Definitely. Standards shouldn't specify what kind of backup, just the duration. If they want to use batteries, fine. Generators, fine. Flywheel storage, fine. Compressed air storage, fine. If you can get more than 24 hours of storage, add some solar, and you now have basically an unlimited duration. This is, of course, the ideal answer, where practical.

There are two types of outages. Widespread outages at the transmission level are fairly rare (almost everywhere). Outages at the local level, like substation failures, overhead line damage from car accidents/wind/ice, etc. are not. It doesn't take a massive regional outage to make cell phones unavailable. In urban areas, cell towers cover a radius of only a couple of miles, typically, with lots of dead spots when even a single tower goes down. One bad traffic accident, and thousands of people could lose cell coverage. And those localized localized outages can take way more than four hours to repair.

For cellular phones, you either have the same system or you don't have any way for people to call an ambulance in an emergency. So that argument really doesn't hold water. And for urban towers, it could take you more than four hours to reach the owner of the business whose roof has the tower on it so that you can get access to the premises to connect a generator. So that's also not an entirely safe alternative.

Okay, the news article I read said that it took days to fully restore everything, but that may have been a few fringe places or something.

Either way, mandating 4 hours of backup in response to an event that lasted 15+ hours still seems more than a bit shortsighted.

That may be what sg_oneill meant, but that's not what I meant in the post that sg_oneill was replying to. NotRobot is talking about exactly what I'm talking about — using a tablet for reading sheet music while I sing or play music on an actual physical instrument.

The best part of the Android tablet experience is that MobileSheets lets you have two tablets side-by-side and sync them with Bluetooth so that you can turn two pages at once, so that you get to the spot where the publisher (hopefully) left time to turn before having to deal with it. That costs $320 with basic Android tablets, or $1500 with iPads (or $1660 for iPads with cases to match the Android tablets).

To be fair, I *do* compose music, record music, etc., but I do all of that on my Mac, not on a tablet. Tablets are simply the wrong tool for the job.

For recording, iPads don't have nearly enough storage for recording, and don't provide an easy way to back up locally, which makes giant audio files a no-go.

For composing, I can't imagine doing it without a physical keyboard, because keyboard shortcuts are what make that survivable. And Apple's keyboard for the 13-inch Air is a $280 add-on. Worse, even if you do that, you'll still have a tiny 13-inch screen, which IMO is undesirable. And if you can tolerate a 13-inch screen, a MacBook Neo would still be $400 cheaper than a Wi-Fi Air with keyboard and is vastly more capable.

Also, even though I'm slowly starting to get used to non-discontinued score editing software, 100% of my existing compositions were done in Finale, which has no iPad version at all. So for working with all of that content, an iPad would be basically useless. Given that it was one of the most popular music editing apps for a very long time, I'm not alone in that problem.

On a stone or anything else non-flat, sure, though that's just shy of 50% of the outer surface area of an iPad, and you're keeping it on a music stand with feet that stick out, so I don't exactly like those odds. You might get some protection from the case, but did I mention that the $160 tablet comes with a magnetic folio case, whereas Apple's folio case for the iPad is an $80 add-on? If you add the cost of the case to the cost of AppleCare+, the things you would typically do to make a bad accidental drop not be horribly expensive for the iPad add up to more than the total cost of a basic Android tablet. Ponder that for a moment.

No big deal. Most of the sheet music reader apps offer cloud syncing, etc. And even if I had to redownload them from IMSLP or some publisher/distributor website, re-downloading the dozen or so pieces of music that I'm actively rehearsing at any given moment isn't exactly a huge burden. Or I could buy two, sync them every few weeks when I add new music, and keep them both in my car except when I'm charging one of them. With that approach, I'd be all but guaranteed to have a working one with me at all times even if I drop one and break it, and I'd still pay just a third the cost of the cheapest equivalent 13-inch iPad.

Even if they provide security patches for only three years, you'd still get 18 years out of it and its successors for the price of one iPad. Having to throw it away to install a new major version of Android really isn't a big deal when you're talking about hardware at disposable prices. Also, the likelihood of it actually mattering when I'm using it exclusively as a sheet music reader is basically zero. :-)

And four hours is nowhere near enough. That's less than the average power outage duration in California, for example (4 hours, 16 minutes). And the fact that this was in response to a blackout that lasted days makes me really wonder what they are thinking, unless the assumption is that they will then scramble to bring generators online to provide continuous service. Four hours might work for landline service, where you have one central office per city, but with cell towers spread out everywhere, that doesn't seem nearly as practical.

