>Something else I just thought of while typing this is that this would make an awesomely sci-fi means of information storage. No need to remember a password, we've encoded your gut flora with your private key!
First occurred to me as interesting too. Then I realized that you'd be dropping your private key in every toilet you defecate into. Not to say that secure intra-body information storage isn't possible though.
Then again, re: the steganography -- gut flora's pretty diverse (and there's a lot of it). People might not necessarily think to, or want to, dig through your shit.
From the article: "These findings, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology in September, echo previous work that showed milk composition varying with infant gender in gray seals and red deer and with infant gender and the mother's condition in rhesus macaques."
As the article rightly notes: "...every one of your relatives who spits in a 23andMe vial is giving the company a not-inconsiderable bit of your own genetic information to the company along with their own. If you have several close relatives who are already in 23andMe’s database, the company already essentially has all that it needs to know about you."
The FDA's regulation doesn't stop that or have anything to do with that. I fail to see the problem with 23andMe. They provide testing for people who want to pay for it.
FUD about building a massive database is kind of hard to take seriously when the NSA watches everything and the US government already builds DNA databases.
It's probably largely down to the definition of what a smartphone was back then. The same graph scaled by market size or including dumbphones would be more interesting.
Yeah, I was confused by Windows' apparently-large share as well, and I figured it was a definition thing as well, but if you look at these sales figures:
Microsoft sold 14 million smartphones (or rather, their device partners, probably mostly HTC back then) in 2007, but according to this article from 2007, RIM was running at about 9.6 million devices a year, which matches what wikipedia says:
This graph is kinda confusing to read, but I'm parsing it correctly then it looks like Blackberry had a pretty massive surge around 2009-2010 - well after the release of the iPhone. That is actually surprising to me.
I suppose that might be due to the market growing - in which case Apple looks like it's relatively flat starting around 2010 but in reality the number of users were increasing along with the market.
According to the report, [tenure and tenure-track] positions now make up only 24 percent of the academic work force, with the bulk of the teaching load shifted to adjuncts, part-timers, graduate students and full-time professors not on the tenure track.
The report was published by Center for the Future of Higher Education in 2012. Link: [2]
From the executive summary from this 2010 publication by the American Federation of Teachers [3]:
Altogether, part-time/adjunct faculty members account for 47 percent of all faculty, not including graduate employees. The percentage is even higher in community colleges, with part-time/adjunct faculty representing nearly 70 percent of the instructional workforce in those institutions.
This is actually one of my biggest disappointments with the Hyperloop announcement. Musk said early on that it wasn't a vacuum tube. But in the end, we have a tube with vacuum pumps, and an air pressure much lower than that of Mars. In my book, that is close enough to a vacuum tube that it sounds like purposeful mis-direction on Musk's part. I.e., when he said (when he first mentioned the idea) that it isn't a vacuum tube, it would have been more honest to say that it isn't a complete hard vacuum tube. Would have cut out on some of the more wild speculations.
"Vacuum tube", aside from being a complete misnomer that's more usually applied to 'pneumatic tube', betrays the concept in one particular area:
It's a battery-powered hovercraft inside of a soft vacuum tube (soft vacuum being within reasonable reach of cheap pumps), with boost segments to get it up to speed.
Usually, vacuum concepts rely purely magnetic levitation & propulsion. The fact that it's an air cushion vehicle in a soft vacuum IS the novel concept here.
I think it would be misleading to call it a vacuum tube, since there are well known implementations of that where the capsule is moved by air pressure/vacuum. Meanwhile the hyperloop has electric propulsion. If he had said vacuum tube, no one would have guessed the propulsion mechanism. The air pressure being reduced in the tube is done more for efficiency than as the mechanism of movement.
While it might seem like a vacume the amount of air left in the tube makes it far cheaper to operate. It's one of those 1 +/- .001 foot rod is not that expencive but a 1 +/- .0001 foot rod is getting there and a 1 +/- .00001 foot rod even more so. Basicly vacume pumps cost more, use more energy, become more delicate, and move less air the closer you get to hard vacume.
However, there is still plenty of air in the tube to be an issue at the proposed speeds thus making Hyperloop cheaper and more complex than a traditional vacume transport.
But isn't the fact that it is not a vacuum an important aspect of the design? First, some air is used to elevate the train. Second, it's easier to maintain a near vacuum than a total vacuum.
Eh, as an American who's visited several major US cities, I've observed a whole lot of variation in behavior during inclement weather, partly because the US is pretty big and hence pretty diverse in climate. The behavior you describe might be more common in southern California, where it doesn't rain all that often. When I was in Seattle (where it rains pretty much all the time), a lot of people didn't seem like they noticed it was raining.
From related 3D scanning videos, it looks like 3D scanning is already a pretty common operation, e.g. in mining and navigation. Putting the technology into consumer-facing mobile devices... wow.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood