Their OLED TVs are really good - afaik, some of the best available right now. I got one semi recently - and aside from a initial firmware update, it's not been connected to the internet since. I don't care for much of the 'smart' functions built into TVs - I've got other devices connected to the TV that do a far better job of that. The only thing I want from a TV is good picture quality and LG OLEDs tick that box.

Granted, LG still got some of my money despite being a shady company -- but hopefully they're not profiting too much from me personally considering they can't use/sell my data.

You could just not have an emotional reaction to a news article?

From a tech point of view, the piece I find interesting is that one of the biggest social networks in the world is taking what I assume is a very important part of their user recruitment and monetisation funnel down for 3 days or so. Regardless of the reasons why - I might use this as an example in my own work when a business-type demands 0 downtime to make a significant upgrade....maybe graceful downtime isn't that big of a deal...

Not being able to buy can result in a loss. That is literally what is killing Melvin Capital. They are obliged to buy because they owe someone some stock that they don't currently own.

Melvin cannot buy if the stock price keeps going up because they literally don't have enough money. That's the squeeze. That's what's going on with this GME nonsense. Retail traders are buying up the stock and refusing to sell it, driving up the price and putting Melvin further and further into debt.

Obviously, Melvin want to buy quickly before the prices rockets into oblivion, so if they were unable to buy quickly, they would be taking some very serious (literally potentially infinite) loses. They aren't using Robinhood to manage their trades though.

In the context of a retail investor who sees this opportunity to squeeze a juicy hedge fund - Robinhood stopping retail investors from buying, reduces the demand for stock. Reduced demand for stock means price for that stock will go down. This is good for Melvin, if it goes down far enough they might be able to buy their way out of this mess. It is bad for retail investors, ie, Robinhood's actual users, because Robinhood's actions are lowing the price of stock held by Robinhood's users. Robinhood users are losing money because Robinhood is not allowing the buys that are keeping the price high.

tl;dr; Not being able to buy absolutely does result in losses. Robinhood are, ironically, helping the rich (melvin) and hurting the poor (their actual users)

The main reason it's going up right now is because of recent moves by large institutional investors (ie, 'whales').

If a big investment funds decide to bet on or against bitcoin, they put millions of $ into or out of it. Those large fiat movements drive overall market sentiment.

If someone decides to throw $100m in to bitcoin, the market thinks that person knows something and the price is about to go up so everyone else starts buying to try and take advantage of the situation (an action that itself drives the price up).
If someone takes out $100m from bitcoin, the market thinks that person knows something and the price is going to go down soon - so everyone else starts selling their bitcoin (an action that itself drives the price down).

It remains to be seen if the latest influx of institutional money is due to the institutions knowing/believing something good is about to happen that will drive the price up further - or, if the whales are using their substantial market influence to orchestrate a pump & dump - ie, the institutions are encouraging schmucks to invest in bitcoin only for the whales to cash out and take all their money.

The same definition of worth anything else uses. It's worth as much as someone will pay for it.

Right now, people are paying fiat to get crypto and that's what the $1t market can TFA quotes

I wasn't nitpicking so much as correcting op's nitpicks. Allow me one more correction;
Iceland is on both the North American and European continental plates and is generally considered included in Europe for geographical, historical, political, cultural, linguistic and practical reasons.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Do you have a source that says it's not part of Europe? Wikipedia cites several that says it is.

The UK is not in the EU & hasn't been since 31 Jan 2020.
It is not listed by the EU as a member: https://europa.eu/european-uni...
And it is not listed by the UK as a member: https://www.gov.uk/eu-eea

The UK + EU relationship right now is in a transition period where the UK is not part of the EU but is still bound by some EU laws/standards/conventions. In Jan 2021, that agreement will end and be replaced by whatever the politicians are currently arguing over.

You're correct to say that the EU != Europe, however it's worth noting that while the EU is a political/economical union, Europe is a continent, a geographical area. So Russia, and the UK are indeed part of Europe despite neither being in the EU. The same is true of Georgia, Bosnia, Iceland & a few other countries that are in Europe but not the EU. Physical location has nothing to do with political/economical unions. Maps of the EU should not include Russia or the UK, maps of Europe should.

The city I live in is pretty much exclusively on-street parking. Practically nobody has private parking. The local government's solution to provide plenty of charging locations is to convert street lights.

This works very well because;
- Street lights are everywhere
- Street lights are next to the road, where anyone can park to charge
- Street lights & their supporting electrical infrastructure generally has a lot of spare capacity for the demands of high-power electrical devices. This might seem unexpected, but it pretty much comes down to; the electrical infrastructure was built to support old-fashioned inefficient light fittings that have since been replaced, leaving some head room in the underlying infrastructure. The LED replacements use around 35% less energy - that's energy that can be used to charge cars instead without needing to upgrade the entire electrical infrastructure.

