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.
The trust usually comes because the small company assumes the big one wants to make money by completing an actual product line and selling it - normally the way just about everybody thinks Capitalism works. The small company says to itself, well, they've got to have X (like Sapphire coatings for screens) to make money - they can't actively want us to fail and take steps to make us fail or they take a hit too. So what we have to do is deliver the component at the price where they still make money, and as long as we do that, we're on the same side. So the small company focuses on distrusting the contract clauses it thinks are rational to distrust, in ways that it thinks might allow abuses a rational but dishonest actor might try..
It's like buying a car and thinking you can't trust the salesman to tell you the truth - only you should have somehow known the salseman wasn't the real salesman but a psycho-killer who had just slain the real salesman and the big thing he wanted wasn't to make too much money selling that car, it was your home address so he could pop by at 2 AM with his skinning knife collection. Most people don't go through life checking with NASA in case the persons they are dealing with are secretly space ailens.
From the summary, Apple seems to have had control over the decision to install back up power supplies, and to have chosen to save money on them instead. That sounds like an Apple executive brought in a good quarterly bottom line and then got out before the product couldn't be made as specced, and to heck with whether Apple still looks good five years down the road. The big company takes a small hit, the little one goes bankrupt. Apple is by this definition exceptionally untrustworthy, just because they won't take as much damage as their smaller subcontractors, or individuals, but if that's true, then Capitalism is a system where the bigger a company gets, the less it should be trusted, just for sheer size, and smaller businesses and customers should rationally start distrusting sheer bigness. How about that, free-market types and Randroids, do we need stronger Anti-Trust laws? The other solution seems to be extreme paranoia. If great market share or rapid growth mean everyone should regard that company as exceptionally untrustworthy, they why doesn't it make sense for consumers to always pick a smaller competitor for everything?
VLCs UI constantly pisses me off - I just can't use it. Fortunately Media Player Classic is there, with the UI I like and no EULAs or DRM.
Every player should hold all my music, otherwise what's the point? But It's only a matter of time before a micro-SD card that can hold everything in FLAC is cheap, at which point it's a non-issue.
So you're say that methods matter and the ends don't automatically justify the means? What's your opinion on Obama's amnesty declaration vs the Constitution?
/thread
I'm sure you're right. Government can print infinite money with no negative consequences down the line. The only reason everyone isn't a millionaire already is the greed of evil bankers. Why didn't anyone realize this before in all of history?
I mean, it's clear as day: you just spend more money that you make, and life is therefore better. I can see no flaw in this plan.
Also, the economy can't recover because the same problem that keeps dragging it down still remains: people don't get paid enough to create enough demand to buy up everything the workforce can produce. As long as this situation persists, the only way to keep the economy even somewhat functional is to pump demand by flooding the market with cheap credit, with all the problems and risks that causes.
Every single economic recession in history looked like that. But we're already well on the upswing. Certainly everywhere around me (in the Seattle area) is hiring, from the minimum wages jobs to the construction sites to the tech companies.
The usual cycle starts up when people start buying durable consumer goods again: you put off buying that replacement car or washing machine or whatever when the future looks bleak, preferring to limp along with a somewhat-broken one. That demand broke out of the doldrums in early 2012, went back down for a year, and now has taken off like crazy. That's usually the spark that ignites recovery (or, questions of causation aside, it's reliably the sector that comes back first in a recovery).
As long as this situation persists, the only way to keep the economy even somewhat functional is to pump demand by flooding the market with cheap credit
There's just no evidence that actually works. Many nations have been trying that for decades without success. Once demand is booming, interest rates have proven a good tool to limit growth and pop bubbles, but the reverse doesn't seem to be true. Supply of money can curtail demand, but it can't create demand. When people are scared stability is all-important. Even when things are bad, people will adjust eventually and start spending again, and companies will adjust and start hiring again, if only the government doesn't keep changing the landscape.
Turns out the conspiracy theorists underestimated the NSA. Check the links in my reply to AC. Storing all US phone calls for a month is just a handful of PB, assuming reasonable compression.
Seriously, just scroll through this list of programs detailed on Bruce's page. Just the scope of programs is astonishing.
"The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception a neccessity." - Oscar Wilde
