Meanwhile, the city of London has tried putting pads on their lamp posts "to soften the blow for distracted walkers."
In response to American football players being injured, they developed better helmet technology to soften the blow. This resulted in football players hitting each other harder, which we now suspect has led to endemic CTE among football players.
The more effective solution would be to electrify the lamp posts so they give you a safe but unpleasant shock if you walk into them (since apparently the blow isn't enough to discourage people from not watching where they are going). OTOH, if you wish to accept that people are going to text while on the sidewalk but wish to avoid collisions, the better solution is a moving walkway.
The EV market isn't growing because people want EVs. It's growing because of massive goverment subsidies and CARB regulations requiring a certain percentage of automaker's sales be ZEV (zero emissions vehicles). EVs are currently the only viable ZEV, although Toyota has sold a few hydrogen vehicles (friend of mine has one - it too has massive subsidies). If you can't meet the ZEV percentage, you get banned from selling vehicles in California. And since about a dozen states automatically adopt CARB's rules (including New York), you end up banned from selling cars to more than a third of the U.S. population.
So every automaker makes and sells EVs regardless of whether or not it's a good idea. (Or buys ZEV credits from a manufacturer who sells excess EVs, like Tesla - this is what keeps Tesla afloat). This is the most massive experimental social engineering program I've seen in my lifetime. We don't yet know if EVs are the right solution to clean energy for transportation, but people in government have decided that it is and are mandating them. You see, EVs (and hydrogen vehicles) aren't truly zero emissions. The energy to push these vehicles forward has to come from somewhere. EVs don't eliminate pollution, they merely transfer the pollution production to a power plant somewhere. So as long as we're generating electricity from fossil fuels, EVs will be powered by fossil fuels.
There is one technology which truly is zero emissions - ethanol. It's a closed cycle. Use plants to gather solar energy, they extract raw materials from the atmosphere and use sunlight to convert it into sugars and starches, use bacteria to ferment it into alcohol, burn alcohol in a vehicle for energy releasing its constituents back into the atmosphere, which plants extract to form more sugars and starches. Brazil produces ethanol (using cane sugar) for about 83 cents/gallon, which puts it at about the same price per mile as EVs powered by coal-generated electricity (3.6 cents/mile). And the best part is, you don't need to build new infrastructure. The existing gas stations and pump technology works just fine as ethanol stations. And internal combustion engines can run ethanol with slight modifications.
Unfortunately, (1) because burning ethanol releases CO2, CARB doesn't classify them as a ZEV even though unlike fossil fuels, that CO2 came from live plants and will be re-used by live plants. And (2) the ethanol program in the U.S. got hijacked by the corn industry. Corn is not ideal for ethanol production at our latitude (sugar beets are). But to prevent starvation we subsidize corn to make sure there's an excess supply. It's always a challenge to get rid of the excess corn - foreign aid, feed for cattle, high fructose corn syrup. And in the 1970s someone came up with the idea of converting it to ethanol. That's a great way to get rid of excess corn - its production costs are a sunk cost so you're not getting it back. Better to use the corn for something rather than let it rot in silos feeding rodents. But the corn industry took over the program and now we're wasting money growing corn for the express purpose of converting it to ethanol. The result is ethanol fuel which is more expensive than electricity and in some cases more expensive than gasoline per mile. What we should be doing is researching sugar beets for ethanol production, or how to modify sugar cane so it'll grow at our latitudes, or how to convert cellulose into sugar (it's basically a bunch of sugar molecules glued together end-to-end making it hard for animals to break apart into sugar, though a few bacteria have figured out how).
Kinda reminds me of the 1980s when people were stealing the logo from the front of Hondas. Owners would go to the dealer to get a replacement and balk when they found out it cost an outrageous amount. Eventually they'd hear from their friend that he knew someone who knew someone who could get a replacement for cheap. That person would steal the Honda logo from another car, thereby continuing a self-perpetuating stolen goods market.
(In case the point is not clear, the key to reducing theft for parts is to make replacement parts available from third parties for cheap. If the manufacturer is the only source, they'll charge an outrageous amount because they have a monopoly, thereby creating the incentive for the stolen parts market.)
Steve Jobs hated paying dividends (profit which is supposed to go to stockholders). Apple stopped paying dividends when Jobs was re-hired in 1995, and started paying them again shortly after his death in 2012. The $200+ billion in cash Apple has in the bank almost exactly equals how much it should have paid out in dividends during Jobs' reign. So I suspect what happened is the board complied with Jobs' wish not to pay dividends to stockholders, but only on the condition that they bank it so they could decide how to use it later (including possibly paying it out to future stockholders).
So basically it's pocket change because they didn't pay their owners for close to 20 years. I'd have a lot of money in the bank too if I didn't have to make payments on my home and car loan for 20 years. (Though to be fair, Google doesn't pay dividends either.)
What makes you think batteries don't need to be cooled? While EVs don't need as much cooling air as an ICE, they still need some air intake since the most obvious source (underneath) is blocked by a thick metal plate to protect it from being punctured by road debris. (Yes you can use it as a heat sink, but then you're only disseminating heat to a two dimensional layer of air contacting the plate, instead of a volume of air.) And you want a duct anyway so you can put a fan in it to force air through when the car is stopped or traveling too slowly but the batteries are overheating.
So if you upgrade to a newer Roomba or have to swap it out under warranty, the replacement doesn't have to learn the floor layout from scratch. I'm not saying it's vital, but it does serve a useful function. The technically competent among us would probably rather have it upload the layout to our NAS. But for the 95% who are technically illiterate, the "it just works" appeal of cloud storage probably is much more attractive.
To date five manufacturers have certified that their eclipse glasses and handheld solar viewers meet the ISO 12312-2 international standard for such products: American Paper Optics, Baader Planetarium (AstroSolar Silver/Gold film only), Rainbow Symphony, Thousand Oaks Optical, and TSE 17
I'm leading a party of 20 family and friends, and I bought mine from Rainbow Symphony a year ago. I thought of making my own with a sheet like yours, cardboard, and glue, but the pre-made glasses were about 75 cents each in bulk (again, this was a year ago) so I just bought them. My camera and telescope have Baader solar film filters (over the front).
