The test is not realistic. Or rather, the specs that the test is written to does not reflect how people really want to use their TVs.
In addition to helping people buy computers, I also help people buy TVs. A lot of them complain that the TV doesn't seem as bright as it seemed at the store, and will "randomly" suddenly turn very dark or off. That's my cue to visit their home, go through the TV's settings menu, and shut off all the power-saving features like the auto-dim timer and dynamic brightness.
Auto-dim uses (on expensive TVs) a camera or the IR sensor to detect if there's any motion in the room. If it detects no motion for a certain period of time, it assumes the room is empty and dims or turns off the screen. Yes this is the camera that TV manufacturers are catching flak for for "spying" on viewers. Unfortunately, many people sit very still in one place while watching, and the TV assumes the room is empty even though they're watching. Cheaper TVs use a simple timer - no volume or channel/signal change in (say) 2 hours and it dims the screen.
Dynamic brightness uses an ambient light sensor to darken the screen backlight when the room is darker. I don't have a problem with the concept behind this, and in fact find it a great feature on my phone. The problem is the default screen auto brightness level is too dark - if you turn it on, the screen just ends up always too dark. On my phone, I can have the feature on, but it lets me adjust the auto brightness level a bit. If I feel the auto level is too dark, I can increase it without shutting the feature off entirely. On the TVs I've seen, it's either on with canned brightness levels, or off. (Windows 8/10 on laptops came with the same feature, which pretty much everyone I know has turned off, or their eyes light up like they've seen the Promised Land when I tell them it's possible to turn it off.)
So I end up visiting their home, turning both features off, raise the backlight brightness level a hair (not torch mode like at the store, but the proper brightness for the room), tweak the contrast and tone down the sharpness so there's less haloing. The owner thinks I'm a miracle worker and thanks me profusely for "fixing" their TV.
People want bright images on their TV. If you attempt to save power by too-aggressively mandating that TVs have "features" which automatically dim their image, people will just turn the features off. Real-life use does not deviate from the test because of manufacturer malfeasance. It deviates because the test fails to accurately model people's real-life behavior.
I helped design submarines. Big, long metal tubes which can withstand well over 50 atmospheres of external pressure. Designing a tube to withstand a single atmosphere is trivial.
And you don't design these things to be uniform in strength so if it fails, the entire cross-section buckles killing everyone inside. You deliberately design them with weaker sections. That way if there's ever a problem, a weaker section fails first and (for a submarine) gives the crew advance warning the hull is about to fail while allowing them time to recover, or (for an airplane or hyperloop) equalizes the pressure before the entire structure can fail.
I think Hyperloop is a boondoggle in California. But I could actually see it working for South Korea. They have an extremely high population density (lots of potential customers), the maximum travel distance in the country is annoyingly too short for airliner but too long for regular passenger trains, and the geography is incredibly stable (no earthquakes).
Phone calls are good if you need an immediate response. Very few things need an immediate response. 911 is about the only thing I can think of. Maybe some big-shot corporate decisions as well. Occasionally you do get a situation where your work is stalled until you get an answer from someone else - those warrant a phone call.
For the vast majority of other situations, a slightly delayed but more accurate response is preferable. If your boss calls you asking for the exact component numbers of last year's EBITDA, you can drop everything you're doing and frantically look for the data in a directory of preliminary, final, and revised spreadsheets to try to get him an answer immediately when he only needs it for a meeting later in the week. Then call him back 30 minutes later with newer numbers when you realize you mis-clicked and opened the wrong spreadsheet. Or he can email you the request, and you can take your time to make sure you get the correct numbers to him in your first and only reply, saving both him and yourself a lot of time.
That's what makes email such a great communications tool. I can take the emails I receive which I need a response, move them into a To-Do folder, assign them stars according to priority, and tackle them in something close to optimal order. You can't do that with phone calls or even text messaging. (Technically you can, but it involves double data entry - you have to type up and enter all the information someone just gave you into your calendar or to-do list. With email, the fact that they've typed up their request to email it to you saves you the trouble of typing it up again.)
The folks who insist on phone calls for everything are usually people who prioritize talking directly with people over efficiency, or who enjoy (ab)using their higher status to make underlings needlessly run about trying to immediately fulfill their requests. Both are a drag on economic productivity.
It WILL care what brand of bread I use and will want to tell me about other wonderful choices in the world of sliced bread. And THAT will take 15 seconds, be associated with an annoying noise, voice and / or blinky light.
See, this is the difference between a device whose purpose is to display lights and make sounds (e.g. TV or laptop), versus a device where these things are superfluous. I can simply disconnect the speaker and light (replace them with resistors if the toaster is programmed to only function when they're connected), and I'm back to having a non-annoying toaster.
Most (all?) are small regional providers. There are a few scattered municipalities across the U.S. which allow 2+ cable companies to compete. I lived in a suburb of Boston when the city allowed a second cable company to enter the market. Immediately my cable company (the one which used to have a monopoly) cut my monthly bill by $10/mo (about 17%), added about a dozen channels to their basic tier TV lineup, and announced they would be rolling out speed upgrades of about 50% over the next 3 months at no increased cost. Service repair times went from a 1-2 week wait with a 8 hour window (basically 8-4), to a 1-3 day wait with a 4 hour window (morning or afternoon).
