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6vload | What regulates air traffic over long distances? What's to keep two planes flying over the Atlantic from crashing midflight? | Also, when do direction of the plane switch over from one airport to the next? Thanks you Reddit aces! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are some general principles of air navigation to prevent aircrafts from crashing into each other. First of all there are air corridors where most aircrafts are flying within. This is the shortest path between common points and also contain radio beacons to make them easier to follow. In addition your altitude have to match your heading. So if you go south east you have to fly at a odd thousandth feet plus 500 feet and so on. This means that airplanes crossing each other will have a minimum 500 feet altitude separation and airplanes on head on courses will have a minimum of 1000 feet of separation. Two airplanes flying the same direction will be flying at the same altitude but will likely have a lot of time to see each other and avoid each other. In addition to following these rules you have to file a flight path and to keep in contact with the air traffic controllers. There are controllers covering most of the planet. The exact boarders between the different controllers are marked on maps. Airports usually only cover the areas around them, mostly traffic in and out of the airport. For most of the flight you will be in contact with a section controller at a regional center. Most countries have a single control center. The boarders between the centers are loosely based on country boarders but they are much more practical then when they drew the boarders. For the oceans there are air traffic service as well. This operates on high frequency radio which work over very long distances. Things are a bit different for private aircrafts flying at lower altitudes but I have the feeling this is not what you were asking about. Smaller airfields do not have air traffic controllers but the pilots can talk to each other on a common frequency for the airport to warn each other about dangers. There are sometimes smaller aircrafts crossing the Atlantic as most aircrafts can do the trip if they have extended fuel tanks and stop to refuel on Greenland and Iceland. However most of these do not have high frequency radios but will be able to use their normal radios to talk to pilots at higher altitudes with better equipment to relay messages."
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6vmpf4 | How are wooden barrels made to not leak? | For hundreds of years, wooden barrels were used to ship and store a multitude of goods. Including liquids, how was this possible? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It takes a long time to build a barrel, but the longest time is simply letting the wood air dry for a few years. The easiest simple explanation is that they use the two iron bands and a big old hammer to bang the wooden slats in so that they fit VERY tightly to each other. Like we're talking massive pressure. Water won't get through that (or wine or whiskey). It's just super tight and they use a hammer, a winch and the iron bands to achieve that.",
"The wood is dried very thoroughly then fitted together as tightly as they can with iron/steel hoops. When they fill it the wood absorbs some of the liquid and swells making the seals even tighter.",
"Watertight barrel making is a specific type of carpentry called cooperage. Those who make barrels are known as coopers. Simply put, they take wood sliced into parallelograms and bend them into shape, then hammer them into place on the bottom of the barrel. Then steel hoops are added, bringing the angled cuts together perfectly. A lid with a groove is then hammered into place."
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6vnn2y | Why are AM towers so dangerous? | Touching a live AM tower results in instant smiting. Why is it so dangerous? The whole thing is an antenna or something? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes. AM radio stations broadcast on such long wavelengths that they normally use \"hot tower\" set ups where the tower is insulated from the ground and then the whole tower is fed from the feedline. Broadcast AM power levels range anywhere from 1 kilowatt to 50 kilowatts and higher.",
"Worked in AM radio for decades. An AM tower is not too dangerous, but you can get burned by touching it. Most AM towers are sitting on a base insulator and the guy wires are broken up electrically by \"Johnny Balls\". So if you touch the tower you provide a path to ground. The RF will burn you, but not kill you. It will not kill you because AM is a much higher frequency than 60 Hz. The government in a super abundance of caution, set up some pretty tight restrictions on how close the general public can get to a hot tower. And all AM towers are require to have fences that are locked to keep people from getting too close."
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6vnqb3 | What does a nanometer mean when talking about processor dies? | Does it refer to each transistor measuring 14 (or say) nanometers or a bunch of them? Also, i see a lot of websites which say things like "true" 14nm and otherwise. Isn't it universal? For example, is Intel's 14nm different from say, Samsung's or Global Foundry's? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"14nm is the size of the features, not entire transistors. [If you look at pictures like this]( URL_0 ), a 14nm process can accurately make 14nm-wide features.",
"It refers to the minimum feature size -- parallel electrical llines would have a minimum 14nm separation, the minimum thickness of any side of a transistor component would be 14nm in any direction, and so on. You can think of it sort of like the pixel size of the design. Going smaller is a challenge from both a design standpoint, because the smaller you get, the more relevant second order, third order, etc effects become and you have to start taking quantum effects into account, and also from a manufacturing standpoint from the challenge of actually fabricating the thing to that level of precision, with an acceptably small number of mass production defects. ETA: after some checking it looks like the issue with \"true\" die size is that certain Intel chips only have 14nm features on their base layer, with larger features on other layers (chips are essentially 3D stacks of thousands of layers these days, like silicon Jenga). Why did they do this? Because it was easier at the time; eventually they'll get there. & nbsp; ^I ^remember ^when ^19nm ^was ^a ^big ^deal"
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6vri6v | what about the chips in credit/debit cards makes it safer than the magnetic strip | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It prevents one specific form of credit card fraud--cloning. The information on the magnetic strip can be read, then used for a subsequent transaction. This is because the information on the chip is static and unencrypted. The information in the chip is unique to a single transaction. Let's say you go to a grocery store, buy some groceries, then realize you didn't pay for the dog food in the bottom of the cart. So you use the card again. The information used for the two transactions are different, even though they were created seconds apart at the same location. So while a bad actor **could** theortecially read what's on your chip, that information is useless because it cannot be used for a future transaction.",
"Magnetic strips are only storage devices that store your credit card information in plain text. However the chip is a tiny computer with built in components. The chip reader will power up the chip in the card and send it your pin code for validation and a copy of the transaction. The chip then compares the pin to the stored value and use a built in encryption key to sign the transaction. So in order to complete a transaction with a chip and pin card you need access to the card for a few seconds, the pin code and the details of the transaction you want to complete. But to complete a transaction with a magnetic strip you just need a readout of the magnetic strip which can be done in a fraction of a second by swiping a reader across the card. With this information you can make several transactions at a later date and also clone the card so you can use it in ordinary shops."
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6vwhc7 | How can merely opening an email be dangerous, if you don't download the attachments? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Email at first was text only, now it can contain images, gifs, etc. This is because web technologies (HTML, CSS) spilled into email territory. So, the email clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc...) now need the ability to render emails like a web browser but instead of reinventing the wheel and create a render engine, is easier to reuse an existing engine from a web browser to do so. This open the door to vulnerabilities that can affect you with only looking at an email the same way a web page does, because now the email client has to interpret the code in the email to render it, and wherever code has to be interpreted there's always the danger of an exploit lurking."
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6vxz3t | How does Velcro work, and why does it get dull after use? | I've always wondered how the pads stick together and how come after some time it gets unsticky? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The generic name for Velcro is \"hook and loop\", which gives you an idea of how it works. The fuzzy side is a lot of little loops, while the more rigid side is a bunch of small hooks. When you try to pull them apart, the hooks grab onto the loops, and hold it in place. When you apply more force, some come loose and others tear. Over time enough loops get torn that there isn't much of the hooks to grab anymore and the sticking power decreases."
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6vz4nh | How do download managers throttle download speed? | Some download managers (like IDM for example) or torrent applications have an option to limit your download (or upload) speed. So my question is, how do they do that? What's the tech behind it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are a number of things at play here, but it all comes down to packets and sockets. The data you're sending (or receiving) is chunked up into packets of predetermined size and buffered (queued) for transmission They're then sent along the TCP/IP relay, and any packets that don't arrive in a reasonable amount of time are re-requested by the recipient, and then stitched back together. So to slow down transmission, you can shrink the amount of data in each packet, and slow down how often you're willing to acknowledge receipt of a packet. For the ELI5 part: it's just like if you were, for example, in a bucket brigade trying to fill a swimming pool with water. You can slow down how long it takes you to give/receive buckets, and you can decrease/increase the amount of water you stick in each bucket, thus changing the speed at which the swimming pool fills up/drains."
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6w1nwi | How do oil rigs work? | Especially the ones you see in empty fields, moving up and down | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's kind of like a reverse plunger. An engine pushes a plug into the ground, when it pulls up, the suction brings up oil.",
"The ones you see in the empty fields moving up and down are called pumpjacks. They're actively pumping oil out of the ground. The rigs with the big tall towers are the drilling rigs & derricks. They have to be tall to be able to support the long pieces of drill stem that gets poked down into the ground. Once a drilling rig strikes oil, the well is temporarily capped off until the derrick can be dismantled and a pumpjack can be installed."
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6w27e8 | Smart Lightbulbs | How Can a Smart Lightbulb allow electricity to move and power the lightbulb when you are not manually turning on a switch? Sorry if its a stupid question, I probably dont have an fundamental understanding of electricity/lightbulbs but some features smart lightbulbs advertise is the ability to use your smart phone to turn off the light with your phone or schedule them to turn off or on without you needing to do it. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The smart lights have a small computer inside them. So they are really two devices, a computer and a light bulb. It also has an electronic switch that works like a gate. When a certain voltage is sent to the switch, it opens the gate and which allows electricity from the socket to flow to the light bulb part. In the past these switches used to made from relays. Relays were mechanical devices that used electro-magnets to physically connect two wires together. A small current would flow through the electromagnet. This would attract a strip of metal to a metal post. When the strip touched the post it would complete the circuit allowing electricity to flow. Now-a-days these are made from semiconductors. Semiconducor based electronic switches are also was are used to make microprocessors. So the smart lights have millions of electronic switches that make up the processor along with a much bigger electronic switch that turns the light on and off (and dims it and changes the colors too if the bulb can do that.)"
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6w37c0 | Why is it bad to have two anti-virus softwares installed? | I've heard that having multiple anti-virus/malware programs installed can create a lot of problems. Is this true? Why or why not? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because when a antivirus scans your pc, what they actually do is scan your HDD for files, meaning, they put your pc under a lot of stress reading a lot of files and processing them looking for patterns of known malware and suspicious behaviour. Add another software that does the same and you have 2 processes fighting hard for disk (and other resources) access. Lowering the life of those devices considerably. Also they fight, over everything, one finds a suspicious file and quarantines it, the other found the quarantine folder and quarantines it again until the first one found the other quarantine folder, etc... And they also see the process of the other accessing a LOT of files and then each try to kill that suspicious process.",
"In a nutshell, AV software acts very much like the malware it tries to prevent. It parks itself in memory, monitors or tries to intercept processes etc. When you have more than one installed, they will often identify each other as suspicious or potentially malicious. Not only will this cause you a lot of false warnings, but it can cause severe system instability as they both attempt to take defensive measures against each other."
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6w3o7f | How does the news get shots of reporters in hurricanes? | With high-speed winds and rain, how do camera crews get that shot of a reporter standing in the storm? What does that setup look like? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I watched Hannity last night. While they were filming the reporter in Corpus Christi, the camera crew was in a parking garage and pretty well protected. The reporter was standing out in the street to get maximum drama. The camera just used a zoom lens to make it look like it was pretty close to the reporter. It's pretty common for these reporters to try to make the event as bad as possible instead of just reporting average conditions."
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6w3sks | How much control does Google have on the internet? | I remember a couple of years ago, Google servers stopped working for a very obscure amount of time, during which a large amount of the internet traffic worldwide ceased to exist. So I just wanted to know how much control and influence they have over the internet? And why can't they employ such power to hurt the business of ISPs and other companies who are trying to stand in the face of net neutrality. Edit : [Article about said outage] ( URL_0 ) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's basically three ways that a website can depend on Google. * First, you have Google's websites, obviously. So URL_0 , gmail, blogspot, YouTube, and so on. Obviously those will be completely down. * Second, you have other people's websites hosted on Google's cloud. Rather than running your own server, it's easier (and some times cheaper, depending on your traffic patterns) to pay someone like Google or Amazon to host your website on their computers. Examples of non-Google services that run on Google's computers include Snapchat, Spotify, Evernote, and Pokemon Go. These will also go completely down if Google gets cut off from the Internet. * Third, you have websites that aren't run or hosted by Google, but which include pieces of code that gets stored on Google's servers. There's a very commonly used swiss army knife of web development called JQuery that Google hosts a copy of, among other things. Websites don't need to use Google's copy, they're allowed to make their own copy, but your computer will only download this code once across all the websites you visit, so it'll actually make the websites load faster if they use Google's copy. If your computer decides to check for updates to this file and Google's servers are down, all of these other websites may have problems. None of this really helps them against ISPs. Google's capable of shutting down the websites of people who rely on them, some of whom pay them boatloads of money for their services, but nothing they can do would have any real impact on an ISP's bottom line.",
"They have an unimaginable amount of influence. They gather so much info via gps, keystrokes, camera usage, even talk time. I noticed just today photos i did not back up somehow managed to appear in google drive. It is scary what they do behind our backs. They pretty much are destroying yahoo, msn and bing at this moment. They are just doing it quietly."
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6w4czv | How did alarm clocks set the time for the alarm to go off before they were electronically controlled? | Back when alarm clocks were still gear powered, how did turning a dial in the back let the clock know when to ring the alarm? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If my logic holds up: Think of the alarm hand as a trigger. When you choose your time, you set the point in which the hour hand (Or a part of the mechanism controlling it's movement) hits it, setting it off."
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6w4mv1 | Why is 60fps held as the gold standard when making video games? | Why not 40fps or 70fps? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The American power grid runs at 60 Hz. Therefore, American television was designed to run at 60 Hz. Early home computers used television tubes for video output and were built in America. Therefore, early computers ran at 60 Hz. Therefore, PC monitors were built for 60 Hz. Common monitors still refresh (i.e. show a new picture) at 60 Hz. If you render new stills slower than your monitor refreshes, you get stutter because one of the stills has to be shown twice. Therefore, 60 Hz is a popular frame rate. Another interesting thing: Television ran at 60 Hz, but only at 30 frames per second. But with old CRTs, which display the image as short flashes, this causes unbearable flickering. What television makers did was divide each frame into two halves, called \"fields\", one contianing the even lines and one containing the uneven lines. They could not push a full 60 fps, but with each field only having half as much content, they could deliver 60 fields per second and still get a 60 Hz refresh rate, making flicker much less noticable, which is where we get interlaced video from. On an LCD, this looks quite terrible, since it does not do short flashes, it holds the image until the next frame comes in, so we see comb-like structures when things move between fields. Interestingly, despite HDTV driving the widespread adoption of flat-panel displays, HDTV was still designed for tubes, so we still got an interlaced resolution with 1080i. Ultra-HD, being designed for flat-panel displays from the ground up, does away with this, and delivers low frame rates instead if it cannot go for full resolution at full frame rate.",
"Most monitors and TVs have a 60Hz refresh rate. So they only display a new image once every 60th of a second. So ideally you want the game's fps to divide exactly into that. If it doesn't you get screen tearing, where the monitor/TV shows part of one frame, part of another. Hence the image looks like it has a tear in it. Some TVs do have higher refresh rates, but the signal to the TV is still usually based on a 60Hz update, so it doesn't really help that much. There are also technologies like G-sync which matches the monitor's refresh rate to the game's fps so it eliminates screen tearing. Hopefully this will become a standard thing for all TVs and monitors in the future."
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6w4tr4 | Why isn't Windows Based on UNIX | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because Windows *was* built on an existing framework - MS-DOS. UNIX was built for workstations, not personal computers. So it would have been impossible to cram it onto on a lightweight machine like the original PC. It was also wholly unnecessary, as its core feature - multi-user processing - was impractical on an 8-bit microcomputer of the time. When Microsoft won the contract to develop the O/S for the IBM PC, they adapted CP/M (an earlier 8080 O/S) into MS-DOS. They did have a UNIX variant, Xenix, but it was never particularly relevant. Once the IBM PC and PC compatibles became wildly popular, they created a huge catalog of software that required Microsoft to continue to maintain popularity. That meant when Microsoft developed Windows, it had to develop it on top of MS-DOS. That core of MS-DOS was retained until 32-bit O/S's (Windows 2000/NT), after which it was deprecated into the terminal functionality we see today."
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6w66ke | Why do browsers get stuck loading, but after a refresh the page loads fine? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you try to open a webpage, your computer has to send a request to the place where the webpage is stored, asking to view the webpage. The webpage then sends the page to you in small chunks called data packets, because it's too big to send all in one go. Kinda like eating pizza in slices purely because it won't fit in our mouths in one big piece. After your computer receives a few packets, it sends one back saying \"I got these. Send the next set.\" And sometimes the packets can get damaged or go missing. If this happens to too many of them you can't load the webpage. If you press refresh to try again it works because less (or none) of the packets went missing.",
"Rendering a web page involves loading a lot of discrete pieces of information. For example, a web page that has a picture on it will cause your browser to go and load the picture. This happens for many images, ads, etc that make up the web page. If any part of this stalls, it can cause the loading of the page not to work right, but if you refresh the page, it will try again only this time certain content like pictures which have already loaded are already on your computer so the whole thing goes faster."
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6wb0ak | Why do downloads often stop at 99% before finishing? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Three possible reasons: **1. File integrity verification:** Your computer performs an operation on the data you downloaded and compares the result to a checksum. If answer and checksum do not match, the data is corrupt. This is how your computer tells if your file's data is a completely correct copy. **2. Uncompressing:** Some optimised downloaders or protocols (usually modern ones) have built-in compression. Compression reduces file size and helps with download duration. However, to extract the raw file from a compressed one, it needs to be decompressed first. The 1% is decompressing: you may notice the 1% takes longer for bigger files. **3. Virus scan:** Modern browsers also have in-built virus scanning. The process is similar to file integrity verification, but your computer actively looks and matches for malicious code checksums.",
"Imagine that your favorite cousin sent message to you Here's the catch: the entire message doesn't come entirely at once. They come in a string of letters, and there are a lot of them, and there are 2-3 days between each letter arriving So when you finally have the final letter, you start assembling the entire letters, THEN you can read the message again in its entirety, to make sure you don't misremember Getting the letters is what the 99% shows, assembling and reading them is what 1% does",
"The other answers here have been good for certain circumstances, but the integrity checksum and uncompressing are usually stream operations, so they can happen as the file is downloading. Virus checking and moving the temporary file to it's finished location are block operations, so they would take time at the end of the download. But those only happen in specific circumstances - many people don't have virus protection and the temporary file doesn't need to be moved across physical drives / partitions, and yet there is still a delay at 99%. But there is an answer: **File cache flush.** When the file handle is closed by the browser, it asks the OS to ensure that the file is physically on the drive. This causes the pipeline from the fast memory-based file cache to complete it's emptying out to the slower hard drive. This mostly happens continuously, but because the hard drive is slower, it takes some time to catch up. You can also see an opposite effect: for medium-sized files, the first few percent is much faster as the memory cache fills up, then it slows down when the memory cache gets full or is flushed and has to wait for the hardware. The size of the cache varies depending on your memory usage, hard drive speed and type, operating system and lots of other factors. The hard drive flush speed also varies depending on what other programs are using the drive, so it's hard or impossible to roll this in to the download time estimate."