At this late stage in the game though, I wouldn't be surprised if some Chinese company were making substandard knockoffs with fake printing claiming to have been manufactured by one of these companies, to try to make money with no concern about the eyesight of a few Americans. No way in hell I would trust anything sold on eBay, and even stuff shipped from Amazon is suspect (they mix their inventory with those of third party sellers). Use the pinhole projection method other posts have described.
The problem stems from media articles which used the term "drop-out" to describe to people who quit college because they didn't need to finish it. "Drop-out" in common usage refers to someone who quit college or high school because they were incapable of or unwilling to finish it, which is why it has a slight negative connotation. Unfortunately, some journalists abused this ambiguity to try to spice up their articles with a subversion of the expectation of the term, and as a result they have helped create a society which believes getting an education isn't really that important.
TFA that the submitter linked to is a junk article written by someone who didn't understand how the Coast Guard works and assumed "calls" meant phone calls. It's so badly written the only reason I can think of for someone to use it in a submission is to drive page clicks for ad revenue. TFA links to the actual article which is much more informative and better written, although it crucially never clarifies what type of "calls" the Coast Guard responds to.
VHF channel 16 is a dedicated marine emergency frequency around the world. In U.S. waters, the US Coast Guard monitors this channel 24/7 and responds to any mayday calls. So the "calls" here are VHF radio calls, not phone calls. A mayday call is supposed to identify your vessel, provide a location, state the problem, and how many people are aboard your vessel, in that order. But things rarely go the way they're supposed to and lots of mayday calls are partial or missing crucial information. The USCG has to assume these are real and the boat sank or radio died before complete information could be broadcast, and deploy search and rescue assets.
Unfortunately there is no universal caller ID on VHF radios. Some of the newer ones will automatically identify your vessel and/or provide your location, but most VHF radios used by recreational boaters are old analog units which simply broadcast only what you say into them. So the only thing the USCG frequently gets is a voice in the RF ether claiming people are in danger of dying. (The USCG will also respond to a cell phone call if it claims to be from a boat close enough to shore to get cell phone service, or if it's from someone reporting a vessel overdue based on a float plan that was filed before leaving.)
Despite its appeal among celebrities and public figures,, Twitter has struggled to sustain its closely watched user growth
So modify the product so it appeals to people other than celebrities and public figures. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple didn't become rich by tailoring their products to 1/10th of the 1%. The companies which make lots of money off tiny markets like celebrities and public figures sell very specialized and expensive products. e.g. Limousines. So Twitter needs to decide if they want to be a tool for the few and extremely wealthy, or for the masses, and redesign their product appropriately.
There are about 2.4 billion smartphone users in the world. One would assume most if not all of them have access to mobile (or WiFi) Internet since aside from side-loading, that's the only way to get apps onto the phone. And apps are what distinguishes a smartphone from a dumb phone.
The more interesting thing to me is that there are over 2 billion Facebook users, and you would assume there's a high correlation between that group and smartphone users. Yet only 1 billion of them choose to use Facebook's IM app on their phone.
Just because that's the only reason you can think of for banning smoking doesn't mean it's the reason everyone else wants to ban smoking. I'm one of those people who gets physically nauseous when there's cigarette smoke in the air. In the old days, if I entered a restaurant and there was too much cigarette smoke, I had to immediately leave and find a different restaurant. Flying (yes, they used to allow smoking in the sealed metal tubes with recirculated air that we call airplanes) was absolutely miserable, and it would take me about a day to recover (lotsa fun spending the first day of your vacation in bed in a hotel room trying to get to sleep to escape the nausea and headache)..
For me, banning smoking in public areas was about my freedom to enjoy public spaces that smokers were making near uninhabitable for me. I always likened smoking to urine. Urine is actually sterile so it's safer than cigarette smoke, but it smells pretty bad. How would you like it if I sprayed urine all over restaurants, hospitals, movie theaters, department stores, supermarkets, etc? That's what the world was like for me before smoking was banned in those places. If you want to spray that stuff inside your home and car, go right ahead. But your right to enjoy spraying it ends the moment it starts to impede my ability to live a normal life by visiting these places.
I actually don't have much problem with vaping. The smell is nowhere near as irritating as cigarette smoke, and I've yet to encounter any non-vaper complaining that it impedes their ability to go about life the way smoking did mine. I do dislike it when a vaper blows a big cloud of hard-to-avoid smoke which the wind will carry in my direction, but that's only because it'll take some years for the dangers (if any) of second-hand vaping smoke to be thoroughly studied. Until then, I'd prefer to err on the side of caution.
As for this study in particular, it was a survey so suffers from self-selection bias (people don't have to take the survey). Maybe smokers who were more serious about quitting were more likely to try alternatives like vaping to help wean themselves off, while the less-serious just tried to quit cold turkey and gave up after a few weeks. Surveys are a good way for finding trends to study further, but because of self-selection bias they never give the final word on a topic. To properly assess the results of the survey, someone will have to put together a study where a bunch of smokers wanting to quit are randomly assigned to different groups. Some try to quit on their own, some are told to quit cold turkey, some are given nicorette gum, some are given a placebo gum, some are told to use e-cigs, etc. Then the success rate at quitting for each of these groups needs to be compared. The random assignment eliminates self-selection bias.
A Pre-check application costs $85 and is good for 5 years. Not much different from a driver's license ($33 every 5 years in California). The price defers the cost of background inspections, fingerprinting, interviews, and other administrative costs. (If you're going to fly internationally, spring the extra $15 for Global Entry - that'll get you into the fast lanes at immigration. If you already have a NEXUS (Canada) or SENTRI (Mexico) card, you're already in Pre-check.)
