Sprint contracted with another company to build the towers in the Los Angeles area. That company tried to save on costs by building the towers with the maximum separation the manufacturer specified as allowable. Since that maximum separation was for ideal situations, the network ended up with a lot of blind spots in between towers with poor or no coverage.
Since the towers were already built, they couldn't pick up the towers and move them closer. And adding new towers in between all the existing towers would create problems too - a cellular network relies on the towers being far enough apart that transmissions in one tower's cell are weak enough (due to distance) that they don't interfere with the transmissions in neighboring cells. So they've been trying to fix it by placing intermediate towers only in spots with poor or no coverage.
For a while they compensated by contracting to use Verizon's towers when roaming. But I guess the roaming payments to Verizon got excessive. Lately their phones have been tuned so that it will try to stick to Sprint if there's the faintest hint of a Sprint signal (i.e. not enough to make a call), rather than switching to roaming on Verizon's network. There's a pay app (Roam Control, root required) which lets you manually switch the phone to roaming-only mode to force it to use Verizon's network. But it stopped working on new phones several years ago.
Some areas in Southern California have better coverage - the towers there were built after Sprint recognized the problem and fired the original company building the tower network. I'm in Orange County and their coverage is pretty good here, with their LTE giving me 20+ Mbps near my house.
UMTS (and HSPDA and HSPA+) is based on wideband CDMA. That's right, CDMA won the CDMA vs GSM war. GSM ended up licensing CDMA from Qualcomm and adding it to the GSM spec for 3G data.
In fact, 4G LTE service probably wouldn't have been possible without CDMA. Most LTE implementations use OFDMA - the tower tells the phones apart by assigning them orthogonal frequencies. All phones can transmit at the same time, the tower tells them apart because each phone generates orthogonal frequencies (i.e. the same frequency combination cannot be produced by another phone). CDMA tells phones apart by assigning them orthogonal codes. So CDMA was the proof of concept needed to show that this "everyone transmits at the same time" hocus pocus actually worked when scaled up to a nation-wide cellular network.
Without CDMA, your GSM data speeds would top out at about 150 kbps.
You don't want to scale it down. Solar's costs are almost entirely up-front. There are no recurring fuel costs. So after you've built the panels, you want them running at full capacity whenever possible. If power generation needs to be scaled down, you want to scale something else down (preferably something using fuel).
The flip side of this is that solar can't provide base load nor peaking load. You need other power sources to provide those. Something renewables advocates need to learn if they want to be taken seriously in energy generation debates.
You don't need nearly as much power at night, and if they go with solar thermal you get quite a bit of storage "for free."
If the dream of an EV in every house comes true, power consumption at night will exceed power consumption during the day.
And all power storage technologies incur losses. Right now, the most efficient method of storage (pumped storage) is about 80% efficient. So like above, you are best off using electricity from solar when it's generated. Don't throw away 20% of the energy just so you can check a box by pounding a round peg into a square hole. Use each technology in its most efficient way. Solar to reduce power generated from other sources during the day. Other power generation sources during the night. Far in the future if so much of our power is generated by solar that we have excess, then we can start to worry about storing some of that energy to time-shift its use.
These are cube sats, so they only produce images with a resolution of about 3-5 meters. Not really enough to make out cars on roads. The smallest recognizable object is about house-sized. Their imagery is of more interest to earth and atmospheric scientists.
Resolution of a telescope is inversely proportional to the diameter of its optics. Spy satellite resolution is about 13 cm, or 5 inches - an ex-NRO official is on record stating that they could see how many plates you set out on a picnic table. To get that resolution, the primary optic needs to be about 2.4 meters in diameter.* Which not-so-coincidentally is the diameter of Hubble's primary mirror. Hubble's size was dictated by the Space Shuttle's cargo bay, and the cargo bay was designed to hold (among other things) a Keyhole spy satellite for launch, maintenance, and refueling. Hubble is basically a spy satellite pointed up instead of down.
* Your primary optic doesn't have to be round. It's possible to create a larger synthetic aperture via an interferometer - two (or more) small mirrors separated by a large distance. You lose signal to noise ratio (which shouldn't be a problem for something brightly lit by sunlight), but gain resolution as if your optics were a mirror with the diameter of the separation between your small mirrors. I suspect newer spy satellites are of this design, giving them much higher resolution (the primary constraint would then be atmospheric turbulence). The unfurling mirror design of the James Webb Space Telescope relies on the same mechanics as would be needed for an interferometer spy satellite. This isn't really viable with cube satellites - the mirrors have to be aligned to within a fraction of a wavelength of light to create an interferometer, so a large rigid structure is crucial.