In an actual emergency, having only four hours of backup could be grim. Mind you, other countries generally aren't any better, but four hours is still woefully inadequate, IMO.

Sheet music != audio. Sheet music readers are PDF readers plus support for Bluetooth foot pedals to turn pages. The most popular app by far is MobileSheets, and it is available on iOS, Android, and Windows.

Yeah, there are subscription services for iPad that have some additional features that could be useful in some environments (e.g. slightly easier distribution of marked-up copies or using your camera to turn pages with facial gestures), but IMO not useful enough to be worth paying a subscription for it, even with my conductor hat on, much less with my individual musician hat on.

The apps on Android are more than good enough, and the literally dozens of people I know who use them are ample proof of that. Meanwhile, the only people I know who use iPads as sheet music readers own them primarily for other reasons, like drawing.

Apple just has zero "basic tablet"-class devices. The Air is pretty and all, but when you're carrying one of these things around every day in high-risk environments, the last thing you want to do is drop an $800 tablet. And that's for the Wi-Fi-only version.

Meanwhile, you can buy a basic 13-inch Android tablet complete with cellular for $160. And if you drop it, you can replace it with another one. And another one. And another one. And then a fifth one. And at that point, you've reached the cost of one iPad Air 13".

And if you leave it somewhere, you can easily locate it, because it has a cellular connection, unlike the $800 iPad Air. You need the $950 version for that. And now you can buy six for the same price instead of five.

It's not just that Apple tablets are a bit too expensive. It's that they're so extraordinarily overpriced that I can't see why anyone in their right minds would buy one unless they have some very specialized use case that can't be done on Android.

Don't get me wrong, the M4 is an amazing chip. Its performance cores' per-core speed is about 4x as fast as the cheap Unisoc chip in that Android tablet, and it has three of them instead of two. So from a pure spec perspective, the iPad wins hands down. But the problem is, most of what people do with these devices is play movies (with hardware codecs, not software). And even for the niche use cases, very few of them require much CPU. The performance per dollar is about equal, but convincing people that a slightly snappier UI is worth spending 6x the price is really, really hard, because for most people, it really isn't.

If I were buying a laptop, I'd buy Apple hands down. I do real workloads on that. It needs to be fast. But for tablets? The speed was basically good enough on my first-generation iPad Mini fourteen years ago. Everything since then has just been performance for the sake of performance, and almost nobody cares. Being faster only matters if you're one of the 3% of users who actually need a faster tablet (and there's an iPad Pro for that anyway).

And thin doesn't matter, either; exactly zero people have a single f**k to give about that outside of Infinite Loop and the donut building. (I am, of course, referring to the one two blocks from Infinite Loop that Apple engineers eat at during late-night hacking sessions because they're open 24 hours, not Apple's new campus; I doubt those folks care about thin, either.)

And all discussions about build quality, reliability, etc. go out the window when price differences approach an entire order of magnitude.

So Apple badly needs a genuine low-end tablet. In my opinion as a stockholder, they've needed one for a really long time. Great phones, great laptops, heinously overpriced tablets. Just my $0.10 (two cents adjusted for the price of Apple's RAM).

Lots of companies, actually. Nearly everybody I know buys them for sheet music. Early adopters still have iPads, but the Android tablets have gotten good enough to do the job and cost less than a fifth as much as the 13-inch iPad Air. So there are two types of people — the ones who want a nice tablet, who spend the extra for an iPad Pro, and the ones who don't care, who buy something that costs $160 on Amazon, knowing that even if they break several of them, they still come out ahead.

I'm part of the solution. I was about to buy an iPad Pro 13-inch, and bought a $160 Android tablet instead. Saved myself $1040. That was right before the price hikes.

They raised prices because they can. The shortage gave them cover.

If Chinese manufacturers can sell an iPad-size Android device with more RAM than an iPad for just $160 retail, this is not about the cost of RAM. Subtract Amazon's 35%, and the total cost of a machine with 40 GB of RAM is no more than $104, and RAM is maybe 5 to 10 percent of that cost, so the wholesale cost of 32 GB of RAM for an iPad is probably no more than $10. And they're cranking up the price by $150. RAM prices did not go up by 1500%.

