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eli5_tech_data

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{ "a_id": [ "h30tzvv", "h30x03q" ], "text": [ "It is a thing in games where they say they’re using “movie quality assets” but that doesn’t really mean much, more of a buzz word. The problem with games is you have to render them in real time, so there’s constraints there movies don’t have. Pixar can take a whole day to render every little detail they want in a frame if they felt like. They can trace every ray of light as it bounces a hundred times, calculate how every strand of hair moves, the exact way something squishes when it bounces, etc, over the course of hours and then just save the final result and put it all together when it’s done. Obviously there’s practical limits, but because they can take much longer with each frame and then just save the result when it’s done they can add lots and lots of detail. Games have to do all that in real time. They have milliseconds to do as much of what Dreamworks or something can do over minutes or hours as they can. So they have to take shortcuts to get as close as possible with as little work as possible. Even if they import the actual movie model, they’d usually have to trim off some of the finer detail so that it’s not quite as much work on your GPU. To my understanding, the models that are originally created for games (even ones not based on animated movies) are typically a lot more detailed than the ones that actually wind up in the final product. They just scale them down afterwards (or the game does it automatically) to meet performance requirements.", "shortest answer. ploygons. the character models used in movies are so highly detailed that it would be wasted potential to render them on gaming devices. that doesn't account for other effects such as shadows, lights, reflections, or animation." ], "score": [ 7, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h30wvyd", "h30wkta" ], "text": [ "An explanation I heard is that commercials can be as loud as the loudest part of the show you're watching. So if you're watching a show where the volume fluctuates all over the place, occasionally punctuated by exceptionally loud noises like gunshots or car crashes, then the commercials are allowed to play as loud as the loudest part of the show. Since the show isn't normally that loud, it creates an imbalance between the spoken dialogue and the commercials' audio level.", "Long story short, they are mixed to seem that way. All stations will put the audio for both TV and commercials through what is called a limiter - a device that will set a ceiling for the absolute loudest the sound can be. This means that at any moment, the sound will never exceed that ceiling - commercial or not. However, that is just the absolute volume. You can increase the relative volume across the entire audio by using a compressor (works like a limiter, but more gentile). You set a max volume in the compressor, then run your audio through it and push the volume as high as you can. There will be less dynamic range (loud and soft parts) but the max volume limits will still be respected. This will make the entire audio seem louder, even though the absolute volume is still below the limit." ], "score": [ 9, 6 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h325808" ], "text": [ "TV screens, especially LED and LCD screens, have a thin layer between the screen and the LEDs/LCDs designed to absorb external light to minimize glare. Monitors and TVs are designed to be non reflective, which has the effect of also absorbing the laser pointer. The only way you could see a laser pointer is if the surface reflects a portion of the laser point back to your eyes." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h32v1jn" ], "text": [ "This worked better back in the days of analog TV and tubes. Over time corrosion would build up on the contacts. Hitting the TV would shake it enough to knock some of the corrosion off, giving a better contact and fixing the problem. This is the same effect of hitting your TV remote to get it to work. In that case, the corrosion is on the battery contacts." ], "score": [ 14 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h331z2k" ], "text": [ "Imagine you own a piece of land. How do you sell that land to someone else? You can't take the land and put it in a bag and give it to someone. Instead, you write on a piece of paper: I sells this land to Susan. If Susan needs to sell the land, she shows the paper to the buyer, then adds another sheet of paper that says Susan sells the land to the new buyer. Now, the problem with this setup is that Tommy can show up with a sheet of paper that says Susan sold the land to him already and he owns the land! So, you and Susan register the land sales with a trusted third party which keeps a ledger of land sales. If Tommy shows up saying he owns the land, just look in the ledger and see who owns the land. An NFT is just a digital way of doing the transfer documents and ledgers using computers. It uses Blockchain tech which is basically a digital ledger that is nearly impossible to fake (as in Tommy can't break into the ledger and insert his name in there.) So, an NFT for a meme is just the same idea of transferring ownership of something that can't be physically owned like land or the rights to a video or picture that can be copied easily on a computer. The NFT just takes care of the ledger and records of transfers. A similar thing could be done without technology with lawyers and a contract saying the rights to the meme are being sold. How do you make money? You can make money selling whatever people will buy. I can sell you air, if you are willing to pay for it. I can sell you my soul if you are willing to pay for it. A meme creator can sell someone an NFT to the rights of the meme if someone will pay for it. Of course, someone needs to confirm that the meme creator is who they say they are and that the NFT being sold can be traced to the original creator or rights holder. But after that, every transfer of the NFT can be digitally confirmed and traced." ], "score": [ 15 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h33qmwu", "h33qpi7", "h33v5dg", "h33ufjb", "h33umqn" ], "text": [ "To make more money off of you. To be able to have ads, tracking and in game purchases. There’s the other side of making games better with multiplayer and patches and updates to a game. But mostly it’s to make more money.", "To collect analytics and data/most games have online stores and encourage online microtransactions anyway.", "Single player games are significantly more expensive to develop because on top of the game systems and level design you need to make convincing AI, NPCs, story, scriptwriters, voice actors, quest developers and a myriad of other elements that i am forgetting. For all this extra work you get a single payment of about 60USD with a bit more from special editions and DLC. Online games require significantly less development and can be maintained by smaller, dedicated teams, all the while raking in money from microtransactions and subscription services. As several game studios are now more interested in making all of the money, it \"makes financial sense\".", "It’s part of the drive to get more subscription based services that they can patch instead of developing brand new games. It also strips you of true ownership.", "On the non-cynical side of things (although many cynical points are also correct).. Some games aren't fun online if there aren't other people playing. So if they want to sell to people who prefer to play online, then it makes sense that encouraging people to play there would be part of the strategy all along." ], "score": [ 67, 20, 14, 12, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h34gjln", "h35spcv" ], "text": [ "Ultimately, it's because true A.I. doesn't yet exist. The technology that people now call \"Artificial Intelligence\" is mostly just super-fast computers with access to a lot of data. They lack individual creativity. In essence, you'd still have to provide the data to the A.I., which means that the A.I. wouldn't actually be developing the data, itself.", "I think the reason is pretty simple: time. You could use A.I. to learn new techniques or even invent new things, but, and that's a big but, current A.I. doesn't really reason the way we do. For example, if you set up an A.I. to play a game it will, after enough sessions, learn proper techniques and even some techniques humans may never have thought of. In fact this is what happens all the time and is a serious problem when it comes to A.I. safety. (If an A.I. ever encounters a weakness in the system it's deployed in which helps to reach their terminal goals, it - will - exploit them it. Be it a bug in a game, a flaw in a security system or even the naive humans who interact with it) But that's not the key part in this discussion, the key part is - after enough sessions. You see, a game can be simulated millions of times in a short amount of time. You can even run them in parallel on several computer clusters. But how would you do that with physical processes? Randomly throwing an A.I. at batteries would produce a lot of attempts humans wouldn't even consider. While that is the whole goal behind this, to find new approaches, most of these approaches would simply end in failure. On top of that the A.I. would have to alter the machinery used as well, because otherwise you would have to build a battery building facility that's capable of building and trying new stuff - fast - at the same time. So you may think \"can't we just simulate it?