If you're so destitute you can't afford $17/year, you probably shouldn't be traveling, much less flying.
Fact is, the people paying for Pre-check are subsidizing the people who aren't getting it. They're paying to have their background check done in advance, so as not to waste the time of TSA personnel at the airport. But they're still paying taxes to fund TSA for the people who don't have Pre-check. The proper way to pay for this would be to take the expense of TSA security and pay for it with a surcharge on every ticket sold, instead of via the general tax fund. Then people who get Pre-check should pay a reduced surcharge or no surcharge at all, to reflect the lowered cost to TSA due to their background already having been checked. But then you'd be complaining about how the government makes it cheaper to fly if you submit to their invasive pre-clearance background checks.
If vaccinations are not required, and your child dies of measles, then the parents blame bad luck. End of story.
If vaccinations are required, and your child dies of complications from the vaccine, then the parents don't blame bad luck. They blame the vaccine and the government for requiring the vaccine. Even if the child's odds of dying from measles without the vaccine were much higher than from complications due to the vaccine.
Somehow, we have to teach people that when it comes to probability-based policies (i.e. ones whose outcome cannot be predicted on an individual basis), the average result for the entire population is more important than a single result for an individual. Unfortunately, the way our news media works, an individual story is much more presentable and catchy (more likely to go viral) than statistics for the overall population. So individual outcomes have a disproportionate effect on what people think policy should be.
I'm reminded of Jan Lohr from United flight 232. She was a flight attendant, and when they were preparing for the crash landing, the parents of a lap child (a child who didn't have to pay for a ticket, and hence had no seat) asked her what to do. She quoted them airline policy - place the child underneath the seat in front like a carry-on bag. The parents survived, the child did not. Jan then started a decades-long quest to eliminate lap children from flights. Eventually (last year) the FAA turned her down. You see, as heartbreaking as the story of that one individual lap child is, statistically far more children die in car accidents than in plane crashes. So if the lap child policy convinces parents with young children to fly instead of drive, it actually saves more lives than that individual loss.
Put another way, our legal system allows parents of a child who dies from vaccine complications to directly pin the blame on the vaccine and sue them. Parents of a child who dies from a measles outbreak cannot directly pin the blame on Jenny McCarthy and sue her, even though she is just as culpable as the vaccine complication death. Our legal system views direct cause as more important than overall statistical effect.
The "fuel" price difference between an EV and ICE is almost entirely due to the price difference between coal and gasoline.
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.
Gasoline is about an order of magnitude more expensive than coal per unit of energy. This is why Hawaii has the highest electricity prices in the U.S. - they generate most of their electricity by burning oil, not coal.
This is what a lot of EV proponents seem to miss - EVs do not have zero emissions. All they do is shift the emissions from the tailpipe to an electrical power plant. If you then simultaneously eliminate the cheapest sources of electricity (coal and gas), the cost of EV "fuel" will go up. Likewise if every garage has an EV charging in it overnight, the overnight price of electricity will go up. (Also, the EPA's decision to base MPGe rating on battery capacity, although necessary to normalize for differences in how electricity is generated, completely cuts out inefficiencies at the power plant, transmission, and battery charging. It's like measuring ICE mileage starting with engine power output, instead of how much fuel was burned. So EV MPGe is not directly comparable to ICE MPG. From an energy efficiency standpoint, EVs use almost as many Joules per mile compared to ICE vehicles; it's tough to peg an exact comparison because most EVs use things like skinny low rolling resistance tires which typically aren't found on ICE vehicles.)
Brazil produced cane sugar ethanol for about 83 cents/gallon a decade ago. Ethanol contains about 79 MJ/gallon (66% of gasoline), so this works out to 1.05 cents/MJ.
Gasoline ICE: 35 MPG @ $3/gallon = $8.57 per 100 miles
EV: 30 kWh/100 miles @ 12 cents/kWh = $3.60 per 100 miles (ignores charging losses so actual cost is slightly higher)
Ethanol ICE:23 MPG (66% of gasoline) @ $0.83/gallon = $3.60 per 100 miles
So the story isn't over yet for ICE vehicles. Ethanol (produced from the right source, not corn) can potentially beat EVs in terms of fuel cost. But without the headaches of developing battery technology, having to haul a massive battery around, replacing existing gas station infrastructure, waiting 30 minutes for a supercharge, installing an overnight charger in your garage, figuring out a new way to implement road maintenance taxes. What's missing is a way to scale ethanol production up without dramatically impacting food production. If someone cracks how to produce ethanol from cellulose (all the weeds, brush, and spoiled vegetables which we currently throw away), then EVs are dead.
In terms of number of battery units produced, Tesla and GM are roundoff error compared to Toyota.
Tesla sells actual electric cars that people get in a waiting list years in advance to buy.
That tells you that there's something seriously wrong with the scalability of their production. (If you want to know what the problem is, Tesla relies on selling ZEV credits to other automakers to keep from going bankrupt. But other automakers only need a certain number of ZEV credits each year to comply with CARB regulations. So Tesla has to be careful not to produce too many ZEVs lest they cause the price of ZEV credits to plummet due to oversupply.)
I was trying to watch some of the archived shows that are available with my DirecTV Now account. Their 72-hour and on-demand playback features have been getting a back seat, and are still very unreliable.
Eventually I gave up and just went to a pirate site to watch the shows. WOW. The pirated shows happen to be commercial-free. An episode of a 30 minute sitcom is about 22 minutes. So 8 minutes - more than 25% of the playtime - is commercials. Some episodes are only about 20 minutes long, meaning 33% of the playtime is commercials.
I didn't remember there being this many commercials when I was a kid (I cut way back on my TV watching after high school). Sure enough, commercial time was less than 20% in the 1970s and 1980s. I may just continue to watch the shows on pirate sites. I've already paid for the licensing rights to view the shows, and the service I paid for is failing to deliver them. So by my reckoning it's not really piracy; I'm just doing what I have to to get what I paid for. If it happens to be commercial-free, so be it.
