Wow... Seattle sucks if a significant number of you are still on dial-ups... Does the Internet even work on connections that slow anymore? When my phone goes to 3G (which can anywhere from 2X to 90X the speed of the fastest dial-up connections), data speeds are so slow that web pages barely load or fail to load.
FWIW, I'm in Chicago and I can get high-speed internet from AT&T, Comcast XFinity, and RCN at both of my buildings. Comcast and RCN offer 1 Gbps service that is actually fairly close to the advertised speed most of the time. AT&T has slower DSL speeds but they are dedicated and I've never seen slowdowns ever at the apartment where it's installed.
My bigger issue is datacaps. RCN doesn't have datacaps but AT&T and Comcast charge extra if you go over 1 TB per month. That might seem like a lot of data but if you have a number of Nest Cameras (7 in my case) or Internet Cameras running 24/7 at a higher quality setting, you can easily exceed that and be charged extra. To get "unlimited" data (no datacap) on AT&T or Comcast, you have to start paying about 5-6X the price of the limited data plans.
Serious question......what benefit do you get from a dishwasher being attached to the internet?
You can monitor how much time is left in the cycle, it will notify you if the rinse agent is low and needs refilling, and if you use dish detergent pods, you can have it automatically keep track of how many pods you've used and reorder pods on Amazon for you (similar to Amazon Dash Button) automatically when you are running low.
I had to ditch my Netgear Nighthawk Router because it only supported 64 WiFi devices. I have close to 100 WiFi devices (mostly IoT) in my house at this time. I switched to Google WiFi Mesh Router because it can actually handle all the devices I have.
But here's a short list of most of what is connected to my WiFi Network and I plan on adding more in the future:
Haiku Homes Lights (40), Switches (10), and Fans (7)
Mitsubishi Ductless Heating System (4 Headers)
Ecobee (controls a Boiler)
Nest Thermostat (controls a forced air HVAC system)
Nest Cameras (4 Outdoor, 3 Indoor)
Nest Smoke and CO Alarms (4)
TP-Link Switches (2 lights, 5 others)
GE Dishwasher
Samsung Washer + Dryer
Sense Electrical Monitor
Amazon Echos (2 regular, 2 dots)
Yamaha Receivers (2)
Samsung TVs (4)
Google Chromcast (4)
Apple TV (2)
Amazon Fire (2)
Harmony Ultimates (2 Remotes, 2 Hubs)
My guess is people who are actively pursuing Smart Home Technologies will need much higher than 20 device capacity.
If you read the comments on the project, nearly all of the recent comments are backers that would be perfectly happy with a device that didn't have any DRM. Why don't they just completely the device development as is and skip the DRM? It's what most of their backers want anyhow.
Actually, her use of a private email server was legal. The requirement that email servers for official government business must be on a government server was an amendment to the Federal Records Act that was passed in late 2014, *AFTER* Clinton had resigned as secretary of state. It's worth noting that previous Sec of States, including Colin Powell, also used private email servers (legally) for government business although the RNC-hosted services "lost" all of his emails so we'll never see what thoughts went into, say, the Iraq War Part 2.
Deleted requested emails after a subpoena for them.
She claims that she deleted only e-mails of a personal nature and handed over all of the "requested" emails. It's your word against hers.
Emailed classified information from an unsecure server to Sydney.
The information in question was classified at a later date. It was not classified at the time it was transmitted.
Lied to Congress about it.
Again, no proof of wrongdoing yet, unless you believe everything that Fox News is saying. So far there is only the fact that a couple of officials have asked to open an investigation.
Also, considering that there have been something like 55 investigations and hearings into Benghazi and not a single one of them has found any fault for Clinton, I'm going to take any "inquiry" requests with a grain of salt until there is an actual factual finding of wrongdoing.
Do you remember when the RNC accidentally wiped as many as 22 million emails from their private servers -- including 379GB of data from gwb43.com, the email server that was used by Bush and Cheney as well as White House staffers who were told to use the private servers rather than the gov't ones.
Not to mention that for 2001-2004, these servers automatically deleted emails older than 30 days. And then there's the fact that Karl Rove used these private servers (also RNC hosted) and continued to delete emails for at least a year after they changed their rentention policies.
Furthermore, Colin Powell used the private email server as well as Secretary of State and all of his private emails were lost.
