True, but measurement is the first step to understanding. Moreover, it is not a foregone conclusion that a building is poorly ventilated or requires costly modification. Quantification is evidence, and evidence is empowerment, and empowerment leads to change. This is how modern epidemiology came into existence, and modern architecture ought to consider CO2 measurement as an integral component of indoor air quality and occupant comfort.

In the past, we did not have a germ theory of disease. People lived amongst open sewers and walked through human and animal waste on the street. We did not have clean municipal water delivery systems. And at the time, the idea that these were problems that needed to be fixed was considered preposterous, heretical, foolish. But to our credit, we have mostly fixed these problems. The global COVID pandemic should have taught us that there is still more to be done with respect to protecting public health. I hope that in the near future, humans will look back on how we live today and think that our attitudes toward communicable diseases is as primitive, barbaric, and disgusting as how we look back on how people lived hundreds of years ago.

For ages, we have had thermostats to tell us the ambient room temperature, and to adjust HVAC settings accordingly. And more recently, they've gone smart--letting us see and control it automatically, or manually with a smartphone interface.

Why not also have this technology for measuring CO2? The sensors are not expensive, they don't need a lot of power, and they are low maintenance. CO2 is a reasonably good proxy for indoor air quality with respect to environments occupied by humans. And you don't need to modify the existing architecture or install ductwork.

The GP is not talking about LTE, they're talking about "voice over LTE" (VoLTE). The Bell compatibility checker they linked to seems like a fairly comprehensive list of phones that support it. Very old phones, like the iPhone 4 or original Pixel don't support it because the standard didn't exist when they were manufactured.

This article almost sounds like an ad to get people to buy things to keep the economy rolling rather than a serious discussion.

You've answered your question. "Productivity" in this case is GDP / capita. If an American buys something with American parts from an American retailer then they increase the GDP, which increases the productivity. It doesn't have to increase their personal productivity.

Yes, very much so. Sometimes it is hard, but the better the rapport you build with the students, the better it works. Talking to them in breaks helps. Showing the occasional weakness helps. If some student know something relevant better than you, let them talk for a few minutes. Of course, some students want the degree, but not do the work (which is really stupid, but it happens) and that is why I have stopped teaching mandatory subjects. If you do not really want to be in my lecture, I do not want you to be there either.

It might not even be necessary to fork much. Genuine Arduino hardware is so expensive most people use clones, lots of people use Platform IO instead of the Arduino IDE, and the Arduino core for the newer microcontrollers is not made by Arduino anyway.

Contrary to the scaremongering we hear, the world is not full of terrorists. They exist, don't get me wrong, but the reason we're so afraid of them is that our fear of them is incredibly useful for people who want to control us.

And also, the ones who do exist aren't engineers. So a shooting, or a stabbing, that's pretty easy to figure out how to do. Derailing a train? That's physics. Physics is much harder than pointing a gun and pulling the trigger.

I got a desktop computer in 1995. It had a 686 Cyrix at 166MHz, 16MB of RAM, an 8x CD-ROM, 1.6 GB hard disk...and it was one of the fastest computers in my circle. By 2001, it was unusable. USB was on its way to replacing serial and parallel peripherals, which Windows 95 didn't support. 166MHz was slow, compared to the 600MHz P3's that were available (and a year later, they'd hit 1GHz). 48MB of RAM was nothing (64MB was common, 256MB was available), and while 1.6GB was a bottomless pit when Word documents was all I was creating, and 50MB installations for video games were considered pigs, 10GB drives were available...and needed for the CDs I was ripping into MP3s. Six years of computer progress was clear, obvious, palpable, and using the old computer had a clear feeling of constraint.

Today, unless you're doing local AI, 8K video rendering, or a handful of other niche applications, a 6-year-old computer will be perfectly usable. Six years ago, SSDs were already the default, 6-core CPUs were the default, and it was right at the cusp of when 16GB became mainstream. A six year old computer is perfectly usable for most tasks. It runs current iterations of OSes (admittedly a 6-year-old Mac might not because of the OSX shelf life on Intel), it *might* need a RAM upgrade, and it *might* benefit from a newer SSD to some extent...but while a 6-year difference was night-and-day in 2000, it's turned into "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".

