The traffic camera law states that "A notice of violation and a traffic citation may not be issued for failure to stop at a red light if the driver is making a right-hand turn in a careful and prudent manner at an intersection where right-hand turns are permissible.
A notice of violation and a traffic citation may not be issued under this section if the driver of the vehicle came to a complete stop after crossing the stop line and before turning right if permissible at a red light, but failed to stop before crossing over the stop line or other point at which a stop is required."
These two specific exceptions were written by the legislature to combat abusive tactics by municipalities throughout the state.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of places in Florida where you have wide roads in urban areas with buildings literally 5-10 feet from the street, and there are lots of areas where the white "stop lines" are SO FAR back from the intersection, you literally can't see far enough to the left to MAKE a reasonable judgment about whether or not it's safe to proceed with the right turn until you've moved another 10-20 feet beyond it.
IMHO, the the IDEAL solution would be for FDOT to just reconfigure most of Florida's major intersections as CFIs ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ) and render the whole concept of a right turn on red (or green, for that matter) meaningless. By definition right-turning cars in a CFI are "go at all times, then merge to the left into what would otherwise be the right lane past the point where left-turning cars cross incoming traffic".
And aren't all Three Worlds well-covered by Inmarsat's BGAN already?
If by "well-covered" you mean, "100mb of data transfer at speeds comparable to pre-56k dialup for about $450.
Saying "all Three Worlds are well-covered by Inmarsat's BGAN" is kind of like saying, "T-Mobile has excellent coverage in rural America, because GPRS works just about everywhere".
These aren't exaclty lucrative potential customers... Who's paying for this and why?
Cruise ships. Especially in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and South China Sea. Two years from now, fast and semi-affordable shipboard internet will be a selling point and competitive advantage. Five years from now, it will be something every ship needs just to be taken seriously.
People should be more patient before blasting a company that has made many technological advances for our betterment.
Bullshit. American consumers owe them zero loyalty. Qualcomm has single-handedly done more to limit consumer choice and enable American carriers to rein in their customers and impose nearly complete vendor lock-in with phone hardware than any company in existence. Qualcomm is the reason why, up until a few months ago, it was LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for a company like Sony to sell a carrier-agnostic phone capable of doing LTE on nominally-GSM carriers like T-Mobile and AT&T. Why? Qualcomm refused to license radio-modem firmware to manufacturers, and only allowed it to be licensed by carriers. So, as a manufacturer, you were stuck... if you wanted your phone to do LTE on AT&T, you had to actively involve AT&T in its licensing... and by definition, that phone would be locked to AT&T, even if it had hardware technically capable of doing LTE on T-Mobile. Or 1700MHz HSPA+, for that matter. Likewise, if you wanted your phone to do LTE on T-Mobile, you HAD to get T-Mobile to deal with Qualcomm... and the resulting phones would be locked to T-Mobile and restricted to firmware that refused to operate on AT&T's LTE frequencies.
Yes, CDMA was a wonderful invention that ultimately determined the future direction of GSM (even if "IS95/CDMA-2000" itself fell out of favor in most places) by becoming the modulation method used for GSM 3G (HSPA+ is basically CDMA2000-1xRTT, extended to use multiple carriers with wider bandwidth, then further extended to allow one phone to simultaneously connect to two or more towers and split the traffic between them.)
By the same logic, we should be even MORE grateful to the Soviet engineers who developed the first mobile phone system based on CDMA back in the 1960s. Google "Altai". All Qualcomm did was make it commercially viable in the US & convince Sprint it was technologically superior to GSM (which, in fact, it was).
How do you know it's not just a recording of the guys kid singing the song in the bath?
Strictly speaking, under US laws (and Berne-influenced copyright laws in general), a kid singing a song in the bath might technically constitute an unlicensed public performance of a copyrighted work (or possibly an unauthorized derivative work) & be subject to takedown as well.
* Caracas has terabits of fiber connectivity straight into Miami
* Venezuela's legal system is openly hostile towards the US and American laws
* AFAIK, there are no restrictions on Americans purchasing services from Venezuelan companies (or paying for them with American credit cards).
30 seconds on Google turned up multiple Venezuelan virtual/colo server hosting companies with monthly fees that aren't particularly expensive. (Try searching for 'Caracas Xen' without quotes).
The problem is, dumping support for Qualcomm processors basically means dumping support for nearly every phone capable of doing LTE in the United States or Canada. Even now, you can count the number of top-shelf best-of-breed US/Canadian-LTE-compatible Android phones with non-Qualcomm baseband processors on one hand & have fingers left over when you're done.
In the meantime, if you're trying to find restricted documentation for things like Qualcomm's MSM8960 chipset, try Baidu. The Chinese internet is LITTERED with Qualcomm datasheets (not to mention other chips whose documentation is kept firmly under lock & key in the United States).
If there's a god, Raul Castro will announce on Monday that within 5 years, 80% of the Havana metro area will have gigabit fiber to the premises. The announcement will drive our elected officials in South Florida mad, and they'll quickly decide that getting TEN-gigabit municipal FTTP laid across Dade & Broward counties is their #1 priority...
