This is an old complaint; it came out in Apple circles within a week of iSO 9.1 being launched.
[MIAMI.CBSLOCAL] Data overages can lead to big phone bills.
One family, however, was shocked when they got a bill for more than two thousand dollars. The big bill was because of a new feature on Apple iPhones that you may not be aware of. Like many teens Ashton Feingold didn't think much about the text message from AT&T which warned that he was nearing his date limit.
"It just said maybe 65 percent of your data has been used," said Feingold.
Then the bill came.
"I thought my dad was going to kill me," he said. "It's usually $250 a month and this was $2,000!" said Ashton's father Jeff.
$250 a month? I see another problem with junior...
The difference? A new feature on Ashton's iPhone called "WiFi Assist" which is standard with the new iOS 9.1 operating system.
"I had no idea what that was," said Jeff Feingold.
RTFM, dude...
It's intended to make sure the user always has a good signal by automatically switching to cellular data when a WiFi signal is weak.
Like in Ashton's bedroom. He thought he was still connected to WiFi while streamed and surfed the web. Instead, his phone was gobbling up date -- more than 144-thousand megabytes.
"That's pretty high but I can see it happening," said Mike Campbell with "Apple Insider."
He added that while some customers like what WiFi Assist does, many don't know they have it.
"It comes by default, it is switched on," said Campbell. "That's why there's an uproar."
Apple had no comment.
To turn off WiFi Assist, go to settings, then cellular, then down at the bottom users can switch off the feature.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/07/2016 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[3 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Thanks to whoever posted this thing, I just went and turned off WiFi Assist on my iPhone.
#2
This feature should be opt-in. But Apple is Apple, and they like to have all the bells and whistles on by default. And not really tell the customer.
Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning, and a colossal stroke of luck.
But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and "should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill."
From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat.
Jeremy England, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity.
The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that, under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
"You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant," England said.
England's theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. "I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong," he explained. "On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon."
His idea, detailed in a paper and further elaborated in a talk he delivered at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.
England has taken "a very brave and very important step," said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who has followed England's work since its early stages. The "big hope" is that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.
"Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across," said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. "I was struck by the originality of the ideas."
Others, such as Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and biophysics at Harvard University, are not convinced. "Jeremy's ideas are interesting and potentially promising, but at this point are extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena," Shakhnovich said.
England's theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation -- that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life -- that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.
"He's trying something radically different," said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England's work. "As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it's going to be very much worth the investigation." I added the emphasis. Seems like one way or another, this will lead to something interesting.
At the heart of England's idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the "arrow of time."
Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses.
Entropy is a measure of this tendency, quantifying how dispersed the energy is among the particles in a system, and how diffuse those particles are throughout space. It increases as a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated.
Thus, as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out.
Eventually, the system arrives at a state of maximum entropy called "thermodynamic equilibrium," in which energy is uniformly distributed. A cup of coffee and the room it sits in become the same temperature, for example.
As long as the cup and the room are left alone, this process is irreversible. The coffee never spontaneously heats up again because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against so much of the room's energy randomly concentrating in its atoms.
Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or "closed" system, an "open" system can keep its entropy low -- that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms -- by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings. In his influential 1944 monograph "What Is Life?" the eminent quantum physicist Erwin SchrĂśdinger argued that this is what living things must do. A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.
Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place. In SchrĂśdinger's day, they could solve the equations of thermodynamics only for closed systems in equilibrium. In the 1960s, the Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine made progress on predicting the behavior of open systems weakly driven by external energy sources (for which he won the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry). But the behavior of systems that are far from equilibrium, which are connected to the outside environment and strongly driven by external sources of energy, could not be predicted.
This situation changed in the late 1990s, due primarily to the work of Chris Jarzynski, now at the University of Maryland, and Gavin Crooks, now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Jarzynski and Crooks showed that the entropy produced by a thermodynamic process, such as the cooling of a cup of coffee, corresponds to a simple ratio: the probability that the atoms will undergo that process divided by their probability of undergoing the reverse process (that is, spontaneously interacting in such a way that the coffee warms up). As entropy production increases, so does this ratio: A system's behavior becomes more and more "irreversible." The simple yet rigorous formula could in principle be applied to any thermodynamic process, no matter how fast or far from equilibrium. "Our understanding of far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics greatly improved," Grosberg said. England, who is trained in both biochemistry and physics, started his own lab at MIT two years ago and decided to apply the new knowledge of statistical physics to biology.
Using Jarzynski and Crooks' formulation, he derived a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics that holds for systems of particles with certain characteristics: The systems are strongly driven by an external energy source such as an electromagnetic wave, and they can dump heat into a surrounding bath. This class of systems includes all living things. England then determined how such systems tend to evolve over time as they increase their irreversibility. "We can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment's external drives on the way to getting there," he said. The finding makes intuitive sense: Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment.
