Yes, I did try their audio captcha... when I couldn't figure out why the image captcha was refusing my answers, I tried audio wondering how much worse it could possibly be and for the most part, I could not even figure out what the heck I was hearing. Instructions said there was supposed to be a dozen words in there but I only managed to catch 3-4 and did not feel like listening to that gibberish again to try finding the others.
That made me feel like captchas are worse than the problems they are attempting to fix.
My mother had a run-in with Microsoft's captchas a few times due to failed login attempts and when that happens, she usually asks my sister to unlock her account but even my sister often has trouble with it so she ends up asking me.
Quite ironic that tests designed to tell humans from machines seem to cause humans to fail so much.
While it is true that the color space has reduced resolution to save bandwidth in broadcast formats, I would still count that as compression - the raw imagery in the studios is still usually captured in 4:4:4 and possibly in hi10 (30bpp) format before processing, archive encoding and broadcast encoding.
Somehow, I do not think pause-to-inspect-minute-detail is common enough to justify the billions of dollars it would cost the industry to make 4k the new standard any time soon when it barely just got done upgrading to HD.
ATSC got updated in 2008 to add h264 support. I would not be surprised if they updated it again to define a 4k format and h265.
The government does not need to pay to replace anything: broadcasters can simply pack a lower resolution MPEG2 stream for backward compatibility with non-HD, non-h265 decoders along with the 4k/h265 stream.
The "bleeding edge" may get to sample new stuff early (or before it dies off altogether like HDDVD) but it is the mass-market that ultimately picks the winners for mainstream stuff like media consumption. HD would still be a niche-market thing if the mass-market did not see enough value in it to bother with the higher price tag when HDTVs started entering the mainstream price range.
The visual improvement from HD to QHD is nowhere near as obvious at normal seating distances as going from SD to HD so I predict most people will not be in anywhere near as much of a hurry to upgrade to 4k... I bet most will even consider it as little more than a gimmick on par with 3DTV - not enough added perceived value to justify the premium.
ATSC added support for h264 in July 2008. Only problem with that is people with pre-ATSC-2008-7 TVs are stuck without h264 support so broadcasters cannot simply switch to h264.
"ATSC is uncompressed 18.2mbit MPEG"
Wut? Raw 1080p30 is ~1.87Gbps so 18.2Mbps MPEG2 is already over 100X compression.
As for artifacts in MPEG2 encoding/decoding, there is plenty of visible block noise in MPEG2 even on DVDs. That's why there was a whole industry of products attempting to improve deblocking, anti-aliasing, "mosquito noise" and other visual artifacts for videophiles. While MPEG2 was a huge improvement over MPEG1, it still left much to be desired unless bit rates were cranked way up.
Front-row seats suck... practically breaking my neck looking up and during action scenes, the image jumps a very noticeable 2-3' between frames at that range. I prefer mid-seats: motion jerkiness is half as bad due to roughly double the distance from the screen and finding a comfortable viewing position for my neck is much easier.
There is such a thing as the "Resting Point of Vergence" which is the shortest distance at which people's eyes can focus effortlessly and indefinitely. The average is 45" looking straight ahead and 35" looking on a 30 degrees down-angle. Sitting closer to your TV/monitor than your RPV will cause eye fatigue over time. In my case, that distance is around 30" looking straight ahead. For some people, it can be as short as 15". But the average is 45".
So for most people, sitting close enough to their monitor(s) or TV so they can scrutinize individual pixels is a bad idea - at least when sitting there for hours at a time.
The Hindenburg was a giant bladder coated with highly combustible thermite-like paint. Lots of surface area to let air in and mix with hydrogen to help it burn when something goes wrong and not much to prevent such a fire from spreading across the whole thing in record time.
In a liquefied hydrogen system, the hydrogen would be stored in a thick steel or carbon fiber tank, which is a substantially different story. Those things would be around 10X thicker than scuba tanks.
Contact surface area has always been a major factor in static and dynamic friction forces in conventional mechanics (ex.: ball bearings) so this "discovery" is nothing more than scientists re-discovering something obvious that they forgot for some reason: reducing contact surface area works at microscopic scales too.
On macroscopic mechanics, surface roughness is a major contributor to friction. On a microscopic scale, roughness is replaced by atomic forces but the rest is still the same.
Supraconductors store energy in the form of magnetic fields. Adding and removing energy from a supraconducting loop requires conversions between electrical and magnetic forms.
Electrostatic storage is the only form of direct electrical energy storage: simple electrons go in, simple electrons come out, no conversions to or from chemical, magnetic, thermal or other energy forms. The main problem with it is that plain electrostatic capacitors have awfully low energy storage density.
If you put gasoline in an enclosed space, the layer of fumes that would readily form on its surface would catch fire if introduced to a hot enough heat source (not sure a cigarette amber would be hot enough unless sucking/blowing on it) and heat from that would be vastly sufficient to keep vaporization going until the gasoline or oxygen supply is depleted. This makes gasoline relatively dangerous - you never know when or where fumes might find an ignition source in a car accident.
With diesel which does not vaporize anywhere near as readily as gasoline does until much higher temperatures, you can put a blowtorch in it and it will put itself out as soon as you remove the external heat source.
Considering how much of an invasive species jellyfish are, drastic measures to get rid of them might become necessary and "raw jellyfish in, cooked jellyfish out" might end up not being such a bad thing.
One thing some water treatment plants do is put a conveyor mesh in front of intakes. Jellyfish and other solids get tangled in the mesh, lifted as the mesh rotates, gets scraped off and dumped with solid waste. If they do not care about cleaning up solid waste in the water, they can dump the intake's catch in the return stream.
Any generally harmless gas can kill you through oxygen displacement leading to asphyxiation.
Helium is generally considered non-toxic and it even replaces nitrogen for deep-diving. Not a problem as long as the helium-oxygen mix is within the right range for humans. Breathing directly from an helium canister though fills your lungs with 100% helium and that would knock most people out within a minute or so.
Er, no. I really meant Linux-kernel-based as in kernel-only.
Android uses the Linux kernel but ditches most of the GNU stuff since it only needs what is required to support the JRE in a graphical environment and is not intended to run native applications. With most of GNU stripped from it, Android can only be called a Linux-kernel based OS since it is nowhere near GNU-compliant.
If you want full GNU support on Android, you need to use a custom ROM that adds all the stuff Google stripped out back.
The main thing preventing Google from integrating more stuff directly in the kernel, JRE or elsewhere to eliminate more middleware is license clashes between GPL and more permissive licenses like Apache and BSD.
Normal floor staff does not communicate with the security and anti-cheating staff.
What likely happened: 1- anti-cheating staff noticed someone with statistics-defying luck 2- the staff couldn't figure out how he was cheating with their normal monitoring 3- the table was instructed to change decks and save the player's hand (it is a common procedure) 4- the anti-cheat staff looked at the discarded hand, concluded that no normal player would have folded on it under normal circumstances, analyzed the cards and found out about the IR markings 5- anti-cheat staff investigated who handled those decks and put them under increased surveillance 6- next time "lucky" showed up and showcased his odds-defying luck, they busted him and his accomplices to find out what his IR detection method was
Not much point in comparing the efficiency of an energy source with the efficiency of an energy sink; they're at the opposite ends of the energy cycle.
Unless you can use your solar-electric power immediately, you also need to add a whole conversion system for storage and discharge which can be quite lossy if you choose electrolysis for energy storage due to much higher energy density than batteries.
To make a fair comparison, you would need to pit two options with similar energy cycle against each other. Something like solar-hydrogen vs solar-biodiesel or solar-ethanol. Growing algae and converting it to biodiesel or ethanol to keep internal combustion engines running might be more efficient overall than electrolysis to produce hydrogen before converting that back to electricity to drive electric motors. Ethanol and biodiesel also have the benefits of well-established distribution channels while high-pressure hydrogen is still scary for many people.
I'm not including plug-in electric since everyone I know seem to be highly skeptical of their operating range and seriously worried about battery replacement costs that can quickly wipe out any fuel savings.