You're right that concrete isn't a guarantee... but true EF5 tornadoes are almost as rare as landfalling category 5 hurricanes... and EF4 tornadoes aren't a whole lot more common. On the other hand, EF0 tornadoes are abundant, EF1 tornadoes are common, and EF2 tornadoes aren't particularly UNcommon. Switching to Florida-style construction wouldn't eliminate the risk of death or injury from a tornado altogether (because frankly, the only place that's safe to be when an EF5 hits your house is "somewhere else, far away")... but it WOULD basically eliminate meaningful damage from common EF0 tornadoes, would dramatically reduce property damage and injuries from EF1 tornadoes, and would almost certainly reduce the death toll (though not necessarily number of injuries or number of houses rendered uninhabitable) for EF2 and EF3 tornadoes. So yes, an unlikely (but non-inconceivable) EF5 tornado hitting downtown Kansas City mid-afternoon would still result in unfathomable carnage... but the dozen or so EF0 and EF1 tornadoes that hit the KC metro area over any given 5-year timespan would barely earn more than a few minutes of semi-sensationalistic coverage on the local TV news (maybe CNN, if someone gets good video footage of the tornado itself & it's a slow-news day).
That's because I'm demanding unlocked hardware with proper documentation, so its only limits will be those imposed by the bare-metal hardware itself instead of those imposed by somebody else's tunnel vision. The Atari 2600 is a perfect example. Officially, its capabilities were little better than a Pong game. It was the ability of programmers to bitbang registers mid-scanline that made it interesting and allowed it to persist well into the early 80s. Give it open-ended input options (diagonal buttons, high-resolution touchscreen, non-limiting display tech, good wireless connectivity (probably in conjunction with a nearby phone), and abundant ram & flash, and let the end users themselves decide how to use it instead of dictating its usage to them a-la-Apple.
There's a fairly easy way the death toll due to tornadoes could be lowered over time in states like Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, etc -- adopt the same building codes we have in South Florida.
Most people don't realize it, but South Florida experiences the most urban tornadoes per square mile per year in the entire United States. Granted, we basically never see EF4 and EF5 tornadoes... but we get plenty of the smaller ones.
The strength of South Florida tornadoes is EGREGIOUSLY under-reported by the Enhanced Fujita scale, because the EF scale is defined primarily in terms of observed damage rather than measured wind speeds -- damage that just doesn't happen in Florida, even with directly-comparable storms. An EF1 tornado capable of wiping a neighborhood of matchstick McMansions off the map would barely make a dent in a neighborhood of concrete post-Andrew South Florida homes with large-missile impact glass windows (Google "ASTM 1886-1996"), and would probably be reported as an EF0 unless it hit a trailer park or a neighborhood with older homes. An EF1 tornado is basically 30 seconds of a category 1 or 2 hurricane... and a direct hit by a category 1 hurricane is the South Florida equivalent of a snow day in upstate New York.
Anyway, the point is, if homes in suburban Kansas were built from reinforced concrete, deaths from anything short of an outright EF5 monster would basically fall into the category of "rare, unfortunate freak accidents" in areas where all the buildings were built to Dade County standards.
Mandatory features of any smartwatch that costs more than $100:
* Acceptable aesthetics.I'm setting the bar pretty low here, but it has to at least look rugged & utilitarian, if not actually attractive. If it looks like a Fisher Price toy or some cheap piece of plastic junk, it's not happening.
* Ability to use normal wrist straps, absent some compelling and good reason to the contrary.
* Glass that's either independent of the screen & can be replaced when cracked by me for $10 or so worth of parts and an hour of time, or hardened enough to survive getting repeatedly scraped against rough concrete walls. I destroyed dozens of watches growing up by accidentally getting too close to a wall/concrete pillar/whatever and scraping or smashing the glass.
* MINIMUM 36-hour battery life
* At least two tactile hard buttons that can be easily pinched independently of one another and used as a modifier key with the other. I hate HATE ***HATE*** touchscreens in general, and a watch would be the worst touchscreen environment of all. The only way to make it random-touch-resistant would be to add latency and sample delays that would make it feel laggy & slow.
* Rootable & reflashable as I see fit. Android would be nice, some Linux variant would be OK, and frankly I could live with an Atmel AVR as long as I can personally reflash it.
* Real, honest-to-god e-ink (not LCD-based "e-paper") display that takes a cue from the DSTN LCD displays of yore & has two or more independent controllers that can update different parts in parallel (doubling or quadrupling the time to redraw the display). Enough framebuffer ram to do full-blown double/triple-buffering with *really fast* DMA (to let you compose changes, then propagate them to the actual display in an instant instead of 200-400ms) would be even better. There's no technical reason why an e-ink display HAS to be glacially slow... they've just been slow up to now because they were designed to minimize component cost and conserve battery life. But since they'd only consume power while being actively updated, the power budget difference between e-ink with parallel controllers and e-ink with one slow controller would be fairly small (think: race to sleep instead of always running slowly).
