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Pavithree

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{ "a_id": [ "cf6a8yv", "cf6ah77", "cf6apjj" ], "score": [ 2, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "The US government has always paid its bonds when they are due. Thus they've been a safe investment for local and foreign investors. However, if the government defaults, it means they have outstanding debts due they have been unable to pay.", "It just means there is a political squabble over the budget and both sides are posturing. There is actually zero risk of the U.S. defaulting on its debt since the IRS collects revenue equal to about five times the cost of debt service.\n\nTo default on the debt would require a decision to do it despite having the money to pay it and despite the Constitution requiring the debt to be paid.", "The US has a weird setup where Congress passes a budget that decides how much money will be spent on various things. Simple enough.\n\nThe US government is currently (and has been for a while) been operating under a deficit, meaning that the government spends more money than it takes in via taxes and customs and whatever else. In order to spend more money than they've collected, the US government borrows money. Basically they sell things like bonds, where an interested party can buy these bonds for a set amount, and then at some point in the future trade those bonds in to get their money back, plus some amount of extra interest. \n\nLots of people/companies/banks/countries/etc. buy these bonds from the US government. US government debt has generally been seen as a very safe investment, as the US economy is huge and very productive, so the country has lots of wealth to draw on. The US government has never missed any scheduled payments on its debt. (Not paying would be considered a default). \n\nVery little of the above has changed recently, but there's one more twist to it all. As a result of all this deficit spending, the US has a running total of national debt. Different people will argue about how much of this debt is a problem for the economy and country, but the important thing is that Congress long ago set a limit to how high that debt could get (this is called the debt ceiling). Many times in the past, as the deficit spending has continued, the total debt has approached that legal limit, and each time, Congress has voted to raise that limit. But recently, some members of Congress decided that the debt was too high, and that the government should stop spending so much money, and threatened to refuse to allow a vote to raise the debt ceiling.\n\nSo basically, the US government has a whole bunch of obligations of things it has to pay, including interest to people who have bought US government debt. If Congress failed to raise the debt ceiling and the government hit it, it would not be able to borrow more money to pay its bills. It would have no money to pay for various things, including interest payments. The government would be in default. \n\nDifferent people have different opinions on what would happen if the US government defaulted, but the vast majority of people expect that it would be pretty bad, and quite possibly catastrophic to the economy, both in the US and globally. One of the foundations of the modern global economy is that US government debt is a very safe investment, and a huge number of entities around the world have a huge amount of money invested there. \n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c6aq88s", "c6aqgbt" ], "score": [ 2, 12 ], "text": [ "We would quickly be overwhelmed with all of the most undesirable people to our economy. Those with few prospects in their homeland would flood in whether there were jobs here for them or not, relying on the social system to take care of them if they couldn't find work.\n\nWorst case is no worse for these folks...the scenery doesn't matter much when you're starving. Of course, for those that are already here, trying to keep the engine going, it would be disastrous.", "Open immigration is only a problem when society is paying for social services. For example, we have public schools, hospitals that accept anyone (regardless of ability to pay), and a number of other social programs. If you allow anyone to immigrate into the US, then these people become entitled to a free education, free emergency room care, etc. and it's all paid for by US Residents (in the form of taxes, or higher ER costs, etc.).\n\nOpen immigration is *not* a problem when these services are not provided. In the early 1900s and slightly before, the US had *a lot* of immigrants coming over, and there wasn't such widespread social services. The immigrants were a source of cheap labor, which helped reduce prices for a number of goods and services." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ejt7tp6" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "In people with normal colour vision, there are three types of cells which respond to blue, green, and red light respectively. [This graph](_URL_0_) shows where the peak of each of these types of cells lies. As you can see, there is quite a large gap between the blue and green peaks, but the green and red ones are quite close to each other and in fact overlap a lot.\n\nThe most common form of colour blindness, deuteranopia, can be split into \"true\" deuteranopia, where green-sensitive cells are entirely missing, and deuteranomaly, where green-sensitive cells just have their peak shifted so it overlaps with the red peak even more, making it hard to differentiate red and green. Deuteranomaly is actually much more common, affecting roughly 5% of men, while true deuteranopia is more like 1% ([source](_URL_1_)). However, protanopia/protanomaly, which affects the red-sensitive cells instead, can also result in red-green confusion, which is why the general term \"red-green colour blindness\" is often used to cover both.\n\nI would guess that this simulation is more specifically trying to simulate deuteranomaly, where the green- and red-sensitive cells are likely to be stimulated together by light of certain wavelengths, rather than true deuteranopia, in which case green light should only be weakly detected." ] }

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[ "https://imgur.com/a/UDoFiVh" ]

[ [ "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/1416_Color_Sensitivity.jpg", "https://www.color-blindness.com/deuteranopia-red-green-color-blindness/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cj4xf30", "cj4xjxe", "cj4ybhp", "cj4z404" ], "score": [ 4, 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "While frankly kind of ridiculous, the current system helps to even out the playing field. Without access to some form of financial aid, intelligent but poor individuals would be unable to get a higher education from a good university.\n\nAll that being said, our current system is completely broken because it encourages everyone to study what they love at the best university that they can get into. This is a losing game, but we are the first generation to play it, so we got the shaft. By the time my future kids start college, I have a feeling that everyone will be telling them something very different.", "Quite frankly working and building credit are not relevant options for most students these days during the school year. In order to get into top colleges kids must dedicate hours to sports, after school clubs, and studying. I played 3 sports, was head of 4 clubs, and was VP of the student body. many nights I was up until 1 or 2 am finishing one project or another. And many people will say just don't do as much. But for a middle class student who's parents can't pay very much for college it's my job to get into the best school possible and call the loan I get, to go along with what ever scholarships I get, an investment. I'm one of the lucky people who got into one of the highly sought after schools in New England that cost +50,000 and got a large scholarship to do so. But without a student loan I would not be able to attend. I chose on a career where I will be able to pay my loans off in a reasonable amount of time. But without my loan I would be stuck at a small in-state college rather than a school where my roommates come from the best schools around the country and my professors have set up meetings between me and high profile professionals in my field of choice. I think of it as an investment for my future. Some pay off, some don't but plan on reaching for the stars while I am young and have the opportunity.", "The loan is considered an investment by the person taking it out - but isn't it also an investment for the lender? How much in interest does the lender get?", "Student loans never die. Even if you were to declare bankruptcy. Banks don't really have much to lose in their eyes. If you can't pay then your co-signer's credit is on the line, so chances are someone's going to pay up and their (the banks') pockets are still getting lined at the end of the day.\nAlso, what /u/padubenay said. It's seen as an investment. Sometimes it pays-off and sometimes it doesn't. Also, on what grounds would you sue them? You signed on the dotted line and took that money, promising to pay it back, and spent it on *your* future. It sucks, I know. Its really really **really** blows. But you can't sue someone for something *you* did because *you* wanted to at the time. \n\nIf you really feel like doing something about it, you should start an awareness campaign. Speak to high schools. Or create a website. Take advantage of the reach of social media. Make students aware what they are **really** getting into. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "f94safl", "f94t287" ], "score": [ 2, 5 ], "text": [ "Infrared is just a slightly longer wavelength of light than red. We call it infrared because it's just a bit too long a wave for human eyes to see, but there's no reason that the \"sensors\" (the cones of the retina IIRC) in an eye could not be able to detect that wavelength, if they are just set up to do it. Turns out a snake's eye is sensitive to that wavelength, which is useful to them.", "What snakes see infrared with their eyes. Pit vipers and boas and pythons use a separate organ to sense infrared. Called a pit organ." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ewtcclj", "ewtdse4" ], "score": [ 3, 3 ], "text": [ "If you work for a city procurement department that buys art you just pull a random (ridiculously high number) out of your ass and use the taxpayers money to buy it.\nIf you are a private dealer you look at what the art is commanding on the free market pertaining to the relevance of the artist and the demand that it is generating.", "Art dealers will look at what that work of art has previously sold for and what other works of art have been selling for. When the market is stable, the assumption would be that the work of art will sell for about what it sold for before. If the market is up by 20%, it should sell for about 20% more.\n\nOf course, if a particular artists work becomes in greater demand, that has to be factored in, as well.\n\nIf you are talking about new art work that has never sold before, then often the artist will ask for however much he thinks he can get out of the work. It's worth may be guesswork, especially if the artist is an unknown. Known artists are easier to estimate because you can compare their work with what their previous works have sold for." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d5n4spy", "d5n55jf", "d5n5ats", "d5n6l3m", "d5npr0s" ], "score": [ 3, 3, 9, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "People are bad with numbers and statistics. If you say there is a 99% chance of something happening people will know it's likely but they won't grasp just how likely it is they'll appreciate the 1% chance more than you should. \n\nWhen it comes to something that could endanger them they are going to have an even more skewed perception of statistics because of the chance of it happening. \n\nJust watch iRobot man.", "According to the entire conservative media machine it's still 2008. They convince themselves we're still in the midst of a world-ending recession, that money is bad and gold, ammo and paracord are good, and that the sneaky dark people who speak strange languages are coming to take their sweet, Christian children to NATO/FEMA camps where they will be re-educated by wild urban negroes to become homosexual coprophagia enthusiasts who believe in tax-and-spend big government but soon we're going to fix all thart *real fast* and it will be tremendous, believe me. We will do so much winning...I love the great people in Samoa...I don't want his endorsement...Now here's a song about taking a prostitute home followed by the Rolling Stones asking the musical question, \"You Can't Always Get What You Want.\"\n\nEDIT: In other words, the media most watched, read and listened to by most conservatives is spreading insane lies. ", "Multiple networks on a 24 hour news cycle means that everything becomes BREAKING NEWS. That along with the discovery that it's far more profitable to keep people afraid than to keep them well-informed. ", "Ease of media consumption and global proliferation of news stories is at an all time high. We live in a 24 hour news culture and that means there are always reports of the bad happening, as the bad is what makes for entertaining news and so it is what is reported. ", "It's not just the raw murder rate that affects people's perceptions, but also the types of crimes that occur. If 10 husbands kill their spouse or 1 guy murders 10 people in a mall, those will have the exact same affect on the murder rate as measured in the typical X per 100K standard. However the former will be treated as isolated incidents and most people will not feel personally threatened, whereas the latter will be widely reported and have an effect far and wide. The USA has had a large string of random gun violence in the past few years which have received wide coverage, so that affects the perception of the country (and let's face it, white people - consider Giuliani's audience) more than a larger problem of gang or domestic violence incidents in the 80s and 90s." ] }

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[ "http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/07/psychology-why-americans-afraid-low-crime-levels.html" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "cimghdz", "cimgpfs", "cimhnr6", "cimjmlw", "cimjnue", "cimkl5j", "cimotn0" ], "score": [ 9, 11, 19, 10, 43, 3, 11 ], "text": [ "I hope someone answers this. It sounds incredibly interesting.", "The blurriness comes from your eyes, not from what you're looking at, so no, I don't think so.", "The opposite of blurring is a technique called [unsharp masking](_URL_0_) It effectively increases contrast at the edges in a photograph. Here's an [example picture](_URL_1_) with blurred text at the top and \"unblurred\" text on the bottom.\n\nSo yes, you can blur an image in the opposite direction. But the equations to unblur an image breakdown near the minimum and maximum intensity of the photograph. If you store color intensities in the range 0 to 255 then the result image would require some pixels to be below 0 and some to be above 255. You're going to lose that information.\n\nAnother caveat is that you're not really talking about the same two things when you say you \"see everything blurred\" and \"a picture is blurred\".\n\nIn order to understand this, a distinction must be made between physical images and photographs. When you look at an object you are observing light that is reflecting off of it in all directions. \n\nA camera has a lens that focuses that light into an image projected onto a digital sensor or film. The camera then transforms that light into a photograph.\n\nLike a camera, the lens in your eye focuses that light into an *image* on your retina. Your retina senses this light and a *photograph* is formed in your brain.\n\nWhen the lens in a camera (or your eye) malfunctions, the image is not focused directly on the sensor. This causes the photograph to appear blurry.\n\nCorrective glasses focus the light coming into your eye in a way that places the image correctly on your retina. They don't unblur anything. The blurring happens after the light has made it into your eyeballs. ", "It's not possible to create a sharp edge for you with just a picture because each point on that image is spread across a large area on your retina (that's what causes the blur). Any attempt to add an edge would itself be spread across that area, and also be blurred.\n\nHowever you can might be able to make your vision sharper without a lens. Try poking a tiny hole through tinfoil with a pin and hold the pinhole up to your eye. \n\nThe pinhole reduces all the light coming in to thin lines which don't spread out, thus stay more in focus. This works for me and I'm short sighted, not sure how well it works for long sightedness tho.", "So you want something like this [shortsightedness optical illusion](_URL_0_). but for farsightedness.", "While you could create a lens that works on the picture instead of next to your eye, you cannot just make it work with paint or ink.\n\nI'm sorry, there is so much incomplete or misinformation on this thread.\n\nLet's step back to how the eye works, and use a piece of paper in place of the back of your eye. In this analogy, whatever shows up on the paper is exactly what you'll see.\n\nSo we start by holding a light bulb in front of the paper. The light goes in all direction, so it lights up the paper but you cannot see the lightbulb on the paper. Now, what's missing from this equation is a lens.\n\nA lens takes light that comes from one point and bends it so it all goes to a specific point. Any particular lens will work with specific lens locations and pairs of points. We'll choose a lens that will work for wherever the lightbulb, paper and lens are placed. [And vola!](_URL_0_).\n\nWell in the eye the relative locations of the paper and lens are fixed, but the objects are in different locations. To work on a variety of objects, we need to change the lens. Which is what the eye does, it bends its lens when you are looking at different points.\n\nNormally, the lens can change shape to focus everything you want to see. Unfortunately, some people's eyes can't change shape enough. What you do to fix this is add another lens which prebends the light so eye doesn't have to change its lens as much. (You can also perform eye surgery to do the same).\n\nWhile, there is no way to make a printed image that will look sharp to you (in the blurry zone), you can design a lens that is placed near the picture to correct your vision from a distance.", " > Are there reverse-blurred images that would appear clear to me? \n\nSort of like this? Look at it, then take off your glasses and look at it.\n\n_URL_0_" ] }

