followed by even traditional airliners wanting to get rid of their pilots
I would expect the free market to take care of that. Would you want to get onto a plane without a human being behind the controls? I sure as hell wouldn't. Can you trust a computer pull this off? More to the point, I highly doubt that pilot training, salary, and benefits compromise a significant percentage of airline overhead. It's a non-zero cost to be sure but there are more significant ones that can actually be attacked without committing marketplace suicide.
Well, the only part of that which seems reassuring to me is miniature, and that claim doesn't hold up. A drone which can carry (for example) more than about a can of soda is large enough to cause serious injury if it falls out of the sky and lands on you, or its software gets confused and it engages in controlled flight into your face. And then there's the fire risk if something bad should happen to a battery; sure, you could use LifePo or another safer-chemistry battery, but that doesn't rule out fires. If the drone should come down and set something inconvenient alight, assigning blame will be the least consideration.
You've overlooked something that a friend of mine summarized with a single Photoshopped image, that of a rottweiler holding an Amazon drone in his mouth.
One can only envision the hilarity that will ensue when every neighborhood dog decides to go after these things. What's the counter to that? Equipping them with pepper spray like the mailman has? That could also prove to be amusing.
Facebook is a far bigger offender at this than Google is. Random example: Google doesn't compel you to register for a G+ account to access content flagged as public. Facebook does. Compound this annoyance with the fact that Facebook is synonymous with the internet for the unwashed masses and you have a walled garden that's nearly as obnoxious as AOL was back in the day.
I yelled at the organizers of our local half-marathon for only making updates available via their Facebook page. Special bonus points in their case for already having a webpage, plus the e-mail address of every registered runner, but using neither means of communication to share important updates. Here's a hint to anybody looking to establish a presence on the Internet: We don't all use Facebook.
Congress takes orders from the President? I must have missed that part of my high school civics class. Why is Obama whining so much then about those obstinate Republicans in the House? Can't he just order them to do what he wants?
It's to protect theft of the information stored on the phone, which is generally far more valuable than the phone itself.
You can already do that with encryption and PIN locks. My/data partition is encrypted, with a six word diceware password, and the phone is auto-locked with a five digit PIN after five minutes of idleness. Ten failed PIN attempts wipes the device. Powering off the device removes the encryption keys from memory. It's entirely possible (probable even) that a well resourced organization could extract the encryption keys from the phone but that's really not a pressing concern for most people. If it's a concern for you then you should probably re-evaluate your decision to use a smartphone in the first place.
They don't. RTFS, that was taken off the face plate on the device. Face plates are always conservative (though this takes it to a whole new level) about power draw. Plug that thing into a watt meter and I'd be surprised if it used more than 15 or 20 watts when running full bore, never mind in standby mode. One might argue that 20 watts is a lot (and it is, my TiVo uses <10) but it's a lot less than 500.
Remember the second law. Energy can't just disappear. A cable box drawing 500 watts would need to dissipate 500 joules of heat energy per second. That's an hourly total of 1.8 megajoules or 1,706 BTU. For point of comparison, a 1500 watt 120V space heater tops out at about 5,200 BTU/hr. Where do you think those 1,700 BTUs are going? Think about how many cable boxes are in tightly confined entertainment centers with little to no ventilation. The cable box would melt down in short order in such an environment if it was truly using that much energy. High end gaming machines and servers usually top out about 200-300 watts of sustained draw and they need active cooling to deal with the waste heat.
We paid extra to rent a Prius went we went out West a few years ago. Don't recall which model year it was, 2007 or 2008 I think but could be wrong there. Either way I came away less than impressed. Strike One for me is anything with an automatic transmission, which makes me a relic I suppose, but there it is. The weird issue was with the seemingly hesitant throttle. There were times (turning left in front of oncoming traffic) where I stomped the gas and it seemed as though the computer had to stop and think, "Hmm.... electric, gas, or both?" and the car barely moved. Once it got going it had ample pick-up, for an automatic, but that 1-2 second delay took a lot of getting used to.
