According to the previous link, WoW has about 9.5 million players. For a per capita revenue of $226 per person per year.
Venezuela's population is 31.6 million. For a per capita nominal real GDP of $2500 per person per year.
Kinda staggering if you consider that Venezuelans live there 24/7, or 168 hours/week. Meanwhile the average WoW player plays 22.7 hours/week. So normalizing for amount of time spent in the "realm":
WoW per capita revenue per hour of play = 19.1 cents.
Venezula per capita GDP per hour = 28.6 cents.
So while the units are pretty meaningless, the actual value of time spent in the game/country turn out not very different.
with a singular hive mind. There are bad people at VW who want to cheat, and there are good people at VW who want to do the right thing. We could institute your punishment and basically force the company into bankruptcy, punishing the good people along with the bad. The good people would have to find new jobs at other companies, if they can, and suffer financial burden while they're searching. But more crucially the bad people would scatter to other companies, free to try to cheat again in other industries.
I'd rather do what's going on here - charge the bad people and fine them or jail them. Give the bad people still out there something to think about if they're considering cheating. Give the good people remaining at VW a chance to salvage the company and turn it into something good. The corporate veil should insulate individuals from liability against financial losses and unintentional harm. But if you knowingly commit a crime or cause the company to commit a crime while working at a corporation, you should personally be criminally liable.
EVs emit nearly as much pollutants and especially CO2 as ICE vehicles. They just shift the emissions to the power plant that generates the electricity. So the cleanliness of an EV depends on the composition of your power generation.
In terms of energy efficiency, EVs are only about 30% more efficient than an ICE.
An ICE is about 30% efficient, an automatic transmission about 90%-95% efficient.
30%*92.5% = 27.8% efficient.
Coal plants are about 40% efficient, natural gas plants about 60%. Split the difference and call it 50%. Power line transmission losses are about 2%. Tesla charging efficiency about 80%. Discharge efficiency is unknown (can't find any numbers on it). And electric motor efficiency about 90%-95%.
50%*98%*80%*D*92.5% = 36.3% * D, where D = discharge efficiency
So all other things being the same, the energy consumption of an EV on an electrical grid mostly powered by fossil fuel plants is 36.3%/27.8% = 31% less at best. If the discharge efficiency of the battery is 80%, then the EV is just 4% more energy efficient than an ICE. (I'm including this because the last time I posted this, someone who obviously hadn't done the math incorrectly claimed EVs were 4-5x more efficient and his misinformation got modded up.)
The reason EVs are cheaper to operate than ICEs is mostly because the coal used to generate electricity costs about 1/10th what gasoline does per MJ.
Coal costs about $50/ton and contains about 24 GJ of energy. That's about 0.21 cents/MJ.
Gasoline costs about $3/gallon and contains about 120 MJ/gallon. That's about 2.5 cents/MJ.
The EPA MPGe figures only factor in energy efficiency from battery to wheels. That is, what your mileage would be if your batteries magically recharged overnight without plugging into anything. They have to do this because it's the only way they can rate EVs with a single "mileage" number nationwide. Electrical power generation varies depending on where you live, so they can't factor in generation losses into the MPGe figure. But because it's missing the electricity generation losses, it's not directly comparable to ICE MPG like may people seem to think.
Pets emit CO2, plants absorb CO2 to form cellulose, cows eat cellulose, pets eat cows. The only way you can change CO2 levels via this cycle is if the ratio of CO2 consumers (plants) to CO2 emitters (animals) changes appreciably. It's self-stabilizing because if excess CO2 is emitted, it encourages more plant growth. If CO2 levels drop, it discourages plant growth.
Climate change due to CO2 happens because we're digging up carbon which is buried deep underground, converting it to CO2 by burning it, and releasing it into the atmosphere. This is increasing atmospheric CO2 levels far faster than new plants can remove it (and even if they remove it, it mostly gets released again as the dead plant is decomposes or is eaten). That buried carbon (oil, coal, gas) comes from ancient plants which died and were buried. Hence the term "fossil" fuels. They removed the CO2 from an atmosphere which had almost no oxygen and was very high in CO2, eventually converting it into the (relatively) oxygen-rich atmosphere we enjoy today. So burning fossil fuels drives the atmosphere back towards that ancient state where only plants could live and animals couldn't.
This whole "study" is part of a disturbing trend I'm seeing where people (either deliberately or ignorantly) analyze only part of the system to try to make something look good or bad, instead of properly analyzing the entire system. e.g. So-called zero emissions vehicles, which aren't really zero emissions. They just move the emissions from the tailpipe to the power plant which generates the electricity or hydrogen. Since their overall energy efficiency is only about 30% better than that of ICE vehicles (their operating cost is lower because coal is about 10x cheaper than gasoline per MJ), they're still causing a lot of CO2 emissions as opposed to carpooling or public transportation.
I remember in the 1990s when this new picture format called JPEG was being tested. I downloaded it and tried it out. It took a minute to decode a 640x480 picture in 24-bit color on my PC, compared to about 2 seconds for a GIF of the same resolution (albeit 8-bit). It took way too long on computers at the time, but the picture was beautiful and I knew computers would become fast enough that this was the future.
Same thing with encryption. Old encryption standards typically aren't retired because they've been cracked. They're retired because a brute force attack against them used to take centuries or millenia, but computers have become fast enough that a brute force attack now takes only days or hours.
MPEG2 with its horrible compression ratio became the standard for DVDs because at the time MPEG4 took too much processing power to be economically added to every DVD player. The same is going to be true for these newer video codecs. Initially they'll be computationally expensive, but within a few years they'll be tolerable. And after a decade it'll be trivial and we'll be looking towards replacing them with a new codec which takes advantage of more powerful modern hardware.
What this also represents is a near perfect case study as to why most Republicans are sheer nonsense when it comes to the economic of taxation. They will try to convince you that if rich people and rich corporations accumulate enough cash they will start to "create jobs." So we need tax cuts or else nobody will create jobs.