And mind you... here's a few disasters they discussed in those deleted e-mails on private servers: The leaking of Valerie Plame's CIA identity, the decisions to fire 7 US attorneys who were investigating Republican political scandals, the Patriot Act and the initiation of the NSA warrantless wiretapping program, the highly-secretive Cheney Energy Task Force, lobbying of Medicare Part D (which they knew was an unfunded deficit bomb), the administrative response to Hurricane Katrina, etc. Not to mention the whole Iraq War and the Abu Ghraid prison torture policies.
As long as there isn't flexing (decent stiffness) and there is a good balance (the screen doesn't want to topple over a too-light base), a light laptop is better than a heavy one. Especially if you want to carry it around with you.
Ugh... sorry bad formatting, the quote parent didn't come through?
What you really want is a connector plated the same as the connector you're connecting it to. If it's tin-plated, use a tin-plated connector. If it's gold-plated, use gold. What I don't know of is any tin-plated cables which include a sacrificial zinc anode. In motoring (and presumably other places with metal bolted to metal) we use zinc anti-seize where dissimilar metals meet because it gets eaten up first, which is handy. I'm not sure if that applies to tin, though. Also in motoring, tin is what's used as an intermediate between steel or copper and aluminum.
What you really want is a connector plated the same as the connector you're connecting it to. If it's tin-plated, use a tin-plated connector. If it's gold-plated, use gold. What I don't know of is any tin-plated cables which include a sacrificial zinc anode. In motoring (and presumably other places with metal bolted to metal) we use zinc anti-seize where dissimilar metals meet because it gets eaten up first, which is handy. I'm not sure if that applies to tin, though. Also in motoring, tin is what's used as an intermediate between steel or copper and aluminum.
"(taxi licenses in Italy are numbered, each can cost more than $ 100k to obtain)."
There's the problem. Piss off Italy...
Taxi licenses (cab medallions) in the US can cost over a million to obtain (example New York City just two years ago).
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11...
But yeah, in the case of having copiously large amounts of RAM and the files cached in said RAM, you won't really ever see much of a win with SSD's except for the first time a file is loaded perhaps.
Until the engine decides to redundantly load the same package again, it won't be cached (ie first time is off disk and latter times off RAM). A good engine limits the number of times redundant loads occur. And unless you have an abundance of RAM, it's typically pointless to cache a very large file that is read at a slower speed than what the disk will actively serve as well.
Ah, the Australian plant has 3X the output. I'm not sure if there is higher efficiency (operation cost) for larger plants, but typically, desalinization is a process which has some efficiency scaling. Anyhow, 7-8% of one very metropolitan/urban county isn't going to put a dent in overall CA water consumption when the vast majority of it is going to agricultural uses.
Game engines are constantly improving on this too... with file read ahead, and multithreading decompression of chunks, as well as other optimizations. Over time, this process has been gradually getting faster and at some point, SSD's will come out ahead. It's just that the current bottleneck is quite often CPU and memory bandwidth, not HD linear read speed.
NOTE: I'm speaking for myself here, and not for my company, but I have been working full time in the games industry for 23 years.
Most games use pack-files (sometimes called packages) that are large binary blobs on disk that are loaded contiguously in a seek-free manner. Additionally, these blobs may have ZIP or other compression applied to them (often in an incremental chunked way). The CPU's can only process the serialization of assets (loading) at a certain speed due to things like allocation of memory from the kernel and graphics drivers (which on secure OS's typically involves remapping and clearing pages). There are additional CPU constraints for the decompression, and for the serialization "linker" phase to associate assets in a package and present them to the game engine.
All this stuff takes time, and in a game with streaming (loading while game-play is going on), there are a limited number of CPU cycles as well as memory bandwidth to process the serialization after running the game engine.
These processing constraints impose a limit on the speed at which data can be loaded and consumed by the engine. And in many game engines on a typically powered PC, that number may be anywhere from 50-200MB/s but probably averaging closer to 100-150MB/s. Since this is in the linear contiguous read speed of many hard drives, as long as the package file is not fragmented on the disk, using an SSD will result in minimal speedup during this type of loading process.
For $30B, you can build a LOT of desalination plants.
Define "a LOT"??? My calculations are that you could build maybe 4-5 plants or actually build and operate 2 plants going on costs from other similar plants in the world.
Australia built a desalination plant with an intial estimated construction cost of $3-4B AUS. Final construction was $6-7B AUS -- however, the total costs including operation of the plant at $1.8M a day over the 27yr contract will be around $19B Australian or roughly $15B US.
Assuming the US could operate as efficiently cost-wise (and we rarely do on large public works projects), we could afford to build and run 2 Desalination plants for $30B US.