\". Well yes and no. Of course we could simulate it, but the simulation is based on our knowledge of the universe, not the universe itself. Thus the A.I. would be bounded by what is known to us in some sense. And even then. Maybe a completely different approach is necessary instead of a slight deviation. The probability of these major changes would have to be small though, otherwise the A.I. wouldn't be better than pure randomness. (Basically the mutation rate can't be too high or it wouldn't find consistent patterns. Just like in evolution, if every generation would be dramatically different then we wouldn't be able to build out lasting structures over generations and this can't optimize) Lower probability means more time is necessarily to eventually reach these \"mutations\". So in the end, I think it all boils down to time and practicality. It would take too long and cost too much to just randomly throw some A.I. at a task." ], "score": [ 6, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h34k8ux", "h34gmyf" ], "text": [ "It's not enough to just reverse all the colours. Companies have brands and reputations on the line. The new look has to still get the OK from the people who deal with that sort of thing. It has to look good, the company logo has to work with the new colour scheme, etc, and every inch of the user interface must be scrutinized for any errors. If there is any black-on-black text that can't be seen any more due to an error it must be fixed. Yeah it's more of a pain than it seems like it would be, but you're basically designing the user interface all over again including the troubleshooting and debugging.", "It really all depends on how you set it up initially and that's gonna be different for every app. Actually creating the assets for a dark theme isn't *that* difficult if you have them from your light mode already, but going through and changing everything to check which asset it's supposed to display can take a while." ], "score": [ 12, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h36of8j", "h36ob60", "h36rnr6", "h36xcfd", "h36s1rf", "h375qnd" ], "text": [ "I feel very old having to explain this. In the 1950s-1970s, there was no 911. If you didn't know the phone numbers to your local ambulance service, police department, and fire department, you were SOL. (Well, you could probably call the operator and hope that got you somewhere.) If you bought a (landline) phone in the 1970s to mid-1990s it usually had a little card with a clear plastic cover, with a blue police car or shield symbol, red fire or fire truck symbol, and red cross symbol, for writing down phone numbers for police/fire/ambulance. When you bought a new phone you were supposed to fill these things out. In the 1960s-1990s, 911 service was rolled out throughout North America. The idea was that when you dialed 911, your call would be automatically routed to whatever local authority (often a police station) agreed to service the block of phone numbers that includes yours. No need to memorize numbers - no matter where you lived, you dialed 911 and got someone who could either help or direct you to help. The rollout was very slow. Emergency phone number cards and stickers were still a big thing for decades. By the late 1980s, 911 service was almost everywhere, and it was no longer necessary to call your local FD/PD/EMS directly. The 911 system was great - you made a call, and you got a 911 center assigned to your phone number. The ubiquitous emergency stickers with police/fire/ambulance next to every phone slowly disappeared. Then cellphones became a thing. They operated in the same system - you called 911 and got a 911 center assigned to your phone number. That might be on the other side of the continent if you were traveling. Enter Enhanced 911, or E911. Under this system, the 911 system was improved, so that 911 calls weren't blindly sent to whatever police department claimed that block of numbers, but instead went to Public Safety Access Points (PSAP) with equipment and operators that could make sure the caller was physically in the region, determine what sort of emergency response was required, and redirect the caller if necessary. For cellphone users, the tower used to make the call was encoded as metadata, and used to redirect the 911 call to the PSAP associated with the tower, *not* the PSAP associated with the phone number. E911 has some additional features, such as the ability to poll your phone for location data, if your phone has GPS/AGPS enabled. This of course only works if your phone has an active and accurate location fix at the time of the call, and the PSAP has the equipment to poll that information.", "The other answer, while not wrong, doesn’t really answer this question, so: When you call 911, your service provider looks up the “Emergency Service Number”, which is a regular 10 digit phone number, that connects to the 911 call center physically closest to you. Every area has one of these, and they look up which one is closest to your area based on your billing address or cell tower. They redirect your call to this 10 digit number, and from there it’ll ring at your local 911 call center.", "To make the reasoning short and non-technical, Your phone operator is at all times aware of where you are. When your phone is on, it talks to the cellphone towers. To make it possible to call you, it's required that the cellphone tower that you are currently communicating with knows that you are supposed to be there. For any of it to work, the tower ALSO needs to share that information with a centralised control system. The first thing the phone system does when it tries to forward a call to you, is that it asks the centralised system \"alright, who is it that talks to that phone right now?\" so that the actual phonecall can be forwarded specifically to that cell tower that is tasked with maintaining the phonecall. There are some more fiddling that occurs when a phone moves out of convenient reach of a cell-tower, and hooks up to another instead in a fashion that appears seamless. But those are not relevant for this explanation, besides that you need to know that when the phone moves, the centralised system gets an updated summary of where you are instead. When you make a 911 call, the phone operator is forced by law to look at this information and make a sensible assumption on which emergency call centre to forward the call to. Generally speaking, this is a manually assigned decision on each and every cell tower, when it's erected. To top it off, many cell towers are \"divided\" into several cells. One antenna in each direction, so to speak. And that also offers an ability for the cell-tower to distinguish your rough direction relative to the cell-tower. And that information is also passed along to the call centre, together with the cell towers physical location. (It still gives a lot of guesswork since the information is something like \"I am at 2200 Main Street, and my westward pointing antenna can hear this phone. It ought to be somewhere within a mile or so in that general direction.\" But at least it's something.) In some places, regulations are pushing for cell towers to be able to force phones to activate their GPS and track themselves. In some places, cell towers already force phones to activate their GPS occasionally. But there are still phones on the market that has absolutely no GPS in them, and the technical information from the cell tower always works, which makes it a convenient start.", "When you make a phone call, it has to be routed through the phone system - so your mobile will connect to a specific cell tower, and your landline will be physically wired through a specific phone exchange. When you phone 911 the phone system recognises you are calling an emergency number, and it notes which tower or exchange your call is coming from - this lets it route your phone to the appropriate dispatcher for your area who will then organise the response.", "imagine you are in one of a large number of adjacent rooms (phone network) . each room also has a manager (call router) , that knows the managers of the other rooms. usually when you want to make a call the manager would transfer you to the other rooms until you me the person you want to speak with. but in an emergency you need that help locally. so the manager also knows where the first-aid kits are located in his room an can send you there directly", "I’m a 911 dispatcher and can answer this. The way 911 works, it routes your call to whatever center is in charge of the first cell tower your phone hits. Once that happens the 911 system keeps refreshing and working on pinging the next 2 closest towers to get a very accurate location (I’ve seen as close as on the physical building to about 50 meters away). Now it’s very common for that first tower that your phone hits to not be in the actual jurisdiction that you’re in, that’s where the triangulation comes in, you’ll then be transferred to the correct agency/center. Now with landlines this is different. Landlines are programmed to ring to the proper agency when they are set up. I hope this answer helps." ], "score": [ 1443, 38, 26, 5, 4, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h378xyi", "h37a8n9" ], "text": [ "By moving forward really fast. The forwards movement and the shape of the wings has two effects: 1. The air travels faster over the top of the wing which, in accordance with Bernoulli's principle, causes a lower pressure over the wing. This pushes the wing upwards. 