Have you actually seen the movie? I was thinking, from the trailers, that it would be a dumb movie. But the IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes scores are about as high as I've seen for a movie, particularly such a big budget action movie. I'm open the possibility that it's good.

Admission to Harvard isn't a prize or reward for having good test scores and a high GPA.

There's inherent value - both to the institution itself and to the educational community - in an institution of higher education having a student body that is highly diverse in many dimensions. Those dimensions include things like ethnicity, economic background, activism, political beliefs, religion, etc. Harvard has so many incredibly well-qualified applicants that it can afford to curate its student body as it sees fit.

Medical schools are well-known for this. Underrepresented minorities tend to get accepted with significantly lower stats than whites or overrepresented minorities such as east Asians. There are good reasons for this. One, it's rather easy to do since only about 45% of people who apply to medical school get in. The schools are flooded with exceptionally well-qualified students who simply don't get in anywhere. Two, since the population of physicians is so tightly controlled, it takes this kind of coordinated, deliberate action to make sure the national pool of physicians is properly diverse (which it isn't).

Removing race and ethnicity indicators from the applications may help make admissions more race-blind, yes. My point is that isn't necessarily a good thing. Neither Harvard nor our nation are well-served by making the campus more homogeneous.

The rep literally and directly told him that his Netflix video would be improved by going from the 50 to 75 Mbps tier.

There will be a market for vehicles with tunable performance characteristics. It may be a small market but it will exist, even if it's limited to track-only vehicles like Atoms. And, frankly, if you're modding your vehicle for performance to the point where you need to tweak valve timing yourself, you should be using that car on a track anyway.

Came here to say this. This has nothing to do with replacing your spark plugs or ball joints. This is about modding your ECU. That said, I think that if a manufacturer ships an ECU that can be modded to such a degree that it causes the brakes to fail, the manufacturer bears a lot of that fault. However, in general, cars aren't cell phones or PCs. It's no big deal if you load up Cyanogenmod and your phone crashes. It's a pretty big deal if you flash your ECU and you lose traction through a turn thanks to some modified vehicle dynamics and kill someone.

CO2 is the primary driver of respiration. Breathing high levels of CO2 makes you feel like you're asphyxiating, just like when you're holding your breath. It's painful and miserable.

Storm surge? It's 4 degrees in Plymouth right now.

I'm guessing the real reason is so they can do some sort of compression between the ground and aircraft. Lossy compression of Facebook and Google images could save a good bit of bandwidth, and they can't do that without intercepting the unencrypted data using this method.

They could say something like this:

Bandwidth at 30,000+ feet is inherently limited, and heavy-load activities like streaming videos from the ground can weigh down our network. That means playback is subject to poor video quality, buffering, and slower connection speeds for your fellow passengers.

Oh wait. That's exactly what they say. They're very up-front about not being able to stream video.

I paid for some GoGo on a flight recently. The signup page made it pretty clear that data speeds were pretty limited and I wasn't allowed to stream video. I don't know why they need to spoof certs for that as opposed to just blocking sites or protocols though. Maybe they do some sort of data compression on the ground before transmitting to the plane or something?

No, it really is kind of a big deal. WebMD is for-profit and largely funded by advertisers such as pharmaceutical companies. The site uses clickbait-style headlines to drive page views and actively preys on fear.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02...
http://www.washingtontimes.com...

(I replied to the wrong post above, sorry for the dupe)

No, it really is kind of a big deal. WebMD is for-profit and largely funded by advertisers such as pharmaceutical companies. The site uses clickbait-style headlines to drive page views and actively preys on fear.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02...
http://www.washingtontimes.com...

DSL uses a different technology. It piggybacks a different signal on preexisting wiring, but has totally different hardware at each end.

Dr. Thorne was the primary scientific consultant on the movie. For this article he's stepping away from the movie and talking about how possible or plausible some of the ideas presented in it actually are.

I don't believe I've ever seen a modem break 56 Kbps over a phone line.