You forget this pesky "t" variable in the equation that represents TIME.
It is illegal *NOW*. It wasn't illegal when she was in office. The requirement to use government hosted email was passed after Clinton resigned and only became legally effective in November of 2014. Clinton left office in February of 2013.
The Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014 became law on November 26, 2014. Clinton's final day as secretary was February 1, 2013.
The "Law" that everyone keeps claiming that she broke wasn't effective until a year and a half after she left office.
There was absolutely no legal requirement at the time of her tenure to use a government e-mail. Furthermore, she retroactively complied with the records portion of the law by turning over any business related e-mails she had on her home server archive.
Also, previous Secretaries of State, like Colin Powell, used personal email as well. In his case, they didn't even archive it so many of the emails are lost. We'll never have access to his electronic discusssions about, say, the decisions leading for him to give a speech at the United Nations calling for the Invasion of Iraq.
Slightly off-topic but this is exactly how I feel watching the Premium Hulu Plus that I pay a monthly subscription for:-( I'd pay a bit more even for ad free.
In Chicago, they have "solved" this by putting tons of speed bumps on almost every street that isn't a thoroughfare. However, Waze occasionally still tries to send you down these streets and destroy your shocks / wheels / bumpers.
IQ doesn't "rise" for an entire population. If all the scores are rising, it means the test is out of date and needs to be restandardized.
By definition, IQ is measured as a standard distribution curve with an IQ of 100 being the average. If everyone on the planet suddenly got twice as smart, we'd still have the same IQ because again, IQ measures you in relation to the rest of the population.
If you develop a new IQ test, then you have to standardize the scoring on it so that average == 100 or you're not actually testing for IQ.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow... Seattle sucks if a significant number of you are still on dial-ups... Does the Internet even work on connections that slow anymore? When my phone goes to 3G (which can anywhere from 2X to 90X the speed of the fastest dial-up connections), data speeds are so slow that web pages barely load or fail to load.
FWIW, I'm in Chicago and I can get high-speed internet from AT&T, Comcast XFinity, and RCN at both of my buildings. Comcast and RCN offer 1 Gbps service that is actually fairly close to the advertised speed most of the time. AT&T has slower DSL speeds but they are dedicated and I've never seen slowdowns ever at the apartment where it's installed.
My bigger issue is datacaps. RCN doesn't have datacaps but AT&T and Comcast charge extra if you go over 1 TB per month. That might seem like a lot of data but if you have a number of Nest Cameras (7 in my case) or Internet Cameras running 24/7 at a higher quality setting, you can easily exceed that and be charged extra. To get "unlimited" data (no datacap) on AT&T or Comcast, you have to start paying about 5-6X the price of the limited data plans.
You can also connect the Dishwasher to IFTTT to Trigger actions on a number of events.
Serious question......what benefit do you get from a dishwasher being attached to the internet?
You can monitor how much time is left in the cycle, it will notify you if the rinse agent is low and needs refilling, and if you use dish detergent pods, you can have it automatically keep track of how many pods you've used and reorder pods on Amazon for you (similar to Amazon Dash Button) automatically when you are running low.
For more details click here.
Oh... and I forgot
August Locks (2 Connect Modules)
Samsung SmartThings Hub
I had to ditch my Netgear Nighthawk Router because it only supported 64 WiFi devices. I have close to 100 WiFi devices (mostly IoT) in my house at this time. I switched to Google WiFi Mesh Router because it can actually handle all the devices I have.
But here's a short list of most of what is connected to my WiFi Network and I plan on adding more in the future:
Haiku Homes Lights (40), Switches (10), and Fans (7)
Mitsubishi Ductless Heating System (4 Headers)
Ecobee (controls a Boiler)
Nest Thermostat (controls a forced air HVAC system)
Nest Cameras (4 Outdoor, 3 Indoor)
Nest Smoke and CO Alarms (4)
TP-Link Switches (2 lights, 5 others)
GE Dishwasher
Samsung Washer + Dryer
Sense Electrical Monitor
Amazon Echos (2 regular, 2 dots)
Yamaha Receivers (2)
Samsung TVs (4)
Google Chromcast (4)
Apple TV (2)
Amazon Fire (2)
Harmony Ultimates (2 Remotes, 2 Hubs)
My guess is people who are actively pursuing Smart Home Technologies will need much higher than 20 device capacity.
Really, it seems like the ability to do AdHoc WiFi is the biggest feature backers wanted.... not DRM.