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6wbc3k | How does the technology that sees if tennis balls are in or out work, and how come it hasn't completely replaced linesmen? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I know more about this than a lay-person should, but that's perhaps because I'm considering starting a business in this area. On this, you can AAMA - I know quite a bit. I also know this is _way_ more info than you actually care about, and nobody is going to care about this, but I enjoy talking about it, so, here goes: The system you're talking about in tennis is called [Hawk-Eye]( URL_2 ) and the first time I saw it in use was during a cricket match being shown in the UK where the broadcaster had brought it in to understand very subtle decisions almost impossible to judge by eye (cricket has a rule called \"LBW\" which in particular, is hard to get right sometimes by sight), and it quickly got engrained into the top tier of the game. There are other systems as well. Ever wondered how \"they know\" your favourite soccer player has run 18.2km this game? That's almost certainly from the [ChryonHego]( URL_1 ) Tracab system. When it comes to pass completion, shots on goal, etc. that data is probably coming from another system called Opta. That relies on a mixture of camera tracking and human event classification (they have people at games saying \"that frame was a pass, that frame was an attempt at goal, etc.\" In Rugby the players are often wearing positional tracking devices that also track heart rate and letting coaches know how players are performing in real-time. I believe NFL does this too. Basketball has a mixture of systems, and in cricket, they have even more toys (I'll come back to that). You are probably also aware that in motorsports, the objective has become \"a driver moving as large a collection of sensors as possible around a track as quickly as possible\", because the more sensors you have, the better you are at managing the data, the more likely you are to win. Hilariously, just this weekend, one F1 team has shown that their [positional analysis is easy to fool and can lead to stupid decisions]( URL_0 ). The positional tracking systems all have similar concepts: film something, then analyse each frame. In the case of Tracab and Opta, they're happy with 25 frames per second, the same as most broadcast TV systems. I would argue it's a little too low for accuracy. Hawk-Eye is a much higher frame rate (500-1000 frames per second) that should aid with the accuracy. Each frame is broken down in terms of object recognition: here are the lines, here's the ball. Now look at the relationship between them and produce a data frame. The data frame will have x, y, z co-ordinates of a ball in relation to a line or some other aspect you care about, and can be fed into a piece of software that can call \"foul\" or \"goal\" or whatever you need. Now, why has it not all replaced officials? It's obviously already used to augment officials. In some tennis competitions you can actually hear Hawk-Eye make a noise on fouls that is effectively taking the place of a linesman. In EPL games, goal line technology using something like Hawk-Eye (not ChyronHego, I believe), is used to let a referee know the ball just crossed the line in case it's not obvious to them. For some scenarios then, it is being used to replace linesmen. There are three reasons it hasn't yet succeeded in removing them completely, I think. Firstly: cost. It's not cheap. There are a lot of problems they have to take into account in getting this far. Wind, light, shadows, floodlights causing multiple shadows, they all need to be dealt with. That has led to R & D costs being quite significant. They are proprietary systems that cost a fortune to develop, and it's a bit of a closed-shop monopoly. Setup requires a fair bit of work and there is normally a team of people running it behind the scenes at each game where this technology is deployed. That cost is not a problem with the top tier, but the top tier of every sport normally knows its future lies in lower rungs and \"grass roots\" forms of the game. It's important that even the second division (where these systems can't be used), look and feel like the top tier. And ideally, it should be possible to play the game on a Sunday afternoon down your local park without it seeming to be futile. Human judges aid with that. They signal \"you can do this\". The sports in which that's not possible (F1), still have alternatives, and there are some measurement systems (timing, speed, etc.) that are accessible to teens with a desire to soup up their Corolla. Secondly: not all in-game events can be tracked using these systems. Hawk-Eye can track a ball near a line being foul or not, but it can't easily tell whether a player's foot is over the line it should not be when serving, for example. Even in cricket where Hawk-Eye first made its reputation, detection of foul balls (when a bowler steps over a line) has to still be done by umpires and video review. Whether the ball hit a bat or not is done by audio detection (snick-o-meter), and heat-sensitive camera (as the ball brushes the bat, the friction warms it up enough to show as white hot on an appropriate camera). The technology isn't quite there yet to make it possible for these events to be done through camera analysis alone. Thirdly: accuracy. It's pretty damned good in some scenarios but less so in others. I competed in the Manchester City hackday in July 2016 (was in the winning team, too) where we got access to Tracab and Opta raw data from some historical games. In some of those frames we were seeing the football travelling - according to their systems - at 1,500m/s - which is about Mach 5. It clearly didn't actually do that (I mean, I think Yaya Toure is _great_, but he's not _that_ good), so where did the error creep in? That casts doubt, and to my mind, just enough to not allow it to be determining the outcomes of games on which millions of pounds and entries in history books are determined. Hawk-Eye's higher frame rate is likely to make it much more accurate, so you can see it making more inroads into official calls. It makes most sense in contexts of positional review (cricket, tennis, goals in soccer), and ideally in phased-play games where there is a lot of stop-start and reviews can be done without disrupting play. Tennis lends itself to all this perfectly, so the only honest answer I can give you as to why it's not everywhere is quite simply cost and the fact some in-game events can't be done through hawkeye so they need the official anyway. They'll defer to humans allow Hawk-Eye on review where it has the time to churn the data rather than in real-time.",
"It uses camera images. The exact location and specifications of the camera, tennis balls, field lines are known. Then by analyzing the size and location of the ball on the different camera images, they can determine its actual location. Why hasn't it replaced linesmen? First of all it's extremely expensive to set up, so in the near future it's never going to be a universal system. Secondly I'm not sure if it's possible to have it activated in real-time, to call immediately when a ball is out. Given that in football goalline technology seems to work that way, it looks possible, but I don't know the details. Finally tradition is very important in tennis, which could hold back some possible advancements."
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6wbdzb | What's the difference between DVI-I and DVI-D? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"DVI-D is digital only. This means that both the device and the monitor have to support the digital signal. DVI-I combines digital and analog signal. This allows you to use it to connect either digital or analog devices. Specifically it allows you to connect a DVI cable to an [analog VGA connector]( URL_0 ) with a simple adapter, without requiring something that will convert the signal from digital to analog.",
"A digital video interface has to have a lot of pins, but an analog interface doesn't need more than a few. DVI is an older (but still useful) digital video interface that can transmit analog video from the same connector. If the connector supports analog video in addition to digital, it is DVI-I. If it's just digital, it's DVI-D. A provision for analog video is important in connecting to older monitors which exclusively supported it - this connection can be as easy as a five dollar passive converter (as opposed to an active converter which has to do more than just rearrange cable connections, and so needs to be powered). Including this provision in the digital connector allows for more space on a motherboard/graphics card's IO board."
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6wbpfw | How do live YouTube streams of TV shows get away with it? | I've spent all day binge watching live YouTube streams of South Park, Family Guy and American Dad on my TV and it's been great But I've been wondering how these streams survive considering that when full episodes of TV shows are uploaded to YouTube they are always quickly removed due to copyright. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because streams cannot be easily automatically processed by Youtube's ContentID system. Someone would have to report the stream to the copyright holder, then they would have to contact Youtube to shut down the stream.",
"Besides the obvious triviality of re-uploading deleted content, they often alter the stream. Some will mirror the image right/left, others zoom in, stretch or draw a black border to change resolution. Even audio can be changed. YouTube's algorithm needs a comparison file to check against. Even the simplest alterations can cripple its functionality entirely.",
"You can't possibly keep up with how fast people put them back up when they're taken down. Nature of the beast.",
"My guess would be it's so much easier to live stream. With videos say 100 episodes of South park they have to make an account upload them ect everytime they get taken down. A stream all they do is restart the stream no uploading way less work"
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6wc6gt | Has handgun technology apparently stopped advancing? | So, maybe this is all based on a misconception, but it *seems* like gun technology has been at almost a standstill. For example, the M1911 pistol, more than a *hundred years old,* is still considered a valid and respectable combat weapon. How is this the case? If you tried to go into battle with an airplane from 1911, you'd stand no chance against today's warplanes. Same with naval ships and telephones and body armor and practically everything else. Versions from a century ago would be laughably outclassed by today's technology. But not pistols. Carry a century old pistol, and you're approximately as well equipped as someone with a modern one. Why is this? How is it that while almost every aspect of warfare has advanced enormously over the past century, the pistols we have today are more or less the same level as they were a hundred years ago? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Pistols are simple mechanical tools. The hammer hasn't changed much in centuries either. Adding more stuff means more stuff to break or fail. It does all it needs to do. Having said that...they have changed. The metal alloys used and other raw materials change with progress. Ammo and sights change quite a bit as well."
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6wc6tr | Why cameras and screens go crazy when recording/displaying lots of thin stripes? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's called a [moiré pattern]( URL_0 ), caused by two overlaying patterns that aren't identical or aligned. In this case the \"patterns\" are the square grid of the pixels in the camera sensor and the other can be a pinstriped shirt, overlapping when the image of the shirt is projected onto the sensor. Depending on the orientation of the two patterns, the moiré changes. Since just small changes in the orientation can have large changes on the resulting moiré, a moving camera will shift through new patterns with each frame, causing the haywire-like behavior.",
"Most cameras today are digital. This means instead of a chemical pad that light hits, it has a sensor pad that's a bit like a computer screen, full of pixel-like light sensors. Right now the way these sensors work, a little processor pays attention to one horizontal row of these at a time, writes it to memory and then moves down a row. This method can cause weird artifacts when trying to scan thin details or fast moving things, as the objects trying to be photographed will change a lot visually, even in the time for the \"scan-line\" to move down a row. It's the same reason propellers look the way they do when recorded by a smartphone. URL_0 URL_1 Another reason would be for the same as why cameras seem to hate taking videos of snow, rain, confetti or fireworks: many videos stored digitally do so by a more efficient method than storing a whole picture for every frame. Often, it'll store one key frame every few moments, and then much simpler motion frames, which contain no color information, but just motion data on how to smear the last key frame to make it look like things are in motion. This method can make a movie file much smaller when there are times when not much is happening or things move slowly and predictably without much color change (face to face conversation, slowly panning across a city, showing a landscape as a single spaceship goes by) but it can break down of there's too much object movement (many things lines, tiny detailed things moving fast, gunfire)."
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6wc78m | What does a CPU actually do? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A CPU is essentially a calculator. It does arithmetic like adding, subtracting and multiplying numbers, and can then make \"decisions\" based on the results of those operations. It reads sequences of instructions and executes them. Instructions are arithmetic operations like I mentioned above, or they are \"branch\" instructions. Branch instructions cause it to jump to a different position in the sequence of instructions is specified conditions are true. This usually means if a particular number is less than, greater than, equal to or not equal to another number. There are also other instructions such as reading or writing to memory (which in this context usually means RAM), and various control instructions. Pretty much everything a computer does is just lots and lots of these relatively simple instructions put together in complex ways.",
"Everything your computer does, from \"simple\" things like writing a text document, to running complex simulations of physical systems, is broken down into many, many, small specific instructions (like a recipe) that your computer must do, and the part of the computer responsible for executing those instructions is the CPU (Central Processing Unit). Imagine a simple line of code that says: x = y + 3; Meaning the variable \"x\" will now be the value of the variable \"y\" plus 3. Your computer would break this down as it follows: - Find y in the memory, save its value in a temporary space in the cpu itself - Take the value of y it just got, add 3 to it, and then save the result in another space in the cpu - Put the result in the space in the memory where x is located. It's not necessary for the programmer to tell the CPU to do that, and it's not the CPU itself the part that breaks things down into simple instructions, that duty lies with the compiler (the thing that takes computer code like \"x = y+3;\" and \"translates\" it into something your computer understands). There are, of course, many different instructions the CPU can do, and there are many ways in which it can do them. There are also situations in which several CPUs are working together to execute the instructions to speed things up, which is what people mean when they say their computer is \"dual core\" or \"quad core\"."
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6weive | Why are 100%cotton button-down shirts made out of a different fabric than 100% cotton t-shirts? | T-shirts are stretchy. However, button-down shirts only recently started incorporating elastane/etc. for the "stretch" effect. Why not just make button-downs with the same stretchy 100% cotton that t-shirts are made out of? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Woven fabric vs. knit fabric is why button downs don't have the stretch that t-shirts do. Here's a blown up photo of [woven fabric]( URL_0 ), which has a grid look to it. And here's [knit fabric]( URL_1 ), which is interlocking loops. While these aren't cotton shirt material, you can see the difference in the fabric's structure.",
"Dress shirts are woven. T shirts are knit. Unless wovens include elastic type threads, they do not stretch."
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6wfok0 | What would happen if you didn't turn on airplane mode during a flight? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Nothing. Absolutely friggin nothing. To put it another way: Things that will happen = zero. The opposite of something will happen. Really, like, not a thing.",
"To add to the \"Nothing\" response... Obviously thousands of people get on planes every day with their phones, and even if only one in a thousand forgets to switch to airplane mode, that still means that right now there are probably hundreds of planes in the air containing phones NOT in airplane mode. How many planes crash regardless of the cause? Not many. And how many crashes have ever been officially reported as being caused by a phone not in airplane mode? Zero."
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6wg6no | Why does Computer Science have one of the highest unemployment rate of all majors when the field has so many job openings? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"CS is a decent credential for programming jobs, but it isn't particularly good training. Most people need a ton of self-directed practice before they're good hires.",
"As someone who does interviews for a tech position. College graduates often times aren't prepared for these jobs.",
"CS teaches a lot of theory. Employers want practical applications of theory. This brings a very wide range of skill sets from \"can't ever write a line of code, but can tell you some CS trivia\" to extremely talented. Being from a good school is nice, but if you're actually good or have proof that you are capable of being good (github projects for example), then you will not have any problems.",
"Since demand and salaries are high many people are trying to enter the field that don't know anything about engineering. That code boot camp won't help if you are an arts major. Sorry.",
"I just graduated with a CS degree. One thing I have noticed among some of my peers is that they are pretty damn good at programming but they lack that “social” quality that employers look for. You can’t just be a good programmer. You have to be a team player and willing to face adversity for growth. Some people just can’t face that, so they don’t go that extra mile past just doing their programming homework assignments. To me, It’s about the entire package.",
"Notice that the experienced graduates had half of the 8% unemployment. Going into computer science you have to specialize like medicine or have many specialties. Just because you got a degree does not mean squat if you can't prove it in the real world. I know many colleagues that apparently did really well in class but that hasn't seem to translate into the day to day constantly changing field. You have to be willing to continue your education beyond your degree. My degree got me in the door but my certifications allowed me to get other jobs that were higher paying. I'm not knocking degrees but other than my first job no company has really given any weight to it other than to check it off that I have a bachelors degree. all the conversation so started with what certifications do you have that are current and relevant to the task that you're going to be working on.",
"I've heard that a lot of the tech taught in courses is YEARS behind what is actually being used in most businesses these days. Not sure if that's an answer or not but that's what I read looking into switching to CS",
"Outsourcing I heard. Or at least you see people talk about it on here a lot about how they create a position with the standards so high that they can't get filled practically and they either outsource the job or bring someone from India. They will defend that decision by stating that they couldn't find anyone to fill the position. They save money and no one is the wiser. The tech industry is really nerve wrecking in terms of job security.",
"One thing that's pretty unique to this field is how many different ways (languages, tools, etc) there are to do the work. I can't think if anything else like it. So that makes employment tough. The more different technologies the smaller each one's marketshare and need for your particular set of skills. It's a big pie but there is a lot of slices."
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6wj5nv | How does a computer OS work? Why are there so many files? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you can imagine how much effort It might take to use a grid of on/off states that effect each other to create a cohesive structure for understanding numbers, and then on top of that to try and create a system for using that system of numbers to do something as simple as multiplication, you'll start to have a vague idea of the massive amount of layers of very simple calculations followed by another layer of slightly more advanced calculations and so on it would take to get to the UI (User Interface) level of the operating system. Imagine this as a pyramid, with a whole lot of very simple things happening at the bottom, and each layer up you use the layer below to do more complex things. (It's not quite like a pyramid, but that should give you a crude visualization) The hardware handles the deepest levels of all that and the operating system is essentially where that pyramid stops being about the physical layout of your circuits (everything in the hardware is at the most basic level designed to either process or store information) and starts being about how you can program the system you've created to do more interesting things, files at the low levels of the OS being just data that is stored that knows how to do things that higher levels of the pyramid can make use of. Not only does the OS need to go through a substantial number of layers to be able to do what we use modern computers for but it has to be able to make sense of the entirety of varying hardware currently on the market which requires an overwhelming amount of code, therefore a lot of files. There are also a lot of files simply because it's necessary for organization. A lot of separated pieces that do a lot of simple things that are well organized is a lot easier to sort through than one massive file that does a lot of things that you have to dig through and try to sort out mentally every time you need to modify or trouble shoot any tiny thing. Hopefully that gives you some kind of rough abstract idea of how it all works."
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6wkbks | How do floods like Houston flooding happen with all the modern technology and drainage systems we have? How do they even happen? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Finally, something in my wheelhouse! So, I'm a civil engineer, specifically I do surface water management - so I design culverts, ditches, dams, other water management structures. There's a concept in hydrology called \"Return Period,\" and it's another way of looking at the probability of an event. So if you hear people talk about an N-year event, that's an event that has a 1/N chance of being exceeded in a given year. A 2 year event has a 1/2 (or 50% chance) of being exceeded in a given year. A 25 year event has a 1/25 or 4% chance of being exceeded. So on and so forth. Everything is designed for a given return period, and it's all a question of risk tolerance. You could absolutely design all of your ditches and storm sewers and stuff for 100 year events, or 1000 year events, or even the PMF - the Probable Maximum Flood - which is so big that it doesn't even have a return period. The problem is, what municipality wants to spend the money building a storm sewer to pass a 1-in-1000 year event? It would be totally oversized and cost a ton of money, when chances are you'll never actually get a 1-in-1000 year event during the service life of the structure. So usually what we do is we establish guidelines based on the consequences of failure. Dams are a really good example. For a dam, you look at how many people live downstream of the dam, and how much property would be damaged (and how many people would lose their lives) if the dam were to be overtopped or to fail. And you pick your design return period off of that. As a general rule of thumb, we design things that are small with low consequences of failure for either 2 years or 10 years, we design things with moderate consequences of failure (property damage but no loss of life) for 20 years, 50 years, or sometimes 100 years, and we design things with significant consequences of failure for 100 years, 1000 years, or the probable maximum flood. I hope that helps!",
"Put very simply, each drainage system has a maximum amount of water that it can drain every hour. If rainfall exceeds that maximum for a long enough period of time, the drainage systems being to flood and/or back up and the city starts to flood. Most of these systems can be improved, but it is a cost/benefit discussion. As a Houstonian, there was discussion about improving our drainage systems after our last major flooding event (in April) but it was estimated that it would take years and over $20B to build in the necessary improvements. We didn't make the investment, because it was anticipated that a flood of that volume was such a low possibility that it wouldn't happen again in the near future. Houston actually has a very good drainage system, but you have to remember that Houston is going through the impacts of a category 4 hurricane right now - we call these things _acts of God_ for a reason. It is unlikely that _any_ system could handle the amount of rain that this thing is dumping on us - estimated at over 60” in some parts of the city.",
"It is incredibly expensive and time consuming to plan for extreme, unlikely scenarios. You can build a car to be lava proof, but why would you? No one is driving their honda into a volcano, and the odds of a volcanic eruption being around any given car is next to nothing. Or to put it another way, if your town came to you and said they were tripling your taxes for 10 years to pay for a drainage system that would only need to be that expensive if it was planning to stop a catastrophe at an unknown date, would you be okay with that? The 'modern technology' (big-ass sewers/pipes) is there, but it isn't exactly free (or free to maintain)."
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6wm98m | When a new company make a phone why do they make a skin? | Wouldnt it be cheaper to use stock android? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Part of the issue is that phone companies don't want to be in the business of making a hardware product that runs generic software. They want consumers to feel that it's a product from X company through and through. This is a problem seen in the windows laptop world. The only thing differentiating HP from Dell from Lenovo is the hardware itself. And given that phone hardware is very similar as it is, the manufacturers want to appear to be distinct. So a company like Samsung or HTC want the skin so that it makes their product appear distinct to the consumer. Otherwise, it's just another glass slab and you could buy that anywhere."
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6wn1u7 | Why cant we artifically metabolize food to use as a renewable energy resource? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"We can. That's basically what bio-diesel/corn-based ethanol fuel is. The problem is that food provides enough energy to power a human body handily, but when you want to start powering machines with it, you need a *lot*, more than there's really room to grow if you wanted to power a whole civilization. The other problem is that all the energy that goes into growing the food and processing it into fuel vs the amount of energy produced by the fuel results in a net loss."
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6wo4ro | How did cartoons like Tom and Jerry look so detailed, and most of them were made in the 1940s?. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The backgrounds were actually paintings in a lot of the old animated cartoons and movies, and often pretty highly detailed. The characters themselves (and anything else that moves) were animated on top of the painted background using transparent film. The foreground characters typically weren't as detailed as the background because they'd have to be redrawn a million times.",
"The thing to consider is that animated shorts from pre-TV were made to play in theaters. If you've ever seen a making-of about like a Disney movie? That entire pipeline started with 5 to 10 minute shorts. If you're comparing Tom and Jerry to what plays on TV, that's a whole other animal. Animation *had* to get a faster and cheaper production pipeline to work on TV. Five minutes of cartoon played as is in front of three movies a season, vs twenty eight minutes of cartoon that had to be brand new every week? It wouldn't fly. This is why a lot of cartoons these days are much simpler by comparison, along with why so many of them use some degree of premade assets.",
"People were much cheaper in the 1940s. Cartoons ran in movie theaters, and they were worth money. Money + low cost labor = detailed art."
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6wp6s8 | Intel's Core processor differences and what is Skylake and Kaby Lake | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Those are \"code names\" for different processor generations. Kaby Lake was released in 2016, Sky Lake in 2015. Intel produced processors on a \"tick-tock\" cycle. That means every tick of the clock (12-18 months) they change the architecture, trying to get a faster processor without changing the size of it. Every \"tock\" of the cycle they shrink the die, making it smaller. Practically this means that if you buy a processor during a \"tick\" there's one more generation before you need a different motherboard that has a smaller socket. If you buy on a \"tock\" then the next generation will fit on the same motherboard, but will consume less power and/or run faster. I may have confused which cycle was the tick or tock, someone correct me if I'm wrong."
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6wq2en | In firearms, how do fire selector mechanisms work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When a gun cycles the bolt carrier group cocks the hammer which is held cocked by a sear on the trigger (if the trigger isn't pulled). If the fire selector is on safe it will simply block the trigger from being pulled (and therefore the hammer can't be released). On semi-auto/fire when you pull the trigger the trigger sear is releases the hammer, the gun fires and cycles but if you hold the trigger the hammer will be hooked on the disconnecter that sits on top of the trigger. When you release the trigger it will again hold the hammer on the sear before the hook on the disconnecter disengages and the gun is ready to fire again. On full-auto the selector depresses the disconnecter so it won't hook the hammer when the trigger is held back. To prevent the hammer from striking early or just softly following the bolt before it is completely back in position there is a second sear which holds the hammer until it is released by the bolt carrier at the very end of the cycle. Burst-fire is sort of a mix of semi and auto where the selector does not depress the disconnecter instead a different disconnecter is used. This disconnecter will be attached to a ratchet of sorts that prevents it from engaging the hook on the hammer. Besides that the trigger group will act like full-auto with the second sear but every shot the ratchet moves a step forward until it hits an interrupter. That interrupter will move the disconnecter back into position to hook the the hammer again like in semi-auto action and the gun won't fire again until the trigger is released."