Because of the media tax that the record and movie studios lobbied for and got, it's paid legal distribution, not piracy. If they want to redefine it as piracy, they'll have to first start by repaying all the taxes that have been collected on blank media. Otherwise it's an invalid contract since no consideration was given in exchange for the taxes that buyers paid, and the studios are then guilty of fraud and theft.
Article I. The computer belongs to the purchaser of the equipment (Owner) and must remain under his/her full control. Hardware vendor or software author (Vendors) are not allowed to modify the computer's operation to secretly advance Vendor's own purposes, or otherwise degrade the Owner's control over the equipment.
Hardware components and software (Products) must exclusively do what Vendors advertised they would do when sold to Owner. There is to be no secret or hidden functionality which contravenes or exceeds the advertised scope of the product.
Automated feedback mechanisms sending information to the Vendor for improving future versions of the hardware or software are allowed only if:
The Owner is clearly notified.
The Owner is given the option to opt out of such feedback, without degrading the advertised functionality of the Product that the Owner paid for.
or the Vendor pays the Owner for the service of providing feedback and use of Owner's network connection.
Product updates cannot reduce or eliminate pre-existing functionality. In the event that advertised functionality is removed after purchase, the Owner may ship the Product back to the Vendor at Vendor's expense for a full refund.
The USA lobbied for the third world to be exempt from the Kyoto accords.
WTH? The U.S. was adamant that China and India be included in the Kyoto protocol, and withdrew from it when they were not. The U.S. (and Bush) caught a lot of flak from environmental groups and "green" nations for this stance. You're now trying to blame the U.S. for the opposite?
You joke, but the NIMBY problem played a real factor here. People didn't want a dam in their backyard so instead of lots of small dams, one big dam with one huge reservoir got built. If there had been lots of small dams, the overall capacity would've been larger, spillways would've been used and maintained more frequently because they would've been a way to more evenly distribute reservoir capacity. and the failure of a single dam would release a much smaller volume of water - small enough to be absorbed by the next dam downstream if properly designed.
The whole thing reminds me of the dot-com and housing bubbles. So many people were so heavily invested in the idea that the status quo would continue, that they refused to even consider the possibility that it might end. Officials thought the California drought was the new norm (preferably as a result of man-made global warming), that they refused to even consider the possibility that the drought could end. Just 6 months ago I was reading articles saying that the drought would essentially never end, and we'd just have to get used to the water restrictions forever. Even now state officials are refusing to lift the drought emergency despite it essentially being over in Northern California, and Southern California well on the way to it being over (we still have a month and a half of rainy season to go).
The groups felt that the spillway capacity could be overrun. That has not happened.
I wouldn't count on that yet. We (California) are supposed to get another week of rain starting Wed/Thurs. That's why state officials are scrambling to fix both spillways as quickly as they can. This next week is going to be a nail-biter for everyone with a home downstream from the dam.
1) Agreed. Part of the reason Katrina was so bad was because the levees meant to hold back floodwaters from a hurricane hadn't been maintained because there hadn't been a direct hit from a hurricane in so long. The problem here is that the vast majority of elected officials are elected to 1-, 2-, or 4-year terms. Whereas maintenance typically has a 20-, 30-, or 50-year time constant. The temptation is always for the politician to defer it so their budget numbers look better while some schmuck who gets elected in the future will have to deal with it. The politicians in New Orleans made that gamble one year before Katrina, and lost. It remains to be seen what will happen in Oroville.
2) While the source of the water was natural, the dam was built to create an artificial reservoir to hold fresh water to deliver throughout the state for drinking and irrigation. The dam didn't help absorb the rainwater. Without it, the water would've been sent down the river at a manageable rate over the last 2 months of heavy rainfall. Even now, as long as the spillway(s) are being used, the rate of water flow below the dam (which by definition, since the reservoir is full, equals the rate at which new water is being added to the reservoir by rainfall upriver) is manageable. The danger exists only because if the dam fails, all the water which has been artificially bottled up will come crashing through all at once. So if it fails, it will very much be a man-made disaster.
The Apple-branded monitors reported their resolution and physical screen size back to the Mac. The Mac then uses that info to scale the font so that a 10 point font on the screen is the same size as a 10 point font on paper, or a 10 point font on another different monitor. It's one of the features built into the Macs which made them immensely popular in the publishing industry.