You're trying to understand this from the perspective of an employee, not a business owner. Rich people and rich corporations don't "create jobs" in some cause and effect manner. It's a self-sustaining cycle (as long as the business model works and growth continues). They become rich(er) as a result of the jobs they've created, and becoming richer allows them to create more jobs, which in turn allows them to become richer yet.
To an employed individual, reduced taxes equals more take-home pay (more "profit"). So it's easy to understand your misconception. But to a business owner, the best way to increase your take-home pay (profit) is not by taking home the money saved due to a tax cut. It's from reinvesting that saved money into the business so your business can grow. That reinvestment is what creates more jobs (which in turn creates more profit, meaning more take-home pay). The only rich people who want a tax cut for the sake of a tax cut are people who've inherited their wealth and don't know how to run a business. Any successful business owner would rather take the money from a tax cut and reinvest it in the business (turning it into more money and also incidentally creating more jobs), rather than keeping it for themselves and using it on hookers and blow.
That's why all the arguments that rich people want to cut taxes so they can keep more for themselves are wrong. That's the last thing any rich person who runs a successful business would want to do with extra money from a tax cut. They would rather reinvest it in their business (creating more jobs) and grow it into even more money.
Since you want to make it political, the key point Democrats seem to miss is that it doesn't matter where from the economy you extract taxes. Whether you tax income, sales, business transactions (VAT), or business profits, the end result is the same - money transferred away from people's control to the government's control. Corporations are paper entities - basically a line drawn around a group of people (employees, owners) acting as one entity. The corporation by itself doesn't produce anything - the people it represents do. As such, a tax on a corporation is a tax on those people (and their customers). The government is not gaining any extra revenue by taxing corporations. The corporation, being a paper entity, just passes those taxes on to employees (lower wages), owners (lower dividends), and customers (higher prices).
This is why most taxes and tax cuts don't work like their proponents think it will. Aside from localized effects (a tax on almonds but not pistachios will result in almond sales falling relative to pistachios), taxes don't really affect the economy as a whole (increase in sales of other foods will balance out the decrease in almond sales). Only the overall tax rate affects the economy. Each person generates a certain amount of productivity, and the economy as a whole is the sum total of those persons' productivity. The overall tax rate is the percentage of that productivity which is shifted to the government's control.
Once you realize this, you realize it's insanely stupid to tax every little thing like our government currently does. Taxes should be consolidated into just one or two major things to make them easy to collect (if you believe in progressive taxation, the obvious choice is income tax), plus a few behavior modification taxes (e.g. property taxes to encourage people to find a profitable use for land or sell to someone who will, rather than use it unproductively). Elim
The problem is their cashflow is mixed together with government incentives influencing buyers, and selling ZEV credits to other car manufacturers. It's not at all clear that Tesla's long-term investments actually yield a self-sustainable business model without these external factors. Both have to end at some point.
We need to put an end to climate change denial - by environmentalists. Their advocacy of renewables as the only solution to climate change is based on there being just the right amount of climate change. Enough for us to have to abandon fossil fuels, but not enough that we have to do it immediately thereby leaving us enough time to develop renewable technologies.*
The projections are growing more and more dire. Environmentalists need to stop using climate change as a means to advance their renewables agenda, thereby putting the survival of humanity (and a bunch of animal species) at risk. We need to phase out fossil fuels ASAP and switch over to the only power generation technology available which can provide enough base load cheaply enough to satisfy our modern needs - nuclear.
Once we've switched to nuclear and have arrested global warming, then we can work on developing renewables. And as renewables improve in scalability, come down in cost, and battery technology improves allowing us to even out time-variances in renewable production, then we can start using renewables to phase out nuclear plants. Their current tactic of blocking nuclear power, thereby leaving fossil fuels and renewables as our only choices, is literally playing chicken with the survival of the human race. It's like being on a sinking ship but preventing anyone from using the life rafts, insisting that the only solution is that everyone needs to learn how to swim in the short time we have.
*(This is why a lot of climate change deniers don't believe environmentalists about climate change. They figure if environmentalists really believed climate change threatened our existence, they wouldn't be advocating half measures which will take decades to develop and implement. They'd be advocating eliminating fossil fuels immediately, without caring what replaces it short-term as long as it doesn't emit CO2. But since they are opposed to nuclear, climate change deniers logically reason that the environmentalists are lying about climate change.)
a = (192 MPH)^2 / (2 * 300 meters) = 12.28 m/s^2
= 1.25 g
arctan (1.25 g / 1 g) = 51.3 degrees
That's gonna be trippy riding inside. Since there are no windows, you only have the apparent direction of gravity (acceleration) to determine "up". It's going to feel like you're in a plane climbing up at a 51 degree angle. That is, anyone trying to stand while this is going on is going to be leaned forward at 51 degrees relative to vertical at rest. (I'll add that the earlier test to 69 MPH in 30 meters is 1.68g, giving an apparent inclination of 58 degrees.)
That's true for landlines. But for wireless, there's a fixed limit on the amount of bandwidth available to a carrier at any given location. It's determined by the amount of frequency spectrum they're authorized to broadcast on, and how much data the technology (3G, 4G, etc.) can squeeze into that spectrum. Once they hit that cap, it's impossible to increase total bandwidth, short of the FCC auctioning off more spectrum (and users buying new phones which can use that new spectrum), or new broadcast standards (e.g. 5G) being made so new equipment can be rolled out allowing more data over the same frequency bandwidth.
There's also the complication that usage is bursty and people move around. So one tower may be capped out at max bandwidth while neighboring towers have plenty of unused bandwidth. On a cable Internet network, the cable operator can resubnet to better balance the load throughout its network, maximizing overall bandwidth. But for wireless, there's nothing you can do because technology doesn't yet allow towers cells to overlap without interfering with each other. (Beamforming and directional transmission would allow this, so we may be able to exceed the Shannon limit in the near future by virtue of the bandwidth no longer being shared when transmissions are directional.)
Uber has total control the market (of people using the Uber app). They implemented a stupid pricing algorithm which is easy to game by drivers logging off. Rider wait time would be a better measure, since a driver deliberately withholding rides to make riders wait more would mean the driver gives fewer rides per day thus making less money.