If you read the comments on the project, nearly all of the recent comments are backers that would be perfectly happy with a device that didn't have any DRM. Why don't they just completely the device development as is and skip the DRM? It's what most of their backers want anyhow.
So she illegally ran a private email server.
Actually, her use of a private email server was legal. The requirement that email servers for official government business must be on a government server was an amendment to the Federal Records Act that was passed in late 2014, *AFTER* Clinton had resigned as secretary of state. It's worth noting that previous Sec of States, including Colin Powell, also used private email servers (legally) for government business although the RNC-hosted services "lost" all of his emails so we'll never see what thoughts went into, say, the Iraq War Part 2.
Deleted requested emails after a subpoena for them.
She claims that she deleted only e-mails of a personal nature and handed over all of the "requested" emails. It's your word against hers.
Emailed classified information from an unsecure server to Sydney.
The information in question was classified at a later date. It was not classified at the time it was transmitted.
Lied to Congress about it.
Again, no proof of wrongdoing yet, unless you believe everything that Fox News is saying. So far there is only the fact that a couple of officials have asked to open an investigation.
Also, considering that there have been something like 55 investigations and hearings into Benghazi and not a single one of them has found any fault for Clinton, I'm going to take any "inquiry" requests with a grain of salt until there is an actual factual finding of wrongdoing.
Do you remember when the RNC accidentally wiped as many as 22 million emails from their private servers -- including 379GB of data from gwb43.com, the email server that was used by Bush and Cheney as well as White House staffers who were told to use the private servers rather than the gov't ones.
Not to mention that for 2001-2004, these servers automatically deleted emails older than 30 days. And then there's the fact that Karl Rove used these private servers (also RNC hosted) and continued to delete emails for at least a year after they changed their rentention policies.
Furthermore, Colin Powell used the private email server as well as Secretary of State and all of his private emails were lost.
And mind you... here's a few disasters they discussed in those deleted e-mails on private servers: The leaking of Valerie Plame's CIA identity, the decisions to fire 7 US attorneys who were investigating Republican political scandals, the Patriot Act and the initiation of the NSA warrantless wiretapping program, the highly-secretive Cheney Energy Task Force, lobbying of Medicare Part D (which they knew was an unfunded deficit bomb), the administrative response to Hurricane Katrina, etc. Not to mention the whole Iraq War and the Abu Ghraid prison torture policies.
Oh, and NO ONE WAS EVER PUNISHED.
As long as there isn't flexing (decent stiffness) and there is a good balance (the screen doesn't want to topple over a too-light base), a light laptop is better than a heavy one. Especially if you want to carry it around with you.
... and they are in the similar 2 lb weight category.
What you really want is a connector plated the same as the connector you're connecting it to. If it's tin-plated, use a tin-plated connector. If it's gold-plated, use gold. What I don't know of is any tin-plated cables which include a sacrificial zinc anode. In motoring (and presumably other places with metal bolted to metal) we use zinc anti-seize where dissimilar metals meet because it gets eaten up first, which is handy. I'm not sure if that applies to tin, though. Also in motoring, tin is what's used as an intermediate between steel or copper and aluminum.
Tin is used for solder but in alloys which reduce whiskering, but you certainly don't want pure tin or zinc used for your connectors with tons of very close signal lines because both of them have issues with whiskering which can lead to shorts... especially at points where mechanical stress can occur (flexing of the connection).
What you really want is a connector plated the same as the connector you're connecting it to. If it's tin-plated, use a tin-plated connector. If it's gold-plated, use gold. What I don't know of is any tin-plated cables which include a sacrificial zinc anode. In motoring (and presumably other places with metal bolted to metal) we use zinc anti-seize where dissimilar metals meet because it gets eaten up first, which is handy. I'm not sure if that applies to tin, though. Also in motoring, tin is what's used as an intermediate between steel or copper and aluminum.
Tin is used for solder but in alloys which reduce whiskering, but you certainly don't want pure tin or zinc used for your connectors with tons of very close signal lines because both of them have issues with whiskering which can lead to shorts... especially at points where mechanical stress can occur (flexing of the connection).
"(taxi licenses in Italy are numbered, each can cost more than $ 100k to obtain)."
There's the problem. Piss off Italy...
Taxi licenses (cab medallions) in the US can cost over a million to obtain (example New York City just two years ago). http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11...
But yeah, in the case of having copiously large amounts of RAM and the files cached in said RAM, you won't really ever see much of a win with SSD's except for the first time a file is loaded perhaps.