After a week of driving that thing I came away with the feeling that I would never own one. To be sure, there were some really neat things about it, like the dead silence when cruising at low speeds on the electric drive. Other than the throttle delay it handled as well as any mid-priced car I've driven. The build quality was nice and about what you'd expect in the price range. The gas mileage was a lot less impressive than what I was expecting, though the large proportion of highway miles and my penchant for speeding in wide open spaces (did you know the Prius will happily cruise at 110mph?) doubtless had something to do with that. Frankly if most of your driving is highway I don't see the point, my $17,000 non-hybrid Honda Civic is competitive with the Prius when it comes to highway driving.... I can milk 43-44mpg out of my Civic without trying that hard, and that's despite living in a hilly region.
My solution: buy a f**king map. Need detailed turn information to your destination? Look up the directions on Google Maps (or similar), print them out, and refer to them while you're at a stop light/sign or have your significant other read them.
Because taking my eyes off the road to refer to maps/printed directions is so much safer than listening to audio directions and occasionally glancing at a TomTom that's mounted right below my rear view mirror, in a position where my eyes don't leave the roadway?
1. Maps suck. Road atlases are only useful for the 20,000 foot view, i.e., which combination of interstates and/or state highways will get me to my destination city. Once I'm in that city I need a street level map if I'm going to find my destintion and I don't have the money to equip my car with street level maps for every city within driving distance of my house.
2. Printed directions are even worse. You've got to constantly take your eyes off the road to refer to them, and god help you if you miss a turn either by accident or because of detour. Those directions are predicated on the assumption that you can follow them perfectly and there are no road closures. Once you're off the path they're useless.
The rate of US car fatalities has plummeted 75% over the past 45 years, largely due to government mandates and the NHTSA.
None of which argues in favor of NHTSA sticking its nose in the Google or Apple stores, imposing mandates on mapping apps, mandates that will invariably be shaped (see regulatory capture) to the benefit of incumbents at the expense of would-be upstarts.
It's disgusting (if a bit addictive) but it's stupid fast, and yes, it's cheap as dirt. If I was working two jobs it would be nearly mandatory--no prep time, no dishes, right in front of the bus stop; grab it, eat, sleep.
I don't buy the no prep time argument. You can't devote 20 minutes to making dinner? Because that's how long it takes to cook a piece of chicken, make some rice, microwave some frozen veggies, and heat up some prepackaged curry sauce. My recipe box is filled with easy ones like that, all of which I can whip up in about 20 minutes, using cheap and healthy ingredients.
Breakfast: Bowl of Special K, glass of orange juice, apple and/or banana. Prep time: <2 minutes.
Lunch: Healthy cold cuts (ham or turkey) on whole wheat bread, pistachios, apple and/or banana. Prep time: <2 minutes
Dinner: Aforementioned chicken curry meal, with brown rice, glass of orange juice, and frozen veggies. Prep time: <20 minutes
Snacks: The sky is the limit. Apples, baby carrots, cucumbers, whatever floats your boat. Prep time: None.
If you can't find 24 minutes in your schedule to eat healthy you're not trying hard enough. It's all about priorities. Eating healthy either is or is not a priority for you.
Actually, the basic criteria for cheap, healthy food are: (1) buy mostly individual ingredients, which you can combine in simple ways, rather than stuff that's made of dozens of processed items in combination, and (2) buy in bulk, buy on sale, buy in season.
My MD has the theory that you stick to the outside walls of the grocery store, because (at least around here) that's where you'll find the produce, fresh baked goods, meat, and seafood. All of the processed stuff is inside the store, within the aisles.
He laughed when I pointed out that the beer is also contained on the outside wall of my local grocery store.....;)
A 500/day calorie deficit will drop that in 40 weeks. Sooner if exercise is added to the equation. 500 calories a day is about as high as I would recommend for a deficit, from my experiences the people who shoot for more than that are the most likely to end up in a losing battle of yo-yo dieting. Weight loss is all about long term lifestyle changes, not short term extremes.
FWIW my family has a history of heart disease and diabetes.... my blood test results (fasting sugar and cholesterol) follow my weight more than my diet. Healthy weight equals good test results, irrespective of what my diet consists of at the time. Everybody is different, but personally I didn't really change the foods I eat. I just ate less of them. Seeing my long cousins who are all Type 2 in their 20s (no wonder, their BMIs are all >40) was quite the wake up call....