Since they discontinued their monitor line (not really sure I'd call it "their" line since they just repackaged panels by LG and Samsung), I presume the whole point of Apple-approved third party monitors was that they encoded this functionality into OS X. If it recognized the approved monitor, it could look up the resolution and physical size and perform this auto-scaling.
The problem isn't the integrity of the ransomware author. The problem is that long after the author has moved on to other things (or been arrested, or assassinated), the ransomware virus is still out there, still spreading, still infecting new systems, and still scrambling data.
It's like royalties from little-known songs that someone wrote a decade ago. If some trickle in, it's "oh that's nice" money. There's no incentive for the songwriter to maintain or improve that old product. It doesn't encourage him to write new songs or release a newly edited version of the old song.
If you're lucky the server for that particular ransomware virus was shut down by the authorities or white hat hackers, and you can get a master key to decrypt your stuff. If you're unlucky, your data is as good as deleted. Paying money into an anonymous bitcoin account won't get you anything.
It can get a lot worse. Rambus joined JEDEC - a consortium of memory manufacturers set up so everyone could cooperate in creating a high-performance low-cost standard. They took ideas that were being discussed by other memory manufacturers for DDR memory and secretly patented them, then sued the other memory manufacturers for patent violation. The JEDEC rules expressly prohibited patenting technologies being discussed by consortium members, but crucially did not specify penalties for someone breaking those rules. Consequently the only recourse JEDEC had was kick Rambus out. Their patents based on stealing other people's ideas were still legally valid. This is why everyone hates Rambus.
This is a flow battery. The cathode and anode are dissolved in the electrolyte on opposite sides of a membrane. Current can then flow across the membrane to produce electricity. Their attraction is that because the cathode and anode are in a liquid state, you can "recharge" a battery simply by pumping out the old fluid and pumping in new fluid - just like with gasoline. No need to develop specialized machinery to remove, move around, and insert heavy block batteries. The drawback is that energy density is a lot lower than for solid batteries, consigning them (thus far) to fixed energy storage systems (e.g. battery backup for a building).
They've developed an electrolyte which doesn't degrade as readily and can last a decade. The battery does not last that long. Its cathode and anode still need to be replenished to recharge it.
Most of the stuff mentioned I can agree with. But less favorable lending rates? Only a Millennial ignorant of history would think that. Mortgage interest rates are the lowest they've been in 60 years. My generation (gen-x) had to deal with mortgage interest rates double what they are today. My parents had to deal with 17% interest rates. You have to go all the way back to 1955 to see interest rates as favorable as they are today.
With a 4% interest rate on a 30 year mortgage, 42% of your payments over the life of the loan are interest.
With a 8% interest rate, 62% of your payments are interest.
With a 17% interest rate, 81% of your payments are interest.
For just about anyone alive today, there has never been a better time to get a mortgage to buy a home.
Just about every restaurant and retail business has security cameras. I help run a strip mall and we've got security cameras all around the outside and along the sidewalks (on top of the cameras the tenants have inside their businesses).
Have people already forgotten the Boston marathon bombing? The FBI tracked down the responsible brothers almost exclusively through use of private security camera and cell phone footage. You already have no privacy when you are out in public. It's just that 99.99% of the time nobody cares what you're doing so the video eventually gets automatically overwritten.
The problem with using this against the police is that if there's a major police incident (e.g. fatal shooting by an officer), the police will often confiscate the videos for their own investigation. Rather than just taking a copy of the video (what they ask me for in robberies, muggings, and hit & runs), they will frequently delete the original, or even confiscate the security camera hardware. It's gonna take cloud and automatic local backup systems to thwart this.
The overall tax rate is actually higher in Illinois than in California (for the average citizen). California has higher income and sales taxes, but Illinois has substantially higher property taxes, placing its overall tax burden just above California. The rankings change a bit if you include local taxes (county and city), but Illinois still taxes more than California.
Back in the 1970s, 80x25 characters was the common resolution for a terminal display. Each character was 9x14 pixels (or less commonly, 8x8 pixels). That meant the terminal displayed 720x350 pixels = 252,000 bits of data, or 31.5 kB (or 16 kB for the 8x8 fonts). How then were cheap terminals able to support these resolutions when RAM cost $50 per kB?
Clever engineers came up with text mode. The bitmapped fonts were hard-coded into the display in ROM (which was much cheaper than RAM). So if the terminal supported ASCII, it held 127 9x14 characters in ROM (2000 bytes worth). The computer would then send the display a list of characters to display, rather than a list of pixels. The display would look up each character in ROM, and use that bitmap to display that character (or rather, a row of 80 characters). Then move on to the next row, and so on, then repeat again from the top. This allowed the terminal to display 16 or 32 kB worth of graphics using only 2 kB of RAM (either built into the screen or streamed in real-time from the computer). The caveat being that only text could be displayed.