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[ "http://i.imgur.com/z5XTf5S.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/UeW4ih8.jpg" ]

[ [], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking", "http://imgur.com/6EBYMFp" ], [], [ "http://tinaculit.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/how-to-test-short-sightedness1.jpg" ], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reflectionprojection.jpg" ], [ "http://adsoftheworld.com/sites/default/files/styles/media_retina/public/v_new_2_140430_b_rgb_copy_aotw.jpg?itok=46FCRr1L" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cx52bts" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "We can measure a planet's mass by watching how it interacts gravitationally with nearby objects. Pluto is an easy one because it has a system of tiny moons that are dominated by its gravity.\n\nWe can measure its radius with simple photography.\n\nOne you know the mass and the size, the surface gravity calculation is fairly straightforward since gravity depends solely on mass and distance." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ctz7l6v", "ctz8n6q" ], "score": [ 5, 2 ], "text": [ "When entering the USA from Mexico you must show papers demonstrating that you have the right to be here. If you lack these, armed border guards will deny you entry.", "The legal immigration system for unskilled labor in the U.S. is [literally insane.](_URL_0_) So insane that it de facto does not exist. " ] }

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[ [], [ "http://reason.com/assets/db/07cf533ddb1d06350cf1ddb5942ef5ad.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dn7a59j", "dn7b1cf", "dn7lrh8", "dn7spju" ], "score": [ 25, 3, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Drains need to have a trap so that sewer gases do not enter the structure. The water in the toilet bowl is needed to cause enough pressure to force waste through that trap.", "We do almost exactly that when we use a *waterless urinal.* These are used in high-traffic locations to save water. They aren't installed in houses due to the expense and the amount of space required, and frankly because of tradition.", "Urinals etc also get clogged up just with piss. This a huge issue, particularly in pubs. Plumbers have a customised \"Piss Drill\" that is used to break through this sediment build up. Apparently it is one of the most awful tasks. Therefore, another reason you don't want one, or want to piss down your sink/bath hole repeatedly. ", "1) The drain you speak of would still need a water trap to prevent sewer gases from entering your home. \n\n2) You still need to have a toilet to deal with solid waste. \n\nSo since you need both those things it is cheaper and better to just use the toilet to pee. If you have an issue with using that much water do not flush till you have peed a few times or have also defecated. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ct819xd", "ct81tuj", "ct821r8", "ct82fud", "ct82ofn", "ct87zoe", "ct8ac56", "ct8ckhx", "ct8cuj3" ], "score": [ 69, 6, 8, 9, 18, 2, 5, 2, 3 ], "text": [ "A lot of distilleries are opening in my state due to recent law changes and the ones that have released whiskies have released un aged, clear, or white whiskies until they can age for a bit. Aging whisky for a few years in oak is what causes the whiskey to turn brown. Un aged whiskey is still whiskey but it is much less common. \n", "Often times this is why it is so expensive to start a hard liquor company. The first few years profits if existent are very low. Plus doing it really right you need to buy wine barrels to use and those don't come cheap.", "I'm not an expert by any means. But I would guess that you have to get investors to back you and take a loan. Sounds very risky but if you can get over the initial hump then \nyou're set. However most of the world renown distilleries have been around for hundreds of years so they already beat the hard startup. If anyone knows of new whiskey or whisky distilleries that are just starting out that have good product please let me know. You can always improve and I'd love to try something new ", "Many business require you to invest time and money before you can start it. For example you need to spend a long time building a hotel before you can start selling rooms. I'm working on making dolls and many people spend years working on their prototypes and casting them before releasing anything at all. It's not so weird.", "Many rebottle liquor from large industrial producers. Here's an interesting article: _URL_0_", "Besides the aforementioned sourced whiskey, new distilleries will also sell liquors that require little or no aging, like vodka or white rum. ", "Luckily moonshine is kind of a thing right now. So one thing they can do is sell moonshine while they wait for their stuff to age. (Moonshine is bottled without any aging). But wineries have this problem too. Sometimes the answer is repackaging other people's stuff.", "I know you asked about whiskey but wineries face this same problem. My good friend growing up got around this by selling his grapes to other wineries to use in their wines. Keeping a small amount for himself to make into wine. After a while he could start selling his stuff and keeping more and more of his grapes for himself. I haven't talked to him in years so I have no idea how this worked out. I would imagine it didnt work out as the number of big name wineries moving into that area would have made it difficult ", "Sometimes they'll repackage other distilleries' whiskeys.\n\nFor example the award winning Tennesee Whistlepig 10 year straight rye whiskey is really just Alberta Premium rye imported & bottled. The Whistlepig distillery has only been around for a couple of years." ] }

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[ [], [], [], [], [ "http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/28/your-craft-whiskey-is-probably-from-a-factory-distillery-in-indiana.html" ], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e7eqajz" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Because it feels like a hug, which in turn mimics our feelings inside our mothers’ womb. Babies love to be tied into warm and fuzzy blankets for that reason. It gives a sense of security. Works without anxiety, too. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ds0dabj", "ds0hj16" ], "score": [ 3, 3 ], "text": [ "The waves in question, carried by photons, are called electromagnetic waves. They are the same thing, fluctuations in the same field. The movement of charge produces the \"magnetic field\". Attracting metal, through ferromagnetism or its friends paramagnetism, diamagnetism, and antiferromagnetism, is more a property of those materials than of the field itself.", "To understand what electric and magnetic waves are, you should first understand what the electric and magnetic fields are. Imagine all of the space around you is filled with little arrows that can be pointing in any direction in 3D space: up/down, left/right, forward/backward. This is what a field is. The electric field in a space is affected by electric charge. A positive charge will have the arrows all point away from it. A negative charge has them pointing inwards, [just like this](_URL_3_). A magnetic field works the same, but with magnetic things, [just like so](_URL_0_).\n\nImportantly, these two fields are coupled to each other. If there is a change in one, it will affect the other. In an electric generator, magnets move near wire, the magnet's effects on the electric field around the wire causes electricity to move through the wire. An electric motor does the exact opposite.\n\nA wave in one of these fields is just what it sounds like: a wave. It's where the vectors along some direction in space are alternately going one direction then the other [like so](_URL_1_). For a photon, that wave is moving through space, so the part that was up, then turns into a down, then back into up, that is, it's changing. Since it's changing, then there *must* be a change to the magnetic field there (we could describe it just the opposite way too). This is why we talk about it as the electromagnetic field together, because they affect each other so strongly.\n\nSo what happens is that the electric field wave and the magnetic field wave run together at a 90 degree angle to one another, [just like this](_URL_2_)." ] }

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[ [], [ "https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-26425a6013f1ac644d7554a25fdf242f", "http://montalk.net/emavec/EMevecfull.jpg", "http://www.chemistryland.com/CHM151S/07-Atomic%20Structure/Spectra/WavePacketVsContinuous.jpg", "https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2013/08/summer_sketcheskey4.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ehf4ong", "ehf6dhr" ], "score": [ 8, 3 ], "text": [ "It's not just mental, stress releases certain chemicals into the body that change how it behaves. Cortisol is probably the most important for health problems -- it suppresses the immune system, ramps up metabolism and generally makes your body more ready to run/fight and less receptive to repairing damage/fighting infection. It's not made to be consistently elevated in blood, but anxiety/depression tend to cause significant stress.", "Mental stress turns into physical stress. \n\nStress makes your organs run at full speed so you can have that extra edge to survive the threat to your life. Heart races, perception perks up, you're focusing on everything and nothing all at the same time. \n\nOverclocking your system like that will start damaging your organs, basically aging them prematurely. A little casual scaring here or there is fine because your body will heal the damage. But living in an constant state of stress means the damage starts to become permanent. \n\nThat's what makes [presidents age so quickly](_URL_0_), and those with anxiety disorders die so much faster. \n\nIt's nothing specific that gets you, but your entire system is running to the limit all day every day. Once one has an actual breakdown due to a more acute medical issue, your body can't give any more to make up for the damage and starts to break down. \n\nThink of it like working in an office where 100% of the day's widgets MUST be produced for the company to not die. If everyone's working a normal 8hr day, they can up the workload to 10hrs/day to cover someone that is out sick. \n\nBut if the entire office is already crunching 14hrs/day 7 days/week, there simply isn't any more to give. When Susan gets hit by a bus, they can't produce the day's widgets and start the death cycle unless repairs are made quickly. " ] }

