Thanks, point taken.

Actually, I think the iPhone 6 Plus was meant to be compared to the Galaxy Note 4, and the iPhone 6 to the Galaxy S5.

Uh, what? Samsung makes the Galaxy line, not Apple.

I would leave anything else in a heartbeat if they offered that.

Without a wildly higher-than-average rate of violent crime among young black men in some areas, cops in those areas wouldn't be having to face every situation like another one in which they might get killed doing something simple like a traffic stop. And do you really think that there'd have been riots in Ferguson if the breathless media reports immediately in the wake of what happened had been reporting the observations of credible witnesses instead of the absurdly transparent lies of the criminal running buddy of the guy who had just assaulted the cop? But why did the crowds there, and social media, and some mainstream media outlets catch on fire with the obviously false narrative? Because the honest people who saw what happened were afraid of what would happen to them if they got caught telling the truth. Those witnesses weren't afraid of the cops (they went to the police as soon as they could do so quietly), they were afraid of people in their own neighborhoods.

What sparked violent protests was a bunch of deliberate BS that got trotted out in an attempt to gloss over what that 6'-4", 290 lb "sweet child" and his store robbing, warrant-out-for-him sidekick had just done. If he hadn't stood there in front of cameras and spouted a bunch of self-contradictory nonsense about Wilson shooting out the window of his cruiser, or chasing Brown down and shooting him in the back, or shooting while he was on his knees with his hands in the air and on and on about stuff that did not happen, don't you think that might have been a little different? If the people who live right there weren't so scared of guys just like him and Brown, don't you think the many witnesses who were standing right there and saw what actually happened might also have been on video, talking down the idiots? That would have been great. But they're scared - for their lives - of the very people that the cops also have to confront on a regular basis.

You're right, it's not a single incident. It's years and years of people growing absolutely terrified of the rudderless, violent young men in their own neighborhoods. And when the cameras role, those voices of reason are nowhere to be seen, because they don't want to be another statistic in the huge problem of black-on-black violence - numbers that completely dwarf even the most demonstrably real cases of some dumb cop (white or black ... black cops kill black men, too, not that you'd know that from hearing the coverage) acting rashly.

They're still rated for something like 40 years for 70-80% production.

But I missed a rather large math error. At 10 cents a kwh, it's not $4.38/year, it's $43.80/year. That's what I get for not using a calculator for it. At that point it's only 5 years to break even, everything after that is pure profit.

Massive screwup on my part - assuming 10cent electricity, it's actually $43.80 worth of electricty a year, which is a 5 year payoff, not including other equipment. Easily worth it.

Welp, that changes my figures almost completely. Back to remedial math for me...

I've tried with rocks and sand, no effect. So the hardness is clearly higher than quartz. And once you're to that point, how much do you really need to go higher?

I just wish there was a better way to prevent breakage. :

It's not the ambient temperature of air that's key here, it's the ambient temperature of space, which is about 2,7K.

All objects are constantly radiating energy and receiving energy back from other things that are radiating. When two objects in radiative exchange are roughly the same temperature, this balances out. But when one is hotter than the other, the hotter one loses more energy than it takes in, and vice versa. And it's not just a little difference - radiative heat loss is proportional to the absolute temperature to the fourth power, that's a pretty big exponent. So when you're exchanging energy with space, which is so cold that it takes very sensitive instruments to be able to measure *anything*, well, that heat is simply lost.

You can see this effect for yourself by noting how cloudy nights are usually warmer than clear nights. Clouds are cold, but they're not as cold as space!

The effect of the combination of radiation, absorption, and reflection, with different band peaks for each phenomenon, manifests itself in atmospheres as a greenhouse effect (positive or negative) versus the radiative equilibrium temperature.

This "modulation" happens all the time, few things in this universe are true blackbodies, most prefer to radiate in specific bands. They're apparently using a material that tends to radiate only on one narrow band at regular earth temperatures.

Not sure how much benefit this provides to the building owner, to the point that they'd be willing to cover their building in hafnium-and-silver coated panels, rather than just white paint...

Does anyone actually have problems with scratching of the latest generations of gorilla glass? I've had my Xperia Z2 for over half a year and because it has a glass back as well as front it makes it less risky to try scratch tests, so I've done it a number of times and let other people try to scratch it, and nobody has ever succeeded. I'm sure if you put a diamond to it you'd scratch it, but short of that, I can't see why more scratch resistance is needed.

Now, *crack* resistance, they could use good improvements in that. : But from reports the sapphire wasn't that crack resistant.

and tweaked the punctuation a bit, from "Don't Be Evil" to "Don't, Be Evil!"

BTW, am I the first one to notice that Uber is an anagram of "Rube"?

Luckily, they (say, a village family in rural Ghana) are equipped with essentially the same meat computer your are. They are perfectly able to perceive the fact that the neighbor is dying with blood pouring out of her body, just like tens of thousands of other people just have. They are able to perceive that the ultimate social isolation is having everyone you care about die. It's nice to see you're not one of those people who thinks that a farmer in Liberia, who deals with life and death every day as he tends to livestock or hunts, isn't somehow too dim-witted to grasp cause and effect when he has the basic facts. This is about social behavior DESPITE knowing the facts.

Unless it's what's just killed off everyone you know. Or look at places like Ferguson, MO, where culture just decided to burn down local shops in a tantrum over reality disagreeing with an instantly concocted bogus media mythology. Culture, like the culture of castigating your neighbors for daring to go get an education or acquiring a broader vocabulary - as seen in swaths of urban culture or patches of, say, Appalachia - is often destructive, the opposite of valuable. Pious political correctness, which employees poisonous moral equivalence in the name of assuaging misplaced guilt over the fact that some cultures actually work better than others, preserves and actually perpetuates that destructiveness.

Surprised you haven't gotten any "but animals eat meat!" comments.

Animals also commit petty murder and mass rape. I like to think that we have the intelligence to choose to not have to imitate the behavior of other animals and decide our own path. And fortunately, we have a digestive system which allows us to make that choice when it comes to our diet.

Swans can literally kill people - a guy died just a couple years ago when swans attacked his boat and then kept attacking him while he tried to swim to shore, until he drowned. More common though are things like bruises (up to and including black eyes), scratches, and skin-puncturing bites. A google image search for swan attack shows how they don't mess around when they feel threatene (there's even pictures of one attacking a full-grown horse)