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6wrmib | Coffee and cocoa beans are awful raw, and both require significant processing to provide their eventual awesomeness. How did this get cultivated? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yemeni goatherders noticed their goats eating coffee beans and acting up, so they tried them, too. Like a lot of veggies, man figured out roasting can help the flavor, or that it tastes good with a broth. When they felt its effects it was then used to stay awake for night prayers. Check out the great travel-ethnobotany book The Devil's Cup for a really cool history of coffee Edit: There's been some speculation that the origin was Ethiopia, a theory which has its sources, too, and is close enough to the Arabian peninsula connection most historians pin the origin to. Also, shout-out to Kaldi, the herder who legend says was the one who noticed it; I believe those sorts of legends Edit 2: Thanks for the gold kind caffeinated stranger!",
"Cocoa beans are surrounded by pulp, and coffee beans are found within a \"cherry\". Both of these are edible and consumed by animals. So there were reasons to nibble on them even if you discount the bitterness of the beans. Humans have also been eating and processing foods for a long time, we've probably tried eating damn near everything on this planet at one point or another. Neither are particularly toxic nor require advanced processing, so they're pretty edible as things go. There may be specific events that lead to cultivation of these, but it's no more strange than the fact that we eat olives or beans.",
"We live in an age of food surplus that man as a whole has never known. Famine and hunger were common problems in our past. People have literally tried to eat every imaginable form of life on our planet in order to avoid starvation. There is even a protocol for experimenting with unknown plants to see if they can be ingested. Touch your skin, then more and more prolonged interaction until likelihood of toxicity or allergy may be discerned. The question for me is how many natural foods have we destroyed or forgotten as we moved into a factory farm system?",
"The real question is how soybeans came to be cultivated? Coffee and cocoa may not taste great when raw, but eating soybeans raw can make you sick, and even kill you.",
"The history of many foods that are...errr...challenging is largely lost to history. But the easiest explanation is that happy accidents happen. The story of the goat eating coffee beans is apocryphal, but it's probably not far off from the truth. Either the goat or some other animal ate it and a human noticed, or a human was really desperate and tried eating the beans with interesting results. Over time, experimentation led to better ways of processing to get desired results. Drying (as in the case of coffee beans) is a natural because that's one easy, primitive way to store something past its growing season. It's possible that someone tried drying the beans by roasting them over fire, which would have brought out more flavor in the beans than just sun-drying. And coffee is born. Chocolate needs to be fermented to make it palatable. Again, this is a natural progression. Most organic matter will ferment unprovoked in the right conditions. Chocolate likely began as an accident, and someone liked the results of the accident (or thought the chocolate had potential as food) and started experimenting as well as introducing the foodstuff to other members of the community who also experimented. Those who first consumed chocolate (in Mesoamerica) drank it in unsweetened, fermented form, so it would have been bitter and strong, but Europeans started adding sugar to it and brought chocolate back to Europe. There are lots of other fun examples mentioned here by other users--in ~~South and Central America~~ Mexico corn was nixtamalized to free up nutrients and make it more digestible (also consider that before corn even became corn as we know it, it went through thousands of years of breeding--initially, it was a wild grass that was extremely labor-intensive to harvest and prepare, so part of the history of any of these foods is intensive breeding and selecting for traits that we--humans--find palatable). I always think of artichokes too. A spiny thistle that many of us now find extremely enjoyable. How many thousands of years of breeding did it take to get the artichoke into its current, delicious, but still labor-intensive, form? Fascinating stuff to contemplate. My takeaway is that humans are hungry and clever. If it can be eaten, omnivores will find a way. EDIT: Thank you for my first ever Reddit gold, kind stranger! EDIT #2: Nixtamalization originated in Mexico. Thank them the next time you enjoy a street taco (which I hope is often).",
"I don't see it mentioned here, but for coffee, the legend is that an 8th century Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi noticed his goats were energetic after eating coffee cherries. He showed the effects of the fruit to a Sufi monk, and the disapproving monk threw the berries into a fire. Kaldi observed a pleasant aroma and thus, roasted coffee was born. Many coffee roasters will name a house roast after Kaldi. [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )",
"Most of humanity lived off of plants native to where they live, not grocery stores with Florida oranges and New Zealand kiwis on the same shelves. When you're eating the same foods of generations, and when food is scarce, a lot of experimentation and creativity happens to advance",
"You can get used to a lot of different tastes over time. Even if coffee beans and cocoa beans taste awful raw if you have not tried a lot of it before you can get used to it after a while and enjoy its sweetness and effects. Normally people do get used to less awful things like coffee, beer and cigarettes which all taste awful for the first time but you get used to it. We also have examples of much worse tasting things that is consumed in great quantities. So raw coffee beans is not the worst things you can get used to.",
"> Kopi luwak is the world's most expensive coffee. The main factor of it's high price is the uncommon method of producing such a coffee. It has been produced from the coffee beans which have been digested by a certain Indonesian cat-like animal called then palm civet or also civet cat.",
"same way most things are discovered, trial and error. Someone likely ate a bean and it tasted awful, then thought \"maybe it'll be better if I cook it/boil it/roast it/smoke it etc\".",
"Cooking in many cultures like Italian and Indian etc. is so complicated. Many dishes take hours or even days to prepare from scratch including multiple steps. Someone took their time to figure things out. This is before food science was prevalent.",
"Add cashews to that list. The cashew nut grows on top of a fruit (which can be made into cashew wine or juice). Intensive labor to roast and re-roast the cashews. Have watched the process in awe, takes patience, fire, and skill. Don't complain about the price when they're fresh roasted for $15/lb",
"It's worth noting that both coffee and cocoa have a very tasty fruit that encapsulates the seed. That provides an initial motivation for eating them. Most people who have not spent time in coffee or cocoa growing areas are unaware of this and are only familiar with the seed that gets processed. Additionally, *robusta* (lowland) coffee leaves were chewed much like coca leaves to get the mild narcotic effect. There are lots of foods we use that come from non-intuitive sources. Manioc (cassava or yuca are alternate names) grows in several varieties, one of which is extremely toxic in its unprocessed state. Despite that it's a staple food, but it has to be grated, the juice squeezed out of it (contains arsenic I think it is), leached further with water, and dried before use. After thousands of years of cultivation we now have other varieties that don't contain the toxins and no-longer need the processing, but the original toxic variety is still grown and eaten in some places.",
"When we were starving we would eat anything edible that would fulfill us in anyway and not kill us. When food is scares and tastes bad we would burn roast it or boil it. When it was scares it would also be made into a soup or broth. Basically at one point humans have been starving enough to try to eat everything organic possible , if it tastes bad they cooked it , it if still tasted bad they tried to mix it or make a soup out of it. IF it was still bad they tried desperately mixing it with other things to see it if would make something edible",
"Olives are the ones that confuse me! They're not even edible without months in brine! Who thought...\"I know, let's soak them in salty water for months!\"",
"There are lots of examples of this. Without curing, olives are completely inedible (and according to my wife, still inedible after curing), yet olives form the backbone of the Mediterranean diet going back thousands of years.",
"Just gonna focus on cocoa beans. The creamy stuff around the beans in the fruit is very tasty. This was harvested first, and the seeds were trash and would dry on the ground. Eventually some of the dried beans would have gotten into fire pits or near hot coals, roasting them and releasing their awesome aroma, and that's all it took.",
"Interesting fact... both coffee and cacao get most of their complex flavor from the fermentation process not the roasting. Many high end chocolate makers that source fresh beans don't care about the quality or source location as the flavor is predominantly from the activity of fermenting. Variables such as wild or cultivated yeast inoculations, temperature, musilage removal and time all create the deep earthy tones we perceive in the final products.",
"Cocoa beans actually aren't bad after fermentation and drying. Which can naturally occur in the pods on the ground, then be picked up.",
"What about the guy that looked at a cow's udders and thought \"yeah, that looks alright, wouldn't mind getting me some of that.\"",
"Trial and error. People will roast, boil, charr, damn near anything and try to eat it. And if your friend dies, you're hungry too, you'll try to cook the same thing another way.",
"Gotta disagree with your assumption. My folks used to grow coffee on our farm, and when I was wandering around I used to like picking the coffee beans and chewing on them. The miel in the coffee cherries is very sweet, and the coffee beans inside don't exactly taste bad. Eating them raw like that gives you a noticeable buzz, which is pleasant combined with the sweet taste. Nearby others grew cacao and ... yeah, that's a lot less pleasant if you eat it raw. It tastes almost but not entirely unlike what we know as chocolate. I'd be curious to know why the first people who decided to roast it thought of doing so. But, I can tell you've never tried eating raw coffee fresh off the stem.",
"I'm no coffee historian, but nobody seems to be mentioning the fact that what grows on the coffee tree is a berry, and the 'beans' are its seeds. Coffee fruit tastes good, and contains caffeine, so people probably already ate that. There are other fruits whose seeds (or kernels) are roasted into nuts, like apricots (their kernels are like little sweet almonds). It's not a huge leap of imagination to think that people tried this with the coffee bean, and didn't get something that tasted that good. So they tried boiling it. Still no good, but this water left behind? This tastes pretty good. And it has the same stimulating effects as the fruit, and these roasted seeds last much longer than the fruit. Jackpot! This is a completely unsourced, commonsense explanation, but it sounds plausible enough."
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6wso4x | Why exactly is cross site scripting so terrible? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Terrible isn't the right word, dangerous is the word. You are basically saying I trust this other website that is outside of the control of the site I am visiting to execute shit on my computer. Imagine visiting URL_0 and they want to run a script from URL_2 . URL_1 gets hacked, Amazon has no clue, now all their users are installing viruses because of something they didn't do. You only want users executing code you wrote or control; more importantly code you protect. Edit: I'd like to also add, to ward off the \"then why does anyone do this?\" responses, that many sites depend on this. For instance Google Analytics works by running JavaScript code injected from their site. They won't let you install the JavaScript code directly on your site, so you load it from theirs each time the page is loaded. Stripe is another example of this, since their site does the credit card processing, their code is loaded from their site so hackers don't get into yours and exploit the code."
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6wtlru | . Why can't email services provide an unsend option (at least until the recipient opens it) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because at that point it's on the recipient's email server. They can't go in and delete stuff on another machine. Add to that that the standard email uses is ancient, and if you update it at all, good luck having anyone else be compatible with it.",
"The email protocol and the way email servers work is at its core pretty similiar to and was modeled after physical mail. You send a message which goes to your outbound mail server (kind of like your post office), which sends it to the recipient's mail server (Kind of like the destination post office). On which it sits until the recipient checks for new mail and opens it. Basically there's no mechanism built in to say, tell a destination mail server to delete the message after you've sent it. This would take a massive, massive update, introduce plenty of new potential security issues, and wouldn't guarantee that all copies of said message were deleted since any IT person administrating said server could just make backup copies/circumvent the deletion process."
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6wu2qm | Why do so many actors end up producing their own movies? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"\"Producer\" describes a wide range of roles in movie production - usually people working for or with the studio to secure and plan the budget or act as the movie's business manager so that the director and actors can focus specifically on their work. Usually when an actor is listed as a producer, it means that they had some part in this - most often by helping to fund the movie. It's pretty rare (though not unheard of) for an actor to handle all of the scheduling, budgeting, or hiring jobs that a producer usually handles, which is why there are normally several producers involved in a movie. But investing a large chunk into making the movie is often worth a producer credit alone. And actors produce plenty of stuff because they then get to star in it. If an actor thinks they could earn a lot of visibility or a nice Oscar nomination for a project, but it doesn't quite have the funding it needs, they'll often be willing to invest themselves (and earn back a good chunk of the profits!) to make it happen. EDIT: I thought of another reason! One of the common conflicts on a movie set is between actors and directors, who have an artistic or personal vision of what the film should be, and the producers, who are most concerned with the movie being finished on schedule and turning a good profit - which means that they're often risk-averse. Plenty of directors and actors have gone on record as saying \"Yeah, that movie sucked, but that was because the studio cut this scene, or they cast a terrible pop star to attract teens to buy tickets, or because they added in a love story that the movie didn't need, etc.\" When the actor takes on the producer role, they get to have things their way."
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6wuino | online quiz/test websites that require facebook login. why do they require that, what information do they get and what do they do with it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They get to profile you. Facebook ties your login with a nameless identity. That has interests, dislike, political opinions. And the most importantly interests = shopping potential = monetization for advertisers",
"A lot of information is shared in both ways, mostly interests. Also, it means the site can hold logins of users without being responsible for password security and stuff. All security of user data and such is on Facebook's hands."
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6wv8dw | Do missiles detonate when they are fired at the ocean? How do [the agencies firing the missile] know that there aren't boats in those areas at the time of impact? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"An important fact here besides the other answers about dud warheads and other safety features is that the ocean is huge. And I mean HYUGE. Take a look via Google Earth at the ports around populous cities like New York, and you'll see some boats. But look at the massive amount of space between them, even so, and then translate that space so it's out in the middle of an ocean somewhere. There's almost zero chance of a projectile hitting something. There's such a tiny tiny ratio of boat to unoccupied ocean surface a few tens of miles away from shore that even a detonating warhead-containing missile, unless it's nuclear, won't have even a hair's chance of hitting anything. And if it's close, the target gets splashed with water, not shrapnel or chunks of rock. And when missiles are fired at the ocean, they don't have live heads, because what would that prove?",
"Test missiles are launched without bombs on them, so they don't detonate at all. But they're heavy and fast-moving and if one hits your ship it may kill you anyway. Most countries will only fire missiles at a test area where they have just sent scout planes and ships to ensure no one is there. Some country (North Korea) might be reckless assholes and not check."
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6wvyo2 | Who is the mobile provider for the US Government? What mobile devices do they use? I would assume it's not a private carrier like Verizon. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The US government uses a variety of public carriers, Verizon is a major one they use for a lot, as Verizon does a lot of large corporate accounts. The US government does not own or operate a mobile phone network. Nothing special about it. They buy phones and plans. They just buy in bulk, and as such often get substantial discounts (many large corporations enjoy similar, if not identical benefits for buying in bulk)"
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6wwbt5 | How did early man come across advanced food recipes, like for example bread, when it seems too complicated to guess or figure out on your own? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most if it was accidents. Oh no I left this grain out to long in the sun and it dried. Let me get mad and beat at it and now it's dust. Get mad again and repeat in the same area. Look at that a rain drop better go hid. Well it didn't rain that much what is this pile of dough? I want to move it closer to the fire so I can see it better it's Getting dark. Oh no it got to hot. And we have bread. Or they were smarter than we give them credit for. And we r the stupid ones.",
"It's the cumulation of knowledge. One guy tried just flour and water, but his buddy told him that it tastes much better with salt. So he thinks why not add it to the dough so it's salty throughout. This is more or less how I do most of my cooking.",
"Every food has a proto version. Bread used to be just flower and water baked over an open fire. Innovation and creativity drive more complex ingredients and recipes. We try something new, if it tastes good we tell our friends, they do it, someone else adds something, tastes better, sooner or later you're gonna have 20+ ingredients and a 20 step recipe on how to prepare it."
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6wwncf | Why did Apple get rid of "Swipe to Unlock" in place of Touch ID? | On iOS 10 it is technologically insufferable that Apple does not provide another option to unlock your phone outside of Touch ID. I know that the Passcode screen will show after a few attempts, but there is no way to go directly to the Passcode screen without a Touch ID attempt... | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I am 99% sure that you dont need to store any fingerprints, and thus not have to use TouchID. Either way, hitting home after on the finterprint screen should bring up the password prompt",
"I could be mistaken since I have an older iPhone without a TouchID ring, but I think in Settings > Password and Security you can also disable Touch ID for Unlock, and use it just for Apple Pay if you want."
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6wwnzt | Why do some high-end digital cameras have much lower megapixel counts than some budget models? | A Canon 1DX is a professional grade camera with an 18.1 megapixel sensor but you can get budget models with 20.1 megapixel sensors. Does it not make that much of a difference? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The amount of megapixels doesn't necessarily make the camera better. The sensor size/quality + lens used is what matters most. As an example, the 1DX is a full frame sensor. If you get a budget model like a Canon ELPH 180 it is capable of saving images to 20MP format, but it only has a 1/2.3\" sensor. If you look at this chart you'll see the difference in sensor size: URL_1 The larger the sensor the more light that comes in. The more light you have the less ISO/noise introduced into the image. This is why your cell phone takes shitty pictures indoors and at night. The lens can't take in enough light so it adds noise. It doesn't matter what resolution you save your final image as if the camera itself is taking shitty pictures. Larger sensor cameras also can accept much higher quality lenses which has an even greater impact on image quality, in addition to things like better processing, focusing, etc. The resolution largely helps with print sizes. But once you hit a threshold the resolution becomes less important than things like lenses, quality of sensor, etc. Here is an example of print sizes and resolution camera needed: URL_0 Again, resolution is not a determining factor of the quality of the image, it's just how many dots are stored by the camera for each photo. Those dots can be inaccurate, full of noise, etc. It doesn't mean it will be a higher quality image."
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6wwrqx | Do we posses technology to detect and stop a nuclear missile?? If yes how does it work? If no is there hypothetical solution that could be developed in the near future? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Detect an incoming missile? Absolutely. We've been able to detect ICBMs shortly after launch with over-the-horizon radar (now supplemented with satellite surveillance) since we began developing them in the 1950s. Stop an incoming missile? Much harder, and whether we could do so today is an open question. There are missile defense systems deployed around the world that can launch a smaller missile to—theoretically—intercept and destroy an incoming warhead. The effectiveness of these systems is essentially unknown, at least to the public, since the weaknesses of such a system are a huge national security concern. The military command likely has a much more complete picture of what to expect.",
"Detecting a ICBM is easy. Radars and satelites will see it thousands of miles away. As for stopping it is a bit more tricky. First of most, ICBM's got multiple warheads so one missile might turn into several smaller \"nuclear missiles\" as it closes in on its target. To stop this you would need to physicly shoot it down at a safe distance, imagine a speeding bullet comming at you and you need to stop it using another speeding bullet to hit it. Needless to say this is insanely difficult to do and even todays supercomputers and radar guided missiles can not guarante a 100% success rate.",
"The brutally short answer is yes, but don't test it. The best missile defense in the world is economics. The second best missile defense is mutually assured destruction. The third best is probably [the GMD.]( URL_0 ) This is a network of radars and missiles based mostly in Alaska and California. There's a fair amount known about it because it's not really possible to hide a missile defense test. The upper stage of the missile looks like an ugly ball of rocket motors which tries to get in the way of an incoming missile, and it hits most of the time against basic dummy targets without stealth, decoys, or the ability to dodge. You don't want this system to ever be used because even a pissant nation can probably produce enough nukes to just overwhelm the system - there are only 36 GMD missiles available. The radars are also very likely vulnerable to EMP. Oh, and a human needs to make the decision and hit the button in literally a couple of minutes or it's too late. Fortunately we have two better missile defense options which is why the world continues to exist.",
"Just to add to this, at the distances as of late from launch to detonation a nuke can be there in 20 minutes or more and it takes about 4 to 6 minutes to detect a launch. One thing you CAN rejoice in is ICBMs are known to fail, and NK isnt known for its quality control. Hell back during the first years of Redstone and Atlas the success rate was 70 percent or less."
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6wy2i7 | How does turning an old black & white picture into color actually work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Maybe stupid question, but the editor is guessing what colors might be where? I.e skin color, background, clothing etc..",
"Colorizing any black and white photo is very easy, you can even do it with drawings. The shading and detail is already there. Typically you can use a program like Photoshop and select out areas you wish to be a certain color, and adjust the RGB for that spot which changes the color without losing any detail. You can do other things too like adjust lightness and gradients and so on but the simplest method is just using a freeform selection tool (or point-to-point) and colorizing it one section at a time. Like you will select someone's hair and color it, then their skin, then their shirt, and so on and so forth. There are other methods as well but this is the most common modern method to doing it."
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6wy7i7 | How do "taps" work in Digital-to-Analog Converters (DACs)? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A 'tap' is a single step of amplitude. So a DAC with 256 'taps' could produce 256 different voltages across it's range. Having more taps than your original digital signal does nothing for you. More importantly, having more taps than your system's analog noise can accommodate does nothing for you. As a result, the number of 'taps' on a DAC very quickly goes from 'enough' to 'far more than you need' because the analog noise control gets too expensive to support that many fine gradations."
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6x1033 | How can TV's be turned on automatically during an emergency situation? Who has the control over when that would be needed? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most new TVs have something called **C**onsumer **E**lectronics **C**ontrol, (**CEC**). It uses the HDMI connection between devices like Blu-ray players and your TV. When properly setup it will let your Blu-ray player do things like turn the TV on and select the proper HDMI input to show the blu-ray player on screen. This is meant to be a convenience thing. If you want to watch a movie, you just grab the Blu-ray player remote and hit power. It does everything else for you. Likewise if you took the TV remote and switched to the input for the Blu-ray player it would turn the player on for you. **However**, it could easily be used by your cable box to do that same thing and then show you the emergency broadcast content. As far as I know there is no current mandate from the government that cable boxes do this during an emergency but if CEC is enabled on your TV and your cable box software supports it, it could easily be done.",
"Japan has such a system on some TVs. URL_0 But this isn't available everywhere. I'm not aware of such a system in the US, for example."