2. The wing is angled so that it pushes air downwards which, in accordance with Newton's third law, causes the wing to be pushed up. Exactly how large a role each of these factors play is still a topic of debate.", "Air is a fluid, so like water you can push it together into a very thick pocket, like water in a cup. You can also spread it out very thin, like when you blow water out of your mouth into a mist. Air also likes to rise up and move. If you push a lot of air together, it will move everything else around it trying to escape into any direction. Wind is a very big example of this. So, the shape of a wing cuts through the air in a way that more air gets pushed under the wing, than on top of it. When there is way more thick air under the wing than over it, it pushes the wing up, like how a piece of thin wood floats on top of water. That causes lift, and if you adjust the angle of the wings right with enough speed, you can use that lift to fly up into the air. ✨✨✨✨✨✨✨ Fun fact, there are pockets of thin and thicker air hanging in the sky, so sometimes when you fly through them, you will rise or fall in the air a little bit. Fun fact extra, there are high speed ultra-light sail boats that can rise up out of the water using similar techniques as planes, but still in the water. The lift generated involves the same fluif physics as air flight: thicker water pushes the foil up and into the thinner air" ], "score": [ 12, 9 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h37gwkf", "h37z0h7" ], "text": [ "ELI5 answer. The hardware actually does physically change. When a picture is saved to memory, the phone does a \"write\" command to the drive. This means the data for picture is physically written on the drive. It no longer needs electricity to maintain the data.", "Imagine that you have an row of switches [like this one]( URL_0 ), that you can turn on or off, and to \"write\" information, you put them in different positions. Those switches need energy (your fingers) only when you want to change them, but if there's no energy they get stuck in their state. At the lower level, the methods of storing data you mentioned need energy to change their state (i.e. writing), but not to keep it, being a disc that is magnetized at different parts (as in a typical HDD), a chemical dye that is heated to change its shape (as in a CD-RW), or little \"switches\" (as in a flash drive)." ], "score": [ 10, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [ "https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSnYaNe0JTAf7vBYc0xr_v9639nr3eBvVStffCfdURBeYdbuj2H5YTWYuvcg2xsElw1gPM&usqp=CAU" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h37hzdk", "h37i167" ], "text": [ "Physics. Conservation of energy. All the methods you described would take more energy than they would produce", "Where would that energy come from? With a turbine, the additional drag would consume more energy than the turbine could generate" ], "score": [ 9, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h37p5bm", "h380g1g", "h37ml7k" ], "text": [ "As a developer, I can tell you that a web app is not always a good idea, and even a stupid one as even the weakest computer can handle many thing. You don't need Internet for a calculator for exemple", "There are two key reasons. Reason 1 is history: web browsers are newer than many applications, meaning that those applications would have to run \"natively\" (I.E. not in a web browser). Reason 2, is that web applications are not the most efficient, and don't necessarily have access to every feature the hardware provides. And for something like a video game, you'd want every bit of performance and efficiency you can get. Or, for a system app, you wouldn't want to rely on having a full web browser available. I will also note, that many applications are just webpages bundled with a browser. The most common one is Electron, which is just chromium.", "Initially, with iOS, that’s how Steve Jobs envisioned it. But there are different issues that arise from this. One being you’d need constant access to the internet for web apps. Secondly, they honestly wouldn’t look as appealing. ChromeOS runs web based apps, and there are severe limitations with that OS because of it." ], "score": [ 11, 8, 6 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h37ntsr", "h37wrjj", "h37ort1", "h38lt6i", "h37o2ps", "h3839rw" ], "text": [ "They wait with high-tech zoom cameras under a tarp for days at a time to avoid being detected by animals.", "I have not seen this mentioned yet but, depending on the size of the animals, they sometimes recreate the animal’s environment in a controlled setting which makes it easier for them to control environmental variables for shooting. I’ve seen this done sometimes with insects and aquatic animals.", "They are much farther away than they appear to be. They have really good camera lenses that let them do that.", "They also often stitch together shots from different days, locations and even animals to get the final sequence", "They use long range lenses known as teleobjectives, which are essentially like telescopes mounted on cameras. That way camera dudes can stay at a safe distance from let's say a lion and still capture all the action.", "National Geographic did an interview with the guy that makes cameras for these things. Really cool how they go about assembling off the shelf items into something that animals can be comfortable with. URL_0" ], "score": [ 32, 10, 9, 5, 5, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [], [ "https://www.nationalgeographic.com/podcasts/article/episode-6-real-life-macgyver-in-nat-geos-basement" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h399wfz", "h3994lk", "h398z6i" ], "text": [ "Trust me, corporations and government agencies *do* frown on them. A *lot.* (Along people who kiss the asses of said corporations and government agencies.) But they're utterly powerless to do anything about it. Doesn't stop them from trying, though. YouTube automatically deletes any comments from someone using a VPN. CAPTCHAs get a lot more touchy when they're in use. Streaming services try to block VPN users, though they aren't always successful. But the same things that scare these people are the very reasons why VPNs are so important.", "They're countered equally easily if the service provider wants to. VPNs are inherently centralized, so building an index of VPN servers and blocking their IPs isn't hard. The key is understanding who these limitations originate from, and often it's not the content provider themselves. Therefore, they don't care about people circumventing a ban if it doesn't affect them. Example: A US website does not confirm to EU's GDPR, and therefore is geo-blocked in EU countries. Provider doesn't care about Europeans accessing the site via VPN, since the provider doesn't break the law by serving non-conforming content in the EU. From their view, it goes to an American server and from there on, it's not their business.", "Well, there are a few reasons I believe. The law generally takes a while to catch up. The technology advances at a rapid pace, and it takes years for the companies to gather their lawyers, go to a court and fight something this big. Imagine making a case against VPNs for bypassing netflix, for example. Another thing is that it is generally faster and easier for these corporations (Like netflix) to take the matter in their own hands. As far as I know there is a game of cat and mouse when it comes to VPNs and Netflix. They create algorithms that detect VPNs, and the VPN companies bypass them. So basically, I believe there is not much they can do." ], "score": [ 14, 10, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h39asfc", "h39b9bj", "h39b1lw" ], "text": [ "Pretty simple, there are no financial incentives to improve the systems and no financial risks to not improving the systems.", "Scam and span calls have nothing to do with security Thats like saying roads are insecure because criminals use them.", "The ability to phone your number from anywhere is the whole point of phone networks, of course this means that if someone with malicious intent gets your phone number they can spam you, just like with email, it’s not a matter of security of the system, it’s just what you use it for You can’t simply ban spam calls, it’s just any other call for the phone company, and if they banned number after receiving complaints, the scammers will just get a new number" ], "score": [ 6, 5, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3anqjz" ], "text": [ "There are some types of memory which can be filled up very fast, but like RAM in a PC, they are only temporary. So a high speed camera records a huge number of frames per second for a very short burst, then you need to transfer that data off the camera memory before recording the next high speed burst. You can easily need to be storing gigabytes of data per second, so with high end cameras most of the expense is getting the memory and memory controllers right." ], "score": [ 5 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3ap1ha", "h3aprcm" ], "text": [ "If memory serves the screen is made up of thousands of little Dots that, when pressed, make an adressable electrical connection. To over simplify it think of a grid system like the Battleships game, you press somewhere on the screen, the software in your phone reads it as a coordinate and then checks where that coordinate corresponds to.", "When you touch the screen you complete an electrical connection. This lets the phone (for example) know where your finger is and where it is moving, so it can visually draw the same line on the image. The touchscreen is the laptop track pad, the image is the laptop screen. Just on your phone its all combined into one surface." ], "score": [ 4, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3aqq1k", "h3astzt" ], "text": [ "Because there needs to be a way to READ the connections. Your screen is flat and rigid, so it isn’t actually based on pressure. There’s a slight conductivity to skin, which is what allows the phone to detect contact. That’s why it also works with pencils wrapped in foil, but not things like rubber", "There are two very common touch screen types, resistive and capacitive. The resistive screens work by having two conductive layers held a short distance apart by a grid of spacers. When the pressure of an object touching the screen pushes the layers together the electricity that is able to flow between the conductive layers will allow the touch to be detected. This kind of screen can sense touches from any kind of object capable of exerting the required force, but they tend to have relatively low resolution of touch and the layers obscure the screen underneath a bit. Gloves would work with these screens. A capacitive screen works by having a grid of conductors that form an electric field that extends outside of the screen a short distance. When an object which can conduct electricity such as a finger comes close enough it can be detected and the touch registered. Any kind of object that conducts electricity similar to a finger can be detected as that is what it is calibrated to sense, so special conductive stylus' can be used or even weird things like uncooked hot dogs. Cotton or polyester fabric though as would be on the end of a normal glove is not of similar conductivity to gloves though and so they won't work." ], "score": [ 6, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3awl8e", "h3b7agr", "h3crrvi", "h3awgcb", "h3awod3" ], "text": [ "It is the impurities in the water that connect to contact points within a device. If the device is on, the electric current can be sent to places that it shouldn’t go and that causes damage. If those impurities don’t make contact with the connections in your device and create a short then your device may be completely fine. The water does not automatically destroy devices, but it can trigger problems. Even if your electronic device survives a water incident there is a chance of problems in the future. Water can cause corrosion, a chemical reaction, with metal and the circuit board. Electronics can often function with some corrosion, but you may notice issues or complete failure over time.", "water as in pure H20 doesn't really do anything major. its the impurities in most water you see around that causes problems, they are mostly either minerals or salts, both of which are generally conductive to electrical current, so when it gets inside a device that isn't protected it leads to shorts that will likely damage the device. even if the contact itself doesn't do any noticeable damage, you have the issue where these same impurities tend to deposit after the water evaporates and these materials are helpers in generating corrosion in metals by reacting with them and the oxygen around them.whatever corrosion doesnt end up breaking, rust is not conductive so the circuit still gets irreparably damaged.", "ELI5: Electricity is lazy. What I mean by that is electricity will take the easiest, shortest, least resistance path at any opportunity it can get. To only reason we get electricity to do anything we want it to is by giving it fancy little wires for it to travel on a circuit board. Then water comes along and is like \"hey, instead of going through that very complicated circuit...why not just hop a ride through my electrolytes (charged ions that can carry electricity), and take the easy way?\" So electricity, which should have gone one way very slowly, is now dumping everything at full power into something it isn't supposed to and likely breaking it.", "It will erode certain pieces. And although water isn't a great conductor it will conductor and short circuit pieces which can cause damage", "1. Short circuit, water (the less pure, the worse) is conductive, so it will put electricity where it shouldn't 2. Corrosion, water will cause metals to tarnish and corrode, which might break thin metals like component legs and contacts 3. Electrolysis, when there are two or more metals in electrical circuit through the water, they will react with the presence of electrical current, and do unwanted things like generating flammable hydrogen, eroding material and rusting" ], "score": [ 60, 7, 5, 4, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3blsy3", "h3az5pv", "h3bap54", "h3ayogd" ], "text": [ "People here are failing to address the main issue - explaining resistors assuming everyone already knows everything about a circuit. Imagine a circuit like a bunch of pipes with water flowing. The water pressure is voltage, and the current is the amount of water flowing through. Now imagine you have something which is powered by water, let’s say a garden hose. When you connect the garden hose, you don’t want the water flying out at a crazy high pressure. It could hurt you, and damage things. This is the same in circuits. The components in the circuit can’t all handle the high voltage, just like how your hose can’t handle the high pressure. So what’s done to fix this? You add a valve to the hose, or a resistor to the circuit. The valve on the pipe will restrict the amount of water that can flow through - protecting whatever the water is being used for. Just like this, a resistor is used in a circuit to protect components that could be damaged otherwise. Of course, there are a lot more applications of resistors. However, protecting components is a common and simple use of resistors.", "Even a direct connection via a copper cable has a resistance. It's miniscule, yet unneglectable. This is why we need thermal circuit breakers in house wirings, because if you draw too much current from a cable it heats up due to its resistance. Resistors to electronics is what drag is to aviation. A plane can only steer via flaps because they alter well-dosed amounts of aerodynamic drag. Same thing with electronics. Any device making use of transistors (transfer resistor) only works by altering the resistance of a certain circuit within.", "One important use of resistors is allow for control within a circuit. For example, volume/tone knobs on musical instruments, tuning knobs on radios, and on/off triggers like smoke/door alarms, thermostats, and light switches. All use various forms of resistors to take an input (a change of resistance) and change the properties of a circuit for a purpose (turn on your air conditioning, or making the volume louder on a guitar, for example). Another use of resistors can be to protect sensitive electronic components. Light bulbs, for example, are essentially resistors that make light, but LED lamps produce light with very small amounts of resistance. If I were to install an LED lamp directly into an electronic circuit, there wouldn't be very much resistance at all and the flow of electricity would damage the LED, so I need to put a resistor into the circuit to limit the flow of electricity and protect the circuit. As an analogy, resistors have the role in a circuit as a load does on a car engine. If I took a sports car and floored the pedal to drive up a hill, the effort of driving up a hill is a \"load\" on the engine and it's ok. If I put the car up in the air on a jack and floored the pedal the wheels would spin without any