Yeah, the DEF (diesel exhaust fluid) technology using urea to reduce diesel NOx emissions is patented by Mercedes. So naturally the other diesel vehicle manufacturers would have to "collude" with Mercedes to license it.
The curious thing though is that the DEF usage rates are all over the place. I first noticed this when I had to rent a diesel Ram 3500 for some towing, and it used way more DEF than my personal vehicle (VW Touraeg). So out of curiosity, I looked into the DEF consumption rate for other 3.0 liter diesel engines.
VW Touareg - 5.3 gallon tank, 5 gallons DEF per 10k miles claimed, approx 5.5 gallons per 10k miles observed
Ram 3500 - 8 gallon tank, 11.4 gal per 10k miles observed. Though it got about 65% the MPG since it was a 6.2 liter engine, vs 3.0 liters for all the other vehicles. Normalizing for fuel consumption, it was about 7.4 gallons per 10k miles observed.
Jeep - 8 gallon tank, 8 gallons per 10k miles claimed
BMW - 6.1 gallon tank, 6.5 gallons per 10k miles claimed
Mercedes - 6.8 gallon tank, 4.4 gallons per 10k miles claimed
Notice that VW's and Mercedes' DEF use rates are lower than Dodge, Jeep, and BMW. And the two automakers thus far accused of cheating on diesel emissions are... VW and Mercedes.
Just wish they stored a price history for other stores besides Amazon. You can see a spike to $18.94 on Prime day. Now I'm curious if the other spikes correspond to other Amazon "sales".
You joke, but when a corporation screws up, you can sue it, you can quit buying their products, you can convince your friends to stop supporting it.
When the government screws up, you're stuck with it (short of revolution). In fact the way a lot of government union employment contracts are structured, you can't even fire the people responsible for the screwup.
I've never bought into the claim that all government is good and all corporations bad. Nor have I bought into the claim that all corporations are good and all government is bad. Both can do good things, both can do bad things. The trick is figuring out which things one tends to do better than the other, and giving the job to the more capable entity.
However, the measure, w has been gradually changed so that the number published as the "unemployment rate" no longer tells you how much "unemployment" there is.
I've bolded the important part. TFA makes no such claim, and in fact states that the same measure has been used for decades. If you have evidence that the definition of unemployment was changed to make the economy look better than it actually was, please present it. The argument TFA presents is that the economy has changed so that the definition no longer paints as clear a picture of the economy as it did in the past.
From a statistical perspective, as long as the definition and method of measurement remains consistent over time, it is useful data. It is even more useful when paired and analyzed together with slightly different measures like the inactivity rate as TFA does. But it's not a lie. It is data. Not everything in life has a clear-cut and straightforward definition. So you come up with a definition that is clear-cut and straightforward (and usually selected because it's easier to measure), and you use it to collect data. If you don't like the definition, you can come up with a different definition and collect data on it. But calling the data set you dislike a lie is nothing but an ad hominem attack.
I also find the title of TFA (and summary) highly suspect. The title claims the unemployment figures are very close to exposing the purported lie in the definition of "unemployment". But for that to actually happen, the unemployment rate would have to go negative.. That is, everyone who is looking for a job gets one. And a few people who don't want a job have one (how, I dunno - slavery?).
I'm all for educating people that the definition of "unemployment" is not as clear-cut as they might assume at first glance. But calling it an outright lie is nothing but grandstanding.
The cloud processing is done in software, using general purpose processors (like the CPU in your PC). The AI algorithm in these new processors (usually developed via machine learning) is done in hardware - chips with the algorithm baked into the transistor layout.
You want to do it in software on the cloud because cloud servers can be equipped with much more powerful processors, and you want your cloud server to also be able to handle other types of AI requests (e.g. voice recognition for digital assistants). You want to do it in hardware when it's done locally to reduce the cost and power consumption - same as how video decoding is done in hardware by the GPU on phones and streaming devices.
Blame the idiots hacking their firmware and using their routers irresponsibly (illegally).
First you have to understand why the FCC made the request to router manufacturers. Shortly after the FCC opened up the 5 GHz band for unlicensed use, terminal doppler weather radar was invented in response to several airliner crashes due to adverse weather conditions. Unfortunately, it relies on frequencies smack dab in the middle of the open 5 GHz band, so the FCC took the unusual step of revising their rules which opened up those frequencies
That's why most 5 GHz devices only support channels 36-48 and 149-165. The intermediate channels were reclassified as DFS - dynamic frequency selection. Open devices could use them, but if they detected weather radar in use they had to switch to a different channel. A few devices actually do this and check to see if weather radar is in use. Most manufacturers just took the easy way out and blocked out channels 50-144 entirely in the firmware.
DD-WRT supports DFS - it will change frequencies if it detects weather radar in use (at least it does on my hacked TP-Link). If you install third party firmware and use the 5 GHz band, do the responsible thing and enable this functionality if you're going to enable channels 50-144. Unfortunately, some idiots didn't do this, which caused the FCC to grow concerned about the impact of third party firmware on the effectiveness of TDWR. That's why the FCC made the request to router manufacturers. Not because they hated third party firmware, but out of concern for the safety of the flying public.
This is why we can't have nice things - a few idiots ruin it for everyone else. I had lots of fun with lawn darts as a kid, but we always treated the target area as if it were a shooting range. Here's an example of what happens to TDWR when an idiot blasts their router in the TDWR frequencies. The unauthorized broadcast shows up as a wedge-shaped area spanning a few degrees and extending to the edge of the radar image, completely obscuring any weather in the wedge.
And buying the router in Canada or Europe won't make any difference because those countries have the exact same restrictions on those TDWR frequencies. The only reason they're not being as aggressive as the FCC is because TDWR so far is mostly used at U.S. airports. Eventually most airports in the developed world are going to upgrade to it (or at least airports which frequently encounter bad weather). So the regulatory agencies in Canada, the EU, and most of the rest of the developed world are all going to be on the same page as the FCC once TDWR is rolled out in those countries.
