Smart lock is actually too lenient. It'll auto-unlock if it's in a trusted location or connected to a trusted device (e.g. bluetooth headset). The apps which provided similar functionality in Jelly Bean did it right. The first time you used the phone when connected to a trusted device or in a trusted location, you had to unlock it. After that, the app kept the phone unlocked until it left the trusted place or disconnected from the trusted device.

Lollipop's smart lock will auto-unlock the moment the trusted conditions are met. That is, if you have your workplace set as a trusted place, a co-worker who stole your phone simply has to be at work to unlock your phone. There's no need to enter the unlock passcode the first time it transitions from a locked to an unlocked state. Simply satisfying the trusted conditions will clear the lock.

Endless educational financing is already available.

In what universe would that be?

This one. The U.S. tops the world in education spending per student (p. 4, chart B1.1).

The idea that we're not spending enough on education is a myth, manufactured by those who are sucking up the largest chunk of education dollars. If you ever take the time to dig through a school district's budget, you'll find that the biggest single item is administrative overhead. Basically school payroll is top-heavy with too many administrators and managers.

Every time a budget cut is threatened, they make sure the cuts land squarely on classrooms and teachers, creating an artificial financial crisis. That riles up the teachers' unions and PTAs who broadcast the message that we're not spending enough on education. We really are spending more than enough, but from their perspective we aren't because the administrators aren't passing the money through to them. When the tactic works and public pressure forces legislators to increase school budgets, the administrators divert the bulk of it to fattening up their pay (or hiring more administrators), throwing a few token bones to teachers and classrooms (e.g. an iPad for every child in Los Angeles, which was probably a kickback scheme for the administrators who selected which companies got the contract).

The problem is that police would respond with that level of force based upon an anonymous tip.

The problem is more the police than the swatters.

The problem is the media. I've seen hundreds of news stories where with 20/20 hindsight they'll say police received an anonymous tip regarding a [murder/bomb/bad thing] but failed to act on it. I have never seem them once mention the hundreds of incorrect or fake anonymous tips the police receive. The only time I've seen that mentioned is when the police (FBI, etc) mention it themselves during a live press conference.

Assuming a relatively constant percentage of the population who'll call in fake tips, the more effective your police force, the lower the ratio of real tips to fake ones. For the simple reason that when less crime occurs, the fewer real reports of crime you'll receive. Basically your signal is dropping so low that the noise begins to swamp it out. So ironically, the more effective your police force is, the more likely they are incorrectly dismiss a real anonymous tip as fake.. The media does society a great disservice by portraying an anonymous tip as a strong signal with no noise which the police should have acted on, when it was in fact a weak signal often indistinguishable from the noise.

This puts the police in a position where they feel they'll be raked over the coals if they ignore any anonymous call about something serious like a murder. And they will go all-out to respond to it, "just in case" it happens to be true, in order to avoid the media circus that'll result if it was true and they didn't respond.

The problem is a police force filled with the same adrenaline junky types that call in the swatting.

Yes that is a problem. But cooler heads would prevail and would overrule the adrenaline junkies if the media treated missed opportunities from anonymous tips more fairly, instead of exploiting them as an opportunity to take a cheap shot at the effectiveness of the police. Think of what goes through the police supervisor's head while deciding whether or not to approve the SWAT raid:

• They conduct the raid and it turns out to be fake. A little bad publicity, family inconvenienced for a day or two, everything goes back to normal.
• They conduct the raid and it turns out to be true. Media portrays them as heroes.
• They don't conduct the raid and it turns out to be false. Nobody ever hears about it.
• They don't conduct the raid and it turns out to be true. Media crucifies them. Supervisor loses his job.

There's little to lose and a lot to gain by doing the raid. While there's nothing to gain and a lot to lose by not doing the raid.

don't plant water-intensive crops in a drought zone? Naaa, that would require actual understanding of the situation.

That's a horribly naive way to view the situation. It's a lot more complicated than water-intensive crops in a drought zone. Soil, amount of sunshine, average daily temperature, and seasonal variation in temperature all play a part, and are very favorable in California. When water was cheap, the additional cost of piping it or drilling for it was outweighed by the all the above factors. i.e It was cheaper to pay for the water and grow the crops in California, rather than try to grow them elsewhere where water was more plentiful but the other conditions not as conducive to growing certain crops.

Now that water has become more scarce, its market price should be increasing to reflect its increased scarcity. But that hasn't been allowed to happen with politics being what it is and agriculture being a large portion of California's economy. Consequently water is under-priced. And when you under-price a resource, demand outstrips supply, and you get a shortage. Which is exactly what's happening.

The iris scanners aren't new either. I was in Nexus (U.S./Canada pre-screening) before Global Entry existed, and the airport kiosks used iris scanners back then. They ended up replacing them with the fingerprint scanners currently used for Global Entry (these programs use the same kiosks at the airport). The word going around among Nexus members was that the iris scanners were too unreliable, which I can believe. I had to take off my glasses, and hold my eyelids way open with both hands, and maybe the machine would correctly ID me. The fingerprint machines have correctly authenticated me on the first try every time, even after I made about a 15mm cut across my fingertip while repairing electronics and the two halves healed slightly askew.