Until the engine decides to redundantly load the same package again, it won't be cached (ie first time is off disk and latter times off RAM). A good engine limits the number of times redundant loads occur. And unless you have an abundance of RAM, it's typically pointless to cache a very large file that is read at a slower speed than what the disk will actively serve as well.
Ah, the Australian plant has 3X the output. I'm not sure if there is higher efficiency (operation cost) for larger plants, but typically, desalinization is a process which has some efficiency scaling. Anyhow, 7-8% of one very metropolitan/urban county isn't going to put a dent in overall CA water consumption when the vast majority of it is going to agricultural uses.
Game engines are constantly improving on this too... with file read ahead, and multithreading decompression of chunks, as well as other optimizations. Over time, this process has been gradually getting faster and at some point, SSD's will come out ahead. It's just that the current bottleneck is quite often CPU and memory bandwidth, not HD linear read speed.
NOTE: I'm speaking for myself here, and not for my company, but I have been working full time in the games industry for 23 years.
Most games use pack-files (sometimes called packages) that are large binary blobs on disk that are loaded contiguously in a seek-free manner. Additionally, these blobs may have ZIP or other compression applied to them (often in an incremental chunked way). The CPU's can only process the serialization of assets (loading) at a certain speed due to things like allocation of memory from the kernel and graphics drivers (which on secure OS's typically involves remapping and clearing pages). There are additional CPU constraints for the decompression, and for the serialization "linker" phase to associate assets in a package and present them to the game engine.
All this stuff takes time, and in a game with streaming (loading while game-play is going on), there are a limited number of CPU cycles as well as memory bandwidth to process the serialization after running the game engine.
These processing constraints impose a limit on the speed at which data can be loaded and consumed by the engine. And in many game engines on a typically powered PC, that number may be anywhere from 50-200MB/s but probably averaging closer to 100-150MB/s. Since this is in the linear contiguous read speed of many hard drives, as long as the package file is not fragmented on the disk, using an SSD will result in minimal speedup during this type of loading process.
For $30B, you can build a LOT of desalination plants.
Define "a LOT"??? My calculations are that you could build maybe 4-5 plants or actually build and operate 2 plants going on costs from other similar plants in the world.
Australia built a desalination plant with an intial estimated construction cost of $3-4B AUS. Final construction was $6-7B AUS -- however, the total costs including operation of the plant at $1.8M a day over the 27yr contract will be around $19B Australian or roughly $15B US.
Assuming the US could operate as efficiently cost-wise (and we rarely do on large public works projects), we could afford to build and run 2 Desalination plants for $30B US.
It specifically is illegal actually.
You forget this pesky "t" variable in the equation that represents TIME.
It is illegal *NOW*. It wasn't illegal when she was in office. The requirement to use government hosted email was passed after Clinton resigned and only became legally effective in November of 2014. Clinton left office in February of 2013.
http://mediamatters.org/resear...
Laws are for the little people, not them.
The Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014 became law on November 26, 2014. Clinton's final day as secretary was February 1, 2013.
The "Law" that everyone keeps claiming that she broke wasn't effective until a year and a half after she left office.
There was absolutely no legal requirement at the time of her tenure to use a government e-mail. Furthermore, she retroactively complied with the records portion of the law by turning over any business related e-mails she had on her home server archive.
Also, previous Secretaries of State, like Colin Powell, used personal email as well. In his case, they didn't even archive it so many of the emails are lost. We'll never have access to his electronic discusssions about, say, the decisions leading for him to give a speech at the United Nations calling for the Invasion of Iraq.
FUCKING ENOUGH WITH THE ADS ALREADY.
Slightly off-topic but this is exactly how I feel watching the Premium Hulu Plus that I pay a monthly subscription for :-( I'd pay a bit more even for ad free.
In Chicago, they have "solved" this by putting tons of speed bumps on almost every street that isn't a thoroughfare. However, Waze occasionally still tries to send you down these streets and destroy your shocks / wheels / bumpers.
IQ doesn't "rise" for an entire population. If all the scores are rising, it means the test is out of date and needs to be restandardized.
By definition, IQ is measured as a standard distribution curve with an IQ of 100 being the average. If everyone on the planet suddenly got twice as smart, we'd still have the same IQ because again, IQ measures you in relation to the rest of the population.
If you develop a new IQ test, then you have to standardize the scoring on it so that average == 100 or you're not actually testing for IQ.
From Wiki: When current IQ tests are developed, the median raw score of the norming sample is defined as IQ 100 and scores each standard deviation (SD) up or down are defined as 15 IQ points greater or less