That way the ADA students get the captioning they need
That right there is the problem. The University posted the videos for free, so they should have no liability nor responsibility for captioning the videos. If these are two ADA students browsing the web in their free time, then tough, some stuff online simply isn't ADA-compliant.
But if these ADA students needed to view these videos - e.g. someone else required these ADA students to view the videos for a paid online course - then they should be the ones responsible for paying to close-caption the required videos.
So either these ADA students didn't need to view the videos, or they did and we're putting the burden of providing closed-captioning on the wrong entity.
All its problems from moving the Home PC to the NT kernel vs the DOS based Windowed Shell that use to be Windows.
Windows moved to the NT kernel with Windows 2000. Windows ME was the last version based on DOS.
Vista had the ignominy of being the first version where Microsoft tried to enforce the admin vs user privilege model that Unix had from its inception. Prior to Vista, Win32 app makers would just program assuming they had root privileges (as if they were writing a DOS program). This had the unfortunate side-effect that any bug in any program that was running became a potential root escalation vulnerability. The proper way to make programs is to run them with user privileges unless they need root privileges. Vista was the first time Microsoft required Windows programs to behave this way, resulting in a huge number of legacy Windows app breaking. That's why so many businesses stuck with XP - because apps specific to their business wouldn't run in Vista, and the programmer(s) they'd hired to write it were long gone and hadn't left source code, or said programmers wanted to charge thousands of dollars for an updated version that would run on Vista.
If you didn't run apps with this problem, Vista was actually fairly decent - very similar to Win 7. The main problem then was that XP's hardware requirements were very low. I'd say 400 MHz and 256 MB to run comfortably. Used to be 128 MB - the published minimum - but over the years anti-virus programs got big enough (about 50-60 MB by 2007) that you needed 256 MB. In order not to scare customers, Microsoft published Vista's minimum requirements as 800 MHz and 512 MB to trick people with newer XP boxes into upgrading. Vista would run on that hardware, but it would make for a miserable experience. A realistic minimum was around 1.6 GHz and 1 GB, with a comfortable minimum being 2 GHz 2 GB. Very close to Windows 7's minimum requirements.
The problem with that approach here is that the government required you to register with Dun & Bradstreet if you wanted to bid on government contracts. When I worked at a hotel, I had to register us with them because a military group wanted to stay at our hotel for a retreat, and they required us to bid on the contract.
So any penalty imposed on them would just end up being paid for by the government via higher fees, and/or higher contract bid prices.
It's picked up in the last couple decades as the people who survived the camps and the soldiers who liberated them have been dying of old age. I remember reading an article in the 1980s about a Holocaust survivor who was invited to speak about about her experience to a high school history class What she was saying was so inhumane, so unthinkable, that the students were having trouble believing her, even when she showed them her tattoo. The teacher, who happened to be a WWII vet, had to step in and say it absolutely was true - he'd been there when they liberated the camps and had seen it with his own eyes.
Now imagine if the teacher hadn't been an eyewitness and the woman's testimony had had to stand on its own. With fewer first-hand accounts, it drops to a he said/she said state. And the deniers are working their hardest to speak as loudly as possible. I imagine in 50+ years we're going to have similar problems with 9/11 denial (denying that the attacks ever happened, not conspiracy theories about who dunnit).
MSRP is common, as is a MAP (minimum advertised price - this is why you'll sometimes see sales saying "place in cart to see price"). But some manufacturers try to enforce a minimum selling price, which is outlawed in many countries. Apple can set its own price to the retailers, but the retailers must be allowed to set their own prices - even if it means selling the product at a loss.
As much as everyone hates commercials, they also have some informational value. I lived without a TV for a couple years. One day my friends and I decided to go watch a movie, and I realized I had absolutely no idea what movies were playing because I never saw commercials. They tried for a while to give me a basic plot summary of each movie, but eventually I just told them to pick something they wanted to see and I'd tag along.
The same goes for new products - you often wouldn't know they existed without commercials. You'd have to learn about them via word of mouth, or seeing it in use. When someone comes out with a really cool and useful invention, informing the public that it exists improves economic efficiency by facilitating rapid adoption.
I think the real problem with commercials is (1) marketing lies and (2) repetition / irrelevance (repetition is a form of irrelevance - once you've seen a commercial, a repeat viewing is mostly irrelevant). Government regulation can address (1). But (2) is a lot trickier. The way advertisers are trying to address (2) is by collecting data about your personal interests and tracking your behavior. But that runs afoul of privacy concerns. Maybe the gatekeeper should be an adblocker that sits on your personal computer or device and filters out repetitive or irrelevant ads, while letting ones you'd be interested in through, without letting the advertiser know which category their ad fell in.
