel race. We're still very far from the display resolutions needed to generate and display holograms in real-time (about 1000 lines per mm). So this 8k screen technology if shrunk down would give us a hologram 8mm x 4mm. Add in GPUs which can do billions of FFTs per second, and we should be able to take a computer-generated 3D scene, and convert it to a holographic interference pattern for display in real-time at reasonable FPS.
That's where all these excessive megapixels and ridiculously overpowered cryptocurrency-mining GPUs are taking us. So I don't have a problem with it.
What I really want to know is what they are truly doing with the data and the contribution to solving crime and public safety.
That's the crux of the problem. I'm OK with them collecting the data. I'm even OK with them holding it for a few months (2-5 years seems excessive). What I'm not OK with is them (or the public) being able to access the database willy nilly to look up any license plate they want. The system should be behind lock and key, and require a warrant before they can search for a specific license plate. Or maybe a wildcard search for a partial plate at a certain location around a certain time. Or a match search if the same plate appears at multiple locations at specific times, which spits out only the plates which match that criteria, none of the other plates.
I agree with you. However, levying a requirement on one operator and not others strictly because of size is clearly discriminatory.
It's only discriminatory if the cable operators are in direct competition with each other. I'll bet that the smaller cable operators are in regions serviced by two ore more cable companies in competition with each other. But most of Comocast's service is in areas where they enjoy a monopoly. You can't discriminate (favor one over another) when there's only one entity.
In fact the only time I've seen build-out requirements like this is in exchange for granting the company a monopoly. The government adds the build-out requirement either because it fears the lack of competition will result in insufficient increase in coverage area, or they want to make certain that coverage is extended to a certain area (e.g. low income or rural).
Two types of solar film (non-glass) dominate the market for solar filters in amateur astronomy circles. Black polymer by Thousand Oaks, and Baader astrosolar safety film. The black polymer is black (duh) and produces an aesthetically pleasing orange image of the sun. The Baader film is metallic and photographically superior to black polymer, but makes the sun appear a pale white-pink or white-blue.
Both types are used to produce legit eclipse glasses. Companies buy big sheets of them and cut them to fit in between paper glasses frames. Unfortunately there are dangerous knockoffs of both types (black and metallic).
I took my family and friends to Yellowstone prior to the eclipse. One of the families in my car happened to have two young children (ages 3 and 5). As we approached Yellowstone and cellular data service dropped to near-nonexistent, the two had a meltdown. They were screaming "I want YouTube" over and over for a good half hour, and their parents couldn't get through to them that YouTube was inaccessible here. They had never been without Internet connectivity all their lives. Meanwhile, AM/FM radio worked just fine.
I'm not sad to see music radio die. The entire thing has been a scam for nearly a century with ClearChannel owning most of the music stations across the country, and thus selecting which artists and songs become successful, instead of it happening organically via popularity among actual listeners. But the technology of radio broadcasts is far from dead.
They are not opposites, unless you're working from an incomplete (incorrect) model of logic.
People who think like you do assume logic breaks down into two possibilities - true or false. That is incorrect. Logic actually resolves into three possibilities - true, false, and unknown/cannot be determined.
The scientific method involves choosing a falsifiable hypothesis as the null hypothesis. You then do experiments which attempt to falsify the null hypothesis. If one succeeds, then you can move the hypothesis into the "false" category (or conversely the positive experimental result into the "true" category).
But until such a result is obtained, the null hypothesis remains in the unknown/cannot be determined category, not the true category. The absence of experimental evidence disproving the null hypothesis does not mean the null hypothesis is "true." Short of trying every possible experiment, it cannot be proven true. So it remains in the unknown/cannot be determined category. e.g. The laws of Thermodynamics have never been proven, but have also never been disproven. So we assume (take it on faith) that they are correct. But when push comes to shove we openly acknowledge that we don't actually have proof that the laws of Thermodynamics are in fact immutable laws. Simply that we believe them to be. And that we have faith that any processes and technologies we design will obey them.
Basically, every scientist advocating a properly constructed null hypothesis is exhibiting faith that that hypothesis is correct. String theory is a great example. So far it's completely unprovable, but tens if not hundreds of thousands of research physicists are convinced it's correct. If we were emotionless, completely bias-free automatons, then this wouldn't need to be the case. But human nature means that scientists who have faith in a pet theory are likely to put more effort into coming up with and performing experiments which advance and defend the theory, and thus they contribute more to science.