"We had to go up to farmers' doors and say 'Hi, we're here from NASA, we're wondering if we can set up telescopes in your back pasture?'" one astronomer told Popular Science. "More often than not people were like 'that sounds awesome, sure, we'll help out!'"
That's what we used to do back in the old days when you wanted to set up your telescope in some rural area, away from the city lights, for a night's viewing. Ask for and get permission, and maybe have a pleasant conversation with a farmer who thinks what you're doing is really cool.
Nowadays people just fly their drone over someone's property unannounced, then act like they're the one whose rights were violated when the property owner shoots it down.
No, the current response is the correct one. There are lots of companies out there which will take a bug report, fix the bug, and thank you. Some will even pay you a bounty.
Exploiting the f**k out of any bug you find is the equivalent of lynching the first black person you see because a black guy robbed the local convenience store. The correct response is to single out the responsible criminal / stupid company for reprisal. Like is currently happening to this company.
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In response to American football players being injured, they developed better helmet technology to soften the blow. This resulted in football players hitting each other harder, which we now suspect has led to endemic CTE among football players.
The more effective solution would be to electrify the lamp posts so they give you a safe but unpleasant shock if you walk into them (since apparently the blow isn't enough to discourage people from not watching where they are going). OTOH, if you wish to accept that people are going to text while on the sidewalk but wish to avoid collisions, the better solution is a moving walkway.
The EV market isn't growing because people want EVs. It's growing because of massive goverment subsidies and CARB regulations requiring a certain percentage of automaker's sales be ZEV (zero emissions vehicles). EVs are currently the only viable ZEV, although Toyota has sold a few hydrogen vehicles (friend of mine has one - it too has massive subsidies). If you can't meet the ZEV percentage, you get banned from selling vehicles in California. And since about a dozen states automatically adopt CARB's rules (including New York), you end up banned from selling cars to more than a third of the U.S. population.
So every automaker makes and sells EVs regardless of whether or not it's a good idea. (Or buys ZEV credits from a manufacturer who sells excess EVs, like Tesla - this is what keeps Tesla afloat). This is the most massive experimental social engineering program I've seen in my lifetime. We don't yet know if EVs are the right solution to clean energy for transportation, but people in government have decided that it is and are mandating them. You see, EVs (and hydrogen vehicles) aren't truly zero emissions. The energy to push these vehicles forward has to come from somewhere. EVs don't eliminate pollution, they merely transfer the pollution production to a power plant somewhere. So as long as we're generating electricity from fossil fuels, EVs will be powered by fossil fuels.
There is one technology which truly is zero emissions - ethanol. It's a closed cycle. Use plants to gather solar energy, they extract raw materials from the atmosphere and use sunlight to convert it into sugars and starches, use bacteria to ferment it into alcohol, burn alcohol in a vehicle for energy releasing its constituents back into the atmosphere, which plants extract to form more sugars and starches. Brazil produces ethanol (using cane sugar) for about 83 cents/gallon, which puts it at about the same price per mile as EVs powered by coal-generated electricity (3.6 cents/mile). And the best part is, you don't need to build new infrastructure. The existing gas stations and pump technology works just fine as ethanol stations. And internal combustion engines can run ethanol with slight modifications.
Unfortunately, (1) because burning ethanol releases CO2, CARB doesn't classify them as a ZEV even though unlike fossil fuels, that CO2 came from live plants and will be re-used by live plants. And (2) the ethanol program in the U.S. got hijacked by the corn industry. Corn is not ideal for ethanol production at our latitude (sugar beets are). But to prevent starvation we subsidize corn to make sure there's an excess supply. It's always a challenge to get rid of the excess corn - foreign aid, feed for cattle, high fructose corn syrup. And in the 1970s someone came up with the idea of converting it to ethanol. That's a great way to get rid of excess corn - its production costs are a sunk cost so you're not getting it back. Better to use the corn for something rather than let it rot in silos feeding rodents. But the corn industry took over the program and now we're wasting money growing corn for the express purpose of converting it to ethanol. The result is ethanol fuel which is more expensive than electricity and in some cases more expensive than gasoline per mile. What we should be doing is researching sugar beets for ethanol production, or how to modify sugar cane so it'll grow at our latitudes, or how to convert cellulose into sugar (it's basically a bunch of sugar molecules glued together end-to-end making it hard for animals to break apart into sugar, though a few bacteria have figured out how).
Kinda reminds me of the 1980s when people were stealing the logo from the front of Hondas. Owners would go to the dealer to get a replacement and balk when they found out it cost an outrageous amount. Eventually they'd hear from their friend that he knew someone who knew someone who could get a replacement for cheap. That person would steal the Honda logo from another car, thereby continuing a self-perpetuating stolen goods market.
(In case the point is not clear, the key to reducing theft for parts is to make replacement parts available from third parties for cheap. If the manufacturer is the only source, they'll charge an outrageous amount because they have a monopoly, thereby creating the incentive for the stolen parts market.)
Steve Jobs hated paying dividends (profit which is supposed to go to stockholders). Apple stopped paying dividends when Jobs was re-hired in 1995, and started paying them again shortly after his death in 2012. The $200+ billion in cash Apple has in the bank almost exactly equals how much it should have paid out in dividends during Jobs' reign. So I suspect what happened is the board complied with Jobs' wish not to pay dividends to stockholders, but only on the condition that they bank it so they could decide how to use it later (including possibly paying it out to future stockholders).
So basically it's pocket change because they didn't pay their owners for close to 20 years. I'd have a lot of money in the bank too if I didn't have to make payments on my home and car loan for 20 years. (Though to be fair, Google doesn't pay dividends either.)