Verizon Ev-DO: Maximum theoretical speed 3.1mbit/s, typical real world speed: 600-800kbit/s.
Verizon LTE w/10mhz deployment: Maximum theoretical speed: 75mbit/s, typical real world speed: 3-5mbit/s.
24 times the theoretical speed and 4 times the typical real world speed. That's enough to market it as a next generation technology, irrespective of what 3GPP thinks.
There's nothing wrong with fast food consumed in moderation. Taxing it is absurd. I might eat at Wendy's three times a year, usually on long road trips when it's particularly convenient. I should have to pay more for the privilege because some ass-clown like you wants to use the tax code for social engineering? Screw off buddy.
I'm not a big fan of the Tea Party, though it's interesting that you would attribute elitism to them rather than the person that suggests imposing nanny state taxes on fast food.
LTE was first proposed in 2003-2004 and lab tested in 2005-2006, which was years before 3G networks were fully deployed. It will likewise be years before there are real world trials of 5G technology, then some time after that before consumer gear becomes available at affordable prices and carriers being deployment.
The Shannon–Hartley theorem (aka Shannon capacity) is the term you're looking for. Modern wireless networks use MIMO (multiple input multiple output) concepts to boost this capacity and squeeze more bits into the same slice of spectrum.
It's going to happen regardless of what we do, so perhaps it makes more sense to plan for it than it does to impose huge artificial increases on energy costs that ultimately accomplish nothing other than to force down standards of living?
Slashdot Mirror
followed by even traditional airliners wanting to get rid of their pilots
I would expect the free market to take care of that. Would you want to get onto a plane without a human being behind the controls? I sure as hell wouldn't. Can you trust a computer pull this off? More to the point, I highly doubt that pilot training, salary, and benefits compromise a significant percentage of airline overhead. It's a non-zero cost to be sure but there are more significant ones that can actually be attacked without committing marketplace suicide.
Well, the only part of that which seems reassuring to me is miniature, and that claim doesn't hold up. A drone which can carry (for example) more than about a can of soda is large enough to cause serious injury if it falls out of the sky and lands on you, or its software gets confused and it engages in controlled flight into your face. And then there's the fire risk if something bad should happen to a battery; sure, you could use LifePo or another safer-chemistry battery, but that doesn't rule out fires. If the drone should come down and set something inconvenient alight, assigning blame will be the least consideration.
You've overlooked something that a friend of mine summarized with a single Photoshopped image, that of a rottweiler holding an Amazon drone in his mouth.
One can only envision the hilarity that will ensue when every neighborhood dog decides to go after these things. What's the counter to that? Equipping them with pepper spray like the mailman has? That could also prove to be amusing.
And, this will do nothing at all to fight additiction.
You can't beat an addiction if you die from an overdose. Survival is the first priority, then you try to get a handle on your life.
Facebook is a far bigger offender at this than Google is. Random example: Google doesn't compel you to register for a G+ account to access content flagged as public. Facebook does. Compound this annoyance with the fact that Facebook is synonymous with the internet for the unwashed masses and you have a walled garden that's nearly as obnoxious as AOL was back in the day.
I yelled at the organizers of our local half-marathon for only making updates available via their Facebook page. Special bonus points in their case for already having a webpage, plus the e-mail address of every registered runner, but using neither means of communication to share important updates. Here's a hint to anybody looking to establish a presence on the Internet: We don't all use Facebook.
Congress takes orders from the President? I must have missed that part of my high school civics class. Why is Obama whining so much then about those obstinate Republicans in the House? Can't he just order them to do what he wants?
try being single and going out to drink all the time and having it stolen while drunk because you leave it on a bar
That sounds like a natural consequence to me.
It's to protect theft of the information stored on the phone, which is generally far more valuable than the phone itself.
You can already do that with encryption and PIN locks. My /data partition is encrypted, with a six word diceware password, and the phone is auto-locked with a five digit PIN after five minutes of idleness. Ten failed PIN attempts wipes the device. Powering off the device removes the encryption keys from memory. It's entirely possible (probable even) that a well resourced organization could extract the encryption keys from the phone but that's really not a pressing concern for most people. If it's a concern for you then you should probably re-evaluate your decision to use a smartphone in the first place.