* If it DOES have a touchscreen (in addition to the aforementioned pair of diagonally-opposed hardkeys from a few points back), that touchscreen needs to be capable of AT LEAST 120 samples/second (if not with stock firmware, at least the hardware itself when reflashed to a custom ROM). A tiny screen NEEDS a high sample rate to get any kind of acceptable resolution from a capacitive sensor.
They probably DO have the service available for a fairly low monthly fee... but they don't necessarily advertise it, and don't necessarily have to even volunteer details about its existence if you ask.
For a few years, AT&T had a program for dirt-cheap DSL (like, $9.97-14.99/month for 768k/128k ADSL) in their former BellSouth markets that they offered as a condition of FCC approval of their acquisition by AT&T. The catch was, unless you read the official Tariff filed with the state public utility regulators, knew the (unadvertised) phone number you had to call, and the precise ordering code for the service, you'd never have known it existed, and they wouldn't have told you about it if you asked. You had to order it as a blind act of faith (they'd confirm nothing, besides "the service you are ordering is being offered in accordance with their official Tariffs"), but towards the last year or two, a bunch of people found out about it when magazines & newspapers started to tell people about it and how to subscribe.
In this specific case, the "turn key" (one-click install) nature of the service played a major role in the decision against Aereo itself.
If a New York server colo facility allowed customers to ship them arbitrary PCIe cards & installed them in leased servers on their behalf, supplied the servers with a generic Linux install, and left it 100% up to the customers to get the card working and set up the network streaming on their own, they'd probably be OK under this ruling. However, if a customer in Miami used his TV server in New York to watch NY NBC from anywhere that's "out of market" and lacks a "viable" affiliate signal (or outside the US altogether), the customer himself could probably be sued for infringement by his local NBC affiliate. Whether his local affiliate would *bother* (or even have any way of finding out) is debatable, but if he did it openly & somehow caught their attention, they'd have a fairly open & shut case against him that he'd be almost guaranteed to lose if it ever went to trial.
Believe it or not, the black letter of Florida law does NOT require that drivers unconditionally come to a complete stop at stop signs. That doesn't mean a cop can't give a ticket, but it does mean you're likely to prevail at getting it dismissed in court if you hire an attorney and the police officer can't compellingly demonstrate that you put a specific person in non-theoretical danger.
> It's getting more difficult now that most of the TVs have been trashed.
Well, there's always "Plan B" once 3840x2100 monitors become affordable... at THAT resolution, you can literally emulate phosphor smear and misconvergence, to the point where it almost becomes indistinguishable from a "real" CRT. Increase the framerate to 240fps, and you can even emulate interlaced scanline fade (assuming the game wasn't what would now be called "240p60" with black scanline gaps).
10-15 years ago, video CDs and VCRs were popular in those same poor countries... with hardware and media costs roughly 2-4 times what a DVD player costs now. For the third world, optical media is actually ideal... you can store it under awful conditions, re-sell it almost without limit as long as it's not physically abused, and mail it for only slightly more than the cost of mailing a postcard.
Also, there's "poverty", and there's "Poverty(tm)". Even in countries with economies healthier than, say, Niger or Chad, there's a market for people who aren't necessarily living in desperate grinding poverty, but would nevertheless like to pick up an extra TV or two for other rooms in the house for less than what it would cost to buy a brand new LCD TV.
You're assuming that those same African consumers are buying them FOR aerial reception. DVD players aren't exactly luxury items anymore (I could walk into Wal Mart RIGHT NOW and buy a shit DVD player for about $25) and pirated DVDs of movies & TV shows are available in those countries for a pittance. I'd venture a guess that in the poorest countries, rural TV reception is barely worth bothering with ANYWAY, and most TV content gets delivered via sneakernet and open-air markets.
Also, most American CRT TVs from the 90s required little more to be capable of 576-line pseudo-NTSC than hacking the power supply to convert 220v@50hz into 120v@50hz. Analog CRTs had no fixed concept of resolution... they just swept scanlines over and over, bumping the timing a notch with each scanline, until they saw the vertical retrace signal or rolled over. They might not have had the dot pitch to properly display 576-line video without looking like shit... but that was part of the magic with analog stuff... there was a HUGE gulf between "what it was officially designed to do properly" and "what it could be coaxed into trying to do if you insisted".
Is there some technical reason why they stop at 3 strains, or is it purely a matter of cost? If it's just cost, why can't they offer more expensive flu shots that include more strains, to get the efficacy closer to 80%?
Or, for that matter, if vaccination for a particular strain conveys multi-year immunity, why can't they at least make two variants of influenza vaccine... one with the 3 strains they believe are likely to be the most *dangerous*, and another with the 3 worst strains that haven't been part of the cocktail for the past N years (so that if you got a flu shot every year, and it had N-year efficacy for those strains, after N-1 years you'd have some meaningful degree of immunity to at least 3n-3 different strains instead of just 3?