What makes you think batteries don't need to be cooled? While EVs don't need as much cooling air as an ICE, they still need some air intake since the most obvious source (underneath) is blocked by a thick metal plate to protect it from being punctured by road debris. (Yes you can use it as a heat sink, but then you're only disseminating heat to a two dimensional layer of air contacting the plate, instead of a volume of air.) And you want a duct anyway so you can put a fan in it to force air through when the car is stopped or traveling too slowly but the batteries are overheating.
So if you upgrade to a newer Roomba or have to swap it out under warranty, the replacement doesn't have to learn the floor layout from scratch. I'm not saying it's vital, but it does serve a useful function. The technically competent among us would probably rather have it upload the layout to our NAS. But for the 95% who are technically illiterate, the "it just works" appeal of cloud storage probably is much more attractive.
I'm leading a party of 20 family and friends, and I bought mine from Rainbow Symphony a year ago. I thought of making my own with a sheet like yours, cardboard, and glue, but the pre-made glasses were about 75 cents each in bulk (again, this was a year ago) so I just bought them. My camera and telescope have Baader solar film filters (over the front).
At this late stage in the game though, I wouldn't be surprised if some Chinese company were making substandard knockoffs with fake printing claiming to have been manufactured by one of these companies, to try to make money with no concern about the eyesight of a few Americans. No way in hell I would trust anything sold on eBay, and even stuff shipped from Amazon is suspect (they mix their inventory with those of third party sellers). Use the pinhole projection method other posts have described.
The problem stems from media articles which used the term "drop-out" to describe to people who quit college because they didn't need to finish it. "Drop-out" in common usage refers to someone who quit college or high school because they were incapable of or unwilling to finish it, which is why it has a slight negative connotation. Unfortunately, some journalists abused this ambiguity to try to spice up their articles with a subversion of the expectation of the term, and as a result they have helped create a society which believes getting an education isn't really that important.
TFA that the submitter linked to is a junk article written by someone who didn't understand how the Coast Guard works and assumed "calls" meant phone calls. It's so badly written the only reason I can think of for someone to use it in a submission is to drive page clicks for ad revenue. TFA links to the actual article which is much more informative and better written, although it crucially never clarifies what type of "calls" the Coast Guard responds to.
VHF channel 16 is a dedicated marine emergency frequency around the world. In U.S. waters, the US Coast Guard monitors this channel 24/7 and responds to any mayday calls. So the "calls" here are VHF radio calls, not phone calls. A mayday call is supposed to identify your vessel, provide a location, state the problem, and how many people are aboard your vessel, in that order. But things rarely go the way they're supposed to and lots of mayday calls are partial or missing crucial information. The USCG has to assume these are real and the boat sank or radio died before complete information could be broadcast, and deploy search and rescue assets.
Unfortunately there is no universal caller ID on VHF radios. Some of the newer ones will automatically identify your vessel and/or provide your location, but most VHF radios used by recreational boaters are old analog units which simply broadcast only what you say into them. So the only thing the USCG frequently gets is a voice in the RF ether claiming people are in danger of dying. (The USCG will also respond to a cell phone call if it claims to be from a boat close enough to shore to get cell phone service, or if it's from someone reporting a vessel overdue based on a float plan that was filed before leaving.)
So modify the product so it appeals to people other than celebrities and public figures. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple didn't become rich by tailoring their products to 1/10th of the 1%. The companies which make lots of money off tiny markets like celebrities and public figures sell very specialized and expensive products. e.g. Limousines. So Twitter needs to decide if they want to be a tool for the few and extremely wealthy, or for the masses, and redesign their product appropriately.
There are about 2.4 billion smartphone users in the world. One would assume most if not all of them have access to mobile (or WiFi) Internet since aside from side-loading, that's the only way to get apps onto the phone. And apps are what distinguishes a smartphone from a dumb phone.
The more interesting thing to me is that there are over 2 billion Facebook users, and you would assume there's a high correlation between that group and smartphone users. Yet only 1 billion of them choose to use Facebook's IM app on their phone.
Just because that's the only reason you can think of for banning smoking doesn't mean it's the reason everyone else wants to ban smoking. I'm one of those people who gets physically nauseous when there's cigarette smoke in the air. In the old days, if I entered a restaurant and there was too much cigarette smoke, I had to immediately leave and find a different restaurant. Flying (yes, they used to allow smoking in the sealed metal tubes with recirculated air that we call airplanes) was absolutely miserable, and it would take me about a day to recover (lotsa fun spending the first day of your vacation in bed in a hotel room trying to get to sleep to escape the nausea and headache)..
For me, banning smoking in public areas was about my freedom to enjoy public spaces that smokers were making near uninhabitable for me. I always likened smoking to urine. Urine is actually sterile so it's safer than cigarette smoke, but it smells pretty bad. How would you like it if I sprayed urine all over restaurants, hospitals, movie theaters, department stores, supermarkets, etc? That's what the world was like for me before smoking was banned in those places. If you want to spray that stuff inside your home and car, go right ahead. But your right to enjoy spraying it ends the moment it starts to impede my ability to live a normal life by visiting these places.
I actually don't have much problem with vaping. The smell is nowhere near as irritating as cigarette smoke, and I've yet to encounter any non-vaper complaining that it impedes their ability to go about life the way smoking did mine. I do dislike it when a vaper blows a big cloud of hard-to-avoid smoke which the wind will carry in my direction, but that's only because it'll take some years for the dangers (if any) of second-hand vaping smoke to be thoroughly studied. Until then, I'd prefer to err on the side of caution.
As for this study in particular, it was a survey so suffers from self-selection bias (people don't have to take the survey). Maybe smokers who were more serious about quitting were more likely to try alternatives like vaping to help wean themselves off, while the less-serious just tried to quit cold turkey and gave up after a few weeks. Surveys are a good way for finding trends to study further, but because of self-selection bias they never give the final word on a topic. To properly assess the results of the survey, someone will have to put together a study where a bunch of smokers wanting to quit are randomly assigned to different groups. Some try to quit on their own, some are told to quit cold turkey, some are given nicorette gum, some are given a placebo gum, some are told to use e-cigs, etc. Then the success rate at quitting for each of these groups needs to be compared. The random assignment eliminates self-selection bias.
