Perhaps you are talking about an ANSI X3.171-1989 90mm drive? ;^)

Which some people in the UK occasionally called a 3.5" "stiffy" to distinguish it from its larger/floppier predecessor like the 8" floppy and the 5.25" mini-floppy...

FWIW, although I never personally had a 3.25" drive, one of my buddies did purchase the Amdisk 3" compact floppy disc system for his Apple ][+....

Although you may be in the field of chip design, you don't appear to be as knowledgeable about the field of sino-taiwanese politics. Given the politics of the folks in charge at TSMC, I'm not sure they would side with China over the USA. Many of them exited China during the cultural revolution and generally have a dim view of the Mainland.

In fact, the chairman of TSMC (morris chang, a harvard, mit, stanford alum) cut his teeth in the semiconductor business in the USA (in TI and General Instruments) before being recruited back by the Taiwanese government to found TSMC. Other than being born in mainland china, he's about as American as you can get (fwiw, he was also the guy in charge of bringing us TI's wonderful speak-n-spell). He's also on record supporting the Wassenaar Arrangement even though Taiwan isn't a signator, and I think I remember hearing that most of his daughters attended school and live in the US.

AFAICT, the technique used by this imager is FMCW (frequency modulated continuous wave) which basically give you a very accurate time-of-flight measurement. In this type of system, the received optical frequency difference from the transmitted frequency is measured by optical-coherent mixing and sensing the resultant beat signal frequency. Apparently this groups contribution to this technique is to measure both the phase and amplitude of this beat signal digitally so multiple algorithms can be deployed to analyze the beat signal.

In any case, given a very accurate distance to an object, the solid angle projection to the imaged object, and some basic optical system calibration data, it is presumably fairly straightforward compute the actual size of the object w/o guessing.

This isn't the "arrival" of man-made earthquakes. Ever since man has been doing large scale environmental modification, we have been inducing seismic activity.

The most common induced seismic events occur when we build dams to create reservoirs. One of the first examples was the filling of the Oued Fodda Dam in 1933. Others occur due to depletion of underground reservoirs (like the Lorca earthquake in 2011) or enhanced geothermal energy extraction (Cerro Prieto in 1979).

Of course all phenomena is new to the non-research reporting that passes for news today. The only difference is that today the perpetrators are seeking evil oil rather than life giving water or "renewable" energy...

Probably should review your history. The short story, the US dropped the bomb to win the peace, not the war...

By the time the US dropped the bombs, they had *already* spent considerably resources firebombing Tokyo (including "Operation Meetinghouse" in March which was bigger than Dresden) to the point that most military commanders thought that there were no more high-value targets left in the city target (and other cities were then targeted). This was long before the nuclear bombs which were detonated in August...

I think many professional historians have become to realize that it was actually unnecessary to actually drop the bomb to conclude the war (it could have ended in a war of attrition as Japanese industrial war output had estimated to have dropped 90% from January to June of 1945), but the capitulation of the military was unlikely before the Russians would have become engaged in the Pacific War. The bomb was essentially dropped to hasten the end of the war to end the Pacific Theater War on the US terms (rather than risk a negotiated eastern block situation that occurred in Europe in the aftermath of the war).

Historical documents indicate that Prince Konoye was already favoring ending the war in February due the on-going strategic bombing campaigns which were devastating the country and the Emperor was favoring ending the war after the "Meetinghouse" firebombings in March, but the military rejected US requests for unconditional surrender until after the A-bombs were dropped in August. FWIW, Russia declared war on August 8th and invaded Manchuria on August 9th (3 months after the war in europe concluded as agreed to by Stalin in Yalta and coincidentally the same day the 2nd bomb was dropped).

Which is actually the real problem. Just because you possess a specific fact about a subject, why should I consider you an expert? You can present yourself as an expert all you want, but I don't have to accept that.

Basically, I ask myself, since you are generally only considered an expert if you are in possession of a comprehensive amount of knowledge from authoritative sources, why is googled information authoritative, or even comprehensive?

That doesn't mean that looking things up and presenting an argument based on that isn't applying well known principals of rhetoric in their arguments or statements.

It is of course quite possible to make a coherent and persuasive argument with the kind of limited factual information you might get by 2 seconds of google-ing (e.g., not from an expert point of view), but that art is lost on the interwebs (where somehow somehow asserting artificial "expertise" is bandied about as a way to attempt to suppress detractors from your poorly defensible positions).

I don't think this is at the same as those thinking they are actually experts ala-Dunning-Kruger (except perhaps to those who are naturally self-deluded which is probably a non negligible subset of people)...

FTFY^2

Actually, Germany has traditionally been a bit whiny (some think it's a national pastime among the German populace).

Apparently that national characteristic helps the country excel at producing high-value / high-tech outputs with high-productivity, but sadly it can also be a major obstacle in creating high quality marketing, and performing PR, and subtle diplomacy...

FTFY. By hiding some of the transaction information from the banks that clear the transactions, the fraud detection heuristics used by banks are less effective. By requiring no physical trace of the transaction, the merchants don't have any incentive to intervene to avoid chargebacks thus making it easier those in possession of stolen card numbers to rack up charges.