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6x24mz | How are digital currencies made and how do you convince people to use them? | I don't mean the mining process, but the currency itself, who makes it and why would people use it after it is released when they can trade it to very few individuals | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because you mention mining, I'm assuming you're talking about cryptocurrency. > I don't mean the mining process, but the currency itself The mining is what 'creates' the currency. Try not to think of cryptocurrency as an actual thing, like gold coins or dollar bills, but rather as a big list of 'who owes who'; a ledger, so to speak. Every time a transaction is made, the ledger updates and debts are swapped around in lieu of physical currency. Mining is where people essentially do the hard work of 'upkeeping' the ledger for everyone else (using algorithms and other computer stuff, not actually doing it manually), and they're rewarded for their time by being given a little bonus currency. This is actually how new 'currency' is introduced into the world > who makes it and why I can't say for sure, but probably people that are hoping their cryptocurrency will take off and gain a large amount of value. The important and very key thing that makes cryptocurrencies special is that they're **decentralized**, which means no company or individual 'owns' or manages the system. It's not like there's a central bitcoin bank that all the users connect to to trade bitcoins, but rather a complex web of peer to peer connections (held together by the mining system) make bitcoin possible. For this reason, if you can create your own cryptocurrency and convince enough people to use it from the beginning, you might cash out big in the long run *as a user* rather than as an owner, which would come with it's own set of complications between you and your potential money. > why would people use it after it is released when they can trade it to very few individuals They probably see a lot of potential in it becoming 'the next big one'. Like I said before, if they can get in on it early, they can cash out big later on. This is kind of a gamble though, so for a lot of the smaller cryptocurrencies there are very very few users."
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6x2ecd | Are there any circumstances in which a computer virus could be used constructively, rather than destructively? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes. There was once a virus that took advantage of a security flaw in Windows to forcefully install a patch that fixed the flaw that it exploited. Needless to say, this is frowned upon and rare. If you're trying to do good, it's better to do it with consent. And if you're making a virus, you can make money much more easily by doing bad.",
"Stuxnet! This virus was specially built to attack Iran's nuclear program. It could infect various types of industrial controller computers used for lots of factories and machinery. However, other than spreading, it only \"kicked in\" it's naughty purpose in a specific scenario. When running on computers connected to centrifuges meant to refine uranium, the stuxnet virus would make the machine spin incorrectly, damaging it and ruining the uranium as well. It's creator has never been confirmed, but it's believed to be a joint project between the Israeli(edit: said iranian here at first oops) and American governments. As to whether that's \"constructive\" depends on how you feel about Iran having nuclear weapons. & nbsp; Overall, the problem with using viruses constructively is **They're very hard to control.** Once it's out you cannot bring it back in. Systems to mass-deploy patches, software tweaks, give out something etc usually need \"undo\" buttons of some sort. **Other people might see how your bug works and develop a naughty version.** Viruses almost always take advantage of vulnerabilities in software, exploiting a glitch to gain access. And people are AWFUL about updating software to apply patches. So if you release a \"good\" virus, someone would dissect it to see how it works and built one with a jerk payload pretty quickly.",
"It depends on what you mean by constructive. People generally don't like having their devices infected with software without their permission. Even if the software does good things, it's still unethical to spread it without permission. That said, there are examples where the virus doesn't seriously harm the infected computer. One I'm aware of is the [Carna botnet]( URL_0 ) or the 2012 census of internet address space. It also revealed security holes that should be patched up."
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6x2k2k | In layman's terms, what does P=NP mean? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"P and NP are two classes of problems. P means that the problem can be solved in \"polynomial time\" by a computer. That means that the amount of time it takes to solve the problem grows in some sort of polynomial relationship with the size of the input. To give an example, multiplying two numbers. If you have two n digit numbers, and you're using the multiplication process that you learned in school, then you need to do roughly n^2 operations - that is, multiplying each of the n digits of one number by each of the n digits of the other (plus then some addition to sum up all the individual results). So P is the class of problems that a computer can solve in an amount of time representable by a polynomial function of the input size. NP is more complicated. It refers to problems that can be solved in \"non-deterministic polynomial time\". The actual definition of this is too complicated for layman's terms, I think, but it effectively means problems where you can verify a solution in polynomial time. I guess you can sort of imagine that you might solve a problem by checking all potential solutions simultaneously. So like in the multiplication problem, taking every possible integer, and at the same time, checking whether or not each integer is the correct solution. That's not the best example though, since it wouldn't be any faster than solving the problem normally. So let's look at something more complicated - the travelling salesman problem. Given a set of towns, and roads between the towns does there exist a route from some starting location such that the salesman can visit every town once (but no more than once), and travel a total distance of less than X kilometers (for some arbitrary X). This is a hard problem to solve. It can't be done in polynomial time, so far as we know - that is, as you add towns and roads, it gets a lot harder, really quickly. However, if you had all *possible* routes, and could check them all at the same time, you could quickly find out if any of them are shorter than X kilometers - it's very easy to check how long a particular route is. So, the question of whether P=NP is essentially, are these two classes of problems the same? For every problem where we can verify a solution quickly, can we also *find* the solution quickly. Or to go back to our example, does the fact that we can quickly verify a route for the salesman mean that there exists some way that we haven't yet discovered of quickly *finding* said route in the first place - without having to imagine some magical ability to check all solutions at once. It's suspected that the answer is \"no\", but it hasn't been proven."
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6x5528 | How did voyager spacecraft sent images of Uranus and Neptune? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Voyager broke down each image into a series of numbers representing the dots that make up the picture, and sent streams of numbers back to Earth by radio, where they were reassembled into pictures. Pretty much the same way pictures are sent through the Internet today."
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6x60m5 | Why does new battery in older cellphone gets discharged at the same speed as the old battery? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Heres the thing. Lithium batteries have a variable voltage, while they do specify 3.7v they actually vary between 4.2 and 3.2v depending on the charge level, thats how your phone mesures how much battery is left, the more chage, the higher the voltage difference (4.2v isnt theres 4,2v, it means a 4.2v difference with ground which is usualy 0) Now to keep the battery as healthy as possible and to protect you from the battery exploding or catching fire the phone keeps a log of battery use to make sure the battery charge and discharge cycles are adjusted to the state of the battery, If you insert a new battery in to the phone, you need to get rid of the logs or the phone will keep treating the new batter as if its the old one. URL_0"
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6x9iga | What effects to game developers use to make massive, open world games (such as GTA V or Skyrim) seem so huge while still feeling so proportional? | For example; Trevor tells Michael in GTA V that he is a few hours up the road from LS. And while it looks and feels like a long distance, it only takes me a few minutes of real time. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"For the case you mentioned, you're in the truck with Trevor's goofy sidekick, right? I can't remember his name, but I do remember the conversation he and Trevor have in the truck to be pretty boring. I'm sure that makes the journey feel longer. Also, the time-of-day effect in the game follows the (accelerated) game clock, so you see the sun setting as you travel towards Los Santos."
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6xbt0y | What is "compliance" in IT? | I don't understand this phrase at all. When sites like AWS say "Dedicated Instances are useful if you’re concerned with **compliance** and security and yet have a use case for the elasticity of the Cloud." what is **compliance** supposed to refer to here? I see it all over in other IT discussions and it seems to be referring to some big concept in IT. Thanks! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Compliance with rules like HIPPA and PCI. They're rules that govern data and system security and there are things like limiting physical access to the host hardware.",
"There are ~~two~~ three types of compliance I am aware of: * regulatory compliance - obey the law as it applies to your industry, things like SOX and HIPAA * certification compliance - meeting and continuing to meet a particular industry standard, like ISO 9000 * contractual compliance - making sure you do not violate vendor contracts, particular as it applies to software licenses In each case, you want to have regular internal audits to ensure you can pass an external audit. If you are using external providers, their processes need to fall under your audits as well. If Amazon drops the ball on security, it is still going to be your problem if the HIPAA police come calling."
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6xcq38 | How do modern cinemas show films? Is it still reel to reel or are all of our movies on usb? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're on encrypted hard disc/SSD cartridges plugged into digital projectors, in the same sorts of formats you can find on iTunes but at much higher bitrates. You won't see actual film unless you go to an \"arthouse\" cinema."
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6xdhx0 | How can google maps show so detailed 3D views ? | Hey Reddit ! I'm fascinated when I look at Google Maps , you can explore cities like Hong-Kong in full 3D like you were there. How does it work ? Do they achieve to do that just with Satellites or is there other tools too make measures of the buildings ? What kind of technology do they use ? Thanks in advance :D | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"URL_0 Say \"Hello!\" to the Google Streetview Car. Google pays drivers to explore the world in these things. The high-definition camera on top takes 360 degree pictures constantly to give you that detailed street view angle you're fascinated by. They also deploy hikers with 360 cameras on their helmets, trikes, snowmobiles, and even hand-carts to get inside museums and other buildings! This has been a massive endeavor, starting out in 2007, and it hasn't stopped! More of the Earth is still to explore, more cities to map, and more fascinating geography is still out there."
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6xgawf | If I unplug my headphone jack partially, I'll only hear the beat of the song. How does that work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It's possible to line up the contacts on the plug so that one signal is treated as the ground. Then you effectively hear the \"difference\" between the left and right signals. Since the vocals tend to be in the center of the stereo mix, they disappear and you just hear parts of the music that are on the left or right of the mix."
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6xhm3c | are the times announced in commercials edited for different time zones in the country (US)? | I live in the central time zone and in all of the commercials it says..."watch this at 8 / 7 central." They always say the 8 which is the eastern time zone and then say the time in the central time zone. So are the commercials edited for the west coast? Does it say 8 / 5 pacific? Why do they include the Eastern time zone? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Often programs are time-shifted for the Pacific time zone. So something broadcast at 8pm Eastern time is also re-broadcast 3 hours later to Pacific audiences, at *their* 8pm. But they usually only do the two broadcasts, so people in Central just get the Eastern feed and see the program at what they consider 7pm. People in the Mountain time zone might get one feed or the other, and are just accustomed to the stated time never matching the local time at all.",
"Nah, in California it also says 8/7C I guess people got used to that meaning whatever I'm their local time"
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6xjdsi | People to mention that white bread is "bleached" rather than whole grain wheat. What is actually happening here and why do we have white bread? | EDIT: Sorry for the typo, typed it before bed. Thanks! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I imagine my comment will get removed for some miscellaneous reason. Bread is made from flour, which is made from wheat seeds that have been ground up into a powder. Inside a wheat seed, there's a core called the \"endosperm.\" This endosperm is white, and the outer layer is brown. In whole wheat flour, the entire seed is ground into flour, which will contain all of the nutrients and proteins, etc., that the brown outer layer contains. (I forget the name of this layer, forgive me) White flour is made only from the endosperm, resulting from which the final product will have a more uniform texture, which is perceived as more pleasant. It will also be slightly sweeter, and bake more evenly. But as a result of this, it will not contain the nutrients or proteins present in whole wheat, (+outer layer) which is why whole wheat bread is seen as healthier. There is no bleaching involved.",
"Soft, consistent, light colored bread used to be a sign of quality. Bread made from less desirable grains, like barley or rye, more coarsely ground flour, and cooked in a simple oven by an inexpert baker would be a dark, inconsistent mass with lots of chunks in. A finely ground wheat flour in the hands of an accomplished, well equipped baker would produce a lighter, fluffier, more homogeneous bread. Since color and texture were the most obvious qualities in a bread, the public tended to focus on them above everything else. Bakers responded with various tricks to make their breads even lighter, tricks that had nothing to do with the quality or flavor of the bread. The public bought the lighter breads, and the breads became lighter until we got the tepid, flavorless white bread you find in grocery stores."
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6xogy4 | Why do spreadsheet programs like excel and google sheets have the default text wrapping set to 'overflow'? It seems like everyone switches it to "wrap". | Is there some use for excel that's extremely common that I don't know about that uses overflow frequently? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Spreadsheets are made mostly for numbers. Numbers are usually not as long as text so wrapping isn't as likely to happen. Another reason is that reading down a list with uneven row heights isn't as easy and doesn't look as good.",
"If you find yourself using wrap text as the predominant setting in excel, you probably aren't using it properly. Wrap text should be the exception, not the general rule. It's most useful for #s, not text. It's not a word document application. In fact, if you find yourself manually changing a lot of things in excel instead of using the innate functions, you're probably doing more harm than good. For example, manually changing row and column sizes instead of AutoFit. Source: someone who reviews a lot of excel files for a living and also uses excel to summarize all the fucked up things on said excel files Edit: oh my what a clusterfuck this has become. This is ELI5. I gave an answer that assumes someone is a noob. Are there people who can use excel in a way that's probably not intended and still get it to do what they want? Yes. I can write an entire research paper on excel and have it come out like it was done in word. But I wouldn't do that because it's fucking stupid. I get it that you probably want to use excel as a word application because word doesn't do a good job of formatting charts and such. This is a big question for me every time I do work as well. \"Is this work more suitable in word, excel, or some other?\" This is why I used words specifically like probably, exception, etc. I will say, if you're encouraging a complete noob to go into excel recklessly using it halfway as a word app, you are ABSOLUTELY doing them a disfavor. People like this get laughed at in the office setting, because they make fucked up spreadsheets based on never having learned how to properly make them in the first place. Further, the sad and ironic thing is, many people who think they're great at spreadsheets are absolutely horrid at them.",
"Possibly if someone is pasting in large amounts of data with uncertain formatting, wrapping could make the sheet unyieldly. With the current default they can at least see what's going on before formatting it.",
"Our experiences differ. Wanting text to not wrap is very common. If you have a several columns and of numbers and of short text, and one column of long text, you generally want the long text to be there so you can \"drill down\" into it. That is, it is present so you can view it as an exception, but you don't want it to distort the layout of the entire sheet when you aren't looking at one of those exceptions. If the goal was to have the entire sheet dominated by the layout needs of a few exceptionally long cells, why would you be using a spreadsheet in the first place, rather than a word processor? Also, our experiences differ on what the default actually is. In excel, the default when opening a txt or csv file is for it to have most of the cells not wrap, but then a few scattered cells, for no apparent rhyme or reason, get automagically set to wrap. So to get back to sanity, you have select the entire spreadsheet by hitting ctrl-A, (or ctrl-A-A, or ctrl-A-A-A, depending on version), then hunt down where they hid the wrap button this time, and then click it twice (the first time wraps everything, the second time unwraps everything, including the things that shouldn't have been wrapped in the first place but were).",
"I despise wrap. I receive a lot of customer produced Excel files and immediately strip out their formatting by saving to txt, closing and then reopening. This takes care of things like, non default fonts, wrap, borders, shading, etc. Its like the abomination never happened.",
"Most people who put long things into a cell aren't planning to keep that cell it's default 8.43 width. Overflow is helpful for seeing how wide a column needs to be. Since Excel's primary function is dealing with numbers, those numbers aren't likely to overflow terribly far. And even with a paragraph of text, if the default was to wrap text an 8.43 width cell, you'd end up with a row that was ridiculously tall and might not fit on the height of your monitor. If you are anticipating needing to wrap text, you can select all the cells (the button left of the A column/above the 1 row) and set all the cells to wrap text. I like to middle align my cells too.",
"Because wrapping sucks. Wrapping results in uneven row heights and makes data more difficult to read. It's also ugly. Overflow lets you keep cells small but read the first few words (depending on cell width) which often is enough info. If it's not, then you can click on the cell to read more. It also overflows into the adjacent cell if it's empty anyway, you can put your \"notes\" cell at the end of a row. Using wrap results in an uneven mess of a spreadsheet with a low density of information, making it hard to read manually. Wrapping a column is fine if you want to read a bunch of notes or something, but unwrap it after. It's not ideal for most situations.",
"I can set it to wrap...? Thank you so much",
"Is this really what ELI5 has become now? Isn't it supposed to be questions with intriguing and complex answers. Hence, why you would need to ELI5. Like how a bicycle is stable when at speed was a good one.",
"I actually use the overflow function in a sheet I made for my vet clinic so that it looks neat because there are only a couple blocks of text that need changed for charting and the rest of it are formulas for calculating reversal drugs for anesthesia. So, in order to make ever sheet look the same, the texts have to be in overflow to let be nice and neat."
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6xolrh | How do those old-school western movie dynamite detonators work and what is their actual name? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're called plungers or blasting machines, and they work using electromagnetic currents. First, here's a cross section so you can see the guts. URL_0 These work using things called magnetos, which are basically old generators. The shaft of the plunger has teeth that rotate gears inside the box, which is then connected to another shaft that has a coil of wire with some magnets around it. The rotating coil between the magnets creates an electric current which goes out to the detonator cap, which causes the explosion which sets off the dynamite.",
"I don't know what their name is, but as you insert the plunger the handle turns gears, which turns a coil of wire surrounded by magnets. This creates an electric current which is transmitted to the blasting cap, triggering an explosion."
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6xpk1r | With blockchains whats the difference between proof of stake vs. proof of work protocols? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In proof of work, computing power is used to validate blocks of transactions. This system uses the high cost of the limited supply of computation power in the world as its incentivise for miners to play nice. Attacking the network would cost a lot because of the high cost of hardware, energy, and potential mining profit missed. In proof of stake, collateral like Ether on Ethereum is staked or put on the line to verify a block of transaction. The threat of losing the collateral forces people to be honest. Also attacking the network would hurt the value of the collateral you'd have staked."
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6xqfhu | How can phone screens tell whether your finger is pressing the screen or some inanimate object, such as an eraser? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So you are referring to what is know as a capacitive touchscreen. These utilize the electrical properties of the human body to detect when we touch it. Imagine a bunch of tiny electrical charges under your screen. When you touch the screen, your body completes the circuit, and the voltage drops in that specific spot. This information is then sent to a sensor which calculates exactly where your voltage dropped. When you use some thing like an eraser, which is an insulator, the electricity won't flow, and the voltage won't drop. The same goes for things like cloth. However, you may have noticed special gloves that work on touch screens. These have special materials that allow it to conduct enough electricity to do what your skin does. TL;DR When you touch the screen, the voltage goes down because your body completes the circuit. However, some materials like rubber cannot conduct electricity and therefore are not recognized by the screen. Edit: Changed \"not an insulator\" to \"an insulator\". Thanks for catching that u/come_back_with_me",
"You're most likely using a capacitive touchscreen. These work because they sense small electrical conducts, which perhaps surprisingly, the human body emits. There are more than one types of capacitive screens, but you can read more about these with a quick Google search of \"Capacitive touchscreens.\""
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6xsalx | Why can't source code be reverse engineered from executable code? | I've heard about games and other software having their source code lost and I was just wondering why the executable code can't be reverse engineered first into an assembly dump and from there into whatever language you want? edit: I understand that variables and functions could end up with nonsensical names | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are tools for decompiling executable code, but the results are not usually very useful. A lot of information is thrown away when compiling. Things like function and variable names are pretty important for a human to understand what code does, but the computer doesn't need it so the compiler throws them away. Also the structure of the code is not necessarily preserved. The compiler may have inlined functions (basically copying the code from one function into another instead of calling it), macros will have been expanded, there's all sorts of things the compiler might move around in order to optimise the code. So while a decompiler might be able to turn that assembly into valid C code, it might look nothing like the original and won't be much easier for someone to understand than looking directly at the assembly.",
"You **can** decompile executables into high level programming languages but you generally lose all the variable names, structure & comments. Since compilers generally optimize code, complex sections might not look like the original code and be even more confusing.",
"In short, there are *no* variables and functions anymore after the code is compiled. The code gets turned into a machine language: set of CPU instructions. These instructions do really basic things, and they don't have the concepts you might be used to from programming. Functions just transform into the equivalent of goto statements (jumps), variables are just memory addresses with values written to them. The values themselves get mangled, too -- there's no difference between an array and a bunch of separate variables being near each other in memory at the machine level, no difference between that and a string, and no difference between a bunch of random numbers and something meaningful. Compilers perform a variety of optimisations on the code as well, further complicating things. You'd think, oh, the string \"HELLO\" can probably be recovered, since the numbers corresponding to tthe letters \"H\", \"E\", \"L\", \"L\" and \"O\" will probably be copied to memory, right? No, wrong -- the compiler will compress the string into several larger (64-bit) numbers, copy those compressed chunks into memory (since copying one number is faster than several), and if it needs to access a piece of that as a character, it will just access an 8-bit piece of that. If a program is written in a more modern language than C, it's probably even more complex to recover anything useful from a binary, because there will be a lot of additions to it related to type checking and conversion, to things like classes and whatnot. Recovering the code of a small project from Assembly is possible, but if we're talking about something as massive as a game, it would take way, way longer to do that than to rewrite the bloody thing from scratch. As for why nobody's willing to do *that*? It's a matter of money. Note that none of what I said applies to languages that have a direct 1-to-1 correspondence between source and binary forms, such as C# or Java, or scripting languages, where the program already *is* the source code. For those, recovery is more than possible and simple."