The cable companies aren't the problem - they're capable of lower prices, more and faster service, and better repair service. It's these stupid monopolies the local governments have granted them which leads to the lack of effort, abusive behavior, and exorbitant prices.
Actually, my hunch would be these were Linux file servers. And an infected Windows machine with root-level access to the file shares on these servers encrypted everything. This is the reason we keep telling people that you need an offline backup. Ransomware will simply encrypt an always-online backup along with the computer's files.
You're falling for a misunderstanding of statistics parroted by the many ignorant iPhone fans writing in the media. Most of the Android phones sold are low-end handsets, which drags down the mean price of an Android phone.
However, that does not mean Android only sells cheap handsets as these writers in the media who flunked statistics think. It simply means a greater share of Android phones are cheaper units. But because Android phones outsell iPhones by more than 6:1, the number of high-end Android phones sold is still about the same as or exceeds the number of iPhones sold, even though the mean price of an Android phone is lower.
According to your link, cold is a bigger killer than heat:
Based on information from death
certificates, 10,649 deaths were
attributed to weather-related causes in
the United States during 2006â"2010.
Nearly one-third of the deaths were
attributed to excessive natural heat, and
almost two-thirds were attributed to
excessive natural cold.
That said, here's a link to the original paper in Nature rather than some spin piece in Mother Jones. The 2100 prediction is outright extrapolation, and there's not quite enough history for me to feel confident about the trendline. But there is enough of a historical trend not to dismiss this as mere alarmism as some have posted.
Most things on the iPhone had already been tried or were being used. Phone + PDA (general purpose computing device), iconographic display, touchscreen controls, touchscreen-only interface (no physical keyboard) were already in use before the iPhone.
The standout feature on the iPhone IMHO was the App Store. We computer geeks either don't mind or love fiddling with software to get it installed. Regular people (i.e. 98% of the market) hates it. On my Palm Pilot, I had to download a program file to my PC, plug my Palm into my PC, transfer the file over, then run the installer on the Palm. The App Store made it so you pick the program you want out of a list, click it, and it was installed. Simple. This was a repeat of what iTunes did to the MP3 market. (Getting MP3s and especially playlists over to your MP3 player was a laborious process prior to iTunes and the iPod. That's why the iPod had no wireless, less space than a Nomad, and was lame, yet went on to unparalleled success.)
In that respect, and especially given the precedent set by iTunes, Amazon very well could have been the ones to introduce this development into the smartphone market. They were obsessed with one-click shopping, already had a virtual shopping store, and were already well established (and arguably the market leader) in cloud computing and software distribution over the Internet. They just failed to see the opportunity in allowing people to install software on their phones with one click.
I think Steve Jobs was an egocentric jerk who used talented people like Wozniak for his own selfish purposes. But I do not deny that he knew exactly what the 98% wanted - something easy to use. None of this "if you cannot figure out how to install it, that's not my problem - you are merely unworthy to use it" BS we techies love to judge the 98% non-techies by.
A corporation is only a legal construct because we choose to make it so. In the absence of a government-mandated or sanctioned legal identity, a "corporation" would simply be a bunch of people deciding to work on something together instead of individually. Who knows, they may decide to give their team a name, instead of referring to it as "that thing Bob, Joe, Mary, and I are working on together."
Recycling/reuse is not a requirement. The issue here is one of reciprocity. Apple, Microsoft, et al are enjoying the benefits of reduced cost which come about from having standardized parts (CPUs, HDDs, screens, interfaces, fasteners, etc. But they are refusing to pass those benefits on to their customers. If they were making a product which required they fabricate all their own parts that nobody else makes or uses, nobody would have a problem with them controlling the supply of repair parts. But that's not what's happening. They're using standardized parts, but blocking people's access to them via adhesives, one-way clips, fasteners tooled for no purpose but to make it harder for others to open, and interfaces with a few wires switched around or shaped slightly differently for no reason but to make it incompatible. That's just Wrong.
Any other business, people would be all over them for not respecting the wishes of all customers. But Hollywood somehow gets a free pass?
"The restaurant owner doesn't exclude blacks just for the fun of annoying special snowflakes like yourself. It's part of the character of the restaurant, part of the experience. If you force them to allow blacks, it's no longer a unique experience and not worth your time.
"I hate restaurants which exclude certain races. So I don't go there. See how easy that was? Now do the same."
If you want to produce art and give it away, you can do whatever you want with it IMHO. But the moment you start selling it, you become a business. And like all businesses, you have to comply with anti-discrimination clauses which prohibit exclusion based on race, gender, religion, etc.
Maybe you missed the part of the article citing research that showed ANY level of lead was unsafe.
Which is irrelevant because lead is a naturally occurring substance present everywhere in the environment. You literally cannot go anywhere or do anything which does not expose you to lead. So it's pointless trying to avoid exposure to "ANY level of lead."
It's the higher concentrations of lead which you have to worry about. So OP is correct that without knowing how much lead was found, it's pointless.
The whole point being, why does baby food contain *more* lead than adult food?
Just as a guess, I'd say because baby food is finely minced into a gruel, any contamination is spread throughout the product instead of just sitting on the surface where it can be easily washed off (with purified water with a lower lead concentration than storage, processing, and transport environments). Similar to why ground beef is more prone to salmonella contamination than steak - grinding it spreads the bacteria from just the surface where it can be easily washed off or killed by cooking, to throughout the entire volume of meat.
Delta IV Heavy is about $435 million. USAF contract of $1.74 billion for 4 launches.
What may be skewing your analysis is that although there are about 2x as many Atlas V launches as Delta IV, because we're using a mean price, it's the higher cost rocket which affects the mean more, not the rocket with more launches (4x the cost @ half the number = 2x the effect on the mean). The one with more launches affects the median more.
Also worth noting that a "fair and reasonable" price is not what it costs to make the product plus some percentage. It's what the buyer is willing to pay. If the buyer (govt in this case) thinks it's worth paying $1 billion per launch (space shuttle), then that's a fair and reasonable cost. As long as what you pay is less than the benefit you gain, then it's a reasonable economic transaction.
The key to lowering costs is competition, not requiring transparency of the seller's accounting. Nobody wants to have to go through Walmart's accounting books to guarantee they're getting a "fair and reasonable" price when they go shopping there. It's a helluva lot easier to compare prices at a bunch of competing stores selling the same stuff. If the government wanted lower prices, they should've prohibited Boeing and Lockheed from forming ULA together.
Locking owners out of the device sounds great for manufacturers (owners have to pay for expensive repairs or buy a replacement). Until a component that's normally trivial to replace turns out to be defective and fails catastrophically. And a recall which should've cost about $25 per device ends up costing several hundred or several thousand dollars per device.
A Boeing 737 Max has a 3515 nautical mile range (4045 statute miles) and 6853 gallon fuel capacity. With 162 passengers, this works out to 95.6 MPG per passenger (2.46 L/100 km). Competitive with most cars carrying 3 people.
Their massive fuel burn from air travel is because of the long distances they travel, not because air travel is inherently worse than other forms of transport. If you're planning a weekend getaway by car, you'll probably only have enough time to travel a couple hundred miles, thus limiting your fuel consumption. But if you fly, you can travel a couple thousand miles in the limited amount of time.
For trips of the same distance, flying is usually more environmentally friendly than driving with 1-2 people, sometimes more friendly than driving with 3-4 people.
Whether a flyby is dangerous or safe depends on how well you know the path of both objects. The trajectory of the ISS is very well known, and the trajectory of the spy satellite is (presumably) very well known. Probably to within a few hundred meters. So they could've accurately predicted that the two were in no danger of colliding, and this was a safe pass. The same would've been true for an active Russian or Chinese spy satellite (though it would've required sharing of precise orbital element info between the involved countries).
Space junk is a problem because its path is not well known. At best we use radar to nail down its trajectory to within a few km. That larger error radius is what makes any pass within a few km dangerous. It's not that passes within a few km are inherently dangerous.
Yeah, my hunch is in a true survey of all programmers, it's the tab-users who make more money. Tabs are a relic from the old typewriter days, so older programmers are more likely to use them. And older programs tend to make more money.
Tabs worked great on typewriters because they were a fixed size (there was a mechanical stop you could move along notches to set the tab stop length). But when computers came out, they failed to standardize the number of spaces in a tab. So tabs turned into a hindrance which would make code display differently on different computers. I loved tabs on typewriters, and used them extensively on my first computers (for writing reports - before all this networked sharing of files began). But once I had to share what I wrote in software format with others, I switched to using spaces. I only use tabs in Word, which retains the old typewriter ability to manully set the amount of indentation you get from a tab.
No, this situation arose because the government regulates the airwaves, thereby limiting the number of companies which can compete in the cellular market. With few competitors, it's very easy for them to coincidentally decide to lock their phones.
In an unregulated market with multiple carriers, chances are high at least one carrier would offer unlocked devices. Customers would flock to that carrier, forcing the other carriers to also unlock their devices. A company doing an asshole thing like locking a phone cuts its own throat, unless the government has implemented regulations prohibiting or limiting the number of competitors it faces.
One can argue that the airwaves need to be regulated to avoid or minimize interference. But the asinine development of companies locking phones is a consequence of that regulation, not something that will happen on its own unless regulations prohibit it.
The ideal implementation of cellular service would've been for cellular networks and cellular service to remain orthogonal. A company could build a cellular network, but not sell cellular service to customers. Or it could provide cellular service, but not build a network. The service companies would then negotiate with network companies for airtime on their tower networks, effectively acting like a union representative on behalf of all their customers. Meanwhile the plethora of service companies would mean there was plenty of service providers for customers to choose from, so none would be stupid enough to try to lock their phones. And the fact that service companies might have to switch network companies would mean they would request manufacturers design phones which were compatible with all networks.
Nearly all implementations of the data service in GSM 3G (UMTS, HSDPA) is wideband CDMA.
CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. GSM was designed (by committee) to use TDMA - each phone takes turns communicating with the tower. That was OK for voice, but absolutely destroyed data bandwidth because each phone got an equal slice of the bandwidth even if it didn't need it. CDMA allows every phone to transmit simultaneously, and the tower distinguishes them because each phone uses orthogonal codes. Kinda like two people writing on the same sheet of paper, one vertically, one horizontally. CDMA interprets other devices transmissions as an increase in the noise floor (decrease in signal to noise ratio), so each phone's bandwidth scales automatically. If 10 phones are transmitting simultaneously, each phone gets 1/t0h the bandwidth. If only one phone is transmitting, the noise floor is lower and it gets all the bandwidth.
