I'm slightly skeptical - and hopefully my skepticism can be easily answered. But my skepticism has to do with measurement biases.

I read what I could of the scientific publication, but I'm not experienced at reading these things - so I'm also skeptical about my skepticism. My thoughts range around the following:

• [A] Differential aging between the masked (covered) pixels and the exposed pixels over time
• [B] Whatever cloud of stuff surrounds New Horizons - expelled maneuvering propellant, off-gassing of plastics, etc. reflecting light from the sun.
• [C] Low level noise effects from other EM-spectrum that might be affecting the sensor at the extreme low levels of measurement involved here.

I would think that these would at least be considered by the researchers and taken into account. This kind of stuff seems like pretty basic concerns to me - largely covered by accurately calibrating the instrument (the telescope.)

In the meantime, I'll take a bit of childish (and ignorant) joy in mumbling dark light to myself.

I'm not going down the tin-foil hat rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.

I'm just looking at the reasons given:

• Bad cell phone service
• Logging into the app
• questions

QUESTIONS are a user-error?

This calls into question the competence of the Iowa Democratic party at a state wide level. As an organization. As a political party. Someone should take the existing leadership off to the side and tell them they should spend the next few summers running a lemonade stand.

I can't even imagine how such a thorough screw up can even satisfy any conspiracy theory.

I really don't care if lots of craptastic apps leave iOS (or any platform.) The sheer number of craptastic apps leaves me unwilling to try most any app - just because the likelihood of it being craptastic is as close enough to certainty as to make the effort to even look for an app to satisfy some need a completely wasted effort if there is any workaround at all.

Y2K? Meet IoT

This is why we can't have nice things.

So, is Parkeon paying for this?

I barely watch these services as it is. If a service starts interrupting my viewing of something, I drop the service. I tried to watch CBS All Access for the new Star Trek series - but the advertisements were so foul that I dropped CBS and won't be going back. Ever.

I do have a Netflix subscription (that's the ONE I barely watch.) I justify it as supporting my children. But if they make it unwatchable to me, I'll drop it.

I know I'm a bit extreme - but over the course of my life, people have been adopting my perspective more and more. These services are replaceable commodities.

And just think of what Disney's movie distribution model was for decades - they'd bring out their "classics" rarely. People got used to NOT seeing them. That can happen again.

To me, LinkedIn is an example of horrible bad design and practice for the following reasons:

• They've demonstrated bad security practices over the years like no other (surviving) organization
• They'll spam your throw-away email identities with connection requests

Most of the people I know of who have used LinkedIn for developing their career could have used other mechanisms and gotten better results for the same effort.

We're not at Peak Cellphone but the only new customers are young people buying their first phone (or having it bought for them by their parents.) There are people who have chosen to NOT have a cell phone - and those people aren't going to change their minds much. And there are people who can't afford a cell phone - and that's not likely to change much. The time of easy growth is long gone.

And the time of easy feature based growth is closing too - because most new features offer only small marginal benefits over a relatively new phone. Vendors are caught between improving their phones interfaces to support some of those marginal benefits and alienating their customers. Smartphone interfaces aren't as terrible as they once were and real improvements are harder to achieve.

It all gets down to what do people use these devices for. And for all the apps and features available - most people don't drift outside of the intrinsic functions of texting, photos, calendaring, web browsing, navigating, and a few other apps like social networking, a few games, and maybe a job related app (if you're a sales-drone.)
Really, do you use your phone any differently (qualitatively or quantitatively) more this season than last season? Are any of your apps lagging behind? The app vendors know better than to drive away their customers.

I think that the big question is whether partial disconnect scales.

Consider what happens when solar batteries become exhausted - and the need for a backup (grid or on-site generator) comes into play - and the cause is widespread due to reasons like:

• Long period of inclement weather - such as weeks of grey cloudy days in a northern winter.
• Sudden end-of-life of batteries or dimiminishing capacity - because so many were installed in a short period of time.
• Hacked systems because the controls are connected to the Internet

Bear in mind that there is no longer one Electric Company anymore. The industry has been broken up into Generation, Transmission Systems, and Retail (or local) delivery. Each are owned by separate corporate interests. None of them are going to want to support maintaining excess capacity, even if they're paid to.

