If you can't add without a calculator 33 and 84 in your head and get an answer instantly, then you are fucked up.

If you have to think about it at all, then your education has been wrong.

There is value to pages and pages of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division work. And in not being able to access a calculator to do it.

There is no competition because the local governments in most of the areas Comcast services has given them a government-approved monopoly. The market has nothing to do with this because the government has deliberately eliminated market forces.

I know loads of people who have anti-authoritarian spirit who take great care about where they say things, and try to clean up any record of what they've said.

Ah... the old "the .0000000001% of the population I know behave like x, therefore x is representative of the whole population" fallacy.

if you ever are the victim of a newsworthy accident/ crime, you will get cold called by a number of lawyers, who want to represent you pro bono

because such cases gild their CV, get their name out there. free advertising

They represent you pro bono because they think you have a good chance of winning, and standard lawyer's fee is 33% of any award or settlement. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. The dozen or so lawyers in the $200 billion tobacco company master settlement became instant billionaires.

Close, but you're not thinking big enough. Microsoft committed the same blunder as the Maginot line. They built their empire on PC (x86+x64) dominance - making sure Windows dominated the architecture, and making sure their software dominated Windows. Their defenses were built around x86, and their warning tripwires were set up to detect anyone encroaching on their x86 territory.

They were blindsided when iOS and Android sprang up outside of x86, essentially creating their own Microsoft-free playing fields. They actually had a mobile OS long before iOS and Android (Windows CE, which eventually became Windows Phone after about 5 different renamings), but they were so focused on bringing it into the x86 fold (some of the WinCE PDAs look like Win XP clones) that they completely missed the opportunity for a new mobile sector.

AT&Ts U-Verse runs fiber to a corner box in the neighborhood and then dual-DSL over existing copper lines to homes. It's been a dismal failure. When they initially rolled it out they thought they could situate the corner boxes relatively far away from the homes but the copper had so much noise and cross talk it just didn't work, so they've had to move the boxes closer. And even then they barely get 20 MBits downlink and a really horrid uplink. Comcast is twice as fast at a minimum.

Sounds like BT hit the same problem. The only real solution is, as they said, make the copper portion of the run as short as possible (ultimately remove it entirely but that means a lot of retrenching).

-Matt

I'm kinda like you. I jumped aboard Sprint's "unlimited data" plan way back around 2000(?) when they first implemented it. I've been tethering ever since (I got aboard before they changed their ToS to say you can't tether). Had to plug in with a cable at first, but on my rooted Nexus 5 I just use the built-in hotspot.

If you want my (biased) opinion, we're getting to the point where we're trying to jam too much functionality into our phones. Smartphones are great (I've had a PDA since 1998), but there are certain things which pretty much require a bigger screen. The way cellular data should be working is that you pay for it on your phone, and it shares it with your tablet and laptop via a hotspot. Instead, the cellular companies are so hell-bent on milking people for as much money as they can they're forcing the adoption of the more complicated and expensive solution of putting a cellular radio in your tablet and laptop, and getting a new service accounts for them.

Now everything's been clones of the iPhone since. Inertial scrolling, multitouch, practically identical user interfaces out of the box down to even the colors of the icons, etc -- they all use these things basically identically. Before the iPhone they had plastic buttons and you would try to scrolled around by jabbing little arrows on side of screen.

You're confusing inevitable industry evolution for copying Apple. The LG Prada did those things before the iPhone, because that's the way the industry was headed whether Apple ever released an iPhone or not. Apple won their case against Samsung only because the judge disallowed evidence Samsung had prepared showing phones they had in the design phase before the iPhone was announced, because they missed a filing deadline. Like I keep telling people, just because the first time you saw something was on an Apple product, doesn't mean Apple invented it. And likewise just because other companies started doing it after Apple, doesn't mean they copied Apple.

Sadly, it all ended in 2011. Look at phones. They're all the same as 2011 iPhone was just with 2015 cpu/graphic, 2015 screen brightness/contrast, 2015 CMOS camera sensors. Same with computers. Everything's just the same as an iPad or Macbook Air from 2011.

Wow, talk about Reality Distortion Field. Apple just had the biggest quarter in history. It came after they abandoned Steve "no one is going to buy a big phone" Jobs' arbitrary and damaging restrictions on what products the company could make. His ego was so inflated, he thought everyone should use the same product that best fit his needs. Since his death you've gotten an iPhone with a wider aspect ratio (something Jobs opposed), a smaller iPad (something Jobs opposed), giving buyers a choice of two different iPhones and iPads (something Jobs opposed - he thought you were so stupid you'd be confused by two choices), and a phablet iPhone (something Jobs opposed). And that's just on Apple's product lineup. If you don't see other changes and improvements in the market, it's because you're willfully ignoring them. (BTW, the MBA has one of the worst screens on any laptop above $500 - not sure why you're holding it up as your champion. The MBPs are much better.)

Most of us who don't like Apple dislike them not because they're Apple, but because they artificially restrict market choice. But Cook has been doing a good job giving users back the choice that Jobs took away. And as long as they continue down that path, there's little reason to continue to hate Apple. You folks who love Apple so much that you hate everything else OTOH...