load and the engine would just accelerate and accelerate to a speed that could damage the moving parts of the car. In a similar way, in a circuit without resistors electricity could flow so freely it could damage the sensitive computer chips and things that don't like tons of electricity.", "This explanation is far from correct, but you might get the idea: Not every component in a circuit is made to handle high voltages/currents, so you will need to limit how much energy flows to avoid breaking those components. Some components produce different results when applying different voltages, in which using a resistor can aid in achieving the result you were aiming for. Also, electricity attempts to go the path of least resistance. If you wanted to power multiple parallel components equally you would have to balance the resistances on each." ], "score": [ 41, 12, 11, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3bcjzb", "h3bfdlz" ], "text": [ "At the end of a shutdown process, your operating system sets an ACPI command indicating that the computer should reboot. In response, the motherboard resets all components using their respective reset commands or lines, and then follows the bootstrap process.", "It does clean everything (or at least used to. not sure for newer technologies). To start a computer, you push a button, it send an electric signal to the motherboard to start up. Mother board does its thing and computer start. When you push the shut down button (or tell windows to shut down) it send a signal to the motherboard to shut down. Mother board does its thing then shut down. When you order a restart instead of a simple shutdown, there is a very slight change in the \"does it thing\" before shutting down. The last thing the mother board does before shutting down... Is sending a signal to herself to start up. So while everything MB needs done is done, there is a very slight delay before cutting the power to empty the batteries. Well the signal to start comes before these batteries empty and the MB can start the process immediately." ], "score": [ 19, 11 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3btejo", "h3cmf7i", "h3cwdno", "h3bubdw", "h3btfw2" ], "text": [ "The entire radio spectrum is \"noisy\"--there's interference in it from both man-made sources and natural ones (e.g. lightning strikes). If you tune the radio to a dead channel then all it will be picking up is that noise, which it amplifies and turns into the static that you hear. You still get the noise on actual radio channels, but it gets drowned out by the radio station you're tuned in to so you tend not to notice unless it's very bad.", "You hear whatever radio electric waves are around that specific frequency. These are generated by each and every electric device, near of far. Tuning at a frequency means your receiver expects a specific signal (a carrier) at that frequency, with some power level, and it also expects data to be coded in a specific way on that carrier. FM radio means frequency modulation, so you get bits by adding a specific set of frequencies on the carrier for a specific length of time (or oscillations). When there is no emitter, there is no power, but the system will still try to decode the signal like there was a carrier and modulation on it, which produce this noise. Smart receiver systems will try to follow the carrier, as it does move a bit, but when it gets too far from anything it will not \"autotune\" to the nearest, highest powered carrier detected. Fun fact, there can be data in that noise. In fact, when you do not need a lot of bandwidth, say under 1000 bauds, you can transmit with a very low level of power, at noise level power or sometimes even less. It makes it \"invisible\", since to everyone and anything that scans by trying to detect power levels higher than noise, it is drowned in noise. I think the military uses that now (they used to use frequency jumps but that can be spied on now)", "I'm surprised I didn't hear this answer yet. One of the most dominant noise sources is the thermal noise generated from your system. You can think of heat as random motion or vibration of the matter in your antenna (and well...everything). That means the electrons are randomly moving, and moving electrons in a resistor makes small random voltages occur. This noise is multiplied by the effective receiver bandwidth. So cosmic noise maybe 10 dB above the fundamental noise floor.. Electrical storms and other man made noise can contribute, but MOST of the time, you're just hearing a bunch of warm electrons dancing around inside your radio.", "Your radios antenna picking up all the background radio waves/interference from other electromagnetic waves. When you tune a radio to a station number (or more specifically tune it to that specifically frequency) you pick up what the station is broadcasting with that frequency. Typically, the this signal is strong enough to drown out any background static/background radiation/interference. But, when you’re tuned to a station that isn’t broadcasting (that you’re out of range of any station that is broadcasting on that frequency. Your radio antenna is just picking up and playing all that background noise that typically gets drowned out. Edit: to add a source of these waves/background noise that you’re picking up. They can come from things like radio stations that are too far away to receive clearly, or they could come from all the electronics and appliances like microwaves/handheld radios etc we have around in our modern world. Or, for really sensitive equipment (or equipment away from lots of other sources of interference, it could even be radiation from space. The sun, stars, and even cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang all exist and can interact with our equipment.", "[Cosmic background radiation]( URL_0 ) Basically, it’s electromagnetic radiation leftover from the big bang. Same as TV static (does that exist anymore? Lol). Your radio is looking for electromagnetic signals, and it picks that up when it can find anything stronger (like a station’s signal). Edit: erased some redundant wording cause I messed up the link at first" ], "score": [ 383, 65, 29, 23, 21 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [ "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3c22qv", "h3cl5au", "h3cj1jw", "h3d6i4c", "h3d3ozc", "h3ciuh9" ], "text": [ "Generally the difference is light. If the light is hitting objects at different angles, or if it’s not passing through partially transparent objects like skin, your mind will see that something is wrong.", "There are several things that I notice that will clue me in to CGI: * Lighting is off. It looks mismatched with the scene, or it doesn't shift with perspective. * Edge blending is unrealistic. Often the edges of the CGI are too fuzzy or too sharp. They look the same when \"distant\" as when \"close\". * Unrealistic physics. Like when someone is shot into the distance at what would be 50g acceleration. Or, when a Transformer grabs on to a bridge and shoots around in the other direction without destroying the structure or generating enormous exhaust from thrust. Or when something large drops from orbit and doesn't create a crater or shockwave.", "Modern CGI has gotten really good at replicating photorealism, especially with the use of ray tracing which has allowed movie makers to actually simulate how light actually works in the real world. Games do a really bad job of showing how human skin and light interact because it's actually really complex and games (until recently) couldn't use ray tracing. Movies don't have the same limitation so they can spend as much time and money as they want rendering their frames whereas games need to render dozens of frames per second. Basically at this point you really have to know what to look for to spot the CGI, even more so in action scenes where your brain is more focused on the action. Unless of course the studio just does a really bad job of drawing superman's mouth...", "We like to brag about the size of our human brain compared to animals, but a very, very large portion of that is dedicated to visual processing and facial recognition. Compared to most animals which recognize each other by scent, it takes up a lot more space to do visual recognition. This is the essence of the uncanny valley. Our brain is really, really good at human facial recognition and, to a slightly lesser extent, other animals we're familiar with like dogs and horses. We can make pretty darn convincing CGI still images, but making every single frame of a moving sequence convincing enough to fool our brains is much more difficult. The final factor is that CGI is sometimes *too* real. It perfectly models an artificial reality that is neater than actual reality. The light is scattered in a mathematically perfect way rather than a messy, real way, for example.", "movies employ many tricks to avoid you getting too close of a look at a \"fake\" thing. especially fake human things (I mean... whos to say what a fake thanos should look like? but we know what humans should look