And like the Great Recession, the systems and procedures for dealing with a sudden surge in demand because of a widespread event are not going to be well designed, maintained, or tested.

Consider what'll happen if several counties need to resort to a backup mechanism suddenly. Transmission lines will be overwhelmed. On-site generators will fail - or will operate inefficiently and produce enormous pollution. If they're fed by natural gas, the natural gas system will be overwhelmed too.

Solutions to this would require more invasive government regulation of battery systems, backup generators, etc. than people who classically want to go "off grid" would tolerate.

Actually, the TI-58/TI-59 opcode set. I think earlier Texas Instruments TI calculators in the 5x series shared opcodes - but I'm not sure.

Think of it as an adjustable Harvard machine architecture. Programming in a language that was written like APL (special keyboard) and read like machine language.

Just stand on the edge of the moon and drop the rocks off. Easy peasy.

Silly (and unfair) snark aside, not only would you need to (minimally) reach escape velocity from the moon, you'd have to change the orbit of the rock about the earth such that it wasn't nearly circular (as the moon's is.) Once you start layering on additional rockets (or solar powered ion drives or whatever) onto the rock, it's not a rock anymore.

Seriously ... these outages are usually caused by the organization itself, either by an immediate technical mistake, or when a minor glitch cascades into something major due to a design flaw.

I'm sure Amazon is a constant target of hackers, both pimply faced youths and of shady state-sponsored black-hats. But taking out Amazon isn't a very interesting goal.

The California law REQUIRES the automobile to USE the bike lane to make the right hand turn.

Michigan law FORBIDS the automobile from using the bike lane (except to cross it.)

I can believe other states are even more complicated..

If you're REALLY obsessed by this, force using IPv6 on your WiFi network.

Not only are IPv6 addresses typically NOT NAT'd (they'll share a prefix that's ISP dependent but not the whole address), but properly configured devices will vary their IPv6 addresses over time.

Of course, this solution will break other parts of your App/Web experience - especially if you disable IPv4 on your WiFi. And it's going to require you to build your own router. But FreeBSD with two ethernet ports does that just fine - and I suppose Linux could be beat into shape to do so too.

Yes, my question sounds elitist and perhaps naive. But I've been driving a vehicle with My Ford Touch for three years. It's only when you think that there is no value to an Infotainment system over a simple AM/FM radio with an aux-input will you be at ease with My Ford Touch.

I don't use My Ford Touch extensively. If anything, I use it very lightly - and it still fails to satisfy purpose. I don't sync my phone contacts with the car - my contacts are precious to me, and they don't belong on a vehicle that gets a few recall service visits a year. The car came with SiriusXM and a 1 year subscription, which I tried twice and was deeply unimpressed by. Most of my driving is local, so the built-in GPS system is useless, and GPS systems in a smart-phone will always be more advanced and useful than whatever gets baked into the frozen technology of an automobile. (And the GPS system refused to recognize a valid postal address in my area.) The GPS system isn't worth $149/year for something that comes free with a smart phone.

Even the AM/FM radio part is seriously flawed. It refuses to restart the FM radio when the car powers up if the FM station is HD.

Being able to play from a USB stick is nice - except that when the car restarts, the Infotainment system looses track of where it is, and when it reaches the end of an album, it will resume playing from the "first" album - where non-alphabetic characters in the album name sort before alphabetic characters. I'm VERY tired of listening to "Cats".

The heat/AC, backup camera, and various plugin-hybrid controls are also integrated with the Infotainment system. Fortunately, they don't seem to be impacted much by the flaws - although they do have flaws of their own.

My Ford Touch is fine as a proof-of-concept done by high school kids. It should have never been released to the public.