IIRC governments subsidized the development and investment in production capacity of the AZ vaccine before it was known whether it would pass the clinical trials. In exchange for taking the risk, they got charged a list per-dose price.
Pfizer/Moderna took the risk themselves. There were loans, but those were repaid - a loan is not the same as a subsidy.
There's also a company that turns expired mangoes into a leather substitute. (You know how fibrous mango flesh is when it gets stick between your teeth).
They say it's not as durable as regular leather, not do they show end products. There're also a lot of proprietary non-plant-based additives involved.
What? A high-end model of a few years ago will generallly only be available as a second hand. With a worn-out battery and other parts that are subject to wear.
My previous smartphones were all worn out after about three years, each with a different failure mode. Touch screen became unresponsive; power button broken; volume button broken. I had the one with the broken power button replaced; then I botched a DIY battery replacement, so I was out 100 euros and still had a broken phone. Continued with the broken volume button for half a year.
They were not the very high-end, but not cheap at 350-450 euros a piece.
The patent only describes the trivial part: detecting whether the user is wearing glasses.
"2. The method of claim 1, wherein: the corrective eyewear scenario corresponds to the registered user wearing a corrective eyewear; and the graphical output compensates for a vision deficiency associated with the corrective eyewear scenario and the registered user."
It does not explain at all how the graphical output is supposed to do this correction. I tried to explain that it is essentially impossible.
The idea is that a near-sighted person can take off their glasses and the display will somehow produce an image that is in focus anyway despite being too far away from the person. The whole patent is about how you detect what glasses the user is wearing, which is sort of trivial if you have a phone with a face-ID sensor.
The hard part is making a display that appears to be somewhere else than its physical position. You could achieve that effect by placing a large (Fresnel) lens in front of the screen, but there needs to be some distance (say, at least about the diagonal size of the screen) between the screen and the lens. Also, it would only work if you hold the screen-lens combination at a particular angle.
The least unpractical way to do this is if the device has a telescopic arm holding your prescription glasses about 2 cm n front of your eyes.
Without a lens in front of the screen, you'd need each pixel of the display to emit different intensities in different directions with a fairly high resolution. There is no technology for that.
I don't get all the debates about which time to adopt. Just pick one, it is just a number. Just offset your schedule accordingly. You could actually work with a winter and summer schedule, if your job and family schedule allows it.
For some people that might work. But most will have to deal with office hours, public-transport timetables, daycare hours, and so on. Unless some (but not all) organizations also decide to shift their hours twice a year, in which case it will be great fun to adjust.
Still, a dial-up modem can fit 33.6kbps over a rather noisy phone line with something like 3.4kHz bandwidth. Audio tape has at least double the bandwidth (100Hz-10kHz would be OK to use)
These micro tapes were for voice memos. The article has a response spectrum; it's just 1 kHz - 4 kHz (at the -3 dB points). The signal/noise ratio might also be worse than a telephone line.
I'm reading on how the 14.4 kbps V.32 bis modems of the 1990s worked, which had a similar bandwidth limitation as this cassette player. Seems that it is QAM with some smart preprocessing (Trellis encoding) of the bit stream. For QAM you don't need FFTs; just a sin and cos oscillator and some mechanism to keep he oscillator in the decoder synchronized with the input signal.
Well yes, but if you choose to use an Arduino to do the signal processing, then you could just as well try to squeeze out all performance that you can from the Arduino.
The chosen encoding is very inefficient. I couldn't figure out from a quick read what the actual bit rate is; there are various numbers in kHz, but this encoding needs a lot of bandwidth relative to the bit rate.
I wonder how much bit rate you could squeeze out of a cassette player using a more advanced encoding such as QPSK , QAM, or OFDM. Of course, an interpreted Python script on an Arduino would not be able to do the signal processing in real time. Is there no encoding that can be done efficiently without FFT methods and still work with the given bandwidth?
I suppose a problem with the audio-tape-audio roundtrip is that it may have a frequency-dependent phase shift and wow and flutter that these advanced methods have difficulty with. Although wireless communication also has to deal with quickly changing signal statistics when the device is on the move.
The keypad needs to be a touch screen and the numbers have to be assigned random positions for every use. You can't re-use a one-time key pattern.
How will that protect against a camera recording the keypad? And PIN entry will be very slow, making it easier for shoulder surfers.
People with poor vision will surely appreciate that solution.
The scanner function of Brother network printers is borked if you use Linux. Brother has linux drivers, but they don't work for recent Linux distros (Ubuntu/Mint 2018 and newer), based on experience with three different models of laser printer (old and new models).
I wrote a cgi script on a LAN server running an older Linux version so that I can scan via the network. Maybe they fixed it in the last year; i didn't check for updates.
Well, I live in the Netherlands and we're seeing exponential growth in cases (doubling time 11 days) starting about 10 days after the government abandoned the mandate of social distancing (three weeks ago). It's not as bad as in the South-East US because ~70% of the population is vaccinated (80% of the adults) but I expect the "really nice" part to be ended forcefully within a month.
I'm relieved to hear that the system works for you as a non-EU citizen. I suspected that getting a non-EU vaccination status to work here is a massive PITA.
A tsunami is not a 30 m x 500 km x 1000 km plateau of water.
Tsunamis are formed when a barely noticeable wave of 500 km long and e.g. 10 cm high in deep sea reaches shallow water, where the wave velocity is much smaller. The 500 km becomes much shorter and the height increases proportionally.
Not very different from how breaker waves e formed at the beach.
Are people really too stupid to understand the difference between a "charger" and a "cable"?
Do you understand the difference between a charger and a power supply? A charger is a device that interacts with a battery and regulates voltage and current so that the battery is charged at the appropriate rate and not overcharged. The wall warts that feed your phone are power supplies. The current and voltage regulation is in the phone.
I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato