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6xshag | Who invented the internet and how is it owned by nobody? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The inventors of the internet are Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf. Internet is not a single thing. It is a set of thousands of other things. No one owns it. A nice analogy would be agriculture. No one owns agriculture, agriculture is a set of techniques. The parts of the internet are owned by various people and companies though, like Facebook, Google, etc, but I think you know that. Edit : replaced a word.",
"The Internet were not invented in a single project with a few people but developed gradually though a lot of incremental steps. These improvements are still ongoing. As computers started to be developed it was natural to let them connect together over telephone wires instead of having human operators relay the messages between them. But to improve reliability in case one connection got broken either by accident or by an enemy attack routing protocols were developed that allowed the computers to reroute data throughout the system depending on its current state. And as computers became more common universities started connecting together. They developed new protocols for file transfer, text transfer, searching, emails, etc. Old standards were improved or replaced. When computers became even more common commercial and private actors also started connecting computers together. But since most of these are too small to maintain their own connections around the world phone companies started offering Internet access where they were responsible to send the data to the receiver. So Internet was and is an effort from lots of different people, universities and companies and each of these organizations are responsible for a tiny part of the big network.",
"Who owns the economy? Nobody. Who invented it? Various people invented various parts, but they all work together. Who owns global diplomacy? Nobody. Who invented it? Various people invented various parts, but they all work together. Like these, the Internet is a system of numerous different things that are all designed to interact with each other. It's not a single technology or a single object. However, certain bits of the technology (and of the governance structure) are especially important, and we may praise their inventors.",
"The Internet is a network of networks. It's all owned by someone, but no one owns the whole thing. Your ISP has a network which it owns, the cables to your home may be owned by them or another company which your ISP pays. Your ISP has a bunch of routers to make sure messages go to where they need to go. Your ISP probably has their own ISP which allows them to connect to the wider Internet. At the top of all of this you have the backbone providers. They own the cables and equipment that allow networks across countries and even continents to connect to each other. They connect to other backbone providers. They don't pay each other for access to their networks since their connections are mutually beneficial."
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6xt96j | How do astronauts travel between the Earth and the ISS? | Is a new space capsule made and used every time astronauts leave Earth or leave the ISS? When astronauts have to leave for Earth, does a new capsule first reach the ISS to carry them? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Currently only the Russian Soyuz spacecraft transport astronauts to and from the ISS (Prior to 2011 the Space Shuttle also fulfilled this role for the US, and in the next few years SpaceX and Boeing will provide US with manned spaceflight capabilities again.) The Soyuz carries up to 3 astronauts to the ISS, and is onlt used once. After launch, it docks to the space station and stays there while the astronauts complete their roughly 6 month stay. When it's time to come home, they board the same Soyuz that brought them to the station and return to Earth. Only one of the three modules of the spacecraft land with the astronauts as it's the only part with the heat shield; the other 2 burn up in the atmosphere. Once the capsule has landed back on Earth, its job is over and isn't used again."
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6xth7n | How is machine learning and artificial intelligence different from each other? | AFAIK, both involve a machine to learn certain tasks and evolve over time and get better at it. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> both involve a machine to learn certain tasks and evolve over time and get better at it. False. That does not apply to AI AI most often refers to a process that can evaluate and intelligently react to its enviroment. A Chess AI will not evolve over time and get better. It will not learn chess from the ground up. It will be given an algorithm to scan the game for possible good moves and is programmed to be able to evaluate the current board, but it does no organic learning. Once you start the AI it will never change its skill. Machine learning involves the computer learning patterns and discovering its own solutions trough a wide array of strategies and via trial and error. AI can do that, but is just ad apt to describe computers who are told the method to find the solution beforehand. Machine learning is a sub field of AI research. It is one tool in a toolbox, but AI does not need it for all tasks and in some tasks it is just the wrong tool.",
"This is mostly just a \"unclear use of words\" problem. In the sense that you are referring to they are the same, but when people say that AI is something different then they are talking about what should be (and officially is... just commonly is not) called General Intelligence/General Purpose AI/Superintelligence. The idea idea of a GAI is, that it is closer to a human brain than a comupter, or, in fact, is a simulation of a human brain, wich is one of the theoretical ways it could be created. It will not only learn to solve a problem, it will solve a problem, and then afterwards select the next problem to solve, set the parameters for solving this new problem, work it out, and then choose a next problem to solve, like a human brain does. It does not just work in a single field, it can do anything, adapt to solve anything you throw at it, it will answer your physics test, write a novel, paint a picture, let a robot build a house, and play microsoft pinball at the same time. The comparison of AI to GAI is very much like the comparison of a computer to a human, the computer does a limited number of things really well, but the human can, with enough time and energy, learn to solve *anything*, do *anything*, and he can make the active decision wich of those unlimited tasks he could theoretically do he wants to fulfill, and learn how to do it.",
"Machine learning (ML) is more of a subset of artificial intelligence (AI), like how eagles are a subspecies of birds. I don't think it's meaningful to compare the differences between them when they are subsets of each other, so I'll just explain their relationship instead: Machine learning is applied to AI, but not all AI uses machine learning. AI involves decision making based on algorithms and heuristics. Conventionally, without the use of machine learning, those algorithms are pre-programmed by a human being and dictates the action the AI will take, no matter how stupid the action turns out to be. This means that AI without machine learning is only as \"smart\" as the programmer programmed it to be, so if the algorithm the AI follows is flawed or sub-optimal (which is the fault of the programmer), the AI will always make that bad choice. This is where AI with machine learning comes in. Without going too much into the technical details, the AI is programmed with an objective in mind and is tasked to achieve it, but is not told how to achieve it. It hence performs different actions determined at random, each time figuring out what helps it get closer to its objective and what hinders it. From there it literally \"learns\" how to achieve the objective by selecting and remembering the actions that helped it get closer to the objective, and after numerous tries - sometimes thousands, depending on the complexity of the task - it will develop its own algorithm."
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6xu07q | Why do we instinctively seem to hit machines / devices that aren't functioning properly? Where did this come from? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's called \"Percussive maintenance\" and it's related to the old mechanical and analogue systems that used to drive machines where if they got stuck sometimes a sharp jolt to the machine could cause the stuck pieces to jump into their proper places.",
"People are mentioning mechanical throwbacks, but I think chimps exhibit the same behavior when they can't get something to do what they want, so I think it's possibly more primitive.",
"It's a result of frustration. Watched a study documenting frustration in animals; They basically taught a squirrel how to open a box with a nut in it, but when they made it so that the box wouldn't open or the nut was gone, the squirrel would become frustrated and try to break the box or throw it around. It was theorized that frustration in animals is a result of subverted expectations and in order to \"work around\" the new problem, excessive force was impulsive. If you can't open the box, break it. This mechanism is probably enough for regular animals, but is definitely obsolete when said animals start producing complicated and delicate machines.",
"I learned from this guy, [Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli]( URL_0 ). In time, this was reinforced by true life experience. To this day, a light rap on a CPU will unstick a CD tray. Edit: CPU in the generic, 1985 definition meaning the desktop case and all components within. Note this definition is wildly newer than The Fonz's technique.",
"I had my home's AC go out on a REAL hot day in Arizona, and the repair man said the condenser was just frozen (I didn't believe that answer for a second). He proceeds to take out a hammer, whack said condenser a few times real hard and tells me to turn the power back on. It came alive. Mind... Blown.",
"In old televisions and radios, there were tubes that made them work. Nowadays, everything is solid state but back when I was a kid, transistors and diodes were in vacuum tubes. These tubes plugged into backplanes. When the device got static in it or got to where it didn't receive a signal very well, hitting it on the top or the side would jostle things internally and make those tubes get a better connection in the backplane. The tubes had 5, 6, 7 and more connectors, so getting them all to make a good connection required some tweaking by hitting sometimes.",
"The most important tool of the helo I learned to fly in was a hammer. The starterbox contained a lot of relays and if one hung on startup...well you get the picture.",
"On top of the other answers things like jukeboxes were self contained but played records. If a needle skipped you could hit it on the side to put the needle back into it's proper position. At least that's what the Fonz taught us all. Pinball machines are another thing that would get routinely hit, balls would get stuck or you wanted to not lose you could rock the machine. Then there were NES systems that could also benefit from a good smack on the side from time to time to get a game to play right. Some games would not make contact right with the system and you would have these artifacts on the screen. Smacking it would help the system make contact with the cartridge.",
"[From a behavioral psychology standpoint, organism can become aggressive when a behavior that has produced a reinforcing stimulus in the past suddenly stops delivering the reinforcing stimulus. This is call extinction and the associated increase in novel behaviors and aggression is called an extinction burst.]( URL_0 )",
"Old wooden floor model zenith brand televisions. At first they would take a smack to turn on. It eventually worked it's way up to a running dropkick to fire up",
"Shit moves over time. Shit opens the circuit. Hit shit to move shit again, therefore closing aforementioned circuit. As for hitting humans, they associate hit with pain. Therefore they avoid thing that causes hit. Masochists have a short in their circuit, therefore negating hit equalling bad. However, a strong enough blow can temporarily or permanently destroy said circuit.",
"Because most of us back in the 90s saw AC Slater hit a drink machine and get 2 sodas, thus Demonstrating his value to Jessie Spanner, in an attempt to Engage her physically.",
"Well you used to be able to hit your kids when they weren't working right. You still can, but you used to, too.",
"As far as describing the emotional aspect of it: In behaviorism, this is known as an extinction burst, and is a side-effect of extinction, or not receiving reinforcement from behavior that had previously been reinforced. e.g. Pushing a button used to produce results, suddenly it doesn't. So you push it more, getting increasingly angry. It is behavior that generalizes across items/machines as well as settings.",
"Machines not working makes me angry. I hit things when I'm angry, and since it's the machines fault, I hit it.",
"It's older than engineers. Just go watch a video of chimps getting angry with a nut, or a tree, or a tool...",
"One of the most common ways for an electronic device to malfunction is for a connection to be loose; jarring the device can push things back together",
"TVs in particular worked this way. A potentiometer is essentially a volume control, and old tvs had upwards of a dozen of them, many internal. They'd get dirty and cause audio or video glitches, that vibration could often fix.",
"In the early days of non linear editing we used 2gb hard drives the size of shoe boxes. When there was an issue with a drive, one of the recommended fixes was to hold it a foot off the floor and drop it. A platter or needle could get stuck and that would get it running again."
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6xu95i | How come cash can make it through a cycle of laundry but paper (such as post-it notes) deteriorate? | Paper seems to be stronger than cash in regards to tearing and what not when dry so I'm very confused | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cash is not wood-based paper, it's actually a cotton/linen blend. It's closer to cloth than paper."
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6xugmf | Why do laptop screen colors change at different viewing angles, but phone colors remain the same no matter what angle, and what causes this effect? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It comes down to the displays used in each. Most desktop and laptop monitors use TN panels (the panel is the bit inside that actually changes colour, has pixels, etc), they are cheap and fast (in terms of response time and maximum refresh rates) but that is at the tradeoff of colour accuracy and viewing angles. IPS (or PLS in Samsung's case) panels are slow but have more accurate colour and can be viewed from near any angle without distortion. What actually causes the distortion I dont know, I just know that its a property inherent to TN panels. As you can imagine, IPS panels are preferable in phones for their lack of distortion at extreme viewing angles and the increased colour accuracy to go with it is now standard given that manufacturers are basically in an arms race over display quality. IPS displays are also used in desktop monitors and laptops but just arent as ubiquitous.",
"Many computer monitors use a type of screen called TN (twisted nematic), while portable devices mostly used a type called IPS (in-plane switching). TN screens are cheaper and faster to produce, along with a few other benefits. Their drawback is they have small viewing angles as you noticed. However, for computer monitors this isn't as important because there is usually just one user sitting still in one sweet spot. IPS screens are more energy efficient and have wider viewing angles. Both of these are crucial to portable devices since you're meant to move them around a lot and they need to run on a battery."
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6xx7s6 | Why are Tv's and Monitors rectangles instead of squares? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You have two eyes placed horizontally giving you a wider field of vision looking left and right. Most content you view is also laid out best in this format: a landscape, conversation between two people, etc.",
"Yarr! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained: 1. [ELI5 : Why TV's/Monitors are rectangle and not square. ]( URL_0 ) 1. [ELI5: Why are screens rectangular and not square? ]( URL_1 ) 1. [Why don't we use square monitors? ]( URL_2 ) 1. [ELI5: Why are monitors wider, and not taller? ]( URL_3 ) 1. [ELI5:Why are most monitors/televisions \"landscape\" shaped rather than portrait? ]( URL_4 )"
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6xxfp0 | Why does mustard make little circles? | Kinda dumb question but [this]( URL_0 ) is an example of what I mean. How come it doesn't come out in a straight line? I mean.. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The mustard stream comes down so slowly, and it's so dense and cohesive, that it's actually pushed back on by the surface of the bagel. This causes *oscillations* in the stream (a back-and-forth motion in reaction to the pushing-back force), like slow-motion turbulence.",
"I think it's something to do with Bernoulli/ coanda effect- which is about flow of fluids and one side of the stream moving faster than another along a tube."
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6xy4bg | what does it mean when a key cannot be copied? | Specifically safety deposit box keys and certain car keys (not electronic ones). Isn't it just a piece of metal shaped a certain way? Thanks | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"No, it's a legal warning to key makers that it's not a key they can legally copy. I'm sure they physically could if they wanted to, but it's unlikely doing so would be worth their job and, depending on the key, subsequent jail time that would be consequences of knowingly copying it anyway."
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6xzmfc | How is digital information stored (in computers, memory sticks etc.) without a power source? | To my basic, high school level of knowledge all digital information is stored in millions of byte, small "switches" known as transistors, that have two settings: 1 or on, when there is current flowing through the transistor, and 0 or off, when there isn't any current through the transistor. That is fine and well as long as there is a power source connected, but how can for example the memory stick retain its information when it is unplugged from the computer? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, you have optical storage, like CD, DVD, or Blu-Ray where ~~tiny holes let a laser beam trough and mean 1 or no hole means 0.~~ a sequence of microscopic indentations reflect a laser beam with different intensity than the flat surface and is interpreted as binary data. Then there is magnetic storage, like hard disks or tapes, where a special material is locally magnetized one way or the other, meaning 1 or 0, and remains that way without power. And then there is your USB stick or SSD, which contains a special memory type, NAND flash, which has some special transistors (Floating-gate transistor) that do not lose their electric field on one of the gates when disconnected from power. And other types of flash memory too. LE: replaced the *tiny holes* theory with the *indentation clarification*.",
"The way I understand it, a power source is only required to \"flip the switch\". Once a particular bit is set to either 1 or 0, it will remain 1 or 0 until an electric current is applied to switch it again. Of course, transistors are physical objects and they can be damaged or corrupted.",
"Solid state devices, like the one in a USB memory and some newer hard drives hold a charge (each memory cell is an electron trap), kind of like a mini battery. You could make a storage device out of a set of rechargeable batteries if you wanted, charge up a battery and it represents a 1 or shortcut it until it'd empty and you have a 0, just connect a volt meter to each battery to see if it's charged or not to read your memory. This doesn't require any power to store the memory, but it requires energy to read and write. Older mechanical hard drives rely on magnetism, that doesn't require steady current either. You can magnetize an iron nail with a magnet and it will remain magnetic afterwards, without any current. Same with these! only smaller nails. This is how analog information was stored before the computer days as well, remember video tapes?",
"Flash memory, for example, is based on floating gate transistors, where the gate of the transistor is insulated. That means any charge you collect in there, will stay there. In ELI5-terms, it's like a bucket that holds electrons.",
"It all depends on the medium of storage and how information is stored on it. Media like CDs and hard drives can store information without power, while RAM can't. RAM uses circuitry to store the 0s and 1s. A 0 means there is no current passing through the circuit, and a 1 means there is. Since the circuit requires electricity to function, all information is lost without it. On the other hand, 0s and 1s on a CD are stored as physical crests and troughs on the medium. On a hard drive, they are stored as magnetic polarities (North or South) on a magnetic medium. In both cases, once the 0s and 1s have been created, they don't need electricity to persist.",
"For brevity, I will assume you already know enough about transistors and don't need more information on them. I will also assume you know about diodes, which is hard to avoid on the path to learning about transistors as a simple transistor is basically a diode and a half. Now, transistors and diodes are commonly packaged into functional units known as *logic gates.* You could imagine these as boxes with one or more inputs and an output, with the output depending on the inputs and the type of gate. There's the NOT gate, which basically inverts the signal, zeroing the output when the input is a one and vice versa. There's the AND gate, which does exactly what it says on the tin: if all the inputs are all ones, the output is a one, and otherwise it's a zero. The one we're interested in is the NAND gate, which is a NOT gate tacked onto the output of an AND gate. This means that the output will be zero when the the inputs are all ones, and otherwise it's a one. Thus, assuming the names A and B for the inputs and X for the output: A | B | X ---|---|---- 0 | 0 | 1 0 | 1 | 1 1 | 0 | 1 1 | 1 | 0 Now, imagine two of these bad boys next to each other. Actually, scratch that. *Draw it,* otherwise you'll just be confused. Let's append numbers to the connector names, so we can tell them apart. Now, connect X₁ – that is to say, the output of gate one – to A₂ – the first input of gate two – and X₂ to A₁. Now, imagine that you have connected power to B₁ and B₂, so they are constantly ones, but can be made powerless when you so desire. When you first power this thing on, one of the outputs will be one, and the other zero. Now, do a thought experiment, and try to figure out for yourself what happens if you briefly make each of the B inputs powerless. The answer follows in the next paragraph. If you make the B input powerless on the gate where the output is zero, that output will go high, and the other output will go low. Connecting power to that B input again will not change the outputs, but doing the same thing with the *other* B input will restore the original state. And that is how you store information in a powered system. This is known as a *NAND latch.* There are other types of latches, but this one is one of the more common ones, and it demonstrates the principle. Flash chips are basically vast arrays of latches. This leads to an unholy amount of input and output leads – although not as many as you think, as usually something called *multiplexing* is used, but that's beyond the scope of this ELI5 – so usually a flash memory chip is coupled with a flash *controller* chip, which is basically a translator between whatever language the computer wants to speak (USB, SATA, & c.) and these input and output pins. I say *usually,* because some older memory card formats – such as the xD-Picture card and the SmartMedia card – didn't contain a controller, but had the NAND flash chip connected more or less directly to the card pins. This made them cheap to produce, and the host system had more control over the raw memory structure which meant they could in theory optimise the use of it. The damning disadvantage, though, was that, as a bigger array of latches means more input and output leads, the controller-less design pretty soon hit an upper size limit, as greater sizes would have meant redesigning the card, which would have made it incompatible with existing devices. And that probably *was* beyond the scope of an ELI5, but there you are. It should be added that these gates aren't actually *powered* by the inputs and the outputs. Those are data ports, not power ports. Power is supplied individually on other pins. So, what is providing the power when the device isn't connected to another, powered, device? In short: Capacitors. Well, not really. Modern NAND flash uses something called floating-gate MOSFETs, which is a fancy name for a type of transistor where one of the nodes are *floating,* i. e. not directly connected to anything, and thus is only capacitively influenced. A transistor with a built-in capacitor in a funny way, basically. So, again, in short: capacitors. These capacitors are pretty resilient and will hold the charge for long, long periods of time, but flash memory is definitely not something you would chuck in a vault and expect to be able to read in a century's time. The longevity of USB flash drives is measured in decades – and, if you ask me, talking about *decades* in plural is pushing it."
