brianorca

Spoilers in Connect are not readable when I click them. (White on white) Unless I first select the post so the background in grey.

Because most of what you look at in real life is mundane. But go find a nice sunset or a green forest, and you can appreciate it. When you see a scene in HD or 3D on the screen, there is a heavy selection bias to show you pleasant scenes that most people seldom see in real life. If it was super 4k and 3D, but it was just your same living room you see every day, it would be uninteresting. But the same camera showing a living room in a 10 million dollar house would be interesting. (And the natural views outside even more so, most likely.)

That sounds more like they are excluding most corporate internal systems, (which would also happen to cover the systems run by government.)

People do sometimes get electrocuted in fresh water, but only when a boat in a marina has shore power (120V) and a bad connection of the hot side into the water. This can only occur with shore power, because otherwise the circuit can’t leave to boat. It also doesn’t occur in salt water because salt conducts electricity better than the human body.

An EV battery might have enough voltage, but the current would prefer to travel directly from - to + on the battery itself. You would have to literally get in the way of that for it to affect your body. Most situations where that could happen, such as touching the electrodes directly, would be almost as dangerous even when you are dry. And again, salt water would conduct it much better than your body, therefore bypassing you, as long as you don’t get in the way.

USB PD (Power Delivery) actually does use a higher voltage for more wattage. Standard USB is limited to 5V at 0.5A and sometimes up to 5V @ 2A on quick chargers. But PD chargers can give 20V and 3A for 60w or even 5A (100w) with properly rated cables. There’s even a proposal for up to 48V at 5A to get 240w. This is all determined by a negotiation between the charger, the cable (which does have a small chip for this purpose), and the device, therefore PD chargers must support multiple voltages.

I’d guess it’s easier for the paramedics to jump out when they first arrive on scene. Nothing happening in the back yet, so they can look around and see the situation while rolling in.

I do a lot of code. That means I often deal with three or four programs at the same time, and perhaps 10 loaded throughout the day and I want to see them all. So I have two monitors that are each 27" and 4k.

This means I can see a web browser sized to a full 1080 size, next to a database query, and still see the code that I’m working on, and keep an eye on any new emails or text chats. Without needing to Alt-tab to switch windows. It’s like spreading your work over a dining room table, instead of those little desks you got in high school.

Most apps don’t need to be larger than 1080. But some can be taller to see more code (maybe 160 lines, for example) without scrolling too much. And I hardly ever deal with just one window at a time.

Some of that may not be subjective, even if it is a personal difference. Some need glasses, some don’t get glasses because they just barely need them, and others have problems glasses can’t fix, especially as we age. Some eyes are just different, and that’s physical differences, not just a difference of preference.

The problem is “unsafe websites” is actually a very broad category. Even popular, reputable websites have accidentally hosted malware in the advertisements, some of which can infect without a click.

Also note that before this switch, years were often designated in relation to the founding of a city or by the start of a ruler’s reign. There were always ordinal numbers, so the first year of a reign would be year 1, and there was never a zero, because it was year X of a previous reign.

It’s also the only way that is portable. A professor could evaluate each student, but has no way to transmit that kind of evaluation in a way that schools or employers across the country would trust. They didn’t know who the professor is, or what his standards are, or even if he is being bribed to pass somebody. (Which would happen much more if the professors opinion had the weight that the standardized test does. )

Not zero reason. Some people with certain disabilities could benefit from such a device. (Stephen Hawking for instance, was limited to about 10 words per minute with his button interface. A brain interface on a similar patient could be closer to normal conversion speed.)

It’s like looking through frosted glass. If you’re looking at someone, and trying to figure out what they are doing. Frosted glass means you can kinda see their overall posture, and some big movements. That’s like the skull cap. In order to use it you would have to make large changes in your brain patterns so it can be detected. But put clear glass, even a small window, and you can see exactly. Even a small window on the right place will let you read their lips, or watch their hands. That’s like the implant. Even though the implant reads a very small part of the brain, the data it gets is very clean and gives more precise control to the user.

The Fourier transform is a way to convert from a raw waveform into all of its distinct parts, and back again. Computers do this for some types of sound data compression, such as MP3. Your ears do this (in the cochlea) when converting the physical movement of sound waves into electrical signals for your brain.

There will probably be a new app for the new chairs. You’ll have to upgrade the chair to keep using the app support.

Fun fact: pretty much all the helium we have access to comes from alpha decay of heavier atoms, such as natural uranium. An alpha radiation particle is just a “naked” and fast moving helium nucleus. (Missing the electrons.) When this happens deep in the earth, it quickly runs into something, stops moving, and picks up some electrons to make it helium, which can accumulate in certain rocks.

GMail has an option to snooze an email until a later date. It disappears from your inbox, (but could still be accessed from the snoozed folder) and then shows up again on the requested date.

Orbits are circles or ovals, and the satellite must always be moving to stay in orbit. But the time to go around depends on the distance, so there is a distance where the satellite takes 24 hours to go around, which matches the Earth’s rotation, which is geosynchronous. A subset of these is called geostationary, when the orbit is a circle around the equator, so it stays in the same spot of the sky. (Then we can aim a ground antenna just once and don’t have to adjust it.) Satellites at this distance add 1/4 second delay to any signal because of light speed. This orbit is very tight, since it can not vary in altitude by more than a few hundred meters. (More than that would cause them to drift east or west out of the assigned spot.) There are a limited number of “slots” in this orbit to keep the satellites safely separated and to prevent their signals from overlapping. Most of these are used for communication, especially TV. A few are for weather, as they can watch an entire hemisphere constantly.

Other satellites operate in a lower orbit. Here the orbital period can be as low as 90 minutes. Most of these orbits are inclined so they pass over most of the earth instead of just the equator. The orbit (circle) stays in one angle while the earth rotates underneath. Satellites here get better images because they are closer to Earth, but take a day (or more) to see everything. They also have greatly reduced light speed delays. These orbits eventually decay because of tiny amounts of air at that altitude.

A settlement would cost less, can be kept private, and doesn’t set precedent. Now they have an actual court case judgement, and that does set precedent.

They weren’t always premium. Your local ISP or college often ran a server for their users in the old days.