like, especially famous recognizable ones that were just in the last scene) so they put on masks, and wear outfits that have easy to render textures and minimal \"loose\" fabrics that need to wrinkle. They they shoot the scenes with lots of cuts and bright lights, and distractions, and the rare close ups they will put a real image into a fake scene and just the right shadows so you cant see the cutting line. games on the other hand... have almost no control over how you see them. the angles and lighting are completely uncontrolled, they can do very little to optimize them other than improving everything about them in all circumstances. which is much more difficult.", "We are so used to looking at people's faces that we recognize small details that aren't so relevant. There are different skin textures, hair follicles, shadows, etc." ], "score": [ 285, 64, 41, 9, 9, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3cn4oq", "h3cowzk", "h3cldc3", "h3d7ibm", "h3coyd8", "h3day9m" ], "text": [ "“One or the other, but not both” True XOR True - > False True XOR False - > True False XOR True - > True False XOR False - > False", "The best advice that I ever got in math is: when in doubt, write it out (for functions, plot it out; for word problems, draw it out). It may take a while at the beginning, but that’s how everybody got started. Eventually you do it enough times that you can do the writing/drawing/plotting in your mind, then everybody else start telling you that you’re “good at math”. In this case, the truth table goes like: TRUE XOR TRUE = FALSE FALSE XOR FALSE = FALSE TRUE XOR FALSE = TRUE FALSE XOR TRUE = TRUE Then, you look at it and try to describe it in your own word… …and it’s a difference detector — the result is TRUE only when the 2 inputs are different. Next, go ahead and write the truth table out for multiple inputs… …and you’ll see that XOR is an even/odd detector — the result is TRUE only if there are even number of TRUE’s in the input.", "Well, its like an OR where it can be A or B , you get a true result with any of: {A, B, A+B} EXCEPT its called EXCLUSIVE OR, which means the case where its BOTH A and B is deliberately excluded A xor B, you get a true result with any of: {A, B} or did you mean like how I'd make this out of diodes or whatever?", "You are having a wedding and are asking guests to choose chicken or steak. They choose chicken? Sure They choose steak? Fine They don't want to eat? Not ok, once that open bar takes effect they're going to be wasted without food They want both chicken and steak? Fuck that noise, you're on a budget and weddings aren't cheap.", "If you have two light switches for a room, they work the same as XOR. If either light switch is in the ON position, the light is ON. If both switches are OFF -- *or* if both switches are ON -- then the light is OFF.", "Ask two girls to prom. If one says yes and the other says no, that’s the girl you take. If they both say yes, you just call in sick and cancel. If they both say no, you don’t go. XOR: only one evaluates true to be true but not both" ], "score": [ 71, 9, 8, 7, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3d4n55", "h3d47ty", "h3d58xq", "h3dd5yr" ], "text": [ "The problem was that people didn't think far enough ahead. Many early computer programs only used two digits for the year. For example, *1976* was just *76*. However, once you hit 2000, two digits aren't enough. When the data says \"00,\" is that *1900* or *2000*? Any date-related program could go haywire. Imagine a payroll program for example--does it pay you for two weeks or a hundred years and two weeks? Fortunately, as 2000 got closer, computer programmers realized the potential problems and raised the alarm. There was a huge world-wide effort to update programs to deal with four digit years. The effort was so good, 2000 came in with very few serious problems. For more info, see [Year 2000 Problem at URL_0 ]( URL_1 ).", "Dates are used in all sorts of calculations. And a lot of those weren't built to suddenly have the year swap from 99 to 00. Imagine a billing program, calculating your next bill it calculates with the end date of the billing cycle being 100 years earlier. Some pretty weird results for the math. Or, a real example, a medical risk evaluation for pregnant women that used age. Suddenly, their ages are all over the place, and instead of getting the risk information of a mid 20s year old they're getting the risk information of a 70 year old. This actually led to abortions in some countries because the tests came back with wonky results. These were known issues, which was why businesses had mostly upgraded their systems early on. The cost comes from having large teams working on *very* important systems trying to make sure that the old and new data flows seamlessly and doesn't accidentally take down a banking network or power grid. Those emergency fixes are even costlier.", "When computers first started getting used in businesses and governments and banks, making programs as small as possible was important, as they couldn't store giant files. So using 75 rather than 1975 for the year made sense. Those early programmers never imagined that years later, many major systems would still be using those programs, and that when 1999 became 2000, those older programs would get confused and not know what to do as a result. This could have caused major problems for banks, for power plants, for military bases, as a lot of them were still using really old software in many cases. A power plant's computer might go \"You haven't paid your bill in 100 years! We're shutting off the power!\" or a bank computer might go \"We can't give that person a loan, they haven't been born yet.\" This was a real issue, and could have been really bad, but because we knew it was coming, companies were able to hire programmers to go back and update those older programs so that they used 1999 rather than 99, and thus prevent Y2K from causing a lot of problems. It could have been bad, but thousands of programmers all around the world worked hard to fix things ahead of time.", "Often, when we wrote dates, we just write the last two digits. 1945 becomes 45, 1969 becomes 69, 1992 becomes 92, 2010 becomes 10. Often, this is fine. Now, say you want to know how old someone is. Easy method is to take the current date or year and subtract their date of birth. If you're in 1992 and someone was born in 1945, then 1992-1945 is 47. But if you only use the last digits, 92-45=47, so it still works! Now, say we're in 2010. Someone who was born in 1945 is 2010-1945=65. Great. But if you only store the last two digits, you get 10-45=-35. Apparently, this person is -35 years old, i.e. they won't be born for another 35 years. Oops. This is the essence of the Y2K bug. Computers that stored dates as just 2 digits might trip up. The would think someone who's 105 and someone who's just 5 are the same age. To fix it, we just need to use a longer date format to do sums. And it might not just be the ages of people. Software might be keeping track of how long ago a particular thing happened. Maybe there's something that needs to happen every 5 year, for example. So, you need to use more digits to stop the computer from getting confused." ], "score": [ 25, 17, 4, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [ "Wikipedia.org", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem" ], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3dx8ie" ], "text": [ "> What happens when someone mints an NFT without having a right to the artwork for instance? Then they created an NFT and control it, until potentially selling it to someone else. The NFT does not confer ownership of the original work, just control of the hash of... something. Commonly it would actually just be the hash of a URL which points to an image file of the artwork. If the artwork is actually owned by someone else then they could demand the host of the URL take it down. At that point the NFT owner controls the hash of a URL that points nowhere. No NFT actually establishes the ownership of an artwork, it is at best a paper trail of receipts. Local law establishes ownership no matter what happens with the NFT. > But what happens to the blockchain if errors like this occur? There is no error. The NFT still exists and whoever controls it still \"owns\" the NFT. It is just slightly more pointless than it was from the start. > Can the information in the ledger be erased or changed and if so, how? Nope, that is the whole point. But that information only indicates who controls the NFT itself, not anything to do with ownership of the artwork." ], "score": [ 10 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3flna5", "h3fhbu5", "h3fm45e" ], "text": [ "Let's think of operating systems as human languages. You write a book in English and you want a Swahili speaker to read it. What do you do? Translate the book to Swahili. This is analogous to game available to both Linux and Windows. What about Proton and Steam Play? Well, some books don't get published in Swahili so you'll have to hire a translator to read it to you. Some books are really easy to translate on the fly, but some use advanced concepts that the translator doesn't fully understand. So the translator makes some mistakes. They're obvious but you can still enjoy the book. Now, try to give a book about theoretical quantum physics to a translator who works mainly with literary works. With all the hard to understand concepts and specialized words maybe they'll just say no to the job.", "For proton one of the big issues nowadays is often whatever the game has (non steam) DRM, Denuvo for example does not play well with proton.", "Generally speaking. If the game is very old. Like, 2005 Or below. The game will work with no issues. There are exceptions to this though. Where the issues arise are with Proton to play games because, If theoretically proton got good enough to run almost all Windows games. There would be no reason for any developer to make a native linux version. And Linux would always be stuck with the \\~ 5% performance loss in games **except some games do run better on Proton than they do on Windows ironically.