Copyright is an artificial construct. For its existence to be justified, it must at the very least be self-sustainable. i.e. If the money copyright holders collects isn't enough to pay for copyright to exist, there is no point in allowing copyright to exist.
So if we get rid of safe harbor provisions as the Copyright industry wants, then the logical thing to do is for the government to collect a fee from all copyright holders and distribute that money to ISPs and websites to pay for copyright enforcement. Doing it the way the Copyright industry wants - where enforcement costs are completely externalized and not borne by the Copyright industry - can result in a situation where the economic cost of enforcing copyright (borne by ISPs and websites) exceeds the economic benefit of having copyright (enjoyed by the Copyright industry). At that point, the economic reason for having Copyright (to promote economic progress and activity) ceases to exist.
NAND just holds charges at different voltages. SLC uses two charge levels - one bit per NAND cell. MLC uses four charge levels - two bits per NAND. TLC uses eight charge levels - 3 bits per NAND.
Physically, there is nothing different about the NAND. So most modern TLC drives initially write new data as MLC or even SLC to avoid the speed penalty. Then later during idle time they will re-write that data as TLC. Reading is still a bit slower, but writing should be the same speed unless you're writing large amounts of data.
The only remaining concerns are then reliability and endurance. After Samsung's fiasco with TLC in the 840 EVO, everyone is being super-careful to make sure they avoid problems due to charge leakage. So reliability shouldn't be a concern. And with modern large capacity SSDs (250 GB - 1 TB), the ~3000 cycle endurance of TLC represents several lifetimes of drive usage for the typical user. So endurance isn't an issue either.
Oh, people understand exactly what's happening. For over a decade I ran my own private mail and web server, on server space I paid for. I explained the privacy issues to friends and offered to give them a free email account and web space. They still signed up for Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail; Geocities, MySpace, and Facebook instead.
Here's how the average person values things:
1. Easy to use
2. Free ...
187. Protects your privacy
That's the problem with what the privacy advocates are preaching. People tend to assume others think and behave as they themselves do. So the privacy advocates all make the incorrect assumption that if The People just knew what was happening with their private data, they would be horrified and rebel against the data farmers like Google and Facebook. That they don't know the true value of their privacy.
News flash: The People don't care. They value their private data so little that they think that trading it for free email and web services is a great bargain for them. If you want to attack this, it's going to have to be via another angle that people actually do care about. Maybe the financial impact of identity theft.
Comparative statistics are only useful if stats you collect now cover the same age groupings as stats collected in the past. So if 15-24 is a standard group, statisticians will want to continue to collect stats for that group even if it doesn't make as much sense for a particular stat.
The energy from pressurization is pressure * volume. At a 2.23m diameter (3.906 m^2 cross-sectional area), every km of tube pumped to 95% vacuum represents 376 MJ of energy. With an estimated 500 miles of tube, this represents 188 GJ, or about as much energy as 45 tons of TNT. Granted it's spread out over 500 km so is equivalent to about 82 grams of TNT per meter. That's not an insubstantial amount of energy. But I think a steel tube could be designed to withstand it.
The problem is what happens when a train car traveling 700 mph hits a section of tube damaged by a localized implosion. If a section of tube were somehow weakened, it would fail when the stresses it experienced were highest. This would probably be right when the first car of a train passed it. The weakened section fails inward, and the following train cars hit it at 700 mph.
Yes we fly 500+ mph in planes every day. But those planes don't fly a few cm from things that can suddenly pop out and strike the plane.
The person behind it all seems to have been ex-CEO Martin Winterkorn (if not directly, then by unnecessarily causing the circumstances which led to the cheating). Winterkorn had been the head of Audi, while Wolfgang Bernhard was the head of VW. Bernhard was hired from Daimler-Benz-Chrysler, so was seen as an outsider within the VW Group (VW / Audi / Porsche). In an apparent corporate coup the former CEO was ousted by Winterkorn and the chairman. Winterkorn was crowned the new CEO, and they also got rid of Bernhard in the process.