For what it's worth, "anchor babies" is another misleading term.
A baby born on US soil to a Mexican citizen in the US illegally enjoys automatic US citizenship, but it was established by the Supreme Court a few decades ago that being a child with US citizenship does NOT automatically convey a right to GROW UP on US soil unless at least one parent or legal guardian has US citizenship or residency. (I believe the Supreme Court's rationale was that a child needs a legal guardian, and since the constitution doesn't grant automatic citizenship to the PARENTS of US citizens, the child can't independently exercise his rights as a US citizen until he or she is legally an adult).
Under the best circumstances for the mother, her baby will be born in the US, get an official US birth certificate, then both will be deported to Mexico. 18 years later, the child can move to the US at will, but bringing his mother (or any other extended family member) will require demonstration of financial ability to support and sponsor the immigrant parent. In the end, all having an "anchor baby" really gives the mother is the ability to cut in front of other Mexican citizens and move to the front of the immigration line ahead of them. immigration status.
Civil disobedience. Root your phone, reflash it to an AOSP- or AOKP-derived ROM, and configure it with an app that feeds invasive apps spoofed or sanitized data.
Quantum data transfer will probably end up succumbing to the same kind of catch-22/gotcha that plagues realtime digital filtering of analog waveforms...
a) Analog filtering introduces phase changes due to delays. When digitally-filtering a waveform, the length of time you have to sample it to get enough to analyze and transform ends up introducing basically the same phase shift an analog filter would have caused.
b) Quantum data transfer has "1 in 100 million" odds of actually working for any particular attempt. Obviously , lots of forward error correction will be needed to both detect and fix errors. My prediction is that the time the required error-correction overhead adds to the transmission time will end up being basically equal to the time it would have taken to transmit the data at the speed of light.
c) In both cases, the limit will apply primarily to realtime uses. Using the audio example, if you try to apply a digital high-pass/low-pass filter to audio for something like a subwoofer, you'll basically create the same phase shift you would have had anyway... but if you have the luxury of buffering playback so that you have time to completely analyze the signal & can delay the OTHER signals to bring them back into temporal alignment with the filtered signal, you can enjoy the best of both worlds... infinite-slope filtering with zero induced phase shift. In the context of quantum data transfer, it will fail at the goal of "faster than light" throughput, but might nevertheless find utility as a way to transport data in non-realtime under circumstances that would render "normal" electromagnetic radio modulation schemes unusable.
At some point, if there are enough consumers living beyond Earth orbit to commercially matter to normal web sites (or their future equivalent), the most logical step would be to allow web applications to bundle themselves and their data in a way that allows the web app ITSELF to be automatically deployed to a remote virtual server closer to the end user & sync its mirror of the database with the authoritative one back on earth (multicasting most of the replicated data from earth to elsewhere & caching it blindly at the local end to the greatest extent possible).
The basic technology already exists today (think:.war files and databases with replication, load-balancing, and hot failover), but the number of users (say, passengers on a cruise ship) is too small relative to the expense & currently-insurmountable licensing barriers (Oracle isn't going to start making "replicant" licenses for Oracle and MySQL available that would be remotely cost-effective anytime soon).
A lot of people forget that the annoying habit some websites have of using AJAX to send data nonstop keystroke-by-keystroke is a plague of fairly recent origin. There's no reason why web applications HAVE to be written that way. If latency is high, but bandwidth is abundant, it makes more sense to satisfy the request by bulk-sending everything the requestor is likely to want anytime soon, and do it in a way that allows it to be cached locally for the benefit of others who might make the same request later.
The thing is, if cable/satellite went to true a-la-carte, any short-term savings would be rapidly neutralized by skyrocketing per-channel costs. Instead of paying $89.95/month for 200-300 channels, you'd be paying $84.99/month for 17 specific channels. Someone who literally watched only one or two channels might come out ahead, but the cable industry would make sure that most of us were at least as fucked as we are now, and would use it as an opportunity to fuck other customers just a little bit harder. It's depressing, but deep down inside, we all *know* it's true.
There's another category nobody in the industry even wants to TALK about (besides complaining about the costs, then passing them straight along to customers) -- the fees paid to local channels that insist on payment in lieu of "must-carry". IMHO, the FCC should amend the "must-carry" rule to REQUIRE cable/satellite providers to break out the total amount they'd otherwise have to collectively pay the local channels, and allow customers to opt out of paying that fee in return for having to use an antenna to watch local channels. The probably couldn't get away with demanding a breakdown of channel-by-channel fees due to nondisclosure rules, but if they disclosed their aggregate cost, it wouldn't really reveal much. I can almost *guarantee* that cable/satellite customers who don't live in New York City would begin opting out EN MASSE if they started seeing line items on their bills like "Local Affiliate Rebroadcast Fees - $17.47 (optional)". In the short terms, the local affiliates would probably raise prices for the remaining customers who don't want to bother with an antenna... but the higher they raised them, the more cable/satellite customers would be motivated to opt out of the fees and switch to OTA reception for them.