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[ [], [ "https://www.google.com/search?q=president+before+and+after&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwippvLm2dzgAhVmc98KHSHdA0EQsAR6BAgEEAE&biw=1307&bih=806" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ff4oxub" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Probably dehydration caused by the fever.\n\nThe fever means your body's temperature is increased, your body starts sweating to protect itself from overheating, you thereby lose water. As you usually don't drink while asleep you thereby lost more water than usual resulting in dehydration." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cpz0kag", "cpz0sqj", "cpz1zh2", "cpz5a80", "cpz5xvl" ], "score": [ 11, 8, 3, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Minimum wage in the US is a little complicated. There's the federal minimum wage, which no state can go under, and then each state can set a higher minimum wage if they choose. So, while the minimum wage is only $7.25 per hour in Indiana, it's $9.47 in Washington State. Outside of the UK and Canada, I don't think there are a lot of places that have a much higher minimum wage.", "I wrote a paper on comparative politics that touched on this. I found that the US is a massive country with a large population. In order to get votes across such a large demographic you need money, a lot of it. This opens the door to corporate influence and I don't think many corporations would be in favor of increasing minimum wage.", "Look at the McDonald index for cost of living ", "Because freedom. If you want to work for pennies, you're free to do so.", "Because in terms of purchasing power, it's actually not lower and in most cases better." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbrsegc", "dbrsg56", "dbrt761" ], "score": [ 7, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Data rate. Each frame is just a still picture and takes up a certain amount of data. As the frame rate goes up you have to be able to transmit those frames, the higher the resolution the more data it takes per frame. \n\nSo you lower the resolution in order to be able to send each frame to something that is recording it.", "A cost hand-off, high speed isn't cheap. \n\nPhysical limitations, if you're achieving it by having 25 photoreceptors per pixel and using one of them each frame and going back to the first after 25 frames then you're using 25x more photoreceptors in the same camera than you're using at any one moment and can't fit any more in. ", "There is a limit to the speed with which the sensor chip can send out pixel data, and further limits on the data transmission lines, and on the memory system is being transmitted into. Whichever of these handles the fewest bits per second is the limiting factor." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cyn34s2" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "Time and space are not separate, they are a single thing called \"Spacetime\". Gravity doesn't suck stuff up, it actually creates a divot in spacetime that stuff falls into. So the bending of space caused by the gravity is actually bending time as well, because time and space are a single thing that make up the universe." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dngks1x", "dngkszz", "dngl4ep", "dngms1e", "dngtusy", "dngu0c4", "dnguo81", "dngurm2", "dngvmsx", "dngwxh3", "dngyke8", "dngyt1o", "dngyvp3", "dngz9qt", "dngzk4d", "dnh0q9x", "dnh0z1g", "dnh0zfl", "dnh1kzv", "dnh1ph3", "dnh2474", "dnh29uq", "dnh36t1", "dnh3jaw", "dnh3mpc", "dnh43m5", "dnh4oyz", "dnh4sde", "dnh6349", "dnh7cge", "dnh9su7", "dnhb5pa", "dnhbk9u", "dnhfttm", "dnhiw4x", "dnhkod3" ], "score": [ 2707, 15, 124, 609, 83, 22, 7, 34, 41, 73, 19, 2, 2, 2, 3, 10, 97, 69, 1559, 25, 10, 5, 3, 28, 3, 2, 45, 3, 2, 2, 14, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3 ], "text": [ "Linux is \"Open Source\". This means that you can easily access the raw code that the OS is built out of, and edit it as you see fit. If you have relevant skills as a programmer, you can change literally everything about the operating system.\n\nIf you compare that to something more commercial like Windows or Mac OS, you don't have those options. The operating system was compiled by the manufacturer and released as a finished product. You can't even see the code, and have no option to edit it. \n\nThink of it like cakes. Buy a Linux cake and you get the cake, and the ingredient list. At any point you can easily take that recipe, tweak it to your heart's content, and make another cake. Buy an MS or Apple cake, and you just get a finished cake. ", "Its completely open source. The source code to do whatever you want is out there and available to be modified by an end user should they want to do such a thing. If you have the source code, you can do whatever you want.", "Because a \"Linux\" system is composed of many individual software projects, and these have all developed to play nicely with each other. Every so often someone becomes fed up with one of those projects and decides to make their own. There's multiple desktop environments, windowing systems, software libraries, etc. etc. At some point, someone has made an alternative to just about every piece. The end result is that these \"pieces\" are generally well-contained, because they keep getting ripped out and replaced.\n\nSo while on a Windows system, where the graphical environment is strongly integrated with the whole, it's not easy to use a substitute, on a Linux system, where there have been many different graphical environments, it's much easier. The design has evolved over the years to be modular by the nature of how it was developed.", "For Windows and MacOS, one company built the entire thing as one integrated experience from the ground up. They could make everything integrated together.\n\nFor Linux and UNIX, one organization made a command-line OS. Then another built a base GUI system, X Windows. Then a third created a widget toolkit. A fourth created a desktop environment.\n\nAnd then someone else made a different kernel, which is the program that manages your hardware and determines what programs get time on your CPU and get memory and things like that, because the existing ones weren't open source so you had to pay AT & T a lot of money to alter the kernel to your needs, which we needed to do back then.\n\nAnd then someone else made copies of all the basic utilities you need to have a usable command line only OS because the existing ones weren't open source.\n\nAnd then several people created different widget toolkits because the existing ones were crud. And on top of that they built a few different desktop environments because they needed them and couldn't agree on the best way of doing things.\n\nThis created a lot of choice on how to set up your computer.\n\nSo now you've got a bunch of people who are pretty particular about how their computers should be set up, and they know their opinions differ from each other. But they don't want to duplicate tons of work by each maintaining effectively identical software that differs only by what color it is, or what key sequence saves a file, or which side of the window the close button is on. So they added theme support and rebindable keys and configuration options -- a lot more than Macs or Windows.\n\nAnd then the GNOME Desktop Environment decided that it should ruthlessly curate its configuration options, removing any that the core devs didn't find useful, and they found fewer useful with each release. Eh, it's a general trend that Linux stuff is configurable, not an iron law.", "Your account is new and only 3 posts on it. There are a lot of trolls going to /r/linux so maybe they thought you were one. Also, both threads gave you more or less accurate answers. ", "FYI, from what I've read online about similar communities, if you posted that Windows is a far superior operating system, the people over there would be more likely to (indirectly) answer your question than if you just asked.\n\n\nIt is a shame that you had the experience you had over there, but also not uncommon (unfortunately) from what I hear.\n\n\nWhile other people have already answered your question very well, I just wanted to add that because Linux is open source, there are many different flavors of Linux.\n\n\nSome of these different Linux versions are bare bones where you can customize what you like, and there are others that are somewhat already setup, and anything in-between. I believe there is one that mimics windows and possibly another that is similar to Mac OS (which I believe Mac OS is based off of the Linux kernel but is different enough that Apple can still make money from it).\n\n\nAll that being said, there are two, three or four main environments that Linux uses: KDE and Gnome and some others. These environments define what the user interface looks like and how to interact with it. This goes from creating keyboard shortcuts to installing applications.\n\n\nBut what really makes Linux truly customizable is that it's source code is available (it is open source). Which means anyone can make even more changes than I described earlier. And if these changes are contributed to the community and enough people like it, I suppose it can eventually be utilized in a future release of the OS and probably improved upon.\n\n\nIn fact, because of this, there are often branches of the different environment-types of Linux. This is how the multiple environments (KDE, Gnome, etc.) came about. Enough people liked each of them that instead of picking one environment, the communities kinda split up in that aspect.\n\n\nSorry for the wall of text and hopefully it is accurate. I'm still a bit of a noob when it comes to Linux but I am enjoying learning more about it. I would appreciate any correction to anything that is incorrect here, so _I_ may learn more about Linux.\n\n\nAlso, there are probably some good details on Wikipedia which, now that I mention it, I will probably go check that out again (it's been a few years since I read that page). Be fore-warned that, like anything else, that is a rabbit hole you might end up diving down when reading about this.\n\n\nGood luck!\n ", "Most OS is like buying a house. When many people have a house, they want to live there, not knock down walls, try a different wall, or make an interior wall a fish tank. Linux builds let you break, fix, and seek answers to problems that aren't quite so encouraged in other places. ", "Linux is Lego. Completely customizable. \n\nWindows is a concrete building you can decorate and put furniture into. ", " > I posted the same thing at r/Linux and they were so rude about it.\n\nSounds exactly like the Linux community. \n\nDisclaimer: am part of said community.\n\nBTW I use Arch.", "One thing I want to add that I haven't seen mentioned yet is that most settings in Linux are stored somewhere in plain text files. This means you can modify values for things that you wouldn't normally be able to on another OS, like mouse acceleration values or the colors used in your terminal window. Additionally, you can read from those settings with relative ease, something that isn't always easy on say windows. (Try to find the path to the image that is your desktop background.)\n\nAlso, check out /r/UnixPorn for some examples of people who go crazy with customization.", "Linux isn't even an operating system. It's just a kernel, upon which many operating systems known as Linux are built. Most of them use very similar software and incorporate different package managers or desktop environments. That's why it is so customizable, because Linux actually doesn't get you much, in the pedantic sense. You have to include all the other bits that most people consider to be operating systems.\n\nAndroid uses the Linux kernel, but that's about all it has in common with desktop Linux, for example.", "Most Linux distributions won’t prevent you from making questionable configuration choices, which in my experience is a double-edged sword. If you want your bootloader to be on a usb stick instead of an internal drive, it’ll let you do it, but it might not ask if you’re sure you want to do that or tell you the ramifications of doing so.\n\nAlso, a lot of Linux software can be configured by manually editing its configuration files; GUI configuration tends to limit you to the more sensible possibilities.", "Same reason a custom-built PC, or a tricked out car is more customizable.\n\nYou can edit, and rebuild the entire operating system to suit your needs, provided you have the skills.\n\nYou CAN'T do that with Windows, or OSX, since you don't have the underlying code that makes up either of those systems.", "Windows and MacOS is rather like a collection of playmobil(tm). Linux is more like a collection of Lego(tm).", "As others have said Linux is kernal (core of the OS). On top of that is a very modular design. Various people have built different moduals that go on top of the kernal them.\n\nNow in Windows you install different programs on top of the OS, but they all have to talk to the kernal and hardware through the OS.\n\nBut Linux based operating system can have the various parts of of the OS traded out as the user pleases, and many can be removed. (You still install programs as well, but basically the whole OS in smaller programs you can trade out)\n\nInstalling a Linux distro on low powered laptop? Pick a distro built for that or assemble your own (if you want to). More powerful desktop, install a Linux OS that has more features, but requires more power.\nCan't find what you want? Grab something like Arch Linux and install just what you want.\n\nYou can see this with how Android (A Linux based OS) changed from different phone manufacturer. The GUI aka the skin your phone runs changed from manufacturer to manufacturer. Google's Nexus and Pixel lines run what some refer to as \"stock Android\" while Samsung used their Touch wiz interface.\nBut these can be somewhat changed thanks to Linux's flexibility, allowing you install different launchers to changed you \"desktop\" on your phone. All thanks to Linux's flexibility.\n\nDown side to all this is Linux doesn't hold your hand like Windows, and worse Mac, does. With Linus you can completely wide your system accidentally with s few lines in the command prompt. \n\nIt's kinda like the difference between my 2014 truck and my friends 98 Wrangler. The Jeep you can drive around with no top, no doors, no window, etc and the vehicle doesn't care.\n\nIf I foget my seatbelt my truck won't shut up.\n\nTruck is Windows, Jeep is Linux. Linux says do what you want, just don't come whining to me if you bork your system.", "So I think to really answer this question, you have to understand what exactly computer programs are. \n\nI'm sure you're familiar with the term computer processor. On a physical level, a computer processor is composed of silicon with dopants such as phosphorous and nitrogen such that electrons and so electricity behave a certain in a well-defined fashion - the arrangement of dopants and silicon is called an electrical circuit. These circuits can do things like hold high voltage states and low voltage states, read high voltage and low voltage states and then produce other arrangements of voltage states. It doesn't have to always have to do with high and low voltage states, but much of our modern electronics involve high and low voltage states - this high and low and nothing in between is what \"digital\" refers to; as opposed to \"analog\", which is when all the states in between are also used. \n\nSo the processor holds a bunch of these electrical circuits in its silicon. Certain circuits can hold collections of high and low voltage states. If we think of high voltage as representing 1 and low voltage as representing 0, we can start seeing collections of high and low voltage states as base 2 - or binary - numbers. The term used to described the information contained by just one of these high / low voltage states is \"bit\". You may have heard of this in terms of \"32-bit operating system\" or \"64-bit operating system\". This means that the default size of information used by the operating system for certain operations are 32 of these states together, or 64 of these states together. \n\nA processor also has other circuits which can take these collections of high and low voltage states in one area of the processor and produce new high and low voltage states in the same or other areas of the processor. If we see the high and low voltage states as bits which represent numbers, these circuits perform functions such as adding together numbers or other arithmetic, as well as other operations such as reading the information contained in a certain area of the processor. The functions a processor can do is called an instruction set. \n\nThe processor keeps track of what instructions it can perform by having an associated number called an opcode. For example, I could say instruction #12 is adding this and that number, instruction number #55 is stopping an operation. At the most basic level, a computer program is a list of these instructions - this is called the machine code or machine language. Of course, when we think of a computer program it might be more like this:\n\n def hello_world():\n print(\"Hello world!