Banks that don't charge currency conversions fees in the UK are Norwich and Peterborough Building Society (no fees for withdrawal in foreign currency) and Metro Bank (no fee conversion for EU member states).
Xe.com is also a great website for super affordable currency conversions. No fee wire transfers and will always beat out big banks any day.
While they don't charge a fee, there's still a spread. If you convert US$100 to Euros and back to USD fee-free, you'll end up with about $97.50. Xe.com tends to have tighter spreads, though occasionally a big bank will best it (Amex used to allow you to use their charge card in other countries fee-free at their exchange rate, which had a considerably tighter spread than peons like you and me can get).
The spread represents the cost of handling the transaction, the risk the party doing the exchange takes (everyone always assumes the worst - that the currency they're giving up will rise and the currency they're taking from you will tank), and a small profit margin.
Cryptocurrencies may have a future, but at it's current valuation?
Unless/until the value of cryptocurrencies stabilizes, they have no future as a currency. And since there's no regulating entity which modulates the number of [*]coins available to track closely with the number of economic transactions using those [*]coins, their value can only remain stable through blind luck. So they are and will continue to be a speculative commodity, not a currency.
The station's orbit needs to be boosted from time to time to compensate for slowdown due to friction with the (extremely) thin atmosphere at its orbital altitude. It's also occasionally steered to keep a safe distance between the station and the larger pieces of orbiting space debris. So yes, NASA does in fact "fly" the ISS.
What happens when industry effectively solves the problem so that no human can compete, like sewing clothing here... will every sewing machine operator become a fashion designer?
It's a self-correcting problem. If automation puts too many people out of work, those people cannot afford to buy what the automated factories are producing. And thus demand for whatever that automated factory is producing will drop. At which point it becomes in the best interests of the automated factory owner to make sure their ex-employees are able to find a job.
Economic activity (and average productivity) is maximized when everyone has a decent job (or potential to get a decent job) and is being paid a fair wage for it (i.e. excessive profit not being sucked up by the factory owner). Ford accidentally stumbled upon this when he paid his workers nearly double the prevailing wage. They made enough money to actually buy the cars his factories were producing, and the resulting feedback loop of increased demand catapulted Ford into one of the most successful companies of the early 20th century, and made him one of the wealthiest men of his time.
So if these doom and gloom scenarios about automation putting huge swaths of the population out of work ever really happens, everyone - people who lost their jobs and factory owners - will be on the same page. We will all want to do something to correct the problem. Unemployed people so they can get a job and afford living expenses. Factory owners because the more people are working, the more people will buy what their factories are producing.
Mathematically, if an industry can produce a product using 1/17th the human labor, the product will drop to about 1/17th its original price. That frees money that the buyer can then spend on other things. And people need to be employed to produce those other things. Fewer people per product, but a lot more products.
Anyway, unlike what economics teaches, I think humans do have limited wants and needs and that's the problem.
While the quantity of wants and needs may be limited, the quality is not. If you're only capable of buying and using 1000 products, but doing so leaves you with a bunch of money left over, you're either going to invest that money (producing new job opportunities), or you're going to spend it buying higher quality and more featured products. That extra money will go into labor (probably in R&D) to produce better products. That is, once you reach an economic limit in volume of sales, the money starts to flow into improved quality of sales. In other words, the rate of technological advancement speeds up.
Tesla Motors wasn't started to make a buck, it was started to prove the viability and promotion of electric vehicles.
Telsa was started to capitalize on the ZEV (zero emissions vehicle) mandate the California Air Resources Board (CARB) implemented in 2015. Beginning in 2015, ZEVs had to account for a certain percentage of each automaker's annual sales (percentage increasing each year - currently 4.5% for 2018). If they failed to meet that percentage, they would have to buy sufficient credits from a company which exceeded the percentage, or be banned from selling cars in California. About a dozen other states automatically adopt CARB's standards, so failure would result in being locked out of about 33% of the U.S. auto market. Musk correctly foresaw that there would be a lot of demand for these ZEV credits among automakers, and set up a company which could capitalize on this - generating credits and selling them to other automakers.
Tesla has not proved anything about the viability of EVs until the heavy hand of these ZEV credits and the federal and state tax incentives to buy an EV are removed from the market.