It's not just fringe political movements. Need I point out that the over-representation of the left online and in the media during the last election gave everyone the sense that Hillary had it in the bag. Their toxic attacks on anyone who openly supported Trump drove his supporters into hiding so they wouldn't admit to pollsters (or even their friends) that they were voting for Trump, leading to the polls also making it appear that Hillary had it in the bag. A lot of people on the left were probably complacent because of this and didn't bother to vote. And Trump ended up winning.
(And before anyone brings up that Clinton won the popular vote, she only won if you disenfranchise anyone who didn't vote for Trump or Clinton. If you include the votes for all the third party candidates, conservative candidates won 49.9% of the popular vote vs 49.2% for liberal candidates. Liberals were the majority online, but they were the minority among those who voted. So for better or for worse, Trump is probably the correct winner for this election. And no I didn't vote for Trump.)
So these strandings have been happening for a very, very long time. There is no reason to be disconcerted. Interest in the reasons why should be purely academic until prove to be unnatural. While there has been evidence correlating strandings with man-made activities, per scientific standards the burden of proof is upon those advocating such theories to prove a causal relationship.
Maybe you join a club, start a band, discover an aptitude for art, start your own business.. who knows?
The problem is not all "work" is equal. The value of the work you do is how much useful economic productivity you generate - how useful what you produce is to other people. The market modulates this by overvaluing productivity which is in short supply (STEM workers), and devaluing productivity which is oversupplied (musicians, artists). This differential pricing then encourages people to "work" in the more productive jobs like STEM, rather than the less productive but more fun jobs like joining a club, starting a band, discovering an aptitude for art (these things are often so unproductive that people have to pay to be able to do them, rather than be paid).
That's the big problem with a UBI. The market prices labor to encourage people to do jobs that are needed, rather than jobs that are fun. A UBI encourages people to do what they find fun rather than what's needed. At first glance, layering a market economy on top of this seems like it would work (i.e. you can still get paid extra on top of a UBI for doing a STEM job). But if you crunch through the math, the pricing for the STEM job then leads to non-UBI income following a divergent series.
Basically, the UBI doesn't make market pricing of wages go away. All it does is fix the low-income point at a non-zero level. The market wants to make the ratio between a STEM wage (productive worker wage) and UBI wage infinite. It wants to make the UBI (the low-income point) zero to reflect the fact that the "worker" is generating no productivity needed by the economy. But since it can't achieve this ratio directly by setting that wage to zero, it does the next best thing. It devalues the currency while simultaneously inflating the wages of the STEM worker (people doing productive jobs) so that the ratio of STEM wage to UBI wage is infinite. e.g. The first year the $500/mo UBI is enough to buy basic living expenses for the month, and the STEM worker makes (say) $5000/mo. After a few years, the $500/mo UBI is enough to buy a carton of milk and the STEM worker is making $500,000/mo because the market has devalued the currency. Meanwhile, milk still costs the same to the STEM worker. It used to cost $5 when they made $5000/mo (0.1% of their monthly income). It now costs $500, but they now make $500,000/mo (0.1% of their monthly income).
The best solution I was able to come up with is to decouple the UBI from the regular economy. Don't pay everyone a $500/mo stipend. Given everyone vouchers which entitle them to pick up certain staple goods (enough food for the month, generic clothing) from a government warehouse every month. The vouchers need to have zero cash value - steps must be taken to prevent people from selling them for cash - some sort of ID verification when picking up the UBI goods to prevent someone from turning in multiple vouchers each month. You'll still have some leakage via people selling the goods after they've received them. But hopefully it'll be small enough that the inflationary pressure it has on prices is minimal (or even substitutes as the slight inflation you want with a fiat currency).
Housing is a little trickier since it's not fungible like tomatoes or blue jeans.
As I said before, the streaming services like Netflix would like nothing more than to offer a single streaming catalog for the entire world. It would drastically simplify their operations. All these stories make it seem like they're the culprits, when they're not. They're forced to do this silly geo-blocking by the music and movie studios, who use it as a way to eek out a little more profit via a graduated rollout schedule - movie first shows up in theaters, then via pay per view, then for sale on blu-ray, then on subscription services, then syndicated on TV. Each earlier step gives them a little more revenue per viewer than the later steps.
The "correct" solution to this is for these studios to get their butts in gear and work at synchronizing these rollouts throughout the entire world. But because they have a monopoly on their shows, there is no competition, so there is no pressure for them to work at synchronizing. So they've been lazy and have been relying on the crutch of geo-blocking to prevent certain countries from getting access to movies and shows which have been out for months in other countries. Since the problem stems from a government-granted monopoly (copyright), the correct solution is for government to step in and prohibit use of the geo-blocking crutch.
Israel did this in 1996 to assassinate the head bomb-maker for Hamas. They remotely detonated a small explosive hidden in a cell phone once they confirmed that he was talking on the phone.
Slashdot Mirror
Sprint contracted with another company to build the towers in the Los Angeles area. That company tried to save on costs by building the towers with the maximum separation the manufacturer specified as allowable. Since that maximum separation was for ideal situations, the network ended up with a lot of blind spots in between towers with poor or no coverage.
Since the towers were already built, they couldn't pick up the towers and move them closer. And adding new towers in between all the existing towers would create problems too - a cellular network relies on the towers being far enough apart that transmissions in one tower's cell are weak enough (due to distance) that they don't interfere with the transmissions in neighboring cells. So they've been trying to fix it by placing intermediate towers only in spots with poor or no coverage.
For a while they compensated by contracting to use Verizon's towers when roaming. But I guess the roaming payments to Verizon got excessive. Lately their phones have been tuned so that it will try to stick to Sprint if there's the faintest hint of a Sprint signal (i.e. not enough to make a call), rather than switching to roaming on Verizon's network. There's a pay app (Roam Control, root required) which lets you manually switch the phone to roaming-only mode to force it to use Verizon's network. But it stopped working on new phones several years ago.
Some areas in Southern California have better coverage - the towers there were built after Sprint recognized the problem and fired the original company building the tower network. I'm in Orange County and their coverage is pretty good here, with their LTE giving me 20+ Mbps near my house.
UMTS (and HSPDA and HSPA+) is based on wideband CDMA. That's right, CDMA won the CDMA vs GSM war. GSM ended up licensing CDMA from Qualcomm and adding it to the GSM spec for 3G data.
In fact, 4G LTE service probably wouldn't have been possible without CDMA. Most LTE implementations use OFDMA - the tower tells the phones apart by assigning them orthogonal frequencies. All phones can transmit at the same time, the tower tells them apart because each phone generates orthogonal frequencies (i.e. the same frequency combination cannot be produced by another phone). CDMA tells phones apart by assigning them orthogonal codes. So CDMA was the proof of concept needed to show that this "everyone transmits at the same time" hocus pocus actually worked when scaled up to a nation-wide cellular network.
Without CDMA, your GSM data speeds would top out at about 150 kbps.
You don't want to scale it down. Solar's costs are almost entirely up-front. There are no recurring fuel costs. So after you've built the panels, you want them running at full capacity whenever possible. If power generation needs to be scaled down, you want to scale something else down (preferably something using fuel).
The flip side of this is that solar can't provide base load nor peaking load. You need other power sources to provide those. Something renewables advocates need to learn if they want to be taken seriously in energy generation debates.
If the dream of an EV in every house comes true, power consumption at night will exceed power consumption during the day.
And all power storage technologies incur losses. Right now, the most efficient method of storage (pumped storage) is about 80% efficient. So like above, you are best off using electricity from solar when it's generated. Don't throw away 20% of the energy just so you can check a box by pounding a round peg into a square hole. Use each technology in its most efficient way. Solar to reduce power generated from other sources during the day. Other power generation sources during the night. Far in the future if so much of our power is generated by solar that we have excess, then we can start to worry about storing some of that energy to time-shift its use.
These are cube sats, so they only produce images with a resolution of about 3-5 meters. Not really enough to make out cars on roads. The smallest recognizable object is about house-sized. Their imagery is of more interest to earth and atmospheric scientists.
Resolution of a telescope is inversely proportional to the diameter of its optics. Spy satellite resolution is about 13 cm, or 5 inches - an ex-NRO official is on record stating that they could see how many plates you set out on a picnic table. To get that resolution, the primary optic needs to be about 2.4 meters in diameter.* Which not-so-coincidentally is the diameter of Hubble's primary mirror. Hubble's size was dictated by the Space Shuttle's cargo bay, and the cargo bay was designed to hold (among other things) a Keyhole spy satellite for launch, maintenance, and refueling. Hubble is basically a spy satellite pointed up instead of down.