\")\n\ninstead of something like this (note, opcodes are often represented in base 16 - or hexadecimal):\n\n B9 3A\n A8 FF\n DD 84\n\nThe program we saw at the top, with words we understand - that program gets turned into something like the machine language below through something called compilation. Compilation is done by a compiler, which is a computer program which can translate some human-readable input into the machine code which the computer can understand. This may seem like a chicken-or-the-egg problem - how was the first compiler written? The first compilers were written by humans in machine code. \n\nThe compiler is the basis of any programming language - such as Java or Go or Rust or Haskell or Swift or C or C++ or so on... Since a given processor might have a different instruction set from another processor, a compiler needs to be specific for a processor's architecture - so there's language-specific compilers for x86-64, or ARMv7, or MIPS, or PowerPC. A compiled machine language program for one processor architecture will almost certainly not work on another processor architecture. Also, when a program gets compiled a bunch of the human-readable information that helps a lot in understanding how the program works is lost. It is not easy to take a compiled program then \"reverse-compile\" it and try to understand what comes out. \n\nSo here's the thing - the compiler takes the human-readable code in whatever language and spits out machine language. After you get that machine language program for your specific processor architecture, do you need that human-readable code to run that program? The answer is no. \n\nThat compiled machine language program the only thing given in closed source products. Linux is open source - they make its human-readable code freely available for everybody to use. That means that if you want, you can take the Linux code and modify it then recompile it and get your own personal version of Linux. Meanwhile, for closed source software like Windows and Mac OS, you aren't going to get the source code and so making modifications are pretty much impossible or at least involves dealing with cryptic code derived from machine language that's extremely difficult to read and may only be relevant and true for whatever processor architecture you have. Meanwhile, the modifications you make to Linux can be shared with people with other processor architectures by recompiling the changes you made using compilers for different instruction sets. \n", "You might want to work on your delivery. from /r/linux/\n\n\n*I literally asked the question above and got shit on for no reason. That tends to make a person more hostile towards those who are rude.* --Jkrollinup\n\n*Go fuck yourself* --Jkrollinup\n\n*Yes dipshit. It's a project for my computer class where each group gets a major operating system and argues why it's better. Go fuck yourself* -- Jkrollinup\n\n", "I just checked your post history. You ignore that most people there gave you good answers. Yet you crap on the whole subreddit because of a couple people that didn't. And judging by your follow-up thread, YOU are more rude than anybody on /r/linux. ", "I'll approach this from a different standpoint,\n\nI personally tell people frequently that I bled and sweat and cried my way into Linux. It wasn't an easy thing at first, I started around 2008 with Mandriva Linux, which I borked repeatedly due to inexperience and computer inexperience. I gave up, and returned a year later with Ubuntu linux, of which I use regularly.\n\nIt wasn't easy, I was used to being catered to by 90% of the world I knew running on windows, so finding help for Linux was harder. It didn't help that I didn't know how to search for help for linux for quite sometime either.\n\nNo Linux is not my main machine at home, but it is at work, so I get a good 50/50 out of it. (Windows at Home for games, Linux for IT work at work.)\n\nLinux is Open Source, as many here have pointed out, and it's very customizable. If you know the right code, and have the right skills, you can change it to your liking, in any way. As long as you follow the Open Source license and release the changes. (This is generally easy, as if you contribute to any open source project your changes will generally be very open to view, I'm looking at you Github.)\n\nBut onto the meat of it, Why does open source mean better for us? Me and you? Because it means that while I can edit this code, Everyone else can too. This means that even if I never do, I can use the internet to find a great deal of many people who *have*.\n\nSay, that I don't like how my desktop is laid out. (I don't like where my start button is, or I like how a Mac laptop is laid out.) I can go online find the appropriate command, and download and change it. It may take a little time to download and install, but the options are available. I can choose between quite a few: KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment, Unity, Mate, LXDE, just to name a few!\n\nThis goes for Software too. Because the internals of the Linux Family of Operating Systems are open, we get choices on almost every level, far beyond the ones that Windows gives. This is something some people love to an extreme degree, and naturally have strong opinions on the matter. \n\nLets list some examples:\n\n* My Task bar is too big, because I have a tiny laptop with a tiny screen, with linux you can look up how to make your task bar as small as you'd like, and still hold your icons. Maybe you don't want a taskbar at all, and want a Mac-like dock? Linux lets you do this.\n\n* My computer is running very very slow, windows just takes too much for it to run, I can find a version of Linux that requires much less power and will run and make my computer act brand new.\n\n* I want my computer for a very specific use: I only want it to run google chrome, nothing else ever. You can set up a computer with Linux to do just this one task, and nothing else.\n\n* I want to make [Google Deep Style images at home](_URL_1_) I did this one personally and I love it, I crank them out on one of my servers at home, and it's a fun gift to give to people from time to time who've never seen it. This one is harder though, so I'd recommend a newbie keep clear of it for a little while at least.\n\nIn my line of work, I often tell people to simply get something that you will enjoy working with. If it's a Mac, a Windows machine, or a flavor of Linux. Do what you need to be productive on your machine, but keep an open mind and try other things. You never know what you will find on another piece of Software, or Operating System that may blow your mind and change everything about how you produce whatever it is on your computer.\n\nI find myself working fairly well on any of the big three. I've poked around with BSD and may in the future make it a work machine so I can learn it more forcefully.\n\nThe last thing I can offer is this: If you are curious to learn Linux, I'll tell you the biggest three things I learned that helped me get familiar with it:\n\n1. Dive in, and don't be scared of problems. Use google to find solutions and begin to learn how things operate. In time you will find yourself getting more and more familiar with it. This is much like learning Windows for the first time, not a lot will make sense, but as you notice patterns, you will begin to understand how this works. View it as an adventure, and do a little reading before hand so you know where to start.\n\n2. Find an aspect of the OS you enjoy and play with it! I learned to love the Command line, customizing how it looks, and having it do things I used to use a mouse to do or my love of SSH which lets you control computers across your network at home, or even across the internet. Maybe yours is Games? Or perhaps it's seeing what kind of different software you can try? I learned about my favorite Linux Software [youtube-dl](_URL_0_) via [youtube-dl-gui](_URL_2_) which is a program that makes it easy to use and downloads any music you like from Soundcloud, Youtube, and many other places. It was a god-send for my music collection when I found out that youtube-dl works on sites that aren't youtube. It will even let you download just the audio from videos, so you can collect music. I do know that it's available on Windows, but I learned about it because of Linux.\n\n3. Vocabulary! Be sure to ask people about linux functions and see if they have a name you can search for. I wanted to run programs on each of my processors at once. I had no idea what this was called until I asked on the Ubuntu forums and I was told I was looking for something called Parallelization. This then let me google more effectively. This is 60% of the battle. The rest is all implementation.\n\nAnd three warnings:\n\n1. People who google are people who get answers, also take a look through /r/unixporn and subs that focus on Unix/Linux specifics like Unix coding, or linux command lines, or subs dedicated to specific distros. The Forums dedicated to specific distros, like the legendary Ubuntu forums also will offer help for even the smallest questions. Feel free to ask, and search through them, usually people have had the EXACT same problem you've had, you just have to find how they fixed it. I forced myself to use linux exclusively, it took two months and before I knew it, I wasn't thinking about how much trouble this was, I was just browsing the internet and playing games I knew could run on Linux. (And doing my IT work at home.)\n\n2. If you have an older wireless card (USB, onboard, etc.) or certain video cards, be prepared for the possibility of incompatibility or some stretching to get them functioning. Looking them up using google before you install will save heartaches. Of course you may luck out and they may just work without any sort of tinkering.\n\n3. If the distro you like offers it, RUN THE LIVE CD, which means simply that you are running Linux off the CD, or USB drive and taking it for a test drive. It is the full version of the Operating system, but temporarily, this allows you to figure out a lot of the worst problems before you make the jump.\n\nI work a lot with people who have never used a computer before, and fixing computers for people who only have used them lightly. Feel free to send questions my way if you are genuinely interested in learning Linux, I'll offer what help I can, and point out sites that I used to learn it.", " > I posted the same thing at r/Linux and they were so rude about it.\n\nHAHAH. That's par for the course.\n\nHey, I'm a life long Linux user, developer, and fan. *However,* the Linux community is full of huge assholes who discourage newcomers just trying to learn the system. It's been like this for a long time.\n\nI'll give a legitimate answer to avoid getting deleted.\n\nLinux is highly modular. It supports loading modules at runtime. It wasn't always like this, however it was still modular at the source code level. Think of a runtime module as a DLL on windows, but assume the DLL's follow a consistent interface (like COM objects.)\n\nThe reason Linux is very modular is because it was forced to be. Linux developers work remotely from around the world in different timezones. Therefore, there was a strong need to separate the operating system functionality into modules so that developers could work on different parts of the OS without interferring with each other or creating dependencies upon each other.\n\nWindows had a different development situation. Most of their kernel developers were housed in the same building so they could interact in the real world in order to communicate and synchronize their work.", "#I think it matters *who* you ask that question to.\n\nImagine you have a regular guy, a chef, and a master chef. \n \nLets say all 3 are told to make a cake. \n \nA regular guy may go to the Internet, get a recipe or suggestion for a cake he can make, and just go with it. Sure, he can put icing on it and choose what cake he wants. \n \nA chef may have experience with cakes and choose the best cake mix and ingredients to his knowledge. He makes a better cake than the regular guy cause he has experience, knowledge, and some skill. \n \nA master chef will not only know about cakes, but about base ingredients, oven capabilities, has sources to get the best stuff from and tools to outperform good chefs. \n \nA lot of Linux users tend to be chefs. Some are Master Chefs. \n \n#Knowing how to read, write, edit, and apply source code is a high end to master chef level of computer usage. \n \nA lot of people have been posting that Linux is \"open source\" and that every piece of it can be scrutinized and reviewed. That's like a regular guy inspecting every chicken that laid an egg for the cake, the health of the wheat grown for flour, the quality of the sugar that goes into the cake, the strength for the vanilla extract, etc. It's impossible for the layman to inspect everything on such a small level. We entrust people who specialize in certain fields to test and review each ingredient instead. \n \n#Linux is only superior to people who have the ability to manipulate it on a skillful level. Otherwise, it's pretty much like Windows, Mac, Andriod, or 3rd party proprietary on a simple level. \n \nHonestly, I wouldn't worry about people gloating that Linux is so and so. There is a sharp learning curve and a horrible level of accessibility for 3rd party products for it. Most people brag about Linux doing 1 or 2 things well like serving data. No one brags about Linux's odd lack of support for off the shelf products or it's obscure methods of management. ", "First off, I'm sorry people over at /r/Linux were rude.\n\n\nPretend you'd like to change a meal you eat every day.\n\nMicrosoft and Apple don't share their recipes, they want to keep it secret, and you have to buy the meal as is without knowing how its made from the store pre-packaged and you just have to eat it the way it is.\n\nLinux comes along and not only shows you the entire recipe, how its made, but gives it away for free, with so many options its a bit annoying.\n\nThat's the simplest explanation I can think of.", "Easiest way to explain the concept is to ask:\n\nWhy is making your own food more customisable than buying ready-made from the store?\n\nThe answer is of course because when you can get your hands on the ingredients you have more control, and thus can change anything you like. Note that this might not necessarily make things better, will take more effort and you might not understand or want to understand what you are doing, but you have that control.\n\nLinux 'distros' are a bit like those companies that sell you a recipe and all the ingredients to make it with instructions. They have already done some of the work and come up with a good recipe and you can use that as a starting point, but you could still change things if you wanted and knew how.\n\nNow the real question is how important is this to you.", "I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.\nMany computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use.\nLinux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.", "To do a ELI5 explanation:\n\nImagine you want to buy a car. You can go to a dealer, and buy a well tuned car which was built and tested in a factory by the manufacturer. That would be your Window or Mac OS.\n\nNow, there's another possibility. You can go on internet and download the blueprints for a car. You have the choice to put an engine and customize it for speed, or for less noise. Then you have the option to put on top different gear boxes. Then you can choose what frame you want. And what kind of buttons to have on your steering wheel. Depending on what you want, you can end up with a race rocket or an off-road monster BUT, ... you have to do the work. \n\nIn the end, Linux was thought more like a blueprint, while Mac/Windows is sold like a finished product.", "A big deal to me is the amount of choice you have. There's literally hundreds of distributions out there. I mostly stick to the more popular (Ubuntu, sometimes Mint) but if Ubuntu ever were to make a strange turn I don't like, I can switch to another distro literally in minutes. \n\nNow take for example Windows. I wouldn't want to be running Windows 7 because it's pretty outdated by now. But I wouldn't want to run Windows 10 because of the mandatory privacy infringements built in. There's really no choice there. ", "OP, while you did get your answers, people weren't being rude to you at /r/Linux. You got all of your answers from them, yet two morons who commented bothered you. Infact people disagreed with them and agreed with you. Then you went ahead and called the community toxic and got disagreed with.\n\n\nYou're attacking an entire subreddit over 2 redditors. That's not okay.\n\nedit: a word.", "Let's pretend you're buying a new car.\n\nFirst you go at the typical Microsoft car store. Their Windows model is popular; the car it has nice leather seats but a trashy wheel. When you ask the vendor if you can replace the wheel, he says \"no... our product is sold and used as a single piece. You won't find another suitable wheel anyway.\"\n\nThe fancy Apple car store sells OS X models. They're flashy, but same deal as above: you aren't supposed to replace parts you dislike. \n\nThen you go to the bazaar where the Linux and BSD crowd sells cars. There are a thousand vendors, each yelling \"CHECK OUR CARS, MADE FROM THE FINEST PARTS!