Incidentally, all of this has happened before. In the late 1990s, CARB tried to implement a similar ZEV mandate beginning in 2000 (initial goal of 10% ZEVs by 2003). Ford and Chevy bet on hydrogen fuel cells. The Japanese automakers gave up early and bet on hybrids. GM invested nearly a billion dollars and produced the EV-1. By 1999, it was clear GM was the only company which had a viable ZEV. GM was on the verge of cashing in on their capital investment by being the sole supplier of ZEV credits to everyone else. The other automakers petitioned CARB and some even sued, and CARB gave in. They changed the rules and decided to allow hybrids and PZEVs (partial zero emissions vehicles) to fulfill the requirement. CARB pulled the rug out from under GM. Since California wasn't allowing GM to benefit from the technology they had developed, they decided not to allow California to benefit from it either. And as a result GM destroyed every EV-1 and locked the R&D away in their internal archives. The only difference with Tesla is that CARB stuck with the ZEV requirement in 2015.
The most commonly consumed forms of HFCS are 45% fructose (used in foods) and 55% fructose (used in soft drinks). The forms of HFCS with fructose levels as high as 80%-90% are used almost exclusively to mix with 45% fructose HFCS to bring it up to 55% fructose for use in soft drinks (fructose tastes sweeter than glucose). Which isn't that far off from the concentrations of fructose/glucose produced (50%/50%) from the breakdown of sucrose (table sugar). HFCS is only called "high fructose" to distinguish it from regular corn syrup which is almost pure glucose. Not because it's unnaturally high in fructose compared to other food sources.
Here's a list of the fructose vs glucose levels of different fruits. Pears, mangoes, and apples are 70%+ fructose. Other fruits are mostly around 50%+ fructose (hence why it's sometimes called fruit sugar). If fructose were really as bad as you're implying, these fruits would be considered poisonous. Glucose can be used directly in aerobic cellular respiration, but fructose needs to be converted by the liver into glucose and glycogen before it can be used in cellular respiration. Fructose is not poisonous like alcohol as you're implying. Alcohol interferes with certain neurotransmitters, which results in drunkenness in low concentrations, and death in high concentrations. There's debate over the effects of dumping a large quantity of fructose into the bloodstream and forcing the liver to process it all, but again that gets us back to pears, mangoes, and apples doing the same thing.
And to be pedantic, sucrose, fructose, and glucose (and lactose) are all "sugars".
I find it more outrageous that the car can be disabled remotely.
The capability was requested mostly by law enforcement to stop high-speed chases, though it's occasionally been used by a parent to stop a minor from taking the car.
I'll add that this situation is almost completely analogous to cell phones on contract, and pre-paid BYOD cell phones. It's none of the carrier's business what you have on your phone, and their refusal to unlock it or to relinquish control of certain functions on it (e.g. preinstalled apps) is/should be illegal.
Also note the remote disabling capability (even in owned cars) is similar to the laws requiring carriers remotely brick phones which have been reported stolen (to help thwart cell phone theft). Can the government really give a third party that power if the owner doesn't want it? There's some vague justification in cars, since they have to be operated on government-owned roads. But cell phones operate on spectrum which has been lawfully licensed so the government is not involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering the U.S. has elections every 2 years, if running ads a year before the election counts as attempting to influence the election, then every ad run at any time is attempting to influence the upcoming election.
The journal who happens to hold the copyright because the authors willingly transferred it to them in exchange for being published.
That's the real problem here - journals bribing scientists with publication in exchange for transfer of copyright. It corrupts the scientific process and makes anything published in those journals suspect (presumably they auto-reject anything submitted by scientists who refuse to transfer copyright). Prohibit the transfer of copyright, or the granting of exclusive licenses, and the problem goes away on its own.
Don't believe everything you hear. A lot of times people just make up plausible-sounding stuff to dodge a difficult question.
Personally I think 3:2 is ideal, but 16:10 a good second. 4:3 is too narrow, 16:9 is too broad.
So far this season, we've had 9 named storms, 4 of which have become hurricanes, 2 major hurricanes. While we've still got 3 more months, but the end of September is the end of the peak, with a few storms in October, and almost none in November. Predictions at the start of the season were for about 14 named storms, 6-7 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes. So we're on track for a really boring, average year in terms of Atlantic hurricanes.