Actually this was quite predictable (and predicted by several industry folks), but fear of being left off the ship that was going to sail basically led the banks to just hope for the best as a cost of doing business.

Reminds me of a story a co-worker told me. Back many moons ago (~20years ago), he was a field engineer for mainframes. One day he got an emergency call from a customer that needed a mainframe fixed as some ridiculous hour of the morning. When he got there, his boss was there along with a half-a-dozen Bank presidents in suits in the computer room hovering and watching him work.

Later he found out from his boss that it was a mainframe that did real-time credit card approvals and the bank was basically approving nearly all transactions blind whilst they waited for the computer to be fixed. The theory was that if they didn't do this, people would just take out another card and they would lose all the business for potentially several days (the once bitten twice shy on c-c declines). Apparently all the Bank presidents were there as part of an agreement to verify if he wasn't able to fix the computer within that hour, they would start denying large transactions and they expected to lose tens of millions dollars in lost merchant fees if they did that (and something like that needed their immediate approval). That's why his boss didn't tell him that before he started working on the machine. No pressure...

Although I would think that is likely to be true on average, you always have folks like Nick Gorden, Justin Beiber, Amanda Bynes, Marcell Dareus, Conrad Hilton, David Beckham, Matthew Brodderick, Ted Kennedy, etc, etc...

If I had to speculate, it's likely to be a "U" curve where middle class folks have the fewest problems, but at some point, you can fix many things with money and people that have enough money will feel they might as well worry about fixing things later. I'd argue by percentages, there are more problems with the upper incomes, although of course there are quite a bit fewer of them to deal with on an absolute sense, so that kind of makes them outilers...

Enforcement of laws is generally easier with those that have the most to loose (e.g., you are in the sweetspot of pain and survivability). If you don't have anything to loose (e.g., you are judgement proof because the amount of extra-survival money you have isn't worth anyone's trouble), or if you have so much money (that you don't care about the laws), enforcement of laws becomes much more difficult...

People give money to groups all the time. Groups claim they want to solve poverty, cure diseases, help the children (or perhaps just little girls and not boys), eliminate racism, promote suffrage (well maybe one if you vote for the correct political party) things that they can never accomplish with the resources available to them (but they want to help the cause). People pony up because they feel connected to the cause, not because the groups can expect to achieve the goal.

These groups raise funds in order to pay staffers, hire consultants, give contracts to the their friends' companies for promotions, logistics and supplies (say like Interplanetary Media Group). If any money is left over, they sprinkle some of the spare change to the cause de-jure, and then call it a day. As long as it's considered a legal cause and is organized as a non-profit (or more recently, a type-B corporation), we have decided as a society that this is one way people are legally allowed to make a living redistributing income...

And even when their cause becomes passé (e.g., the March of Dimes was originally founded to combat infant polio), they will simply change the game and take on a larger more grandiose goal (e.g., combat birth defects)...

Move along, there's nothing to see here (unless you want to change these rules). Mars One is just one of many groups that exploit this niche in modern society ;^&

As I understand it, during the Apollo lunar missions, exposure to radiation from the Van Allen Belt wasn't too bad because of the short transit time. Much more ionizing radiation was received from solar wind sources when outside the earth's magnetic field during the mission.

It remains to be seen if solar/galactic radiation can be mitigated to allow us to transit beyond the moon and live to tell about it, but at least the VA belt is of relatively small concern...

The new world? It took the largest and most powerful empires of the times, several centuries, royal decrees, and hundreds of ships to get a handful of explorers to have establish colonies in the new world. When they got there, they found local indigenous populations that helped their efforts.

The same thing could be true for space. The local indigenous populations that help our efforts aren't necessarily beings, but could be as simple along the lines of nitrogen-fixing bacteria helping us on earth, or plants or other things we can eat, or help us with water, air, energy, etc...

Or space could be like Antarctica You never know until you get there.

I'm guessing space is going to be more like Antarctica, which doesn't mean you don't go there, it just means you don't colonize it right away, you just research it and see where it leads you...

Between global warming, tectonic plate movement, improved technology, open land exhaustion, and maybe even some ecological disaster (due to war or perhaps an asteroid collision), maybe we will actually colonize Antarctica someday, which seems like a reason to spend some time to better understand it today...

Although you *might* measure things like this, I'm pretty sure the IEA methodology in this report is to estimate the so-called "end-use" energy consumption and compute the probable CO2 emissions by scaling factors in the proportion of the different CO2 profiles of the different energy production means (by proportion of those production means). The CO2 emission scaling factors are taken from the 1996 IPCC Guidelines so are averages across many regions and industries, not measured numbers that include efficiency numbers. The proportion of production is survey information, also not measured (e.g, if a country reports 100 nuclear power plants and conversions from coal to gas, but those facilities are offline most of the year, the average scaling factor will be quite optimistic)...

Also there are also changes in source data collection and estimation methodology from time to time. A critical example might be 2014 vs 2013 (as described in the report)..

It's all possbile that this is just a discontinuity due to change in estimation methodology rather than something real in some measured data...