A deregulated market would be a craigslist-type site where people wanting rides post requests. Anybody wanting to give them a ride places a bid (if they're first), or places a lower bid than the previous bid. The rider selects a winning bid after they're tired of waiting for more bids to lower the price. Lots of drivers bidding each rider within x minutes of their request means the price goes down, few drivers bidding on each rider means price goes up. Riders willing to wait for a ride pay less, riders in a hurry pay more.
In a deregulated market, the price adjusts naturally in response to real fluctuations in supply and demand. In Uber's market, their algorithm sets the price, apparently based on an easily spoofed measure of supply.
This is something I really have to commend the optical disk makers for. The newest Bluray drives can still read DVDs and CDs. Heck, most of them can still burn CD-Rs.
My master's thesis is stored on a Zip disk in some box in my garage. So is the Zip drive, but it didn't work when I switched my archival storage to CD-Rs a couple decades ago. OTOH those early CD-Rs are mostly still readable.
I'd say that's more an example of how effective the MPAA/RIAA have been at brainwashing people into thinking that they should have to pay for every movie/TV show they watch and every song they hear. Because if you don't, it's piracy!
When I was moving to my new house, my millennial cousin came with me to the moving van rental store. It was a hot day, so on the drive home he complained that the van didn't have air conditioning. I told him to open the window. He fiddled around with his door for a minute, then declared "The windows in this van don't open." I had to explain how to roll down the window with the hand crank. He'd never been in a car without power windows.
So basically you're ok with paying $5 more per item for hassle-free returns.
Newegg Premier is just $50/yr. It gives you expedited shipping, free returns for any reason (Amazon charges you return shipping if there's nothing wrong with the item), no restocking fee, and your friends and family can use your membership as well. By your metric, if you and your friends/family could potentially buy more than 10 items per year from Newegg, this is a better deal than Amazon.
A lot of apps don't even need to be apps. They worked fine as a website, but the company wants you to use their app instead so they can better track you. Now multiply that by the 20-50 sites you frequently visit. One web browser with 20-50 bookmarks, vs. 20-50 apps at 5-300 MB each.
LinkedIn is a great example. Push content (notification of contact request) worked fine over email, and could even be sent as a SMS. Pull content works fine via their web portal. Web forums which try to get you to install their app with an annoying popup whenever you visit the site on a mobile device are another example. Sites like forums, where all the heavy lifting is done server-side, belong in a web browser. Unless there's something that needs to run locally on the phone/tablet, there is no reason for the app to exist.
Fix your website so it'll scale properly to the smaller screen space (but higher resolution) of a phone or tablet. Yes your web designer will probably cry, but it's their own damn fault. The whole purpose of the web was to transmit content but leave rendering up to the browser so it could display the content in a manner most suitable for the display device. It wasn't supposed to be a mechanism for designers to force their idea of a perfect graphic design (which doesn't even render properly in certain cases) onto everyone.
To be fair, Google has been pretty good about keeping their ads unobtrusive. If this coalition publishes a standard for acceptable ads which any advertiser can follow, and Chrome's ad blocker adheres to that standard, then I don't really see a problem if most or all of Google's ads also adhere to the standard and thus aren't blocked.
I've had to resort to a strict ad blocker (uBlock Origin), but I'd really like to support the sites I like by allowing their ads through. But it seems every time I try that, I get bombarded with obnoxious or intrusive ads which force me to block them again. I think Google may be on to something. Blocking ads on a site-by-site basis doesn't give advertisers any incentive to clean up their ads since they don't really control the sites where the ads show up. But blocking ads on the basis of how intrusive they are creates a clear incentive for advertisers to move away from obnoxious ads.
I recently went to the Goodwood FoS with a mate. I had a 4 year old Canon P&S (albeit a quite good one), he had the latest Samsung. He was astounded after the level of quality in my shots of fast moving cars.
The point and shoots and DSLRs take better pictures because they use larger sensors. Most phone camera sensors are 1/4" or smaller. The P&S sensors have several times the area. The DSLR and mirrorless sensors have several tens of times the area. More area means better low light sensitivity, better action shots, more capability to stop down before diffraction begins to blur the image, and (due to geometry) a narrower focal plane (good for generating bokeh in portraiture, bad for shooting close-ups). It also means you need larger lenses, which are heavier and more expensive.
No amount of talent in the world can get good shots out of bad cameras.
Not really true. A bad camera will limit a talented photographer, but won't prevent his talent from shining through. Back in the film days, one of the principal photographers for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition would show up at shoots with a little Fuji point and shoot camera with a fixed 35mm lens (one of their first with an aspherical element). He said he used to use a DSLR, but as he got older his eyes got worse he was having a hard time focusing the DSLR. So he used the Fuji. Its autofocus was almost always spot on, the lens was very sharp across the frame, and the shots were taken in sunlight so he could use high resolution film which could be cropped down to appear the same as a telephoto. It was weird seeing a professional photographer conducting a shoot with a P&S camera, but Sports Illustrated couldn't argue with the results and published them.
You seem to think you can just cut and paste portions of an in-focus and out-of-focus image together to generate a duplicate of a real bokeh from a lens. You can't.
Bokeh is what's called a point spread function of the lens when out of focus. If there's only a point light source in the image against a dark background, and you take a picture of it out of focus, that's the PSF for that lens. When you shoot a portrait, the person's face is in focus, and the lens applies the PSF to everything ithat's out of focus (the background) to generate bokeh.
If you are correct that the iPhone is simulating bokeh by shooting two pictures (one in focus, one out of focus), then that's actually worse than computational bokeh. The out-of-focus picture will also apply the PSF to everything - including the person's face. The bokeh from the person's face will overlap and combine with the background bokeh. If you're taking a portrait of a caucasian face against a dark background, this will cause a light-colored halo (face bokeh whose width is the radius of the PSF) around the face that spills over into the background bokeh. A DSLR OTOH will have completely dark bokeh with no halo because only the dark background is being blurred to generate bokeh. The face is in sharp focus so there's no spillover of blurred light skin into the background.
You'll run into this problem if you try to add simulated bokeh in Photoshop. Unless the background and subject are a similar color and brightness, you'll end up with a halo around the person's face. Instead of a quick blur filter on a second layer and "painting" the in-focus head back in with a mask, you end up having to mask the in-focus parts first. Then you apply the blur filter with the masked parts removed from the layer, then you can paint the blurred parts over the background.
Computational bokeh would generate something approximating the DSLR shot. It would start with a completely in-focus image, determine which parts should be in focus (based on AI or by using two lenses to determine distance in each point of the image). Use that as a mask as in my Photoshop explanation, and blur only the background parts of the photo. Apple's bread and butter customers have included photographers for over 3 decades now. They would've immediately spotted and complained about the fake bokeh halos if the method you described was what Apple is using. I strongly suspect you don't know what you're talking about, and that Apple is using the two lenses to calculate rudimentary depth info a la the Xbox Kinect.
The shots from the Facebook post appear to back this up. Not only are there no halos, but the PSF is not fixed in diameter like you'd get from your simulated bokeh method. Stuff that is out-of-focus but closer in distance to the subject (back of boy's shirt, chair behind girl's arm) is blurred less than stuff far in the background. Just like a real lens, the PSF becomes bigger the further something is from the focal plane. You can only simulate this if you can estimate the distance to different things in the photo.
I hardly think it's that nefarious. What is the best scale in which to apply the same set of economic rules (laws)? A million people (city-sized)? Tens of millions (country-sized)? Hundreds of millions (U.S. or EU sized)? The entire world? Too small and you lose out because of unnecessary bureaucracy (duplicated work, extra work to comply with similar but slightly different regulations). Too big and you lose out because of inability to make exceptions for deviations in local conditions.
Nobody really knows what the best regulatory size is. Everyone likes to think they do, but nobody really does. Heck, there might not even be a best single best size for the entire world.
To find out what is the best regulatory size, you have to actually try different sizes. Sometimes the trial will fail and it'll become apparent the original size was better. Sometimes the trial will succeed and those people will have found a better size (at least for themselves). There's no way to know without trying. Some of the greatest breakthroughs in exploration and technological progress have occurred because people had the courage to try their own idea despite the mocking of others. Likewise, a lot of people have gotten themselves killed because they didn't heed the warnings of others. There's no universal right answer here. You have to take risks if you wish to find greater rewards.
There are all kinds of people out there. I remember when the final Harry Potter book came out (disclaimer: I am not a HP fan), there were people inserting spoilers randomly all over the web (Snape dies) just to ruin it for HP fans who hadn't yet read the book but were continuing with their regular non-HP activities online.
Anyway, the current and previous GoT seasons are following a common story plot-line trope (break down the hero/heroine until all hope seems to be lost, before they manage to pull out a victory) and have become predictable. Which is kinda disappointing considering a lot of what made previous seasons fun was because they subverted such tropes (e.g. killing off the "obvious" hero at the Red Wedding). So I'm not really sure what's to be gained by spoiling it, both for fans and for people who want to ruin it for fans (unless the end of the story is that the bad guy wins).
They're pointing out that it's been done before because when Apple did do something first and other companies followed up with the same or similar features on their products, the chorus of Apple fans declared that they were copying Apple, that they were followers not innovators, and that they should be sued to stop them from copying. You can't have it both ways. You can't argue that when other companies do it it's copying, but when Apple does it it's properly implementing a feature.
The argument by most anti-Apple people has been that the industry thrives on lifting features that competitors introduce, and improving on them. That is how progress is made. Apple tried to halt progress by suing anyone who introduced anything remotely similar to the iPhone, which is what earned them the hatred of a large segment of slashdot. Reading/listening to Steve Jobs' talks on the matter, it's pretty clear that just because he happened to introduce the first successful touchscreen-only smartphone (not the first), he felt that the entire market should belong to him alone, and that anyone else who introduced something similar (when his wasn't even the first) should be sued. That attitude trickled down to the legion of Apple fans. It's been incredibly frustrating arguing against them, trying to point out that the well being of society via technological progress outweighs the well being of a single company.
Anyway, we're glad you're now on board, and believe that it's OK for companies to copy each other's ideas if they improve on them (or change them in ways that they hope will be an improvement). Please help us out and tell the remaining Apple fans to shut up next time they start talking about companies copying Apple.
P.S. The iPod became the best-selling MP3 player because Apple nailed how to sync your music collection between your computer and the MP3 player. If you ever owned one of the earlier MP3 players, this process was a nightmare. Even copying your music folder from your computer straight to the MP3 player's storage wouldn't work because the MP3 player would re-organize your music according to some internal algorithm which seemed to ignore folders and existing playlists. And don't even get me started on players like Sony's which insisted on re-encoding your music into some proprietary format after doing an ownership check (to enforce copyright) before it would allow you to copy it to the MP3 player. "It just works" for managing playlists was exactly what MP3 players needed. You'll note that the "No wireless, less space than a Nomad" issues were addressed in later iPods, indicating that those were legitimate criticisms.
A reporter at ZDNet counters that "the only way to really secure Flash is to get rid of it... If Flash lives, people will continue to use it, and without security support, it will be even more insecure than ever."
Flash was not intended to be the de facto scripting language for the web. Repeat: Flash was never intended to bring scripting to websites.
Flash was designed to do one simple thing: Allowing animators to transmit animated movies over low-bandwidth dial-up connections. (YouTube version if you don't have Flash). Instead of transmitting compressed video, it would transmit a background, sprites, and instructions for moving, rotating, zooming, and animating the sprites against the background according to a timed script. It's still used for this purpose today.
To understand why Flash took over the web, you have to go back to the mid-90s. The web had just become mainstream, and the new population of web designers were pushing the envelope of HTML's capabilities. They sorely wanted to be able to add animation (other than the ridiculous blink tag), audio, and scripting so visitors could do things other than just view static content. The W3C (organization setting HTML standards) refused. So web designers looked elsewhere, and lo and behold they found Flash. It did most everything they wanted. But because it was only designed to play animations, not run scripted websites, security was never considered in the design. But with the W3C refusing to add these capabilities to HTML (they wouldn't for over 15 years), web designers all began using Flash on their websites. It soon became a de facto web standard, and everything went downhill from there.