The only reason both storms seem unusual is because until Harvey, the U.S. hadn't been hit by a major hurricane since 2005. Contrary to the doom and gloom scenario painted by climate change alarmists after Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, who warned us that 2005 was going to become the new norm for Atlantic hurricanes. Sometimes outliers are nothing more than outliers.
Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the web was that the server would transmit the relevant info (pictures and text) to your browser, and your browser would format it in the manner which was most readable on your device.
Graphic designers and page layout artists went nuts over this because it basically put them out of work. Unfortunately most web designers started off as graphic designers and page layout artists. Their first salvo against reader-control of content formatting was the Flash website. The entire page and navigation was in Flash so the user wasn't able to change, resize, or reformat any of it. They fought for and won the inclusion of immutable formatting tools in the HTML standard. So now we're stuck with idiotic designs like Slashdot's homepage where the "supplemental" sidebar on the right actually has formatting priority over the useful text on the left. If you try to shrink your browser horizontally (like viewing on a phone in portrait mode), the text becomes unreadable in order to preserve the full width of the sidebar.
So he's basically admitted that Apple has hired illegal aliens. (Or if you prefer, non-citizens without proper work authorization documents.) That's a violation of Federal law punishable by fines and imprisonment.
The DACA wasn't a law. It was just the Obama administration saying they wouldn't prosecute for violations of the actual law which mandates fines for hiring non-citizens without Federal work permits. The law is still there, and Cook has now admitted in public that his company is knowingly in violation of it. If he'd kept his mouth shut and only expressed an opinion, he could've feigned ignorance and kept the affected workers in Apple's payroll. But because he tried to publicly use their plight as leverage, he's now put himself into a position where Apple has to fire them or face fines and imprisonment.
You could be fairly certain movies shared via torrenting were pirated. You could be sure of the same to a lesser extent on YouTube. But movies shared via Google Drive - which is tied in with Google Photos, which automatically backs up all photos and videos shot by Android devices - are going to be predominantly home videos.
Say 0.1% of DMCA requests on YouTube are overreaching and block a home video because of something like a copyrighted song being heard playing in the background. If YouTube hosts a ratio of 10 home videos per pirated movie, then that means only 1 home video is improperly blocked (false positive) for every 100 pirated movies blocked (true positive). That ratio means the false positives are few and far between relative to the positive impact of the DMCA requests (getting pirated videos pulled).
But if they start applying those same algorithms to Google Drive, where there are probably 100,000 home videos per pirated movie, suddenly they'll be blocking 100 home videos for each single pirated movie blocked. The false positive rate relative to the true positive rate is now 10,000x higher. The annoyance factor will be that much higher, and they're risking raising the ire of the public, and getting the parts of the DMCA they bought and paid for rolled back by new legislation.
Using accelerometers to detect motion (actually changes in motion) is blindingly obvious because that's what they're designed to do.
But if you want to be a stickler about where they're used and for what purpose, crash test dummies have been using accelerometers for this purpose in human body analogues since at least 1997, pre-dating and invalidating this patent.
I'd have to disagree. Once the app is running, tapping on it from the home screen is the same as switching to it. So on WebOS, the order of your running apps is constantly changing (based on which ones are running, which was used most recently). So you have to swipe up to bring up the multitasking view, then search for the app you want to switch to.
In Android and iOS, your app icons are always in the same place. So you just tap the home button, and you tap where you already know the app's icon is; you don't have to search for it. Android is actually the best because if you have a handful of apps which you switch between most frequently, you can put them on the same page. iOS auto-sorts them (though I suppose you could put your common apps into the same folder, but that represents an extra tap).
So this 700 MW of solar power represents just 5.7% the capacity of the scrapped nuclear plant. Guess where the other 94.3% of energy production is going to come from (hint: its initials are FF)?
To replace the nuclear plant entirely with solar, they'd have to build (1980 MW / 0.161) = 12,300 MW of panels. That's more than 8x larger than the largest existing solar plant in the world, more than 20x larger than the largest existing solar plant in the U.S. At the optimistic cost of $1/Watt, those solar panels (never mind the supporting infrastructure) would cost $12.3 billion. The nuclear plant was only going to cost $7.65 billion. They killed it because of regulatory delays.
It is exactly an example of what happens to your eyes when looking at the sun.
It isn't the size of the lens which matters, it's the f-ratio. The ratio of the lens aperture (diameter) to the focal length. While a larger diameter collects more light, a longer focal length focuses that light into a larger image. So regardless of lens size, if they have the same f-ratio then the intensity of the light at the focal plane is the same when pointed at the same light source.