They're still rolling it out, most streets only have a handful of charging locations so far - but given most the city is still using petrol/diesel at the moment, that seems reasonable.

If something we think is correct (eg, a constant) is later shown to be incorrect (eg, different at some level of precision), that is not something we should be assume to be small or unimportant and it definitely isn't evidence of the original theorists being liars.
An unexpected change is likely a clue to something yet undiscovered.

The fun things about undiscovered things is we don't know how big they are until we discover them.
The extra fun thing with discoveries is; even if we discover a small thing, the sum of several small things can still be a huge thing.

Newton wasn't 100% correct with his equations of motion. His equations were, and still are, correct enough for the majority of scenarios. However, he didn't take into account the stuff we now know about special & general relativity.
Was he lying with his equations? No.
Did small discrepancies in his equations help uncover a whole new area of mathematics and physics that have since enabled us to harness atomic power, explore into space, launch satellites and power the GPS we all take advantage of? Absolutely yes.

I encourage you to be less dismissive of learning new things.

It's the first vaccine of this type too (mRNA).

Mod parent up. This is an obvious hit piece designed to generate clicks


If the journalists at VICE actually cared, they could provide a better write up that explains the issues with free map services in general and do some research into a bunch of map services to properly compare them. Crapping all over google maps is just trading on google's name to generate interest in VICE's crappy clickbait.

Maybe if VICE wrote about the actual issues, it might be more obvious to spot the hypocrisy. VICE's own website uses various tracking techniques for personalised ads. The info in their cookie popup, if you care to dig through it, lists tens if not hundreds of vendors that VICE share your data with for their own monetary gain.

Dear VICE, where's your hit piece on VICE's way of monetising it's free service? Why is Google maps the subject of your journalism?

Depends how you define battery. There is more than one way to save up solar energy to use at night or wind energy when the wind isn't blowing.

The lithium-ion batteries used in Hornsdale Australia has a 150 MW capacity.
The Bath County pumped storage 'battery' has a 3003 MW capacity.


Your point still stands though. Even with all the batteries in the world, we currently don't have enough storage (or excess generation to charge those batteries) to reliably get us through the night or peaks on intermittent renewable energy alone.
Yet.
Many countries were repeatedly breaking the 'x days running without coal' record this year over the summer - the UK was hitting headlines here a lot, but I know other European countries are doing similarly well. That's not to say those x days were running on renewables alone, they weren't - I think the UK was about 50:50 renewable:gas during that period. And winter energy demand is higher than summer. And this year was up to 20% less energy demanding because of the lockdowns. But even so, we're not talking huge orders of magnitude difference between what we have now & a 100% renewable baseload. On the face of it, it seems attainable.

I do however doubt whether it's entirely ecologically sound to cover the coast in wind turbines, the mountains in pumped storage reservoirs and strain the world's lithium and cobalt supplies even more. Taking on a little bit of nuclear waste to take the edge off that environmental impact is probably a good idea.

There is already a law against distracted driving. It's called driving without due care and attention. Instead of creating laws for specific devices, they just needed to set the precedent that screwing around with your phone, camera, tablet, mp3 player, gameboy or whatever else all comes under the existing law.

The quick launch was probably deliberate.

If they waited too long, then amd would come out with something competitive which would split customers between nvidia and amd. Any nvidia cards manufactured might have ended up being surplus and, in retrospect, not worth delaying the launch for.

By launching fast, nvidia have blown the competition out the water, sold all the inventory & they can they adjust future manufacturing based on the competition and demand. There is no risk of nvidia cards gathering dust in warehouses and it means they can keep the prices high all the time demand outstrips supply.

Seems a sensible move for nvidia, even if it's not great for consumers.

Programming !== Computer science.

Computer science has some programming elements. But also includes a bunch of other more generalised aspects like;
* Common design patterns
* Different paradigms (functional, OO, procedural)
* History of computing (turing machines, difference engines etc)
* Boolean logic, gates & CPU architecture
* Algorithmic efficiency
* Operating system fundamentals (HAL, kernels etc)
* Data formats (text, media, executables, different encodings etc)
* Networks and communication protocols (TCP/IP, UDP, HTTP etc)
* Security
* Databases
* Ethics
* etc


Most of that stuff isn't useful to most people. Heck, most of it's not even that useful for people who want to be average programmers.

While I agree teaching people problem solving skills, abstract thinking, logic etc is very valuable - computer science isn't the only way to get those skills. Python 101 would get you a lot of the way - or even some engineering field completely unrelated to computing.

You do make a good point around the pervasiveness of computers though. Just about every job requires interaction with computers these days and people should not be oblivious to how they operate. A plumber who doesn't know how to use his tools properly would get fired, but somehow it's OK for a desk jockey who uses a computer 9-5 every day to not know having 200 chrome tabs open might slow things down.