I don't give a whit about Flash websites. I hated them when they first appeared, I still hate them now. Nothing would make me happier than if they all disappeared forever. But there's a huge amount of artistic and programming content out there written for Flash (I have a folder full of a few Flash movies, early zombie games, and old arcade game clones). It would be incredibly short-sighted to consign these locally run Flash animations and games to the dust bin because I hated Flash websites.
If you don't like how they look, unscrew the wall plate, shove the cable into the wall, and replace the wall plate with a blank one. That's a helluva lot cheaper and less labor-intensive than pulling the cable out.
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If you look at it per capita:
Kinda staggering if you consider that Venezuelans live there 24/7, or 168 hours/week. Meanwhile the average WoW player plays 22.7 hours/week. So normalizing for amount of time spent in the "realm":
So while the units are pretty meaningless, the actual value of time spent in the game/country turn out not very different.
with a singular hive mind. There are bad people at VW who want to cheat, and there are good people at VW who want to do the right thing. We could institute your punishment and basically force the company into bankruptcy, punishing the good people along with the bad. The good people would have to find new jobs at other companies, if they can, and suffer financial burden while they're searching. But more crucially the bad people would scatter to other companies, free to try to cheat again in other industries.
I'd rather do what's going on here - charge the bad people and fine them or jail them. Give the bad people still out there something to think about if they're considering cheating. Give the good people remaining at VW a chance to salvage the company and turn it into something good. The corporate veil should insulate individuals from liability against financial losses and unintentional harm. But if you knowingly commit a crime or cause the company to commit a crime while working at a corporation, you should personally be criminally liable.
Sony did the same thing. And when they got hacked, all their passwords were revealed to the world too.
If you're gonna store your passwords locally, it needs to be encrypted with a single master password which you never write down.
In terms of energy efficiency, EVs are only about 30% more efficient than an ICE.
30%*92.5% = 27.8% efficient.
50%*98%*80%*D*92.5% = 36.3% * D, where D = discharge efficiency
So all other things being the same, the energy consumption of an EV on an electrical grid mostly powered by fossil fuel plants is 36.3%/27.8% = 31% less at best. If the discharge efficiency of the battery is 80%, then the EV is just 4% more energy efficient than an ICE. (I'm including this because the last time I posted this, someone who obviously hadn't done the math incorrectly claimed EVs were 4-5x more efficient and his misinformation got modded up.)
The reason EVs are cheaper to operate than ICEs is mostly because the coal used to generate electricity costs about 1/10th what gasoline does per MJ.
The EPA MPGe figures only factor in energy efficiency from battery to wheels. That is, what your mileage would be if your batteries magically recharged overnight without plugging into anything. They have to do this because it's the only way they can rate EVs with a single "mileage" number nationwide. Electrical power generation varies depending on where you live, so they can't factor in generation losses into the MPGe figure. But because it's missing the electricity generation losses, it's not directly comparable to ICE MPG like may people seem to think.
Pets emit CO2, plants absorb CO2 to form cellulose, cows eat cellulose, pets eat cows. The only way you can change CO2 levels via this cycle is if the ratio of CO2 consumers (plants) to CO2 emitters (animals) changes appreciably. It's self-stabilizing because if excess CO2 is emitted, it encourages more plant growth. If CO2 levels drop, it discourages plant growth.
Climate change due to CO2 happens because we're digging up carbon which is buried deep underground, converting it to CO2 by burning it, and releasing it into the atmosphere. This is increasing atmospheric CO2 levels far faster than new plants can remove it (and even if they remove it, it mostly gets released again as the dead plant is decomposes or is eaten). That buried carbon (oil, coal, gas) comes from ancient plants which died and were buried. Hence the term "fossil" fuels. They removed the CO2 from an atmosphere which had almost no oxygen and was very high in CO2, eventually converting it into the (relatively) oxygen-rich atmosphere we enjoy today. So burning fossil fuels drives the atmosphere back towards that ancient state where only plants could live and animals couldn't.
This whole "study" is part of a disturbing trend I'm seeing where people (either deliberately or ignorantly) analyze only part of the system to try to make something look good or bad, instead of properly analyzing the entire system. e.g. So-called zero emissions vehicles, which aren't really zero emissions. They just move the emissions from the tailpipe to the power plant which generates the electricity or hydrogen. Since their overall energy efficiency is only about 30% better than that of ICE vehicles (their operating cost is lower because coal is about 10x cheaper than gasoline per MJ), they're still causing a lot of CO2 emissions as opposed to carpooling or public transportation.
I remember in the 1990s when this new picture format called JPEG was being tested. I downloaded it and tried it out. It took a minute to decode a 640x480 picture in 24-bit color on my PC, compared to about 2 seconds for a GIF of the same resolution (albeit 8-bit). It took way too long on computers at the time, but the picture was beautiful and I knew computers would become fast enough that this was the future.
Same thing with encryption. Old encryption standards typically aren't retired because they've been cracked. They're retired because a brute force attack against them used to take centuries or millenia, but computers have become fast enough that a brute force attack now takes only days or hours.
MPEG2 with its horrible compression ratio became the standard for DVDs because at the time MPEG4 took too much processing power to be economically added to every DVD player. The same is going to be true for these newer video codecs. Initially they'll be computationally expensive, but within a few years they'll be tolerable. And after a decade it'll be trivial and we'll be looking towards replacing them with a new codec which takes advantage of more powerful modern hardware.
You're trying to understand this from the perspective of an employee, not a business owner. Rich people and rich corporations don't "create jobs" in some cause and effect manner. It's a self-sustaining cycle (as long as the business model works and growth continues). They become rich(er) as a result of the jobs they've created, and becoming richer allows them to create more jobs, which in turn allows them to become richer yet.
