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eli5_tech_data

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{ "a_id": [ "dbuns7l", "dbunw2c", "dbup34d", "dbuo2f1" ], "text": [ "It's more that we're really good at picking up subtle mistakes in humans, and fantasy beasts have no reference, so its a lot harder for them to look wrong.", "Probably because we are so adapted to human skin/tone/etc. that our brains can pick out what is real and what is fake. Since we can't actually conceptualize what alien skin would be, real or fake is no different to us. Think about it like being scared as a child by a man dressed in a costume, over time we learn and accept that it is fake and not a threat (except clowns fuck that shit).", "When was the last time you compared an Orc IRL to WoW?", "It's a phenomenon known as the uncanny valley. We are very good at noticing when something is off with our fellow human beings." ], "score": [ 34, 11, 7, 7 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbuq0qt", "dbuqstj" ], "text": [ "In a 1080p screen each pixel is represented by four individual points of light, one for each color and two for green. However when projecting 1080p video on a 4K screen you have 16 individual points of light for each pixel. This gives you a lot more room to play with. If you just map it naively you end up with a crispier image since there now is less distance between the pixels. However you have room for some filters on top which can interpolate the additional pixels from the surrounding pixels depending on the context. So an intelligent algorithm will find out where you want a smoother gradient and where you want a crispier line.", "Besides what people are saying about upscaling interpolation. It may just be a better tv, the same way an excellent 1080p will look better than a Westinghouse UHD tv. Another option is vibrant picture settings, like added sharpness and enhanced color, which while they give you what the picture is supposed to look like, it makes it more eye catching." ], "score": [ 9, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dburxe8", "dbursr8", "dbuuxnd", "dbuutes", "dbuy0vg", "dbuxrff", "dbuyci8", "dbuy3lo", "dbuxujv", "dbuxyrh", "dbuyev3", "dbuy1ya", "dbux4mj" ], "text": [ "It mainly has to do with the monopoly that ISP's hold over different areas. Most people have one choice for their internet provider. It's not like you can switch to a different company if you aren't happy with their shit service. Another thing is that the capacity for fast internet exists it's just that they have no reason to give it to you. My city recently became a prospective city for google fiber and TWC immediately upgraded our 20mb/s connection (maximum available) to 100mb/s for free and also started offering 200mb/s and 300mb/s for not much extra. They're also doing everything they can lawsuit wise to keep google fiber out of the city", "Verizon has the best coverage, but it's not the fastest, I'm visiting family in Atlanta and I get > 110Mbps on T-Mobile. Though, I'm on their Wi-Fi as [it's much faster]( URL_0 ) (he's an exec at HP so gotta have fast Internet). 90% of the answer is because they can. 10% of the answer is because money, America is huge, and dense, so having to have thousands/millions of cell towers spread across the country and having hundreds in a single city is expensive in regards to renting out the land, supplying enough data per tower, etc.", "Of all of the countries to use as an example, you use Australia? They still have a good chunk of the country on dialup since it's such a large region but has only six or so metropolitan areas. Really, America's internet speeds aren't that bad. They're not #1 but I think they were in the top 10. Meanwhile, Australia is still trying to build a fiber network but its own government keeps sabotaging it", "Several reasons: 1. there's little or no competition in most markets. 2. the cost of starting up puts it out of reach for most companies. Even Google is growing insanely slow due to the cost of laying new lines 3. we've got other problems. My Internet is reliable (like 95%+ uptime) and fast enough (50 Mb) for just about anything my family of 4 needs for $65 a month. The only way things are going to change is if we make a widespread political effort to change it and frankly, my efforts there are better spent on other issues.", "Speeds are so slow because the telecom industry in America is a monopoly. In certain areas you only have one choice for a provider, so why would they spend money to improve their services if you don't have any other choice? The telecom industry has been vigorously lobbying and filing lawsuits to prevent competition. Things like poles, switches, and boxes (the kind you find outside) are owned and rented out. Lawsuits have been thrown around to prevent other companies from using those utilities which makes it hard to compete. Telecom companies also sign deals with the cities themselves. If the city attempts to provide their own internet they would get sued. The only reason Google Fiber was able to become a thing is because Google could afford to build their own utilities and fight in court with a chance of winning. The American telecom industry is the poster child of corruption and bad morals and ethics. They are not satisfied with their 97% profit margins and don't care one bit about making the world a better, more connected place. It is because of Google Fiber that companies like Comcast are finally starting to improve their networks, because it is clear to both sides that the moment Google Fiber is available everybody will jump ship. These companies are fully aware of what they are doing and how damaging they are and are terrified that their monopoly will end.", "Most people here simply do not understand how absurdly expensive running fiber is here in the US. A lot of it is all the codes and standards, environmental protections etc. Just to give you an example. When we tried to build a single fiber run to a local school, the cost was $75,000. We got an estimate for wiring the entire small city for fiber (every home) and it came out to about $35 million. That's for about 15,000 people. That's almost $2400 per person if every single one of those 15,000 signs up. That's just the fiber and equipment, no bandwidth to backhaul providers, etc. And this involves no big greedy corporations who just want to charge you a ton of money because they are evil and diabolical as is the common belief on Reddit. And in the real world, this notion that bandwidth costs nothing is simply untrue. Sure there are some companies that trade bandwidth. So long as they are both sending each other the same amount of data each way, they don't charge each other for that mutual bandwidth. But its not very common for ISPs. The US is very vast and has lot of mountains in many areas. Those long distances cost a huge amount of money to cover, as do areas like mountains. So take the endless claims that it's all about big greedy corporations with a grain of salt. Feel free to do some research and see how much it would cost you if you were to build your own fiber network non-profit and you will see for yourself.", "You won't get 200Mbps on Telstra LTE most of the time unless you're very lucky. First of all, the guy is in Melbourne, speedtesting to a Telstra server. Telstra has its HQ in Melbourne, and they have very strong mobile reception here (plus in other cities). But outside of the bigger cities, or even in the suburbs, the mobile cells are further spaced out, so there's more congestion and generally the speeds drop off a bit. It is pretty good though, I'm currently getting 85Mbps inside my house (Melbourne suburbs, about 8km from the CBD). Telstra is a world leader in LTE technology, they're investing a lot of money in it. If you moved to another carrier, you wouldn't get as good service. However the fixed line internet in Australia is nowhere near as good, as other commenters have said. Also, mobile data is expensive here, especially with Telstra (best network, so they charge more). You get 10GB on a $120/month plan with an iPhone 7 (unlimited talk and text). And when you go over the 10GB, it doesn't throttle your speed, you get charged at a $10/GB rate. Source: I'm currently doing an internship at Telstra :)", "LOL, sure you can get those speeds in Aus, but i mean you have a max of like 25GB before you start paying $10 per GB over that. Source: Am an internet seller man", "America is where the technology is developed. As a result it's usually the first country to get things and gets technology 1.0. As the technology gets deployed people figure improvements, better ways to do stuff, upgrades, etc and technology 2.0 is developed. Usually this updated technology is deployed in the rest of the world after the USA. So why don't you just upgrade the technology? Well, upgrading usually costs more money, and technology 1.0 tends to be good enough. BTW, this doesn't just refer to LTE cell phones, but to credit card chips (which most of the world had before us), and other stuff that's deployed first to the US and later to the world.", "I work for T-Mobile as a project manager. We are the fastest in our area and many others but it really depends on the spectrum owned by the carrier. The US government (FCC) Is in charge of dividing up the available spectrum via auctions. 5MHZ of additional spectrum can cost billions of dollars per market (geographic area). That's the reason he carriers are always trying to merge or buy each other out. It isn't the towers, customers, or equipment. It's the spectrum. The carrier with the most bandwidth owns the speed and thus owns the customers. It's a vicious game.", "There's an Adam Ruins Everything on this. If I remember correctly the TLDR is that since the govt thought that I'd all be just a fad, they didn't stop monopalization- There's barely any competition so no pressure to get any better.", "Collusion. Companies spend the absolute bare minimum they need to maintain their networks and strike deals amongst themselves so as not to have to compete with anyone else. When someone like Google Fiber comes into the market, they use lawyers and politicians to help keep them out and protect their fiefdoms.", "The geographical area that is covered in other countries is is tiny compared to in the US. Even in countries that are larger than 1/50th of the US, they still only supply internet to their larger cities and metropolitan areas. Also, CDMA is an anti-competitive technology. Verizon is a CDMA company in the US. Everywhere else, GSM (Like T-Mobile and AT & T) is mandated and pretty much open to competitive forces which improve service and decrease consumer costs." ], "score": [ 423, 321, 235, 52, 22, 13, 9, 8, 8, 6, 3, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [ "http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/1916489877" ], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbuum0h" ], "text": [ "If you were placed in a sealed room with no pipes to the surface it would be like placing a bag over your face and waiting to suffocate. Eventually through breathing the oxygen level would drop and carbon dioxide levels will rise, you will feel sick, possibly dying if you stay long enough. For mines, underground parking and so on it's important to pump out the toxic air and replace it with fresh air from the outside, especially if oxygen supply is a concern. The reason underground areas need ventilation systems as opposed to say a highrise building is that there is no wind or natural airflow in those underground environments. If there was there would be no need for ventilation." ], "score": [ 5 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbv646p" ], "text": [ "The streaming services collect all the money from subscriptions and ads, then each artist is paid their percent of the total streams. If there's only 100 streams that months, and Taylor Swift songs account for 10 of those, she gets 10% of the revenue that month. When you break it down, each streamed song gives the artist about $0.007. Spotify' analytics break this down better if you want to see their total streams and their policies and stuff. This is sad because then that sliver of he pie is broken down even more and divvied up between the record label, management, legal, and THEN the artist, which ends up being a fraction of a sliver of not a whole lot of money for your art. Which is still better than stealing the music, but not as good as actually buying the product and seeing your favorite artists live." ], "score": [ 9 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbv6wz0" ], "text": [ "Because you need the microphone to be right next to your ear for it to work. If the phone is in your pocket, it can't pick up the exact sounds it needs to cancel, because the sound at your hip is slightly different than at your ear. Additionally, there is the delay caused by the wire which would likely cause the cancellation noise to be too late to be effective. And then there is also that the headphone has dedicated hardware, allowing it to work very quickly, the phone does not, introducing an additional source of latency that greatly reduces its effectiveness. *Edit: Spelling" ], "score": [ 11 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbv7856", "dbvdj0r", "dbvhfqm", "dbvh7vq", "dbvntjk", "dbvh2wn", "dbvn4mq", "dbvew3z" ], "text": [ "Nobody likes Norton because it is a resource hog that slows your computer down. It doesn't effectivly do it's job. Norton's CEO even admits that it only gets 40% of viruses at best. So why would people pay outrageous for a program that slows down their computer, and only does less than half the job. Stick with Microsoft Essentials; it is free and makes sense that Microsoft would know the in's and out's of their own code better than some 3rd party like norton. Norton is a complete waste of money.", "A good antivirus program is like having an amazing immune system. A bad antivirus program is like having severe, debilitating allergies.", "Back in the day Norton was the only game in town. Time were much simpler and it was a product that did one job and did it well. It's been a bloated POS for 20 years. It spreads it's tentacles into every nook and cranny of your system. I'm still salty about having to remove it piece-by-piece one time in 1999. Their endpoint AV, which is installed on company computers and controlled by the sysadmin, is pretty good. Very little resource usage and it seems to catch most things. Can't speak to how easy it is to use from the admin perspective but as a user I really didn't notice it was there. A final note; *Antivirus software is your last line of defense.* If you're worried about security there are many layers that go on top of the AV. Edge firewalls, OS firewalls, email filtering, ad blocking, DNS filtering, etc. If you're counting on *any* AV to protect you you're doing it wrong. A final, final note: [Norton's DNS service]( URL_0 ) is free for home users and seems pretty good at blocking malicious sites. Pick a protection level and plug those DNS addresses into your router. That way when your browser sends a request to resolve URL_1 Norton's name servers send back a \"Nope, this site ain't safe.\"", "There are a multitude of reasons that Norton is infamous, the most common of which is its malware style behavior when attempting to get you to resubscribe. It was basically windows 10. The last thing you want in an anti-malware program is for it to pester the shit out of you like malware itself does. To answer your second question without any intention of endorsement, malware-bytes is, in my opinion, the most effective available free anti-malware software. Like most consumer products, you get what you pay for.", "From earlier this year: [Google Found Disastrous Symantec and Norton Vulnerabilities That Are ‘As Bad As It Gets’]( URL_0 ) That is, installing Norton/Symantec has been **actively making users horribly less secure**. The one thing that article didn't mention was exactly how many years it's been doing this. > Given it's so notoriously bad for some reason, how come sales reps at electronics stores push it so hard? Norton is a business that cares about money above all else. Your security is near the bottom of their list. Prepackaging and partnering is a pretty central part of their business (\"first one's free\" (or really cheap) is their favorite thing). So they have a business deal with Best Buy to push Norton installs. That's all.", "I'd suggest MalwareBytes over Norton. It's free and reliable. Not only that, but there's a mobile app for your phone (at least for Samsungs) that does more than \"clean your phone.\"", "It acts like a virus. Sales reps are paid on commission, they usually get very little commission on the actual computer, they make tons of commission on anti virus and other accessories.", "People are stupid and stupid people just keep using stuff that works badly. Or making other people use it. The one that works very well is Frisk software F-Protect. It is much better at finding everything and includes an Artificial Intelligence engine for stopping things acting like a virus even with no positive ID." ], "score": [ 218, 33, 30, 27, 6, 4, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [ "https://dns.norton.com/configureRouter.html", "maliciousfuckersinc.com.cn" ], [], [ "http://fortune.com/2016/06/29/symantec-norton-vulnerability/" ], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbvex5u", "dbvytvq", "dbveim5", "dbvqaq3" ], "text": [ "It's quite simple. Advertisers pay money to Google/Youtube for the rights to show an advertisement before (or during) a video. Google/Youtube takes a cut of the revenue, and the Youtuber earns the rest. The amount advertisers are willing to pay in terms of cost per click or cost per view, is dependent on many factors, including but not limited to: - The popularity of the Youtuber / video - The target audience of the Youtuber / video - How competitive (from an advertiser perspective) the video is (or its associated keywords are) Certain videos are not eligible for monetization (so Youtubers typically won't earn ad revenue from them). This includes, for example, many videos depicting nudity or sex and videos containing extremely foul language or controversial / offensive topics. If a video contains commercial music, sometimes the music publisher or record label will file a copyright claim over the video and instead of taking it down will request the Youtuber's revenue share instead. So, in these cases, the Youtuber is not penalized but also does not earn ad revenue from the video. Youtubers also make lots of money (much more than standard ad revenue) by negotiating product placement deals directly with advertisers to personally use and/or promote a product (such as a mobile app, web service, gadget, etc.) within their video.", "My girlfriend is a popular YouTube creator (currently between 150k-250k subscribers). There are three core ways YouTubers make money. (1.) YouTube AdSense: - This is purely getting paid for views on videos, because there are ads on videos, such as display ads (the ads next to the video), overlay ads (ads that pop up at the bottom on the videos), and skippable and non-skippable video ads before the actual content. Depending on the time of the year, the amount a creator is making is roughly between $1 to $2 per 1,000 views. YouTube does this because they are getting a cut of the revenues that the advertiser is paying for on the videos. Some videos are not \"monetizable\", so the creator will not earn anything for the views. This is generally because of offensive content within the video. (2.) Sponsored Content: - This is advertising within the video itself. This form of advertising can occur in many different forms, but a few examples would include companies paying for their products to be featured in videos, merely having the products mentioned in a video, or saying something along the line of \"this video is brought to you by [XYZ Company].\" (3.) Selling Branded Products: - This one is pretty obvious. Selling t-shirts, stickers, hats, etc. My girlfriend is only involved in (1.) & (2.) at the moment, and she made ~$50k in 2016. Each community within YouTube is different, but in her sphere, the majority of earnings come from sponsored content with AdSense being a nice bonus.", "Companies pay to advertise on YouTube, YouTube gives a portion of that money to the uploader of videos with ads on them. The amount companies pay to advertise depends on a bunch of factors, like views of course, if it's skippable after 5 or 15 seconds, how many comments/likes the video gets, etc.", "The ad makers pay YouTube to put their ads on YouTube videos. YouTube keeps a portion of that money (around 30% I think) and then pays the youtuber based on how many views they get. For a non-partnered youtuber, it's about 10 views for 1 cent, 100 views for 10 cents, 1,000 views for $1, and $2,000 for 1 million views (these are all estimates, it varies a lot). I'm not sure how different it is for partnered YouTubers, but I think it depends more on who they're partnered with. It also depends on your viewer base, and more specifically, how many viewers have Adblock. On videos over 10mins you can put extra ads, and therefor some extra money." ], "score": [ 126, 13, 4, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbvwrp6", "dbvvki6", "dbwnmen" ], "text": [ "If you're suffocated by being locked in a small box, it's not actually the lack of oxygen which is the problem. Normally the cycle is 20.9% oxygen, 0.04% CO2 in, then 16% oxygen 4% CO2 is exhaled. Inhaling 1% is very uncomfortable, \"stuffy\" air. 7%-10% CO2 is toxic and will lead to suffocation *even if there's sufficient oxygen*. Excess CO2 will change blood pH and the body can't handle that. So if you exhaled into a bag along with a tank of pure O2, well you could add the equivalent of +4% pure O2 on one side and vent out 4% of the volume of gas on the other side, but the CO2 mixed into the air so you don't remove the 4% CO2. No, the new CO2 level after partial venting is 3.84%, still toxic. So we're got 3 problems here: 1. We can't maintain breathable air by just adding O2. 2. You can't breathe pure O2 when diving either, O2 is toxic at the increased pressures experienced while diving. We can't dilute it with CO2 either, it can ONLY be diluted with nitrogen or (rarely) with helium. 