Bernhard had just licensed the DEF system from Mercedes Benz (diesel exhaust fluid - adding urea to the diesel exhaust to convert NOx into nitrogen and water). Winterkorn's ego was apparently big enough that it wasn't enough to get rid of Bernhard, he also dumped the DEF-enabled engine Bernhard had been working on. Thus the VW 2.0L diesel engine without a DEF system was born, whose only way to comply with emissions regulations was by cheating.
Winterkorn resigned because of the scandal. But believe me a lot of VW owners would love to see him jailed.
My modern smart meter has a digital readout of instantaneous power consumption in Watts, and cumulative consumption in kWh. My old meter was just a spinning disc colored half black, half white, with an odometer-like counter. I had no idea how those numbers translated into kWh, or the spin rate to Watts.
If this kind of problem had happened with my old meter, I would've had no recourse. With my smart meter, I can turn on/off stuff in the house and check the meter's reading if I suspect something fishy is going on. Then demonstrate to the power company how if my computer monitor goes into power save mode, the meter's reading goes from 423 Watts for the entire house to 2885 Watts.
You have it backwards. If DST were useful as its proponents claimed, you'd expect to see a positive correlation with its use. Instead a negative correlation was found. That's enough to invalidate the claims of DST's proponents. No need to prove causation. (In fact if anyone needs to prove causation, it's the people advocating DST.)
We're not trying to prove smoking is bad for you. We're merely trying to disprove the claims by the tobacco companies (DST proponents) that smoking is good for you.
And if you actually read TFA, you'll see that their comparison was nothing as stupid as comparing the lunch hour to the hour before or after lunch. They compared Los Angeles (which uses DST) with Phoenix (which doesn't use DST). That neatly accounts for all time-based variables like lunch hours.
Because your body's circadian rhythm works on a 24 hour clock, simply giving people a day off doesn't fix the problem. If you've traveled internationally, you may have noticed that it's easier to adjust flying West than it is flying East. That's because flying West makes the day longer. You can simply stay up longer each day, and still get enough sleep. But going the other way you have to force yourself awake without enough sleep. It's the lack of sleep which makes it hard to adjust.
DST works the same way. The change in Fall is easy because you can still get enough sleep. But in Spring you have to force yourself away without enough sleep for as long as it takes your body's circadian rhythm to adjust, which can be several days. A single day off isn't enough time for your body to adjust.
And giving people an extra day off of work would result in the loss of 1/250 = 0.4% of their annual productivity. That's more than enough to completely wipe out any of the purported productivity gains from DST. To make it work without a productivity loss would require businesses to start their day (say) 50 minutes later immediately after DST begins. 40 minutes later the second day, 30 minutes later the third day, etc. At which point you have to ask why you're concocting such a complicated adjustment to people's work hours when you can just get rid of DST entirely and not have to deal with any time change at all?
Read TFA. It compared Los Angeles (uses Daylight Saving Time) vs Phoenix (doesn't use DST) There's a large increase in health services consumed associated with the start of DST, and a minuscule almost non-existent decrease associated with its end. Across all aspects measured (grocery sales, retail sales, restaurant business, other services, health services), the net effect of the start and end of DST was zero or negative.
The entire premise behind Daylight Saving is that it will result in improved quality of life. If it's correlated with decreased quality of life, then that's enough to invalidate its reason for being. We don't need to show causality. We're not trying to prove smoking is bad for you. We're just trying to show that the purported health benefits of smoking don't exist.
That said, I suspect Daylight Saving was more useful when we were an agrarian society and the extra hour of daylight was useful for field hands to see what they were doing out in the crop fields. But today only 1% of the population works on farms.
IMHO "employer-provided health care" should be a voucher up to a certain amount that the employer gives you to spend on any health insurance of your choice. That way it remains a purely financial transaction between you and the employer, while all personal health information remains between you and your insurer. Then there's no excuse for any health information being leaked to your employer. No entrapment that comes about when your employer is the source of your health insurance. If you lose or change your job, you can keep the health insurance - paid out of pocket or with vouchers from your new employer.
I was manager of a small business when we instituted employer-provided health care. The operating premise is that by combining your employees into an insurance pool, it stabilizes both the premiums paid into the pool (one person could quit their job, but it's highly unlikely all your employees will quit their jobs at the same time), as well as the payouts due to employees getting sick (one person can get sick, but it's highly unlikely all your employees will get sick at the same time). But a pool is a pool. Unless your employees are uncharacteristically healthy or unhealthy, there's no statistical difference between a pool of employees, and a pool of random people who bought their own health insurance (out of pocket or using vouchers from their employer).
You used to be able to spoof your MAC address. Intel removed the capability from their WiFi cards some time around 2010. The laptop I had before then could do it, but the laptop I replaced it with couldn't. When I investigated why, I learned that Intel had removed the capability due to too many wardrivers using the capability to connect to WiFi networks with poor security which were relying on MAC address filters. Kind of a backwards solution if you ask me, but it is what it is.
As long as you allow AT&T to provide U-Verse/DSL service anywhere there's Verizon FIOS/DSL, and allow Verizon to provide FIOS/DSL service anywhere there's AT&T U-Verse/DSL service.
The problem isn't really zero rating. The problem is lack of competition. Net neutrality is just a way to keep the ISPs honest if you insist on letting them keep their local cable/phone monopolies. If you get rid of the monopolies and allow competition, then you don't need to enforce net neutrality because any ISP which intentionally degrades (say) Netflix service will just drive Netflix customers to a competing ISP. Intentionally degrading service only works if the customers can't flee to a competing service.
Anti-piracy copyright holders need to take a lesson from Canada. The music industry there convinced the government that piracy was pervasive and destroying their industry, and that a tax should be levied on all blank CDs to compensate them for their losses under the theory that people were burning pirated music onto blank CDs. The government agreed, and instituted the tax.
Later when the music companies tried to sue individuals for copyright violation, the courts decided that since The People had already compensated the music industry for their losses via the CD tax, there was no need for any more lawsuits.
Double-dipping may be normal for the music and movie industry (when's the last time one of them offered you a discount for upgrading your DVD collection to Blu-Ray, or CD to streamed, even though you ostensibly already bought a license when you bought the first one?). But it's not normal for the rest of the world, and the courts will slap them down if they try to impose their perverted view of how things should work onto the real world.
Apple is one of Samsung's best customers. Apple buys Samsung memory, flash NAND, and screens for use in their devices. The Apple iOS processors are mostly manufactured at Samsung fabs (initially they were made entirely at Samsung fabs). If the new iPhones switch to OLED screens, it'll probably be Samsung screens since LG probably won't have enough capacity.
Apple tried to disassociate itself from Samsung after the two butted heads in various patent lawsuits. But it was difficult/impossible to do since Samsung makes a lot of the stuff Apple uses in their products. They had to use the Samsung fabs because nobody else had sufficient capacity for 10nm production (TSMC finally began adding some capacity last year). And Samsung has 98% of the world's OLED screen production capability. Apple OTOH accounts for only a few percent of Samsung's sales. So it's actually Apple who needs Samsung a lot more than Samsung needs Apple.
A lot of people seem to forget or not know that Apple doesn't actually make anything (except software and a processor design). Apple is primarily a parts assembler, like Dell, who buys other companies' products, repackages them, and sells it to the end-user. Actually, even Dell has more skin in the game since they own their own assembly factories. Apple contracts out their assembly work to companies like Quanta and Foxconn.
Deleting it will decrease their effectiveness at recognizing what you say. They use your voice history to "learn" your specific speech patterns, helping recognize future voice queries. But as with most things Google, they leave the choice to you, unlike the other services.
To allow our AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles - robot submarines) to navigate underwater, we'd deploy a network of underwater navigation beacons. Each beacon would ping (at a different frequency) when they heard a certain acoustic code from our sub. Based how long it took for the sub to receive each response ping and the locations of the beacons, it could determine its position underwater. The beacons were housed in glass spheres anchored underwater. Since it was a pain to recover them, they held enough batteries to power them for 6-12 months of operations.
So one year we deployed the beacons and ran our AUV ops for a week. We'd then go back to our lab to analyze the data for the rest of the month. Since we were going to be back in the water in a month, we left the beacons. We came back the following month, sent out a test signal to make sure the beacons would respond and.... nothing. We sent down divers to recover the beacons and all their batteries were dead. We assumed someone had programmed the charging power supply wrong so they hadn't gotten a full charge. So we recharged them, re-deployed the beacons, and ran our ops.
The following month, same thing. Sent a test signal and all the beacons were dead again. This was a real head scratcher. Eventually we figured out what was going on. Dolphins had heard the coded signal the AUV transmitted. They thought it was pretty cool that our beacons would respond back with a ping. So while we were away, they were having fun whistling the coded signal over and over making the beacons ping until the batteries were dead.
