seriously though, the Chinese can destroy our country without setting a single boot on the ground simply through economic measures.

*Poof* You have your wish. China ceases all trade with the U.S. The $122 billion in stuff going to China, and $440 billion in stuff coming from China vanishes.

The U.S. economy has a GDP of $16.8 trillion. Trade with China was equivalent to 3.3% of that. And in fact since the U.S. runs a trade deficit, the cessation of trade with China actually increases its GDP to $17.1 trillion.

China's economy has a GDP of $6.8 trillion. The vanished trade was equivalent to 8.3% of that. And since they ran a trade surplus, their GDP shrinks to $6.5 trillion.

So China's GDP is hurt more and they lose a bigger chunk of their economy from these "economic measures." And you somehow interpret this as China having the power to destroy the U.S. economically?

Here's what people like you don't get - China needs the U.S. more than the U.S. needs China. The U.S. buys manufactured goods from China. It doesn't have to buy from China. If China boycotted us, we could pay for manufacturing in Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, or one of a hundred other developing countries eager for the business. OTOH, where is China going to sell the stuff they manufacture? If the U.S. doesn't buy it, who else will? There just aren't that many first world customers willing to fork over cash for merchandise. China already sells to all the first world customers willing to buy. The U.S. doesn't buy from all the developing nations willing to manufacture.

The US force is a tripwire to draw the US into the conflict. That's why we are there. The US force is tiny and not sufficient to do anything useful except get overwhelmed. But when US bodies start showing up on newscasts, the DPRK is toast

Case in point, the troops there call themselves "speed bumps." They know their job in case of a N. Korean attack is to get overrun and die, so the U.S. populace will get all outraged and back a full reprisal in S. Korea's defense.

And to answer OP, the idea is that the outcome of a war between N. Korea and S. Korea has enough uncertainty that some loony of a N. Korean leader may actually try it. But the outcome of a war between N. Korea and the U.S. is so obvious that no N. Korean leader would try it. (Well, no sane N. Korean leader. I'm starting to have my doubts about how much sanity is left after 60 years of indoctrination about how "N. Korea drove the U.S. out" of half the peninsula.) If you talk with S. Koreans, most of them don't exactly like U.S. troops being there, but are willing to tolerate it for this tangible deterrence factor.

But couldn't the UN do something? When the original 1950 "police action" in Korea was authorized by the UN security council, China's vote was controlled by Taiwan, and the Soviet Union happened to be boycotting the UN to try to get that vote transferred to mainland China. Let's just say that if a similar situation should arise, there's considerable uncertainty about getting anything more than a strongly worded statement from the UN.

Wouldn't it be easier to reprogram a few text-to-speech readers to look for both hyphens and dashes based on context, instead of forcing the rest of the world to distinguish between two visually nearly-identical symbols? Do the readers also break when I type things like Quebec, resume, creme brulee, etc. without their accent marks?

Most airports let you mail the items back home now. It's only confiscated if it's not worth the cost to mail it back.

The stuff on their prohibited list is pretty silly though. They wouldn't let me bring a piano tuning wrench in my carry on. It's basically a fixed socket wrench about 12 inches long, no sharp edges or points so can't be used for jabbing/prying like a screwdriver, and designed to be lightweight so you couldn't use it like a hammer. But there's some rule prohibiting tools over 8 inches, so they refused to let me bring it aboard. Unfortunately you can't just pick one up at the local hardware store, so I had to pay 25% of what a new one cost to check in my carry-on bag.

You might recall that the TSA got started by taking sackloads of private company-employed rent-a-cops and making them federal employees, thus unfirable. This ensured and still ensures a nice base level of incompetence as well as arrogance, and costs you more tax dollars than the private situation did.

Airport security has always been a government job for the simple reason that all commercial traffic airports (in the U.S.) are owned by the government. The local government may have chosen to subcontract out their security to a private company prior to 9/11, but they were still government employees or contractors. All the TSA did was move the responsibility from the local government to the federal government. Don't try to lay blame for this on the private sector.

The real problem, however, is that it's all security theatre. It doesn't do anything worthwhile. The hassle does the same thing that comfort noise does for voip and cellular phone connections. It assures you that "something is being done" without having the slightest connection as to whether something is actually being done or not.

Exactly. The real problem is that some of the folks in charge of airport security never got this memo, and take their jobs way too seriously. Unfortunately, reports like this one are bad for the people in charge who do realize their job is merely security theater, and increases the likelihood that they'll be fired and replaced by some bozo who thinks strictly enforcing the rules actually results in a statistically significant benefit to safety.

None of the confirmed hijackings since 2001 has casualties, though I suppose there's mysteries like MH370. Even if you assume the worst though, statistically you're far more likely to die from technical malfunction or pilot error.

Statistically, except for transcontinental and overseas flights, you're more likely to die in an accident on your drive to/from the airport than on the flight itself. And the only reason the risk is higher for longer flights is because, well, they're longer, so there's more time for something to possibly go wrong.

If you're seriously worried about terrorism impacting your flight, you should lock yourself in your room and never go out. Just about everything in the world is more likely to kill you than terrorism.

You think the folks working at the NSA and GCHQ sat around doing nothing before terrorists showed up on the scene? Their job (at least what they're supposed to be doing) is surveillance of criminal operations and foreign powers, of which terrorists are a subset. What got them into trouble was they started pointing their monitoring apparatus at people outside those categories - i.e. their general population.

Thanks. Here's the rather important last line od the author's blog you linked:

"UPDATE: The book is now back on sale. Common sense seems to have prevailed "

For comparison, 3 minutes is about how long it takes to fill a tank of gas (including stuff like removing the gas cap, inserting the hose, swiping your credit card, and putting the hose back on the hook). It's a good time to reference against.

My take on this is if they put up wind or solar arrays, it would work better than trying to charge people's cars live off it.

Have you ever calculated how big a solar array it would take to charge a Tesla battery?

Solar constant on the ground at U.S. latitudes is about 750 Watts/m^2.
High-efficiency panels are about 22% efficient. Commercially, 18% is more realistic, but let's go with 22%.
Solar capacity factor for the desert Southwest U.S. is about 0.18. Multiply by 2 to account for night.
The big Tesla S battery has a 85 kWh.

750 Watts/m^2 * 22% efficiency = 165 W/m^2
times 0.36 capacity factor (average for the day) = 59.4 W/m^2 average generation during the 12 hours of daylight

Assume 90% charging efficiency. Real-life measurements put it at about 85%, but solar would charge it a lot slower so let's be generous and say 90%. At 90% charging efficiency, you need 94.4 kWh to fill the 85 kWh battery.

To charge the battery in 12 hours would thus take:
94,400 Wh / (12 hours * 59.4 W/m^2) = 132.5 m^2 of solar panels

A car parking space is about 9' x 18', or about 15 square meters. So you'd need roughly 9 car parking spaces worth of solar panels to charge one big Tesla S battery per day in the desert Southwest U.S.

Costs of implementing a PV Solar generation system are about $3.30/Watt in the U.S. on a utility-level scale. Technically this is commercial scale, but let's go with best case. 1 m^2 of these panels would be rated at 165 Watts peak capacity. At a price of $3.30/Watt, this would be $544.50/m^2 * 132.5 m^2 = $72,146.25 worth of PV to be able to charge 1 Tesla battery per day.

The amount of electricity used by a busy Tesla battery charging station would put it into the industrial category. The average U.S. electricity price for industrial customers was $0.07/kWh for 2014. At $0.07/kWh, the panels would essentially be charging the battery with $6.61 worth of electricity per day. It would take 10,913 days, or 29.9 years for the PV system to pay for themselves.

I won't go through the math in detail, but if you use more realistic figures of 18% efficient panels, 0.145 capacity factor (average for the U.S. overall), 85% charging efficiency, and the $4.50/Watt cost of commercial PV installations, the numbers end up 213 m^2 (14.2 parking spaces) of panels to charge one battery per day, and 61.9 years before the panels pay for themselves.

The costs are coming down, and we will eventually get to the point where it's cost-effective. But please do a reality check on the notion that you'll be able to prop up a few square meters of solar panels and charge your car for free.

1) Yet another reason why it should be illegal for cities/municipalities to award a monopoly cable contract. The folks living in such an area (90%+ of Comcast's network) cannot choose not to do business with Comcast if they want broadband Internet.