3. We don't want to waste any volume of air here other than the CO2, but we can't just vent CO2 selectively. Not only would we waste the remaining 16% O2, but a larger volume of inert nitrogen too, and we don't want to carry a huge volume of nitrogen. Same's true for spacecraft. Spacecraft can't tolerate high O2 either because it makes everything super-flammable. What we have is a CO2 scrubber of lithium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide. These adsorb ONLY CO2 from the air and form a carbonate, this does reduce the volume of air and and equivalent volume of O2 can be added. The nitrogen (78% on Earth, varies in diving and space ships) is not consumed nor regenerated. The CO2 is literally \"scrubbed\" out.", "Humans don't exhale solely waste gasses - in reality, there is still some oxygen in the gas mix that you breath out. Rebreathers function by allowing this gas to be recycled, adding appropriate amounts of oxygen from the tank to the recycled air, and by filtering out gasses such as CO2 (IIRC). I can't give you any exact numbers, but this is my understanding from reading the Wikipedia page a while back.", "I'm a certified rebreather diver. I dive the Poseidon MKVI and 7. The rebreather machine is basically a Nitrox mixing machine on my back. One of the small bottles is 100% O2. The other is regular air. On the surface it feeds me the pure O2. As I dive it blends more and more air into the system to keep the gas safe to breath. The breathing system is a closed loop. Bubbles only exit the system when I use the gas for buoyancy purposes. The O2 will get used up by my body to survive so there is a sensor that automatically replaces the O2 as my body metabolizes it. The CO2 my body produces is deadly so there is a chemical in the system that absorbs that CO2. That's called the scrubber. Mine is a prepackaged sodalime chemical that I can buy at any rebreather specific dive shop. That's about it. Rebreathers are great. They are totally silent. Fish don't run away when they see you. They seem to think you are just another fish instead of a bubble spewing monster. One very small 2L tank of O2 can last me three - four hours of diving. If you dive with regular divers that ends up being an entire weekend of 2 tank diving." ], "score": [ 91, 5, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbvoph3" ], "text": [ "When you swipe your card, the machine is reading information on the card. One of the things it reads is a little message that says \"Hey! I have a chip on me!\" Now the machine knows, so it tells you to use the chip." ], "score": [ 48 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbvom3m" ], "text": [ "The C compiler will craft a request to the operating system to assign an available memory location to hold an integer. When it's time to store a number there, the CPU will put an electric signal on its address bus pins equal to the binary address of that memory location, and a signal on its data bus pins equal to the binary version of the number 5, and then briefly electrify the \"Store\" pin to tell the memory subsystem to accept this write request." ], "score": [ 7 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbvpq8r", "dbvzxmi", "dbvq4h3" ], "text": [ "This might be a snarky response but: have you purchased any 30-40$ mobile games? If you can play a game for free, what you are playing is what someone could create on a fairly small budget, in a fairly small studio, and then sell to investors in order to produce. Most of these games are riddled with ads and microtransactions because those provide a source of income that is lost by not charging players for the initial purchase. Games with an initial charge make their money through game sales; those with very low costs rely either on volume or on other methods to pay for the costs of development. Triple-A hand-held games, like Pokemon, are developed and marketed by companies that are usually very large and have entire teams dedicated to promoting the game; they also cost more to buy up-front. Finally, note that while the gameplay may be limited in \"free\" games, the graphics and potential are much better than older handheld systems, with social capabilities that those older systems lacked due to the connected nature of smartphones.", "touch-screens are horrible for most games. Gameboy is way better. A solid set of buttons for controls is how games are meant to be played and CPU power does not make the game. Style of game-play does", "I assume because most mobile developers want to make as much money as possible. This means the target audience are largely nongamers. The best games that anyone can play are simple and repetitive to get as many people as addicted as possible. Complex stories, concepts, and challenges would largely scare away nongamers. In contrast, things like gameboy games need to be geared towards a gamer. Instead of just a way to spend $5 or waste 5 minutes, gamers want a deep and rich experience, something that will make you care about what's going on in the game world and get immersed in it." ], "score": [ 21, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbvvbzc" ], "text": [ "Regular eyesight has a resolution equivalent to around __576 megapixels.__ This is the resolution that must be matched in order for VR to appear 100% real. (Although lower resolutions might suffice, too.)" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbw4z5c" ], "text": [ "Your cable company is compressing the signal. Over-the-air transmissions are 100% pure, uncompressed video signals." ], "score": [ 8 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbw63s0", "dbwctv7", "dbwcyg5" ], "text": [ "The key difference: With a credit card, the *card issuer* must fight to get *its* money back. With a debit card, *you* must fight to get *your* money back. If you report your card lost or stolen before any fraudulent transactions occur, your liability is zero. Many credit cards promise zero liability for all fraudulent transactions. ... The real difference between a debit card and a credit card when it comes to fraud is in how you get your money back. Having zero liability is safer than having liability, so credit is safer.", "A debit card is connected directly to your bank account. All the money on that card is money you already own. When you swipe a debit card, you're taking money directly out of your own bank account, immediately. So if a debit card is stolen, that person has access to all the money in your bank. A credit card is an I.O.U. to your bank. When you swipe a credit card, you're not paying any money at all; your bank is paying for whatever you're buying. Then at the end of the month, your bank will send you a bill for all the money it paid for when you swiped that card, and you pay it all at once out of your own bank account. If a credit card is stolen, that person has access to your bank's money, not yours. The big difference here is, if someone tries to spend a lot of money with the card, and your bank notices it and stops the card from being used, it's easier for them to say \"you don't have to pay us back for that time someone else used your credit card\" and remove the item from your bill, than it is for them to sort out which of the money in your bank account was spent by you, and which was spent by someone else.", "A couple reasons, that boil down to: debit cards are direct access to your money. Credit cards earn money from you (or, more money) so the companies are more likely to offer competitive offers such as charge-back insurance, which is basically when you tell Visa or MasterCard \"Hey, I didn't authorize Joe the mechanic to charge me that much, he was only supposed to do an oil change and report back but he went ahead and did $1300 of work and billed it to me\" and Visa goes \"I see, you've been a loyal customer, we believe you\" and unless Hal really thinks he has a case, it goes away. Another way it protects you is if, for some reason, someone has your card(s) and your PIN(s), the credit card has a delay and limit. If you check your online data every week or so, you'd see suspicious activity before it was deducted from your \"real money\" in the bank. But if the thief had your debit card, he might just empty your account and when you went to use your money, you'd find you had no money and it might be days or weeks before the bank 1) opens up and 2) does something about it. With the credit card, first you could have the charges reversed/canceled, and if for some reason that failed you could sever the relationship between your bank and the credit card company before the charges went through and deal with it through court. If you're not on the ball and only check your shit every few months, you'll be hosed no matter what." ], "score": [ 12, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbwhrdn", "dbwk1uu", "dbwhovn" ], "text": [ "They were floppy when they were first created. If you look at URL_0 , which has the three most common sizes of floppy disks, the largest (8-inch) and the middle (5.25-inch) ones are housed in flexible plastic. By the time the smallest (3.5-inch) version, which is housed in hard plastic, came about, the name had already become established. They all also share the same flexible magnetic media on the inside, so they all have a \"floppy\" component even if their outer shell is made of hard plastic.", "Holy shit you know you're old when people don't know the answer to this. Back in the day, 5.25 inch disks were bendable/floppy. The name stuck even when they got smaller/harder.", "Because the original ones *were* floppy. The discs you're picturing are the rigid 3.5 inch 1.44MB variety - but before those were 5.25 inch ones which were pretty flexible." ], "score": [ 17, 6, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#/media/File:Floppy_disk_2009_G1.jpg" ], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbwt2bw", "dbwihvn", "dbwk8rd" ], "text": [ "Pilot here. Landing on water is quite possibly the worst scenario a pilot can face when a forced landing is on the cards. It's a lot worse for some aircraft than it is for others, but regardless of the aircraft your in, it's a bad day no matter what. The first problem the pilot has to worry about is water isn't solid. It's also incompressible. That means anything entering the water is going to slow down really, really fast. That's a problem for most planes because almost all of them have something hanging from the bottom that will dig into the water well before the body of the plane hits the water. For large jet aircraft, this most often tends to be the engines sitting under the wings that act like giant water scoops. For smaller aircraft, it's often the bottom of the propellers and indeed some smaller aircraft have fixed non retractable undercarriage. The trouble is when these things hit the water, they basically act like a scoop causing instant drag and smashing the body of the aircraft into the water. Often quite hard. It's this near instant de acceleration to a stop that causes the aircraft to break up and the many fatalities on board. To counter this, pilots are taught that when forced to land on water, they should keep the nose extremely high which forces the tail to go extremely low. Hopefully the tail glances along the water first and slows the plane down enough so that when the plane \"Digs in\" to the water, it's going at much slower speed.You may be surprised to know most airlines do not extensively train their pilots for water based landings, if even at all. If there was ever a plane to be in for a forced water landing, it's one where the engines are mounted on the body of the aircraft [like this example]( URL_0 ). This means there's nothing to hit the water before the body of the aircraft does, thereby decreasing your chances of a fatal break up. Should the pilot get the aircraft down in one piece, it's surprising to most people to learn that a plane will float quite well, though it likely would not remain afloat forever. This is because some of the same reasons that keep it flying in the air also help to float on water. A broad weight distribution across a large surface area. Another reason is either the air or the fuel in its tanks is lighter than water and thus aid its buoyancy. It tends to be water rushing into the aircraft via windows/doors/breaks that forces it to sink. This was evidenced by the [aircraft that came down in the Hudson river]( URL_1 ) and how long it took to sink.", "It sinks and depends on where it went down divers or recovery crews are sent to recover the black boxes to see why the plane failed. If a plane sinks the cost of repairing the water and impact damage usualy makes the idea of refusbishing the plane and putting it back in to service quite unrealistic.", "Wikipedia has an [excellent article on this]( URL_0 ) and it's worth readin if you want to get a sense of how rare successful water landings are. Planes are normally irrecoverable in terms of being able to make them flight worthy again. Black boxes and scrap metal are the only things worth dredging them back up, typically." ], "score": [ 8, 5, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/17/6b/98/176b98bf4a7f119545d0127ad4870cb2.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549" ], [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_landing" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbwjtzv" ], "text": [ "For two reasons. 1. Your mind associates the game visual with known experiences. So it triggers the memories of being blinded by sunlight 2. Your autonomic nervous system learns to react based on previous experience. So your pupils will constrict to minimise light intake. So for a split second you do actually see less light..." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbwlxfd" ], "text": [ "A lot of modern cars use LEDs, now LEDs don't really dim, they actually just flash on and off really fast to give the perception of them being dimmer. So, if the same bulb is used for the high beams, then the regular headlight brightness will be achieved by dimming." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbwnqt9", "dbwn88b", "dbwst39" ], "text": [ "There were once some smart guys that realized that math problems that can be solved by humans can also be solved by machines if we can come up with some kind of sequence of steps to tell the machine what to do to carry out the computation. This set of instructions is called an algorithm. Church-Turing relates computability (i.e. the potential for a problem to be solved by a machine) to the properties of the machine and the underlying algorithms that the computer is operating on. Specifically the machine must satisfy these conditions: a) it must support abstract assignment of numbers and b) it must support bounded AND potentially unbounded iteration. Basically this means that you can tell the computer what symbols represent what (like saying \"x = 3\") and you can tell it to do something over and over until some condition is met (like saying \"while x is TRUE: do y\"). If a machine supports these physical functions it is called a Turing machine. If a programming language supports programming this kind of behavior, it is called Turing complete. Today, we take it for granted that all computers are basically Turing machines and all languages are Turing complete. I say basically a Turing machine because a Turing machine is a math model for a real computer. A Turing machine is not constrained by run time or memory bounds (which real computers are). Now the deeper, philosophical implications of Church-Turing is that it goes both ways, meaning that not only can any algorithm on the natural numbers be programmed for execution on a Turing machine, but humans *can only discover algorithms that could be executed by a Turing machine*. It makes a lot of sense, because you basically can't describe an algorithm to another person, or even yourself, without assuming some basic formalities on how the steps will be executed. Church-Turing outlines these basic formalities and relates it to the physical properties of a machine that is designed to solve any math problem. Hope this answer is good. My understanding of this thesis comes from my CS minor and the book Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglass Hofstadter. I highly recommend that book if you're interested in computation and its relation to human activities and philosophy. It really is a gem of non-fiction. edit: Forgot to mention the Turing test. The test is supposed to be the benchmark for a computer being indistinguishable from a human. However, we have built machines that pass the Turing test (at least on some samples) that are most certainly not intelligent. You can look up the rules for The Turing test, but modern computer scientists don't really take it seriously anymore because we've realized that the rules for the test are much too lenient to really serve as an identifier of an intelligent machine.", "The Church-Turing thesis is a proof of what computability is. It basically says that if you can write a program to do something, that program can be written as a Turing Machine and as the 'Lamda-Calculus'. Both the Turing Machine and the lamda-calculus are not particularly useful for actually computing stuff because they are sort of just mathematical constructs, but it is important to be able to ground computability in math. It also says that there are certain tasks that computers are incapable of solving, but that's a bit more minor. The Turing test is a completely different thing that deals with knowing whether or not an AI is actually intelligent, or, at least how good it is at pretending to be a human. I'm happy to go into more detail about either of those things if you would like.", "The Church-Turing thesis says that if a computer has certain basic properties (defined as Turing machine), it is capable of computing anything that can be computed. Given sufficient time and resources, your phone can do anything a network of supercomputers can. The Turing Test is something completely different. Turing posited that if a computer's responses were indistinguishable from a human's, that could be taken as sign of innate intelligence. Note that the Turing Test is **extremely** misunderstood. It is not some sort of threshold to intelligence. When computers first started to be useful, there was a philosophical question whether or not machines could think. People offered all sort of objections to the notion, computers were not conscious, computers had no souls, computers could not be creative, computers cold not learn, etc. In his landmark 1950 paper, *Computing Machinery and Intelligence*, Turing used the Turing Test as sort of a thought experiment to help dismantle these objections. He never intended it to be any sort of rigorous test of a computers capabilities. In fact, today the test is less about a computer's ability, and more about human psychology." ], "score": [ 21, 20, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbx529r", "dbx3emv" ], "text": [ "You are thinking of your operating system being frozen. YOu might have windows. This is a layer of 'computer'. But you can do a fun experiment. Disconnect your hard drive. Turn on your computer. You will then find a whole level of 'computer' that exists beneath your operating system (OS). It is running something called firmware. So from that point it can still do lots of things. One of the things it does when you turn your computer on is to start your OS, if it can find it. So when your OS is frozen, holding down the power button is just sending a message to your BIOS to shut down. That is why you don't usually want to do it when your OS is running. It completely bypasses the OS and doesn't let it do any of the things your OS likes to do when you turn off your computer.", "The hardware power button is probably tied to the system's bios or low-level firmware. This is basically a small separate computer. Tapping the power button passes that event to the main computer's OS, which does whatever it wants to do. But the firmware/BIOS is what's in the position to *actually start or cut the power*, so if you hold the button it's setup to interperet that as a \"pull the plug\" signal." ], "score": [ 12, 9 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbx45s4", "dbx3qjg" ], "text": [ "Lego blocks have many different sizes. So let's say the smallest piece the machines can make is a 2x8 brick. You can only fit so many of those on a big flat plate. That's your 500 mb stick. Now technology improves and the machines get better and can now make 2x2 bricks. You can now fit 4 times as many on the same big plate. This would like a 2gb stick. Miniaturization and better computing power to control the machines now allows them to reliably make 1x1 Lego bricks. You can now stick 4 times as many on our big plate. This is a 8 gb USB. Tldr. Better machines that make machines that make smaller machines that make faster machines cause production to be faster, cheaper, and better every generation. When applying this to computers, where every 2 or so years is a generation, everything is obsolete faster and faster.", "There's a few things, but one big change how small we can actually build the parts that sit on that chip. In the 1970s, the transistors on embedded circuits were 10 micrometers across. That's **tiny**. But by 2004, we'd hit 90 nanometers. To save you the conversion that's 9,910 nanometers smaller. In 2016 year Samsung hit 14nm across, and will probably be able to do 10 in 2017. The result is that since we can build stuff even more ridiculously tiny-er-er, we can start to squeeze a lot of the same basic structures that make up memory circuits and the like into smaller spaces, which means we can fit a lot more **of** them onto one chip." ], "score": [ 4, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbx71ib" ], "text": [ "Time division multiple access. Each user gets a time period on that frequency to talk and no one else is allowed to use it during that time period. If you split a second into 100 chunks then each person gets a 10 millisecond window to transmit a second's worth of data for clean audio. There's loads of multiple access techniques. Code division multiple access CDMA, space division SDMA, frequency FDMA and time TDMA :)" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxbasj", "dbxdrol" ], "text": [ "Because it's cheap (in that they don't have to maintain this data themselves) and easy (because Facebook and Google made it so), and it means they might get some additional information about you. Facebook and Google, on the other hand, *definitely* get more information about you by letting other sites authenticate through them. It is worth pointing out that there *was* an attempt to make an *open* version of something like this *years* ago, but it never caught on because it was a pain to implement, and nobody was making money off it so nobody really pushed it very hard.", "For the same reason we use banks to handle our money transfers. Getting security right is very difficult and the needs change constantly. What is secure yesterday might be a major vulnerability tomorrow. It's just so much easier to let some giant company that needs to get it right take care of that for me." ], "score": [ 6, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxs8te", "dbxsbe3", "dbxs7hq" ], "text": [ "Other than with Full HD (1080p/i) or regular HD (720p/i) which describe the amount of vertical pixels, 4K describes the approximate amount of horizontal pixels in the image. There is also another 4K standard that is mostly used in movies and film production called DCI 4K that actually has more than 4k horizontal pixels (4096x2160). In the case of the regular consumer 4K (which is also called UHD-1 or 2160p), it was a marketing choice to call it 4K even though it has less than 4k horizontal pixels. Small fun fact: 4K has exactly 4 times the pixels of FHD. There is also a standard called Quad HD (QHD) that has exactly 4 times the pixels of regular HD (2560x1440).", "\"HD\" can refer to 1280x720 or 1920x1080. 