Interesting that they're planning to bring back the iris scanners. Either they've improved the technology, or someone in DHS really likes iris scanners regardless of how well they (don't) work. Possibly bribed like with the airport backscatter x-ray scanners.

I still can't understand why the fuck people are racing to create smart watches. how many times does this segment have to fail before they realize this is a case of them searching for a problem that doesn't exist.

Because history says you're probably wrong. The first mechanical clocks filled up a room. Refinement of the design allowed them to become small enough to sit in the hallway of your house. Replacing the pendulum with a spring allowed them to shrink enough that you could pack in your bag and take it with you while traveling. Miniaturization shrank that until they were small enough to carry in your pocket. Further miniaturization and the introduction of electronics allowed them to became small enough to be strapped to your wrist.

Computers were first large devices that took up most of the room. Then the shrank to something small enough to fit on your desk at home. Then something you could pack in your bag and take with you while traveling. Further advances and reduction in power consumption (reducing battery requirement) allowed them to become small enough to carry in your pocket. The next step down in size is something you can strap to your wrist.

The main impediment to further miniaturization right now is screen size - both for display and data entry purposes. My hunch is that as soon as someone begins mass-producing flexible displays, that barrier is going to vanish. Your computer/phone will be strapped to your wrist with rudimentary interactive functions handled via its small built-in display. If you need a larger display, it'll come in the form of a pen you carry in your pocket or purse which unfurls like a scroll and connects wirelessly to your watch-computer. Unroll it part-way for a display the size of a current smartphone display. Pull it out further for a display the size of a tablet or small laptop. Speaking of which, your "laptop" will simply be a wireless keyboard you can add to your travel bag and use in conjunction with your watch-computer and unrolling display.

You do realize that Verizon, Comcast, et al have local monopolies which are government-granted? If the telecom industry was deregulated and this had happened, the Feds would've been happy to crucify Verizon to set an example for competitors. But because regulations have made them the only game in town for so many people, the Feds have no choice but to impose a fine which smarts, but won't really affect Verizon's operations. Verizon is "too big to fail" by government mandate.

As for PC/Mac, it is also pointless. You buy Apple-branded products if you want all the Apple coziness and conviviality of OS X, the underlying machine is pretty much identical...

OS X runs a variant of BSD Unix under the hood. If you pop open a command prompt (called Terminal in OS X), pretty much most Unix commands work. If you just need a Unix environment and not specifically Linux, a Mac is the simplest way to get it in a laptop. With Linux you have to search to make sure the laptop you get has drivers for its specific hardware, and usually get stuck with poor battery life because power management isn't fully implemented.

He's probably confusing it with WPA (the original WPA, before WPA-2). It was found to have a flaw similar to WEP, especially if you use it with TKIP instead of AES, so it's only slightly harder to crack than WEP. Kinda makes you think they should just give these things a completely different name when one is cracked. Simply incrementing the version number just leads to confusion.

When you use a credit card online or in the store, the merchant can use various information like your address, phone number, the security code printed on the card, your signature, to confirm the card is valid. (The U.S. is finally rolling out EMV smart card chips.) This is actually optional - the merchant doesn't have to do it. But if the cardholder issues a chargeback, the merchant's chances of successfully contesting the chargeback are much better if they've used these options. If you've ever wondered why the gas pump asks for your zip code when you use a credit card, this is why. It's not trying to collect marketing data, it's doing a rudimentary identity check to elevate the chances that you are the card's actual owner.

Anyhow, allowing transactions using only the card numbers themselves is horribly flawed because anyone can just take a photo of a card to get its numbers. So the credit card companies have come up with these other methods to "verify" the card's authenticity. (I put it in quotes because it doesn't actually verify the card's authenticity, just reduces the chances the card is not authentic.) Apparently Apple refused to forward much if any of this information to the banks when a fresh card is first being loaded into Apple Pay, making it easy to load a stolen credit card - easier than actually using the card for a purchase. And the banks were too cowed to make an issue of it, landing them in the mess they're in.

On the one hand it's the bank's fault for not speaking up and pressing a vital security issue. On the other hand it's Apple's fault for being an 800 pound gorilla which uses its market clout to force concessions from its partners. Stuff like this is why you always want at least two strong competitors in a given market - so if one makes unreasonable demands of a business partner, the partner is not afraid to tell them to go jump in a lake. It's the same reason we allow unions - because the hiring employer has a lot more clout than the individual employees.

Most humane way to execute someone:
Bullet (or bolt gun) to the head, followed by organ donation to more worthy human beings. This may be ugly, but it is very humane.

That's the way we slaughter cattle - bolt to the head.