\": Canonical with their Ubuntu, Red Hat with their CentOS, the Debian Foundation... there's even a guy selling \"how to build your own car from scratch\" manuals!\n\nBut when you check the cars, some models have some identical parts, and some different parts. It looks like there are two motor in all models (with Torvald's motor being the most popular), three different starters, five or six different bodyworks, ten different window models... all of those in almost infinite combinations. Heck, there's even a guy who decided to sell cars with pink rocket launchers! \n\n(There are also the ones who copied the model from someone else and did a paintjob.)\n\nWhen you ask one of the vendors on why this happens, he says: \"it's normal here. We rarely make the parts, we buy them elsewhere. Each vendor picks the ones they like the most, depending on what the car is supposed to do, then assemble the model at home and produce the cars we sell. And of course, if you dislike some part of my model, you can replace them at home, I'll give you a list of part sellers.\"\n\n________________\n\n*This* is the reason Linux is more customizable than most other systems. They're made as single pieces, while Linux is actually a bunch of spare programs made to be used together - and made to be *replaced* if that's what you want. The *Linux distributions* (Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Suse...) you see out there are like those car models on the bazaar - pre-made with certain programs instead of others, but nothing prevents you from picking new programs and switching them.\n\nFor all intents and purposes, you can replace anything in a Linux distribution with an alternative. Not just your browser or office suite; you can do it with the initialization (the \"starter\"), the desktop environment (the \"bodywork\")... you can even take Linux (the \"motor\" = kernel) out of a Linux distribution, replace it with something else and get an usable system, if that's what you want!\n\nAnd if starting from a distribution like this feels like insufficient, you can also start from scratch. Grab a Linux from Scratch manual and literally build the system from some programs you download. ", "I'll try to explain in a non-technical way, which is what I think would have gotten me into Linux sooner if someone said it to me when I wasn't using Linux yet.\n\n- You have multiple options for desktops; which means that you can simply log out and log back into another desktop environment and you will have a completely different theme, different layout, different icons, and sometimes even different programs. \n\n- You can apply system-wide themes and icons in a few clicks. That includes fonts, titlebars, etc.\n\n- There are so many alternative software that do the same thing different. If you don't like the text editor or the file manager, you can simply install a different one by going to the software store/center and clicking \"install\" on a different one. \n\n- You can customize your desktop down to the last detail to make it suit your needs by installing addons and extensions or removing components. \n\n- The lower level of the system is open source and exposed (not security-wise, but configuration wise), so you can even change the login screen, the boot splash, and the boot theme. You can also configure hardware different by editing config files which is not really all that hard to do. \n\n- Linux caters to power users more. You can easily schedule your system to do things automatically like change the themes at 6 am and 6 pm so you can have a day and night theme or you can create a barebone desktop environment from slapping together different components and creating a boot script.\n\n- More advanced users can tweak the way window managers and drivers work to get an optimized performance and squeeze as much as they could from their hardware. By default, software is optimized for 'most' cases but it can be optimized further for specific cases. \n\nTL;DR Linux is about choice and you have so much to choose from that it's difficult _not_ to tweak your desktop to behave and look the way you expect it to. ", "Mac OS is like driving a car with an automatic transmission.\n\nWindows is like driving a stick shift.\n\nLinux is like driving a car that you've built yourself and aren't quite done with.", "I followed the debacle from r/linux and basically asking a question there is against the rules( there are /r/linuxquestions and /r/linux4noobs for that). It's clearly stated on the sidebar. Additionally since linux marketshare has started going up we get a lot of trolls leaking from apple and microsoft subs so the situtation is a big tense. So I'll try to answer your question here.\n\n\nLinux on it's own is not an operating system. Linux is a vital part of it(the kernel) and possibly the hardest to create from scrath, but it's not enough on it's own. The kernel takes care of speaking directly to the hardware. It includes things like thread scheduler( the part that decides which application or daemon will get cpu time and when), I/O scheduler( organizing writes and reads from the hard drive), all hardware drivers and so on. You get the idea, very low level stuff. So when you say \"I use linux\" (as a desktop OS), in reality you are using linux as the kernel, plus a ton of libraries and applications on top( consisting the userland, usually the GNU userland). The result is a full operating system. An end user rarelly interfaces directly with the kernel unless it is for something technical.\n\nThe main driving factor behind the customizability of linux is the fact that it's open source. Open source does not mean that someone makes some code and throws it in the wind, but rather uses a lincese that follows the code around. Linux( the kernel) uses [gplv2](_URL_2_), while everything else in the system uses a combination of gplv2, [gplv3](_URL_1_), or permissive like [bsd](_URL_0_). You can read more about them, because open source has played a huge role in shaping the modern IT world and it's adoption is only expected to increase. \n\nAnyway what every single one of these licenses allows is for a user to take the source code, modify it and redistribute the modified version. This has resulted in companies and people all around the world creating and sharing software that solves all kinds of problems. This ranges from alternative schedulers in the kernel( e.g. Facebook created the BFQ scheduler for their servers and due to the fact that the kernel uses gplv2 they released it to the public), to different algorithms for thread scheduling. The result are 20 years of libre software that ranges from 20 or more different desktop environments( the graphical part of the OS with all the buttons, window management, and a software suite), multiple applications that do the same thing( e.g. nautilus, thunar, pcmanfm, midnight commander, vifm for file managers, a muriad of music applications etc). Aditionally let's say I want an application to look or behave in a specific way, but there is none that is exactly how I want it. In that case I would either make a new one( usually a lot of wasted effort), or I would take the one that is closest to how I want it, modify it to add an option to do what I want it to do and push the patch upstream( to the app maintainers). Now every user of that application will get that new option. So not only we have a lot of e.g. desktops to chose from, but we also have a ton of options on each one of them. This has resulted to the creation of modular applications that users can tweak with addons and extensions to their needs.\n\nThis extends down to the more technical part of the OS, for example you can chose different file systems instead of only NTFS for windows or AFS for apple stuff depending on what you are trying to do. You can use ext4 for a stable desktop or try something more advanced like btrfs if you have a system with multiple hard drives and you care alot about data rot. Or different file system if you are running an SSD, specifically designed for SSDs instead of retrofited like NTFS( it's from Samsung, I can't recall the name). You can switch I/O schedulers depending on your workload and the type of the hard drive, you can enable/disable kconfig switches on hardware drivers and so on. \n\n\nAt some point early on this entire ecosystem became too big to be managed by each person, so distributions were created. Each one of them is supposed to cater to a different audience with different use cases. Some of them like Debian go back to the 90s. Debian for example is aimed at users who need extreme stability and are willing to sacrifice newer versions of applications or the kernel (i.e. hardware compatibility) in exchange. It's aiming at being the universal OS, that can run on any architecture people want it to run( from x86-64 to armv7, aarch64, spark, power8/9 riscv, you name it). Ubuntu takes from Debian and tries to make it more user-friendly and ready to use out of the box with minimal tweaking. It's aimed at engineers and business users, and to some extend to the mainstream public that is not afraid to open a terminal once in a while. Linux Mint takes the Ubuntu base and narrows it down to the average Joe, making sure that everything works with a nice coherent UI and no need for a terminal. Arch Linux on the other hand is a DIY distribution that allows you to select a decent amount of the parts consisting your system on your own. It's a rolling release distro meaning it doesn't have releases, but software is updated as soon as a new version rolls out upstream. Gentoo follows the same idea but to a greater extend allowing more control but at the same time you have to compile the software yourself. Fedora lies somewhere in the middle with a stable base(desktop environment, compiler and C library version) rolling applications, while it rebases every time a new kernel is released. There are plenty of distros covering every niche of the userbase, some more professional, some more community oriented. \n\n\nOf course with power comes great responsibility. You do not have to tweak every single option in the system, but if you do start tweaking you have to get ready to bork it multiple times. The choice is yours. For this reason one can chose e.g. Linux Mint to just get shit done^TM or something more advanced. There is an option for everyone.", "Think cake. \nmmm cake.\nNow, Windows is like a store-bought cake, the whole cake, you can't really buy one slice and you don't really need 9/10s of it but it's convenient to have it if someone comes to visit. But it comes with gluten, and peanuts and hydrogenated plant oils and artificial sweeteners to offset that heavy, nausea inducing decorative layer of teeth rotting sugar paste on top. (Oh and it likes to use your network connection to call back to the store about the times you eat the cake too :p)\n\nNow Linux, Linux is that lie you tell yourself about learning to bake and making a perfect cake for yourself or your SO, friends and family. Face it, you're never going to do it but there's a whole industry built around you not doing it but being able to. In practice it's the home-made cake that someone baked for you but you tell yourself you know exactly where all the materials came from and that they are gluten/drm/capitalism/cruelty free. And you can maybe decorate the cake yourself or ruin it by digging around trying to hunt down all the almonds and replace them with hazelnuts then throwing a tantrum after the pieces won't come back together.\n", "Sorry for the poor reception. Many of the Linux peeps forget that we all started on equal footing. Don't let the snobs tarnish the entire community. \n\nLinux is a great OS and if you have the time and desire it can be exactly what you want!", "Not sure if it is mentioned yet, but most Linux distros (all the common ones), provide a package manager that makes it extremely easy to install software. Think of it like an app store, but everything is free.\n\nWant Firefox? Run \"apt-get firefox\" on the command line. Package manager repositories have thousands of things you can install.\n\nYou can also update all of the software installed on your computer by running \"apt-get upgrade\".\n\nThere are GUI's that run on top of package managers for people who don't like the command line.", "I don't know who was more rude, you or the known neckbeard troglodytes at /r/linux, and I don't care. Your question is now here.\n\nI'll use anecdotal experience to explain my answer. I currently use a desktop environment called XFCE, and it is heavily customized. How did I get here?\n\nI first started using Linux with a desktop environment--DE from here on--called GNOME 2, the default in Ubuntu Hardy Heron. What I immediately liked about the desktop experience was its cohesion in terms of both UX and UI. Everything followed a community-agreed standard, so everything meshed together. If you wanted to change one facet of your desktop environment, everything else would fall in line. Window control themes, icon themes, fonts, stuff like that. Here's another thing I liked that I'll never take for granted again: apps are sorted into *categories*, by *default*!\n\nI started to dislike GNOME 2's sluggishness and some of its rigidness and undefinability in terms of its customization. All of its apps depended on each other and their own components, and there were a lot of them, they were all fairly heavy. So I switched to a different DE called XFCE. I really loved XFCE from the get go. Same customization, but more of it. The entire desktop is modular, so you can switch out pieces of it for other pieces, or drop them out entirely. They don't depend on each other, and each individual piece is light with few light dependencies.\n\nI wanted my desktop to have really snazzy visual effects, so for a while I switched the default window manager out with one called compiz, which gave me a lot of fancy animations. I eventually went back to the default window manager with something called an external compositor, which allowed customizable translucency and minimalist animations.\n\nI ended up using a netbook for a period of time, and the default experience was sub-optimal, but I set things up so that every application was always maximized, the window frame was hidden, and the window name and buttons were in the panel. I also used an in-panel dock to save more space. I achieved this by running an XFCE panel plugin that lets you run GNOME 2 panel applets, and used DockbarX and Namebar. I got tired of the dependencies that pulled, so I ported Namebar raw to XFCE panel, and made a stupid hack to shove DBX into the panel.\n\nI got tired of the fact that everything in the DE tries to start up at the same time, and you can't make things go one after another, so I made a script to do that by watching for internet connectivity as well as the appearance of certain files, processes, and window classes, and changed all my startup items to use it.\n\nI play a lot of games, and gaming used to be not so nice on DEs, doing nasty things like changing resolution and moving stuff around, so I made a script to run all my games in something called an X server--specifically, a separate one than the one that runs my DE. This also gave me alt-tab functionality in games that didn't allow it.\n\nAny controller works on my computer, and is exposed to userspace as a 360 controller, no matter what it actually is. All my games are automatically recorded. I have full control over dualshock 4 light bars. All my important files and settings are synced in real-time between all my computers. I even have a separate user with an encrypted home directory for when I need to do things more privately than Firefox's private mode, and keep persistent storage for it.\n\nI could keep going on all the little things I did to make my desktop work exactly the way I like it if I wanted to, but we'd be here forever. Windows would not let me do even 10% of what I've been able to do with Linux, and that is why I use Linux.", "Since your question has already been aptly answered by /u/JaceTheSaltSculptor I'll just take a moment to apologise on behalf of the Linux community for the bad experience you had at /r/linux. I've been running Linux as my daily operating system both at home and at work for a few years now and naturally still find myself asking stupid questions in forums like /r/linux. One of the cornerstones of Linux's massive success is the active collaboration among all of its contributors and the fact that someone shows interest in it and is treated disrespectfully is very damaging to our community.\n\nUnfortunately, as with everything in life, there are jerks everywhere, and Linux is no exception. For anyone who's not particularly tech savvy, Linux as an ecosystem is already pretty hostile as it is, so if you have to factor in people's sarcastic replies when asking for help, it's only normal people decide it's not worth their time. Even though the general sentiment of the Linux community towards newcomers is not bad, when someone new to Linux is received with negativity, they have yet another reason to think Linux is hard, painful and only ever used by a bunch of insecure, elitist neckbeards.\n\nPlease don't let that experience drive you into thinking the whole Linux community is that way, because it definitely isn't." ] }