The human eye has a f-ratio of about f/2.1 (night-adapted) to f/8.3 (daylight). While the 600mm telephoto gathers a lot more light than your eye, it also focuses the light into a much larger image of the sun, so the energy per mm^2 of sensor isn't as high as you'd think given the large lens diameter. F-ratio goes as the diameter of the lens, while amount of light gathered goes as the area of the lens, or diameter^2. So comparing the 600mm f/4.0 telephoto to your eye at f/8.0, the telephoto's light has only 4x as much energy per mm^2 of sensor as per mm^2 of retina. Consequently, it would only take 4x as long to cause similar damage to your eye than it would take with the 600mm telephoto. Probably a lot less time since biology tends to be much more sensitive to temperature than metal and silicon circuitry.
I took my nephew to volleyball practice a couple times, and noticed a marked gender difference. During practice the kids got into a line and the instructor tossed balls at them one at a time so they could hit it back. The girls were attentive and accurate. The boys were goofing off and frequently mis-hit the balls.
Then they started playing a game and kept score. Suddenly the boys were focused and accurate, while the girls stood around talking to each other and missed shots. One of them even got hit in the head by the ball because she wasn't even watching.
While both boys and girls were capable of playing well, there was a marked gender difference in the situation which caused them to use that capability to the fullest.
If you give the child no choice, of course he/she will play with whatever is provided to him/her. If a caretaker projects their cultural biases onto a child, they can force the child to play with whatever they think the child should be playing with. Nobody is debating that.
The point here is that given a choice, men and women (or boys and girls, or male and female monkeys) gravitate towards doing different things of their own free will. The argument here is actually the bigger nature vs nurture debate. And the overall conclusion of all the studies I've seen on it is that it's a little of both. Gender biases are partially genetic, partially enforced by cultural stereotypes. Unfortunately for the SJWs, their movement is based on the theory that gender biases are entirely rooted in cultural stereotypes and there is zero genetic basis. The science simply doesn't support their position.
I don't have a problem with the megapixel race. We're still very far from the display resolutions needed to generate and display holograms in real-time (about 1000 lines per mm). So this 8k screen technology if shrunk down would give us a hologram 8mm x 4mm. Add in GPUs which can do billions of FFTs per second, and we should be able to take a computer-generated 3D scene, and convert it to a holographic interference pattern for display in real-time at reasonable FPS.
That's where all these excessive megapixels and ridiculously overpowered cryptocurrency-mining GPUs are taking us. So I don't have a problem with it.
That's the crux of the problem. I'm OK with them collecting the data. I'm even OK with them holding it for a few months (2-5 years seems excessive). What I'm not OK with is them (or the public) being able to access the database willy nilly to look up any license plate they want. The system should be behind lock and key, and require a warrant before they can search for a specific license plate. Or maybe a wildcard search for a partial plate at a certain location around a certain time. Or a match search if the same plate appears at multiple locations at specific times, which spits out only the plates which match that criteria, none of the other plates.
It's only discriminatory if the cable operators are in direct competition with each other. I'll bet that the smaller cable operators are in regions serviced by two ore more cable companies in competition with each other. But most of Comocast's service is in areas where they enjoy a monopoly. You can't discriminate (favor one over another) when there's only one entity.
In fact the only time I've seen build-out requirements like this is in exchange for granting the company a monopoly. The government adds the build-out requirement either because it fears the lack of competition will result in insufficient increase in coverage area, or they want to make certain that coverage is extended to a certain area (e.g. low income or rural).
Two types of solar film (non-glass) dominate the market for solar filters in amateur astronomy circles. Black polymer by Thousand Oaks, and Baader astrosolar safety film. The black polymer is black (duh) and produces an aesthetically pleasing orange image of the sun. The Baader film is metallic and photographically superior to black polymer, but makes the sun appear a pale white-pink or white-blue.
Both types are used to produce legit eclipse glasses. Companies buy big sheets of them and cut them to fit in between paper glasses frames. Unfortunately there are dangerous knockoffs of both types (black and metallic).