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6xzmn9 | Why is cgi so expensive ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"CG Supervisor here. Simple answer, it's because of wages and overhead. Working with a studio is usually a lot more expensive than working with freelancers. A couple of the important factors is that studios will guarantee or insure a delivery,work more professionally, and the overall process is much smoother especially when a client is involved and they're hands need to be held during the whole process. Working with a freelancer comes with their own rates (usually way cheaper), but they can be flaky, work with illegal software, unprofessional and make the whole process very messy. It's usually less kosher this way as sometimes the client or agency takes time or doesn't pay them at all for their work and the relationships in the freelancing realm is usually a bit rocky and a lot of walls are put up to avoid either party getting screwed. Details about the process of CGI and why it's so expensive working in the studio as I mentioned above is because of the wages and overhead costs (equipment, licensing of software and plugins, and operational running costs). A team of CGI Artists consist of people with very specific skillsets. First we have the CG Supervisor, Art Director, and Technical Director. These would carry the higher paying salaries of roughly $80,000 USD up to $150,000 USD, depending on your experience and the studio you're working for. * CG Supervisor: Responsible for managing the team's schedule, works with budgets and quoting for jobs with the producers, involved in meetings and presentations for the production. * Art Director: Responsible for the quality of the team's work. Makes sure the work is going in the right direction as per clients' and agencies' expectations. Guides the artists with concepts, style frames, mood references, anything that will give the rest of the team the vision they need to get to the end product. * Technical Director: Responsible for bringing new technology to the department (scripts, plugins, etc) to lift the process and complexity of our quality to a higher degree. They essentially concentrate on research & development while assisting the team in finding solutions to problems that they the artists are facing. Finally you have the Artists, who generally will be involved in their own specific task in the CG workflow. You will also have Generalists who makeup everyone's skills, but only at the least at a competent level, while specialists would be more inclined at delivering their tasks at a much higher level. Depending on the studio and their experience, and Junior, Mid, or Senior level, these artists can make a salary of anywhere from $20,000 USD to $100,000 USD Within the artists you have Leads who will usually be in charge of a certain stage in the CG Pipelines (Modelling, Animation, Shading, Compositing). These team leads will be at the very least Senior level that possess a leadership trait and can help guide the team through the process. Sometimes You will need a team of Modellers to create a robot, or you will need a team of rendering artists to light a few shots in sequence. These leads will be there to micro-manage them so that everything comes together as one. * Concept Artist: Responsible for drawing / painting references for mood, styleframes, concepts for characters, monsters, environments. This can also include storyboarding which tells the story of the animation in frames drawn by hand to visualize the composition and camera movements that compliment the action of what's happening in each vignette. * Modeller: Responsible for bringing the concepts to life. They would bring the 2D Concepts or references in to the 3D world and \"sculpt\" them so that we can use them as assets in the application of shots. They can be characters, environments, assets like trees, rocks, stones. * Animator: Responsible for using the storyboard and assets created by the modeller to create the shots in 3D. This involves camera move, and character animation - which can get technical as they need to be rigged so that they are able to have all the controls needed (posing, facial expressions, etc). * Shading / Rendering: Responsible for taking the shots from the animators and making them look realistic or whichever direction the project is going. It could be cartoonish, or it could be photoreal. They would set up the lights and make sure the materials on objects react the correct way (metallic, rubber, subsurface, translucent, etc). * Compositer: They will take the sequence rendered from the rendering artist and polish the final look of the shots. They will add or remove passes from the shots (more reflections, ambient occlusion, motion blur, depth of field), play with the warmth or coolness of the overall image, add effects, and run a final grade through them. During this whole process there will be milestones and that means there will be rounds of feedback given by the client and agencies. This will overall slow the process down and add more buffer time to the schedule. So paying a whole team of artists for months of work can start getting extremely expensive, while keeping up with licenses, plugins, and software packages that are now all at subscription models.",
"> It's not just a bunch of guys drawing on a computer. There is a combination of the actual drawing and the computer processes needed to add all of the things that make the item look real. It starts with a model which is drawn by an artist and put into the computer and rendered as a 3d wireframe image - like a skeleton. The computer programmers create processes to add motion, shading, texture, transparency, translucency, lighting, camera angles and zoom, etc. It may take almost an entire day to render a very short sequence (a 10 second walk from point a to point b for example) and when it's done and you look at it, you may find out that the character doesn't appear to be on the ground or the nose is misplaced because the math wasn't quite right. So the computer programmer has to recalculate and try it again. (The Toy Story DVD has some really funny mis-renders in the special features.) So it takes a whole slew of computer programmers and artists and hours and hours to create even one little sequence. > Some movies still use animatronics for things like hands that need to grab actors etc. But in the long run, CGI can be cheaper and look more realistic than animatronics. So it seems as though it is a combination of wages and the equipment used.",
"It's not if you don't want it to be...but you get what you pay for: URL_0",
"The cost of technology is always improving and using the latest is always expensive. When toy story was created in 1995 it used a huge rack of high end servers (a render farm) to render each scene. You could probably do the same thing nowadays on single high end workstation. Unfortunately technology has moved on and audiences expect much better fidelity and realism, so to create a new CGI film you still need to use a render farm built of really high end server grade computers. On top of this you have the artists time, the more the fidelity increases then the longer the artists have to model, sculpt, paint and light everything. In 1996 you needed a cutting edge PC to play Quake but now you can run it on a Raspberry PI. Destiny 2 however still requires an expensive PC to run full detail. However CGI isn't always more expensive. Look at any film that has a large crowd scene such as a battle in Game of Thrones. It is expensive to do it in CGI but it would be much more expensive to hire several thousand stunt performers and horses to do the same thing.",
"For the same reason movies are so expensive Production value(things on screen) cost money! Take game of thrones - The production costs money because you have all the actors, prosthetics and the costumes and the sets The cgi costs money because you have the actors: like dragons (that literally have to be built from nothing) So they go through a concept phase - then a modeling phase(size and shape) (then a detailing phase) then a texturing phase(color) then a lookdevelopment phase (shaders (how light reacts to the object) example is it shiny meta or rusted metal or skin or fur etc) Now you have the shape of the dragon .... and we need it to move So you rig it! Add in all the bones (chances are you have a rigging system in your studio so this is somewhat automated - but dragons still need wings etc - and kraken need tentacle rigs etc) - All you digital doubles is the actors need scans(of the actors - probably photogrammetry) Now the object can move but it doesn't until someone animates it (or you use motion capture (which still needs some clean up)) Animation is VERY slow - it's a process of moving a puppet around inside the computers so that the dragon feels heavy and angry etc.... such a unique skill set Now the background!! Start with concepts then mattepaintings then cgi sets - snow, simulations for cracking ice, fire etc Add dothracki on horses (start from the beginning to make these) - add castles and unsullied and mountains and clouds! Ok now you need lots of computers to render the damn scene and the technology is constantly changing When I started I used 3ds max and vray Then Maya Houdini and mantra and vray Then Houdini and arnold Now Houdini and redshift And the computers need to be replaced every 3 years or so because of RAM and GPU CPU etc Add the fact that all of your artists have gone to school for around 4 years to learn all this so they make in average around $80,000/yr (that's a guess after being in the industry for 10 years) Low end is around 30,000 to start and 150,000-200,000 when supervising And you can make more on the flagship shows at major studios People in the industry complain a lot but It's a good living - it becomes more of a lifestyle because you're always working on learning new things - but it's also never boring and it's a way to use your art school diploma to make a living - plus you can say \"I worked on that show\" For whatever that's worth!",
"The real ELI5; because the artists are expensive, the software is expensive, writing the software is expensive, it requires expensive machines, and rendering takes a lot of time on those expensive machines.",
"TL;DR: Because high-end CGI involves such a high level of detail that it takes a *lot* of artist time to pull off, and that means spending a lot of money on wages and related overhead. Say we're talking about a tree. If you go outside and take a picture of the tree, boom. Done. But how long would it take someone to manually *copy* that photo, with a photo-realistic level of detail, each and every leaf, branch, and square inch of bark? A long time, that's how. Hours and hours. Days even. And that's starting with a pre-existing referent for your tree. What if they had to come up with that tree from scratch? As would be the case with any CG object that doesn't actually exist? Now in addition to however long it takes to just draw the thing, you've got to take the time to *design* it. And unlike someone just drawing the tree for its own sake, *this* tree has to fit in with the director's cinematographic choices for the rest of the scene (e.g., branches need to go here and here, but not there, the light needs to come from *that* direction so shadows go over *there*, etc.), which place additional constraints on design choices. Now we are talking about CG here, not completely hand-drawn animation. That means there are a lot of design, drafting, and animation tools that save an *enormous* amount of time compared to doing everything manually. But that notwithstanding, producing the level of detail required by a truly realistic animation still takes a huge amount of artist time. And because artists don't work for free, that makes high-end CG really expensive. Equipment (both hardware and software) is also expensive, but those are often capital investments that can be made over time and used for multiple projects (though not always!). The *real* expense is going to come in the form of labor.",
"I have a friend who have done cgi for a lot of major films and he says on average his team manage about a second of completed work a day. So just imagine the cost of merely paying that team for months to get a few minutes of footage. Then times that for the whole movie.",
"It isn't always. It depends on the effects and the quality. The final fantasy movie that was all CGI (Spirits Within) was of course expensive since it was 90+ minutes of full CGI rendering at (to this day) pretty amazing fidelity and quality. The dragons in Game of Thrones are probably pretty expensive CGI since they are just so fucking much detailed, just look at the recent scene where you see a closeup of his eye - all the scales move individually when he breathes, etc. Average to good CGI isn't too expensive these days. You can see this in the proliferation of CGI in common cheap-ish produced TV shows like CSI and even some sitcoms from time to time. Though you usually don't remember or see the CGI in those shows since its usually just short scenes or background stuff or blurry or whatever. For Example: South Park is fully CGI since more than 10 seasons ago or so. And South Park isn't expensive to produce, they do a full episode in a week. It just depends on what the CGI is used for and how prominent it is and how high quality. Depending on the effect it could even be cheaper to do something in CGI than with practical effects. For example Christopher Nolan uses practical effects as much as possible, and a lot of those scenes (like the spinning hallway fight in Inception for example) would have probably been much cheaper if they were done CGI-enhance instead of practical."
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6y0vlv | Why does Seran wrap seem to not be as clingy as it used to? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The CEO had them change the formula because the chemical that gave it that extra stickiness and odor control was bad for the environment. He did that knowing it would hurt sales.",
"Because it really isn't as clingy as it used to be. The old Saran Wrap (a.k.a. \"the good stuff\") was made with polyvinylidene chloride, and except for pesky environmental concerns and overall cost, that stuff was amazing. Now it's made of polyethylene, which doesn't cling or block oxygen (in other words, doesn't work) as well as the good stuff."
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6y23rh | How did civilisations deal with human waste before the invention of sewage systems? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's worth noting that Humans has sewage and sanitation for thousands of years. That said, it really depends on the civilisation and population size. With a small population it's not really a big deal. **That** said, there were any civilisations and cultures where the answer to that question is \"Badly\". As in \"Toss it out the window\". Even in big, modern (for the time) and not-that-long-ago cities.",
"urine was a valuable commodity, tanners use it in turning hides into leather....hence the term \"so poor they havent got a pot to piss in\" families would literally collect their urine in a pot and sell it to the tannery.....if they had a pot. Shits just fertilizer once you compost it. You have to remember that modern sewage treatment only became necessary when we stopped being rural agrarian societies. Though it did take some time to become as refined and discrete as it is today. Shit pails dumped in the street to wash down the gutter made early cities quite odoriferous....but then again bathing wasnt a terribly high priority back then....and the air was often thick with coal smoke as well...and then there was all the horses shit and piss to boot. A journey to the past would probably make most modern people wretch."
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6y2ywv | Why are coins historically round? Seems like square coins would be more efficient/easier to cut from a sheet of metal. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Early coins were *not* cut from a sheet of metal. They were formed by taking a carefully weighed lump of metal (usually silver or bronze), heating it, and smashing it between two sides of a die. The important thing is that coins made of precious metal have to be precisely weighed. If you're cutting or stamping the coins out of a sheet, you have to be able to rely on the sheet being a very precise thickness, and the technology to (cheaply, at least) make such sheets of metal wasn't developed until the industrial era.",
"There's quite a few reasons relating to different time periods, but interestingly there are actually several examples of square-shaped coins. The most obvious reason is ease of use, so to say. It is easy to pick up round coins and scoop them up, put them into tightly packed bags, etc, without any worry of corners causing issues. Then there's the fact that coins are intended to be hard wearing and semi-permanent, since there are coins likely older than you or me still in circulation. A round shape is less likely to wear down unevenly since no one part of it sticks out further than the rest from any angle. A little historically, a lot of coins were made by pressing down a small ingot with a pre-made stamp. This typically forces the metal into a rounded shape anyway and means less work to finish the coin - and coins had to exist in relatively large quantities. In a modern day setting, arguably cutting coins into squares from a metal sheet would be more efficient, but it's not too much extra work to take the leftover metal and melt it down to use in the next batch. A key modern reason for rounded coins is that round coins are convenient for transport within vending machines, etc, since they will roll easily. It also makes those little charity spiral spinner gimmicks possible, and that alone is in my mind a perfectly good reason to have round coins!",
"coins are stamped not cut, a circle was easier to stamp. Later it's all about make counterfeit coins harder to make by adding dots(roman), lips and etching. Each thing ups the price of the initial equipment required reducing forgers"
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6y4637 | How come we still can't make suits that can be washed normally? | I feel like with how advanced we are technologically, making clothes that look like a suit but don't get messed up in a washer/dryer machine shouldn't be difficult. What's the hiccup? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A man's suit contains hidden extra layers of fabric and padding that will get mashed up if laundered in a rough laundry machine. Formal cloth is typically made of wool in order to get a traditional look and texture. Unfortunately wool shrinks drastically (and changes appearance) when washed in water and dried.",
"Any suit immune to these problems with machine washing will cost more. People that are willing to pay more for a suit are more inclined to receive a better look or fit in exchange for that money. The greatest priority for the majority of suit wearers is visual conformity, and wearing a different material, likely with a different look (unless the manufacturer designs it to look similar in exchange for even more money), isn't something they're as comfortable buying."
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6y47g5 | How do completely autonomous vehicles navigate parking lots? | Seems to me like parking lots have some of the most unpredictable driving conditions. How does an autonomous vehicle decide which spot to take? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Autonomous vehicles usually use a combination of stereoscopic cameras and LIDAR to build a 3D map of the local vicinity: Stereo cameras use the slight differences between the images perceived by two side-by-side cameras to determine how far away something is. (Try closing one eye then the other, closer objects will appear to move left and right more than distant objects) LIDAR is a system that sends out a signal and uses the time for it to bounce off an object and return to determine the distance to that object. By combining these a 3D map of the space around the vehicle can be created. From this, machine learning algorithms are used that have been trained to recognise common object like cars, vans, people, bollards etc... The training process is a little hard to understand, but it basically works by 'showing' the sensors examples of objects you want the car to recognise and asking it what it is seeing. If it identifies the object correctly, take no action, if it identifies the object incorrectly or fails to identify the object, a small change is made to the identification program until the deemed probability of what the object is moves in the direction of correct identification. Then another object is show to it and the process is repeated. A lot. This object recognition and 3D scene map are combined to place objects around the car in a 3D map. Additionally gps information can also be used to tell the car it is in a parking lot. Using the object location in the 3D map, the car can find spaces between cars that correspond to parking bay sizes and the parking procedure can be started. In terms of avoiding collisions these cameras and LIDAR are constantly scanning the area around the vehicle and have the ability to very quickly stop the car if the scene should change I.e. a car moves, or a person steps in front of the vehicle. I hope that was somewhat helpful. It's a tough one to explain to a 5 year old."
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6y4dl8 | Why does wifi not cause cancer? | Why does wifi not cause cancer? NOTE: this is for my mother as she thinks that it does | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Why does wifi not cause cancer? For the same reason that the light bulbs in your house don't cause cancer. When it comes to light (wifi uses microwaves, which is a frequency of light outside of the visible spectrum), cancer is caused when the photons are energetic enough to knock electrons completely away from their atoms, turning the atoms into ions (this is called \"ionizing radiation\"). Microwaves are non-ionizing. They don't have enough energy to strip the electrons away from atoms the same way that ultraviolet light, x-rays, and gamma rays do.",
"First, many things can \"cause cancer\" in at least some instances or some small part of the population. And, I am sure there are at least some studies out there that will point to some observation that wifi has some correlation with som cancer. That said, the reason that people don't think wi-fi causes cancer in the same way that, say, plutonium exposure causes cancer is that the energy of the wifi waves aren't high enough to do damage to cells. When we talk about radiation causing cancer, it's because radioactive things produce energy with such power that it can literally break apart your DNA and other parts of your cellular machinery, which can lead to cancer causing mutations as broken cells go on a rampage. But, as you can see on [this chart]( URL_0 :), wifi is basically on the whole other side of the map. Again, biology is complex. After all, nicotine doesn't emit gamma rays, but it too can cause cancer. But there's no reason in theory or observation that suggests wifi does the same.",
"Wifi uses electromagnetic waves to send data. This is also known as electromagnetic radiation. That radiation has a certain energy level. The cancer concern comes from the idea that the energy in radiation can disrupt the functioning of the DNA in our cells and give us cancer. There's a name for that kind of radiation, it's called \"ionizing radiation\". The radiation from Wifi devices isn't nearly powerful enough to do that. URL_0",
"The radiation released from wireless devices is non-ionizing, which is a principal ingredient to creating tumors. You probably get a higher dose of radiation standing under power lines than you do by sitting next to your router."
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6y6wz2 | Why do some objects create a 'whooshing' sound when you drive close enough past them? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The \"whoosh\" sound is coming from your vehicle, the object you are passing is just reflecting the sound back at you. You're hearing your echo with a hint of [Doppler effect]( URL_0 )."
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6y8hsb | How do motion detecting cameras work? | Title says it all | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They have a buffer, with the last image in it, they compare the current image with the last one, and if a certain number of pixels are different, then it generates a signal to start recording (or whatever)."
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6y95ug | Why did TVs skip 2560x1440 and went straight for 4k? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"4k is a direct scale of 1080p, you are now using a four pixel square to display information that used to come from a single pixel. 1080p does not directly scale to 2560x1440, meaning it would have had more scaling/pixel redistribution to do on 1080p content.",
"Most of the content shown on TVs is delivered by cable companies. Cable companies only broadcast a handful of video standards so most content created for TV networks uses one of those standards. It takes a *long time* to retool those systems for a new standard. Switching from SD to HD720 and then HD1080 took many many years. So for that reason TV makers are only going to consider upgrades that make a noticeable impact. And evens till when sitting at the typical distance one views a TV from, the difference between 1080p and 4K isn't very noticeable.",
"1. Because they could. 2. Most content is 1080p, which scales perfectly onto a 4k display. 3. Most high budget movies are shot in 4k."
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6y9t3u | Why can't Facebook, Twitter and Instagram just shut down bot accounts? | There is a lot of news lately about bot accounts on social media and I want to know what the process would be to shut down the accounts automatically? How hard is it to design/implement that process? Or is it a fairly simple process to design and implement but perhaps there are other reasons why they can't do it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The problem is how do you actually figure out that a twitter user is a bot. You can use Machine Learning with certain features (like tweet sentiment) to analyze the data, but there's the possibility of false positives. Also, it's an arms race. Once they figure out what you're looking for all the bot creator needs to do is to change the bot themselves. You can take a look at [this pdf]( URL_0 ) if you're interested in the details of figuring out whether a twitter user is a bot or a human. My ML professor participated in the DARPA Twitter Bot challenge and he said there were a lot of arguments on his team because of it, and at times he felt that it was going to rip the team apart.",
"Well, just banning the accounts in the first place is a bit of a problem in and of itself from a structure standpoint because there are a lot of loose ends to tie up. * What do you do with the usernames? Are they still taken even after the account is removed? This could be thousands of usernames. Do we differentiate between \"bot dukeofdummies the 1st\" and \"human dukeofdummies the II\"? Do you show it visibly or hide it in the back end? * Do you show the history of the previous account? Do you delete all of \"Dukeofdummies the 1st\" or does it still show up? Records are nice but it does skew with all the marketing data these sites make money off of. * What happens when another bot account *still wants to talk to dukeofdummies*? I take this account not knowing its prior history and every day I get 30 friend requests from random bots I've never met. Talk about a bad customer experience. Even if we get all the technical jargon figured out to remove accounts (it's annoying but it's doable) How do you even figure out if someone is a bot? You could look for bot-like behavior... but that gets tricky. * 8000 people on one IP address? Kinda sketchy. 50 people on one IP address? Could be legit. * 8000 people copy paste the same post all around 9:25? Could be a bot net, but it could also be a bunch of humans posting the latest Rush Limbaugh rant that started at 9 in a race to be the first to post on Facebook. * What about an account that doesn't do anything but copy yesterday's most popular posts in these subreddits and then tries to post them to the front page! You could easily build a bot to do this [but on the other hand...]( URL_0 ) * Flat up asking is an interesting idea, but that doesn't work. Because humans can ignore your question just as easily as a bot. Some people can go six months without checking Facebook. People can also easily say \"yes. sincerely, Dukeofdummies\". How is that proof that you're human? The really, really difficult part about all of this though is that these websites purposely make it easy to sign up. If the initial barrier to enter to one of these sites is too high... then people don't sign up. However that means that even if you remove 700 bot accounts accurately... they can simply build them right back up. You need to remove them from circulation *faster* than they can repopulate, which means jumping to conclusions faster and making false positives, costing you customer satisfaction and having people leave your user base and cost you money which hits on the biggest issue in all of this. With all of the effort it's going to take to fix this, with all of the ambiguity of the question \"are you human?\", with all the potential costs of accidentally removing customers, A website owner has to ask itself, \"is anyone *really* going to care if bots are manipulating some things?\" Is the user base going to leave over this? Comparing costs/benefits does this really hurt us? Can we make do with a light purge every once in a while of the most obvious offenders to make it look like we're doing something and go on with our lives? TL:DR: It's kinda hard to do, really hard to do it well and in a timely fashion, and they really don't feel the urge to do it in the first place."