I doubt Java as a programming language is going to die any time soon since Android, which has been the fastest-growing platform for a while now, is pretty much a JRE running on top of a Linux-based kernel.
Oracle's own walled-garden Java on the other hand might not fare so well.
We estimate arrival times all the time, albeit subconsciously: whenever you walk or run, you do not consciously monitor your legs, you mindlessly execute a well-timed walk cycle based on estimations from observable surface conditions and when your estimations are too far off the mark, you trip. When you move to grab a glass on the counter and fail to correctly estimate your hand's acceleration and deceleration, you knock the glass over instead of grabbing it.
We do estimations with nearly every single movement we make.
That would be a pretty stupid way to implement it anyway, even for legitimate speed limit changes, so it wouldn't be done like that. A limit on acceleration would deal with the majority of cases. If they really cared enough about acceleration sue to downhill slopes, they could add in very gentle braking too.
Acceleration limit / coasting makes a lot more sense than forced braking. Personally, anything that might "randomly" affect the car's handling sounds somewhat dangerous so if they are really going to do it, they should go with the least disruptive method possible. I would not be surprised if "accident prevention" systems end up creating their own new class of accidents. Ex.: imagine trying to do a lane change on an icy road just when the speed-limit braking kicks in... ridiculously dangerous. Losing accelerator control due to a speed limit enforcement kicking in could also be a problem during a skid where you might need to punch the gas to straighten out.
As for gentle breaking on downhill slopes, this is the quickest way to wear down your brake pads and discs so I would imagine people getting a little upset about more frequent brake jobs.
I'm guessing most of the people who are making those decisions are only looking at statistics without considering the practical implications.
Why the ISS? Voyager I is 18 billion kilometers high and still "rising" which makes it the most distant man-made object chucked towards heavens to date.
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Many patents "obvious to one skilled in the art" these days are also painfully obvious to an average person with common sense.
Yes, I did try their audio captcha... when I couldn't figure out why the image captcha was refusing my answers, I tried audio wondering how much worse it could possibly be and for the most part, I could not even figure out what the heck I was hearing. Instructions said there was supposed to be a dozen words in there but I only managed to catch 3-4 and did not feel like listening to that gibberish again to try finding the others.
That made me feel like captchas are worse than the problems they are attempting to fix.
My mother had a run-in with Microsoft's captchas a few times due to failed login attempts and when that happens, she usually asks my sister to unlock her account but even my sister often has trouble with it so she ends up asking me.
Quite ironic that tests designed to tell humans from machines seem to cause humans to fail so much.
While it is true that the color space has reduced resolution to save bandwidth in broadcast formats, I would still count that as compression - the raw imagery in the studios is still usually captured in 4:4:4 and possibly in hi10 (30bpp) format before processing, archive encoding and broadcast encoding.
Somehow, I do not think pause-to-inspect-minute-detail is common enough to justify the billions of dollars it would cost the industry to make 4k the new standard any time soon when it barely just got done upgrading to HD.
ATSC got updated in 2008 to add h264 support. I would not be surprised if they updated it again to define a 4k format and h265.
The government does not need to pay to replace anything: broadcasters can simply pack a lower resolution MPEG2 stream for backward compatibility with non-HD, non-h265 decoders along with the 4k/h265 stream.
The "bleeding edge" may get to sample new stuff early (or before it dies off altogether like HDDVD) but it is the mass-market that ultimately picks the winners for mainstream stuff like media consumption. HD would still be a niche-market thing if the mass-market did not see enough value in it to bother with the higher price tag when HDTVs started entering the mainstream price range.
The visual improvement from HD to QHD is nowhere near as obvious at normal seating distances as going from SD to HD so I predict most people will not be in anywhere near as much of a hurry to upgrade to 4k... I bet most will even consider it as little more than a gimmick on par with 3DTV - not enough added perceived value to justify the premium.
ATSC added support for h264 in July 2008. Only problem with that is people with pre-ATSC-2008-7 TVs are stuck without h264 support so broadcasters cannot simply switch to h264.