I took my family and friends to Yellowstone prior to the eclipse. One of the families in my car happened to have two young children (ages 3 and 5). As we approached Yellowstone and cellular data service dropped to near-nonexistent, the two had a meltdown. They were screaming "I want YouTube" over and over for a good half hour, and their parents couldn't get through to them that YouTube was inaccessible here. They had never been without Internet connectivity all their lives. Meanwhile, AM/FM radio worked just fine.
I'm not sad to see music radio die. The entire thing has been a scam for nearly a century with ClearChannel owning most of the music stations across the country, and thus selecting which artists and songs become successful, instead of it happening organically via popularity among actual listeners. But the technology of radio broadcasts is far from dead.
They are not opposites, unless you're working from an incomplete (incorrect) model of logic.
People who think like you do assume logic breaks down into two possibilities - true or false. That is incorrect. Logic actually resolves into three possibilities - true, false, and unknown/cannot be determined.
The scientific method involves choosing a falsifiable hypothesis as the null hypothesis. You then do experiments which attempt to falsify the null hypothesis. If one succeeds, then you can move the hypothesis into the "false" category (or conversely the positive experimental result into the "true" category).
But until such a result is obtained, the null hypothesis remains in the unknown/cannot be determined category, not the true category. The absence of experimental evidence disproving the null hypothesis does not mean the null hypothesis is "true." Short of trying every possible experiment, it cannot be proven true. So it remains in the unknown/cannot be determined category. e.g. The laws of Thermodynamics have never been proven, but have also never been disproven. So we assume (take it on faith) that they are correct. But when push comes to shove we openly acknowledge that we don't actually have proof that the laws of Thermodynamics are in fact immutable laws. Simply that we believe them to be. And that we have faith that any processes and technologies we design will obey them.
Basically, every scientist advocating a properly constructed null hypothesis is exhibiting faith that that hypothesis is correct. String theory is a great example. So far it's completely unprovable, but tens if not hundreds of thousands of research physicists are convinced it's correct. If we were emotionless, completely bias-free automatons, then this wouldn't need to be the case. But human nature means that scientists who have faith in a pet theory are likely to put more effort into coming up with and performing experiments which advance and defend the theory, and thus they contribute more to science.
While they don't charge a fee, there's still a spread. If you convert US$100 to Euros and back to USD fee-free, you'll end up with about $97.50. Xe.com tends to have tighter spreads, though occasionally a big bank will best it (Amex used to allow you to use their charge card in other countries fee-free at their exchange rate, which had a considerably tighter spread than peons like you and me can get).
The spread represents the cost of handling the transaction, the risk the party doing the exchange takes (everyone always assumes the worst - that the currency they're giving up will rise and the currency they're taking from you will tank), and a small profit margin.
Unless/until the value of cryptocurrencies stabilizes, they have no future as a currency. And since there's no regulating entity which modulates the number of [*]coins available to track closely with the number of economic transactions using those [*]coins, their value can only remain stable through blind luck. So they are and will continue to be a speculative commodity, not a currency.
The station's orbit needs to be boosted from time to time to compensate for slowdown due to friction with the (extremely) thin atmosphere at its orbital altitude. It's also occasionally steered to keep a safe distance between the station and the larger pieces of orbiting space debris. So yes, NASA does in fact "fly" the ISS.
It's a self-correcting problem. If automation puts too many people out of work, those people cannot afford to buy what the automated factories are producing. And thus demand for whatever that automated factory is producing will drop. At which point it becomes in the best interests of the automated factory owner to make sure their ex-employees are able to find a job.
Economic activity (and average productivity) is maximized when everyone has a decent job (or potential to get a decent job) and is being paid a fair wage for it (i.e. excessive profit not being sucked up by the factory owner). Ford accidentally stumbled upon this when he paid his workers nearly double the prevailing wage. They made enough money to actually buy the cars his factories were producing, and the resulting feedback loop of increased demand catapulted Ford into one of the most successful companies of the early 20th century, and made him one of the wealthiest men of his time.
So if these doom and gloom scenarios about automation putting huge swaths of the population out of work ever really happens, everyone - people who lost their jobs and factory owners - will be on the same page. We will all want to do something to correct the problem. Unemployed people so they can get a job and afford living expenses. Factory owners because the more people are working, the more people will buy what their factories are producing.
Mathematically, if an industry can produce a product using 1/17th the human labor, the product will drop to about 1/17th its original price. That frees money that the buyer can then spend on other things. And people need to be employed to produce those other things. Fewer people per product, but a lot more products.