4K is 4x 1080p -- 3840 is twice 1920, and 2160 is twice 1080, twice as wide and twice as tall means four times larger overall. It's actually 9x 720p. (3840*2160)/(1280*720) = 9, or 8.2944 megapixels vs 0.9216 megapixels. Anyway, the terms '2K', '4K' and '8K' come from cinema production. 4K is anything with about 4K vertical lines to the image, and we use this measurement because the exact number can vary according to the 'aspect ratio' or shape of the image (you know how some movies are closer to regular widescreen, while others are in super-widescreen?). 4K can be 3996x2160, 3840x2160, 4096x1714, 3656x2664, 4096x3112, and other similar shapes. The number of horizontal lines varies wildly (1714 vs 3112) so we measure by vertical lines, which are always roughly 4K. 2K can be 1998x1080, 2048x858, 1828x1332, 2048x1556, or 2048x1552.", "Regular HD is 1920x1080. 1080 x 4 is irrelevant, the 4K refers to the fact that 3840 is close to 4000 and is easier to say." ], "score": [ 8, 7, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxuyqc", "dbxxq12", "dby2gws", "dby3l2g", "dby2uwz", "dbxzalb", "dbxz52n", "dby43ut", "dby3ikl", "dby12hm" ], "text": [ "Arguably there is no interest. The action scenes are *meant* to be loud for the purpose of sensory overload. Such a feature will simply cause a loundness arms race and attempts at trickery.", "A lot of media player softwares have a feature called \"volume normalization\" which tries to make all of the audio played in a media file near the same volume. It's been around a long time, but for some reason you don't see it often on TV's or stereo receivers.", "A HUGE part of this is inadequate (or non-) mix down from 5.1 Surround to Stereo. A typical result is, dialogue is _very quiet._ Then, music or effects BLOW YOUR GODDAMN WALLS OUT. Since most of TV is programmed in Surround, this is not always super easy to fix. Some TV do have a master mix down to Stereo function. But if not... you have to do it outboard.", "In music production lingo, what you're looking for would be called a dynamic range compressor. They're used a lot with popular music to make it sound brighter, crisper, and louder, as well as to make it easier to hear over the din of an automobile or a bar. Dynamic range compression is an unpopular technique with audiophiles since its overuse can take away from the impact and fidelity of a piece of music, and even cause unwanted distortion in extreme cases. I've often wondered why consumer audio systems don't just come with compressors built in, so the users can dial in the amount of compression they want. Personally, I'd end up using it a lot more for movies and television than for music. It is a feature some audio systems have, but my best guess as to why they aren't standard is due to cost reasons, and because the general public doesn't know what it is. Another theory is that the music industry doesn't want people owning their own compressors, so that they can continue waging the loudness war and finding new ways to make their music stand out on the radio.", "The problem only happens for those listening multichannel track on stereo. all BD players I've touched have this option called \"nightmode\" or \"Dynamic Range Control\". Though to have more control I downmix tracks on-the-fly while watching movies with the help of ffmpeg custom downmix matrix. I have two settings, \"normal\" and \"night\", boosting the dialog even further in the latter case. go check the link for starters: URL_0", "THIS. And \"shaky cam\" . And the modern acceptance of \"actors\" who, unlike those on stage, do not project their voices, or attempt to be understood. The hip thing is to speak as fast as possible , and that shit just ain't for the public, who don't know or share your inflection. I admit to hearing loss , but people don't ever seem to grasp that just turning up the volume doesn't work ; then the loud sounds HURT . I have to use subtitles, and they are often a disaster, becsuse they can flash on and off faster than they can be read. The idea that sudden loud noises, recording airplane engines , or high pitched wailing sound tracts, or shacking the camera results in fine art is a lie. It is a way to cover for the LACK of art.", "I use an outboard audio compressor/limiter with heavy compression. It is intended to be used with live sound but works great on dynamic films.", "The worst is when all is quiet... a character will slowly move towards an object, say a door. Ever so gingerly begin easing the door open... suddenly BBBWWWWAAAAAAAAMMM. The Michael Bay foghorn produces so much bass you can hear the dishes rattling. It's not even an action scene, like why in the fuh is there so much bass. Buddy is literally just walking in a straight line... ^^can ^^^you ^^^^hear ^^^^^me. *panting heavily*^^^I ^^^have ^^^something ^^^really ^^^important ^^^to ^^^tell ^^^you *stares at camera*^^BBBBWWAAA AAAAMMMMMMM. *paintings fall of the walls*", "This already exists : It's called [Dynamic range compression]( URL_0 ) If you have a home theater receiver, this may be called different things such as \"Midnight mode\", \"Dynamic Range Compensation\", or \"Adaptive Range Control\" or other buzz phrases. But it's all the same thing. (It makes the loud parts quiet, and the quiet parts loud) EDIT: To answer your second question, it's usually a feature on most receivers, but not all of them. It is also usually disabled by default because people usually want the loud/quiet experience which is true to the source material, and not the compressed experience.", "That would be awesome. I'd really, REALLY like music volumes to be normalized when streaming. And I'd like to personally kill every single sound tech that works in live shows that makes it so you cannot hear the singer over the music." ], "score": [ 83, 43, 30, 13, 7, 7, 6, 5, 5, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [ "http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-168267.html" ], [], [], [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression" ], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxxf05", "dby3bpq" ], "text": [ "Most cameras are set up with three different color sensors because that makes most sense if you are to watch it with your eyes. However the colors the camera sensors detect is not the exact same as the ones humans detect but is close enough. And you have broad spectrum sensors that detect light levels which is something that is missing from cameras so you can see more colors then a camera. However we can make different color filters for the cameras if we want to. You have likely seen infrared cameras that can see the heat from cold things like we can see the red or orange glow from hotter things. For scientific use there can be lots of different color sensors in a camera. I have worked with images with 7 different colors to detect different compositions. It turns out green farmland can be very colorful in different infrared colors which can be useful to see different properties in of the plants and soil. If you ever wondered what the difference in color is between snow and clouds check out the ultraviolet colors and see the huge difference.", "> Can a camera capture ALL colours, some of which we can't see? **Most** cameras capture less colors than our eye can see. For example, violet is not accurately captured by color cameras because it lies outside the [gamut]( URL_1 ) captured by the Red, Green, and Blue filters used in cameras. They cover most of the colors in nature but highly saturated, single-wavelength colors (think lasers) are slightly outside their gamut. A [chromaticity diagram]( URL_0 ) shows the range of colors we can reproduce inside the triangle of the three primary colors. The colors outside it are simulated because your monitor uses the same primary colors as your camera. You can make cameras which capture more colors, but you would also need to make monitors which can display them. The demand for that just isn't great enough to justify the cost." ], "score": [ 6, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut#/media/File:Cie_Chart_with_sRGB_gamut_by_spigget.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxyabc" ], "text": [ "Better wiring, but also better equipment between the wires. Faster routing, faster decision making. Comes down to both efficiency through iteration (engineers have been thinking about better ways to solve the same problem for twenty years), and technological improvements like smaller and faster chips, etc. Data compression has certainly gotten more efficient as well, both in the encoding algorithms for media and for the transport layer. (Think of implementing torrent-like technology not at the consumer software level, but at the hardware level, etc.) Another big thing is Content Delivery Networks. When YouTube started, they were streaming video to you from their huge central datacenter in California, even if you lived in Melbourne. Now, they just copy an upload to their CDN nodes around the world, and you're watching a stream that comes from Sydney, much closer to you physically." ], "score": [ 8 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxyxul", "dby1bef" ], "text": [ "What happens when you have two different patterns at a very close frequency, is that at some times, they will line up perfectly, but then slowly drift off until they are in opposite phase, and then drift back to lining up, and so on. Now if you had two patterns at exactly the same frequency, and they started in phase with each other, they would stay in phase with each other.", "Source: I am a mechanical engineer. Windshield wipers and turn signals do in fact follow a consistent rhythm. This rhythm is called the frequency, which is a constant (i.e. does not change) pattern of beats. The reason it seems to fall out of sync with the music is because the frequency of both the music and windshield wipers or turn signals are slightly different, and fall out of phase with each other. They will eventually fall out of phase then eventually fall back in phase. Frequency is measured in hertz (Hz) and if you want something to always be in sync with each other you must need the same amount of frequency. Edit: I did not see the previous post, as that explains it pretty well too." ], "score": [ 12, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dby43lk", "dby3z5d", "dby3mad" ], "text": [ "They can do it if they want. However the car companies makes money to train and certify car mechanics and to provide them with the correct codes. Codes can often change between similar cars and be totally different for the same model with different option packs or with different production dates. It also ensures that the owner takes the car to a licensed workshop which helps reduce problems that comes from untrained mechanics or unoriginal parts.", "If I was being cynical it doesn't give information because it wants you to take your car to the dealer for a expensive service. I genuinely don't understand how with modern cars with big LED displays and onboard computers, a car can't give an indication of the nature of the issue.", "The mechanic can get much more data, with a reader, from the car's ODB2 maintenance data port. The car manufacturer only lights the MIL to tell you to take you car to someone who has a reader. There are thousands of codes, and cluttering up the dashboard with space for all the message details would not meet the car company's styling requirements." ], "score": [ 9, 6, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbyg6ua", "dbyfz7y", "dbyixic", "dbykqqd" ], "text": [ "I would assume dedicated volenteer moderators. Probably also why they have implemented the \"youtube hero\" plan, to use their user base to improve the site for them. On a side note, thank you to the silent moderators for making this site as great as it is and keeping it clean!! Thank you!!", "Because the product YouTube is providing isn't that adversely affected by spam. They are about videos, not discussion, and you'll enjoy the funny cats even if the comments are full of spam. Reddit, on the other hand, is all about discussion, and it is highly motivated to fight spam, on the admin, moderator, and user level. Even spam that makes it through the first two is likely to be downvoted to oblivion.", "I want to also add that there are tons of bots on Reddit. Mainly to manipulate reddit's voting algorithm. Just because they don't act like other bots on social media sites doesn't mean they don't exist here. In the past month someone posted a video on how they could force their content on the front page. Plus then you have the discussion on how The_Donald used many bots to get their content to the front page. Just because you don't see them doesn't mean they don't exist.", "Reddit, Instagram, YouTube and many other sites have an issue with covert advertising. You may think that you can block all ads, but this is false. If the video or post itself is an ad, then you can be marketed to without your knowledge. - [Warner Brothers fined for paying YouTube celebs to promote game without properly disclosing that the videos were paid endorsements.]( URL_6 ) - [USA Today: Lord & Taylor settles FTC charges over paid Instagram posts]( URL_3 ) - [Wired: Microsoft, through an outside agency, paid Machinima to produce positive videos about the Xbox One game machine, and many of the YouTube stars who accepted the deal failed to properly disclose that they were producing paid, sponsored content, not independent analysis.]( URL_5 ) This also works with government propaganda. - [The Guardian: British army creates team of Facebook warriors]( URL_1 ) - [US military studied how to influence Twitter [and Reddit] users in Darpa-funded research]( URL_0 ) - [NY Times- From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.]( URL_2 ) ---------------------------- [More info at the Astroturfing Information Megathread.]( URL_4 )" ], "score": [ 33, 9, 7, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [ "http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/08/darpa-social-networks-research-twitter-influence-studies", "http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/31/british-army-facebook-warriors-77th-brigade", "http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_r=1", "http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/03/15/lord--taylor-settles-ftc-charges-over-paid-instagram-posts/81801972/", "https://np.reddit.com/r/shills/comments/4kdq7n/astroturfing_information_megathread_revision_8/?st=ixhqirhl&sh=617118f1", "http://www.wired.com/2015/09/ftc-machinima-microsoft-youtube/", "https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/12/warner-brothers-fined-for-paying-youtube-celebs-to-promote-game/?ncid=mobilenavtrend" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbynixe" ], "text": [ "There is no such thing as \"Electricity on Standby\". Electricity is the flow of electrons, much the same way that water from a faucet flows out. You experience electricity doing work as it flows through your light bulb. Until that flow starts there is no electricity. That flow cannot start until your circuit is completed by turning the light on. Imagine the light as the kitchen sink drain and the electricity as the water flowing into that drain. You are allowing it to flow, thus 'consuming' it." ], "score": [ 12 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbysurz", "dbyuamb", "dbz501w", "dbyu2u7", "dbyt5qc" ], "text": [ "since we don't have anywhere near enough knowledge of how the human brain works to be able to make a computer emulate one, the correct answer is: No one has a clue.", "We don't know, but using the deep thinking massive data processing is coming online to simulate a human mind to where, in just a few more years, we'll have computers like Alexa and Google Home that you won't be able to tell if you are talking to a human or not. Or maybe you will, but it won't matter as the device will have it's own place in your life, maybe we won't need it to be indistinguishable from a human. It could be, that we'll see these artificial minds as a really good friend. Just think of a friend who is always there for you, can answer any question rationally and without any type of malice or dishonesty. We already like being on the web more than just about any other activity, I think we'll have new best friends soon.", "Some rough estimations and fun background. [The human brain has been estimated to have a processing power or roughly **38 petaflops and a memory of at least 3.6 petabytes**]( URL_0 ). That's a lot. Our top supercomputer, the Chinese [**Sunway TaihuLight**]( URL_1 ) has a processing power of about 93 petaflops, though it lacks a little memory sitting at 1.31 petabytes. It was just built too (June 2016). It cost over $270 million. The previous top supercomputer - also Chinese, [Tianhe-2]( URL_2 ) only had about 34 petaflops. To give you some contrast, currently the top i7 processor only has about 120 gigaflops (peta = giga * million). The GTX Titan X has about 11 teraflops (tera = giga* thousand). **Can the Sunway TaihuLight emulate the human brain?** *Not really*. Emulation usually requires the emulator to have processing power orders of magnitude larger than the emulated hardware. As a rough example - look at game console emulators (a bit of an ancient example but eh), they require PCs at least 5-6 years youger than the consoles they're emulating. **How much processing power is actually needed to emulate the human brain?** *We likely won't know until we try.* We definitely won't know until we actually fully understand how the brain works. However, I would call it a safe bet to assume that it will take orders of magnitude more than 38 petaflops. Likely X or XX exaflops. My personal, completely biased and unburdened with research or evidence opinion is that by the time we get together to actually write the software, the hardware won't be a problem.", "What is amazing is that the human brain is only powered by about 12 watts of electricity. About as much as a cfl light bulb.", "Deep blue, a super computer took 30 or so minutes to simulate 1 second of average human brain activity." ], "score": [ 41, 10, 9, 6, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [ "https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/computers-have-a-lot-to-learn-from-2009-03-10/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunway_TaihuLight", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhe-2" ], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbyu1nk", "dbyw661", "dbyvefs" ], "text": [ "URL_0 has a different IP address than URL_1 . When enter that address into your browser, it goes directly there, without every going to URL_1 . The part after the slash is information the website used to figure out what to do with your request. /status tells URL_1 to display a page about status, /products will display a page about products, most likely. Here's the tricky part. The website can be configured to *redirect* you somewhere else. The website that handles URL_0 could just send you to URL_1 /status...and vice versa. What you initially requested might not be where you wind up.", "A long time ago, computers were identified on a network by IP address only. This was easy...as there were only a very small number of computers. When things got a but more busy, the industry came up with a concept called Domain Name System. This was a concept to map the thousands (millions!!) of possible IP addresses to an easy to remember name. DNS has a hierarchy. Initially, there were only a few *top level* domains... like .com and .net and so on. Under these, could be created any number of subdomains... like URL_1 , or even URL_0 . In all these cases, these DNS entries needed to *resolve* to an IP address. The stuff *after* the .com (/status) is information used to find *resources* on available on the IP address in the first part. Put together, this is called URL. So, in brief, the first part identifies the place to look, and the second, the specific stuff to look for. As you might imagine, the DNS part is a bit tougher to change (as it's regulated world wide), and the second part is very easy...developers / web admins /etc can create resources very dynamically.", "To break things down, let's move to an example address: URL_3 This address is broken down I to: Protocol (http://) Subdomain (sub) Domain (example) Top Level Domain (com) Resource (index.html) The way domains work (using your example), is that Apple owns the domain \" URL_1 \". This means they can \"point\" or \"map\" that domain, or any subdomain under that domain ( URL_0 ) to whatever servers/addresses they want. What happens when you go to URL_0 , is that your computer first checks something called a DNS Server, which is essentially an address book for the internet. It sends \" URL_0 \" to a DNS server, and that server says, \"Hey there, the website you're looking for is at 192.168.0.1!\" (Example address). Your computer then goes, \"Okay, I'll look there!\" And sends a message to the computer located at the address 192.168.0.1 saying it's looking for \" URL_0 \". In this case, the computer checks its own records and says, \"Oh yeah, that's me! Go see URL_1 /status!\" What's happened here is that the server has a record saying that URL_0 is just a shortcut so to speak to get to URL_1 /status. Alternatively it could also just have a completely different website instead of a redirect. In this case, your computer ends up sending a request for the resource/file \"status\" on the URL_1 domain." ], "score": [ 8, 5, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [ "status.apple.com", "apple.com", "apple.com/status...and" ], [ "status.apple.com", "apple.com" ], [ "status.apple.com", "apple.com", "apple.com/status", "Http://sub.example.com/index.html" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbz46gn" ], "text": [ "One of the design goals for what became the Internet was to be tolerant of failure. If some lines get cut, the Internet just routes around them. As long as there is still power and one intact line connecting that area to the rest of the world (whether it's a physical cable or a satellite link), the Internet will continue to work." ], "score": [ 5 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbzae9h" ], "text": [ "The scanners would be dangerous to humans, if you went through the machine. That is why they make you put your carry on bags on the belt and walk you through the metal detector without bags. Different technologies. Trust me, they would rather just stick you on the belt." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbzfws2" ], "text": [ "Of all the artificial methods we know to transmit information through a vacuum, the electromagnetic spectrum is pretty much what we can both send and receive; there may be other theoretical concepts, but radio, and light, and various other points along the electromagnetic spectrum are what we have to work with. It's not because we think aliens will use it, it's because it's what we can currently work with that isn't naturally occurring that is most likely for aliens to be using. So, you are correct: absence of data doesn't prove aliens do not exist, but in cases like this you can't prove a negative as you're noting, so people who say this is proof that aliens do not exist are making insubstantiated claims. It doesn't prove they're wrong, either, it means they're using the wrong info to reach the conclusion." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbzqut9", "dbzruh1" ], "text": [ "The 16:9 size was chosen as a compromise between the wider shape of most movies, and the narrower shape of older TV shows. This way neither one looks ridiculous.", "In the beginning, Edison decided that movies should be 4:3. Then television was developed and they followed the 4:3 convention. As television got popular movies started experimenting with wider screens to differentiate films from TV. After some very wide movies, cinema standardized on a few formats around 2.35:1 and 2.4:1. This made for a very small letter boxed picture on 4:3 TVs. When the HD standard was in development, it was decided to choose an aspect ratio that minimized the size of black bars required for 4:3 content and 2.35:1 content, which was 16:9. However once broadcasters shifted to digital broadcasts, they quickly expanded to use the full 16:9 aspect." ], "score": [ 4, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbzvem9", "dc0ubfs", "dbzxbzm", "dc0c2bv", "dbzuk9a", "dc0c1uv" ], "text": [ "Hashing is destructive. To take an easy example that's easier to wrap your head around, we can make our own hashing algorithm. For simplicity, imagine we have a password system where users have 4-digit pin codes as passwords. So a real simple hash would be something like this: 1. Pick a number between 1111 and 9999 (3456) 2. Multiply the number by itself (3456 * 3456 = 11 943 936) 3. Store the last three digits as the password (936) Turning 3456 into 936 was real simple - Turning 936 into 3456 is very hard. Beyond that, there are a few not-to-rare caveats that occur, such as the need to use salts to prevent identical passwords from rendering identical hashes and avoid excessive truncation of both the input data and the stored hash. In our system above, for instance, any input that results in 936 will be a valid password, which means we have a high rate of collisions, which is bad.", "> So my question is, why can't hashing be reversed? Because each calculation in hashing offers a single and straightforward option going forward; but multiple options in reverse. Have you heard of [Tesla's valvular conduit]( URL_0 ) & ndash; a valve without moving parts? A hash function is hard to reverse for similar reasons. Each step is more difficult in one direction than the other. When you chain enough steps together, the difficulty multiplies in a way that flow in the wrong direction is close to impossible. Imagine you're at one of the source flows that join a large river. It's very straightforward to go downstream and end up where the river meets the ocean. Every turn is obvious - you always go downstream. However, if you're starting at the ocean, it's very difficult to go back to the place you started. Going up, you have to make countless decisions where the origin streams diverge, and it's highly unlikely you'll make all of them right unless you already know exactly where you're headed.", "Two reasons. First, it is designed to be hard. In mathematics, there are functions that get harder when you reverse them. It is typically easier to multiply than divide, or to raise to a power rather than taking a root. A well designed hash takes this to the extreme, and is a function that is computationally infeasible to reverse. Second, hashes lose information. They aren't encoding the information, they are taking its fingerprint. The best you can to is find one of the infinite number of strings that created that hash. Now if that string turned out to be \"Password123\" and not \"a67ab5ba895526eb3a7695c7b16bd910\", you could be reasonably sure you had the password...just not completely.", "What is missing from all of the answers so far is a statement of just how hard cracking is. A hash function is a mathematical function, or algorithm, that takes some string as input, and produces a number as output. It has the property that given the same input, it produces the same output. A modern, cryptograhic hash function does this in a way that is hard to reverse. That is, given the output if the hash function it is hard to find an input that, if run through the hash function, will produce that output. How hard? Hard enough that mathematicians believe there is no algorithm for reversing the hash function that is faster than trying all possible inputs until you find one that works. (Note: belief is not the same as proof. No hash function has been proven to be this strong, yet.) The number of possible passwords is very, very large, so trying them all is not practical. Nor will it ever be practical. Passwords as a system are widely regarded as no longer secure, but not because people can reverse the hash algorithms. People have gotten too good at coming up with plausible passwords you might have used, or at stealing your password.", "Because there are multiple inputs that can produce the same hash. So there is no way to reverse that process to get the specific input that was used to create that hash. Now, in terms of passwords, this is irrelevant because the system only checks to see if the hash is correct, it really doesn't care what the submitted password is. However, getting any of the potential inputs is hard because the math used to generate the hash is difficult to do in reverse. It uses functions known as \"one-way\" or \"trap-door\" functions that are easy to do one way but hard to do in reverse. The prototypical example is multiplication. It is easy to multiply two numbers together, but it is harder to take a number and determined what two numbers were multiplied together to make it (factorization). If you choose your number carefully, there doesn't exist sufficient computing power to solve that problem. Various hashing algorithms use different methods, but the fundamental principle of easy-one-way-hard-the-other holds. Hackers get around this by precomputing all possible inputs and hashes using a technique known a rainbow tables. By doing all of the work ahead of time, they can easily look-up what input produces a given hash.", "Let's say instead of your password, it's the city you live in that we are trying to verify. If I want to verify that you live in the place you lived before but I don't want to save your actual home city in a database for security reasons, I could calculate something based on your city instead. One easy thing to do would be to store how many miles away your city is from a given spot, such as Chicago. When you tell me your city again, I can calculate the distance from your city to Chicago and check that against the distance stored in the database. This isn't a great hashing scheme though because you can easily figure out all cities that are X miles away from Chicago and guess what city the person is from. You can make this kind of check harder by making the distance calculation more complex. So instead of just straight line distance, maybe you map an actual travel route between the two cities, then maybe add 1 to your distance count for every mile traveled North, subtract one for every mile traveled West, etc. Now when someone sees \"42\" in the database, it's not clear if the city is 42 miles North, or 70 miles North and 28 miles West, etc. Ideally, the results for your calculation seems like a random number, so that if one city's code is 122, a city right next to it could just as easily be 25 as 429, there should be no correlation between similarities in the city geography and the code you generate. As long as it's just a set of simple math operations to calculate that distance number, the system can easily create a code for any city and then recalculate the same code later to verify. There's still a problem though. Let's say New York's distance code is 149. Since this distance calculation itself isn't secret (if it works well it would be used for all kinds of websites and software), someone could just make a list of every major city and its corresponding distance code when compared to Chicago. So later if you find 149 in a leaked database, you know every user with that code is probably from New York. The solution is salting, which basically makes each calculation more unique. So instead of calculating distance from Chicago every time, you could calculate from a random city every time. Instead of user1:149, user2:149, user3:149, for three users from New York being stored in the database, it could be user1:149 from Chicago, user2:418 from Miami, user3:12 from San Francisco, so that now every user from New York has a different code stored. Now if someone wants to be able to know every user that lives in New York, they have to do the work of calculating the distance to New York from every other possible city that the system uses. Edit: Said hash where I meant salt" ], "score": [ 207, 10, 9, 9, 7, 7 ], "text_urls": [ [], [ "http://fluidpowerjournal.com/2013/10/teslas-conduit/" ], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbzvmih" ], "text": [ "Hacking generally means using a computer to gain unauthorized access to data in a system. So anything where you steal files from someone's computer is hacking. In most cases when people hack passwords from a database, they steal what are called the hashed passwords. To understand what that means, you have to know what a hash function is. A hash function is an algorithm that takes input and gives output in such a way that it is very difficult if not impossible to figure out the input from output. So you put something like \"password123\" into a hash function and you get out something like \"0086 AC73 249E 7845.\" Every time you put \"password123\" into the function, you get that same output. However, the operation doesn't reverse. So you can't use \"0086 AC73 249E 7845\" to figure out that the original password was password123. Websites typically used hashed passwords for security. This means when you initially submit your password, the website hashes it and saves the output. It never saves your actual password. Every time you log in, it runs the hash function again and compares output. Those lists of outputs are what hackers are able to steal. Breaking into a database and getting that list is hacking. Now that a hacker has a huge list of hashed password, the guessing comes in. The hacker can't reverse any of the hashed passwords to see what the originals were, but what he can do is feed common passwords into the function and see if he finds any matches. Hackers know common passwords (things like \"password\" \"123456\" and \"asdf\") and will test those out first. So in our example, the hacker may put \"password\" into the hash and get out a string of characters that don't match aynthing. He may then try \"password123\" and get the string \"0086 AC73 249E 7845\". That matches the hashed password next to your username in his list, so now he knows what your password is because he guessed it and got confirmation. tl;dr - Hackers have to first guess passwords to see what they look like hashed and then match that to the lists of passwords they steal." ], "score": [ 8 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbzvd05" ], "text": [ "They don't \"need to\" necessarily, but that's just how Reddit has their site mapping set up" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc02hjf", "dc01k0z", "dc03jb6" ], "text": [ "Because the simple characters have special meaning in certain contexts. In a web page, for example, you use < > to tell the browser about the structure of the page. If I wanted to make a paragraph with red text, I would write < p style=\"color:red\" > This text would be red < /p > If I want a literal < or > , I need a way to tell the computer that \"this is a literal < , not the start of an instruction\", and it needs to be a sequence that won't be used anywhere else. The way web pages take care of this is to use an & followed by a description of the character to mean the literal character. So if I want a literal `'`, I can use ` & apos;` or ` & #39;` (an apostrophe is character number 39). If I want a literal ampersand, I can use ` & amp;` or ` & #38;`.", "Certain characters like punctuation have those codes like & #39 to differentiate between a displayed punctuation in text and something that's part of code to execute.", "All these are great answers. To add on, these are known as 'escape sequences'; every language (markup or programming) that deals with strings has them, and they generally differ from language to language." ], "score": [ 43, 4, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc00j2h" ], "text": [ "They're a lot easier for people to remember and to key in. Which are you more likely to do: text \"FREEGIFT\" to 66066, or text it to 2068794482?" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc044yt", "dc031wv" ], "text": [ "If the social media market starts to gravitate towards Snapchats or livestreams, etc it means users could use other platforms to share content and information which means they become less relevant. They are also working on different ways to monetize the live streaming with ads so they maintain revenue. This is revenue they lose if people use other networks to do accomplish the same goal. Essentially, they are trying to protect their market share in case social media transitions to into this new live space.", "Twitter created Periscope -- which has been letting users effortlessly host their own live streams for quite a while now. Facebook is trying to make up for lost ground." ], "score": [ 7, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc051c5", "dc03rit" ], "text": [ "Long story short, bandwidth gets you fast downloads, low latency gets you fast gaming, and packet loss hurts both. Bandwidth is a limit of the network capacity, and data caps placed on your account by your network provider so that you get the speed you paid for but no more. Latency is a matter of the switching performance of the switches and routers, the number of network hops the packet makes, and the distance between your computer and the other end of the connection. And packet loss hurts both latency (due to re transmitted packets) and bandwidth and is mostly a result of un optimized network routing and equipment defects. Details: So there are several different types of data and each has different sensitivities to network issues. For instance downloading a file is asynchronous and it is okay for parts of it to arrive out of order or for there to be a lot of latency in the communication because it's the size of the packets, and the number of them that make it through without being discarded that affects how quickly a download can work. Contrast that with a skype call which doesn't use a lot of bandwidth, but the data that is sent, is time critical. If the packets arrive out of order it doesn't do you any good because by the time the system re-assembles them you've already moved on to the next sentence. We perceive these problems as jitter and sound dropping out or becoming noisy. So latency is somewhat important, not dropping packets is very important, and bandwidth is less important. Then you have gaming, where you and all of the people playing as well as the server all have to exchange packets quickly so that each user is updated on what the other users did for each slice of time, and the server calculates all of these, and then sends the results out to each client. For instance you shoot an enemy at the same time they shoot you, whichever packet makes it to the server first, that player gets the kill and the other doesn't. Then the server sends the results. So you might see you fire first, but if the server doesn't, then it doesn't matter. So the latency, or round trip time it takes a packet to be sent and responded to, is the most important. So what effects latency, bandwidth, and packet loss? Latency is affected mostly by how far away you are from the server, and how many hops the packet has to make along the way. Packets are switched and routed, and each time they hit a switch or router, they have to be copied and re-transmitted and this causes a slight delay in the round trip time. This is less about the amount of bandwidth, and more about the switching speed and performance of the switches and routers. Bandwidth is affected mostly by network traffic, and throttling such as paying for 500mbps internet, the cable company caps your bandwidth at this limit. Also if neighbors are downloading a lot of stuff and the cable network gets overloaded, it can slow down your speed for a bit. Packet loss and arriving out of order, is mostly a matter of provisioning the networking equipment to use the best route, not to exceed the packet size, your computer not using a packet size too large so it's not fragmented, and the quality of the connections between the different hops on the way to the other side of the connection. Line noise, thunder storms, corroded wires, radio interference, over worked equipment, and of course [the fiber seeking backhoe]( URL_0 ). All of these lead to packets being lost or corrupted. Also certain transfer protocols like UDP do NOT re transmit packets. If a packet is lost, it's lost.", "Ping is the time it takes a signal to go from your location, to the destination and back. For example, a \"ping\" to a spaceship on Mars would take several minutes because electronic signals cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Similarly, while the distance between the United States and China is negligible for the speed of light, it still requires time and is not instant. Additionally, at every node/server, there may be some computation or process to occur that redirects your signal to the proper location (which also may take time). Download speed is the amount of information you can download from another. For example, downloading a game/music to your harddrive. Upload speed is the amount of information you can transfer to another. Have a high upload speed means you can upload a video to youtube much quicker. For the purposes of COD, download speed is the most important item but once it is over a certain threshold, your hardware, and the server's hardware will limit you." ], "score": [ 5, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [ "http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fiber-seeking%20Backhoe" ], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc05hls" ], "text": [ "You get the transcript and search them (or better yet, the captions for a video, since it's already time tagged). There are commercial services that have the transcripts for practically everything and there is software that can DVR shows and stuff with closed captions which can be searched. There are ways to search the captions of youtube videos as well." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc0eaop", "dc0tyaj" ], "text": [ "Money. They need the income to fund the continued development of the game. This is a practice that software developers have been using for a very long time. It is not just games either but OS and network gear. They all do some amount of 'sell to fund' and it doesn't seem to hurt them because people still are buying.", "Let's say your boss gives you an assignment you need to get done by Friday. Thursday comes, and you know that it won't be done - you go to your boss and explain, but they insist that they need whatever you've got by Friday, because your assignment needs to go out to partner companies and other branches due to agreements and contracts. It works the same largely with games. For an example, let's go with Dragon Age 2. The game is *developed* by BioWare, but *published* by EA. EA is the \"boss\" in this scenario - they told BioWare, the \"employee,\" that they needed the game done by a certain release date. This is due to contracts with retail stores, advertisers, partners, etc. Despite the fact that the game was released with many flaws and a lot had to be cut, they had a strict deadline they had to meet, or the team could potentially be fired. The other reasons for set release dates can vary. They might want to get in the holiday rush, compete with a new console release as a sort of package deal, be bound by an exclusivity contract with a certain platform, or want to avoid crashing into other games they're developing (if a company has two blockbuster titles, it's better to release them apart than to have them both come out at once and have their audience split between them). If it's an online game, things like servers might come into play - you're paying for the server from a certain date, and if the game isn't out you're just throwing the money away. In certain very egregious examples, or if the developer and publisher are on good terms or are close enough, you might get a delay instead. If a game literally just will not work, they can delay it. Or if you have a smaller publisher that works more closely, they might understand. But the AAA companies tend to want what they want when they want it - and they have so much clout and name recognition that people will go out and buy it no matter how broken it is." ], "score": [ 6, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc0en27" ], "text": [ "There are no *perfectly* flat objects being made today. Even the mirrors on giant telescopes have fluctuations on the surface. If one wanted to make a fairly flat stone surface with only stone tools available one could use water in a bucket and grind a disk (or whatever) so that the edges and surface are even with the still water. Metals can be pounded flat pretty easily. Polish them to see how flat they are and work at it some more if necessary." ], "score": [ 8 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc0mra5" ], "text": [ "There is the 500/600 rule. Basically take 600 (500 to be safe) and divide it by your lens' focal length, that will tell you how many seconds you can expose for without getting star trails (where you see the stars move). Now, that is for full frame (35mm) sensors, I believe Nikon sensors have a 1.5x crop radio, so it should be: 500 / (1.5 * focal length) = seconds If you are just posting to Facebook or Imgur, 600 should be good, but if doing prints, go with 500." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc0mmtw" ], "text": [ "Look up Ben Hecks ps4 and xbox teardowns on YouTube, the main difference as I remember is the xbox has an oversized heat sink as a precaution against the overheating issues of the 360" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc0ocmb", "dc0zd5o" ], "text": [ "Programming languages are like real-life languages. There are times one may be easier to communicate in - like speaking French when you're in France - but for the most part they all communicate the same things. If you want to program a sensor to detect when you press a button on a remote and then do something, you'll probably have an easier time in C since it was designed to keep stuff like that simple. But if you don't know C, you can still use Java or C# or whatever you do know, it will just be expressed differently. So really, they all serve the same function to communicate what you want to do to the processor. The only things that change are how that's expressed and how familiar you are with how to express it.", "during **insert problem** here, why should I use **insert language** here? Here are some suggestions for common problems you may need to solve, as most would have a programming language that's more suitable than the rest. * You want to make one application that you can distribute which runs the same on all Mac, Linux and Windows versions? Your application doesn't need to do high performance or speed intensive things? **Java** * You want to write an application where you will compile and distribute different versions for Mac, Linux and Windows? Speed is important? **C** or **C++** * You want to do smart things like extract meaning from text, parse documents, compare documents for similarity, or experiment with machine learning algorithms? It's a program that you will run but you don't need to distribute it to others to run on their machine? Speed isn't that important? **Python** * Windows application only? **C++** or **C# and the .NET framework** * Android app only? **Java** * iOS app only? **Swift** * An app to distribute on Android and iOS? **Java** and **Swift** (you probably need to write your app twice, in fact double the work!) * You want a fast number crunching application that runs on Android and iOS? Use **C++** for the number crunching part and **Java** and **Swift** for the pretty part of the app (the *front end*). * You want an interactive website? **Javascript**, or **PHP and MySQL**, or **Ruby** * You're making a TV, a TV remote, an MRI machine, or a car diagnostic system (these are called embedded devices)? **C** Of course every language can do every operation, but some have better support for some tasks than others. I do not intend to imply that this or that language can't do this or that task. Rather I am trying to illustrate what I would recommend from a neutral point of view to a person who has a precise task in hand and has developers in all languages at his/her disposal. For example Python has very helpful libraries for interpreting text. So it would be the number 1 recommendation if you have to parse documents, etc, while doing this in C would be painful. Market share is also a factor. For example Java has many flaws as a programming language which Microsoft tried to fix in C#, however Java is still more popular than C# and it's also the language of choice for Android. This makes it a more natural choice for many tasks, which in turn increases its popularity! If you try to go against the flow and do things in an uncommon language, you encounter problems as you can't Google for help so often, or may find that a library (such as machine learning) isn't as well implemented. All other things being equal, a widely used language is a better choice." ], "score": [ 8, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc0x5ih", "dc0upwf", "dc11lhw" ], "text": [ "Say a website is using an SSL certificate. That certificate is just something that says something like \"I am reddit and nobody can impersonate me\". Now obviously SSL certificates websites offer up can simply be copied, so to authenticate themselves, the certificate includes a public key, and they have their private key which isn't shared, and the keys are mathematically linked, but the one can't be derived from the other (feasibly) they can only be created together, and the odds of you randomly generating an already existing key is miniscule, and when something is encrypted with one key, the other can decrypt it, and vice versa. So what's to stop websites from simpy generating their SSL certificates? Nothing, so to actually prove that the website you're connecting to is the real deal, they have their certificates signed by a higher authority, and you automatically trust that authority, even though you have no idea because it comes preloaded in your browser. It's like government issued IDs, if someone shows you their driver's license, you have reasonable cause to believe their age on that card is the truth. The certificate authority signs other people's certificates with their own private key, which is also not shared, but can be verified with their public key. So how does signing work? It's basically hashing and encrypting put together. Hashing is a function where you take a block of data and trim it down to a unique result that it isn't feasible to find a different block of data that returns the same result, so hashing can't (generally) be broken. Then it works like this, websites have their certificate, the certificate authority hashes it, and then encrypts the hash with their private key, which in turn spits out the digital signature Now when you connect to a website, they serve you their signed certificate, which includes their public key and their digital signature which was signed by the certificate authority's private key, and you have the certificate authority's public key already preloaded in your browser. You take their certificate, hash it yourself, and then you take their digital signature, decrypt it with the certificate authority's public key. If they both match, then they're legit. Now this only proves that the website you're connecting to has a certificate that's correctly signed by a certificate authority. To prove that it is actually them you're connecting to, they send a verifiable block of data signed with their own private key, which you test with their public key. So at the end you have reasonable cause to believe that the website you're connecting to is who they say they are, and their story is confirmed by a higher authority at the same time. At this point you know you're actually connecting to the website you're trying to connect. So how is any further data you exchange protected? You generate a key, this time a symmetric key that's used for both encryption and decryption. You encrypt it with the website's public key and send it, and the website decrypts it with their private key, which only they can. This key can't be compromised because you confirmed the website's certificate (which contains their public key), and only that website can decrypt anything you encrypt with their public key, so at the end both you and the website have a key that was encrypted during transmission and it's used to encrypt any data you exchange from this point on. Which brings another question, after the certificate is verified why can't we just continue encrypting stuff with their public key? Why do we have to generate a symmetric key and send it to the server? Because while you'll be able to send data securely to the server, the server in turn can't because anything they encrypt with their public key will be readable by anyone, and also because the algorithm used for the public/private key encryption is very slow, so it's only used at the start, after a which a faster algorithm is used. What algorithm to use is decided during the initial phase by both the browser and server telling each other their capabilities. For some real world example, let's take reddit. If you click on the top left green locked key sign, you should be able to see reddit's certificate, and that it's signed by DigiCert Inc. If you go into more detail and view it, you should be able to see reddit's public key, and their digital signature signed by DigiCert Inc. Edit: Minor correction, thanks /u/a_2 Edit2: Added another reason for using symmetric keys for encryption, arguable the main reason.", "It's like passing encrypted notes back and forth to a friend in class. You use a cipher so the teacher or other students cannot read the message. Except your 3rd friend who is really good at math, created the cipher and is the only one who can verify if the note that you received was actually sent from your friend. It should be noted that you can trust this 3rd friend to verify the notes correctly because you guys have been best friends basically forever, and everyone else trusts him too because he is so trustworthy. Edit: As a follow-up to your other questions, SSL is technically crackable, it's just not feasible to do so because with modern SSL, each packet would take days or weeks to crack. So the more feasible thing to do is setup a proxy server that intercepts SSL traffic, decrypts it, records it, and re-encrypts it the same way so the receiver never knows it was intercepted in the first place. Businesses do this to spy on their employees encrypted traffic, and the NSA basically does this at major internet relay points so they can spy on everybody. SSL just makes it so the average computer nerd can't spy on you, you have to have money to do it.", "This may no longer be the case, but this style of encryption was explained to me like this. Imagine you have a message and you want to send it to your mate. You have a box with the message inside. You add a padlock to the box and lock it, then send the box to your mate. Your mate then adds his own padlock to the box and sends the box back to you, now with both locks locking it. You remove your padlock from the box and send the box to your mate (now only with their padlock locking the box). He removes his lock, opens the box and reads the message \"FU MFER!\" So, you've exchanged a message, no one in between was able to intercept it, and neither of you had to give each other sensitive stuff like keys and passwords. Replace the box with a packet of data (or a frame or whatever the term the network bods are using these days) and the padlocks with encryption and it's sort of the same thing." ], "score": [ 51, 29, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc0upky" ], "text": [ "A deep space radio wave is just what the name describes - a radio wave coming from deep space (one has recently been pinpointed to come from another galaxy some 3 billion light years away, which I assume is why you're asking this question). They're short, they're rare, they're mysterious, and nobody knows exactly what causes them - but knowing which galaxy sent one out helps us determine that. As for how they affect us as a species, they don't right now, and they likely won't ever, really. It's just one of space's mysteries and we like solving those mysteries - and maybe we'll get some new insight on physics that allows us to build all sorts of crazy shit. On the other hand, maybe it's \"just\" a remnant of a star crossing the event horizon of the supermassive black hole at a galaxy's center, which won't be very practically applicable at all. On the other hand, maybe it's a giant planet-destroying space laser, and the more of these we keep seeing, the more fucked we are. But it's probably not that." ], "score": [ 24 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc0secu" ], "text": [ "If you're asking about when your browser asks you if you want to save a password, it's saving it inside your browser's memory or inside your browser company's cloud-based databases. If you're asking about when you have an account on some website, they store all of your account information inside a database, which is basically just a fancy spreadsheet." ], "score": [ 4 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc0tofc", "dc0u2jt", "dc1buyc", "dc10e9v", "dc0v6c4" ], "text": [ "A color changing LED isn't one LED in a package but three LEDs along with a small computer to drive them. The LED is made up of red, green and blue LEDs each of which can be controlled by a microcontroller. Since the two legs on the LED that supply the power are connected to the microcontroller and not the LED elements a current limit resistor is not required. The microcontroller is able to turn each of the colors on or off, so if the red LED is turned on then the output from the color changing LED is red. When the blue LED is turned on it is blue, if both the blue and red LEDs are turned on then the color changing LED is a shade of purple (called magenta). Similarly combining red with green gives yellow and blue & green gives cyan. Although the color changing LED uses the six colors mentioned above, it slowly changes from one to another. This is still done using the three basic red, green & blue elements. If the red LED is combined with the blue LED, but the blue LED is only driven at 50% of its normal brightness then a color half way between red and magenta is generated. Whilst the red LED is left turned on, if the blue LED is slowly taken from 0% brightness to 100% brightness then the color will gradually change from red to magenta. If a standard LED is turned on and off very quickly, say 100 times every second then as far as the human eye is concerned it looks like it is constantly on. If the amount of time the LED is on for is the same as the time it is off for then it will be on for 50% of the time and 50% of its full brightness. This same method can be done with the three LED elements inside the color changing LED. This means it is possible to combine any amount of the red, green and blue to give the desired color. Looking once again at the change from red to magenta, if the blue LED starts mainly turned off, goes to being on and off in even amounts and then to mainly being on then the the color will change as required. [Source]( URL_0 )", "Masters Electrical Engineering. Most RGB LED have all three colors in them. You then light a specific one my applying power to the color you want. If you look at large LEDs that can do RGB, they have 4 prongs coming off. You then power the prong you want an bam! Color. One for ground, and then each color gets a prong. If you make a super small RGB LED and then combine a bunch into a massive array, you get a tv. You can do it with a single light source, then apply a polarizing filter. The filter is controlled by a small current. This can produce colors as well and is the idea behind LCD displays.", "Wow thanks everyone! That would have taken me hours of googling and synthesizing information from multiple sources. This is more than I wanted which is even better.", "As most have said, they typically contain a red, green, and blue LED in one package. Just wanted to point out: this is also how a TV or computer monitor works. There is a red, green, and blue pixel in a pattern over and over. By controlling each color, you can basically make any color.", "An older style of multi-colour LED is the type that have a red and a green LED in the one package. They usually have three legs. Despite having a red and green LED, they can actually display a third colour. Light them both and you get yellow, because red and green light combined give you yellow light." ], "score": [ 110, 50, 4, 4, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://www.kitronik.co.uk/blog/how-color-changing-leds-work/" ], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc0ulfs", "dc0ulsf" ], "text": [ "How would you get it there? Pound for pound, going to the moon is expensive. Really expensive. How would you service them? Getting a technician up there is really really expensive. How would you protect them? Earth has mild temperatures and magnetic protection from solar flares. The Moon doesn't.", "We could but it would be prohibitively expensive to both ship up the materials as well as construct the dishes. Not to mention the cost of maintenance. All that cost and we would not get an appreciable improvement in quality - at least not one worth that effort." ], "score": [ 11, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc0xxhq" ], "text": [ "An OLED tv is a tv made up OLEDs - Organic LEDs. It works basically like a regular LED tv. To explain the significance of LEDs, I'll have to explain LCD displays first. Liquid Crystal Displays work by having a screen-wide backlight, and crystals in front of that backlight to manipulate the light it gives off into a viewable image. They're usually limited in brightness, as compared to an LED display. A Light Emitting Diode display has millions of tiny diodes, which as the name suggests, emit light individually, and control the color of light emitted through voltage. Since there isn't a crystal in front of the diode, it can emit a brighter light for you to see. Now, OLEDs are basically the same principle, but because of their structure, they have some properties, like being flexible, that make them much better than traditional LEDs for curved displays, either on a curved monitor, TV, or even the inside of a car windshield, where they're being prototyped by several manufacturers." ], "score": [ 7 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc113s1" ], "text": [ "This website is great at breaking down what you need to know URL_0" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://tosdr.org/?branch_used=true#" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc1ceht", "dc1d0wn" ], "text": [ "Your eye has photoreceptive cells that respond to certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation striking them. This occurs because those photons are absorbed by proteins in the cell, which trigger a change, that generates a signal sent to the brain. Those cells do not absorb other wavelengths, including those of infrared light. Because that light does not get absorbed, it does not trigger the change which generates the signal. No signal is sent to the brain, and so the brain does not know to generate any image. Additionally, the eye is not equally transparent to all wavelengths of light. For instance, near UV light might be visible, but your eye is opaque to it, so those photons would not reach your cells regardless.", "/u/stuthulhu mentions good points about our light sensitive cells not responding to infrared light. One of the main reasons they never evolved to respond is that not much infrared light manages go through our eyes. The vitreous humor, the clear liquid that makes up the inside of our eye is mostly made of water. Water highly absorbs infrared light. Most of the infrared light is absorbed by the ~1 inch of vitreous humor so not much remains to be detected when it hits the light sensitive cells lined on the back of our eye." ], "score": [ 4, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc1dfrx", "dc1e6s4" ], "text": [ "Extensive testing of these systems on all terrain has been conducted and will continue to be conducted. There are standard responses to certain situations that we should all do. For example if you're skidding, you turn into it to regain control. The car can do this, but faster than you can even think it. Modern cars even without all of the fancy cameras of self driving models are able to determine the ground conditions; for example modern Land Rovers can auto detect sand/gravel/loose dirt etc and adjust traction and gear differential accordingly. If you throw in visual and radar sensors as well, then the car will very very quickly know what condition the road is in. So what we have, is a car that can determine the road condition better and faster than a human, that can also respond to out of control situations faster than a human. It will also be able to respond to individual wheel traction etc automatically, which a human currently can't do anyway. Blizzards are fine as radar can see through it.", "at the moment, this kind of obstacle is on the fringe of consideration. Simply put, its hard enough to drive on a sunny day. The rollout of automation will included stages of geofencing and weather restriction. Over time, they will tackle these hurdles. At the end, simple fact is that humans have a tendency to drive in unsafe conditions, and we have accidents as a result. These are limits of physics, not the driver, sensors, or automobile. So will autonomous cars balk at 3\" of snow as humans should (but dont)? That will certainly become a huge discussion if/when lvl 5 automation becomes imminent and we talk about removing driver controls from vehicles." ], "score": [ 6, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc1j0yg", "dc1hxad", "dc1nb8h", "dc1kpgr", "dc1kiyg", "dc1iwcx", "dc1jhhm" ], "text": [ "Like /u/donsterkay said, such companies usually make their money through advertising. It's worth noting, though, that not all of them do shady stuff like cramming ads on all your pages. As is usually the rule on the internet, for every 100 online services there are 99 scumbags and 1 honest fellow. Those two you listed as examples look legit, and although I haven't used them, I didn't find any scam accusations on Google. The most likely answer to your question is that these companies have different tiers of service; i.e. the free tier offers basic levels of bandwidth and tools that would be enough for most people (think portfolio website or shopify online store), and the paid tier has extra stuff targeted at larger clients (like an online business). As long as there are enough paid clients to keep the ship afloat, the company can easily offer legit free hosting. Edit: A user below mentioned that 000webhost have had big security issues in the past, Google seems to confirm that. I asked a colleague of mine about OneSite and he said they're solid.", "A lot of the free hosting sites do indeed let you have a \"free\" wesite. They make their money by cramming your pages full of ad's. Some limit your size or throughput some charge after as certain throughput is