The same logic saying biofuel is inefficient (requires a lot of land for low energy yield) is the same logic saying meat is inefficient (which is true, meat is energy inefficient) because it requires a large amount of crops for the livestock.

It's worse than that. A comparison purely on efficiency ignores another vital factor - cost. Yes solar panels might be 50x more efficient than plants at capturing solar energy. But they're infinitely more expensive. You have to manufacture the solar panels. Plants manufacture themselves. Why build shiny 50-story high rises at the cost of billions, if "magical" one-story houses which build themselves and self-replicate are widespread?

That's what biofuel is. Its reputation has been tarnished badly in the U.S. by the corn lobby using it to put themselves on the public dole.* But their fundamental basis is sound. The cheapest and most prolific solar collectors in the world are plants. Not only do they cost nothing, they will spread by and maintain/repair themselves. Nature has spent hundreds of millions of years working and plants are the most efficient solution it came up with for harvesting solar energy. They are so successful that all life on earth (except at hydrothermal vents deep underwater) get their energy from plants. Heck, all oil and coal originally came from plants.

All biofuels are is taking the energy in plants and converting it into alcohol fuel, instead of an alcohol drink or ATP. The only impediment I can think of is that plants are such an attractive energy source, they've had to evolve defenses against being consumed for hundreds of millions of years. Consequently, modern plants store that energy in a form where it's exceedingly difficult to extract (cellulose). But there should be workarounds: Certain animals like termites have cultivated bacteria which breaks down cellulose into its component sugar molecules. Or we might be able to genetically engineer a plant which keeps more of its energy in the form of sugar than cellulose. Or we can take a plant which already does that (e.g. sugar cane) and engineer it to grow in a wider variety of climates.

* Corn ethanol began because of the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. Food shortages led to price increases and starvation. To prevent a recurrence, the government began subsidizing farming (mainly corn) to insure there was always overproduction. This crashed the price of corn, so the government set it up so it buys all the corn from farmers at a price which can keep the farms in business, then resells it. Since there is more supply than demand, there is always corn left over. This excess corn would otherwise rot in silos, so a variety of uses for it have been found - feed for cattle, HFCS, foreign aid. And during the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, someone came up with the bright idea - why don't we convert it into alcohol for fuel?

It's a fine idea for excess corn. The cost of growing and harvesting that corn is a sunk cost. You're never gonna recover that cost, so it's better to do something with it than nothing. So turning it into ethanol makes sense. But the moment you start growing corn for the sole purpose of turning it into ethanol, the economics of it completely breaks down because now it's no longer a sunk cost. Not only has the corn lobby been looting our country's treasury for decades, it's been impeding the growth of other legitimate and more efficient ethanol crops by distorting market prices with their subsidy.

State governors can't exercise Federal Executive powers - such as commanding the Army, or supervising the Federal courts or the Postal Service, or... well, you get the picture.

They're part of the fragile balance of our precious, vulnerable ecosystem

That's a myth dreamt up by people wanting to protect the environment, but who had never taken any higher-level math or engineering courses and had no clue how dynamic systems function. Fragile balances are almost impossible to find in nature, for the simple reason that if something is fragile enough that any perturbation would upset it enough to destroy it, it would've self-destructed long ago before man ever showed up.

Nearly all surviving balances in nature are stable equilibria. They're not fragile at all. If you perturb them, it just re-stabilizes at a new equilibrium point. e.g. If you tilt the bowl in the wiki picture, the ball doesn't fall off the top of the bowl like in the first picture or roll away like in the third picture.. It just settles in at a different spot on the bottom of the bowl in the second picture, now-tilted slightly.

Technically speaking? He probably doesn't, but that doesn't really matter. Like it or not, the VC-25 is part of the image that the presidency presents to the rest of the world. If you want to present an image of strength and the supremacy of the American Ideal, showing up in a European aircraft is not the way to do it. Also, showing up in a smaller aircraft (787 or 777) doesn't help either. Like it or not, it's partially dick waving, and the 747-800i is really the only choice.

I hope it's well taken care of. Those are beautiful aircraft, and one of the aircraft that truly built Canada. You are very lucky. :)

The last I looked, the state of remote-sensing algorithms for limb profiling is something between bad and "are you kidding?".

But they are not doing much "remote sensing". All they are doing is recording when a GPS signal is received. That's it. That shouldn't be too hard. The delay between when the GPS should have been received, and was actually received, will tell them the index of refraction of the atmospheric cord it passed through, and from that, a ground computer can calculate the humidity, temperature, and pressure.

That sound you heard is the OP's point whooshing over your head. Limb profiling (what you describe) is a remote sensing technique, and it's not one that works really well.

The problem isn't receiving the signal (well, it's not a problem in this sense though it has challenges of it's own), the problem is analyzing the signal. You have three different variables (all of which vary with altitude to boot), with no way to significantly constrain any one of them - meaning arriving at an accurate value for one (let alone three) is a Very Hard and Poorly Understood problem.