To an employed individual, reduced taxes equals more take-home pay (more "profit"). So it's easy to understand your misconception. But to a business owner, the best way to increase your take-home pay (profit) is not by taking home the money saved due to a tax cut. It's from reinvesting that saved money into the business so your business can grow. That reinvestment is what creates more jobs (which in turn creates more profit, meaning more take-home pay). The only rich people who want a tax cut for the sake of a tax cut are people who've inherited their wealth and don't know how to run a business. Any successful business owner would rather take the money from a tax cut and reinvest it in the business (turning it into more money and also incidentally creating more jobs), rather than keeping it for themselves and using it on hookers and blow.
That's why all the arguments that rich people want to cut taxes so they can keep more for themselves are wrong. That's the last thing any rich person who runs a successful business would want to do with extra money from a tax cut. They would rather reinvest it in their business (creating more jobs) and grow it into even more money.
Since you want to make it political, the key point Democrats seem to miss is that it doesn't matter where from the economy you extract taxes. Whether you tax income, sales, business transactions (VAT), or business profits, the end result is the same - money transferred away from people's control to the government's control. Corporations are paper entities - basically a line drawn around a group of people (employees, owners) acting as one entity. The corporation by itself doesn't produce anything - the people it represents do. As such, a tax on a corporation is a tax on those people (and their customers). The government is not gaining any extra revenue by taxing corporations. The corporation, being a paper entity, just passes those taxes on to employees (lower wages), owners (lower dividends), and customers (higher prices).
This is why most taxes and tax cuts don't work like their proponents think it will. Aside from localized effects (a tax on almonds but not pistachios will result in almond sales falling relative to pistachios), taxes don't really affect the economy as a whole (increase in sales of other foods will balance out the decrease in almond sales). Only the overall tax rate affects the economy. Each person generates a certain amount of productivity, and the economy as a whole is the sum total of those persons' productivity. The overall tax rate is the percentage of that productivity which is shifted to the government's control.
Once you realize this, you realize it's insanely stupid to tax every little thing like our government currently does. Taxes should be consolidated into just one or two major things to make them easy to collect (if you believe in progressive taxation, the obvious choice is income tax), plus a few behavior modification taxes (e.g. property taxes to encourage people to find a profitable use for land or sell to someone who will, rather than use it unproductively). Elim
The problem is their cashflow is mixed together with government incentives influencing buyers, and selling ZEV credits to other car manufacturers. It's not at all clear that Tesla's long-term investments actually yield a self-sustainable business model without these external factors. Both have to end at some point.
We need to put an end to climate change denial - by environmentalists. Their advocacy of renewables as the only solution to climate change is based on there being just the right amount of climate change. Enough for us to have to abandon fossil fuels, but not enough that we have to do it immediately thereby leaving us enough time to develop renewable technologies.*
The projections are growing more and more dire. Environmentalists need to stop using climate change as a means to advance their renewables agenda, thereby putting the survival of humanity (and a bunch of animal species) at risk. We need to phase out fossil fuels ASAP and switch over to the only power generation technology available which can provide enough base load cheaply enough to satisfy our modern needs - nuclear.
Once we've switched to nuclear and have arrested global warming, then we can work on developing renewables. And as renewables improve in scalability, come down in cost, and battery technology improves allowing us to even out time-variances in renewable production, then we can start using renewables to phase out nuclear plants. Their current tactic of blocking nuclear power, thereby leaving fossil fuels and renewables as our only choices, is literally playing chicken with the survival of the human race. It's like being on a sinking ship but preventing anyone from using the life rafts, insisting that the only solution is that everyone needs to learn how to swim in the short time we have.
*(This is why a lot of climate change deniers don't believe environmentalists about climate change. They figure if environmentalists really believed climate change threatened our existence, they wouldn't be advocating half measures which will take decades to develop and implement. They'd be advocating eliminating fossil fuels immediately, without caring what replaces it short-term as long as it doesn't emit CO2. But since they are opposed to nuclear, climate change deniers logically reason that the environmentalists are lying about climate change.)
v1^2 - v0^2 = 2ad
a = (v1^2 - v0^2) / 2d
v0 = 0
v1 = 192 MPH
d = 300 meters
a = (192 MPH)^2 / (2 * 300 meters) = 12.28 m/s^2
= 1.25 g
arctan (1.25 g / 1 g) = 51.3 degrees
That's gonna be trippy riding inside. Since there are no windows, you only have the apparent direction of gravity (acceleration) to determine "up". It's going to feel like you're in a plane climbing up at a 51 degree angle. That is, anyone trying to stand while this is going on is going to be leaned forward at 51 degrees relative to vertical at rest. (I'll add that the earlier test to 69 MPH in 30 meters is 1.68g, giving an apparent inclination of 58 degrees.)
That's true for landlines. But for wireless, there's a fixed limit on the amount of bandwidth available to a carrier at any given location. It's determined by the amount of frequency spectrum they're authorized to broadcast on, and how much data the technology (3G, 4G, etc.) can squeeze into that spectrum. Once they hit that cap, it's impossible to increase total bandwidth, short of the FCC auctioning off more spectrum (and users buying new phones which can use that new spectrum), or new broadcast standards (e.g. 5G) being made so new equipment can be rolled out allowing more data over the same frequency bandwidth.
There's also the complication that usage is bursty and people move around. So one tower may be capped out at max bandwidth while neighboring towers have plenty of unused bandwidth. On a cable Internet network, the cable operator can resubnet to better balance the load throughout its network, maximizing overall bandwidth. But for wireless, there's nothing you can do because technology doesn't yet allow towers cells to overlap without interfering with each other. (Beamforming and directional transmission would allow this, so we may be able to exceed the Shannon limit in the near future by virtue of the bandwidth no longer being shared when transmissions are directional.)
Uber has total control the market (of people using the Uber app). They implemented a stupid pricing algorithm which is easy to game by drivers logging off. Rider wait time would be a better measure, since a driver deliberately withholding rides to make riders wait more would mean the driver gives fewer rides per day thus making less money.
A deregulated market would be a craigslist-type site where people wanting rides post requests. Anybody wanting to give them a ride places a bid (if they're first), or places a lower bid than the previous bid. The rider selects a winning bid after they're tired of waiting for more bids to lower the price. Lots of drivers bidding each rider within x minutes of their request means the price goes down, few drivers bidding on each rider means price goes up. Riders willing to wait for a ride pay less, riders in a hurry pay more.