And, so too it is with phones. The difference between the iPhone 4 and iPhone 8 was readily understood and appreciated by most users; the storage capacity increases, camera improvements, FaceID implementation, Apple Wallet/NFC, bidirectional lightning cable, and screen size increase were all understood, palpable, and basically sold themselves. I went through the Wikipedia page to get a feel for what changed between the 13 and the 17...and the answers were the satellite connectivity (that may-or-may-not-work depending on carrier), Apple Intelligence (that they famously are still trying to get off the ground), the dynamic island, a few more camera improvements, and colors...oh, and they are more expensive now.

Samsung is kinda the same deal; the foldable phones are nifty, but at $2,000, one can get a phone, a laptop, *and* a tablet for the same price...and the difference between an S21 and an S25 is similarly uninspiring for a $1,000 upgrade.

So yeah, phones have gotten "good enough" for most people, they've been that way for a while, despite the price tags more frequently involving commas. So...yeah...makes perfect sense that with more money expected for less improvement...that 3-year-old phones are the norm now.

What kind of a nonsense posting is that? Stop projecting and read what I actually wrote.

That would require that there are no more and no less than the materials required in existence. The problem students face is not lack of materials. The problem is they are faced with vastly more materials than they need and most do not yet have the skills to competently make a selection and structure structure what they selected.

Other than that, I agree with your statement.

Indeed. Also reminds me of a certain "stable genius".

It's just below IRC and just above Usenet.

Hate to disappoint...but it was exactly that for longer than it was the P2P network from which it got its notoriety.

Circa 2003, Napster came back as a legit music seller, just like iTunes. They spent a few years selling DRM'd WMA files, but they were between a rock and a hard place because Apple wouldn't license the iTunes DRM that worked on iPods, nor would they license Microsoft's WMA format, and the RIAA wasn't about to let them sell ordinary MP3 files without DRM (God knows how Amazon managed to score that deal)...so, Napster blamed Microsoft for the fact that their sales paled in comparison to Apple.

I'd argue that they were also a bit ahead of their time; Napster To Go was a monthly subscription service that used Microsoft's Janus DRM to enforce subscriptions...the Slashdot crowd hated the DRM at the time, but in a pre-LTE era, that was pretty much how subscription music on mobile was going to happen...and several years later, we have Spotify, which is basically the successor of Napster To Go, enforcing its DRM by other means. They also had a short-lived partnership with XM Radio that allowed subscribers to listen to linear streams of certain music channels, in turn allowing rental or purchases of songs that were liked while broadcast. A decade later, Shazam would do that with Apple Music and audio recognition, but Napster implemented a rudimentary version of the idea before Apple implemented iMessage.

In 2011, Rhapsody acquired Napster, but their niche was in licensing to other businesses. While they kept the "Spotify from Temu or Wish.com" setup for a while, their real bread and butter was in licensing to other companies; many of those music channels available on cable subscriptions were Rhapsody on the back end. They also did 'compliant music for businesses', similar to Muzak and other companies who pumped music into stores and bars and things. Amusingly enough, Rhapsody rebranded itself as Napster, and continued on the model, going through a handful of private equity firms, until earlier this year, when once again, the company found itself in court...again...due to unpaid licensing fees.

So...yeah, while they've floundered around for a number of reasons (some their fault, some not), they were a P2P service for about three years...and a (mostly) law-abiding corporation for over 20...and most of the highlights were posted as articles here on Slashdot.

I know how to use this stuff: Stay away from it, it adds nothing and wastes my time. Oh, I have one use: I currently have a student evaluate the major coding assistant and some general LLMs on how good they can judge code security. The results so far are that they work well for toy examples and not well or not at all for real situations. This may eventually get me a nice publication.

While I do not completely agree, the idea has merit.