Eminent domain those house and get some more lanes in.

Probably better to put a new highway in off to one side or another, considering it's LA go with both.

Actually, LA is the #1 example of trying to out-build congestion. And traffic engineers have observed and pretty much concluded that traffic expands to fill all lanes. Build another lane and it's full and congested in relatively short order.

So no, trying to build more lanes of traffic just leads to ever worse traffic in the end as it expands to fill the new space up. The goal instead is to try to promote more efficient use of the road - a whole city block of (single occupant) cars can be cleared up by one bus carrying the same number of people.

Very forward looking behavior from apple. You're going to need 64 bit to use more than 2GB of ram without major pain (32 bit addressing is a bitch and workarounds are slow) By the time the rest of the industry is going to be faced with the inevitable transition apple will already have years of experience with 64bit in their mobile platform.

Actually, Apple didn't do it for memory, they did it because AArch64 is a more efficient architecture. I.e., it's a lot faster. ARMv8 over ARMv7 running 32-bit code is only around 10-20% faster. But run the same code in 64-bit mode and it screams.

It's how people got the "2x faster" figures on the A7 SoC - in 64-bit mode things are way faster on the A7 than if you ran it in 32 bit mode.

Android will get similar speedups once it's fully 64-bit...

Samsung is a Korean company and manufacturers ICs in Korea.

Actually, Samsung owns a fab in Texas that makes Apple SoCs - and that's all it does.

And that's been the case for a few years now, even through the Samsung-Apple patent spat.

It's a complex relationship, to the say the least -

Except that Interac has been doing realtime debit transactions for many years, across all Canadian banks, both at point of sale and at ATMs. It's good news if the US is moving in this direction, because it is an excellent system, but it would be a stretch to call it the bank account of the future when it has existed for years.

The thing is, in most places in the world, Canada included, there aren't that many banks, credit unions and other financial institutions. The number is small enough that they all can rapidly agree on new standards and proposals and all that. Heck, the vast majority of banking in Canada is done by the "big three" banks.

In the US, that doesn't hold - there are literally tens of thousands of banks and credit unions and other financial institutions. If you ever wondered why US cheques don't seem to be taken at a lot of places ("money orders" only or the sort of thing), well ,that's why - getting it all sorted out is a mess.

So a problem is just getting all of them to talk to one another and cooperate. And some of these are literally some old lady sitting around with a ledger whose only excitement is having to connect the computer to the phone line and downloading the day's transactions.

And given how independent-minded Americans are, there's probably a ton of those kind of banks who are basically run by 2-3 people.

Fundamentalists. They hate us for our chocolate.

I understand, once I tried Lindt chocolate, too.

Given the chemistry of chocolate, conching and termpering take place at VERY specific temperatures or you get poor results.

Notice how hot the middle east is? Well, it's so hot that chocolate just doesn't conch or temper at all without cooling, so if you keep chocolate outside, it gets nasty.

So yeah, they don't have good chocolate at all.

(While the actual temperatures are closely guarded, tempering is usually done around 31.5C, while conching times and temperatures are proprietary trade secrets for every company)

You ain't telling me nothing because I have a customer who has all the early Kiss albums on the very first CD releases and he came to me complaining that "These new CDs don't sound right, I think my PC is messed up" but when I threw an MP3 rip of Strutter from his first run CDs in Audacity? There was peaks, valleys, actual HEADROOM on the recording. Took the exact same song from the exact same album from his recent box set? it was just a fucking wall, literally it was just slammed to the max from the first note to the last and sounded like shit.

I have a compilation CD that was obviously from various masters. There was one track on there that was notable in Audacity - because while all the other tracks were squiggly with peaks, valleys and stuff, this one song was a solid blob on the timeline; And the CD was normalized, so the solid blob didn't touch more than 70% or so.

Was such an interesting sight - you had songs and then you had this solid blob in the middle of it.

why in the world is it still under patent?

You're not understanding how patents work.

For drugs, the drug (chemical) itself is not patentable. The process used to make the drug IS patentable. That's what's actually patented.

You see, part of the problem with making chemicals is the process you use. You want a process that uses little energy (energy costs money), has high yields (every chemical reaction has an equilibrium point and for some processes, it means your desired product is only 10% of the entire thing at the end), etc. etc. etc.

So when they tweak the process to produce slightly modified versions of the drug, that can generate a new patent because the patent describes exactly how to produce that drug - start with raw materials A, B, C, ... Z, then mix A and B and heat, ... etc.

In fact, it's possible for a generic drug manufacturer to come up with a different way of making the drug before the patents expire.

Android and Apple's own OSX are proof that this is not a death sentence to the company.

So, your example is to show that only Samsung is really making profits (HTC and the rest are struggling), and only by carpetbombing the market with hundreds of phones (seriously - Samsung has released 2 new smartphones per week in 2014, and 1 tablet per week).

And your other example is in a market that's declining (Mac sales are declining to stable, but far far less profitable than iOS).

Yeah, it may not be a death knell, but do we need to bring up the "Apple is dying" meme again? Your examples where companies are struggling to exist or product lines that have significantly diminished sales volume doesn't actually provide any backing to your statement. In fact, one could say that other than Samsung, Android isn't a moneymaker, and OS X shows a slow gradual fall.

GIven most of the data is what's reported by a browser, why don't browsers filter the data?