In a deregulated market, the price adjusts naturally in response to real fluctuations in supply and demand. In Uber's market, their algorithm sets the price, apparently based on an easily spoofed measure of supply.
This is something I really have to commend the optical disk makers for. The newest Bluray drives can still read DVDs and CDs. Heck, most of them can still burn CD-Rs.
My master's thesis is stored on a Zip disk in some box in my garage. So is the Zip drive, but it didn't work when I switched my archival storage to CD-Rs a couple decades ago. OTOH those early CD-Rs are mostly still readable.
I'd say that's more an example of how effective the MPAA/RIAA have been at brainwashing people into thinking that they should have to pay for every movie/TV show they watch and every song they hear. Because if you don't, it's piracy!
When I was moving to my new house, my millennial cousin came with me to the moving van rental store. It was a hot day, so on the drive home he complained that the van didn't have air conditioning. I told him to open the window. He fiddled around with his door for a minute, then declared "The windows in this van don't open." I had to explain how to roll down the window with the hand crank. He'd never been in a car without power windows.
So basically you're ok with paying $5 more per item for hassle-free returns.
Newegg Premier is just $50/yr. It gives you expedited shipping, free returns for any reason (Amazon charges you return shipping if there's nothing wrong with the item), no restocking fee, and your friends and family can use your membership as well. By your metric, if you and your friends/family could potentially buy more than 10 items per year from Newegg, this is a better deal than Amazon.
A lot of apps don't even need to be apps. They worked fine as a website, but the company wants you to use their app instead so they can better track you. Now multiply that by the 20-50 sites you frequently visit. One web browser with 20-50 bookmarks, vs. 20-50 apps at 5-300 MB each.
LinkedIn is a great example. Push content (notification of contact request) worked fine over email, and could even be sent as a SMS. Pull content works fine via their web portal. Web forums which try to get you to install their app with an annoying popup whenever you visit the site on a mobile device are another example. Sites like forums, where all the heavy lifting is done server-side, belong in a web browser. Unless there's something that needs to run locally on the phone/tablet, there is no reason for the app to exist.
Fix your website so it'll scale properly to the smaller screen space (but higher resolution) of a phone or tablet. Yes your web designer will probably cry, but it's their own damn fault. The whole purpose of the web was to transmit content but leave rendering up to the browser so it could display the content in a manner most suitable for the display device. It wasn't supposed to be a mechanism for designers to force their idea of a perfect graphic design (which doesn't even render properly in certain cases) onto everyone.
To be fair, Google has been pretty good about keeping their ads unobtrusive. If this coalition publishes a standard for acceptable ads which any advertiser can follow, and Chrome's ad blocker adheres to that standard, then I don't really see a problem if most or all of Google's ads also adhere to the standard and thus aren't blocked.
I've had to resort to a strict ad blocker (uBlock Origin), but I'd really like to support the sites I like by allowing their ads through. But it seems every time I try that, I get bombarded with obnoxious or intrusive ads which force me to block them again. I think Google may be on to something. Blocking ads on a site-by-site basis doesn't give advertisers any incentive to clean up their ads since they don't really control the sites where the ads show up. But blocking ads on the basis of how intrusive they are creates a clear incentive for advertisers to move away from obnoxious ads.
The point and shoots and DSLRs take better pictures because they use larger sensors. Most phone camera sensors are 1/4" or smaller. The P&S sensors have several times the area. The DSLR and mirrorless sensors have several tens of times the area. More area means better low light sensitivity, better action shots, more capability to stop down before diffraction begins to blur the image, and (due to geometry) a narrower focal plane (good for generating bokeh in portraiture, bad for shooting close-ups). It also means you need larger lenses, which are heavier and more expensive.
Not really true. A bad camera will limit a talented photographer, but won't prevent his talent from shining through. Back in the film days, one of the principal photographers for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition would show up at shoots with a little Fuji point and shoot camera with a fixed 35mm lens (one of their first with an aspherical element). He said he used to use a DSLR, but as he got older his eyes got worse he was having a hard time focusing the DSLR. So he used the Fuji. Its autofocus was almost always spot on, the lens was very sharp across the frame, and the shots were taken in sunlight so he could use high resolution film which could be cropped down to appear the same as a telephoto. It was weird seeing a professional photographer conducting a shoot with a P&S camera, but Sports Illustrated couldn't argue with the results and published them.
You seem to think you can just cut and paste portions of an in-focus and out-of-focus image together to generate a duplicate of a real bokeh from a lens. You can't.
Bokeh is what's called a point spread function of the lens when out of focus. If there's only a point light source in the image against a dark background, and you take a picture of it out of focus, that's the PSF for that lens. When you shoot a portrait, the person's face is in focus, and the lens applies the PSF to everything ithat's out of focus (the background) to generate bokeh.
If you are correct that the iPhone is simulating bokeh by shooting two pictures (one in focus, one out of focus), then that's actually worse than computational bokeh. The out-of-focus picture will also apply the PSF to everything - including the person's face. The bokeh from the person's face will overlap and combine with the background bokeh. If you're taking a portrait of a caucasian face against a dark background, this will cause a light-colored halo (face bokeh whose width is the radius of the PSF) around the face that spills over into the background bokeh. A DSLR OTOH will have completely dark bokeh with no halo because only the dark background is being blurred to generate bokeh. The face is in sharp focus so there's no spillover of blurred light skin into the background.
You'll run into this problem if you try to add simulated bokeh in Photoshop. Unless the background and subject are a similar color and brightness, you'll end up with a halo around the person's face. Instead of a quick blur filter on a second layer and "painting" the in-focus head back in with a mask, you end up having to mask the in-focus parts first. Then you apply the blur filter with the masked parts removed from the layer, then you can paint the blurred parts over the background.