reached (hey you get that many hits you might be willing to pay or there might be a ad that will support you).", "It is worth noting that most free host's IP addresses get blacklisted because scammers use them so someone behind a corporate firewall may not be able to access your site.", "You've gotten some good answers already, so I just wanted to add hard drives [are getting ridiculously cheap]( URL_0 ). So, you know, if you run a server farm or whatever, you have some initial cost, sure, but getting your storage online isn't going to be very capital-intensive. Therefore, webspace providers and companies like dropbox can easily afford to hand out a couple gigabyte of storage - it doesn't cost them anything and might even turn you into a paying customer. That's a win.", "Not all company's but some will make you have a weird domain name. For example URL_0 will give you a free site but your domain will be whateveryounameit. URL_0 if you want to change you'll have to outright buy the domain you want on top of what ever tier of service you want.", "Usually the free option is very limited. It will likely have low bandwidth, low storage space and some back end features like PHP or SQL will not be available. Paying will get you more power and a wider variety of available features. I used one company for a lot of free hosting for various projects in my college days, but when I had a website that had a login and needed to be able to email users I had to upgrade to a paid service, for example.", "All of them have paid services too. They give you the free service but a lot of stuff is limited on free plans. Number of databases, ftp accounts, traffic, CPU and RAM, SSH, backups, etc. When your site grows and you need more of those stuff you will have to pay them. Also some of them put ads in your website. Also because of the limited nature of free hosts I don't suppose they cost them much. And they aren't dedicated servers, they are virtual servers which means lots of free websites can reside in one physical server." ], "score": [ 27, 6, 5, 5, 4, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [ "http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm" ], [ "webs.com", "whateveryounameit.webs.com" ], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc1nwzu", "dc1oucn", "dc1oxn0" ], "text": [ "So the big common misunderstanding is that Facebook, Google, and most large companies **don't** actually sell your personal information. Yes they collect it, but they don't sell it. Smaller and more unscrupulous companies will sell your data though, usually to email spammers. The big guys instead collect it, research it, and both share the results of that research and use that research to build more targeted ads. If some random company is like \"I have a product for cat lovers, I'd love to buy some ads on facebook in front of people who like cats\" Facebook can not only make *exactly that* happen for that company, they can also tell things like \"people over 40 are more likely to click on these links\" \"surfers are more likely to click on these links\" and stuff like that. So now you can put your ads for cat products in front of surfers too, since you know they're more likely to buy it than other demographics. Knowing *what kind of person* wnats to buy your stuff is extremely important, because it lets you put the ads or the product right in front of the kind of people who are most likely to be your customers.", "Generally it's not an excel document since it's generally massive and more efficient to do so in another manner, however it looks just like an excel document with checkmarks of certain behaviors. With that very rarely do they say \"John Smith went to this website at this time to buy this product\". Generally they make your data anonymous and include general information about your actions. I recently finished a project that dealt with buying prospective customers in the insurance industry so I'll give you a story. If you type search for an insurance policy online and give your email to a website, that website can turn around to a 3rd party company that cleans up your data, adds to it using cookies on your browser and estimates some stuff about you (age, sex, income, location etc.) based on your other habits. From there an insurance agent buys your information from that 3rd party company. The price is based on how valuable you are, income, assets, chance you'll sign up for a policy all, come into play. I've seen $20 for a single persons info down to $1 per person in a bulk buy.", "I worked with these kind of people for a while. At least sort of. So I worked in the It department of a major Car Dealership chain. We had 10 different buildings with 18 different manufacturers. Part of my job was to export data to several different companies for various reasons. So when you buy a car, or get service done, you get a customer profile built in the system. This typically includes a bunch of general info about you and your car. Sometimes this means your SSN. Well, Dealerships love sending out letters to their customers, or anyone really, about how they really need some new stock, so they'll give you a great deal on a new car, or a trade in, or something else. These are called mailers. We pay a third party company to make mailers for us. Part of the deal, is we export a bunch of client info for them, and they send out the mailers. Now, naturally, this sounds like a super exploitable system, and it is/was depending on who you ask. There are several companies that create these dealership software systems, but there are really 2 or 3 big ones across the USA. The big ones have standards, and typically require the small 3rd party companies to apply for a license to export data. So the Big company would charge the littler company somewhere around $80,000 to grant them permission to a data feed. Now, as much as we'd like to believe that being certified means that these 3rd party companies were clean and ethical, we know they weren't. We know this because of cross dealership bleeding. So, lets say I buy my car at the Toyota dealership. Then a couple months later I'm going to start getting mailers from the Toyota dealership \"General Manager\" about service specials or trade in opportunities. This is normal, and should technically happen. Except maybe a year or two later, I get a mailer from the Hyundai dealership about *their* service specials and their trade in offers. See, someone at Hyundai was \"clever\" and bought a chunk of customers from the mailer company in a hope to reach new clients. Now apply this to almost every other piece of junk mail you probably get, and you get an idea of why people want your information. Edit: The data looks messy in a standard .CSV file. CSV stands for comma seperated values. And in notepad it would look like this John Does, 1952, 123 Street Ln, Town, Zip, Toyota, 801237, Sport, White, White, Jane Doesnt, 1983,,,,Toyota 423414,, Gold, Tan Jose Can, 1990, 456 Curbside St, Town, Zip, Scion, 210543, D, Blue, Black" ], "score": [ 52, 5, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc1rgx3" ], "text": [ "The larger size audio jacks are preferred in pro-level gear because it can be built much sturdier, and with high end beefy metal parts withstand thousands and thousands of plug/unplug cycles. Functionally, there isn't a big difference. But since for musicians this stuff can spend a ton of time getting thrown around on stages and run over with carts and stomped on and rattling in cases, they'd like it tough." ], "score": [ 4 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc1sxyo" ], "text": [ "Because everybody hates change. Week 1-4 of a UI overhaul, everyone hates it. It's all different and you have to find the stuff you want again. Once you figure it out you stop caring and usually whatever new/optimized feature gets a jump in usage, which is why they made a new UI in the first place." ], "score": [ 4 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc1wxzd" ], "text": [ "Computer Engineering is about the hardware and making of a computer. answer the question: how does it work? and how do i make a new functioning one? how do i make a better one? IT is about using existing devices in an environment. answer the question: how do i deploy these devices in an office so that 100 people can access it and how do I maintain and service the devices using my IT staff during its serviceable lifetime? Computer Science is about the software and using the computer to solve problems (sometimes not real world problems) answer the question: if I had to walk 500 miles using a computer program, what kinds of algorithm would i need to 1) do it 2) do it efficiently 3) prove that its most efficient way possible" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc2eqgt", "dc2gs3g" ], "text": [ "A lot of the tiredness comes from your posture. When we sit in front of a screen (or lay down in the same posture for a long time), our muscles strain and tense up. There needs to be movement in our muscles for proper blood flow. The strain in muscles is why we feel tired.", "It's mostly because you're not moving, not drinking water, and you're doing a lot of shallow task switching. Not moving lowers your energy level, and the task switching (versus getting immersed in a conversation or a project) makes your mind work hard with no specific sense of accomplishment, sort of like driving in traffic. Or listening to a lecture where the teacher is bouncing back and forth from topic to topic and you're struggling to keep up. Same situation: no physical movement to keep the blood flowing, and lots of cognitive effort with no reward." ], "score": [ 8, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc2du1x", "dc2gn76" ], "text": [ "You are incredibly mistaken on how easy it would be to make a soldier bulletproof. When you shoot someone they suffer bruised and/or broken ribs even with the hugeass vest and ceramic plates in it. This is assuming the bullet doesn't go through and cause them a really nasty injury if not death. The technology to make a soldier bulletproof does not exist, and by the time it does guns will be advanced enough to go through it anyway. And then you get into the issue that it would be hot as hell inside a full body suit, not to mention very expensive. In short it can't be done, especially not in a cost effective way.", "Combat veteran and police officer here: For one, knights did not move around easily. They were mostly mounted on horseback. You could put a soldier in head-to-toe armor, but he wouldn't be able to physically move. The ceramic SAPI plates that US military personnel wear weigh about 30 lbs. On top of that, you've got a helmet, weapon, ammunition, and whatever gear you need for that mission. Going out on a routine patrol, you'll probably be carrying about 150+ lbs of gear on you in total. So there's a balance. You protect the vital organs, and train hard to avoid getting shot in the first place. On top of this, there's nothing \"bulletproof\" that a human can wear. You will still be injured if you get shot, and nothing protects against all types of ammunition." ], "score": [ 12, 8 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc2mqug" ], "text": [ "In principle, yes. But how many valid PINs exist at any time? Let's be very optimistic and guess 1 billion. There are 10 quadrillion possible 16-digit PINs, so you have a 1 in 10 million chance of guessing a valid PIN. That puts it in the same ballpark as guessing the winning lottery numbers, and there are probably far fewer than a billion active PINs." ], "score": [ 4 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc2qq4m", "dc3152a", "dc2qqx7", "dc2so1n", "dc2qq9o" ], "text": [ "Conceptually that is possible. However most of the time when we talk about \"nuclear missiles\" we are referring to the concept of an \"ICBM\" or intercontinental ballistic missile. That type of missile fires between continents which means that its most vulnerable time, when it it is first launching, happens deep inside the territory of the nation which is performing the launch. Other people can't shoot it down because it is over the horizon from where they are and nothing they have could get there fast enough even if they could see it. Other stages of the flight are even harder to interrupt. The main cruise of the missile happens in space, a near-orbit curve that can lob the missile halfway around the planet. It doesn't even need engines at this point (hence the \"ballistic\" part) and it is difficult to even spot the object much less get to it. Finally it enters the atmosphere over the target *screaming fast*. Modern missiles can come in at about 7 kilometers per second, which means transitioning from space until they impact their target would take less than 15 seconds. If you want to shoot it down you have to get something to it, and 15 seconds isn't long enough to take a decent dump in your pants much less hit it with a rocket.", "They go really, really fast. It is like trying to shoot down a bullet with a bullet. There are anti-missile system out there, but they are very complicated, expense and not completely reliable. Any know what is easier then developing an effective anti-missile system? Building more missiles than it can handle.", "The thing to realize is that, in an actual nuclear war, there wouldn't be a single nuclear missile launched. There would be *hundreds*, all aimed at different targets (and likely multiple aimed at each target). And ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles) are *fast*. They actually go up out of the atmosphere into a sub-orbital trajectory, and then streak back down at speeds of about 4 miles **per second**. Hitting even one of those with another weapon is *very* hard to do, and doesn't always work. Hitting dozens of them aimed at a city, for dozens of different cities? Probably no gonna happen.", "ICBM's are fast, they carry multiple warheads, and they are hard to track. There are so many missiles that the number of missiles required to destroy all of the missiles launched would be very high. Take into consideration that each ICBM carries multiple warheads, it further multiplies the number of anti missile missiles required. Some of the defensive missiles would miss. It would also be very expensive to make and maintain all of the defensive missiles. The best time to shoot down an ICBM would be at launch when all the warheads are still in one place. This would require satellites with anti missiles missiles hovering over the launch areas. There are anti satellite missiles that can shoot satellites down. This is truly an arm's race that for every new offense, a new defence was created or dreamed up. For every new defence, a new offence was created or dreamed. Thus, diplomatic solutions were the only real feasible solutions.", "That is possible, but very difficult. ICBMs (Inter-continental Ballistic Missiles, aka the big nukes sitting in silos in Montana) are sub-orbital weapons. They fully leave the atmosphere before starting their descent onto the target. 95% of the missile you see only has the job of lifting the warhead. The nuclear weapon itself is contained in a very small reentry vehicle that comes screaming down from space at a ridiculous speed, trailing a giant streamer of superhot plasma behind it. Just tracking something that small going that fast is a very difficult problem. Actually hitting it with another missile is incredibly difficult and is made more difficult by the fact that modern ICBMs carry with them numerous very advanced penetration aids to confuse or decoy intercept systems. This is why early (and current Russian) anti-ICBM systems relied on nuclear interceptors with enhanced radiation warheads to fry incoming weapons with gamma rays and EMP. The problem there is that to intercept the nukes you're setting off hundreds of your own nuclear detonations in the sky above your country." ], "score": [ 9, 3, 3, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc2t54a" ], "text": [ "Major internet service providers are just like any corporation, they're out to make as much money as possible. They charge as much as they can for their product, and spend as little as possible on infrastructure. So, while prices have continued to go up, and new ways are introduced to place fees and fines on the users. ISP have spent very little on upgrading infrastructure over the years. So, as the number of users increase, and the amount of data used by application also increases, ISP's find themselves in a bit of a bind. They haven't made any significant upgrades to their network in a decade, but they have to move all this newly demanded data. The solution, get users to use less data by introducing data caps. This way, you can charge them overages if they use too much, you can continue to add new users, all while raking in profits. As a bonus, now you can put off all those network upgrades because people have cut back on data usage, so there is no additional spending. Network congestion solved, and profits continue to go up. Happy CEO is happy." ], "score": [ 9 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc2tdgf" ], "text": [ "An LCD element is made so it is transparent unless you apply a voltage. When you apply a voltage to the element it is going black. It does not take much power to do this as you only need a voltage and no current. The electricity does not pass through the elements but still affects it. You can get window sized LCD elements that runs on tiny solar cells." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc30ilg", "dc3dsbr", "dc2zqiz" ], "text": [ "In the original series the stardates were made up just to sound futuristic. There have been some attempts to explain them, but the original writers didn't have a secret code. Starting with The Next Generation, they standardized them. The first number (4) represented the four in 24th century. The second number was the season of the show. TNG originally went for 7 seasons, but of course there was DS9 and Voyager meaning this number would go over 10, so that increased the the first number from a 4 to a 5. if you hear the first two numbers of the stardate, you get a good idea how many years since the TNG premier. The last group of numbers 000-999 was the progress of the show through the season. The decimal point was what part of the day it was.", "/r/DaystromInstitute or even /r/startrek would be a much more accurate place to get information and an explanation than ELI5.", "It's entirely nonsense. In the original *Star Trek* series, there are even a couple notable backlogs and duplicates. In *Star Trek: The Next Generation*, the writer staff had a guy dedicated on ensuring each use of a stardate was sequential. The fan base *may* have invented a calendar system around it that makes some sense, but I don't think any actual system is officially endorsed into the cannon." ], "score": [ 337, 6, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc3385j", "dc331rp", "dc32vrt" ], "text": [ "It's mostly CYA. You are probably removed from the \"get new email\" list quickly, but they can't guarantee there isn't an already sent email sitting in a mail servers queue somewhere you haven't received yet. Easier to give you a few day buffer than have you call up angry the next day.", "When bulk emailing normally these are front loaded with timings set up for when they go out so the company can control drop rates and deal with unexpectedly high demand as a result of mailers. A lot of the time this is actually handled by a 3rd party company. It's not like sending out a group email from your own inbox. As a result of the processes these batches end to be signed off in advance and everything ready to go at set times so you can just go in and change the database etc or email a 3rd party to remove one of possibly thousands of emails due to go out.", "One such issue is some companies use different mail programs for different mail services. The problem is that you then have different lists that need to be coordinated. This isn't necessarily quick, depending on how it was built. Sometimes they request it built quick, not the right way." ], "score": [ 34, 10, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc33xax", "dc39slf", "dc3ly62", "dc3ajw2" ], "text": [ "Android? It's a popular topic that Snapchat on iOS produces much better images than on Android, and an answer I saw was because the Android version only screencaps your live-preview and actually doesn't use the camera to take a picture. So, whatever app you are talking about may do the same. However, worse focusing doesn't make sense, unless it can somehow alter the focusing priority like on a DSLR (spot focus, dynamic, full auto, etc.).", "depending on the app, the default one may be designed specifically for your phone's hardware, wheras the ones in many apps will be very general to coer a wider range of hardware- and, often, won't have much money put in to the actual interface software (buying access to a cheap picture capturing library to get to the bare minimum) A better app that functions above and beyond stock might cost more money and need to be produced fully in house, or require purchasing a more expensive library, and might need to be designed specifically towards the hardware if your particular phone.", "It may not be known to every user but your phone actually has two individual cameras for videos and photos that have different properties. Your stock camera app uses the latter one (except if you are actually in video mode), which produces higher quality pictures in most situations and has more software post-processing applied to for example avoid motion blur or improve image quality in dark environments. The drawback of this camera is however a bigger delay between the moment you activate the camera and the actual moment the picture is taken, and switching between this camera and the video one takes about a second. Snapchat or other Apps that don't have a serious need for high image quality exclusively use single frames recorded by the video camera for photos to give you a better feeling of actually taking a snapshot of exactly what you see when you're hitting the button. Also they allow you to take both videos and photos in the same moment without any delay or change of perspective. The drawback is that most post-processing of the image is skipped this way and the camera has no time to actually fix focus or blur issues before taking the photo.", "For me it's the stock camera that has a shitty focus and anything else that works. Stock camera app can't focus unless the flash is on." ], "score": [ 28, 5, 5, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc3gko7" ], "text": [ "From what I've seen on some Linus videos, many servers use 10GBit but the cost is so high that most consumers can't really justify the premium cost." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc3h1cm" ], "text": [ "Many computers do momentarily power off when restarting. However the capacitors on the motherboard have not been lacking power for long enough to completely discharge their power and so can still hold some things in memory. Sort of like when you unplug a power adapter from the wall but the little light on the brick stays lit for a few seconds. Those capacitors store power much like batteries do. That's why sometimes a restart won't fix a problem where a full power off and power on will." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc3jul1" ], "text": [ "First, the program using the data takes data and chops it up into reasonable chunks called packets. Each packet has an IP address and port number where it is destined to, in addition to the data. It's kind of like the address on an envelope. It gives this packet to the operating system. The OS keeps a list of all the IP addresses it knows about on the local network, and associates those with Mac addresses. The OS also knows about a special IP address called the gateway address. When the IP is outside of what the OS thinks is local (this is defined by the Subnet Mask), it sends traffic to the gateway. In order to send traffic on the local network, to an Ethernet device connected to another computer, that IP packet gets wrapped in an Ethernet frame, like another envelope. When the device it is destined to sees that number, it starts listening, and unwraps that envelope. This is where the gateway comes in. When the gateway unwraps an Ethernet frame, it looks at the destination IP. If it is outside the local network, it sends a packet out to the WAN, which is really another router. That router then looks at the list of gateways IT knows, to see if any are wider areas, until your packet is either on a network whose subnet matches the destination, or it is certain that the destination doesn't exist on that network." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc3oy54", "dc3tuwg", "dc3yky4" ], "text": [ "I don't know why Microsoft does it, but when Google switched they specifically stated their reasoning. They want to make it possible in the future to support alternatives to passwords. For example, you put in your email and Google asks you to either scan your thumbprint or enter your password. [Here's a good link explaining it]( URL_0 ).", "* 1- It's so you have more options in how you log in. If you have your Google account setup to use a phone authentication rather than a password, you shouldn't be prompted for the password in the first place. * 2- Security. While all major sites use HTTPS, encryption, and many more security tools, if the connection gets compromised having two separate pages might make it harder for someone to match up the data between the two. * 3- It limits traffic for the site's databases. If a user enters an invalid email, the server would just reject it, instead of doing the complex password hashing stuff. Its not going to decrease overall traffic because there are multiple pages being sent, but the strain on databases and computation will slightly decrease.", "Some domains have their own internal authentication systems (this is called federation). So for example if you try to login into a MS service with email somebody (at) URL_0 , you'll get redirected to an internal login website instead. (Not All services support it though) Same will happen for other organisation domains on Gmail. (Many universities use that) This way organisations can manage and their own accounts without involving the MS processes every time. This helps when the accounts for new hires are automated. It makes the login flow less surprising this way. Some services will still display both fields (user and password) on one site, but if you click the password field, your email will be checked in the background and you may get redirected halfway through typing your password anyway." ], "score": [ 26, 10, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [ "http://ux.stackexchange.com/a/78810" ], [], [ "hpe.com" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc3y6z0", "dc42nwq" ], "text": [ "At a guess I would say that new games are bigger then a disc can hold, my battlefield 1 digital game was 43 GB (rip my data cap :( ). Im willing to bet that if everything has to be read off the discs the load screens would be all over the place and, with all the massive open worlds lately, that would be a game killer.", "The 360 has a ridiculously high reading speed to read the massive amount of data DVDs hold. I think a DVD spins around 300 times a minute? Which is crazy and one of the reasons the console is really loud. Yet, this gives the 360 the ability to read a lot of data off discs, avoiding long install times. The PS3, on the other hand, had the issues that they used a new format and also way lower reading speeds, which ended up in the need to install games, at least partly. The BD drive used in the PS3 was really slow and to compensate for that I read that some companies put their game data more than once on the disc, so it can be reached in time without long loading times inbetween. Thanks to the pretty huge size of blu ray this wasn't really an issue. Or they simply offloaded a lot of reading work to the ps3s HDD, which can read data a lot faster than the disc drive. When the new consoles arrived the whole install thing became quite the usual thing, also HDDs weren't as expensive anymore as they used to be. So you can throw in a reasonable big size with okay-ish reading speed, copy the entire game on it and let it handle the reading speed issue because BD drives still aren't fast enough to access data off discs. So you pretty much pre-install a game on PS4/X1 up until a point where it becomes playable and the rest background installs while you can start playing. Some games, like Final Fantasy XV or Battlefront just give you a small demo level to run around in, others give you the whole prolog to play (I think Uncharted 4 does this?) and the worst ones, like Fallout 4, let you start the game but have you watch an ingame install screen." ], "score": [ 5, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc401o7" ], "text": [ "Lots of people confuse internet speed (measured in megabits) with file transfer speed (measured in megabytes). One megabyte is eight megabits." ], "score": [ 7 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc42qz7" ], "text": [ "We don't need to. If the brain interprets that limb as our own, it will go on to fabricate sensations based on other sensory input. [Watch this]( URL_0 ). > And on top of that, how can we connect the brain to the limb allowing for our brain to control said limb? Cybernetics. Stick wires into the brain. Learn the rest through practice." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxwn1w7MJvk" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc4410o", "dc444gm", "dc4ealq", "dc466bc" ], "text": [ "The 'catch' is getting more people into the areas with net. Those areas will have all kinds of things that mean more taxes going to the city, like business revenue or land ownership.", "City-wide internet usually either means free wi-fi blanketing the city (via routers placed all over the place like lamp posts etc). This has many advantages. 1. When tourists visit the city, they don't have to use expensive roaming data and can use their mobile devices to access maps and spend money in tourist areas they wouldn't have been able to had they not been able to access the web. 2. It drives innovation. When you can't afford the internet, many doors shut to you, including a variety of entrepreneurial resources. So many people living in the middle of nowhere make their livings off ebay and etsy and all those other online e-commerce sites. This keeps people in their home towns and stops them from always moving to bigger cities. 3. Makes it easier for people to telecommute. Actually the list goes on and on for why this is a good idea. The only reason it gets shut down is because the big telecom companies don't want competition and want to keep profits as high as possible while providing the least amount of service.", "If something is free, it's because at that point you are not the customer, you are actually the product.", "City councils are supposed to serve the citizens. That includes providing services and amenities. This is a service that they can provide that many people want. That's the why: people want it. Just like people want schools, parks, roads, lamps, traffic lights, footpaths, waste collection, gardeners and cleaners etc. Enough people want these things and believe they are justified in spending money on these things, so money is spend on these things." ], "score": [ 21, 6, 5, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc45y9k", "dc47dmw" ], "text": [ "They are capacitive touchscreens. They rely on human skin or a special conductor to sense where you pressed, instead of just registering a press like older touchscreens. URL_0", "Small layer of fraction hair thin wires are Layn across your screen. These sense a magnetic field that when disturbed, changes the voltage at the receiving sensor which is then interpreted as input. This is done on an X and Y axis. You can see the output of this effect by enabling developer mode for Android and choosing 'show pointer location.' you can see where the x and Y axis sit where you touched. This interface or input relay is called a digitizer. To enable developer options, you go into 'about device.' and tap on build number several times. Then back out to main settings screen. At bottom should be developer options. Do be careful what settings you enable. Aka don't tamper with what you don't know." ], "score": [ 12, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#Types" ], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc4dzea", "dc4e1n4" ], "text": [ "Volkswagen isn't being sued over the pollution that the cars are putting out, they're being sued because they altered their emissions standards testing to report that the vehicles they produce are more efficient and create fewer carbon emissions. It's a case of false advertising and a \"defective\" product. Vintage cars, or cars not built for mass production purposes also have different standards, and may not have to meet the same requirements.", "VW sold their product to customers with the expectation that it would meet requirements required to legally operate. Not only did it not meet the expectation, causing several thousand motorists to now have cars that they can't legally drive, but did so intentionally and went out of their way to hide that fact from consumers and the government. They also marketed their diesel cars as being more environmentally friendly due to testing at such low emissions. That's a kind of corporate villainy you would expect to find on a Captain Planet episode." ], "score": [ 10, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc4g5um", "dc4h3cc" ], "text": [ "Check/scan disk is not fixing hardware. It's fixing bad data on the hard drive. The OS was in the middle of writing data when it lost power, and that put the data on the disk in a bad state that makes the OS unable to boot normally. Check/Scan disk is one of the tools that your OS has to fix the problem. It's still part of the OS, but it has to be run before the main, graphical part of the OS can be loaded, since the rest of the OS relies on the data on the hard drive being good. So the OS boots up, allows you to run check/scan disk, and then continues to boot afterward.", "Your hard drive uses an organization system. Think of it like the index of a book, it's page numbers and table of contents too. There's way too much data to ever keep track of otherwise. As it's working, it's constantly updating and editing this index to reflect the drive's contents. Pulling the plug before it can finish it's work leaves it potentially inaccurate, which will screw up something down the line when it tries to locate a resource and can't. So when starting up from a hard shutdown, it needs to take the time to figure stuff out and have everything organized and documented again. Fixing those issues on-the-fly is possible in theory, but it means that a lot of applications would probably quit or time-out and throw an error message because the OS is cleaning up the mess before getting the application the data it needs. So it's better to just do it up front." ], "score": [ 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc4ikd2" ], "text": [ "Microwaves are electromagnetic radiation with fairly large wavelength. If you take away the spinning mechanism and put in something like a block of cheese, you'll pretty reliably be able to see that the heat will most be applied in certain sections. If you measure the distance between those sections, you'll be able to tell the wavelength of the microwaves. What'll happen if you leave the door open? Microwaves will leak out. What does this do to you? Well it affects the water in your system which definitely can't be good for you, but it isn't a HUGE deal. It'll also really fuck with the wifi at your house so long as the microwaves are leaking out" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc4teq1" ], "text": [ "Err. I haven't noticed this to happen in any online game so thought I'd start with that. Video games online don't use much bandwidth so getting a faster connection doesn't really impact them that much. (Unless it comes with better latency) Games are mostly impacted by latency or ping, this is how long it takes for a piece of information to get from your computer to the host. Some games select a player with a good connection as a host and others use a central server. The graphics are rendered locally with just the information about what movements the players are making sent back and forth. Having played NHL, Madden, and NBA 2k I have never noticed long delays. Are you playing one of these games on a computer and the other on TV? Delays in console gaming especially can be very long if your TV isn't in \"game mode\" Most modern TVs put a 1/2 second delay on what they show so that they can upscale, and insert additional frames to make things look smoother- this obviously negatively impacts gaming." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc4zjhv", "dc4xttn", "dc58mq4", "dc5e4xy", "dc4zm8c", "dc5cilv", "dc5ijbx", "dc5j7m6", "dc5j5lr", "dc5k1ab" ], "text": [ "What you may be refering to is the Pitch Tone of the message. High pitch notfication sounds are going to sound higher than lower pitch ones. When i get an amber alert, it uses a stock notfication sound not my normal one which is a higher pitch however it will not bypass my volume settings so that might be throwing you off Also phone speakers can go higher then what they are limited to, The reason makers lock it is because it begins to become distored and thats not good for business.", "Phones make a noise for an amber alert?", "Amber alerts are designed with a few things in mind. One of those important things is to amplify the importance of a message being broadcast. in order to do so, the audio for the broadcast is fitted to the most sensitive spectrum of the average humans' hearing. this means that regardless of technical volume, the messages sent for an amber alert, or another alert, would be heard as louder due to their being within the most sensitive spectrum of the human ear.", "How else are you supposed to know to be on the lookout for a missing child (from a different city), at 2am while you're asleep in bed? Obviously, it has to be loud enough to wake you up.", "Your phone can clearly go that loud because it makes that sound. But the sound level is unpleasant(music and video would sound horrible) and potentially damaging(your hearing) that app designers don't want that.", "Assuming you're talking about the 'emergency alert system' tone (which is what my phone plays for amber alerts anyway) that sound is just two sine waves mixed together. A sine wave is a pure sound consisting of just one frequency at a constant volume. This will sound louder than music, which is a complex combination of many different frequencies. Plus with music, the dynamics change over time, so the perceived average sound volume will be less than the maximum level the device is capable of playing.", "It really is kind of stupid. I had one go off at 2am the other night too. Sure, I'll be on the lookout for that silver Tahoe in my bedroom, ill even check my closet for you just in case.", "Lurker here, my apologies in advanced for accidentally breaking any rules. It's because it's a continuous tone, non changing, meaning the driver/speaker can focus uninterrupted at oscillating for that single note (I believe). Now for the fun part: About a year ago I was taking a communications class (core requirement), and it just happened to be with a professor that would royally hate people using phones in his class. Seemed like unjustified hate, considering the fact he'd go on about people wasting time distracting others by using cellphones when he'd take 15-20 minutes ranting about it with the entire class, making everyone uncomfortable by putting a college student on the spot. Well, this particular instance we were taking a midterm... and the class was 40-50 people... The guy is sitting at his desk at the front of the classroom when suddenly at the end of the first row, a chick's phone starts playing the alert tone, REALLY FREAKING LOUD. She quickly pulls it out and fumbles it as she frantically tries silencing it. Guy looks up looking pretty annoyed, gets up and starts marching to her desk already ranting as to how her test is now invalid due to her \"inability to silence the device or turn it off.\" Well, as he's about to arrive at her seat the electronic choir kicks in and you've got every single phone in the classroom buzzing the dissonant tune... He panics and asks, \"What the hell is that? Are we being freaking invaded!?\" Lmao, as you can imagine everyone started laughing. Turns out he didn't know AMBER alerts play a similar tone as the EAS. He gave the test back to the gal and sat his ass down, lol. Edit: Tried answering the question this time.", "In a related question, why do I get an amber alert because a child 400 miles away from me was driven away with his or her biological father. Is there some specific reason to believe most of these fathers are going to be driving straight through my town? Have most of these fathers been charged with abuse or at least driving under the influence? It all seems like the amber alert is becoming the allegorical \"boy who cried wolf\" if half of them are in no real danger at all.", "Does the UK or Europe have anything similar (where they take over your phone)?" ], "score": [ 204, 156, 53, 32, 26, 26, 11, 11, 10, 6 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc5n5pu" ], "text": [ "A lock-on is an act of focusing the sensor system on a single target so that the target can be automatically tracked. With the sensors in our case being the missile's seeker. Now, in case with an infrared missile such as an AIM-9 Sidewinder, FIM-92 Stinger or R-73, there will be no lock-on warning because the seeker is *passive*. You will only be able to detect incoming fire by spotting the missle itself, and there are plane-based infrared systems to do that for you as well. The good thing is, this is the close-range choice of sensor. There are additional undetectable options, such as no guidance at all, TV guidance (rarely used, and only against ground targets - basically the bombardier uses a camera in the nose to steer the bomb), and GPS guidance (only good enough for bombs used against stationary targets). Long-range missiles and tracking in general relies on radar or ladar; certain anti-ground ordnance relies on designated lasers, and there are similar dynamics for active and passive sonar, but we'll stick to radar as the most prominent example. Now, except for some exotic and finicky variants that piggypack on random radio waves - such as the very first one, using a BBC radio tower - features a source of radio-band electromagnetic radiation (illuminator) that is reflected from the target and then received to identify its azimuth and range. So, you're emitting something - it's an *active* sensor. Using an active sensor is the equivalent of turning on a flashlight in a dark room - you *might* see something, but you'll definitely be seen by everyone in the room. Radars can be detected from roughly twice their effective range using a Radar Warning Receiver, or just a garden-variety radio; furthermore, they can be recognized, their position approximated, their type identified, and their activity determined by their emission characteristic. You can tell whether that idiot with the flashlight is waving it randomly, or it has it pointed right at you... or if there's a beam of red light edging towards your head. A radar in lock-on mode stops sweeping and maintains a focus on its quarry. Now, there are two principal types of radar-guided missiles. Semi-active ones are broken into two subtypes. One type carries the receiver system for the radar, but the emitter stays with the launcher; there, it's just a reasonable inference that the guy who wants to kill you and has a lock also has missiles in the air. The other type are anti-radiation missiles, and they basically target the *enemy's* radar signals; Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses is basically playing whack-a-mole with their AA. The other type, true active guidance, has the whole radar kit onboard the missile, so detecting distinct new radars is already bad news bears." ], "score": [ 12 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc621vs", "dc647tk", "dc62gyr", "dc6henx" ], "text": [ "It's not \"made up\" anything in particular. It's just a concept. A byte is a string of eight bits, and a bit is just a binary digit. A number. And it doesn't make much sense to ask \"what is a number made of, and how big is it?