"ATSC is uncompressed 18.2mbit MPEG"
Wut? Raw 1080p30 is ~1.87Gbps so 18.2Mbps MPEG2 is already over 100X compression.
As for artifacts in MPEG2 encoding/decoding, there is plenty of visible block noise in MPEG2 even on DVDs. That's why there was a whole industry of products attempting to improve deblocking, anti-aliasing, "mosquito noise" and other visual artifacts for videophiles. While MPEG2 was a huge improvement over MPEG1, it still left much to be desired unless bit rates were cranked way up.
Front-row seats suck... practically breaking my neck looking up and during action scenes, the image jumps a very noticeable 2-3' between frames at that range. I prefer mid-seats: motion jerkiness is half as bad due to roughly double the distance from the screen and finding a comfortable viewing position for my neck is much easier.
There is such a thing as the "Resting Point of Vergence" which is the shortest distance at which people's eyes can focus effortlessly and indefinitely. The average is 45" looking straight ahead and 35" looking on a 30 degrees down-angle. Sitting closer to your TV/monitor than your RPV will cause eye fatigue over time. In my case, that distance is around 30" looking straight ahead. For some people, it can be as short as 15". But the average is 45".
So for most people, sitting close enough to their monitor(s) or TV so they can scrutinize individual pixels is a bad idea - at least when sitting there for hours at a time.
The Hindenburg was a giant bladder coated with highly combustible thermite-like paint. Lots of surface area to let air in and mix with hydrogen to help it burn when something goes wrong and not much to prevent such a fire from spreading across the whole thing in record time.
In a liquefied hydrogen system, the hydrogen would be stored in a thick steel or carbon fiber tank, which is a substantially different story. Those things would be around 10X thicker than scuba tanks.
There is no information to share.
Contact surface area has always been a major factor in static and dynamic friction forces in conventional mechanics (ex.: ball bearings) so this "discovery" is nothing more than scientists re-discovering something obvious that they forgot for some reason: reducing contact surface area works at microscopic scales too.
On macroscopic mechanics, surface roughness is a major contributor to friction. On a microscopic scale, roughness is replaced by atomic forces but the rest is still the same.
Supraconductors store energy in the form of magnetic fields. Adding and removing energy from a supraconducting loop requires conversions between electrical and magnetic forms.
Electrostatic storage is the only form of direct electrical energy storage: simple electrons go in, simple electrons come out, no conversions to or from chemical, magnetic, thermal or other energy forms. The main problem with it is that plain electrostatic capacitors have awfully low energy storage density.
If you put gasoline in an enclosed space, the layer of fumes that would readily form on its surface would catch fire if introduced to a hot enough heat source (not sure a cigarette amber would be hot enough unless sucking/blowing on it) and heat from that would be vastly sufficient to keep vaporization going until the gasoline or oxygen supply is depleted. This makes gasoline relatively dangerous - you never know when or where fumes might find an ignition source in a car accident.
With diesel which does not vaporize anywhere near as readily as gasoline does until much higher temperatures, you can put a blowtorch in it and it will put itself out as soon as you remove the external heat source.
Considering how much of an invasive species jellyfish are, drastic measures to get rid of them might become necessary and "raw jellyfish in, cooked jellyfish out" might end up not being such a bad thing.
One thing some water treatment plants do is put a conveyor mesh in front of intakes. Jellyfish and other solids get tangled in the mesh, lifted as the mesh rotates, gets scraped off and dumped with solid waste. If they do not care about cleaning up solid waste in the water, they can dump the intake's catch in the return stream.
Any generally harmless gas can kill you through oxygen displacement leading to asphyxiation.
Helium is generally considered non-toxic and it even replaces nitrogen for deep-diving. Not a problem as long as the helium-oxygen mix is within the right range for humans. Breathing directly from an helium canister though fills your lungs with 100% helium and that would knock most people out within a minute or so.
Er, no. I really meant Linux-kernel-based as in kernel-only.