This is why CDMA carriers rolled out 3G data a year before GSM. The U.S. allowed both standards to compete, and CDMA absolutely destroyed GSM in data service. GSM threw in the towel and licensed CDMA from Qualcomm, and needed the extra year to come up with the specs and hardware. This is also why 3G GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time. They had a TDMA radio for voice, and a wCDMA radio for data. CDMA phones had only one radio, and it could only be used for voice or data, not both simultaneously.
CDMA for voice is used mainly in only the U.S. But if the U.S. had gone along with GSM, our data speeds today would probably be around 300 kbps - 1 Mbps. And LTE probably wouldn't exist. Most implementations of LTE use OFDMA - orthogonal frequencies as opposed to orthogonal codes in CDMA. CDMA served as the proof of theory that this crazy orthogonal signaling stuff really did work when scaled up to the size of a nationwide network. Without that proof, people wouldn't have been willing to put in the time and money into developing LTE. (OFDMA requires more processing to extricate the orthogonal signals than CDMA. Up until about 2010, the processors needed for OFDMA used too much power to be of practical use in a device designed to operate for at least 12 hours on battery. My old Galaxy S supported Sprint's WiMAX which was also OFDMA, and it would only last about 4 hours if I was using WiMAX.)
The time-limited nature of TDMA is also why GSM coverage is worse in rural areas. Because the timeslices are synchronized and a constant length, each TDMA tower's range is limited by the speed of light multiplied by the duration of the timeslice (IIRC this is about 35 km). CDMA has no such restrictions, so in a wide-open rural area with little noise and few obstructions, a single CDMA tower can cover a lot more area than a GSM TDMA tower. TDMA was just a bad idea overall, and it was stupid for GSM to standardize on it.
If you create a stigma of shame around certain disrespectful behaviors or beliefs, all you do is drive it underground. It's still there, people just become better at hiding it. I was hopeful this would become obvious after Trump's election - where Trump supporters were shamed by the media to the point that they lied to pollsters about who they were going to vote for, causing the the polls to inaccurately predict a Clinton victory. But instead the media has gotten sidetracked with blaming the whole thing on Russia (probably because that would absolve them of any responsibility).
If you want to get rid of prejudice and discrimination, you have to do it through education and exposure. First you counteract the bigoted prejudices by teaching people that these other people who look or believe differently than you are more like you than they are different. They have feelings, hopes, dreams, desires, failings, make mistakes, and are just trying to make a better life for themselves just like you. Then you expose people to these other people for long enough so they can see these things with their own eyes (short exposure causes them to only pick out things which confirm their prejudices). I come from a conservative religious background. But one of my childhood friends turned out to be gay. Becoming friends with someone from a group you're supposed to be opposed to is the best way to gain perspective. It's no longer "would I scream slurs at some anonymous person?" It becomes "would I scream slurs at my friend?"
The entire SJW tactic of trying to change society via shaming is misguided, and arguably harmful as people will perceive shaming to be an accepted tactic. People are learning that it's OK to disrespect and behave rudely towards other people with certain beliefs (religious or atheist), from certain areas (the Bay Area or the deep South), or with certain characteristics (black or rich). Basically it's the same discrimination SJWs are purportedly trying to stamp out, just directed at different groups. You're not stamping out hatred, you're just swapping it for a different hatred.
Don't assume the caricatures - the criminal black, the privileged white male, the self-entitled Millenial, etc. - are true. Each person is a unique blend of feelings, thoughts, abilities, and beliefs. And you have to learn that person's unique blend before you have the right to criticize them. Judging them based solely on their appearance, where they're from, what event they're attending, etc. is prejudice, discrimination, and bigotry. Doing so under the guise of stamping out prejudice is hypocrisy.
Please quote the passage which suggests that Jesus revoked Leviticus 20:13.
"And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them."
Matthew 12:31
"And so I tell you, every kind of sin and slander can be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven."
The entire reason it's called the New Testament is because it contains a new set of rules and guidelines which supersede the ones in the Old Testament (including the one you've quoted). Mainly, salvation through grace (Jesus' sacrifice), rather than salvation through adherence to Mosaic law. The law from the Old Testament is still relevant - but only as a reminder of what Jesus saved us from, not as rules which still need to be strictly adhered to. The only sin which cannot be (has not been) forgiven is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit - i.e. denial of this new testament.
The concept behind the new testament superseding the old is summed up in Romans 13:8-10:
Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, "You shall not commit adultery," "You shall not murder," "You shall not steal," "You shall not covet," and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: "Love your neighbor as yourself." Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
(For those unfamiliar, the above quoted commandments are from the Ten Commandments - the cornerstone of Mosaic law.) In other words, the intent of the law is love. But because Mosaic law was defined as a set of rules blind to intent, it could end up misapplied. When the Supreme Court has to decide what a law means in an ambiguous situation, they often fall back on the intent of the authors of the law to help them interpret it. This passage is telling us that the intent of Mosaic law was to help us to love our neighbors and do them no harm. Interpretations of Mosaic law which contradict this intent (like yours) are misinterpretations.
Furthermore, we do not have the authority to mete out justice for transgressions of the law. Only God has that authority. Romans 12:17-21:
Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord. On the contrary: "If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
In the majority opinion, the court left little wiggle room for advocates of price-capping, with the possible exception of the cross-state caps, which are a minority of calls made by inmates.
So any lawyer working with inmates in a certain state just needs to get a virtual phone number in another state, and have it forward to his regular phone number.