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> There is no county in the US where a rolling turn is acceptable
Sort of. http://www.bradenton.com/2014/...
I quote:
These two specific exceptions were written by the legislature to combat abusive tactics by municipalities throughout the state.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of places in Florida where you have wide roads in urban areas with buildings literally 5-10 feet from the street, and there are lots of areas where the white "stop lines" are SO FAR back from the intersection, you literally can't see far enough to the left to MAKE a reasonable judgment about whether or not it's safe to proceed with the right turn until you've moved another 10-20 feet beyond it.
IMHO, the the IDEAL solution would be for FDOT to just reconfigure most of Florida's major intersections as CFIs ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ) and render the whole concept of a right turn on red (or green, for that matter) meaningless. By definition right-turning cars in a CFI are "go at all times, then merge to the left into what would otherwise be the right lane past the point where left-turning cars cross incoming traffic".
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Where are the usable pro quality Linux apps ?
SmartGit: http://www.syntevo.com/smartgi...
IntelliJ IDEA: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/...
Ardour DAW: https://ardour.org/
And aren't all Three Worlds well-covered by Inmarsat's BGAN already?
If by "well-covered" you mean, "100mb of data transfer at speeds comparable to pre-56k dialup for about $450.
Saying "all Three Worlds are well-covered by Inmarsat's BGAN" is kind of like saying, "T-Mobile has excellent coverage in rural America, because GPRS works just about everywhere".
These aren't exaclty lucrative potential customers...
Who's paying for this and why?
Cruise ships. Especially in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and South China Sea. Two years from now, fast and semi-affordable shipboard internet will be a selling point and competitive advantage. Five years from now, it will be something every ship needs just to be taken seriously.
People should be more patient before blasting a company that has made many technological advances for our betterment.
Bullshit. American consumers owe them zero loyalty. Qualcomm has single-handedly done more to limit consumer choice and enable American carriers to rein in their customers and impose nearly complete vendor lock-in with phone hardware than any company in existence. Qualcomm is the reason why, up until a few months ago, it was LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for a company like Sony to sell a carrier-agnostic phone capable of doing LTE on nominally-GSM carriers like T-Mobile and AT&T. Why? Qualcomm refused to license radio-modem firmware to manufacturers, and only allowed it to be licensed by carriers. So, as a manufacturer, you were stuck... if you wanted your phone to do LTE on AT&T, you had to actively involve AT&T in its licensing... and by definition, that phone would be locked to AT&T, even if it had hardware technically capable of doing LTE on T-Mobile. Or 1700MHz HSPA+, for that matter. Likewise, if you wanted your phone to do LTE on T-Mobile, you HAD to get T-Mobile to deal with Qualcomm... and the resulting phones would be locked to T-Mobile and restricted to firmware that refused to operate on AT&T's LTE frequencies.
Yes, CDMA was a wonderful invention that ultimately determined the future direction of GSM (even if "IS95/CDMA-2000" itself fell out of favor in most places) by becoming the modulation method used for GSM 3G (HSPA+ is basically CDMA2000-1xRTT, extended to use multiple carriers with wider bandwidth, then further extended to allow one phone to simultaneously connect to two or more towers and split the traffic between them.)
By the same logic, we should be even MORE grateful to the Soviet engineers who developed the first mobile phone system based on CDMA back in the 1960s. Google "Altai". All Qualcomm did was make it commercially viable in the US & convince Sprint it was technologically superior to GSM (which, in fact, it was).
How do you know it's not just a recording of the guys kid singing the song in the bath?
Strictly speaking, under US laws (and Berne-influenced copyright laws in general), a kid singing a song in the bath might technically constitute an unlicensed public performance of a copyrighted work (or possibly an unauthorized derivative work) & be subject to takedown as well.
One word: Venezuela.
* Caracas has terabits of fiber connectivity straight into Miami
* Venezuela's legal system is openly hostile towards the US and American laws
* AFAIK, there are no restrictions on Americans purchasing services from Venezuelan companies (or paying for them with American credit cards).
30 seconds on Google turned up multiple Venezuelan virtual/colo server hosting companies with monthly fees that aren't particularly expensive. (Try searching for 'Caracas Xen' without quotes).
The problem is, dumping support for Qualcomm processors basically means dumping support for nearly every phone capable of doing LTE in the United States or Canada. Even now, you can count the number of top-shelf best-of-breed US/Canadian-LTE-compatible Android phones with non-Qualcomm baseband processors on one hand & have fingers left over when you're done.
In the meantime, if you're trying to find restricted documentation for things like Qualcomm's MSM8960 chipset, try Baidu. The Chinese internet is LITTERED with Qualcomm datasheets (not to mention other chips whose documentation is kept firmly under lock & key in the United States).
If there's a god, Raul Castro will announce on Monday that within 5 years, 80% of the Havana metro area will have gigabit fiber to the premises. The announcement will drive our elected officials in South Florida mad, and they'll quickly decide that getting TEN-gigabit municipal FTTP laid across Dade & Broward counties is their #1 priority...