2) Yet another reason to set the primary DNS of every router you set up for a friend to a public DNS server.

- Energy Use â" The Seagate drives were 7200 rpm and used slightly more electricity than the Western Digital drives which were 5400 rpm. This small difference adds up when you place 45 drives in a Storage Pod and then stack 10 Storage Pods in a cabinet.
- Loading speed â" Edge to Western Digital, by a little over 1 TB per day on average.

That didn't really make sense to me that the 5400 RPM drive beat out the 7200 RPM drive, so I did a bit of research.

The WD drives were the WD60EFRX. It's a 5-platter 6TB drive, or 1.2 TB/platter. It has 64MB cache.

The Seagate drives were the STBD6000100. It's a 6-platter drive, or 1 TB/platter. It has 128MB cache. Googling for it brings up contradictory information, listing it as both 7200 RPM and 5900 RPM. (Note: It's pathetic that Seagate doesn't list basic information like RPM on their website.)

So apparently the higher areal density on the WD (meaning more data can be written per rotation, and shorter r/w head strokes to move to a given number of cylinder tracks) is enough to overcome its RPM disadvantage. Given the results, it's likely the Seagate STBD6000100 is 5900 RPM drive, as 7200/5400 = 1.33 which would've exceeded the WD's higher areal density.

I'd caution though that Backblaze's application seems to be a highly sequential task. Peak transfer rates were over 7 TB/day, which is more than 80 MB/s. Given the larger cache and higher RPM (whether 5900 or 7200), I'd expect the Seagate drive to perform better under random read/writes.

If the US get their way, no company on this planet would touch a data center that is remotely in league with a US based company with a 10 foot pole.

Which is precisely what companies should have been doing as soon as America passed the PATRIOT Act, which pretty much spelled out their claim to be able to do this.

That's the really sad/pathetic thing about all this. Everyone knows how the PATRIOT Act, NSA eavesdropping, warrants approved by secret courts, etc have damaged the trustworthiness of U.S. communications traffic companies within the international community . Rather than learn from that experience and realize that overreaching government invasion of privacy is bad for business and the economy, the U.S. government is eagerly rushing to do it all over again, this time to U.S. data hosting companies. The U.S. government isn't just shooting itself in the foot, it's blasting a basketball-sized hole in its chest (crippling its own tech economy).

App or no app, traffic in cities and suburbs is something that is going to need to be dealt with somehow. Cities like Boston or New York at least have a workable public transit system to keep some cars off the roads. LA is totally different -- it was built around cars and is only now getting a very small set of public transit choices.

Actually most of the highways and major roads in Los Angeles are laid out in a more or less straight North-South East-West grid system, and it's fairly easy to get off the highway to take a local road to bypass an accident or excessive traffic.

Interstates 5 and 405 are the exception. They're diagonal, heading Northwest to Southeast. The roads they intersect are still North-South East-West. Not coincidentally, they also happen to be the LA freeways with the worst traffic.

Public transportation needs high population density to be effective. Los Angeles' population density isn't anywhere near as high as New York or Chicago. While you're correct that the city was built around cars and freeways, that's not the only reason for the sprawl. The other major factor was earthquakes. It was a lot riskier to build high-rises in L.A. until about the 1970s when materials and structural engineering improved. The landing flight path to LAX actually goes right over the "densest" residential part of Los Angeles outside of downtown. Look out the window next time you fly in - it's all singly story housing.

The little "steps" in digital audio are so small and so fast, that no one can hear them.

No, those steps don't exist. The digital sample is basically the minimum information needed to code the original smooth analog signal. The DAC takes that minimum digital info and can convert it back into the complete and smooth original analog signal.

You're thinking of the digital signal as discrete but continuous steps in time. It's not continuous. It's an instantaneous measurement of the analog signal at regular time intervals. The digital signal at any point in time says nothing about the signal immediately before or after that point in time. The DAC "fills in the gaps" by interpolating a smooth and analog signal. If the frequency limit is half the sampling rate, that interpolation is perfect and there is only one unique analog solution to any set of digital samples. And that unique solution is a perfect reproduction of the original analog signal (within the frequency limit).

Watch the first 10 min of this video. It explains it technically, graphically, and experimentally using an oscilloscope and both analog and digital signal generators.