Computational bokeh would generate something approximating the DSLR shot. It would start with a completely in-focus image, determine which parts should be in focus (based on AI or by using two lenses to determine distance in each point of the image). Use that as a mask as in my Photoshop explanation, and blur only the background parts of the photo. Apple's bread and butter customers have included photographers for over 3 decades now. They would've immediately spotted and complained about the fake bokeh halos if the method you described was what Apple is using. I strongly suspect you don't know what you're talking about, and that Apple is using the two lenses to calculate rudimentary depth info a la the Xbox Kinect.
The shots from the Facebook post appear to back this up. Not only are there no halos, but the PSF is not fixed in diameter like you'd get from your simulated bokeh method. Stuff that is out-of-focus but closer in distance to the subject (back of boy's shirt, chair behind girl's arm) is blurred less than stuff far in the background. Just like a real lens, the PSF becomes bigger the further something is from the focal plane. You can only simulate this if you can estimate the distance to different things in the photo.
I hardly think it's that nefarious. What is the best scale in which to apply the same set of economic rules (laws)? A million people (city-sized)? Tens of millions (country-sized)? Hundreds of millions (U.S. or EU sized)? The entire world? Too small and you lose out because of unnecessary bureaucracy (duplicated work, extra work to comply with similar but slightly different regulations). Too big and you lose out because of inability to make exceptions for deviations in local conditions.
Nobody really knows what the best regulatory size is. Everyone likes to think they do, but nobody really does. Heck, there might not even be a best single best size for the entire world.
To find out what is the best regulatory size, you have to actually try different sizes. Sometimes the trial will fail and it'll become apparent the original size was better. Sometimes the trial will succeed and those people will have found a better size (at least for themselves). There's no way to know without trying. Some of the greatest breakthroughs in exploration and technological progress have occurred because people had the courage to try their own idea despite the mocking of others. Likewise, a lot of people have gotten themselves killed because they didn't heed the warnings of others. There's no universal right answer here. You have to take risks if you wish to find greater rewards.
There are all kinds of people out there. I remember when the final Harry Potter book came out (disclaimer: I am not a HP fan), there were people inserting spoilers randomly all over the web (Snape dies) just to ruin it for HP fans who hadn't yet read the book but were continuing with their regular non-HP activities online.
Anyway, the current and previous GoT seasons are following a common story plot-line trope (break down the hero/heroine until all hope seems to be lost, before they manage to pull out a victory) and have become predictable. Which is kinda disappointing considering a lot of what made previous seasons fun was because they subverted such tropes (e.g. killing off the "obvious" hero at the Red Wedding). So I'm not really sure what's to be gained by spoiling it, both for fans and for people who want to ruin it for fans (unless the end of the story is that the bad guy wins).
They're pointing out that it's been done before because when Apple did do something first and other companies followed up with the same or similar features on their products, the chorus of Apple fans declared that they were copying Apple, that they were followers not innovators, and that they should be sued to stop them from copying. You can't have it both ways. You can't argue that when other companies do it it's copying, but when Apple does it it's properly implementing a feature.
The argument by most anti-Apple people has been that the industry thrives on lifting features that competitors introduce, and improving on them. That is how progress is made. Apple tried to halt progress by suing anyone who introduced anything remotely similar to the iPhone, which is what earned them the hatred of a large segment of slashdot. Reading/listening to Steve Jobs' talks on the matter, it's pretty clear that just because he happened to introduce the first successful touchscreen-only smartphone (not the first), he felt that the entire market should belong to him alone, and that anyone else who introduced something similar (when his wasn't even the first) should be sued. That attitude trickled down to the legion of Apple fans. It's been incredibly frustrating arguing against them, trying to point out that the well being of society via technological progress outweighs the well being of a single company.
Anyway, we're glad you're now on board, and believe that it's OK for companies to copy each other's ideas if they improve on them (or change them in ways that they hope will be an improvement). Please help us out and tell the remaining Apple fans to shut up next time they start talking about companies copying Apple.
P.S. The iPod became the best-selling MP3 player because Apple nailed how to sync your music collection between your computer and the MP3 player. If you ever owned one of the earlier MP3 players, this process was a nightmare. Even copying your music folder from your computer straight to the MP3 player's storage wouldn't work because the MP3 player would re-organize your music according to some internal algorithm which seemed to ignore folders and existing playlists. And don't even get me started on players like Sony's which insisted on re-encoding your music into some proprietary format after doing an ownership check (to enforce copyright) before it would allow you to copy it to the MP3 player. "It just works" for managing playlists was exactly what MP3 players needed. You'll note that the "No wireless, less space than a Nomad" issues were addressed in later iPods, indicating that those were legitimate criticisms.
Flash was not intended to be the de facto scripting language for the web. Repeat: Flash was never intended to bring scripting to websites.
Flash was designed to do one simple thing: Allowing animators to transmit animated movies over low-bandwidth dial-up connections. (YouTube version if you don't have Flash). Instead of transmitting compressed video, it would transmit a background, sprites, and instructions for moving, rotating, zooming, and animating the sprites against the background according to a timed script. It's still used for this purpose today.
To understand why Flash took over the web, you have to go back to the mid-90s. The web had just become mainstream, and the new population of web designers were pushing the envelope of HTML's capabilities. They sorely wanted to be able to add animation (other than the ridiculous blink tag), audio, and scripting so visitors could do things other than just view static content. The W3C (organization setting HTML standards) refused. So web designers looked elsewhere, and lo and behold they found Flash. It did most everything they wanted. But because it was only designed to play animations, not run scripted websites, security was never considered in the design. But with the W3C refusing to add these capabilities to HTML (they wouldn't for over 15 years), web designers all began using Flash on their websites. It soon became a de facto web standard, and everything went downhill from there.
I don't give a whit about Flash websites. I hated them when they first appeared, I still hate them now. Nothing would make me happier than if they all disappeared forever. But there's a huge amount of artistic and programming content out there written for Flash (I have a folder full of a few Flash movies, early zombie games, and old arcade game clones). It would be incredibly short-sighted to consign these locally run Flash animations and games to the dust bin because I hated Flash websites.
If you don't like how they look, unscrew the wall plate, shove the cable into the wall, and replace the wall plate with a blank one. That's a helluva lot cheaper and less labor-intensive than pulling the cable out.