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That right there is the problem. The University posted the videos for free, so they should have no liability nor responsibility for captioning the videos. If these are two ADA students browsing the web in their free time, then tough, some stuff online simply isn't ADA-compliant.
But if these ADA students needed to view these videos - e.g. someone else required these ADA students to view the videos for a paid online course - then they should be the ones responsible for paying to close-caption the required videos.
So either these ADA students didn't need to view the videos, or they did and we're putting the burden of providing closed-captioning on the wrong entity.
Windows moved to the NT kernel with Windows 2000. Windows ME was the last version based on DOS.
Vista had the ignominy of being the first version where Microsoft tried to enforce the admin vs user privilege model that Unix had from its inception. Prior to Vista, Win32 app makers would just program assuming they had root privileges (as if they were writing a DOS program). This had the unfortunate side-effect that any bug in any program that was running became a potential root escalation vulnerability. The proper way to make programs is to run them with user privileges unless they need root privileges. Vista was the first time Microsoft required Windows programs to behave this way, resulting in a huge number of legacy Windows app breaking. That's why so many businesses stuck with XP - because apps specific to their business wouldn't run in Vista, and the programmer(s) they'd hired to write it were long gone and hadn't left source code, or said programmers wanted to charge thousands of dollars for an updated version that would run on Vista.
If you didn't run apps with this problem, Vista was actually fairly decent - very similar to Win 7. The main problem then was that XP's hardware requirements were very low. I'd say 400 MHz and 256 MB to run comfortably. Used to be 128 MB - the published minimum - but over the years anti-virus programs got big enough (about 50-60 MB by 2007) that you needed 256 MB. In order not to scare customers, Microsoft published Vista's minimum requirements as 800 MHz and 512 MB to trick people with newer XP boxes into upgrading. Vista would run on that hardware, but it would make for a miserable experience. A realistic minimum was around 1.6 GHz and 1 GB, with a comfortable minimum being 2 GHz 2 GB. Very close to Windows 7's minimum requirements.
The problem with that approach here is that the government required you to register with Dun & Bradstreet if you wanted to bid on government contracts. When I worked at a hotel, I had to register us with them because a military group wanted to stay at our hotel for a retreat, and they required us to bid on the contract.
So any penalty imposed on them would just end up being paid for by the government via higher fees, and/or higher contract bid prices.
It's picked up in the last couple decades as the people who survived the camps and the soldiers who liberated them have been dying of old age. I remember reading an article in the 1980s about a Holocaust survivor who was invited to speak about about her experience to a high school history class What she was saying was so inhumane, so unthinkable, that the students were having trouble believing her, even when she showed them her tattoo. The teacher, who happened to be a WWII vet, had to step in and say it absolutely was true - he'd been there when they liberated the camps and had seen it with his own eyes.
Now imagine if the teacher hadn't been an eyewitness and the woman's testimony had had to stand on its own. With fewer first-hand accounts, it drops to a he said/she said state. And the deniers are working their hardest to speak as loudly as possible. I imagine in 50+ years we're going to have similar problems with 9/11 denial (denying that the attacks ever happened, not conspiracy theories about who dunnit).
MSRP is common, as is a MAP (minimum advertised price - this is why you'll sometimes see sales saying "place in cart to see price"). But some manufacturers try to enforce a minimum selling price, which is outlawed in many countries. Apple can set its own price to the retailers, but the retailers must be allowed to set their own prices - even if it means selling the product at a loss.
As much as everyone hates commercials, they also have some informational value. I lived without a TV for a couple years. One day my friends and I decided to go watch a movie, and I realized I had absolutely no idea what movies were playing because I never saw commercials. They tried for a while to give me a basic plot summary of each movie, but eventually I just told them to pick something they wanted to see and I'd tag along.
The same goes for new products - you often wouldn't know they existed without commercials. You'd have to learn about them via word of mouth, or seeing it in use. When someone comes out with a really cool and useful invention, informing the public that it exists improves economic efficiency by facilitating rapid adoption.
I think the real problem with commercials is (1) marketing lies and (2) repetition / irrelevance (repetition is a form of irrelevance - once you've seen a commercial, a repeat viewing is mostly irrelevant). Government regulation can address (1). But (2) is a lot trickier. The way advertisers are trying to address (2) is by collecting data about your personal interests and tracking your behavior. But that runs afoul of privacy concerns. Maybe the gatekeeper should be an adblocker that sits on your personal computer or device and filters out repetitive or irrelevant ads, while letting ones you'd be interested in through, without letting the advertiser know which category their ad fell in.