Why does a cable box need to use upto 500 W?
They don't. RTFS, that was taken off the face plate on the device. Face plates are always conservative (though this takes it to a whole new level) about power draw. Plug that thing into a watt meter and I'd be surprised if it used more than 15 or 20 watts when running full bore, never mind in standby mode. One might argue that 20 watts is a lot (and it is, my TiVo uses <10) but it's a lot less than 500.
Remember the second law. Energy can't just disappear. A cable box drawing 500 watts would need to dissipate 500 joules of heat energy per second. That's an hourly total of 1.8 megajoules or 1,706 BTU. For point of comparison, a 1500 watt 120V space heater tops out at about 5,200 BTU/hr. Where do you think those 1,700 BTUs are going? Think about how many cable boxes are in tightly confined entertainment centers with little to no ventilation. The cable box would melt down in short order in such an environment if it was truly using that much energy. High end gaming machines and servers usually top out about 200-300 watts of sustained draw and they need active cooling to deal with the waste heat.
We paid extra to rent a Prius went we went out West a few years ago. Don't recall which model year it was, 2007 or 2008 I think but could be wrong there. Either way I came away less than impressed. Strike One for me is anything with an automatic transmission, which makes me a relic I suppose, but there it is. The weird issue was with the seemingly hesitant throttle. There were times (turning left in front of oncoming traffic) where I stomped the gas and it seemed as though the computer had to stop and think, "Hmm.... electric, gas, or both?" and the car barely moved. Once it got going it had ample pick-up, for an automatic, but that 1-2 second delay took a lot of getting used to.
After a week of driving that thing I came away with the feeling that I would never own one. To be sure, there were some really neat things about it, like the dead silence when cruising at low speeds on the electric drive. Other than the throttle delay it handled as well as any mid-priced car I've driven. The build quality was nice and about what you'd expect in the price range. The gas mileage was a lot less impressive than what I was expecting, though the large proportion of highway miles and my penchant for speeding in wide open spaces (did you know the Prius will happily cruise at 110mph?) doubtless had something to do with that. Frankly if most of your driving is highway I don't see the point, my $17,000 non-hybrid Honda Civic is competitive with the Prius when it comes to highway driving.... I can milk 43-44mpg out of my Civic without trying that hard, and that's despite living in a hilly region.
to allow the sources of illegally used firearms to be determined
Because criminals would never think to deface serial numbers. Oh, wait.....
and make it easier for future governments to confiscate now banned firearms
Fixed it for you.
My solution: buy a f**king map. Need detailed turn information to your destination? Look up the directions on Google Maps (or similar), print them out, and refer to them while you're at a stop light/sign or have your significant other read them.
Because taking my eyes off the road to refer to maps/printed directions is so much safer than listening to audio directions and occasionally glancing at a TomTom that's mounted right below my rear view mirror, in a position where my eyes don't leave the roadway?
1. Maps suck. Road atlases are only useful for the 20,000 foot view, i.e., which combination of interstates and/or state highways will get me to my destination city. Once I'm in that city I need a street level map if I'm going to find my destintion and I don't have the money to equip my car with street level maps for every city within driving distance of my house.
2. Printed directions are even worse. You've got to constantly take your eyes off the road to refer to them, and god help you if you miss a turn either by accident or because of detour. Those directions are predicated on the assumption that you can follow them perfectly and there are no road closures. Once you're off the path they're useless.
The rate of US car fatalities has plummeted 75% over the past 45 years, largely due to government mandates and the NHTSA.
None of which argues in favor of NHTSA sticking its nose in the Google or Apple stores, imposing mandates on mapping apps, mandates that will invariably be shaped (see regulatory capture) to the benefit of incumbents at the expense of would-be upstarts.
It's disgusting (if a bit addictive) but it's stupid fast, and yes, it's cheap as dirt. If I was working two jobs it would be nearly mandatory--no prep time, no dishes, right in front of the bus stop; grab it, eat, sleep.