You're right that concrete isn't a guarantee... but true EF5 tornadoes are almost as rare as landfalling category 5 hurricanes... and EF4 tornadoes aren't a whole lot more common. On the other hand, EF0 tornadoes are abundant, EF1 tornadoes are common, and EF2 tornadoes aren't particularly UNcommon. Switching to Florida-style construction wouldn't eliminate the risk of death or injury from a tornado altogether (because frankly, the only place that's safe to be when an EF5 hits your house is "somewhere else, far away")... but it WOULD basically eliminate meaningful damage from common EF0 tornadoes, would dramatically reduce property damage and injuries from EF1 tornadoes, and would almost certainly reduce the death toll (though not necessarily number of injuries or number of houses rendered uninhabitable) for EF2 and EF3 tornadoes. So yes, an unlikely (but non-inconceivable) EF5 tornado hitting downtown Kansas City mid-afternoon would still result in unfathomable carnage... but the dozen or so EF0 and EF1 tornadoes that hit the KC metro area over any given 5-year timespan would barely earn more than a few minutes of semi-sensationalistic coverage on the local TV news (maybe CNN, if someone gets good video footage of the tornado itself & it's a slow-news day).
That's because I'm demanding unlocked hardware with proper documentation, so its only limits will be those imposed by the bare-metal hardware itself instead of those imposed by somebody else's tunnel vision. The Atari 2600 is a perfect example. Officially, its capabilities were little better than a Pong game. It was the ability of programmers to bitbang registers mid-scanline that made it interesting and allowed it to persist well into the early 80s. Give it open-ended input options (diagonal buttons, high-resolution touchscreen, non-limiting display tech, good wireless connectivity (probably in conjunction with a nearby phone), and abundant ram & flash, and let the end users themselves decide how to use it instead of dictating its usage to them a-la-Apple.
There's a fairly easy way the death toll due to tornadoes could be lowered over time in states like Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, etc -- adopt the same building codes we have in South Florida.
Most people don't realize it, but South Florida experiences the most urban tornadoes per square mile per year in the entire United States. Granted, we basically never see EF4 and EF5 tornadoes... but we get plenty of the smaller ones.
The strength of South Florida tornadoes is EGREGIOUSLY under-reported by the Enhanced Fujita scale, because the EF scale is defined primarily in terms of observed damage rather than measured wind speeds -- damage that just doesn't happen in Florida, even with directly-comparable storms. An EF1 tornado capable of wiping a neighborhood of matchstick McMansions off the map would barely make a dent in a neighborhood of concrete post-Andrew South Florida homes with large-missile impact glass windows (Google "ASTM 1886-1996"), and would probably be reported as an EF0 unless it hit a trailer park or a neighborhood with older homes. An EF1 tornado is basically 30 seconds of a category 1 or 2 hurricane... and a direct hit by a category 1 hurricane is the South Florida equivalent of a snow day in upstate New York.
Anyway, the point is, if homes in suburban Kansas were built from reinforced concrete, deaths from anything short of an outright EF5 monster would basically fall into the category of "rare, unfortunate freak accidents" in areas where all the buildings were built to Dade County standards.
Assorted SoFla torn-porn:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Mandatory features of any smartwatch that costs more than $100:
* Acceptable aesthetics.I'm setting the bar pretty low here, but it has to at least look rugged & utilitarian, if not actually attractive. If it looks like a Fisher Price toy or some cheap piece of plastic junk, it's not happening.
* Ability to use normal wrist straps, absent some compelling and good reason to the contrary.
* Glass that's either independent of the screen & can be replaced when cracked by me for $10 or so worth of parts and an hour of time, or hardened enough to survive getting repeatedly scraped against rough concrete walls. I destroyed dozens of watches growing up by accidentally getting too close to a wall/concrete pillar/whatever and scraping or smashing the glass.
* MINIMUM 36-hour battery life
* At least two tactile hard buttons that can be easily pinched independently of one another and used as a modifier key with the other. I hate HATE ***HATE*** touchscreens in general, and a watch would be the worst touchscreen environment of all. The only way to make it random-touch-resistant would be to add latency and sample delays that would make it feel laggy & slow.
* Rootable & reflashable as I see fit. Android would be nice, some Linux variant would be OK, and frankly I could live with an Atmel AVR as long as I can personally reflash it.
* Real, honest-to-god e-ink (not LCD-based "e-paper") display that takes a cue from the DSTN LCD displays of yore & has two or more independent controllers that can update different parts in parallel (doubling or quadrupling the time to redraw the display). Enough framebuffer ram to do full-blown double/triple-buffering with *really fast* DMA (to let you compose changes, then propagate them to the actual display in an instant instead of 200-400ms) would be even better. There's no technical reason why an e-ink display HAS to be glacially slow... they've just been slow up to now because they were designed to minimize component cost and conserve battery life. But since they'd only consume power while being actively updated, the power budget difference between e-ink with parallel controllers and e-ink with one slow controller would be fairly small (think: race to sleep instead of always running slowly).