If you're going to execute people and don't want the mess of a head shot, I'd say put em in a gas chamber-like room, and flood it with enough CO2 to displace all the oxygen (it is heavier than N2 and O2). Loss of consciousness within about 10-15 seconds. Death in couple minutes. I never understood why they insist on using a "deadly" substance like cyanide or phenobarbital, when oxygen deprivation is just as lethal. In fact the way cyanide kills is by inhibiting the mechanism by which cells metabolize oxygen.

Those growth rates are exponential because they're receiving massively disproportionate subsidies relative to the amount of power they're generating. Tables ES4 and ES5 have the relevant data.

Coal received 6% of the subsidies, and generated 40.1% of 2013's electricity. A 0.15 ratio.
Gas received 4% of the subsidies, and generated 26.4% of 2013's electricity. A 0.15 ratio.
Nuclear received 10% of the subsidies, and generated 20.1% of 2013's electricity. A 0.5 ratio.
Hydro received 2% of the subsidies, and generated 6.8% of 2013's electricity. A 0.29 ratio.
Geothermal received 2% of the subsidies, and generated 4.2% of 2013's electricity. A 0.48 ratio.

Wind received 37% of the subsidies, and generated 4.3% of 2013's electricity. A 8.6 ratio.
Solar received 27% of the subsidies, and generated 0.2% of 2013's electricity. A 135 ratio


Once the subsidies dry up and they're forced to compete on their own economic merits, their growth rate is going to plummet, or even start shrinking.

It's a missed opportunity for open source. FOSS could've developed a block chain algorithm which governments could've used to distribute virtual versions of their currency online. Instead the community glommed onto a rather flawed version based on artificial scarcity (which like all artificial scarcity made early adopters disproportionately rich - dunno why more people aren't complaining about that than they do about 1%ers or domain squatters) simply because it was government-free. You can't really complain when someone else offers to provide something you aren't.

Yes, you COULD use an SSD as swap, but it will not help THAT much. An SSD is much faster than a mechanical disk, but still a couple of orders of magnitude slower than real RAM. That upgrade would be like the difference between jogging with 50 pounds on your back, and then lowering it to 35 pounds. Yes, it will make a difference and make things better, but how much better to have no weight at all?

You haven't actually tried it, have you? Putting a swap file on a SSD instead of HDD helps tremendously.

It's not because the SSD transfers data at a faster speed. It's because its seek times are minuscule. A typical HDD's seek time is around 10 ms. A SSD's is around 0.1 ms, making the SSD 100x faster. In practical terms, this means when the computer starts swapping to a HDD, you cannot use the HDD for anything else. Were you opening a file when it started swapping? The computer's not gonna complete the read until it finishes swapping. Does the computer need to get one itsy bitsy file off the HDD to continue with it's current operation? It's gonna have to wait for the swap to finish. The swap writing to the HDD saturates the drive's seek capability and the drive cannot do anything else.

With a SSD, the "seek time" (actually time to find and read/write electronically) is so short the limiting factor is actually filesystem overhead. That's why enabling NCQ speeds up 4k read/writes on SSDs by about 10x, while it gives almost no speedup to HDDs. In practical terms, this means the computer can continue to use the SSD while it's swapping. My previous laptop came with 4GB of RAM and a SSD. I found I needed 8GB when using Photoshop, but the behavior while swapping was so amicable that I put off buying the RAM upgrade for 3 months until there was a good sale. I could tell it was swapping because it got a bit slower, but it wasn't show-stopping like with a HDD.

Even with HDDs, the recommendation if you had multiple drives was to put the OS and swap file on different physical drives for this reason. If you've ever used a system set up like that, swapping was nowhere near as bad as with a single HDD.

. It must be tempered by the capacity factor. That is the ratio of the theoretical capacity of a device to the actual output from the device. The capacity of solar panels is found by exposing the panel to a set amount of light. It is used to compare panels and is only part of calculating the actual output of the panel.

Correct. Comparing different generation technologies by peak production capacity is like trying to compare the range of cars by looking only at the size of their gas tank. You must take into account fuel efficiency to get an accurate range estimate. LIkewise, capacity factor is analogous to the "efficiency" with which the power source can convert its potential capacity into actual energy.

he capacity factor of PVs in the US is anywhere from 13% to 33%.

Capacity factor for static PV installations in the U.S. is 10%-19%. The contiguous 48 states averages about 14%-14.5%.

33% is the max capacity factor for concentrated solar power - where you have reflectors tracking the sun all day and the panels/thermal salt bath mounted atop a high tower to minimize oblique incident sunlight angles throughout the day.

Then there is the fact the coal power is dispatchable while solar is not.

Coal is used mostly for base load. It's pretty slow to ramp up or down in respond to demand - once you shovel in a certain amount of coal to start it burning, you cannot stop it from burning. Nuclear is like that too.

Most peaking plants (supply electricity as demand peaks) are gas, oil, and hydro. You can shut those off within about a minute of demand dropping.