I don't buy the no prep time argument. You can't devote 20 minutes to making dinner? Because that's how long it takes to cook a piece of chicken, make some rice, microwave some frozen veggies, and heat up some prepackaged curry sauce. My recipe box is filled with easy ones like that, all of which I can whip up in about 20 minutes, using cheap and healthy ingredients.
Breakfast: Bowl of Special K, glass of orange juice, apple and/or banana. Prep time: <2 minutes.
Lunch: Healthy cold cuts (ham or turkey) on whole wheat bread, pistachios, apple and/or banana. Prep time: <2 minutes
Dinner: Aforementioned chicken curry meal, with brown rice, glass of orange juice, and frozen veggies. Prep time: <20 minutes
Snacks: The sky is the limit. Apples, baby carrots, cucumbers, whatever floats your boat. Prep time: None.
If you can't find 24 minutes in your schedule to eat healthy you're not trying hard enough. It's all about priorities. Eating healthy either is or is not a priority for you.
Actually, the basic criteria for cheap, healthy food are: (1) buy mostly individual ingredients, which you can combine in simple ways, rather than stuff that's made of dozens of processed items in combination, and (2) buy in bulk, buy on sale, buy in season.
My MD has the theory that you stick to the outside walls of the grocery store, because (at least around here) that's where you'll find the produce, fresh baked goods, meat, and seafood. All of the processed stuff is inside the store, within the aisles.
He laughed when I pointed out that the beer is also contained on the outside wall of my local grocery store..... ;)
You have to be alive to get sick.....
The 40lbs sounds hard and it is
A 500/day calorie deficit will drop that in 40 weeks. Sooner if exercise is added to the equation. 500 calories a day is about as high as I would recommend for a deficit, from my experiences the people who shoot for more than that are the most likely to end up in a losing battle of yo-yo dieting. Weight loss is all about long term lifestyle changes, not short term extremes.
FWIW my family has a history of heart disease and diabetes.... my blood test results (fasting sugar and cholesterol) follow my weight more than my diet. Healthy weight equals good test results, irrespective of what my diet consists of at the time. Everybody is different, but personally I didn't really change the foods I eat. I just ate less of them. Seeing my long cousins who are all Type 2 in their 20s (no wonder, their BMIs are all >40) was quite the wake up call....
Anti rejection drugs > death.
Who cares? Seriously.
Verizon Ev-DO: Maximum theoretical speed 3.1mbit/s, typical real world speed: 600-800kbit/s.
Verizon LTE w/10mhz deployment: Maximum theoretical speed: 75mbit/s, typical real world speed: 3-5mbit/s.
24 times the theoretical speed and 4 times the typical real world speed. That's enough to market it as a next generation technology, irrespective of what 3GPP thinks.
Dude, haven't you ever played The Sims? If you try to cook without cooking knowledge you invariably set the kitchen on fire. Boiling water is hard. ;)
There's nothing wrong with fast food consumed in moderation. Taxing it is absurd. I might eat at Wendy's three times a year, usually on long road trips when it's particularly convenient. I should have to pay more for the privilege because some ass-clown like you wants to use the tax code for social engineering? Screw off buddy.
I'm not a big fan of the Tea Party, though it's interesting that you would attribute elitism to them rather than the person that suggests imposing nanny state taxes on fast food.
LTE was first proposed in 2003-2004 and lab tested in 2005-2006, which was years before 3G networks were fully deployed. It will likewise be years before there are real world trials of 5G technology, then some time after that before consumer gear becomes available at affordable prices and carriers being deployment.
The Shannon–Hartley theorem (aka Shannon capacity) is the term you're looking for. Modern wireless networks use MIMO (multiple input multiple output) concepts to boost this capacity and squeeze more bits into the same slice of spectrum.
What's the positive argument for global warming?
It's going to happen regardless of what we do, so perhaps it makes more sense to plan for it than it does to impose huge artificial increases on energy costs that ultimately accomplish nothing other than to force down standards of living?
Also put a big ass tax on Fast food places that sell utter crap like McDonalds and Taco Bell. They prey on the poor with their $1.00 menu.
*eye roll*