** Also. There would still be services like FaceIT or ESEA where they wouldn't want you to ever use proton to play it and they'd figure out someway to detect it." ], "score": [ 167, 6, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3g7gal" ], "text": [ "So there are microphones on the outside listening to what's around you. Sound waves behave like other waves, if two of equal and opposite size meet, they interfere with each other and cancel each other down to zero. So the software listens to the environment around you, makes a waveform of the sound, and plays it's inverse with the music you're listening to. The inverse waveform \"destroys\" the waveform of the sounds getting to your ear through the headphones." ], "score": [ 11 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3gk0wf", "h3gkp0m", "h3glk0z", "h3gos87" ], "text": [ "An invention like the TV sounds like it had to have been made deliberately, but in reality, for the most part, these things end up with someone wanting to do something, and looking for what parts they know they might need, and only really invent the few bridging pieces, and the specific assembly of pieces. In the case of a TV, for instance, if we have the technology to make an electron-sensitive substance that reacts to having an electron thrown through it, and will react in a different intensity with how many electrons hit it, you then have the basis for a monochromatic image. We already knew that electrons are affected by electromagnets, and we knew how to make a variable strength electromagnet. We just needed a way to spread the particles (electrons) in exactly the right pattern, which is the right invention, and that was nothing more than setting out with a goal, and a lot, A LOT of trial and error. The invention of a TV likely predates what you think of as \"the TV\", though, as a TV is mainly a CRT monitor with an input source that is easy to modulate at will to display a movie or a TV show. EDIT: For whatever reason, I thought it was photons, when I actually knew it was electrons. Replaced every mention of the former by the latter to not be inaccurate.", "The requisite technologies were discovered and demonstrated in the late 1800s. It was then that various scientists discovered the photovoltaic effects of various substances. It was the 1890s that some guy demonstrated focusing and steering electron streams inside vacuum tubes with electromagnets. Early televisions were rather electro-mechanical, and driving a cathode ray tube with a signal was thus invented and possible. But signal storage, like on magnetic tape wouldn't come until the 1970s. It wasn't until the 1920s that someone invented a photo sensor tube that was able to make a television camera, and it wasn't until the late 1940s that someone refined this technology with the idea of reproducing it as an image. Once you have an electrical signal, it's not a leap of logic to beam that over radio as opposed to over a wire, they're practically the same thing, from an engineering perspective. It's a combination of scientists discovering neat properties of materials and properties, and engineers refining these basic principles until they had a handle on something that really demonstrated a utility.", "When people first started experimenting with radiation of subatomic particles they tended to conduct their experiments in vacuum tubes. This is because not only is the subatomic particles unaffected by anything in the tubes but also if anything shows up in this vacuum it must be due to radiation as there is nothing else there. This experimentation lead to the development of both vacuum valves and cathode ray tubes. The first CRTs that were manufactured and sold were for measuring electric and magnetic fields as these would bend the electric ray making visible patterns. And by passing a current through coils mounted on the side of the tube you could measure current directly. Two sets of coils mounted at right angle to each other allowed you to compare two values to each other and make simple oscilloscopes. A tool still used today. From this it was a short leap of imagination to make it show images based on the signals passed to it. It was simply one thing leading to another. The real trick was how to get the audio and eventually the color into the same signals.", "The first TVs were mechanical. A spinning disk was placed behind a screen with holes drilled into it. The screen only showed a small portion of the disk. The holes in the disk moved closer to the center as they traveled along the disk ([like this]( URL_1 )). If you span the disk, you'd see the first hole travel across the top of the screen in a straight line. Then the next hole would travel across the screen just underneath it, so on and so forth until the last hole crosses the very bottom of the screen. After that, the process would repeat again with the first hole traveling back across the top of the screen. If you place a light behind the disk, you'll see that part of the screen light up. Spin the disk fast enough and the whole screen appears to be permanently lit up due to an optical illusion called permanence of vision. Basically, your brain hangs onto an image for a brief time after it disappears. By varying the intensity of the light as the hotels travel across the screen you can make a black and white image. Now you just need to sync up a recorder disk in the studio with a TV and you've got a transmitter reciever. This system is called a Nipkow disk. [Here's]( URL_0 ) a very primitive one in operation. Unfortunately, this device had huge limitations. The screen was tiny, and the disk was very large. A modern size TV would require a disk the size of a building spinning at thousands of RPM to maintain the illusion of a single moving image. To get around this limitation, the disk was replaced with a spinning cylinder and the projector placed inside the tube. This allowed screens to get much larger, and the holes could be smaller and closer together, increasing the lines of resolution. Syncing auto to the visuals wasn't much of an issue because all TV was broadcast live in the early days. Pre-recorded TV shows didn't become common until the 50s when the videotape was invented. Later, the mechanical TV was replaced by the cathode ray tube (CRT). CRT creates an electron beam inside a vacuum tube. A magnet can be used to bend that beam as it's transmitted to the screen. Just like a mechanical TV, it draws lines from left to right down the screen. Finally, the CRT was replaced by digital TV. The TV signal is now sent as a data packet. It contains instructions for the color and intensity of each pixel for every frame of the footage, which is decoded by a chip in the TV. --- But none of this came about as a single invention. It's not like someone sat down one day and decided to build a TV from scratch. It was the culmination of several different inventions being put together in new ways." ], "score": [ 10, 3, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [ "https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bCLSLBsXcZ0/WPXEe-kVY7I/AAAAAAAAScs/hmqiWLhUvI4TI0kb0D0hCZggiyOpTNe4ACLcB/s1600/Working-tv.gif", "http://www.earlytelevision.org/Yanczer/images/60_l_lens-2.jpg" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3hs45l", "h3hdoqf", "h3hphac", "h3hsqj0", "h3j6nty" ], "text": [ "This is probably the biggest problem that thousands of engineers have been working on the last few decades, with the resulting improvement from GSM connections to incredibly slow internet, to 1GBps on 5G. There are lots of different ways each receiver can differentiate which signals are meant for it. 0. Spatial sharing. Wireless signals have a limited range so each device only communicates with the tower that is closest to it. The area around each tower is called a \"cell\", which is why we sometimes call mobile phones \"cellphones\". (The edges where two cells overlap get tricky.) 1. Time Division Multiple Access, TDMA. Basically each transmitter takes turns. 