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6ya7z8 | Isn't Google killing other websites by displaying most of the content in search results? Why do these websites allow this? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Not at all. The blurb you see with Google search results is just a small snippet of information regarding whatever your search terms were. Yes, sometimes that is all you need... However, more often than not, you're probably going to want to click on through to the actual site itself in order to see what else the site has to say/offer, as well as to verify their credibility in some cases. As long as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is set up properly, it will actually increase traffic tremendously.",
"1. They don't have to ask for permission. It's not protected by copyright, most of the data is open. 2. Google brings them more visitors than it takes (55% from search). So it's still a good deal for them to allow Google to let their site be indexed. 3. Google is a commercial company and it has their interests in saving traffic on their search results rather than sending it to websites. They don't care if websites are harmed as long as visitors are satisfied.",
"Without Google visitors, they'd have no visitors at all. IMDB isn't charging you for that information, so you aren't their customer. They save money if Google sends you their data, and they get the good PR. Google respects robots.txt instructions, so they could easily tell Google not to do that and Google would comply. But they choose not to because it's a good deal for them."
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6yaoye | Why Digital Movie Rentals Cost So Much Money. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because they can basically. People choose to pay that much so there is no reason to change it.",
"What's considered so much? They cost less than watching in the theater, and however many people are in your living room can watch. They cost about the same as renting a DVD did from Blockbuster (adjusted for inflation), and you don't have to worry about remembering to return the disc the next day or incurring late fees.",
"Supply and demand. The gross profit the company makes equals number of sales x price per sale. If the price is too high, people stop buying. If price is too low, lots of people buy but not much total profit is made. The price is set somewhere in the middle where the company hopes to make the most money possible as part of a delicate balancing act."
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6ycgo6 | How do in-ear headphones break so easily? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Probably because you're buying really cheap earbuds and putting them through extreme stress by not wrapping the cables correctly, unplugging them by pulling the cable, or sweat profusely when you wear them.",
"It's often not the \"in ear\" portion that breaks! The wires of the headphones are poorly protected with a thin rubber/plastic coating. When that wire is bent/stressed often, it kinks those wires. Those kinks will cause breakages in the strands, until eventually there's no longer a connection and an ear piece (or both) short out. So stop wrapping your headphone wires around your device!"
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6yeq9u | How come some keys on a keyboard can't be used together with the ^ symbol? | For example î works, but ^ + r doesn't. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The circumflex ( ^ ) doesn't exist on all the latin letters. Only on a select few, mostly vovels. It's the same with diaresis (¨ - the germans often call it umlaut, and that's what it's called in HTML too) it only exists on latin vovels. I'm Swedish. We use the diaresis (and a ring) to add a few extra letters to the alphabet: å, ä and ö. Their pronunciation has very little resemblance to the to original latin letter. And that is why they are there to begin with: to distinguish between different ways to pronounce words. The extra lines, rings, dots and stuff on letters change how they are pronounced demands a pause in the middle of a word or even changes how the *next* letter is to be pronounced, and other things. They are there because writing in latin is fine and all, but it was...lacking for the local language. A computer could in reality print a few extra bits of black above any letter, but it hardly makes any sense to manually create a visual font for a sign combination that is not used in any widespread written language, is there? EDIT: formatting",
"Diacritic marks over letters such as ê (but also things like ö or ú and so on) are used to modify the way a particular letter sounds when it's used in a language. The reason that you can't use the combination on your keyboard is because that letter isn't used with ^ in any language. As an aside, the semi-fictional band Spinal Tap use an umlaut (the two dots) over the letter *n* in their name, but as this combination isn't used in any language it's impossible to type."
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6yfsex | Why does Reddit show me the same couple of topics on each page when searching "Hot" | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To add to what the others have said, Reddit's algorithm isn't as straightforward as it looks. You have items 1-25 on your first page. When you click \"next\" to get to the next page you are **not** shown items 26-50. Instead Reddit takes whatever item you were shown as 25, calculates it's new place in the overall list and then shows you the next 25 items that follow. So, if in the time it takes you to read the front page item 25 moves up to slot 10 then your page 2 will show you items 11-35 from the master list even though they are displayed on your screen as 26-50.",
"topics you see on page 1 right now will be on page 2 later today, then they fall to page 3, and so on...",
"I have the problem of being returned to the front page whenever I log-in using my usernames. Say I open Reddit and I surf the first ten pages before I bother to log-in to leave a comment at posting 254 on page ten. When I close that posting (posting 254) after having left a comment I find I am seeing all of the postings from the first ten pages I just passed, but they're numbered as if I had not gone back. So posting 1 on page one is now posting 255, and posting 2 on page one is 256, posting 3 on page one is 257, etc. So it's like I am being forced to start over, to go back to page one, just because I waited until page ten to log-in and leave a comment."
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6ygjev | How do you "switch" to renewable energy? | When someone says they switched to green electricity, what does that mean? The power in their outlet is the same, coming from whatever sources that are producing electricity. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> The power in their outlet is the same, coming from whatever sources that are producing electricity. Every power generation source hooks into the same grid, mixing their output into the same pot. Imagine you have a hydroelectric dam and a coal power plant sharing the same grid with a group of customers. The price for coal power is $1 per unit and from the hydroelectric dam it is $1.10 a unit. Both the power plants vary their output to match the demand of the customers, and let us say that that demand is 1000 units and each plant supplies 500 units to that end. If someone decides to buy their power \"from the hydroelectric dam\" then they start sending their money for however many units they consumed at the rate of $1.10 a unit. The hydroelectric supplier adds up all their customers and the units of electricity they supplied to them and compares it to the 500 units they supplied to the grid; if their customers used more than 500 units in total then some obviously had to have come from the coal plant! In that case they pay the coal plant for the units they supplied (at $1 each, pocketing the 10 cents). The coal plant does the reverse so they might be needing to buy energy at a higher price than they produce it! Ultimately the outcome of buying from the hydroelectric plant is that it funnels cash into the hands of the renewable energy source which hopefully will expand its contribution to the grid in order to avoid giving potential profit away."
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6ygjkw | When somebody mutes a computer, does the computer play the sounds at zero volume, or does it not play the sounds at all? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sound card actually has a digital mixer, which mixes sounds from all audio sources and redirects the final signal to the output which can be called \"master\". When you mute the master, it basically sets the output volume to 0. But all the audio sources still process and produce sounds - this way when you unmute you continue from the proper position and with proper effects. In this case all the memory resources are used at full power during this process. But every individual software can handle muting differently - it depends on implementation. But again usually it's playing at 0 volume.",
"Actually it completely depends on who is processing the sound. In any application like a media player, usually there will be an entire function (set of commands) that is executed to proceed sound and output it. Usually at zero volume, there's a good chance the function isn't executed at all. Executing and processing sound takes up system resources, and a good program will not process the sound to then discard it.",
"The data will be sent to whatever output device you have muted: either the player itself or the speakers. The playback device specified above will know if it is muted or not. If it is muted it will play no sound. Otherwise it will play the sound at whatever volume is specified. More details: if the music player is muted the sound data will not be sent to the speakers. If the speakers are muted, depending on the drivers/coding/design the sound data will either be processed and not played or will be ignored until the speaker itself isn't muted.",
"Depends what you mean by \"play\". The volume setting is a measure of how much current is sent to the speakers with the signal. No signal means no current sent. The more electricity sent the louder the sound. Does the computer process the sound? yes. Does it send it to the speakers? if the volume is 0 then no.",
"I don't know about computers, but when I put my TV at zero I can still hear it when close. Mute shuts the sound off completely.",
"It depends of the computer that you are using. Most computers, including PCs plays the audio at Zero volume. Only a few devices disables the audio processor when mute is selected.",
"Audio Systems engineer here! It varies from platform to platform, but generally speaking the process goes like this: * The program (think of the computer program as the top layer of a cake) \"creates\" the sounds, then sends them down a layer to the operating system. This is done through a pre-built set of coding instructions called an API, or Application Programming Interface. (Examples: OpenAL, OpenSL ES) * The operating system grabs the sounds (which are still in the form of digital files) and puts them into separate \"tracks\" (Example: ALSA). It mixes all the tracks together, then makes the final mixed track available to the bottom layer of the cake -- the driver/sound card. * The sound card is where the digital signal gets turned into an analogue signal made out of voltages, which is the \"language\" your speaker can understand. Here, a typical driver (software that lets your computer talk to the sound card) will apply the overall volume setting to the sound. Basically, every 8 milliseconds or so (again, this varies by system) it will push 8 milliseconds worth of sound data to the DAC (digital-analogue converter). When the volume is set to zero or mute, it will typically not even bother running the calculations to lower the volume -- instead, it sends a **null buffer**, or 8 milliseconds worth of zeros. Many newer/premium devices (like iPhones or high-end Androids) have \"smart amplifiers\", which detect these zeros and stop amplifying the sound. That is why when you are talking to someone on your phone speaker and the person stops talking, the background noise will often cut out entirely, then come back when they start talking again. (There is more to it -- things like gates and dynamics processing, but that's the general idea). **TL;DR it is not playing the sounds at all. However, the program you are using will still spend energy on creating the sounds and trying to send them to the speakers.**"
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6yh04x | What do audio engineers look for and what changes are made to 'remastered' recordings? And why do some prefer the original? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Mastering is taking a recording and adjusting it for whatever format it's being released on. For example lots of recordings from the 60s and 70s were originally released on vinyl records and eventually cassette tapes. The original recordings, however, were made on high quality magnetic tape. It's *like* cassette tapes but it's much higher quality since the surface area used for each track is larger and the tape moves past the head faster. There are characteristics of both vinyl and cassette that that dictate how the recordings are mastered. Then CDs came along and so lots of older recorders were mastered again to be released on CD, however lots of it was done poorly because record companies realized people were willing to re-buy albums on CD that they already owned and so they rushed through the mastering process to try to cash in. Eventually the artists behind those records wanted them to be mastered properly so they went back re-did the mastering aka remastering, this time doing it properly.",
"I'm not sure why they \"remaster\", but some people prefer the original since many originals were mastered to take use of the limited dynamic range of vinyl. This means that you have a full set of high and low volume sections of the music. A lot of more modern stuff is compressed, meaning the softer parts are cranked up, and the louder parts pushed up right to the clip point, so that the whole piece sounds louder and brighter, and can be heard better on shitty earbuds in busy places or in crap car stereos. The side effect of this is that the music becomes monotonous and exhausting to listen to."
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6ylcyv | How 100,000 hour technology tests are actually conducted? | The new LED lighting in my office are said to be tested for 100,000 hours, surely they have not been left on for this long? Same goes for the microwave in the canteen, 600 hours testing. How do they conduct these tests? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's mostly just calculation. The electronic components in your LED have known degradation and failure rates so they know a certain capacitor is rated to do a certain thing with a certain amount of energy for so long before it fails. Usually they don't say \"tested\" they say they have a \"life\" or \"last.\" Some wont, some will fail quickly and they know that. They calculate a percentage they are ok with and go with that. So, they know that 25% of their capacitors fail after 100,00 hours. So they say, \"100,000 hour life.\" knowing that out of the smaller percentage that are likely to fail early, there is an even smaller percentage of people that wouldn't just throw it out. The others, they just give a new free bulb to.",
"Firstly, [mean time to failure]( URL_0 ) is actually computed based on running a LOT of test instances for a reasonable period of time. So, if they have hundreds of these LEDs and they last 100hrs with X failures, they can compute a number that indicates how many failures you should expect over a longer period of time. It's not a great measure, as it doesn't actually tell you the life-time, but a rate of generalized failure. And that generalized failure rate isn't that good because most items die on a probability curve that starts out high (was broken to start with, dead on arrival), drops low for a reasonable time (normal lifespan), then starts to increase again (aging product). Secondly, there's a lot of accelerated aging techniques that companies do on their products to extrapolate similar information. They'll cycle switches, lights, etc. on and off very rapidly for thousands of cycles. They'll use abrasives, acids, and other weathering techniques on anything that goes outside or that you might wash in a washing machine. They'll have machines use pens to draw until they run out. They'll have tools that confetti paper with kitchen knives till they start to dull. So they'll convert cycles, chops, washes, etc. to the average use-case of \"x cycles/day\" in order to say \"this survives 100M on/off cycles, it should last you for 5 years of normal use\""
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6ymd12 | How do FBI track down anonymous posters on 4chan? | Reading the wikpedia page for [4chan]( URL_0 ), I hear about cases where the FBI identified the users who downloaded child pornography or posted death threats. How are the FBI able to find these people if everything is anonymous. And does that mean that technically, nothing on 4chan is really truly "anonymous"? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Nobody is trully anonymous. Even hackers that use proxy can, in theory, be tracked back. But most of 4chan do not use any proxy at all. Not quite ELI5 but should be easy to follow. For administrative purpose the forum store the poster IP address. The web server also have a log with every ip address with a timestamp and what they did, the formay might be like \"ip-address 2016-09-07 13:21:32.1234 get URL errcode filesize\" and in some country the hoster might be required by law to keep the logs. Then you have the internet provider for the hoster that in most country they are required to keep the logs (which do not contain the data but just the header and size (think of the postal service that would take a picture of the labels and physical size). There is some intermediate provider that is most likelly also required to keep the same logs, and finally the user's provider that also keep those logs. The police can ask for a warrant to get the information from the forum owner, if he do not have the logs then they will ask the web hosting compagny. Then they find the ip address of the client, ask for a warrant for the client's isp, which give them the account owner and address. For those that hide behind a VPN, it get more complicated mainly due to the fact that it is around the world and international cooperation is complicated and require quite more effort. They get the forum owner info, notice it is a vpn, request info from vpn, but they don't have logs because they are in a country that don't mandate it. request web hosting isp logs then vpn hosting compagny logs and then match the packets flow... Once they matched it, they can check the VPN data which other connection had the same packet pattern: what came out of the vpn had to come in from somewhere. Then, with the timestamp and packet size and other information, they can be pretty sure out of any resonable doubt that the outgoing connection came from THAT incomming connection at the VPN end. They now have the true client ip info. Get the warrant for that client isp, and they get the account holder. Repeat if required. It take time, LOTS of effort, and some country have ridiculous short time for the logs. I beleive canada and usa is 6 months, but some under defelopped part of the world have zero log, and some refuse to cooperate together. I know that some place in africa is 2 weeks data retention. BTW, here is one of my apache log line: 192.168.2.23 - - [28/Apr/2017:09:34:30 -0400] \"GET /public/serveur/20170427_160015_HDR.jpg HTTP/1.1\" 200 4289991 http/1.1 is the protocol used, 200 is the status code, in this case a \"ok\" message, while 4289991 is the file size. I beleive that instead of http/1.1 if someone post an image it would say \"POST\" instead of \"GET\", which as you can guess make thing easy to search for: \"search log for this filename, find the line containing POST\" As for TOR (read edit bellow), the same can be applied: match the victim log to the tor exit log, match the outgoing packet to the incomming packet (which can be a small issue as there will be a size mismatch, but the timestam should match withim a few ms and the size will be simmilar), repeat until you hit the entry tor server, match with the client ip, figure out that there is no other connection that match, thru being trully that one. Now you found the originating account holder. The issue with tor is the complexity of working internationally, and the fact that each step get harder to convince a judge that the data is still valid and no error has been made. EDIT: For Tor, this is an extremelly over simplified explanation. But the main issue is that it is too much of a trouble to get enought proof and follow the communication that they do not do it. Packet maching of encrypted data is a royal pain to do, and the fact that the nodes are overloaded cause a royal headache. Plus the chance of error is so high that it would not hold in court. And at the end they still can't know what was transfered unless the endpoint is in the clearnet. If the endpoint is on Tor then good luck. One of the issue is that you do not know really where the hidden server is in the world. Even if you do know you can't know what exactly got transfered. Those server will most likelly not have any usable log, usually the actual logs will reside in ram only, so if the police seize the server then all the log goes poof. Meaning that they will most likelly not be able to track back anything. What they did to catch some is to install some virus/hack on the page and run the server for a while and hope that the person catch the virus and the virus will expose them. Or they just read everything and try to match the info collected with some other piece of info and close down that way on some suspect.",
"The Chan sites are only anonymous in the sense that anyone can post anything without having to make an account or provide a name, they are not anonymous in the commonly misconceived form of hiding ones identity and being completely free of digital-trails. Every time you post on a Chan site your IP is recorded (its hidden to public but clear to admins), thus if you post something forbidden they can then report the post and share your IP to authorities. Hackers have also been able to 'see' posters IP addresses on 4chan in the past and have used this for both good and evil, for example when annon was posted up images of an actual freshly murdered body, some batman-esk hackers managed to track down the up-loaders location just from the IP activities. In short; you are never truly anonymous.",
"In some cases, wesbites like Reddit give law enforcement a user's IP if it's relevant for criminal cases. But even if that is not possible, there are means to track users. For example, it's possible to link a user on 4Chan to his other activities on the internet through his style of writing and interests. This way, they might identify someone who posts childporn anonymously on 4Chan as a Reddit user with a prolific posting history, which might shed light on personal information. They might even find his Facebook account with his real name, all through data that the person posts publicly on the internet. There are also some more shady techniques, like a correlation attack. What that means is that they monitor outgoing traffic of an internet user and compare that to the posts on 4Chan. So if an anonymous guy posts an image with a size of X at time Y and the suspect has outgoing traffic of size X at time Y, they've got a match. This might be sheer coincidence the first time it happens, but if it happens several times in a row, it's enough for a court order. This is how they got a guy who [issued a bomb threat through TOR]( URL_0 ). Edit: Better link",
"A couple of things to note here; * Since 2008, Christopher \"Moot\" Poole, the founder of 4chan has been cooperating with the FBI and Governmental Agencies allowing them access to the IP-Addresses of posters when needed. He also famously appeared before a Court to describe the nature of this sort of IP-Address tracking and how it could be used to identify an individual. He is no longer incharge of 4chan but I'm assuming this policy hasn't changed much. * Since 2009, The FBI and/or other agencies have been running \"Honeycombing\" operations on sites like 4chan and other Chan boards, including the Famous TORChan which was in the onion web. In these Honeycombing operations, they will post a \"Bait\" image of either CP or other illegal activities (including drugs and what not) with a post asking them to follow a link to an external site. This site is under the full control of the involved agency and they then use it to try and coerce personal information from the person involved and try and pin them for conspiracy or intent. * Since 2011, 4chan has kept detailed backlogs going a number of months of posts / threads on all boards. These logs are used to perform lookups for certain patterns when they need to identify a single individual. Things like typing pattern recognition. This can then be used to create a profile of the person which can then be cross referenced to other sources to try and identify an individual. * A lot of people posting images online don't realize that the images contain metadata. Most mobile phones will encode the exact location that the image was taken at (Lat / Long), if you don't scrub this metadata it is very easy to identify you. I think 4chan now automatically removes metadata from posted images but for a long time inexperienced posters were caught and publicly doxxed using this technique.",
"You are not as anonymous as you think. Something that seems innocuous, such as the size of the WINDOW you browse a website with, can be used to uniquely identify and track you. URL_0",
"Your IP is recorded when you post on 4chan and attached to the post, but not shown. Moderators and the admin have access to it. Though the more common use is to identify rampant shitposters, when something illegal or a credible threat is posted they generally contact law enforcement, or law enforcement contacts them and they pony up the IP.",
"I'd decribe the two main ways as, 1. User error. The user makes no attempts to cover their tracks. Everything you do online essentially leaves a footprint, your PC itself has several identifiers, the connection routes you use have identifiers, etc. Imagine robbing someone's house when there's thick snow. All they have to do is follow the footprints and they've found your house with the stolen TV inside. 2. Connecting the dots. Even if the user has made substantial attempts to cover their tracks, they used a common alias that they've used many times. So they know the user FuckNut12 posted CP. They do a general search for FuckNut12 and find a hotmail address with that name, which is also used on Reddit, Youtube and a few forums. Through court orders they can obtain personal information that relates to that username, and then once they have name, address and other identifiers, they can then get a warrant to search that persons PC. On which they find the evidence linking to the 4Chan post. A mix of the two is also used, connecting usernames to different sites, gathering IP information based on connections, getting the relevant information from ISP's, VPN providers and the like. Mostly it's down to the user. If you take every single measure possible, you probably won't ever be found. But due to human nature we often unintentionally leave clues and traces due to our reliance on familiarity or memory recall. I believe the Silk Road guy was caught through a series of posts he'd made well before he founded Silk Road for example.",
"use a vpn service. that you paid for with bitcoin. from a public wifi. and a randomly generated username that you then throw away. ( URL_0 ) and two finger type (unless you usually do, then go one finger or whatever is different from \"normal\"). and use search and replace to change or delete articles (\"a\", \"the\") and other similar things to help mask your dialect/accent/ethnic origin. and write whatever you write offline and post it copy/pasta to mask typing speed, etc.",
"Nothing is actually anonymous on the internet... Your best bet is to use public Wi-Fi with a burner laptop that you purchased with cash.",
"Most people have absolutely no idea about how much personal data they are willingly giving to the web services companies (besides the data that are unknowingly given or the 'digital footprint') that they can share and how much those companies track them. FBI can get that data from those companies easily.",