Especially if "Do Not Track" is set to on - why don't they limit the data to send back?

Fonts - Microsoft released 6 fonts for the web over a decade ago - just report those 6 across all platforms and maybe a few standard system ones (you can get this from the User-Agent anyways). Make it whitelist of fonts.

Sure, some data is gathered through plugins, but I thought many are now click-to-run so you can't get that data unless you specifically run those plugins.

Is there a reason why browsers like Firefox return everything?

As for CDs, they seem to be all over the place to me. Early on there were a lot of bad CDs because of bad engineering. Some were released with their vinyl oriented RIAA equalization intact, which is just plain dumb. People like to argue about technology, but I think recording engineering is an often overlooked factor in what comes out of your speakers. I have an MP3 album of the original cast recording of "Hair", and it sounds great over a good pair of earphones. It's not because of some kind of magical MP3 pixie dust, it's because the original recording was done so competently. If something is missing in the original master tapes, no amount of lossless encoding and copper-free speaker cables will conjure it back.

It's things like that which is probably where the "vinyl sounds better" craze got started - then it comes around again in the 90s because overcompressed (DRC) CDs sound noticably worse than the non-compressed vinyls.

As for tubes, it turns out people get very used to the "tube sound" (or rather, tube distortion) at normal levels, while overdriven tubes do sound harmonically better than clipping transistors (hence their use as guitar amp effects).

The reasoning is that natural gas releases less carbon than coal, so if we switch from coal to natural gas, then we'll reduce climate change. I do not have the information necessary to determine if that is a correct line of reasoning or not.

Well, natural gas/methane is CH4 - there are 4 hydrogens per carbon. As you start going to longer chained hydrocarbons, the ratio between hydrogen to carbon goes from 4:1 to 2:1 because adding another carbon adds only 2 more hydrogens. Octane, in gasoline, comprises of 8 carbon atoms and 18 hydrogen atoms - 2 per carbon plus 2 more at the ends.

I wasn't aware that hydrogen fuel cell cars were already approaching production. Here are the stats for the Toyota Mirai:

[snip]
You have to dump the resulting water

At the moment, most hydrogen is generated using fossil fuels (much like electricity), so it is only one of a two-part process if we wish to stop releasing CO2.

Hyundai is also piloting a project as well - though you lease the vehicle because they're only doing it in a few places where there are stations. I think the lease (which is fairly price at $600/month or so) includes fuel too.

Though - why is there a water dump valve? I mean, since it comes out as steam, why not just have a tailpipe that emits steam? Or just let it drip on the ground like a car A/C.

While getting hydrogen from hydrocarbons still emits CO2, it's sort of like electric vehicles - the carbon emitter is one place instead of many which is far easier to clean up. After all, next time you get stuck behind a truck or car belching smoke...

We do not have a shortage of CS workers in this country, we have a surplus, and with some provinces having over 10% unemployment rates Harper is seemingly doing everything he can to keep Canadians out of Canadian jobs.

Incorrect. Harper is a skilled politician that does things he knows about. Like oil. He knows a lot about oil. He knows oil provides jobs, and good paying ones at that. He knows anything that threatens oil will make it less profitable, and thus, make it less money and hurt Canada.

Of course, Harper's problem is, Canada is NOT just an oil state. Sure we have a bit of oil, and our dollar reflects that, but Canada is also a lot more diverse - we do have a booming high-tech industry with several leading game studios, many indie game developers, booming cultural industries including TV, music and movies, and manufacturing, as well as forestry.

Of course, Harper knows oil. Fuck the rest of 'em - he's ignorant of those sectors and they mean fuck-all to him. Oil is all that matters. And not even refining it in-country (where people might actually benefit from stuff like lower gas prices).

Hell, Keystone XL is like every other pipeline planned in Canada - just ship the oil somewhere else - don't even try to make a value-added product out of it. (Keystone XL was to bring oil to a port to ship it somewhere. Not even to go to US refineries where US consumers might actually benefit...).

Sure, oil may be Canada's biggest money maker right now, but diversification of an economy isn't a bad thing if like now oil is tanking because Saudi Arabia wants to bankrupt US oil companies and pick them up for a song. Alberta's in a lot of trouble because oil is way lower than they budgeted for.

My 500G Archos still refuses to die. It fits a particular niche that Apple will refuse to address and Android hasn't quite caught up yet with (but will eventually).

I stopped at Archoa. I used to like them - they had spec sheets a mile long and did a whole pile of things.

Problem was, they are utter crap, poor quality parts, locked hardware (if the hard drive dies, it's dead. You CANNOT replace the hard drive as it's bootloader locked!).

I've never seen a dead pixel on any screen except on Archos devices, and it usually isn't one, it's usually many.

Nevermind their size since it's a 2.5" hard drive so it's over twice the size of an iPod classic. And the 1.8" drives Apple uses are no longer made by Toshiba (who wants a 160GB drive when 160GB of flash is rapidly falling in price? It's just like the iPod Mini - Apple stopped making them when the 4GB hard drives were outclassed by flash producing the iPod Nano instead).

I wonder if they have to pay patent royalties to Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson since they invented this app during their Google internship?

The inspiration for that came from the Google Labs thing for GMail that did just that, introduced years before that movie^H^H^H^H^Hrecruitment ad. It literally pops up a math problem for you to solve before GMail will let you send the email out to determine your level of intoxication.