It is clear to even a casual observer that Apple is just taking advantage of the massively inflated consumer price for the small amount of RAM that isn't being bought up by computer and device manufacturers, and is assuming that users won't be shocked to see their computer prices go up comparably. But those of us who have a clue recognize that the reason for retail price increases is that companies like Apple have multi-year contracts for nearly all the RAM, and the folks selling parts at retail are getting what's left over. I can pretty much guarantee Apple's prices aren't fluctuating nearly as much.

So of that $150, probably about $145 will show up as increased profits.

Guess I'll hold on to my M1 MacBook Pro and my iPhone 15 Pro for a few years longer. I was thinking about upgrading. Now I'm not. And I bought an Android tablet instead of an iPad two weeks ago because the prices were already way too high for what you get. Apple is pricing themselves out of the market, even for folks like me who have used Apple hardware exclusively since the mid-1990s and have high disposable income.

Selling fewer and fewer products at higher and higher prices is exactly why Apple nearly went bankrupt in the 1990s. This is not a winning strategy. They've tried this before.

Epigenetically, yes, actually. The extent to which this affects immunity is unclear, however.

In the context of a thread about the common cold having been eradicated for hundreds of years, that's "not being exposed at all". My assumption is that such a thing would happen through vaccination that eventually results in the case count reaching zero, and after a period of time, the vaccination being phased out, at which point the virus in question would no longer be circulating. If that's not what was meant by the original premise, then that's an entirely different question.

And if that number is zero...

Lifetime reduction in severity for the first kind of flu you are exposed to as a kid. Yes, I'm aware of how this stuff works. And yes, I know about Yamagata. And in a couple of hundred years, if Yamagata suddenly got reintroduced, it would be bad, because nobody would have been exposed to it. That was my point.

That likely depends on whether you should reasonably have noticed them in time.

Either way, though, your comment misses the point. If I understand correctly, the taller hoods were correlated with a higher rate of pedestrian injury temporally based on the number of vehicle sales in a given year, rather than directly, based on the type of vehicle causing each reported injury or death.

Assuming that is correct, then it is worth noting that something else also started happening in 2009: smartphone sales skyrocketed. The iPhone got people's attention in 2007, but smartphones didn't start becoming really popular until the price drop in late 2008, combined with the subsequent release of Android devices in late 2008. The LTE rollout in about 2010 to 2012 also pushed prices down, which accelerated the momentum. So unless that correlation was adjusted for, it seems entirely possible that the correlation is spurious, and that distracted pedestrians are the primary culprit, rather than hoods, in which case we could spend huge amounts of time and money making hoods shorter again, and it could make zero difference.

No, but I do keep my luggage in my shoe.

Language is fun.

Actually, the GP may have worded it in an appallingly insensitive way, but the answer is correct. There is no safe way for cars and pedestrians to be in the road at the same time. The way you fix pedestrian safety is by:

• Requiring all traffic light pedestrian cycles to give pedestrians complete control over the entire intersection (all directions), with no turns, for a period of time (a.k.a. pedestrian scramble intersections).
• Regularly ticketing pedestrians who cross when it isn't their turn.

That's it. If you do this, every single pedestrian death that doesn't involve the car physically leaving the roadway and driving on a sidewalk becomes the pedestrian's fault, because pedestrians can never be in the road when cars are moving, and vice versa.

It is also more efficient for traffic overall on every street that doesn't have a dedicated right turn lane (or left in the U.K.). Instead of pedestrians forcing cars to wait to turn right, which forces the straight traffic to wait behind those cars, reducing the number of cars that get out from dozens to as few as one or two, the cars get their entire traffic cycle to themselves. And because pedestrians are crossing in every direction at once:

• It likely adds up to only a bit more time than the turn blocking chaos for the cycle in one direction, and far less than their impact on both directions combined.
• It means that the car cycles can be shorter, rather than having to extend them to allow pedestrians to cross, which means the overall total cycle time doesn't increase much, if any.
• If pedestrians have to cross both ways, their travel time is reduced (and it is better for cyclists, too, assuming you allow them to carefully use the intersection during this time), albeit with potentially more latency for pedestrians if they are crossing only in one direction.

But it only works if you do it consistently at every intersection in a city and then enforce it consistently by ticketing every pedestrian who crosses against a don't walk sign. Otherwise, you get pedestrians who make a habit of crossing when they shouldn't, and sometimes they get hit by cars. But if you do these things, plus adding some parking garages and eliminating road-side parking, you should be able to cut out about 99% of pedestrian deaths.