If they're using the same code base for their 32-bit vs 64-bit versions, the int declaration for session ID should be the same on both versions. 32-bit processors can handle 64-bit integers just fine. They just need two clock cycles to manipulate them instead of one. So if they took the same code and compiled it twice (once as 32-bit, once as 64-bit), the same bug should have shown up in the 64-bit version.
They're using a different codebase for their 32-bit vs 64-bit versions, and it just so happened the 32-bit version had a bug the 64-bit version did not. It could easily have been the other way around.
Or they use the same codebase and there's a bug present in both versions. It just turned into a fatal overflow error on the 32-bit version, while the 64-bit version could continue. (Possible since a 32-bit int compiled for 64-bit would have a bunch of zeroes added as padding - though whether it protects from overflow depends on the endian-ness of the processor).
Or there's more going on here, and they're doing some other manipulation of Session ID further down in the code which is causing a crash on the 32-bit version, while the 64-bit version continues to run. (This could explain why the error happens at 2^31 instead of 2^32, even if Session ID were an unsigned long int.)
So it's not necessarily true that Apple's move to 64-bit is why it runs fine in the 64-bit version. I think the swipe at Apple is because they removed 32-bit apps from the App Store. Even if chess.com had found and patched this bug ahead of time (which they may have since the CEO has admitted he's clueless about this tech stuff), as I understand it owners of 32-bit iOS devices would've had to update their software by downloading the patch directly from chess.com. No auto-update via the App Store anymore for 32-bit apps.
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Employees are more efficient and cost-effective than kiosks.
Until the city passes a $15 minimum wage. Then suddenly kiosks become more cost-effective than minimum wage employees.
In addition to helping people buy computers, I also help people buy TVs. A lot of them complain that the TV doesn't seem as bright as it seemed at the store, and will "randomly" suddenly turn very dark or off. That's my cue to visit their home, go through the TV's settings menu, and shut off all the power-saving features like the auto-dim timer and dynamic brightness.
So I end up visiting their home, turning both features off, raise the backlight brightness level a hair (not torch mode like at the store, but the proper brightness for the room), tweak the contrast and tone down the sharpness so there's less haloing. The owner thinks I'm a miracle worker and thanks me profusely for "fixing" their TV.
People want bright images on their TV. If you attempt to save power by too-aggressively mandating that TVs have "features" which automatically dim their image, people will just turn the features off. Real-life use does not deviate from the test because of manufacturer malfeasance. It deviates because the test fails to accurately model people's real-life behavior.
I helped design submarines. Big, long metal tubes which can withstand well over 50 atmospheres of external pressure. Designing a tube to withstand a single atmosphere is trivial.
And you don't design these things to be uniform in strength so if it fails, the entire cross-section buckles killing everyone inside. You deliberately design them with weaker sections. That way if there's ever a problem, a weaker section fails first and (for a submarine) gives the crew advance warning the hull is about to fail while allowing them time to recover, or (for an airplane or hyperloop) equalizes the pressure before the entire structure can fail.
I think Hyperloop is a boondoggle in California. But I could actually see it working for South Korea. They have an extremely high population density (lots of potential customers), the maximum travel distance in the country is annoyingly too short for airliner but too long for regular passenger trains, and the geography is incredibly stable (no earthquakes).
Original concept art for Curiosity
Number Five from Short Circuit
Things that make you go hmm...
Phone calls are good if you need an immediate response. Very few things need an immediate response. 911 is about the only thing I can think of. Maybe some big-shot corporate decisions as well. Occasionally you do get a situation where your work is stalled until you get an answer from someone else - those warrant a phone call.
For the vast majority of other situations, a slightly delayed but more accurate response is preferable. If your boss calls you asking for the exact component numbers of last year's EBITDA, you can drop everything you're doing and frantically look for the data in a directory of preliminary, final, and revised spreadsheets to try to get him an answer immediately when he only needs it for a meeting later in the week. Then call him back 30 minutes later with newer numbers when you realize you mis-clicked and opened the wrong spreadsheet. Or he can email you the request, and you can take your time to make sure you get the correct numbers to him in your first and only reply, saving both him and yourself a lot of time.
That's what makes email such a great communications tool. I can take the emails I receive which I need a response, move them into a To-Do folder, assign them stars according to priority, and tackle them in something close to optimal order. You can't do that with phone calls or even text messaging. (Technically you can, but it involves double data entry - you have to type up and enter all the information someone just gave you into your calendar or to-do list. With email, the fact that they've typed up their request to email it to you saves you the trouble of typing it up again.)
The folks who insist on phone calls for everything are usually people who prioritize talking directly with people over efficiency, or who enjoy (ab)using their higher status to make underlings needlessly run about trying to immediately fulfill their requests. Both are a drag on economic productivity.
See, this is the difference between a device whose purpose is to display lights and make sounds (e.g. TV or laptop), versus a device where these things are superfluous. I can simply disconnect the speaker and light (replace them with resistors if the toaster is programmed to only function when they're connected), and I'm back to having a non-annoying toaster.
Most (all?) are small regional providers. There are a few scattered municipalities across the U.S. which allow 2+ cable companies to compete. I lived in a suburb of Boston when the city allowed a second cable company to enter the market. Immediately my cable company (the one which used to have a monopoly) cut my monthly bill by $10/mo (about 17%), added about a dozen channels to their basic tier TV lineup, and announced they would be rolling out speed upgrades of about 50% over the next 3 months at no increased cost. Service repair times went from a 1-2 week wait with a 8 hour window (basically 8-4), to a 1-3 day wait with a 4 hour window (morning or afternoon).
The cable companies aren't the problem - they're capable of lower prices, more and faster service, and better repair service. It's these stupid monopolies the local governments have granted them which leads to the lack of effort, abusive behavior, and exorbitant prices.
Actually, my hunch would be these were Linux file servers. And an infected Windows machine with root-level access to the file shares on these servers encrypted everything. This is the reason we keep telling people that you need an offline backup. Ransomware will simply encrypt an always-online backup along with the computer's files.
You're falling for a misunderstanding of statistics parroted by the many ignorant iPhone fans writing in the media. Most of the Android phones sold are low-end handsets, which drags down the mean price of an Android phone.
However, that does not mean Android only sells cheap handsets as these writers in the media who flunked statistics think. It simply means a greater share of Android phones are cheaper units. But because Android phones outsell iPhones by more than 6:1, the number of high-end Android phones sold is still about the same as or exceeds the number of iPhones sold, even though the mean price of an Android phone is lower.
That said, here's a link to the original paper in Nature rather than some spin piece in Mother Jones. The 2100 prediction is outright extrapolation, and there's not quite enough history for me to feel confident about the trendline. But there is enough of a historical trend not to dismiss this as mere alarmism as some have posted.
Most things on the iPhone had already been tried or were being used. Phone + PDA (general purpose computing device), iconographic display, touchscreen controls, touchscreen-only interface (no physical keyboard) were already in use before the iPhone.
The standout feature on the iPhone IMHO was the App Store. We computer geeks either don't mind or love fiddling with software to get it installed. Regular people (i.e. 98% of the market) hates it. On my Palm Pilot, I had to download a program file to my PC, plug my Palm into my PC, transfer the file over, then run the installer on the Palm. The App Store made it so you pick the program you want out of a list, click it, and it was installed. Simple. This was a repeat of what iTunes did to the MP3 market. (Getting MP3s and especially playlists over to your MP3 player was a laborious process prior to iTunes and the iPod. That's why the iPod had no wireless, less space than a Nomad, and was lame, yet went on to unparalleled success.)
In that respect, and especially given the precedent set by iTunes, Amazon very well could have been the ones to introduce this development into the smartphone market. They were obsessed with one-click shopping, already had a virtual shopping store, and were already well established (and arguably the market leader) in cloud computing and software distribution over the Internet. They just failed to see the opportunity in allowing people to install software on their phones with one click.
I think Steve Jobs was an egocentric jerk who used talented people like Wozniak for his own selfish purposes. But I do not deny that he knew exactly what the 98% wanted - something easy to use. None of this "if you cannot figure out how to install it, that's not my problem - you are merely unworthy to use it" BS we techies love to judge the 98% non-techies by.
A corporation is only a legal construct because we choose to make it so. In the absence of a government-mandated or sanctioned legal identity, a "corporation" would simply be a bunch of people deciding to work on something together instead of individually. Who knows, they may decide to give their team a name, instead of referring to it as "that thing Bob, Joe, Mary, and I are working on together."
Recycling/reuse is not a requirement. The issue here is one of reciprocity. Apple, Microsoft, et al are enjoying the benefits of reduced cost which come about from having standardized parts (CPUs, HDDs, screens, interfaces, fasteners, etc. But they are refusing to pass those benefits on to their customers. If they were making a product which required they fabricate all their own parts that nobody else makes or uses, nobody would have a problem with them controlling the supply of repair parts. But that's not what's happening. They're using standardized parts, but blocking people's access to them via adhesives, one-way clips, fasteners tooled for no purpose but to make it harder for others to open, and interfaces with a few wires switched around or shaped slightly differently for no reason but to make it incompatible. That's just Wrong.
Any other business, people would be all over them for not respecting the wishes of all customers. But Hollywood somehow gets a free pass?
"The restaurant owner doesn't exclude blacks just for the fun of annoying special snowflakes like yourself. It's part of the character of the restaurant, part of the experience. If you force them to allow blacks, it's no longer a unique experience and not worth your time.
"I hate restaurants which exclude certain races. So I don't go there. See how easy that was? Now do the same."
If you want to produce art and give it away, you can do whatever you want with it IMHO. But the moment you start selling it, you become a business. And like all businesses, you have to comply with anti-discrimination clauses which prohibit exclusion based on race, gender, religion, etc.
Which is irrelevant because lead is a naturally occurring substance present everywhere in the environment. You literally cannot go anywhere or do anything which does not expose you to lead. So it's pointless trying to avoid exposure to "ANY level of lead."
It's the higher concentrations of lead which you have to worry about. So OP is correct that without knowing how much lead was found, it's pointless.
Just as a guess, I'd say because baby food is finely minced into a gruel, any contamination is spread throughout the product instead of just sitting on the surface where it can be easily washed off (with purified water with a lower lead concentration than storage, processing, and transport environments). Similar to why ground beef is more prone to salmonella contamination than steak - grinding it spreads the bacteria from just the surface where it can be easily washed off or killed by cooking, to throughout the entire volume of meat.
Atlas V is about $109 million (used to be about $180 million before competition).