* If it DOES have a touchscreen (in addition to the aforementioned pair of diagonally-opposed hardkeys from a few points back), that touchscreen needs to be capable of AT LEAST 120 samples/second (if not with stock firmware, at least the hardware itself when reflashed to a custom ROM). A tiny screen NEEDS a high sample rate to get any kind of acceptable resolution from a capacitive sensor.
They probably DO have the service available for a fairly low monthly fee... but they don't necessarily advertise it, and don't necessarily have to even volunteer details about its existence if you ask.
For a few years, AT&T had a program for dirt-cheap DSL (like, $9.97-14.99/month for 768k/128k ADSL) in their former BellSouth markets that they offered as a condition of FCC approval of their acquisition by AT&T. The catch was, unless you read the official Tariff filed with the state public utility regulators, knew the (unadvertised) phone number you had to call, and the precise ordering code for the service, you'd never have known it existed, and they wouldn't have told you about it if you asked. You had to order it as a blind act of faith (they'd confirm nothing, besides "the service you are ordering is being offered in accordance with their official Tariffs"), but towards the last year or two, a bunch of people found out about it when magazines & newspapers started to tell people about it and how to subscribe.
In this specific case, the "turn key" (one-click install) nature of the service played a major role in the decision against Aereo itself.
If a New York server colo facility allowed customers to ship them arbitrary PCIe cards & installed them in leased servers on their behalf, supplied the servers with a generic Linux install, and left it 100% up to the customers to get the card working and set up the network streaming on their own, they'd probably be OK under this ruling. However, if a customer in Miami used his TV server in New York to watch NY NBC from anywhere that's "out of market" and lacks a "viable" affiliate signal (or outside the US altogether), the customer himself could probably be sued for infringement by his local NBC affiliate. Whether his local affiliate would *bother* (or even have any way of finding out) is debatable, but if he did it openly & somehow caught their attention, they'd have a fairly open & shut case against him that he'd be almost guaranteed to lose if it ever went to trial.
You have obviously never driven in South Florida.
Believe it or not, the black letter of Florida law does NOT require that drivers unconditionally come to a complete stop at stop signs. That doesn't mean a cop can't give a ticket, but it does mean you're likely to prevail at getting it dismissed in court if you hire an attorney and the police officer can't compellingly demonstrate that you put a specific person in non-theoretical danger.
> It's getting more difficult now that most of the TVs have been trashed.
Well, there's always "Plan B" once 3840x2100 monitors become affordable... at THAT resolution, you can literally emulate phosphor smear and misconvergence, to the point where it almost becomes indistinguishable from a "real" CRT. Increase the framerate to 240fps, and you can even emulate interlaced scanline fade (assuming the game wasn't what would now be called "240p60" with black scanline gaps).
10-15 years ago, video CDs and VCRs were popular in those same poor countries... with hardware and media costs roughly 2-4 times what a DVD player costs now. For the third world, optical media is actually ideal... you can store it under awful conditions, re-sell it almost without limit as long as it's not physically abused, and mail it for only slightly more than the cost of mailing a postcard.
Also, there's "poverty", and there's "Poverty(tm)". Even in countries with economies healthier than, say, Niger or Chad, there's a market for people who aren't necessarily living in desperate grinding poverty, but would nevertheless like to pick up an extra TV or two for other rooms in the house for less than what it would cost to buy a brand new LCD TV.
You're assuming that those same African consumers are buying them FOR aerial reception. DVD players aren't exactly luxury items anymore (I could walk into Wal Mart RIGHT NOW and buy a shit DVD player for about $25) and pirated DVDs of movies & TV shows are available in those countries for a pittance. I'd venture a guess that in the poorest countries, rural TV reception is barely worth bothering with ANYWAY, and most TV content gets delivered via sneakernet and open-air markets.
Also, most American CRT TVs from the 90s required little more to be capable of 576-line pseudo-NTSC than hacking the power supply to convert 220v@50hz into 120v@50hz. Analog CRTs had no fixed concept of resolution... they just swept scanlines over and over, bumping the timing a notch with each scanline, until they saw the vertical retrace signal or rolled over. They might not have had the dot pitch to properly display 576-line video without looking like shit... but that was part of the magic with analog stuff... there was a HUGE gulf between "what it was officially designed to do properly" and "what it could be coaxed into trying to do if you insisted".
Is there some technical reason why they stop at 3 strains, or is it purely a matter of cost? If it's just cost, why can't they offer more expensive flu shots that include more strains, to get the efficacy closer to 80%?
Or, for that matter, if vaccination for a particular strain conveys multi-year immunity, why can't they at least make two variants of influenza vaccine... one with the 3 strains they believe are likely to be the most *dangerous*, and another with the 3 worst strains that haven't been part of the cocktail for the past N years (so that if you got a flu shot every year, and it had N-year efficacy for those strains, after N-1 years you'd have some meaningful degree of immunity to at least 3n-3 different strains instead of just 3?
For what it's worth, "anchor babies" is another misleading term.