Copyright is an artificial construct. For its existence to be justified, it must at the very least be self-sustainable. i.e. If the money copyright holders collects isn't enough to pay for copyright to exist, there is no point in allowing copyright to exist.
So if we get rid of safe harbor provisions as the Copyright industry wants, then the logical thing to do is for the government to collect a fee from all copyright holders and distribute that money to ISPs and websites to pay for copyright enforcement. Doing it the way the Copyright industry wants - where enforcement costs are completely externalized and not borne by the Copyright industry - can result in a situation where the economic cost of enforcing copyright (borne by ISPs and websites) exceeds the economic benefit of having copyright (enjoyed by the Copyright industry). At that point, the economic reason for having Copyright (to promote economic progress and activity) ceases to exist.
NAND just holds charges at different voltages. SLC uses two charge levels - one bit per NAND cell. MLC uses four charge levels - two bits per NAND. TLC uses eight charge levels - 3 bits per NAND.
Physically, there is nothing different about the NAND. So most modern TLC drives initially write new data as MLC or even SLC to avoid the speed penalty. Then later during idle time they will re-write that data as TLC. Reading is still a bit slower, but writing should be the same speed unless you're writing large amounts of data.
The only remaining concerns are then reliability and endurance. After Samsung's fiasco with TLC in the 840 EVO, everyone is being super-careful to make sure they avoid problems due to charge leakage. So reliability shouldn't be a concern. And with modern large capacity SSDs (250 GB - 1 TB), the ~3000 cycle endurance of TLC represents several lifetimes of drive usage for the typical user. So endurance isn't an issue either.
Oh, people understand exactly what's happening. For over a decade I ran my own private mail and web server, on server space I paid for. I explained the privacy issues to friends and offered to give them a free email account and web space. They still signed up for Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail; Geocities, MySpace, and Facebook instead.
...
Here's how the average person values things:
1. Easy to use
2. Free
187. Protects your privacy
That's the problem with what the privacy advocates are preaching. People tend to assume others think and behave as they themselves do. So the privacy advocates all make the incorrect assumption that if The People just knew what was happening with their private data, they would be horrified and rebel against the data farmers like Google and Facebook. That they don't know the true value of their privacy.
News flash: The People don't care. They value their private data so little that they think that trading it for free email and web services is a great bargain for them. If you want to attack this, it's going to have to be via another angle that people actually do care about. Maybe the financial impact of identity theft.
15-24 coincides with the age brackets used by the CDC. So I suspect it's a standard demographic grouping.
Comparative statistics are only useful if stats you collect now cover the same age groupings as stats collected in the past. So if 15-24 is a standard group, statisticians will want to continue to collect stats for that group even if it doesn't make as much sense for a particular stat.
The energy from pressurization is pressure * volume. At a 2.23m diameter (3.906 m^2 cross-sectional area), every km of tube pumped to 95% vacuum represents 376 MJ of energy. With an estimated 500 miles of tube, this represents 188 GJ, or about as much energy as 45 tons of TNT. Granted it's spread out over 500 km so is equivalent to about 82 grams of TNT per meter. That's not an insubstantial amount of energy. But I think a steel tube could be designed to withstand it.
The problem is what happens when a train car traveling 700 mph hits a section of tube damaged by a localized implosion. If a section of tube were somehow weakened, it would fail when the stresses it experienced were highest. This would probably be right when the first car of a train passed it. The weakened section fails inward, and the following train cars hit it at 700 mph.
Yes we fly 500+ mph in planes every day. But those planes don't fly a few cm from things that can suddenly pop out and strike the plane.
The person behind it all seems to have been ex-CEO Martin Winterkorn (if not directly, then by unnecessarily causing the circumstances which led to the cheating). Winterkorn had been the head of Audi, while Wolfgang Bernhard was the head of VW. Bernhard was hired from Daimler-Benz-Chrysler, so was seen as an outsider within the VW Group (VW / Audi / Porsche). In an apparent corporate coup the former CEO was ousted by Winterkorn and the chairman. Winterkorn was crowned the new CEO, and they also got rid of Bernhard in the process.
Bernhard had just licensed the DEF system from Mercedes Benz (diesel exhaust fluid - adding urea to the diesel exhaust to convert NOx into nitrogen and water). Winterkorn's ego was apparently big enough that it wasn't enough to get rid of Bernhard, he also dumped the DEF-enabled engine Bernhard had been working on. Thus the VW 2.0L diesel engine without a DEF system was born, whose only way to comply with emissions regulations was by cheating.