"1. Supposedly 4chan cooperates closely with law enforcement, to the point that they cache a second copy of the site for leo review, or give le unabridged realtime access to the site. A theory is that 4 Chan is basically a honey pot at this point. Though I've never heard of any one getting in trouble for downloading things from 4chan, only uploading. 2. Nothing on 4chan is truley anonymous, just as nothing is truly anonymous on the internet as a whole.",
"Nothing is ever really anonymous on the internet. Everything you do has your IP attached to it in some way. The FBI can easily obtain a subpoena that requires a website to release their records for investigation, under threat of legal punishment if they don't. Same process for cell phone records.",
"Well, don´t post a picture which you captured with your smartphone with GPS-location turned on (which is standard activated on Android). They got over 100 drug sellers like this.",
"There's a really good Defcon talk that explains exactly this: URL_0 Talks about a lot of the cases mentioned in this thread, like how they got Lulzsec, that harvard student, silkroad guy, etc",
"The best thing to do is buy a laptop from someone with cash, or steal a laptop. Boot from flash drive and use Starbucks or Mcdonalds free WiFi from a stolen car or have some way to disguise your identity if you go inside. Use free vpn or trash laptop after use. Send package to random house but don't use the actual home owners name, use fake name. If the home owner is present when the package is delivered you say you live nearby and accidentally sent package to wrong address, otherwise just swipe package when it's delivered. Make sure home owner doesn't have cameras outside front door. Don't use trailer parks or apartment building, those people don't have jobs and will be home when your package is delivered.",
"The FBI also keeps any images they find of child pornography for several reasons. First it is to investigate the background in the image to try to find where it was taken and who might be responsible. Second is to use the images to find other people collecting/sharing child pornography. Almost like a reverse image search. This means that the largest collection of child pornography is owned by the government.",
"In addition to all the information here about ips being stored in server logs and attached to posts, every request we make is being watched and logged by probably several agencies. When you view a webpage, your browser makes a request for that page. This is intercepted and logged by your isp and by government programs such as PRISM. Each image, etc... in that page is another request, which is logged. Data at this scale generally works by aggregating (or making lists of) simple information. So if there's an illegal image anywhere, you can be pretty sure that it has been identified by it's url and added to a list. Then, when anyone requests this image, you are \"added to a list\" of having viewed this information. Ultimately, at least one commercial entity (your isp) and an unknown number of government agencies has a complete record of everything you've done online for many years now. I predict these records will be used in dramatic ways in the coming years.",
"Logs are kept. These logs show detailed information about anyone connecting to a website. Your ISP also has logs of every connection you establish. These logs can go back years. On a side note... it's shockingly easy to get some of these companies to release information. I've seen some major websites release information when they get a letter with some law firm or police department letterhead on it. You don't necessarily need a warrant due to the laws.",
"You are never truly 'anonymous'...your ISP will sell you out for as little as an oreo cookie...",
"Well, it depends on a lot of things, basically the what, how, when of their post. If they are not using any techniques such as a VPN or TOR, then it is trivial for law enforcement to catch them. Whenever computers talk to each other on the internet, they need to know each others source and destination IP addresses, which basically work like phone numbers, So, if someone posts something illegal, there will be a source ip associated with the user. Law enforcement can then phone up the internet service provider and they will know what customer the address corresponds to. Now, let's suppose they are using tor/vpn. The idea with those is that you pivot through another machine so that it obfuscates your true ip address. This makes it slightly harder for law enforcement, but they can be tracked through a number of ways such as: Each web browser has slightly different settings, version, add-ons, and other variations which make them unique enough to act like an online fingerprint. So depending on the circumstances, and what intel they have, they can just do the standard detective's game of cross referencing against suspects. The next way is how some anon a few years ago got caught for threats about going postal with pipe bombs at school. He took a photograph of his pipe bombs and guns etc, using his dad's camera. He probably should have looked at the EXIF data before he uploaded because his dads camera automatically embeded something personally identifiable (was like family business name or address) and so he got arrested less than a day after his post. Smartphones (and some DSLRs) can even embed gps data. Depending on how high value the target is for law enforcement, they use tailored access operations, which basically translates into finding a way to hack into the target. Usually with cooperation from ISPs, cell phone companies etc. and just get malware into their pc so they can gather evidence. Also, the biggest way people get caught with internet crimes is why people get caught with any crime. They get sloppy, they get overconfident, they think they are like some criminal mastermind whose untouchable but really fail to see all the different ways they can get caught, The thing about the term 'anonymous' is that its not really a thing with forensics. Everything you do leaves a trace, and as long as the trace exists, eventually it can be connected to you. 'Anonymous' just means traces that don't yet have a name attached to them.",
"Mods are required to report the IP of posters when something illegal is posted. That's why you don't mess with football",
"Just yesterday I read [this article]( URL_0 ) about Brian Krebs researching the history of Mark Hutchins (malwaretech). He goes into detail how he connected a number of dots. Now imagine this, but with the resources of an entire department of people able to access much more information that Krebs had available.",
"With the counterfeit couponing guy, he had [used another forum]( URL_0 ) to direct users to the 4chan post. The admins of the other forum gave him up. It didn't help that he quickly confessed. Also, the FBI monitors 4chan, and almost definitely archives posts as they happen. > In mid-March, when an agent sought a search warrant for Henderson’s Rochester apartment, the investigator indicated that federal probers had been keeping an eye on 4chan. Agent Barry Couch referred to “FBI agents’ observation of posting activity on the 4chan Website.”",
"[But there are 23 Douglas Jones's in metropolitan area, how are we going to find the right one?]( URL_0 )",
"4chan is only anonymous in the sense that there are no usernames. The connection between 4chan and the user is not anonymous.",
"4chan is NOT anonymous. 4chan \"chooses\" to capture your IP address (which is basically the physical address to the spot where you are accessing the internet) when you log in (i.e. they have programmed the site to capture and store your IP address when you log in). Most (if not all) ISPs (the company you pay to access the internet) log your IP address as well. With the new H. Res 230 bill passed this year by congress, your ISP can now sell your browsing history to anyone that pays for it.",
"I think people greatly underestimate the tracking prowess of the feds. URL_0 That was the 90's. If you collect enough of the backbone traffic and make it searchable, it's not a far reach from nailing people (encrypted or not) by traffic patterns. TOR had the right idea, but even they've proven to be questionable.",
"there are technologies that analyze traffic in near real time and at the same time comparing it to months of history, that makes it very easy to find someone - as /u/Fauler_Lentz says, there are patterns that are hard to avoid making. It has become extremely hard to stay anonymous on the internet to the point where you might as well not try.",
"Most replies are lazy. When you visit a site, the site usually tracks your IP and timestamp. Although you don't need to register an email, this is all logged to report to the FBI when needed, because otherwise their domain gets seized for noncompliance. Similar to lavamail's issue, they shutdown rather than comply with some requested. So the gov has more access to the providers, even webhosts ( I've worked for both ), to comply with even more info, all to track back to a physical location and a timestamp. Remember silkroad's dread pirate robert? He got busted using a library wifi. They can't trace every post back to a person, but they can follow it back and if the user continues to post, even over time, they can piece it all together. Eventually, someone messes up and either posts from home or in a pattern that lets them narrow it down to a number of actual names then watch, or they have enough to point to one person and just arrest. It's a lot of leg work because it's not a live stream and you're usually auditing logs of multiple entities trying to piece it together.",
"what if there was mock site that made a viewer automatically download unwanted photos? is that an alarm to the fbi ?",
"I'm going to be that guy here, but the correct term is child abusive images. Pornography suggests something else altogether. URL_0 scroll down and there's an explanation.",
"I don't understand how people could possibly think they're anonymous online no matter the site. **Every site is required to keep log files containing your ip for legal purposes.** Some can even go further and collect browser addons and settings, and even your window size if they deem it necessary. Some sites collect this information to improve their sites. Others will collect it to alleviate authority pressure if the need arises. It's just what it is, and there's no law that says you have to provide information on all of these things like there is for cookie usage now. You're not anonymous from using Tor either. Hell, you're not even anonymous by using Tails. I recall a cyber security expert from Russia mentioning ISPs are using heavy-handed laws in the US for more than just greed; they're using it for control. If you even download Tor or a security software, your ip is put on a list by your ISP. If these net neutrality rules get axed, it will mean way more than simply price-gouging you for service packages. It will mean them being able to issue new legislation requiring smaller bits of information under the guise of service improvements. And, much like cookies, these will have lots of nuances that won't be codified in law. That second part is always glossed over by people here and that's a shame. We need to consider implications further than simple price-gouging. If anything that's the battle the monoliths would want to fight, not a battle on grounds of the sneaky stuff. In fact I don't recall ever seeing a post about net neutrality focusing on anything *but* price-gouging. Makes me wonder sometimes.",
"My ELI5 version: Every computer on the INTERNET has an address. People can try to hide their address, but the Police can make companies tell them what addresses have visited their site and what they did why they were there.",
"When you post there is an IP logged. Christopher \"poole\" moot never had an issue working with authorities. Posts IP's were saved for a period of time (30 days?) after the post - Chris forwarded those to the FBI / authorities when requested.",
"The scariest thing about 4chan is anyone could post CP, and if you were just browsing and accidentally came across a CP picture, the thumbnail would automatically be downloaded in your browser's cache or cookie folder. Possesion of CP is a crime similar to rape in the US. Which makes me wonder, if someone's computer gets hacked and the hacker placed CP on their computer and then reported the victim for running a CP ring, wouldn't that person just instantly go to jail?",
"Nothing on the web is truly \"anonymous\" due to the nature of the web. It's clusters talking to clusters whose jurisdictions change and laws change. There is no current \"uniform code\" for log retention. Back in the day we used IP Hopping and IP spoofing to hide what we were up to....these days the NSA has a backdoor into everything. PRISM is nothing compared to the real capabilities of the NSA. I remember eating Chinese food with Emmanuel Goldstein (and REBEL) in NY in ChinaTown one day and he basically prophesized everything we're dealing with today.",
"Local and state police, the FBI, NSA and all those other agencies that combat terror can still get warrants for surveillance. I'm not trying to take that away, but the fact that they can get secret warrants pretty much at will is a fuckin problem. I'd rather take my chances w more terrorist attacks than give these agencies carte blanche w the info of 100s of millions of people. It's none of their fuckin business what kinda porn I like or what kinda shit I read. That nonchalant attitude towards your privacy is naive and concerning. Think of it this way. If you have a significant other and they've ever sent you nudes, personal information, SSNs, bank info or anything like that, the government has a record of that now and forever. Now think of all the government scandals you've heard about. Now imagine the less salacious scandals that probably just lead to a reprimand or firing. That's fuckin scary. You have no idea who has your information or what they'll do with it. Link to an article that talks about NSA employees trading nudes from illegal surveillance on American citizens: [Theyre really combatting terrorism ]( URL_0 ) I don't know the answer, but I know unfettered government access isn't it. Edit : my grammar blows",
"How about you don't download child pornography or make death threats?",
"You know that mini computer in your pocket with the unremovable integrated battery? That's how",
"4chan is literally an FBI honeypot, and they use software to detect -- and deny posting permission to -- most users behind a proxy/VPN.",
"TLDR: on the internet, nobody knows that you are a dog. Except if you download puppy porn, then FBI and NSA will sooner or later find you which dog you are.",
"most forums track EVERYTHING you do. They do it to show advertisers who their viewers are, and how to best advertise on their websites. Reddit makes money from advertising, selling your information is how they make their money.",
"4CHan and others record your IP when you post. You're anonymous to other users, but not the the webhost. The information can be passed on to authorities. Usually the main mistake people made though if they've made some effort to cover their tracks through Tor or other services is to give out too much identifying information- that may be hardware information or personal- like using a similar username or mentioning things about their physical location or self. The authorities then use that to track you down. Tor can also be 'broken' because it uses a series of nodes to disguise traffic from end to end. What happens when the authorities have control of each node in the chain, and even the endpoint? They can directly correlate the traffic at one end to the other. Then they call up your ISP for your details and then they're at your door.",
"Note that 4chan does not accept or permit Child Pornography and pulls it down as soon as they see it. There may be some leeway on the whole cartoon images of children thing (which is also considered CP in some jurisdictions), because no child was actually hurt or used in the production of that, but if you're posting porn photos of real underaged girls or boys on a forum, it is going down and you're getting banned as soon as a mod or admin sees it. While they may tell the cops to fuck off if they wanted your IP for posting something political or other forms of speech, I don't think they make any bones about running your ass in for CP. They may not call the cops themselves, but they will hardly stand up for a pedo in that situation if they are posting that crap. Expect that 4chan will cooperate with the law if you post that crap and may even be working with the law to nail you if you do.",
"ELI5 version, assuming you understand how regular postage mail works: To be connected to the internet you need an IP (internet protocol) address. This is like a mailing address, it tells other machines on the internet how to send you information. For example, if you're playing the latest video game with a friend, you need to know his IP address so you can send him data packets such as 'my character just moved through the door' or 'I just picked up a new shotgun'. There is one organization that hands out IP addresses to make sure no one gets the same one. From you can tell who owns an IP address. You as an individual user are unlikely to have your own. What's more common is that your internet service provider (ISP) buys a bunch. They make have 10,000 customers but know that only 2000 are online at any given time so they buy 5000 to be safe. Then when you need one they assign it to you. Now to 4Chan. When someone posts there the 4Chan server receives their data. It also logs the IP address of the person who sent that data. It logs is for many valid reasons, for example say there's a lot of spam that comes from Nigeria the 4Chan server may want to block all data coming from Nigerian IP addresses. So lets say the police want to know who posted a message. They contact the owners of 4Chan servers and say \"We have a warrant, what was the IP address of the person who posted this particular message?\", then the police looks up who owns the IP address, lets say it's Comcast, and they go to Comcast and say \"We have a warrant, who was using this IP address?\" and Comcast says John Smith was at 123 Mulberry Lane. Then the police politely knock on your door and ask you if you have a license for the dankness of your memes. Now there are ways around this such as connecting through different countries with different laws and using services which don't keep historical logs of IP addresses so you have to catch the person mid-connection to trace them. It's kind of like trying to mail a letter anonymously by dropping it without a return address in a mail box across town. You might get away with it once or twice but if what you're doing is of interest to the police they will have someone watch that mail box and all the ones in a mile radius to spot someone suspicious dropping something off then they'll pull you over for a chat. It's labour intensive and not perfect but they can find you. The point to remember is that since machines require addresses to know where to send data too there is always a way to use that information to help track down a person or track down their approximate whereabouts."
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6yqee4 | How do heartbeat sensors work in ellipticals and things like that? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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6yqhba | When freezing vegetables, the cells explode because of the water in it expanding, and they get mushy. So ho does cryogenics work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Short answer: it doesn't. The whole point of cryonics is that all we have is step 1: freeze body. There is no step 2 yet.",
"Cryogenic is the idea that you can freeze things so fast ice crystals won't form. Sure you can accomplish that but unfreezing is not trivial and reviving. Cryofreezing heads... Assumes you can revive a severed brain. It's completely unproven. We haven't ever frozen a live animal like a rat and revived it. Relies on the concept of future techno magic. It gets worse from here. Because you're dead you can't pay for the refrigeration nor sue if they fuck up. So technically if in a decade after you die the company... Dies... Even your techno magic dream is crushed because thy can't afford to refrigerate you. Tl;Dr. Meat bags are scared of dying and meat bags sell magic refrigerators."
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6yrpny | People say that Apollo 11 could have been done with a normal calculator, so why is space flight nowadays still so hard? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"All the math your computer does to run Call of Duty could be solved with an Abacus and a lot of patience. There were professional mathematicians titled Calculators who did loads of math on pencil and paper to figure out flight trajectories and stuff that today we have complex programs that can do it in real time. Fun fact, many early maneuvers in space were eyeballed by the astronauts because they didn't have time to do the math. Getting into space may take less time to do mathwise, but rockets are still engineering marvels and take a load of work to make and maintain.",
"It's often forgotten what level of risk was considered acceptable during the space race. A 10% loss rate was seen as tolerable back then. NASA was ok with losing every tenth mission. The Apollo Astronauts could not get life insurance because they were operating under such high risks (cool snippet: Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins signed a bunch of commemorative postcards before the Apollo 11 launch, as a kind of alternative life insurance. If they didn't come back, the postcards would be worth a ton of money, and their families could sell them). Also, space flight isn't particularly hard, but it is very expensive. We know how to do it, we could put together a Mars mission tomorrow if we had to, but it's not cheap. It wasn't cheap back inthe 60's and 70's either, but it was considered a good investment.",
"math tells you how fast and what direction you should go. it's the engineer's job to make sure you actually go that direction and that fast in a controlled manner by strapping a couple of people on the the equivalent of a 6.5million pound slow burn bomb.",
"There are several reasons, one of which is that the TI84, the standard high school calculator, probably has more computing power than the Apollo 11 space craft did. That is a fact that is pretty much set in stone. However, the Apollo 11 space craft had a specially designed computer that was made to only calculate orbital mechanics and such. This allowed for the Apollo 11 computer to have a far superior ability to calculate the needed numbers and adjustments. An example of this optimization used in everyday life is finding the area under the parabola. Draw a rectangle where one corner is on the highest or lowest point of the curve, and the opposite corner is somewhere on the curve; the area of the parabola in the rectangle will always be 2/3 the area of the rectangle created (people still in high school, don't cheat by using this fact, learn your integrals). It is because that the computer is specifically designed and programed to only deal with orbital mechanics and space ship stuff is why it was so underpowered. However, an everyday calculator's > general < computing power is too inferior to even point the rocket in the correct direction. Fun fact, to get to the moon by eyeball, get into low earth orbit, then look for the moon rise, when you see it, fly towards it for a bit and u will intercept it. On another note, getting into space is not hard, what's difficult is getting into space without using up the entirety of the worlds GDP. Source: Aerospace major. edit. Grammar. edit 2. It's late at night, my brain compute no good.",
"Answering like you were actually five: Because the difficulty of space flight isn't based on computer power, but on the challenge of building and affording the actual thing that flies. Imagine trying to hand build your own clock, out of bits you have at home say. Imagine how well it would work. Now imagine how well it would work if you also ran as fast as you can down the street, shaking your hand built clock as hard as you could. Now imagine you're actively running at 18,000 miles, shaking it unbelievably hard, and if one part fails the very thing that got you going that fast blows everything into tiny pieces. That's the real problem, not controlling where the nose points. You could do that by hand. The early astronauts often had too as well.",
"Computing power is just a small part of it. A saturn 5 has 3 million parts. Smaller rockets have less, but still hundereds of thousands of parts. Computers make building, and designing rockets, and flight computers on the rocket are a lot more advanced, but its never going to be simple. One other thing to consider is we are not spending MUCH MUCH less (as a percent of GDP) on space than we did in the 60's. Computers help, but there are a lot of things that NASA would love to do, but they don't have the budget.",
"The hard part about going to space isn't the computations, the Japanese actually have a functioning orbit-capable rocket with NO ascent guidance at all. They just point her the right way and light her up, so to speak. The hard part is the mechanical engineering required to get there: The engines, fuel pumps, fuel tanks, fuel mixtures, advanced construction materials, heat management, radiation hardening, life support... All those things are REALLY hard, even now.",
"Think of a trebuchet. It's fairly simple to calculate how far a projectile will go. It's very hard to actually design, build, and use a machine capable of hitting the mark. For Apollo, they spent months running the computer to get the possible moon arcs and launch windows. On top of that, they did countless simulations to simulate possible burn paths and orbits. Today, you could get those calculations in a few seconds to a few hours, but you still need to actually do them. Rocket fuel is explosive. Most rocket fuel is highly corrosive to metal. Even pointing the rocket in the in the right direction is a huge feat of engineering. On top of that solar rays wreak havoc on computer systems. For example, the voyager system had 3 redundent array of ECC memory because there are so many faults."
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6yrwzb | Why can two companies, for example Apple and Samsung, specifically target each other in their commercials? Isn't this considered defamation of a brand? | I've seen both companies talk doo-doo about each other in multiple commercials. Isn't this defamation of another brand? Why and how can they do this? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you mention another brand, even with a negative connotation, your essentially marketing your competitor in your own commercial.",
"There's no law against making statements that reasonably could be true about someone else's product--and this includes non-factual claims, like simply calling the product \"bad.\" Apple and Samsung can't make outright false statements, but they can openly argue about their respective products all day long. Still, someone who is the subject of negative claims may try to intimidate the speaker or even file a lawsuit. Defending against such claims may be expensive even if you win. There is also research that shows simply mentioning competing brands, even in a negative context, can make advertising less effective. For these reasons, some companies are careful not to identify their competitors and refer to \"Product X\" and \"the leading brand\" and so on.",
"In the UK, most of the use of competitor’s registered trademark in a comparative advertisement was an infringement of the registration up till the end of 1994. However, the laws on comparative advertising were harmonized in 2000. The current rules on comparative advertising are regulated by a series of EU Directives. The Business Protection from Misleading Marketing Regulations 2008 implements provisions of Directive (EC) 2006/114 in the UK. URL_0",
"Defamation and libel must be false. If this weren't true, you couldn't have things like the better business bureau, or more relevant to modern times, negative reviews. It's not done as much because commercials aren't typically designed to convince you the product is good, but to make sure it's on your mind. In that vein, mentioning your competitor is a bad idea - you're making them remember them too! Sometimes companies get into sparring matches like you mentioned, they don't mind terribly because while you're seeing them argue, what's really happening is they're both making sure you think of those two when thinking about a product. It ends up helping both, not hurting as much. Hell, you just made a Reddit post about it, so clearly it's working it for both of them."
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