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[ [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [ "https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/", "http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-neural-paintings-deepstyle-ubuntu/", "https://mrs0m30n3.github.io/youtube-dl-gui/" ], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses", "https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html", "https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html" ], [], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cjpzo39", "cjq0py8" ], "score": [ 4, 3 ], "text": [ "Better penetration of structures, lower power requirements, smaller antennae, and higher data rates.\n\nIn addition, the electromagnetic spectrum is extremely crowded and frequencies are assigned to specific services. Check out the chart linked. You can't just go around using whatever frequency you want.\n\n_URL_0_", "In order to use a frequency, in the US, you either need a license (some of which can be very expensive) or to use the special frequencies that are open to use (with restrictions on power). Operating an unlicensed radio station is pretty easy to triangulate and the FCC is very good at it. " ] }

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[ [ "http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_management" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "f4rzrar", "f4s1f85", "f4s26oq" ], "score": [ 7, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Energy leaves our planet in the form of infrared light that radiates out, through the atmosphere, into space.", "The Earth is not an isolated or closed system, it's part of the larger system that is the universe\n\nThe first law of thermodynamics really only works for isolated systems", "I think a lot of your misunderstanding comes from another simple mistake you've made; the Earth is not further away from the sun in winter. This is a common misconception, however isn't true at all. The different hemispheres are tilted towards and away from the sun as the year progresses, however the sun remains at relatively the same distance.\n\nWhen the pole is tilted away from the sun (the winter months for that hemisphere), it receives less direct sunlight, with more \"glancing off\" of the atmosphere. (This is a ***DRASTIC*** oversimplification, however serves the purpose for explanation), and during the summer months, it receives more direct sunlight (closer to 90 degree angle) and so less is lost." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ehvoi1q", "ehw6l28", "ehwbaha" ], "score": [ 24, 7, 3 ], "text": [ "The “black box” isnt a single system, its made up of separate recording devices through the aircraft.\n\nIt doesnt record EVERYTHING, only the Time, Engine specifics and altitude, the other records cockpit voice and conversations.\n\nThe data recording systems on aircraft flights saves burst data, meaning it only starts actively storing information on systems during burst periods of input, as soon as altitude. Flight pattern. Engine function or flap position starts changing quickly, like a problem has occurred, it begins capturing the movement and data.\n\nIt doesnt record every aspect of the flight or its systems. Only those that are changed via pilot manual input basically.\n\n\nIts like trying to take a 30 second movie trailer and building the entire movie from it.\n\nEdit: spelling ", "So much bad info in here. On commercial planes, there's 2 'black boxes' (actually painted orange, not black, but the name stuck): the Flight Data Recorder (FDR), and the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR). Optionally there's a 3rd device, the Quick Access Recorder (QAR) but this is not always used. \n\nThese recorders are constant recording devices, recording up to thousands of data points. On the CVR, there are multiple high resolution audio channels in the cockpit, including each flight position and general cockpit noise. On the FDR, things are also tracking aspects of the flight, engines, attitude, etc. \n\nWhy can it take so long to read out? Because they are recovering vital data after a massive impact that usually shreds the plan to bits. The boxes have to be found first (e.g. for the recent Amazon flight, they were buried in mud, but they could also be deep in the ocean, or in supper-difficult terrain to access). Once found, they have to be very carefully preserved and shipped to properly equipped research labs (only a handful in the world). When the devices are relatively unharmed, and assuming modern solid-state digital recordings (versus the ancient tape recordings), they are usually downloaded, read, and validated within a couple of days or arrival at the lab. But then they have suffered a massive impact (e.g. over the defined 3400G limit, or 1100C fire for 30 mins), then the lab experts often have to extract individual data chips and then reconstruct data by very low-level recovery techniques.\n\nWhen you put it all together, these guys do an awesome job, and the lessons learned from the last minutes of a stricken flight make the skies safer for all of us. ", "If they find the black box in tact they can get the data pretty fast. But interpreting it isn't that easy. There isn't enough data to build a complete simulation of what happened. And even if there were it wouldn't really be cost effective to develop a simulator program to reliably make sense of it. Easier to just parse it and reconstruct what happened manually.\n\nThere are other systems aside from black box that they recover data from. They aren't necessarily water/damage proof. I work for a company that makes engine control units. If the unit is in tact we can pull the data off of it with our normal engine maintenance software easily.\n\nBut in the past they've brought water logged ECUs to us, and we've had to spend weeks recovering the data from them. We have to pull off the memory chips then come up with some hardware/software to be able to recover the data from them. We don't have this equipment laying around because it happens so seldom.\n\nOn top of that, even if you can get all the data immediately and it seems obvious what went wrong you're still going to want to finish your investigation and account for all factors. Does the physical damage agree with the aircraft data? If the problem was an engine failure, were there other factors that led to that engine failure? You're going to want to have all the answers before you start publicizing your findings." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "eixvkoq", "eiz3kdl" ], "score": [ 6, 2 ], "text": [ "Freckles are actually over active melanocytes (cells responsible for melanin production.) when you tan you are also increasing the amount of melanin you have as a whole , while freckles do not do that. The reason freckles can appear on either unexposed or exposed skin is because it is less dependent on the sun. Sometimes melanocytes just go into overdrive producing melanin.\n\nEdit: I was wrong about tanning increasing the amount of melanocytes ", "Whether you tan or freckle is determined by genes. Some people have the freckle gene and will freckle. \n\nYou have melanocytes everywhere so you’ll develop color everywhere, which is why people freckle in areas not exposed to the sun and why people who have naturally darker skin won’t be ghostly white in areas not exposed to the sun. Sun exposure makes you darker or makes you freckle *more*. But you’ll still have a baseline of freckles and melanin in places where the sun don’t shine," ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c3xk1mo" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "It was essentially to secure more power for himself and destroy anti-Mao sentiments. It was also an attempt to unify the country after a couple of failed nation building campaigns (Great Leap Forward being one of the bigger failures). He stated that capitalists were becoming more powerful, and could turn China away from communism. So he instituted many policies that would denounce capitalism, intellectuals, traditionalist, or really, any person that falls under the broad category of possibly forming a coup against him.\n\nIn the end, the Cultural Revolution was yet another failure. The country was set back yet again, many academic texts were lost, many people died (particularly party members that were alleged to be \"counter-revolutionary\" and students that were sent out of the city to \"further the cause\"), and lack of social, economic and political progress." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ejvx8bx", "ejvxezg", "ejvxo8t", "ejvxrna", "ejvxxfk", "ejwedie" ], "score": [ 7, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Refresh rate - how often the screen itself is refreshed. It is completely independent of frames per second since you still have refreshes even with a static image.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFPS - How many frames per second of a moving picture are displayed.", "If you have a TV or monitor it could refresh at say 60hz so 60 times a second it refreshes the image with whatever the source tells it too, PC, DVD or Blu-ray etc.\n\nFrames per second is how many different images are being sent to the monitor or TV every second.\n\nThe two do not have to be the same so in the example of a TV refreshing 60hz the source may only send 30FPS to the TV. This causes the same frame to be refreshed twice.\n\nMostly things sync up so the TV may change and refresh 30 times a second. If it's a computer monitor they tend to match the output from the GFX source.", "Refresh Rate is how fast the individual little cells that make up your screen can refresh, or flicker at. Refresh rate is the maximum rate at which your screen could keep up with a graphics card output.\n\nComputer or console graphics cards are designed to calculate and shove pixesl into what's known as a frame buffer. The graphics card gets texture data, model geometry, lighting, viewpoint info (i.e. what you're looking at), movement etc. from the CPU, RAM etc. and can calculate - for each pixel in the frame buffer - what colour and brightness it should be based on everything going on in the screen view. Depending on how fancy your graphics are set to, how much is going on in your game etc. will impact how fast the graphics card can update this frame buffer. Once a frame is completed, the GPU flicks a switch and tells the HDMI port to send this to your monitor. If there's too much going on in your game, your GPU is only updating the frame buffer maybe 20 or 30 times per second. \n\nSo that means if your monitor is running at 72 Hz, it will display the same frame for 2-3 updates - i.e. until the next frame is ready from the GPU. This results in only a 20-30Hz screen update. More frames per second is smoother, more lifelike. Some monitors may be able to interpolate or \"smooth\" between successive frames to make it look better. \n\nObviously if you have a really good (or multiple) GPU and you're getting 100+ fps, but only have a 60 Hz monitor, you're not getting full potential out of your rig. If thats the case, you should crank up the graphics quality of your game, why not?", "Hertz (Hz) is a unit that means that something is happening a specific amount of times per second, so technically *x* FPS and *x* Hz are the same thing.\n\nHowever, FPS typically refers to the number of frames that an application can process per second, whereas refresh rate is the number of frames that the monitor is capable of displaying per second. They don't always match, and most monitors still operate at a fixed refresh rate. \n\nIf a monitor has a refresh rate of 60 Hz, it means that the monitor will always update the image it displays 60 times per second, regardless of whether the application can keep up or is in fact faster. If an application is too slow to compute the next frame, the monitor will simply show the same image during the next refresh cycle. If the application is too fast, then the monitor will not be able to present every frame and some computed frames will be lost.", "The frame rate is the rate at which the graphics card can render an image, and the refresh rate is how often the screen can actually change the image. So if you have a frame rate of 120 and a refresh rate of 60, the screen will only show every second image it rendered to the screen. The other way round, if you have a refresh rate of 60 Hz and just 30 fps, the screen will repeat every image once. And if your frame rate is somewhere inbetween, say 45 fps and 60 Hz, your screen will occasionally show a half finished image, an effect known as [tearing](_URL_0_). Which is why it makes sense to enable V-Sync if you can't reliably reach 60 fps with a 60 Hz screen, which synchronizes the graphics card with the refresh rate of the screen so this doesn't happen. So instead of dropping from 60 to 45 Hz, it'll go down to 30 Hz if the scene on the screen is too demanding.", "FPS is the number of frames that your CPU/GPU is calculating per second. Refresh rate is how fast your monitor is refreshing per second.\n\nNow you may think that FPS higher than your refresh frame is useless but the thing is that higher FPS will still reduce your input lag. So even if you have a 60 HZ monitor, you will still notice a huge difference between playing on 60 fps and 200 fps.\n\nV-sync will cut your frames to the monitor refresh rate; I suggest turning that off." ] }