Delta IV Heavy is about $435 million. USAF contract of $1.74 billion for 4 launches.
What may be skewing your analysis is that although there are about 2x as many Atlas V launches as Delta IV, because we're using a mean price, it's the higher cost rocket which affects the mean more, not the rocket with more launches (4x the cost @ half the number = 2x the effect on the mean). The one with more launches affects the median more.
Also worth noting that a "fair and reasonable" price is not what it costs to make the product plus some percentage. It's what the buyer is willing to pay. If the buyer (govt in this case) thinks it's worth paying $1 billion per launch (space shuttle), then that's a fair and reasonable cost. As long as what you pay is less than the benefit you gain, then it's a reasonable economic transaction.
The key to lowering costs is competition, not requiring transparency of the seller's accounting. Nobody wants to have to go through Walmart's accounting books to guarantee they're getting a "fair and reasonable" price when they go shopping there. It's a helluva lot easier to compare prices at a bunch of competing stores selling the same stuff. If the government wanted lower prices, they should've prohibited Boeing and Lockheed from forming ULA together.
Locking owners out of the device sounds great for manufacturers (owners have to pay for expensive repairs or buy a replacement). Until a component that's normally trivial to replace turns out to be defective and fails catastrophically. And a recall which should've cost about $25 per device ends up costing several hundred or several thousand dollars per device.
A Boeing 737 Max has a 3515 nautical mile range (4045 statute miles) and 6853 gallon fuel capacity. With 162 passengers, this works out to 95.6 MPG per passenger (2.46 L/100 km). Competitive with most cars carrying 3 people.
Their massive fuel burn from air travel is because of the long distances they travel, not because air travel is inherently worse than other forms of transport. If you're planning a weekend getaway by car, you'll probably only have enough time to travel a couple hundred miles, thus limiting your fuel consumption. But if you fly, you can travel a couple thousand miles in the limited amount of time.
For trips of the same distance, flying is usually more environmentally friendly than driving with 1-2 people, sometimes more friendly than driving with 3-4 people.
Whether a flyby is dangerous or safe depends on how well you know the path of both objects. The trajectory of the ISS is very well known, and the trajectory of the spy satellite is (presumably) very well known. Probably to within a few hundred meters. So they could've accurately predicted that the two were in no danger of colliding, and this was a safe pass. The same would've been true for an active Russian or Chinese spy satellite (though it would've required sharing of precise orbital element info between the involved countries).
Space junk is a problem because its path is not well known. At best we use radar to nail down its trajectory to within a few km. That larger error radius is what makes any pass within a few km dangerous. It's not that passes within a few km are inherently dangerous.
Yeah, my hunch is in a true survey of all programmers, it's the tab-users who make more money. Tabs are a relic from the old typewriter days, so older programmers are more likely to use them. And older programs tend to make more money.
Tabs worked great on typewriters because they were a fixed size (there was a mechanical stop you could move along notches to set the tab stop length). But when computers came out, they failed to standardize the number of spaces in a tab. So tabs turned into a hindrance which would make code display differently on different computers. I loved tabs on typewriters, and used them extensively on my first computers (for writing reports - before all this networked sharing of files began). But once I had to share what I wrote in software format with others, I switched to using spaces. I only use tabs in Word, which retains the old typewriter ability to manully set the amount of indentation you get from a tab.
No, this situation arose because the government regulates the airwaves, thereby limiting the number of companies which can compete in the cellular market. With few competitors, it's very easy for them to coincidentally decide to lock their phones.
In an unregulated market with multiple carriers, chances are high at least one carrier would offer unlocked devices. Customers would flock to that carrier, forcing the other carriers to also unlock their devices. A company doing an asshole thing like locking a phone cuts its own throat, unless the government has implemented regulations prohibiting or limiting the number of competitors it faces.
One can argue that the airwaves need to be regulated to avoid or minimize interference. But the asinine development of companies locking phones is a consequence of that regulation, not something that will happen on its own unless regulations prohibit it.
The ideal implementation of cellular service would've been for cellular networks and cellular service to remain orthogonal. A company could build a cellular network, but not sell cellular service to customers. Or it could provide cellular service, but not build a network. The service companies would then negotiate with network companies for airtime on their tower networks, effectively acting like a union representative on behalf of all their customers. Meanwhile the plethora of service companies would mean there was plenty of service providers for customers to choose from, so none would be stupid enough to try to lock their phones. And the fact that service companies might have to switch network companies would mean they would request manufacturers design phones which were compatible with all networks.
Nearly all implementations of the data service in GSM 3G (UMTS, HSDPA) is wideband CDMA.
CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. GSM was designed (by committee) to use TDMA - each phone takes turns communicating with the tower. That was OK for voice, but absolutely destroyed data bandwidth because each phone got an equal slice of the bandwidth even if it didn't need it. CDMA allows every phone to transmit simultaneously, and the tower distinguishes them because each phone uses orthogonal codes. Kinda like two people writing on the same sheet of paper, one vertically, one horizontally. CDMA interprets other devices transmissions as an increase in the noise floor (decrease in signal to noise ratio), so each phone's bandwidth scales automatically. If 10 phones are transmitting simultaneously, each phone gets 1/t0h the bandwidth. If only one phone is transmitting, the noise floor is lower and it gets all the bandwidth.