\" In computers, bits are stored in lots of different ways, depending on the device. HDDs store bits as the alignment of magnetic fields on a spinning metal platter. SSDs store bits as extra electrons being pumped into memory cells. Your CPU deals with bits as being different voltages across wires. A CD stores bits as raised and lowered regions of the surface that reflect light differently. In short, a bit is just a number that can be either 1 or 0, on or off, yes or no. Any thing that you can think of that can store and represent two states can store a bit. The light switch on the wall in your home stores one bit of information. Up, and the light is on. Down, and the light is off.", "It's basically just a bunch of 1s and 0s that make up binary code. 1 byte = 8 bits, or a series of eight 1s and 0s. A gigabyte is 1 billion bytes. When you store these bits on something, you're just storing a representation of the bits. For example, with DVDs/Blu Rays, this bits are represented by a series of \"pits\" that the laser can read off the disc. The data is written in a track that goes around the entire disc like a record. As the laser passes along this track, it can detect when there's a pit, and when there isn't. These spaces of \"pits\" and \"not pits\" represent the 1s and 0s of binary. There are many other ways to store this type of information, and people are always looking for faster, cheaper, more dense ways of storing bits. You could, in theory, simply write a series of dots and dashes on a piece of paper and store binary information that way.", "A byte is just stored information made up of eight bits. Bits can store two states either a yes or a no represented by a 1 or a 0. They can be stored two ways depending on what type of storage you have. A SSD stores information inside transistors utilizing electrons. If there is voltage inside the transistor it is a 1 otherwise it is 0. Technically increasing the amount of data inside an SSD will increase its weight just by a completely useless to even mention amount. Each one of these transistors store one bit. A physical platter hard drive uses a metal disk that we can freely alter and read the magnetic fields at any given point inside the disk. If the magnetic field is facing one way it is a true if it is facing the opposite direction it is false. Each one of these domains that we can alter and read would be one bit.", "Alright. A byte is made up of 8 bits. A bit is a number that can only be 0 or 1. It can basically have two states - 1 or 0. It can be represented anywhere where there's two states - a light switch can be either on (1) or off (0), as an example. That's a bit. Bits used to be represented as all sorts of things. For example, on a punch card, the presence of a hole means a 1, while the absence of it means a 0. The computer used a light sensor to determine whether there was a hole punched in or not. And a bit is as large as the device that's used to represent it. Or, a bit can be as small as you can make it. For example, on a modern hard drive, a bit occupies an area of 250x25 nanometers, or 6250 square nanometers. Or 0,000000000000000000625 square centimeters. And if you can change the state of something that represents a bit, you can write a bit. It's as simple as that. On a hard drive, bits are represented by magnetic fields. It's basically like an old audio cassete, but stretched over a disc. The platter inside a hard drive is basically like a \"magnetic canvas\", and the read/write head can either sense the magnetic fields change as it spins, or overwrite the magnetic fields by using an electromagnet to \"paint new magnetic fields\" over the old ones. Certain patterns of magnetic fields represent a 0, and some other pattern represents a 1. About if it changes the weight of a hard drive... it doesn't, and it doesn't need to. Imagine a light switch - it weighs the same whether it's on or off. The only difference between it being on or off, is that the light will glow if the switch is on. But that's not always the case - on a thumb drive, for example, bits are stored as an electrostatic charge, which does have some weight - but it's so small it's basically undetectable. And about bytes, megabytes, gigabytes... A byte is basically an array of 8 bits. Together, they form a number that can range from 0 to 255. How is it so? Just like you can form numbers up to 99.999.999 by pairing together 8 digits, by pairing together 8 bits you can form numbers up to 1111 1111, which is the same as 255 in our decimal system. A kilobyte (KB) is a group of 1024* bytes. A megabyte (MB) is a group of 1024* kilobytes. A gigabyte (GB) is a group of 1024* megabytes. A terabyte (TB) is a group of 1024* gigabytes. And so on. You might be wondering why computers represent numbers as bits instead of decimal numbers, for example. The reason is that bits are very easy to read and write, while numbers with more states can require some guesswork to decide which state it's at. A good way to understand this is to picture a volume knob that goes from 0 to 9, but just has the 0 and the 9 written on it. Can you accurately tell at a glance which number it's at? You can guess, but you won't be right 100% of the time. *1 KB is technically 1000 bytes. But if you use Windows, it considers 1KB as being 1024 bytes. The unit of measure that actually represents 1024 bytes is called kibibyte (KiB). This is also why when you buy a 16GB flash drive, Windows reports that it only has 14,9GB instead of the 16GB it's supposed to have." ], "score": [ 33, 9, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc63gmz", "dc6f7ml" ], "text": [ "It's all connected together. Kind of like the internet. When your phone is turned on and connected, the tower is constantly checking in. It'll \"ping\" your phone like \"whaddup, 999-555-5555, you still there?\" And your phone is all \"sup tower, yah I'm still here\". When you make a call, your phone contacts the tower like \"hey guys, I'm trying to make a call to 1-800-255-3700, any idea how I can get to that?\". So then the tower is all \"yeah hang on, let me forward to over to the central office, they'll be able to hook you up\". Then the central office picks up and is like \"whaddup tower?\" And the tower is all \"yo office, we got a phone looking to call 1-800-255-3700, any chance you could hook a brother up?\". So the central office leans over to the other guy at the office and is all \"yo, where's 1-800-255-3700 at?\" And the other guy is like \"hang on let me get out the Rolodex\". And he spins through all the records and is like \"aight, I found it. Looks like it's another cell phone on the Verizon network\". So the central office is like \"aight hang on tower, we're going to forward you over to Verizon\". Then the Verizon central office picks up and is all \"whaddup genericcellcarrier\" and genericcellcarrier is all \"sup Verizon, I got one of my phone's looking to call a 1-800-255-3700. Rolodex says it's on your network\". And Verizon is all \"Yeaup, that's one of ours, hang on while I forward you\". Then Verizon's central office sees that one of their towers has been pinging the phone that number belongs too all day. So they hit up that tower, and that tower is all \"yo, 1-800-255-3700, I got an incoming call from 999-555-5555, you want this?\". Or something like that.", "It's simple. Whenever your phone is within range of a cell tower, the local telephone exchange knows which tower it is connected to. And the tower always keep \"pinging\" your phone to check if it is still there. So, the local exchange always knows where the cellphone is. When you dial in a number, the call request gets offloaded to your local phone service provider by the cell towers. There, they receive your request and check if the number you called is on their list of local numbers. If it is, they just contact the cell tower where the phone is to alert it that it's receiving a call. If not, they offload it to a bigger station where they try to find in which region that number is located. They basically have a constantly updated database of which phone numbers are active in each region. And when they do find it, they send the call request there, and the destination phone is alerted of the incoming call. And what about long-distance calls? Well, that's why area codes were invented. If an area code is detected, your local phone exchange just sends it to the corresponding area where they'll try to find the destination phone. If all fails, a message is sent back to your phone telling you that the destination number does not exist or is outside cell coverage. An interesting point to note: This process is not instantaneous. Sometimes, when you call someone on their cellphone, you might hear a few short beeps before the ringing tone begins to ring indicating that the destination phone is ringing. Those beeps are there to tell you that the local cell towers at the destination are trying to communicate to the phone to alert it of the incoming call. They're very common when a phone is on a weak coverage area with lots of interference, or when they're crossing a tower's coverage border and the nearby towers are trying to contact it." ], "score": [ 422, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc66wui" ], "text": [ "model naming is completely marketing. there's no rule you're required to follow. most owners of your existing model would like to buy one with a number that's bigger than the one they own." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc6q4wc", "dc6o2xd" ], "text": [ "Most anti-viruses do it very similarly. Here's what Symantec/Norton anti-virus does: 1. Load the malicious file into memory. 2. Encrypt it with a simple algorithm. (Something similar to subtracting 10 from every byte. So if the virus's code looked like KLM, the encrypted version would become ABC.) 3. Move the encrypted version to some folder like C:\\Symantec\\Quarantine. 4. Delete the original file. The encrypted version is basically rendered inert; it's as if it's been deleted. The bytes in the file are completely different and cannot be run, opened, viewed, etc. If you open Symantec and view the quarantine folder, you can choose to restore it, which just means decrypting it and moving it back to its original location. This is also why ransomware malware is effective. By encrypting every file on your computer and throwing away the key (retaining a copy for themselves, privately), they've effectively made everything inert, as if they deleted all your files. By paying money, they can send the key back to you.", "Virus applications vary in their methods. One method I've seen is that the application will 'delete' the file from the current existing location. What may actually happen is the virus application will move the file to a secure location (determined by the virus application), rename it, and log it as a quarantined file. In this way, the file is still available to the virus application and is now secured so it cannot propagate or run on its own. This is due to a possible false-positive detection. Likely the file could be cleaned also, depending on the virus and/or strain. When you open and review any files your virus application has quarantined, you could review, and if needed either restore the file or delete the quarantined file (along with many others)." ], "score": [ 14, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc6nqaf" ], "text": [ "Supershooter here, I was the first United States National Pinball Chsmpion. The loud noise is a mechanism located at the top inside of the back glass part of the machine. This makes a loud noise to let everyone know a game has been won. In old game rooms, it was loud to let others know you won a game. I have a few machines and have put a cloth in to pad the noise in my home." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc6rxh2", "dc6rov0" ], "text": [ "Because copper is far less fragile than fiber, and is adequate for almost all applications. I mean, sure, you could have a fiber connection to a portable hard drive, but it won't be any faster than USB3 because the line speed is already greater than the disk speed.", "If I see how my relatives do treat the cables of their appliances, that question answers itself. Tying knots into optical fiber is not recommended, nor is mangling and twisting the cable beyond recognition, as people do all the damn time with their copper based cables." ], "score": [ 9, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc6sl0o" ], "text": [ "It doesn't \"know\". The electrons don't move because there is not pathway. When you hook up a battery or some other voltage source, not only are electrons pushed one way, but positively charged areas that can accept electrons are created going the other way. For short we call them \"holes\". Also electrons actually flow the opposite direction from what you would assume. When Ben Franklin decided to make one direction positive and the other negative, he had a 50/50 chance of being right. He was in fact wrong. So electrons actually flow from the negative side of the battery." ], "score": [ 7 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc6vsqr", "dc6w21u" ], "text": [ "Well, generally speaking people associate a face with a voice over time. I can recognize my friends voices without even seeing them. It's a learned thing. Just like with the electronic stuff. It's learned. The speaker picks up on your voice by asking you to say a sentence or 5, with the knowledge of what the preset sentences are, the device associates the vibrations the speaker picks up with the words you're saying, and learns the way you speak because of the sentences it's asked you to read to it. Or something like that. Idk man. I just write shit down and hope for the best.", "Sound travels in waves. When the sound waves hit the microphone, the computer converts the sound into a digital signal (i.e. a set of 1s and 0s). This is done through sampling, where the computer takes the sound at small intervals and records it (a bit like a pixel in a scanned image), the more samples the better the sound quality. This gives you a digital representation of the spoken voice. Now, there are two things we can do with this - either identity verification, or text-to-speech conversion. In the case of recognising a person speaking a password, the computer is 'trained' with a previously recorded sample, and compares the set of 1s and 0s from the training example with the one it just received. If the match is close enough then bingo! This is relatively simple, as you are trying to find something that is as close as possible, so flexibility isn't a big factor. Text-to-speech is more tricky, because you have to allow for the different intonations of people's voices, so the data won't be identical. Thus, the computer will try to isolate phonemes, percussive sounds that help us distinguish one word from another (like b, p, t, d sounds). If it can divide the signal according to these phonemes, then the phonemes can be compared to known examples it has been trained with. The computer will then use probability to follow the sequence of sounds and try to identify the words that they make up. This may be done through the use of something like a Markov chain - which is a way of modelling probability in a computer by looking at a sequence of events and the probability of each event occurring. By looking at the sequence of phonemes, the computer can identify the most probable correct interpretation. If the computer finds a sequence of phonemes that correspond to a known word it will then display that word. Good systems will also consider the other possible words in a similar manner to predictive text - so if it is unsure which word is the correct choice, the surrounding words may give a good clue. These contextual clues are discovered by training the system according to some machine learning techniques - i.e. you provide a ton of sample data and the computer can find patterns and connections between words (this is more effective than teaching grammar rules, which are frequently broken). Tl;dr the computer converts the voice to digital data. It breaks the signal down into sounds and uses probability to guess the words that the sequence of sounds are most likely to make. The computer is trained using sample sound and text data to help improve its guesses through probability values." ], "score": [ 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc6ygtn" ], "text": [ "Alright, going down the list of the ones that you have probably seen, there are a few more. The most common type you see is USB type A. The thin rectangular one most likely in the side of your computer. This was the original design of USB, however it should be noted that USB was designed with what is known as a master-slave relationship between connected devices, or at least that was what developed. This is where USB type B comes in. The side where USB A is connected is the master device, it is the one that does all the controlling, it does all the commands and charging. It controls the other device. USB type B, the bigger more square one which isn't that common today (more on this later), is the slave device, the device the master controls. This is why USB type A inserts is pretty much exclusively on computers, or at least this was the standard. The main reason this exists is to prevent short circuiting, but since it is the USB type A port generally sending the signals, it became dubbed the master. Now, USB type B was somewhat replaced by USB mini, which is the smaller connector that is jagged on the sides, it was smaller, phones were becoming popular and smaller, a smaller connector was necessary for USB type B connection. It however was somewhat flawed, it apparently was structurally poor, wore down the port too much, so it was redesigned again, to make USB Micro, the common connection on Android phones today, but slowly getting replaced once more by the next port. USB type C is the replacement for pretty much everything on this list. It gets rid of the issues that a same port Master Slave system has, such as short circuiting, is reversible, most likely a trait borrowed from Apple's lightning connector. It is the best USB connector at the moment. But we are not done yet. USB versions, this one is fun. So, versions of USB 1 were practically not used, so we skip that to USB version 2.0. Classic USB port, sadly still very widely used even if newer versions are available. Has 4 pins inside of it, 2 for power delivery (+5 Volts and ground), and 2 connections for data transfer. USB type B has the same pins, while USB mini adds a 5th pin for mode detection, which detects the type of connection on the other side, this one can actually have the other cable be connected to USB B, and this last 5th pin is added as a detector for it, if it is USB type A, it is hotwired to the ground wire, if not, then it isn't connected at all. Now, it is 2008, the 480 Mbps of USB 2.0 is starting to get slow, so our boys at Intel and many other companies get together and make a new version of USB, version 3.0. This changes the type A connector by adding another 5 pins to increase the data rate to a whooping 5 Gbps. Compatibility with USB 2.0 ports is kept by adding these last 5 pins in the back, where they will only be connected if both the port and the cable are USB 3.0, if not, those contacts will never touch, and it reverts to USB 2.0 mode. It is also denoted by having the plastic in the port or connector be a blue color. So, type A was updated, and guess what that means? More wall of text because now we have to update type B ports, including the mini one. Type B maintains its overall shape but gets a weird \"roof\" to house the last 5 connections for it. [Here is a nice image]( URL_1 ). But this will largely be ignored because type B is being replaced by microUSB, which was also updated... except microUSB 3.0 is also largely ignored because its primary use, phones, did not need the speed until now, and the connector needed an extension to house the extra 5 pins. [So now it looks weird as fuck, because the ports have to maintain compatibility with classic microUSB 2.0, which can be plugged into half of the port, [as shown here]( URL_2 ). Mini USB was abandoned, as it was replaced by MicroUSB. But we are not done yet. Small revisions to USB 3.0 without changing the pinout allowed for USB 3.1 to transfer 10 Gbps, so a small update was made for that. Then, for some weird as fuck reason, they decided to rename normal USB 3.0 as USB 3.1 Gen 1, and the 10 Gbps ports as Gen 2. And now at this point, once again, our boys at Intel, Apple, and several other tech companies gathered around, sat down, took a look at [this clusterfuck]( URL_0 ), took a deep breath, and said things must change. So, they got their asses working on yet another port. In 2014, these engineers released USB type C. Once again, reversible, USB 3.1 bandwidth, and can even support a little something called Thunderbolt 3, which has a whooping 40 Gbps data transfer rate. It does away with the master slave concept, meaning that it also replaces all connectors, type A, which was replaced since there is little purpose in such a large connector, type B, because it is unneeded without the master slave concept, microUSB since type C is also tiny. There is also mini USB type A, and several other connectors, but I think you get the point. /walloftext" ], "score": [ 21 ], "text_urls": [ [ "http://www.mycablemart.com/images/usb_connectors_20_30.jpg", "http://blog.macsales.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/USB-BTYPES.jpg", "https://www.pretzellogix.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/microusb2-vs-microusb31.jpg" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc74mg9" ], "text": [ "I had to create an account just so I could explain and discredit the \"faster than light\" reply. Nothing that we know of travels FTL. Anyway. Consider the average classical computer. Every bit has two states, 1 or 0. Just like a light switch. It's either on or off and nothing in between. With some clever manipulation, and counting in base 2, we can use a ton of these to do some neat stuff, like add and subtract. A quantum bit is the same with one difference. It can be a mixture of a 1 and 0. Like when you hit that sweet spot on a light switch in between off and on. Understand that this is not a third state, nor has the light switch become a dimmer switch (where you can control the amount that light is on - that's analogue and quantum bit is still digital). The quantum bit is a superposition of both off and on. What's the point of all this? In the classical computer, you run a calculation, then run the next etc. In a quantum computer, you could run them all simultaneously. Useful for brute forcing encryptions, querying a database and modelling particles. That's about it. For these things there is the quantum computer, for everything else there are classical computers. Source: Msci physics degree. I only have fundamental knowledge of a quantum computer after module based around quantum bits themselves." ], "score": [ 4 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc7isgw" ], "text": [ "LCD screens use a chemical \"shutter\" effect to do their thing. When a current is run through them, the material crystalizes. When the electricity is turned back off, it returns to it's uncrystalley form. In low temperatures, the material gets slower and \"goopier\" similar t a lot of substances that act thicker in low temperatures." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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