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[ [], [], [], [], [ "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/03/Tearing_%28simulated%29.jpg/1280px-Tearing_%28simulated%29.jpg" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cp1alfc" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Facebook gives you the option to use your email address book to look for people you know. If someone who has your email used this option, Facebook now knows there used to be a connection between you two. This other person might not have sent you a friend request, but Facebook still knows, so it might suggest this person to you." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cclqhbc", "cclu2wj", "cclyva6", "ccm5kpz" ], "score": [ 68, 3, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "I believe that a lot of it is not actually fat under your skin, but fat around your guts that causes them to stick out. This is actually a different kind of fat. The stuff under your skin is called *subcutaneous fat,* while the stuff around your guts is called *visceral fat.* They are actually different types, and can be affected by your *hormones*- chemicals in your body that tell it what to do.\n\nStress, a lack of exercise, genetics, diabetes (too much sugar in your blood), and other factors can cause an increase in the fat around your guts relative to fat under your skin, which is why some people can be skinny and have big bellies, and others can have a lot of body fat but not have their tummies stick out so much.\n\nYour skeletal system and muscles keep it from sticking out of your back, although if you get enough fat on your body, you can get a decent amount of 'back fat' also.\n\nThe actual distribution of fat underneath your skin is, as I understand it, mostly determined by your genetics. This means that 'spot reduction'- the idea that you can lose fat in a specific area more than others say by exercising muscles near that far more- is a myth. Some people's genes make them put more of their fat in their faces or stomachs or arms or legs than others. We're all a little different in that way.\n\nSitups, for example, won't reduce your tummy fat in a larger proportion than anywhere else on your body (or at all if you don't burn more Calories/kilojoules {energy} than you eat), although they can strengthen muscles that hold it in more. And doing squats or lunges won't take off leg fat, either.\n\nSorry if I'm going a little too far in explaining some terms- they did say EXPLAINLIKEIMFIVE, but more importantly, some terms may be difficult for people whose first language is not English.", "You might want to revisit the assumption in your question by reviewing some of the stuff on this website.\n\n_URL_0_", "Evolution has determined that the best place to carry excess fat for a human is around their waist. \n\nThe more you get, the more its distributed other places, but that is where we can best carry the majority of it.\n\n", "[backs dont get fat? NSFL](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/" ], [], [ "http://myskinnybuns.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/back-fat.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d2uud2x" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Squeezed out of a shaped hole, like toothpaste is squeezed out of a round hole. Then sliced off in bits and cooked. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dsbvrmy", "dsbx8dz", "dsc2e9n" ], "score": [ 2, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "They pretend to be at war for a day or two. Use fake bullets and rockets. Sometimes bigger countries also use fewer troops / guns to train for more complicated situations ", "This is a very vague question, but we'll try to take a crack at it.\n\nFor large-scale, military-only exercises, the participating units are put on a war footing and made to perform tasks they normally would during a conflict against either imaginary/simulated enemy targets or friendly troops playing the role of enemy combatants. Indirect fire has real ammo, so they fire on imaginary targets, friendlies playing hostiles necessitate blank rounds to be used. The troops are positioned as they would during a conflict (forward camps, usually) and supplied similarly, with MREs and limited resources.\n\nFor those exercises that want to also simulate civilian operators acting in concert with military forces, those civilian units or organizations (for example, fire crews, police forces and political chains of command) are also put on the same alert as they would under a full-scale conflict and perform simulated tasks and operations similar to those they would in wartime. For fire crews, this may include buildings set on fire in a manner to simulate bomb strikes, police may train to counter enemy special operations forces, and political command chains may face similar dilemmas as those in wartime. Medical organizations may be put on high alert and perform simulated complicated or mass casualty operations.\n\nNormally, all organizations in a country won't hold war exercises (or war games) at the same time, but the results of these can be combined and/or extrapolated to provide a relatively accurate overview of the capabilities against certain levels of enemy action both in the field and on the home front.", "Often by wargaming through systems of the sort you can buy from board game shops; just on a much more complex level and with more accurate information. Computers may be used to assist.\n\nThere is a thing called a 'command post exercise' where officers will be in a room and send orders out to virtual units, then be informed of what happens. The larger ones can have hundreds of players.\n\nThe US Naval War College has run many big ones over the years: here's some information on their site: _URL_1_\n\n[Just be careful that you don't make your RL adversary think you're not playing a game.](_URL_0_)\n" ] }