* Your primary optic doesn't have to be round. It's possible to create a larger synthetic aperture via an interferometer - two (or more) small mirrors separated by a large distance. You lose signal to noise ratio (which shouldn't be a problem for something brightly lit by sunlight), but gain resolution as if your optics were a mirror with the diameter of the separation between your small mirrors. I suspect newer spy satellites are of this design, giving them much higher resolution (the primary constraint would then be atmospheric turbulence). The unfurling mirror design of the James Webb Space Telescope relies on the same mechanics as would be needed for an interferometer spy satellite. This isn't really viable with cube satellites - the mirrors have to be aligned to within a fraction of a wavelength of light to create an interferometer, so a large rigid structure is crucial.
Because of the media tax that the record and movie studios lobbied for and got, it's paid legal distribution, not piracy. If they want to redefine it as piracy, they'll have to first start by repaying all the taxes that have been collected on blank media. Otherwise it's an invalid contract since no consideration was given in exchange for the taxes that buyers paid, and the studios are then guilty of fraud and theft.
WTH? The U.S. was adamant that China and India be included in the Kyoto protocol, and withdrew from it when they were not. The U.S. (and Bush) caught a lot of flak from environmental groups and "green" nations for this stance. You're now trying to blame the U.S. for the opposite?
You joke, but the NIMBY problem played a real factor here. People didn't want a dam in their backyard so instead of lots of small dams, one big dam with one huge reservoir got built. If there had been lots of small dams, the overall capacity would've been larger, spillways would've been used and maintained more frequently because they would've been a way to more evenly distribute reservoir capacity. and the failure of a single dam would release a much smaller volume of water - small enough to be absorbed by the next dam downstream if properly designed.
I wouldn't count on that yet. We (California) are supposed to get another week of rain starting Wed/Thurs. That's why state officials are scrambling to fix both spillways as quickly as they can. This next week is going to be a nail-biter for everyone with a home downstream from the dam.
1) Agreed. Part of the reason Katrina was so bad was because the levees meant to hold back floodwaters from a hurricane hadn't been maintained because there hadn't been a direct hit from a hurricane in so long. The problem here is that the vast majority of elected officials are elected to 1-, 2-, or 4-year terms. Whereas maintenance typically has a 20-, 30-, or 50-year time constant. The temptation is always for the politician to defer it so their budget numbers look better while some schmuck who gets elected in the future will have to deal with it. The politicians in New Orleans made that gamble one year before Katrina, and lost. It remains to be seen what will happen in Oroville.
2) While the source of the water was natural, the dam was built to create an artificial reservoir to hold fresh water to deliver throughout the state for drinking and irrigation. The dam didn't help absorb the rainwater. Without it, the water would've been sent down the river at a manageable rate over the last 2 months of heavy rainfall. Even now, as long as the spillway(s) are being used, the rate of water flow below the dam (which by definition, since the reservoir is full, equals the rate at which new water is being added to the reservoir by rainfall upriver) is manageable. The danger exists only because if the dam fails, all the water which has been artificially bottled up will come crashing through all at once. So if it fails, it will very much be a man-made disaster.
Just connect to your router with an ethernet cable.
Oh, that's right. They courageously got rid of the ethernet port because wireless networking is the future.
The Apple-branded monitors reported their resolution and physical screen size back to the Mac. The Mac then uses that info to scale the font so that a 10 point font on the screen is the same size as a 10 point font on paper, or a 10 point font on another different monitor. It's one of the features built into the Macs which made them immensely popular in the publishing industry.
Since they discontinued their monitor line (not really sure I'd call it "their" line since they just repackaged panels by LG and Samsung), I presume the whole point of Apple-approved third party monitors was that they encoded this functionality into OS X. If it recognized the approved monitor, it could look up the resolution and physical size and perform this auto-scaling.
The problem isn't the integrity of the ransomware author. The problem is that long after the author has moved on to other things (or been arrested, or assassinated), the ransomware virus is still out there, still spreading, still infecting new systems, and still scrambling data.
It's like royalties from little-known songs that someone wrote a decade ago. If some trickle in, it's "oh that's nice" money. There's no incentive for the songwriter to maintain or improve that old product. It doesn't encourage him to write new songs or release a newly edited version of the old song.
If you're lucky the server for that particular ransomware virus was shut down by the authorities or white hat hackers, and you can get a master key to decrypt your stuff. If you're unlucky, your data is as good as deleted. Paying money into an anonymous bitcoin account won't get you anything.