A baby born on US soil to a Mexican citizen in the US illegally enjoys automatic US citizenship, but it was established by the Supreme Court a few decades ago that being a child with US citizenship does NOT automatically convey a right to GROW UP on US soil unless at least one parent or legal guardian has US citizenship or residency. (I believe the Supreme Court's rationale was that a child needs a legal guardian, and since the constitution doesn't grant automatic citizenship to the PARENTS of US citizens, the child can't independently exercise his rights as a US citizen until he or she is legally an adult).
Under the best circumstances for the mother, her baby will be born in the US, get an official US birth certificate, then both will be deported to Mexico. 18 years later, the child can move to the US at will, but bringing his mother (or any other extended family member) will require demonstration of financial ability to support and sponsor the immigrant parent. In the end, all having an "anchor baby" really gives the mother is the ability to cut in front of other Mexican citizens and move to the front of the immigration line ahead of them.
immigration status.
[quote]But what are you going to do?[/quote]
Civil disobedience. Root your phone, reflash it to an AOSP- or AOKP-derived ROM, and configure it with an app that feeds invasive apps spoofed or sanitized data.
Quantum data transfer will probably end up succumbing to the same kind of catch-22/gotcha that plagues realtime digital filtering of analog waveforms...
a) Analog filtering introduces phase changes due to delays. When digitally-filtering a waveform, the length of time you have to sample it to get enough to analyze and transform ends up introducing basically the same phase shift an analog filter would have caused.
b) Quantum data transfer has "1 in 100 million" odds of actually working for any particular attempt. Obviously , lots of forward error correction will be needed to both detect and fix errors. My prediction is that the time the required error-correction overhead adds to the transmission time will end up being basically equal to the time it would have taken to transmit the data at the speed of light.
c) In both cases, the limit will apply primarily to realtime uses. Using the audio example, if you try to apply a digital high-pass/low-pass filter to audio for something like a subwoofer, you'll basically create the same phase shift you would have had anyway... but if you have the luxury of buffering playback so that you have time to completely analyze the signal & can delay the OTHER signals to bring them back into temporal alignment with the filtered signal, you can enjoy the best of both worlds... infinite-slope filtering with zero induced phase shift. In the context of quantum data transfer, it will fail at the goal of "faster than light" throughput, but might nevertheless find utility as a way to transport data in non-realtime under circumstances that would render "normal" electromagnetic radio modulation schemes unusable.
At some point, if there are enough consumers living beyond Earth orbit to commercially matter to normal web sites (or their future equivalent), the most logical step would be to allow web applications to bundle themselves and their data in a way that allows the web app ITSELF to be automatically deployed to a remote virtual server closer to the end user & sync its mirror of the database with the authoritative one back on earth (multicasting most of the replicated data from earth to elsewhere & caching it blindly at the local end to the greatest extent possible).
The basic technology already exists today (think: .war files and databases with replication, load-balancing, and hot failover), but the number of users (say, passengers on a cruise ship) is too small relative to the expense & currently-insurmountable licensing barriers (Oracle isn't going to start making "replicant" licenses for Oracle and MySQL available that would be remotely cost-effective anytime soon).
A lot of people forget that the annoying habit some websites have of using AJAX to send data nonstop keystroke-by-keystroke is a plague of fairly recent origin. There's no reason why web applications HAVE to be written that way. If latency is high, but bandwidth is abundant, it makes more sense to satisfy the request by bulk-sending everything the requestor is likely to want anytime soon, and do it in a way that allows it to be cached locally for the benefit of others who might make the same request later.
The thing is, if cable/satellite went to true a-la-carte, any short-term savings would be rapidly neutralized by skyrocketing per-channel costs. Instead of paying $89.95/month for 200-300 channels, you'd be paying $84.99/month for 17 specific channels. Someone who literally watched only one or two channels might come out ahead, but the cable industry would make sure that most of us were at least as fucked as we are now, and would use it as an opportunity to fuck other customers just a little bit harder. It's depressing, but deep down inside, we all *know* it's true.
There's another category nobody in the industry even wants to TALK about (besides complaining about the costs, then passing them straight along to customers) -- the fees paid to local channels that insist on payment in lieu of "must-carry". IMHO, the FCC should amend the "must-carry" rule to REQUIRE cable/satellite providers to break out the total amount they'd otherwise have to collectively pay the local channels, and allow customers to opt out of paying that fee in return for having to use an antenna to watch local channels. The probably couldn't get away with demanding a breakdown of channel-by-channel fees due to nondisclosure rules, but if they disclosed their aggregate cost, it wouldn't really reveal much. I can almost *guarantee* that cable/satellite customers who don't live in New York City would begin opting out EN MASSE if they started seeing line items on their bills like "Local Affiliate Rebroadcast Fees - $17.47 (optional)". In the short terms, the local affiliates would probably raise prices for the remaining customers who don't want to bother with an antenna... but the higher they raised them, the more cable/satellite customers would be motivated to opt out of the fees and switch to OTA reception for them.