A Pre-check application costs $85 and is good for 5 years. Not much different from a driver's license ($33 every 5 years in California). The price defers the cost of background inspections, fingerprinting, interviews, and other administrative costs. (If you're going to fly internationally, spring the extra $15 for Global Entry - that'll get you into the fast lanes at immigration. If you already have a NEXUS (Canada) or SENTRI (Mexico) card, you're already in Pre-check.)
If you're so destitute you can't afford $17/year, you probably shouldn't be traveling, much less flying.
Fact is, the people paying for Pre-check are subsidizing the people who aren't getting it. They're paying to have their background check done in advance, so as not to waste the time of TSA personnel at the airport. But they're still paying taxes to fund TSA for the people who don't have Pre-check. The proper way to pay for this would be to take the expense of TSA security and pay for it with a surcharge on every ticket sold, instead of via the general tax fund. Then people who get Pre-check should pay a reduced surcharge or no surcharge at all, to reflect the lowered cost to TSA due to their background already having been checked. But then you'd be complaining about how the government makes it cheaper to fly if you submit to their invasive pre-clearance background checks.
Somehow, we have to teach people that when it comes to probability-based policies (i.e. ones whose outcome cannot be predicted on an individual basis), the average result for the entire population is more important than a single result for an individual. Unfortunately, the way our news media works, an individual story is much more presentable and catchy (more likely to go viral) than statistics for the overall population. So individual outcomes have a disproportionate effect on what people think policy should be.
I'm reminded of Jan Lohr from United flight 232. She was a flight attendant, and when they were preparing for the crash landing, the parents of a lap child (a child who didn't have to pay for a ticket, and hence had no seat) asked her what to do. She quoted them airline policy - place the child underneath the seat in front like a carry-on bag. The parents survived, the child did not. Jan then started a decades-long quest to eliminate lap children from flights. Eventually (last year) the FAA turned her down. You see, as heartbreaking as the story of that one individual lap child is, statistically far more children die in car accidents than in plane crashes. So if the lap child policy convinces parents with young children to fly instead of drive, it actually saves more lives than that individual loss.
Put another way, our legal system allows parents of a child who dies from vaccine complications to directly pin the blame on the vaccine and sue them. Parents of a child who dies from a measles outbreak cannot directly pin the blame on Jenny McCarthy and sue her, even though she is just as culpable as the vaccine complication death. Our legal system views direct cause as more important than overall statistical effect.
Gasoline is about an order of magnitude more expensive than coal per unit of energy. This is why Hawaii has the highest electricity prices in the U.S. - they generate most of their electricity by burning oil, not coal.
This is what a lot of EV proponents seem to miss - EVs do not have zero emissions. All they do is shift the emissions from the tailpipe to an electrical power plant. If you then simultaneously eliminate the cheapest sources of electricity (coal and gas), the cost of EV "fuel" will go up. Likewise if every garage has an EV charging in it overnight, the overnight price of electricity will go up. (Also, the EPA's decision to base MPGe rating on battery capacity, although necessary to normalize for differences in how electricity is generated, completely cuts out inefficiencies at the power plant, transmission, and battery charging. It's like measuring ICE mileage starting with engine power output, instead of how much fuel was burned. So EV MPGe is not directly comparable to ICE MPG. From an energy efficiency standpoint, EVs use almost as many Joules per mile compared to ICE vehicles; it's tough to peg an exact comparison because most EVs use things like skinny low rolling resistance tires which typically aren't found on ICE vehicles.)
Brazil produced cane sugar ethanol for about 83 cents/gallon a decade ago. Ethanol contains about 79 MJ/gallon (66% of gasoline), so this works out to 1.05 cents/MJ.
So the story isn't over yet for ICE vehicles. Ethanol (produced from the right source, not corn) can potentially beat EVs in terms of fuel cost. But without the headaches of developing battery technology, having to haul a massive battery around, replacing existing gas station infrastructure, waiting 30 minutes for a supercharge, installing an overnight charger in your garage, figuring out a new way to implement road maintenance taxes. What's missing is a way to scale ethanol production up without dramatically impacting food production. If someone cracks how to produce ethanol from cellulose (all the weeds, brush, and spoiled vegetables which we currently throw away), then EVs are dead.
Cumulative number of Chevy Bolts sold = 8,000
Cumulative number of Chevy Volts sold = 124,000
Cumulative number of Toyota Prius sold = 4 million
Cumulative number of Toyota hybrids sold = 9 million
In terms of number of battery units produced, Tesla and GM are roundoff error compared to Toyota.
That tells you that there's something seriously wrong with the scalability of their production. (If you want to know what the problem is, Tesla relies on selling ZEV credits to other automakers to keep from going bankrupt. But other automakers only need a certain number of ZEV credits each year to comply with CARB regulations. So Tesla has to be careful not to produce too many ZEVs lest they cause the price of ZEV credits to plummet due to oversupply.)
I was trying to watch some of the archived shows that are available with my DirecTV Now account. Their 72-hour and on-demand playback features have been getting a back seat, and are still very unreliable.
Eventually I gave up and just went to a pirate site to watch the shows. WOW. The pirated shows happen to be commercial-free. An episode of a 30 minute sitcom is about 22 minutes. So 8 minutes - more than 25% of the playtime - is commercials. Some episodes are only about 20 minutes long, meaning 33% of the playtime is commercials.
I didn't remember there being this many commercials when I was a kid (I cut way back on my TV watching after high school). Sure enough, commercial time was less than 20% in the 1970s and 1980s. I may just continue to watch the shows on pirate sites. I've already paid for the licensing rights to view the shows, and the service I paid for is failing to deliver them. So by my reckoning it's not really piracy; I'm just doing what I have to to get what I paid for. If it happens to be commercial-free, so be it.