It can get a lot worse. Rambus joined JEDEC - a consortium of memory manufacturers set up so everyone could cooperate in creating a high-performance low-cost standard. They took ideas that were being discussed by other memory manufacturers for DDR memory and secretly patented them, then sued the other memory manufacturers for patent violation. The JEDEC rules expressly prohibited patenting technologies being discussed by consortium members, but crucially did not specify penalties for someone breaking those rules. Consequently the only recourse JEDEC had was kick Rambus out. Their patents based on stealing other people's ideas were still legally valid. This is why everyone hates Rambus.
This is a flow battery. The cathode and anode are dissolved in the electrolyte on opposite sides of a membrane. Current can then flow across the membrane to produce electricity. Their attraction is that because the cathode and anode are in a liquid state, you can "recharge" a battery simply by pumping out the old fluid and pumping in new fluid - just like with gasoline. No need to develop specialized machinery to remove, move around, and insert heavy block batteries. The drawback is that energy density is a lot lower than for solid batteries, consigning them (thus far) to fixed energy storage systems (e.g. battery backup for a building).
They've developed an electrolyte which doesn't degrade as readily and can last a decade. The battery does not last that long. Its cathode and anode still need to be replenished to recharge it.
Most of the stuff mentioned I can agree with. But less favorable lending rates? Only a Millennial ignorant of history would think that. Mortgage interest rates are the lowest they've been in 60 years. My generation (gen-x) had to deal with mortgage interest rates double what they are today. My parents had to deal with 17% interest rates. You have to go all the way back to 1955 to see interest rates as favorable as they are today.
With a 4% interest rate on a 30 year mortgage, 42% of your payments over the life of the loan are interest.
With a 8% interest rate, 62% of your payments are interest.
With a 17% interest rate, 81% of your payments are interest.
For just about anyone alive today, there has never been a better time to get a mortgage to buy a home.
Just about every restaurant and retail business has security cameras. I help run a strip mall and we've got security cameras all around the outside and along the sidewalks (on top of the cameras the tenants have inside their businesses).
Have people already forgotten the Boston marathon bombing? The FBI tracked down the responsible brothers almost exclusively through use of private security camera and cell phone footage. You already have no privacy when you are out in public. It's just that 99.99% of the time nobody cares what you're doing so the video eventually gets automatically overwritten.
The problem with using this against the police is that if there's a major police incident (e.g. fatal shooting by an officer), the police will often confiscate the videos for their own investigation. Rather than just taking a copy of the video (what they ask me for in robberies, muggings, and hit & runs), they will frequently delete the original, or even confiscate the security camera hardware. It's gonna take cloud and automatic local backup systems to thwart this.
The overall tax rate is actually higher in Illinois than in California (for the average citizen). California has higher income and sales taxes, but Illinois has substantially higher property taxes, placing its overall tax burden just above California. The rankings change a bit if you include local taxes (county and city), but Illinois still taxes more than California.
Ironically, that is almost exactly what the Colombian drug lords used to do to obtain the IDs of US DEA agents entering Colombia.
This is one of those cases where transparency is more important than security. Because the lack of transparency actually compromises security.
Back in the 1970s, 80x25 characters was the common resolution for a terminal display. Each character was 9x14 pixels (or less commonly, 8x8 pixels). That meant the terminal displayed 720x350 pixels = 252,000 bits of data, or 31.5 kB (or 16 kB for the 8x8 fonts). How then were cheap terminals able to support these resolutions when RAM cost $50 per kB?
Clever engineers came up with text mode. The bitmapped fonts were hard-coded into the display in ROM (which was much cheaper than RAM). So if the terminal supported ASCII, it held 127 9x14 characters in ROM (2000 bytes worth). The computer would then send the display a list of characters to display, rather than a list of pixels. The display would look up each character in ROM, and use that bitmap to display that character (or rather, a row of 80 characters). Then move on to the next row, and so on, then repeat again from the top. This allowed the terminal to display 16 or 32 kB worth of graphics using only 2 kB of RAM (either built into the screen or streamed in real-time from the computer). The caveat being that only text could be displayed.
It's not just fringe political movements. Need I point out that the over-representation of the left online and in the media during the last election gave everyone the sense that Hillary had it in the bag. Their toxic attacks on anyone who openly supported Trump drove his supporters into hiding so they wouldn't admit to pollsters (or even their friends) that they were voting for Trump, leading to the polls also making it appear that Hillary had it in the bag. A lot of people on the left were probably complacent because of this and didn't bother to vote. And Trump ended up winning.