2. Frequency Division Multiple Access, FDMA. The electromagnetic spectrum can be divided into lots of little \"bands\". An electronic circuit can listen to one band at a time, and filter out all the others. 3. Code Division Multiple Access, CDMA. I don't know an ELI5 explanation for this. An analogy is standing in a crowded room where different people are talking, and your brain can consciously tune into one person or another. 4. Directional antennae. A big advance with LTE and 5G was antennae which can direct their signals more precisely. Now two devices relatively nearby can transmit/receive at the same time, at the same frequency, with the same code, and still get their message through. 5. Non-orthogonal multiple access, NOMA. Because amplitude decays as you get further from the transmitter, you can have a large amplitude signal and a small signal sent at the same time. The closer receiver subtracts off the large signal and uses the small signal. The further receiver won't even detect the small signal and uses the large signal.", "There are two main techniques. The first one is Time-Division Multiple Access which basically means that the time is split into different segments and each phone gets its segment to listen or transmit as assigned by the cell tower. The second technique is Frequency-Division Multiple Access where every phone is given its own frequency to listen and transmit on. Both of these are used in combination. So your phone gets its own time and frequency slots that it can use. In addition there are some slots where all phones are requested to listen inn on which allows the cell tower to give specific messages to phones when there are updates in the situation. It does not make sense for completely idle phones to get their own slot when there are no traffic. Each phone have its own IMSI code which helps the cell tower identify each of them when sending or transmitting data.", "So back in the day with landlines sometimes the phones would interfere and you would hear someone elses call for a moment. How did that work?", "eli5, think of it as your signal has the right color. it is all just photons, so if instead of a cell phone, what if you grabbed a flashlight and hung your hand out the window. you could flash it on and off to send your signal. up on the tower, there is a guy watching and he passes your signal onto a landline. he has his own light up there, but instead of a flashlight it is a flood light and he uses that to send your message back. you know which message is yours by the color. in the real world, it is frequency, not wavelength, and they also use very accurate clocks to send messages in sequence with everybody knowing their own time block. sometimes there is interference, back when i was a kid, they use to put signs on buildings warning people with pacemakers that there were microwaves in the building, but usually things are planned better.", "Most people are providing answers for the \"how does it not interfere\" and those are good answers, though I think we can ELI5 further by just saying that for any given area there are ways to slice up the whole cell's capacity such that each phone that needs to receive a call or data can do so in a very prescribed pattern that it can learn about when it's told that new data is about to be sent to it. And it knows that it's about to be sent data in that way because when it's not receiving some data, it's hanging out listening for the tower announce it has data for that specific phone (not quite using their phone number but close enough). Think of it like a huge room of people with unique names all sitting there silently and some announcer is constantly shouting \"Jim, go into room 45-A for your call in 2 seconds. Mary, go into 87-X for data in 2 seconds.\" And then only they have the key to that room (too complicated to ELI5 how the keys work) so they go there and listen to whatever the message is. Sending data works basically the same way except Jim's twin John goes to another big room with all the other phone-people and shouts that he wants to send data in 2 seconds and waits to hear the announcer tell him what room to go to for that. Sometimes two people shout at the same time and the tower dude can't hear either, so they both have to shout again to try again. Jim and John are different people here because receiving and sending data are different activities but they're twins because they're very related (haha!) In the same device. ETA: on the interference point, you might find it interesting to think about how all of what I said basically relies on everyone playing nicely and following the rules. If someone with an airhorn were to go into either of the big rooms and blast everyone, or even outside each of the small rooms, then nobody would be able to hear anything. That's what jamming equipment does intentionally, and that's why it's illegal. And as for unintentionally interfering, that's why every device sold in the US has an FCC sticker that certifies the device has been tested and it will follow all the rules." ], "score": [ 68, 35, 3, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3hfv2y", "h3hgbyx" ], "text": [ "When you have the HD movie coming your way, you aren't able to detect the latency, being the time it takes for the signal to travel from the ground to space and back down to you. You just detect the incoming stream, and show it as it flows in, like if you were dangling your feet in the water looking at the river, and have no idea how long it took to flow down from the mountains (or to fall on the mountain as rain after evaporating from the ocean, but the analogy is deep enough already). If you try to do something on satellite that depends on 2 way communication, then the delay becomes obvious, AND it doubles, cause anything you send to them is delayed (like when you click on a link) as it goes from you to space and back down to them, then the response also has to go from them to space and back down to you. It makes clicking webpages slow, and real time games unplayable.", "The problem is the directionality. Yes, both use packet based internet protocols, but streaming essentially just sends you a stream of packets in order - if you miss a few well, thats too bad - but the streaming protocols are designed to be able to handle gaps of missing information (maybe you'll see a few seconds of garbled image and audio but then it recovers). There's also the concept of buffering and caching for streaming media, so if you pause your playback the content is still streaming in from the originator. In all of this, your client may send an occaisional keepalive (\"are you still there? should I keep sending you stuff?\") but other than that its one way only: from the server to your client. For non streaming internet usage, its really a two way affair. Your client says \"give me < this thing > \", the server says \"ok here's the first bit let me know you got it\" \"got it\" \"here's part two\", and so on and so on. The problem is satellite transmission delay. When your client sends the first \"give me this video\" msg, thats got to go up to the satellite, then back down to earth somewhere and THEN through some part of the internet. And the ground to satellite or satellite part is the killer: its about 120 ms every time you make that hop. So for the first message \"give me this video\", we're talking: you to satellite (120ms), satellite to ground (+120ms), some internet (~40-50ms), some processing on the server (40-50ms), more internet (50ms), then two more satellite hops: +240 ms. Add all this up you're talking upwards of 6-700 ms, or almost a second. Which is _glacial_ at the speeds computers run at. Meanwhile your client browser or your phone or whatever is sitting there twiddling its digital thumbs. Compound this by x10 since every web page you request is actually hitting a dozen seperate webservers (you know the ones that feed you ads), so all of these requests have to trickle in over several seconds before your browser or phone can even begin to start to render the page." ], "score": [ 6, 6 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3i3ukc" ], "text": [ "Whoever is directing the animation chooses people to write music, create sound effects, and of course voice characters. This is generally done in a series of meetings very early on in the process. Voice acting happens before the animators start key framing in most cases, and sound effects + music are added once key framing is done. Once the key frames and full audio are in place the animation studio can make sure there are no mistakes and then proceeds to finish the episode." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "h3i4l66" ], "text": [ "The surface of the speaker that you see, if you take the mesh cover off, is what is physically making the sound. A coil and magnets push the front of the speaker back and forth and that creates sound waves you can hear. Picture your hand in the water and you push it forward and waves come from your hand." ], "score": [ 4 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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