Android uses the Linux kernel but ditches most of the GNU stuff since it only needs what is required to support the JRE in a graphical environment and is not intended to run native applications. With most of GNU stripped from it, Android can only be called a Linux-kernel based OS since it is nowhere near GNU-compliant.
If you want full GNU support on Android, you need to use a custom ROM that adds all the stuff Google stripped out back.
The main thing preventing Google from integrating more stuff directly in the kernel, JRE or elsewhere to eliminate more middleware is license clashes between GPL and more permissive licenses like Apache and BSD.
Normal floor staff does not communicate with the security and anti-cheating staff.
What likely happened:
1- anti-cheating staff noticed someone with statistics-defying luck
2- the staff couldn't figure out how he was cheating with their normal monitoring
3- the table was instructed to change decks and save the player's hand (it is a common procedure)
4- the anti-cheat staff looked at the discarded hand, concluded that no normal player would have folded on it under normal circumstances, analyzed the cards and found out about the IR markings
5- anti-cheat staff investigated who handled those decks and put them under increased surveillance
6- next time "lucky" showed up and showcased his odds-defying luck, they busted him and his accomplices to find out what his IR detection method was
Not much point in comparing the efficiency of an energy source with the efficiency of an energy sink; they're at the opposite ends of the energy cycle.
Unless you can use your solar-electric power immediately, you also need to add a whole conversion system for storage and discharge which can be quite lossy if you choose electrolysis for energy storage due to much higher energy density than batteries.
To make a fair comparison, you would need to pit two options with similar energy cycle against each other. Something like solar-hydrogen vs solar-biodiesel or solar-ethanol. Growing algae and converting it to biodiesel or ethanol to keep internal combustion engines running might be more efficient overall than electrolysis to produce hydrogen before converting that back to electricity to drive electric motors. Ethanol and biodiesel also have the benefits of well-established distribution channels while high-pressure hydrogen is still scary for many people.
I'm not including plug-in electric since everyone I know seem to be highly skeptical of their operating range and seriously worried about battery replacement costs that can quickly wipe out any fuel savings.
I doubt Java as a programming language is going to die any time soon since Android, which has been the fastest-growing platform for a while now, is pretty much a JRE running on top of a Linux-based kernel.
Oracle's own walled-garden Java on the other hand might not fare so well.
We estimate arrival times all the time, albeit subconsciously: whenever you walk or run, you do not consciously monitor your legs, you mindlessly execute a well-timed walk cycle based on estimations from observable surface conditions and when your estimations are too far off the mark, you trip. When you move to grab a glass on the counter and fail to correctly estimate your hand's acceleration and deceleration, you knock the glass over instead of grabbing it.
We do estimations with nearly every single movement we make.
That would be a pretty stupid way to implement it anyway, even for legitimate speed limit changes, so it wouldn't be done like that. A limit on acceleration would deal with the majority of cases. If they really cared enough about acceleration sue to downhill slopes, they could add in very gentle braking too.
Acceleration limit / coasting makes a lot more sense than forced braking. Personally, anything that might "randomly" affect the car's handling sounds somewhat dangerous so if they are really going to do it, they should go with the least disruptive method possible. I would not be surprised if "accident prevention" systems end up creating their own new class of accidents. Ex.: imagine trying to do a lane change on an icy road just when the speed-limit braking kicks in... ridiculously dangerous. Losing accelerator control due to a speed limit enforcement kicking in could also be a problem during a skid where you might need to punch the gas to straighten out.
As for gentle breaking on downhill slopes, this is the quickest way to wear down your brake pads and discs so I would imagine people getting a little upset about more frequent brake jobs.
I'm guessing most of the people who are making those decisions are only looking at statistics without considering the practical implications.
1.8x10^13 meters and still rising: Voyager-1.
With such a head-start, I doubt it will have competition any time soon as the most distant man-made object.
Why the ISS? Voyager I is 18 billion kilometers high and still "rising" which makes it the most distant man-made object chucked towards heavens to date.
Quite right.
While some visual captchas can be quite obnoxious, audio captchas (at least the ones I ended up trying) are truly evil.
Good thing blind people tend to develop much better hearing. They're really going to need it on those audio captchas.