While the quantity of wants and needs may be limited, the quality is not. If you're only capable of buying and using 1000 products, but doing so leaves you with a bunch of money left over, you're either going to invest that money (producing new job opportunities), or you're going to spend it buying higher quality and more featured products. That extra money will go into labor (probably in R&D) to produce better products. That is, once you reach an economic limit in volume of sales, the money starts to flow into improved quality of sales. In other words, the rate of technological advancement speeds up.
Telsa was started to capitalize on the ZEV (zero emissions vehicle) mandate the California Air Resources Board (CARB) implemented in 2015. Beginning in 2015, ZEVs had to account for a certain percentage of each automaker's annual sales (percentage increasing each year - currently 4.5% for 2018). If they failed to meet that percentage, they would have to buy sufficient credits from a company which exceeded the percentage, or be banned from selling cars in California. About a dozen other states automatically adopt CARB's standards, so failure would result in being locked out of about 33% of the U.S. auto market. Musk correctly foresaw that there would be a lot of demand for these ZEV credits among automakers, and set up a company which could capitalize on this - generating credits and selling them to other automakers.
Tesla has not proved anything about the viability of EVs until the heavy hand of these ZEV credits and the federal and state tax incentives to buy an EV are removed from the market.
Incidentally, all of this has happened before. In the late 1990s, CARB tried to implement a similar ZEV mandate beginning in 2000 (initial goal of 10% ZEVs by 2003). Ford and Chevy bet on hydrogen fuel cells. The Japanese automakers gave up early and bet on hybrids. GM invested nearly a billion dollars and produced the EV-1. By 1999, it was clear GM was the only company which had a viable ZEV. GM was on the verge of cashing in on their capital investment by being the sole supplier of ZEV credits to everyone else. The other automakers petitioned CARB and some even sued, and CARB gave in. They changed the rules and decided to allow hybrids and PZEVs (partial zero emissions vehicles) to fulfill the requirement. CARB pulled the rug out from under GM. Since California wasn't allowing GM to benefit from the technology they had developed, they decided not to allow California to benefit from it either. And as a result GM destroyed every EV-1 and locked the R&D away in their internal archives. The only difference with Tesla is that CARB stuck with the ZEV requirement in 2015.
The most commonly consumed forms of HFCS are 45% fructose (used in foods) and 55% fructose (used in soft drinks). The forms of HFCS with fructose levels as high as 80%-90% are used almost exclusively to mix with 45% fructose HFCS to bring it up to 55% fructose for use in soft drinks (fructose tastes sweeter than glucose). Which isn't that far off from the concentrations of fructose/glucose produced (50%/50%) from the breakdown of sucrose (table sugar). HFCS is only called "high fructose" to distinguish it from regular corn syrup which is almost pure glucose. Not because it's unnaturally high in fructose compared to other food sources.
Here's a list of the fructose vs glucose levels of different fruits. Pears, mangoes, and apples are 70%+ fructose. Other fruits are mostly around 50%+ fructose (hence why it's sometimes called fruit sugar). If fructose were really as bad as you're implying, these fruits would be considered poisonous. Glucose can be used directly in aerobic cellular respiration, but fructose needs to be converted by the liver into glucose and glycogen before it can be used in cellular respiration. Fructose is not poisonous like alcohol as you're implying. Alcohol interferes with certain neurotransmitters, which results in drunkenness in low concentrations, and death in high concentrations. There's debate over the effects of dumping a large quantity of fructose into the bloodstream and forcing the liver to process it all, but again that gets us back to pears, mangoes, and apples doing the same thing.
And to be pedantic, sucrose, fructose, and glucose (and lactose) are all "sugars".
The capability was requested mostly by law enforcement to stop high-speed chases, though it's occasionally been used by a parent to stop a minor from taking the car.
I'll add that this situation is almost completely analogous to cell phones on contract, and pre-paid BYOD cell phones. It's none of the carrier's business what you have on your phone, and their refusal to unlock it or to relinquish control of certain functions on it (e.g. preinstalled apps) is/should be illegal.
Also note the remote disabling capability (even in owned cars) is similar to the laws requiring carriers remotely brick phones which have been reported stolen (to help thwart cell phone theft). Can the government really give a third party that power if the owner doesn't want it? There's some vague justification in cars, since they have to be operated on government-owned roads. But cell phones operate on spectrum which has been lawfully licensed so the government is not involved.