This is why CDMA carriers rolled out 3G data a year before GSM. The U.S. allowed both standards to compete, and CDMA absolutely destroyed GSM in data service. GSM threw in the towel and licensed CDMA from Qualcomm, and needed the extra year to come up with the specs and hardware. This is also why 3G GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time. They had a TDMA radio for voice, and a wCDMA radio for data. CDMA phones had only one radio, and it could only be used for voice or data, not both simultaneously.
CDMA for voice is used mainly in only the U.S. But if the U.S. had gone along with GSM, our data speeds today would probably be around 300 kbps - 1 Mbps. And LTE probably wouldn't exist. Most implementations of LTE use OFDMA - orthogonal frequencies as opposed to orthogonal codes in CDMA. CDMA served as the proof of theory that this crazy orthogonal signaling stuff really did work when scaled up to the size of a nationwide network. Without that proof, people wouldn't have been willing to put in the time and money into developing LTE. (OFDMA requires more processing to extricate the orthogonal signals than CDMA. Up until about 2010, the processors needed for OFDMA used too much power to be of practical use in a device designed to operate for at least 12 hours on battery. My old Galaxy S supported Sprint's WiMAX which was also OFDMA, and it would only last about 4 hours if I was using WiMAX.)
The time-limited nature of TDMA is also why GSM coverage is worse in rural areas. Because the timeslices are synchronized and a constant length, each TDMA tower's range is limited by the speed of light multiplied by the duration of the timeslice (IIRC this is about 35 km). CDMA has no such restrictions, so in a wide-open rural area with little noise and few obstructions, a single CDMA tower can cover a lot more area than a GSM TDMA tower. TDMA was just a bad idea overall, and it was stupid for GSM to standardize on it.
If you create a stigma of shame around certain disrespectful behaviors or beliefs, all you do is drive it underground. It's still there, people just become better at hiding it. I was hopeful this would become obvious after Trump's election - where Trump supporters were shamed by the media to the point that they lied to pollsters about who they were going to vote for, causing the the polls to inaccurately predict a Clinton victory. But instead the media has gotten sidetracked with blaming the whole thing on Russia (probably because that would absolve them of any responsibility).
If you want to get rid of prejudice and discrimination, you have to do it through education and exposure. First you counteract the bigoted prejudices by teaching people that these other people who look or believe differently than you are more like you than they are different. They have feelings, hopes, dreams, desires, failings, make mistakes, and are just trying to make a better life for themselves just like you. Then you expose people to these other people for long enough so they can see these things with their own eyes (short exposure causes them to only pick out things which confirm their prejudices). I come from a conservative religious background. But one of my childhood friends turned out to be gay. Becoming friends with someone from a group you're supposed to be opposed to is the best way to gain perspective. It's no longer "would I scream slurs at some anonymous person?" It becomes "would I scream slurs at my friend?"
The entire SJW tactic of trying to change society via shaming is misguided, and arguably harmful as people will perceive shaming to be an accepted tactic. People are learning that it's OK to disrespect and behave rudely towards other people with certain beliefs (religious or atheist), from certain areas (the Bay Area or the deep South), or with certain characteristics (black or rich). Basically it's the same discrimination SJWs are purportedly trying to stamp out, just directed at different groups. You're not stamping out hatred, you're just swapping it for a different hatred.
Don't assume the caricatures - the criminal black, the privileged white male, the self-entitled Millenial, etc. - are true. Each person is a unique blend of feelings, thoughts, abilities, and beliefs. And you have to learn that person's unique blend before you have the right to criticize them. Judging them based solely on their appearance, where they're from, what event they're attending, etc. is prejudice, discrimination, and bigotry. Doing so under the guise of stamping out prejudice is hypocrisy.
Matthew 12:31
The entire reason it's called the New Testament is because it contains a new set of rules and guidelines which supersede the ones in the Old Testament (including the one you've quoted). Mainly, salvation through grace (Jesus' sacrifice), rather than salvation through adherence to Mosaic law. The law from the Old Testament is still relevant - but only as a reminder of what Jesus saved us from, not as rules which still need to be strictly adhered to. The only sin which cannot be (has not been) forgiven is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit - i.e. denial of this new testament.
The concept behind the new testament superseding the old is summed up in Romans 13:8-10:
(For those unfamiliar, the above quoted commandments are from the Ten Commandments - the cornerstone of Mosaic law.) In other words, the intent of the law is love. But because Mosaic law was defined as a set of rules blind to intent, it could end up misapplied. When the Supreme Court has to decide what a law means in an ambiguous situation, they often fall back on the intent of the authors of the law to help them interpret it. This passage is telling us that the intent of Mosaic law was to help us to love our neighbors and do them no harm. Interpretations of Mosaic law which contradict this intent (like yours) are misinterpretations.
Furthermore, we do not have the authority to mete out justice for transgressions of the law. Only God has that authority. Romans 12:17-21:
So any lawyer working with inmates in a certain state just needs to get a virtual phone number in another state, and have it forward to his regular phone number.
So it's not necessarily true that Apple's move to 64-bit is why it runs fine in the 64-bit version. I think the swipe at Apple is because they removed 32-bit apps from the App Store. Even if chess.com had found and patched this bug ahead of time (which they may have since the CEO has admitted he's clueless about this tech stuff), as I understand it owners of 32-bit iOS devices would've had to update their software by downloading the patch directly from chess.com. No auto-update via the App Store anymore for 32-bit apps.