(And before anyone brings up that Clinton won the popular vote, she only won if you disenfranchise anyone who didn't vote for Trump or Clinton. If you include the votes for all the third party candidates, conservative candidates won 49.9% of the popular vote vs 49.2% for liberal candidates. Liberals were the majority online, but they were the minority among those who voted. So for better or for worse, Trump is probably the correct winner for this election. And no I didn't vote for Trump.)
Whatever the reason, it's a natural behavior. Contemporary documentation of strandings dates back to at least the 16th century. Archaeological evidence suggest a stranding about 12,000 years ago. And the earliest evidence is for a possible mass stranding is about 6-9 million years ago.
So these strandings have been happening for a very, very long time. There is no reason to be disconcerted. Interest in the reasons why should be purely academic until prove to be unnatural. While there has been evidence correlating strandings with man-made activities, per scientific standards the burden of proof is upon those advocating such theories to prove a causal relationship.
The problem is not all "work" is equal. The value of the work you do is how much useful economic productivity you generate - how useful what you produce is to other people. The market modulates this by overvaluing productivity which is in short supply (STEM workers), and devaluing productivity which is oversupplied (musicians, artists). This differential pricing then encourages people to "work" in the more productive jobs like STEM, rather than the less productive but more fun jobs like joining a club, starting a band, discovering an aptitude for art (these things are often so unproductive that people have to pay to be able to do them, rather than be paid).
That's the big problem with a UBI. The market prices labor to encourage people to do jobs that are needed, rather than jobs that are fun. A UBI encourages people to do what they find fun rather than what's needed. At first glance, layering a market economy on top of this seems like it would work (i.e. you can still get paid extra on top of a UBI for doing a STEM job). But if you crunch through the math, the pricing for the STEM job then leads to non-UBI income following a divergent series.
Basically, the UBI doesn't make market pricing of wages go away. All it does is fix the low-income point at a non-zero level. The market wants to make the ratio between a STEM wage (productive worker wage) and UBI wage infinite. It wants to make the UBI (the low-income point) zero to reflect the fact that the "worker" is generating no productivity needed by the economy. But since it can't achieve this ratio directly by setting that wage to zero, it does the next best thing. It devalues the currency while simultaneously inflating the wages of the STEM worker (people doing productive jobs) so that the ratio of STEM wage to UBI wage is infinite. e.g. The first year the $500/mo UBI is enough to buy basic living expenses for the month, and the STEM worker makes (say) $5000/mo. After a few years, the $500/mo UBI is enough to buy a carton of milk and the STEM worker is making $500,000/mo because the market has devalued the currency. Meanwhile, milk still costs the same to the STEM worker. It used to cost $5 when they made $5000/mo (0.1% of their monthly income). It now costs $500, but they now make $500,000/mo (0.1% of their monthly income).
The best solution I was able to come up with is to decouple the UBI from the regular economy. Don't pay everyone a $500/mo stipend. Given everyone vouchers which entitle them to pick up certain staple goods (enough food for the month, generic clothing) from a government warehouse every month. The vouchers need to have zero cash value - steps must be taken to prevent people from selling them for cash - some sort of ID verification when picking up the UBI goods to prevent someone from turning in multiple vouchers each month. You'll still have some leakage via people selling the goods after they've received them. But hopefully it'll be small enough that the inflationary pressure it has on prices is minimal (or even substitutes as the slight inflation you want with a fiat currency).
Housing is a little trickier since it's not fungible like tomatoes or blue jeans.
As I said before, the streaming services like Netflix would like nothing more than to offer a single streaming catalog for the entire world. It would drastically simplify their operations. All these stories make it seem like they're the culprits, when they're not. They're forced to do this silly geo-blocking by the music and movie studios, who use it as a way to eek out a little more profit via a graduated rollout schedule - movie first shows up in theaters, then via pay per view, then for sale on blu-ray, then on subscription services, then syndicated on TV. Each earlier step gives them a little more revenue per viewer than the later steps.
The "correct" solution to this is for these studios to get their butts in gear and work at synchronizing these rollouts throughout the entire world. But because they have a monopoly on their shows, there is no competition, so there is no pressure for them to work at synchronizing. So they've been lazy and have been relying on the crutch of geo-blocking to prevent certain countries from getting access to movies and shows which have been out for months in other countries. Since the problem stems from a government-granted monopoly (copyright), the correct solution is for government to step in and prohibit use of the geo-blocking crutch.
Israel did this in 1996 to assassinate the head bomb-maker for Hamas. They remotely detonated a small explosive hidden in a cell phone once they confirmed that he was talking on the phone.