The curious thing though is that the DEF usage rates are all over the place. I first noticed this when I had to rent a diesel Ram 3500 for some towing, and it used way more DEF than my personal vehicle (VW Touraeg). So out of curiosity, I looked into the DEF consumption rate for other 3.0 liter diesel engines.
Notice that VW's and Mercedes' DEF use rates are lower than Dodge, Jeep, and BMW. And the two automakers thus far accused of cheating on diesel emissions are... VW and Mercedes.
Just wish they stored a price history for other stores besides Amazon. You can see a spike to $18.94 on Prime day. Now I'm curious if the other spikes correspond to other Amazon "sales".
https://camelcamelcamel.com/remodeez-Footwear-Deodorizer-Charcoal-Moisture/product/B016ZZWL6E
You joke, but when a corporation screws up, you can sue it, you can quit buying their products, you can convince your friends to stop supporting it.
When the government screws up, you're stuck with it (short of revolution). In fact the way a lot of government union employment contracts are structured, you can't even fire the people responsible for the screwup.
I've never bought into the claim that all government is good and all corporations bad. Nor have I bought into the claim that all corporations are good and all government is bad. Both can do good things, both can do bad things. The trick is figuring out which things one tends to do better than the other, and giving the job to the more capable entity.
I've bolded the important part. TFA makes no such claim, and in fact states that the same measure has been used for decades. If you have evidence that the definition of unemployment was changed to make the economy look better than it actually was, please present it. The argument TFA presents is that the economy has changed so that the definition no longer paints as clear a picture of the economy as it did in the past.
From a statistical perspective, as long as the definition and method of measurement remains consistent over time, it is useful data. It is even more useful when paired and analyzed together with slightly different measures like the inactivity rate as TFA does. But it's not a lie. It is data. Not everything in life has a clear-cut and straightforward definition. So you come up with a definition that is clear-cut and straightforward (and usually selected because it's easier to measure), and you use it to collect data. If you don't like the definition, you can come up with a different definition and collect data on it. But calling the data set you dislike a lie is nothing but an ad hominem attack.
I also find the title of TFA (and summary) highly suspect. The title claims the unemployment figures are very close to exposing the purported lie in the definition of "unemployment". But for that to actually happen, the unemployment rate would have to go negative.. That is, everyone who is looking for a job gets one. And a few people who don't want a job have one (how, I dunno - slavery?).
I'm all for educating people that the definition of "unemployment" is not as clear-cut as they might assume at first glance. But calling it an outright lie is nothing but grandstanding.
The cloud processing is done in software, using general purpose processors (like the CPU in your PC). The AI algorithm in these new processors (usually developed via machine learning) is done in hardware - chips with the algorithm baked into the transistor layout.
You want to do it in software on the cloud because cloud servers can be equipped with much more powerful processors, and you want your cloud server to also be able to handle other types of AI requests (e.g. voice recognition for digital assistants). You want to do it in hardware when it's done locally to reduce the cost and power consumption - same as how video decoding is done in hardware by the GPU on phones and streaming devices.
Blame the idiots hacking their firmware and using their routers irresponsibly (illegally).
First you have to understand why the FCC made the request to router manufacturers. Shortly after the FCC opened up the 5 GHz band for unlicensed use, terminal doppler weather radar was invented in response to several airliner crashes due to adverse weather conditions. Unfortunately, it relies on frequencies smack dab in the middle of the open 5 GHz band, so the FCC took the unusual step of revising their rules which opened up those frequencies
That's why most 5 GHz devices only support channels 36-48 and 149-165. The intermediate channels were reclassified as DFS - dynamic frequency selection. Open devices could use them, but if they detected weather radar in use they had to switch to a different channel. A few devices actually do this and check to see if weather radar is in use. Most manufacturers just took the easy way out and blocked out channels 50-144 entirely in the firmware.
DD-WRT supports DFS - it will change frequencies if it detects weather radar in use (at least it does on my hacked TP-Link). If you install third party firmware and use the 5 GHz band, do the responsible thing and enable this functionality if you're going to enable channels 50-144. Unfortunately, some idiots didn't do this, which caused the FCC to grow concerned about the impact of third party firmware on the effectiveness of TDWR. That's why the FCC made the request to router manufacturers. Not because they hated third party firmware, but out of concern for the safety of the flying public.
This is why we can't have nice things - a few idiots ruin it for everyone else. I had lots of fun with lawn darts as a kid, but we always treated the target area as if it were a shooting range. Here's an example of what happens to TDWR when an idiot blasts their router in the TDWR frequencies. The unauthorized broadcast shows up as a wedge-shaped area spanning a few degrees and extending to the edge of the radar image, completely obscuring any weather in the wedge.
And buying the router in Canada or Europe won't make any difference because those countries have the exact same restrictions on those TDWR frequencies. The only reason they're not being as aggressive as the FCC is because TDWR so far is mostly used at U.S. airports. Eventually most airports in the developed world are going to upgrade to it (or at least airports which frequently encounter bad weather). So the regulatory agencies in Canada, the EU, and most of the rest of the developed world are all going to be on the same page as the FCC once TDWR is rolled out in those countries.
That's what we used to do back in the old days when you wanted to set up your telescope in some rural area, away from the city lights, for a night's viewing. Ask for and get permission, and maybe have a pleasant conversation with a farmer who thinks what you're doing is really cool.
Nowadays people just fly their drone over someone's property unannounced, then act like they're the one whose rights were violated when the property owner shoots it down.
No, the current response is the correct one. There are lots of companies out there which will take a bug report, fix the bug, and thank you. Some will even pay you a bounty.
Exploiting the f**k out of any bug you find is the equivalent of lynching the first black person you see because a black guy robbed the local convenience store. The correct response is to single out the responsible criminal / stupid company for reprisal. Like is currently happening to this company.