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[ [], [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83", "https://usnwc2.usnwc.edu/Research---Gaming/War-Gaming/Documents/RAGE/Gaming/-Global-Title-X-Series.aspx" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ertdkik", "ertyild", "eru4gta" ], "score": [ 2, 2, 7 ], "text": [ "There isn't good evidence that it is dangerous at levels coming from plastics containing food/drink. It affects the endocrine system, but it's fairly weak in that action. The EPA and the European Food Safety Authority both say it shouldn't be a problem at normal exposure, but some groups still express concern and studies trying to get more data are ongoing. BPA containing plastics leach it out more when it is warmed, so microwaving will increase leakage.", "Knowing the nature of business and the power of Money, in this Subject, the best course is NOT to use anything that has it in it-like bottled water. I always carry an Army Canteen, with my OWN filtered water- and never a bottled water, not even for the dog;; check that espy not for the dog.", "Picture a steel chain in your mind. Flexible, strong, super useful. A single link, however, doesn't really do all that much.\n\nPlastics are literally chemical chains. Individual molecules aren't all that remarkable, but when connected in regular patterns they have incredible properties. Specifically, when BPA is mixed with phosgene, it forms polycarbonate- strong, clear, flexible plastic.\n\nNow, if you ate pure polycarbonate, you'd be fine. Your body doesn't really recognize it and it would eventually be excreted with other waste.\n\nBut to make polycarbonate, you essentially take a bowl and mix BPA with phosgene. Unfortunately, no chemical process is 100% efficient. There's always a little leftover that doesn't end up reacting. So intermixed with the polycarbonate product are little bits of unreacted BPA, sticking to the plastic.\n\nIf that plastic is then used to make a water bottle, some of that BPA may then dissolve into the water. When food is heated in a microwave, the container gets warmed up too. This helps dislodge the BPA from the plastic and allows more of it to dissolve into your food/drink. I also think BPA is used in things like thermal paper receipts, and touching them can cause BPA to dissolve into you through your skin.\n\nThe problem is that while polycarbonate isn't that interesting to your body, BPA is.\n\nHave you taken ibuprofen before? When your body feels pain, a enzyme binds to a molecule, let's call it molecule X, and converts it into a chemical signal for the pain response. Ibuprofen looks enough like X that the enzyme tries to turn it into a signal too, but fails. So while the enzyme is wasting its time with ibuprofen, molecule X just sits around and nothing happens- no pain signal is created.\n\nBPA works the same way. Enzymes in your body called hormone receptors bind to hormones (a type of chemical signal) such as testosterone and estrogen. Obviously these enzymes are really important for development. Testosterone tells your body to do one thing, estrogen another.\n\nIf you drink water with BPA in it, your body may absorb the BPA. BPA happens to look a lot like estrogen, so it binds to those hormone receptors and your body thinks it's getting an estrogen signal, so starts to do things related to that signal.\n\nIs it dangerous? It's hard to say. We can give people more and more BPA until we notice bad things happen, but that isn't really useful. Nobody is eating pounds of BPA, so if eating a pound of BPA is toxic, it isn't that helpful to know that.\n\nThe problem is, what happens when you absorb tiny amounts of BPA over the course of years? If a few cells accidentally think they're getting an estrogen signal once, it probably doesn't do anything. But if they keep getting that response over and over and over again, does it add up? Does it matter for everyone, or just young people who haven't fully developed yet? \n\nThe ideal experiment would be to have two identical babies, feed them exactly the same food and expose them to exactly the same stuff - all BPA free, but feed only one of them a little bit of BPA as well, and see if there are any differences.\n\nObviously, we don't have 80 years to wait around and see those results, and it would be deeply unethical to experiment on babies like that, even if the experiment were possible.\n\nSo instead we have to make models that try to approximate things. The most common one is zebrafish, whose nervous systems are similar to ours. We can grow a lot of them, control their environments, and dissect their brains to study them.\n\nThere are more problems, though. How much BPA do we give them to be representative of how much BPA humans get? How does the BPA affect them and would it be the same in humans? Does it matter if the BPA comes from food or drink? etc etc etc\n\nSo ultimately, the answer is that we don't know. The plastic lobby is really powerful and they make it very hard for scientists to get funding to study this. I personally know a few people who study BPA with these models, and their lives have been turned upside down by plastic companies smearing them and attacking them.\n\nShould you be worried? Experiments in some models have shown pretty scary results if zebrafish embryos are exposed to BPA, but there haven't been enough experiments to know if that's really the fault of the BPA or if it's a design flaw in the experiment. Honestly, at this point it could truly be either, and trying to apply those results to humans would be pretty worthless.\n\n If you are a young child, have a hormone disorder, or are pregnant, it'd be something to avoid to be on the safe side. Otherwise.... do what you can if it makes you feel better. I can't say if it'll hurt you or do nothing.\n\n I personally avoid touching receipts because there is no reason to even get them most of the time, and I try to use BPA free plastic. However, if someone hands me a water bottle and I'm thirsty, I don't worry about it. In the grand scheme of things, it's more dangerous to be in the sun (skin cancer), or eat junk food (heart disease) than it is to get a little BPA exposure." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d6l5jto", "d6l5mq6", "d6l5pn7", "d6l8hxt", "d6lcz3z", "d6ldiwb", "d6ldrmx", "d6li6k6", "d6licp5", "d6liv3d", "d6ljxcz", "d6lkwy8", "d6lkxrm", "d6lldtm", "d6llo0t", "d6lq4kk", "d6lroj8", "d6lse4w", "d6lsmyr", "d6lstlq", "d6lt4om", "d6ltjm9", "d6lubvp", "d6luw39", "d6luxs3", "d6lv34a", "d6lv4jq", "d6lvcf9", "d6lvvyt", "d6lx79w", "d6ly42i", "d6lygtx", "d6lzbfy", "d6lznnw", "d6m01tl", "d6m08ca" ], "score": [ 2325, 21, 308, 4, 47, 444, 8, 3, 12, 5, 7, 16, 11, 14, 381, 20, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4 ], "text": [ "The photon from the laser pointer will travel infinity until something stop it. But the laser itself contains million of photons, and the further they travel, the further they are away from each other. You can test it yourself by pointing at something and walk closer, the dot become smaller but more clear, walk back away, the dot become bigger but blurry. At some point, all the photons will scatter too much to form a clearly visible dot. So if you point the pointer to the moon, it will reach but not be visible enough to see.", "It will travel for all time until it's absorbed by something. The light will get fainter because the laser will spread out. Your ~2mm laser at 100m will be 7km wide by time it hits the moon. It's the same # of photons but spread over a much wider area so it'll appear much less bright.\n\n", "According to [xkcd](_URL_0_), a good laser pointer has a tight enough beam to hit the moon, but the spot would be spread over most of the moon so an astronaut wouldn't notice it.", "light travels forever until something blocks it\n\nthat's the reason you can see stars. because that's same light that's traveled over billion and billions of miles. \n\n", "OK - not the OP here... but to jump on the original question and modify it a little, how far does the light from a laser pointer travel before it gets too distorted to recognize? For example, if I stand 25 feet away from someone who is pointing a laser pointer at my shirt, I can see it. How about if I stand 1 mile away and nothing interferes (and it is dark enough)... would I be able to see it clearly? If so, then how about 3 miles away? At what point will it not be obvious that there is a laser pointing on my shirt?", "According to [Wikipedia](_URL_0_), the divergence on a high-quality laser beam can be less than 1 milliradian. There are a couple of tools to calculate divergence and beam diameter [online here](_URL_1_). Using the distance from the earth to the moon as 1.261e9 feet, a laser beam with divergence of 0.5 mRad would have a diameter of 11.93 miles when it got there - so no, the astronaut wouldn't see a little red dot at his feet.\n\nTL;DR: The further away you get, the bigger the light beam gets. By the time you reach the moon, a high-quality laser beam will be 12 miles across.\n\nEDIT: Forgot the ELI5 TLDR.", "How many people pointing a laser at the moon till we can see it? O.o what if everyone on earth pointed a laser pointer at the moon at the same time?!!", "I understand that the light from a laser will spread out over distance but what I don't understand is why it the photon has infinite energy and will go on forever \"light travels forever until something blocks it\".", "I have a relatively powerful laser pointer and one night I called a friend who lived about 10-15 km away (as the crow flies) and pointed it at his house. It was really difficult to aim by hand but when he saw it, it was lighting a good portion of his garden. That's what he told me. I didn't see it from his perspective. If it's true, it gives you an idea about how quickly the beam diverges.\n", "_URL_0_\n\nHopefully this article is of interest. I saw it when heading across the Thames near Greenwich one time. ", "According to Michio Kaku a laser pointer will create a spot about 5 miles wide when aimed at the moon.\n\nThe light travels forever but it diffuses quickly to a point where it cannot be seen. Military grade lasers diffuse less and can be detected with equipment quite far making them useful for targeting.", "[xkcd answered a similar question](_URL_0_), which I think you'll appreciate and may help answer more questions. ", "The short answer is: No\n\nThe long answer is:\n\nAs the light from your laser pointer leaves, it will slowly spread out. So it will be come more and more spread out. On top of that, particles in the air and even the air itself will slowly but steadily absorb and scatter the laser light. \n\nYou can have someone test this out for yourself. Have a friend wave a laser point at you a block a way at night. Even if you can see the light, it is definitely harder than when it is in the same room.", "A more accurately answerable question would be, \"How far does a photon travel from a light source?\" A laser is just a very focused set of photons concentrated to a tight point and of sufficient energy to be considered a laser. The photons still diverge from each other though and over even a short distance the beam is no longer focused enough to create a tightly defined dot or harm anything in its path. It takes a lot of calculation and a lot of energy to create a path of light with enough resistance to deviation to stay a small focused beam past probably a few meters, and in low power \"laser pointers\" you will lose definition of the dot after probably a few tens of meters. There are too many variables to use a laser pointer as an example of a light source to ask how for it travels.\n\n\nIf you look at a single photon, it will travel forever, at the speed of light in its current medium. The photon will be absorbed by objects, bent by gravity, and speed up or slow down depending on what it's traveling through - and in the case of absorption and re-emission it's technically not the same photon anymore, so passing through glass or a haze of dust for example. In a perfect situation though, light will travel on it's current trajectory forever, and it will only be affected by gravity or expansion of the universe as it's wavelength stretches.", "I want to talk about the \"Laser Thermometer\" and clear something up.\n\nIt is actually an Infrared thermometer and the laser is only there as a means of aiming the device. The Laser does not read the temperature.", "Here's what a 1w laser looks like from the ISS.\n\n_URL_0_", "One night I was camping in the middle of nowhere with some friends. One of these friends had a cheap laser pointer and some night vision goggles. There was a mountain maybe 10 miles away. We could shine the laser on the mountain, and we couldn't see it with the naked eye, but put on those night vision goggles and with the amplification of light, it was like shining a flashlight on something from ten feet away. It was a fairly large mountain, and the dot of light on it was huge. So, yeah, the light spreads a lot, but it gets there. ", "The light photons (particles of light) will travel an infinite distance at the same speed (of course in certain mediums it can travel slower or faster), given theres nothing blocking it, or the light slowly scattering, techniqually a few particles of light will hit the moon, but because of the large distance and large amount of blockers, such as the sky (all the particles of air in the sky, reflect a given amount of light particles) not a 100% of that light particles get there, and on top of that since light is also a wave, it scatters slowly apart from the source, this causing the light to even further become weaker, you can't see the light, but some sensors that are sensitive enough can detect the few that get there. ", "Subsequent ELI5: Could someone in an airplane point a laser pointer into my living room and theoretically use it to play with my cat? How far can a laser pointer point before it doesn't point like a pointer anymore?", "The light will keep going - until it hits something. \n\nThe light from your laser pointer would reach distant galaxies if you pointed it up to the sky on a clear night. But, no one outside of a few hundred yards is going to see it. By the time it reaches distant galaxies, it will just be a stray photon here and there. Far, far, far too faint to see.", "Your thermometer only uses a laser to show where you're pointing it, the laser isn't involved in the temperature measurement process at all.\n\nThe \"temp gun\" has a sensor that detects the (infrared) heat emitted by whatever you're pointing it at. \n\n\n(Other people covered your actual question, I figured I'd add this information)", "Light will travel until it is absorbed, so if you were to aim at the moon it would essentially reach it in just above one second, but you wouldn't see a red dot even if you were next to it because of the scattering of the laser. \n \nIf you've tried pointing lasers at night at something fairly distant (100-200m) you'd see the dot appear much bigger in diameter _and_ fainter, because of all the scatter. For an astronaut on the moon to see your laser you would have to have a very powerful low-scatter laser, which focuses light incredibly well (and if the Earth's air wasn't disrupting and refracting the laser's photons).", "I took a few astronomy classes at my college over the summer and we talked about lasers. Basically if you have any regular laser that's legal strength for regular people to own, the light emitted probably wont make it through the atmosphere. This is just because of the amount of dust in the atmosphere. There isn't much if you look at one part but when you are looking through miles and miles of small dust it starts to add up. Laser tend to become larger the farther they go and when the light spreads out it becomes much dimmer. If you shine a regular red laser pen at you wall its usually a couple millimeters wide but if you shine it across football field it will double in size. You could imagine shining it thousands of miles into space it wouldn't be visible even if our atmosphere was clear of debris and dust. But then we have very powerful lasers used for doing exactly what you said, pointing to the moon. There are a few spots on the moon the have little mirrors on them and certain labs have lasers that they point at the tiny mirrors to get a read about the moon ever-changing distance from earth. Im not sure but i think that these dont enlarge very much like normal laser pens.\n\nsorry if im totally wrong this is what i was told in school a few months ago", "Ok, besides the obvious answer \"Would it hit the moon? -- Yes, if it was a good enough laser!\" There is another point to make. The moon is traveling at 2,228mph relative to the earth. So trying to see the laser would be like trying to see a bullet that flew past you. Totally impossible. ", "Random question. Which radio station?", "Moslty likely that laser only travels about 1/100 of the distance to the moon after that the photons are so far scattered apart that you really wouldn't see anything past that now a really atrong laser like the one nasa uses to shoot at the moon and measure the distance from us to the moon is extremely powerful and has less scattering then a typical handheld red laser", "The 'beam' from a laser pointer, or any laser for that matter isn't perfect, it does diffuse and the cheaper ones diffuse visibly if you just shine them across the street. A hand held laser pointer might be able to hit the moon, but the dot would be miles wide and the light would be lost among other nearby sources. Over longer distances it would get so diffuse that it wouldn't even register.\n\nThis is to say nothing of the atmosphere, just passing through air which we can't visibly discern still has a diffusing effect and traveling through the depth of the earth's atmosphere is likely to cause some pretty severe diffusion of any visible spectrum beam. ", "The photons would spread so far apart with standard lasers. Gaussian beam shapes and whatnot. ", "This was on EITM was it not?", "Light travels infinitely but it also scatters the further away from the source it gets. Best example of this is the flashlight. The average wouldn't light the ground on the moon just as a flashlight wouldn't light the ground after a few feet. Though if conditions are right, you could see the light source. If you were across a large pond, you'll see the flashlight but it wouldn't light up the area around you. Don't think the astronaut would see the laser as it would be hidden by city lights and the fact that it would be too small for our eyes. Though could be wrong.", "When I [built my 1.8W](_URL_0_) laser pointer, the thinking at the time was the diode and driver I was useing should send it 8-14 miles, depending on atmospheric conditions, before it dissipated to an unrecognizable blob.\n\nYou can see the blue beam next to a fairly bright green one [here](_URL_1_), and keep in mind that I can set stuff on fire from ~6 feet away with the blue one (eye protection is a must).\n\n**EDIT TO ADD**\n\nThe one I built used a blue light diode, which, while bright, is nothing compared to a green one. This has to do with the ability of our eyes to see some colors much better than others. A comparably powerful (based on mW) red laser vs a green one will show how much more easily we can see the green. In the image above, for example, that green is rated at 10mW (standard laser pointers are 5mW) and you can see the green light as a solid beam at night without any fog or other heavy sediment in the air. It's great for stargazing. The blue one, OTOH, is also visible, but truly requires care and protection because you can go blind in an instant if it hits a bug or a raindrop and reflects back into your unprotected eye.", "Well a 1 Watt laser is visible from the ISS, if that helps. \n_URL_0_", "It goes very fast. Faster than you can imagine. So fast you could never see it unless you were going as fast as it is, which is impossible because nothing else can go that fast. REALLY fast.", "I'm certainly not an expert, but I'm willing to give it a shot.\n\nI'm tempted to say that the light will travel forever, but that's perhaps not the case. Perhaps most of the light will get scattered by the atmosphere and absorbed by atoms/molecules, these will emit one or more photons. If, for the sake of argument, we count these new photons as a continuation of the laser beam, then the laser beam will continue forever as the photons are absorbed and emitted until the end of the universe. If, on the other hand, we treat the absorption of the photons as the end of the laser beam, then all of the photons that were emitted from the laser beam will probably get absorbed sooner or later by something, thus spelling the end of said laser beam. There isn't much matter in space to absorb photons; on the other hand, there's an awful lot of space. It should be possible to calculate the odds of whether there are any \"original\" photons after a certain amount of distance, taking all of these things into account.", "The short answer is forever, the beam will travel forever, but will it be detected when it gets where its going?\n\nLaser beams slowly spread out as they travel, based on their initial width when they were \"collimated\" or when we made all the light rays parallel. They spread out because of Heisenbergs uncertainty principle essentially and we get a spread out beam after our laser travels some distance.\n\nHere's my crazy ranting calculations on the subject:\n\n\nIn a 1mW red laser pointer. Assuming zero bandwidth.\n\nThere would be N = 10^(-3) W/ (( 3x10^(8) m/s/6.328x10^(-7) m)x7x10^(-34) Js) photons/second coming out the end of the laser.\n\nBear in mind im doing this on my phone in a bathroom and approximating but should be:\n\n N/sec = 10^(-3) /(5x10^(14) x6.5x10^(-34) ) \n = 10^(-3)/(3.25 x 10^(-19) ) \n = 3000 x 10^(12) photons/sec\n \n =3000 trillion photons/second\n\n\nI really want to go check those numbers, seems way too high.\n\n\nUpdate:\n\nWell i tried it in matlab and it says it's 3183.4 Trillion photons/second.\n\n\nGuess i nailed it\n\n-------------------------------------------------\n\nOkay so now we know there are 3 quadrillion photons coming out this laser at 1mW.\n\nLets amp this laser up, we want it to go much further into space so we pump this thing until it hits 10 Watts of power.\n\n\n3.184x10^(19) photons per second!, we have to decide how wide this stream of photons is when it starts its journey.\n\n\nWe will use a dfb laser diode (distributed feedback) which will give us that narrow peak we wanted. We'd want to launch this thing from singlemode optical fibre with a collimating element at the end because the cone that usually pours out of the end of a fibre kinda ruins the concentrated beam we are after.\n\n\n(Continued on my pc in on minute)\n\n\nAssuming the collimating optic was somehow in the fibre to avoid any initial beam spread before we straighten up the beam.\nLight in an optical fibre travels in modes, not all together in the centre of the fibre.\nWhen I look at my old optical fibre notes im seeing for a fibre with core of 20microns, the fundamental (Gaussian) mode will leak into the cladding to become about 28microns across.\n\nBut let's assume we guide this fibre really well (and interestingly) and all the 10 W of red light comes through evenly distributed across a diameter of 20 microns.\n\nSo our irradiance outside the fibre (no 4% reflection at the end from Fresnel because we are clever and use anti-reflect coatings) is\n\n 10 W / pi *(10^-5)^2 or 32 GigaWatts/m^2\n\nsweet, let's beam that baby into space.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nNow it's easier for me to assume the beam travels as a Gaussian distribution from this point even though I said evenly distributed earlier, so that's what ill be using to figure out how weak this beam is after say.. 1 light year.\n\n(continued in a minute)\n\n\nSo I've checked my laser beam notes and it turns out that Gaussian beams, once we check in with the uncertainty principle, give us angular spread, related to the width of the beam, let's hope having a really small beam didn't ruin us!.\n\nthe radius of the beam w0 after a distance z is equal to [this equation](_URL_0_)\n\nso let's plug the values in and see how wide the beam is once it passes the sun.\n\nEdit: corrected some errors from before\n\nSo once our beam travels the distance to the sun, 149.6 million kilometres we have moved from having a beam 20 microns across to one that is ... oh my..\n\n 6 million metres across.\n\nGiving us an irradiance of \n\n 8.764 x 10^-14 W/m^2\n\nor\n\n 0.08 picoWatts/m^2\n\nthat's not detectable, at all.\n\n\n\n---------------------------------------------------------------\n\nLet's do our calculation for the 1mW laser pointer then.\n\n\nMaking all the assumptions of no wavelength bandwidth, just a single wavelength coming out the end. I'm measuring a dot on a piece of paper right now brb.\n\n\n our starting beam radius is 1mm.\n\n The irradiance of the beam is then 318.3 W/m^2\n\nBy the time the beam passes the distance between us and the Sun, the width of our beam will be:\n\n 60 kilometres across\n\nwith an irradiance of\n\n 876 picoWatts/m^2\n \n\nwe did better anyway, still pretty weak, and we aren't even anywhere close to leaving our own solar system yet and of course we ignored absorptions by the atmosphere and all that.\n\n-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nAccording to our research here today, we will need to make a very, very powerful beam that is parallel (collimated) when it is very wide.\n\nMy notes also say that high frequency (lower wavelength) beams don't spread as much as lower frequency (longer wavelength) beams.\n\n\n----------------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nOur friend Randall Munroe at XKCD, writer of \"What If?\" used thousands of National Ignition Facilities to light up the moon, we don't need that high of a power, so we'll just take one, and expand to 1 kilometre across with a giant lens across the sky. \n\n\nNIF can generate 500 TerraWatts, which is awesome and terrifying\n\nWe aren't using red anymore, we are using a much higher energy photon, ultraviolet at 350nm (half our previous wavelength at 632.8nm). This should improve the amount of spreading we see in the result.\n\nSo our irradiance is:\n\n 5x10^(14) / (pi*(0.5*10^3 )^2 )\n = 637 million W/m^2\n\n\nAfter travelling past the sun, the beam has only doubled to ~2km across so the irradiance is then:\n\n 5x10^(14) / (pi*(10^3 )^2 )\n = 160 million W/m^2\n\nWe're doing so much better, easily detectable here.\n\nLet's go the nearest star, according to google, the nearest star is 4.35 light years or 9.46 Terrakilometres away (strange unit) or 9.46 x 10^15 metres away.\n\nhow wide is our beam when it gets there?\n\n 2 billion metres across\n\nIrradiance?\n\n 35.821 picoWatts/m^2\n\nWe did pretty well, maybe aliens are pretty close by and actually have super sensitive detectors on board to get this beam detected.\n\nBut It's looking bleak.", "I'm a chemist who's been working in a laser lab for about 8 months, so this is all new to me still and I work with lasers a bit more powerful/dangerous than typical laser pointers. \n\nMy understanding is that your average laser pointer has a collimating lens, intended to focus the beam \"at infinity\" so ideally the beam would go directly straight and maintain it's size and shape, in practice it would still diverge (spread out and weaken) over distance and would weaken depending on the initial power. This is also disrupted by anything it's going through which would scatter the beam. This is why typically you can see only where the beam impacts (say, a laser pointed at a wall) and not the beam itself. But throw say, dry ice into the beampath and you would see the trail. So the distance traveled would depend on the power I would think." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ck2i7fv", "ck2i8xn", "ck2i9we" ], "score": [ 5, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Gasoline doesn't last that long, for one. \n\nYou can buy gasoline *futures* (paying now for gas later) but it's a poor way to invest money. There are better ways to invest. ", "Considering the amount of equipment you need to safely store gas and or have it all evaporate away or blow you into kingdom come. NO.\n\nBUT, what you can do is purchase petroleum futures, essentially, making money by betting that gas prices will increase X number of months down the line. It's a simple investment transaction, but you need to go through an investment company and you have to pay taxes on it tho.", "1. gasoline is a regulated material - you can't store much of it.\n2. you'd have to have a license to sell it.\n3. you'd have to be able to sell it at a cheaper price than the wholesale price the station pays for it. You'd have bought it at retail and then sold it below wholesale. It'd have to have gone up in price a lot.\n4. it degrades over time. it \"goes bad\".\n\nif you believe in this business idea, I'd suggest you buy stock in gas companies - they are going to be much better at this business than you are.\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ckir983", "ckirec3" ], "score": [ 2, 3 ], "text": [ "Sorry to ELI5 your ELI5, but just for those who have never stepped into a bookies... \n\nIf I bet £10 each on yes and no, do I understand right that a \"no\" result would get me £2.50, and a \"yes\" would get me £30?\n\nIf so, that's a pretty sizable difference.", "I expect that the odds are down to a significant number of people betting the outcome will be 'No'. Odds aren't just calculated by looking at what will *probably* happen, but also by the amount of money already taken in by people betting. If the odds were, say, both even (which is what the polls suggest), and a disproportionate number of people bet on 'no', then if 'no' is the outcome, the bookmaker will lose out significantly. By stacking these odds, they can encourage people to bet the other way." ] }

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