Winterkorn resigned because of the scandal. But believe me a lot of VW owners would love to see him jailed.
My modern smart meter has a digital readout of instantaneous power consumption in Watts, and cumulative consumption in kWh. My old meter was just a spinning disc colored half black, half white, with an odometer-like counter. I had no idea how those numbers translated into kWh, or the spin rate to Watts.
If this kind of problem had happened with my old meter, I would've had no recourse. With my smart meter, I can turn on/off stuff in the house and check the meter's reading if I suspect something fishy is going on. Then demonstrate to the power company how if my computer monitor goes into power save mode, the meter's reading goes from 423 Watts for the entire house to 2885 Watts.
You have it backwards. If DST were useful as its proponents claimed, you'd expect to see a positive correlation with its use. Instead a negative correlation was found. That's enough to invalidate the claims of DST's proponents. No need to prove causation. (In fact if anyone needs to prove causation, it's the people advocating DST.)
We're not trying to prove smoking is bad for you. We're merely trying to disprove the claims by the tobacco companies (DST proponents) that smoking is good for you.
And if you actually read TFA, you'll see that their comparison was nothing as stupid as comparing the lunch hour to the hour before or after lunch. They compared Los Angeles (which uses DST) with Phoenix (which doesn't use DST). That neatly accounts for all time-based variables like lunch hours.
Because your body's circadian rhythm works on a 24 hour clock, simply giving people a day off doesn't fix the problem. If you've traveled internationally, you may have noticed that it's easier to adjust flying West than it is flying East. That's because flying West makes the day longer. You can simply stay up longer each day, and still get enough sleep. But going the other way you have to force yourself awake without enough sleep. It's the lack of sleep which makes it hard to adjust.
DST works the same way. The change in Fall is easy because you can still get enough sleep. But in Spring you have to force yourself away without enough sleep for as long as it takes your body's circadian rhythm to adjust, which can be several days. A single day off isn't enough time for your body to adjust.
And giving people an extra day off of work would result in the loss of 1/250 = 0.4% of their annual productivity. That's more than enough to completely wipe out any of the purported productivity gains from DST. To make it work without a productivity loss would require businesses to start their day (say) 50 minutes later immediately after DST begins. 40 minutes later the second day, 30 minutes later the third day, etc. At which point you have to ask why you're concocting such a complicated adjustment to people's work hours when you can just get rid of DST entirely and not have to deal with any time change at all?
Read TFA. It compared Los Angeles (uses Daylight Saving Time) vs Phoenix (doesn't use DST) There's a large increase in health services consumed associated with the start of DST, and a minuscule almost non-existent decrease associated with its end. Across all aspects measured (grocery sales, retail sales, restaurant business, other services, health services), the net effect of the start and end of DST was zero or negative.
The entire premise behind Daylight Saving is that it will result in improved quality of life. If it's correlated with decreased quality of life, then that's enough to invalidate its reason for being. We don't need to show causality. We're not trying to prove smoking is bad for you. We're just trying to show that the purported health benefits of smoking don't exist.
That said, I suspect Daylight Saving was more useful when we were an agrarian society and the extra hour of daylight was useful for field hands to see what they were doing out in the crop fields. But today only 1% of the population works on farms.
IMHO "employer-provided health care" should be a voucher up to a certain amount that the employer gives you to spend on any health insurance of your choice. That way it remains a purely financial transaction between you and the employer, while all personal health information remains between you and your insurer. Then there's no excuse for any health information being leaked to your employer. No entrapment that comes about when your employer is the source of your health insurance. If you lose or change your job, you can keep the health insurance - paid out of pocket or with vouchers from your new employer.
I was manager of a small business when we instituted employer-provided health care. The operating premise is that by combining your employees into an insurance pool, it stabilizes both the premiums paid into the pool (one person could quit their job, but it's highly unlikely all your employees will quit their jobs at the same time), as well as the payouts due to employees getting sick (one person can get sick, but it's highly unlikely all your employees will get sick at the same time). But a pool is a pool. Unless your employees are uncharacteristically healthy or unhealthy, there's no statistical difference between a pool of employees, and a pool of random people who bought their own health insurance (out of pocket or using vouchers from their employer).
You used to be able to spoof your MAC address. Intel removed the capability from their WiFi cards some time around 2010. The laptop I had before then could do it, but the laptop I replaced it with couldn't. When I investigated why, I learned that Intel had removed the capability due to too many wardrivers using the capability to connect to WiFi networks with poor security which were relying on MAC address filters. Kind of a backwards solution if you ask me, but it is what it is.
As long as you allow AT&T to provide U-Verse/DSL service anywhere there's Verizon FIOS/DSL, and allow Verizon to provide FIOS/DSL service anywhere there's AT&T U-Verse/DSL service.
The problem isn't really zero rating. The problem is lack of competition. Net neutrality is just a way to keep the ISPs honest if you insist on letting them keep their local cable/phone monopolies. If you get rid of the monopolies and allow competition, then you don't need to enforce net neutrality because any ISP which intentionally degrades (say) Netflix service will just drive Netflix customers to a competing ISP. Intentionally degrading service only works if the customers can't flee to a competing service.
Anti-piracy copyright holders need to take a lesson from Canada. The music industry there convinced the government that piracy was pervasive and destroying their industry, and that a tax should be levied on all blank CDs to compensate them for their losses under the theory that people were burning pirated music onto blank CDs. The government agreed, and instituted the tax.
Later when the music companies tried to sue individuals for copyright violation, the courts decided that since The People had already compensated the music industry for their losses via the CD tax, there was no need for any more lawsuits.
Double-dipping may be normal for the music and movie industry (when's the last time one of them offered you a discount for upgrading your DVD collection to Blu-Ray, or CD to streamed, even though you ostensibly already bought a license when you bought the first one?). But it's not normal for the rest of the world, and the courts will slap them down if they try to impose their perverted view of how things should work onto the real world.
When the movie Apollo 13 came out, some people complained how the story was too Hollywood, and that in real life the astronauts would've died.
Apple is one of Samsung's best customers. Apple buys Samsung memory, flash NAND, and screens for use in their devices. The Apple iOS processors are mostly manufactured at Samsung fabs (initially they were made entirely at Samsung fabs). If the new iPhones switch to OLED screens, it'll probably be Samsung screens since LG probably won't have enough capacity.
Apple tried to disassociate itself from Samsung after the two butted heads in various patent lawsuits. But it was difficult/impossible to do since Samsung makes a lot of the stuff Apple uses in their products. They had to use the Samsung fabs because nobody else had sufficient capacity for 10nm production (TSMC finally began adding some capacity last year). And Samsung has 98% of the world's OLED screen production capability. Apple OTOH accounts for only a few percent of Samsung's sales. So it's actually Apple who needs Samsung a lot more than Samsung needs Apple.
A lot of people seem to forget or not know that Apple doesn't actually make anything (except software and a processor design). Apple is primarily a parts assembler, like Dell, who buys other companies' products, repackages them, and sells it to the end-user. Actually, even Dell has more skin in the game since they own their own assembly factories. Apple contracts out their assembly work to companies like Quanta and Foxconn.
Google lets you see/hear everything they've recorded from you. And lets you delete it too if you wish.
Deleting it will decrease their effectiveness at recognizing what you say. They use your voice history to "learn" your specific speech patterns, helping recognize future voice queries. But as with most things Google, they leave the choice to you, unlike the other services.
To allow our AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles - robot submarines) to navigate underwater, we'd deploy a network of underwater navigation beacons. Each beacon would ping (at a different frequency) when they heard a certain acoustic code from our sub. Based how long it took for the sub to receive each response ping and the locations of the beacons, it could determine its position underwater. The beacons were housed in glass spheres anchored underwater. Since it was a pain to recover them, they held enough batteries to power them for 6-12 months of operations.
So one year we deployed the beacons and ran our AUV ops for a week. We'd then go back to our lab to analyze the data for the rest of the month. Since we were going to be back in the water in a month, we left the beacons. We came back the following month, sent out a test signal to make sure the beacons would respond and.... nothing. We sent down divers to recover the beacons and all their batteries were dead. We assumed someone had programmed the charging power supply wrong so they hadn't gotten a full charge. So we recharged them, re-deployed the beacons, and ran our ops.
The following month, same thing. Sent a test signal and all the beacons were dead again. This was a real head scratcher. Eventually we figured out what was going on. Dolphins had heard the coded signal the AUV transmitted. They thought it was pretty cool that our beacons would respond back with a ping. So while we were away, they were having fun whistling the coded signal over and over making the beacons ping until the batteries were dead.