"This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments," England explained.
Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time.
As England put it, "A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself."
In a paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics, he reported the theoretical minimum amount of dissipation that can occur during the self-replication of RNA molecules and bacterial cells, and showed that it is very close to the actual amounts these systems dissipate when replicating.
He also showed that RNA, the nucleic acid that many scientists believe served as the precursor to DNA-based life, is a particularly cheap building material. Once RNA arose, he argues, its "Darwinian takeover" was perhaps not surprising.
The chemistry of the primordial soup, random mutations, geography, catastrophic events and countless other factors have contributed to the fine details of Earth's diverse flora and fauna. But according to England's theory, the underlying principle driving the whole process is dissipation-driven adaptation of matter.
This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well. "It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization," England said. "Many examples could just be right under our nose, but because we haven't been looking for them we haven't noticed them."
Scientists have already observed self-replication in nonliving systems. According to new research led by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley, and reported in Physical Review Letters in August, vortices in turbulent fluids spontaneously replicate themselves by drawing energy from shear in the surrounding fluid. And in a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michael Brenner, a professor of applied mathematics and physics at Harvard, and his collaborators present theoretical models and simulations of microstructures that self-replicate. These clusters of specially coated microspheres dissipate energy by roping nearby spheres into forming identical clusters. "This connects very much to what Jeremy is saying," Brenner said.
Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. A plant, for example, is much better at capturing and routing solar energy through itself than an unstructured heap of carbon atoms. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize. This tendency could account for the internal order of living things and of many inanimate structures as well. "Snowflakes, sand dunes and turbulent vortices all have in common that they are strikingly patterned structures that emerge in many-particle systems driven by some dissipative process," he said. Condensation, wind and viscous drag are the relevant processes in these particular cases.
"He is making me think that the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp," said Carl Franck, a biological physicist at Cornell University, in an email. "I'm particularly impressed by this notion when one considers systems as small as chemical circuits involving a few biomolecules."
England's bold idea will likely face close scrutiny in the coming years.
He is currently running computer simulations to test his theory that systems of particles adapt their structures to become better at dissipating energy. The next step will be to run experiments on living systems.
Prentiss, who runs an experimental biophysics lab at Harvard, says England's theory could be tested by comparing cells with different mutations and looking for a correlation between the amount of energy the cells dissipate and their replication rates.
"One has to be careful because any mutation might do many things," she said. "But if one kept doing many of these experiments on different systems and if [dissipation and replication success] are indeed correlated, that would suggest this is the correct organizing principle."
Brenner said he hopes to connect England's theory to his own microsphere constructions and determine whether the theory correctly predicts which self-replication and self-assembly processes can occur -- "a fundamental question in science," he said.
Having an overarching principle of life and evolution would give researchers a broader perspective on the emergence of structure and function in living things, many of the researchers said. "Natural selection doesn't explain certain characteristics," said Ard Louis, a biophysicist at Oxford University, in an email. These characteristics include a heritable change to gene expression called methylation, increases in complexity in the absence of natural selection, and certain molecular changes Louis has recently studied.
If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve," Louis said.
"People often get stuck in thinking about individual problems," Prentiss said. Whether or not England's ideas turn out to be exactly right, she said, "thinking more broadly is where many scientific breakthroughs are made."
#6
Can't let them drift outside their lane, eh Grom?
when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy..., it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy.
Through my jaded lens, this suggests GLOBAL WARMING is the result of too many bipedal dissipaters.
#7
Yeah.......but what about entropy? It is getting greater by the hour!!!
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
01/07/2016 20:24 Comments ||
Top||
#8
He don't deals with the fact that there isn't live outside Earth and why not.
He's a physicist, Lionel Thoth9784, not an exobiologist. Also, absence of evidence not being evidence of absence, as far as I am aware we do not know absolutely that there is no life elsewhere. It's only in the last few years that we proved the existence of planets, both Jupiters and Earth-sized, around other suns. Proof or disproof of life may need to wait until we can fly out there to see in person.
#9
gorb, if you would be kind enough, in future, to limit your posts to the key 700 words or so from such long pieces, that would be helpful. We can't p.49 articles once they've been published.
But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.
That's the key. Whether this hypothesis fails or succeeds, we will know more than we did before.
Hat tip to our friends at the Sierra Club. I've received many remarkable nature photographs over the years, but this photo of a nesting falcon is perhaps the most remarkable that I've ever seen. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Nature is truly breath-taking! I've sent this to most of my older friends. The younger ones probably have never seen a falcon and wouldn't recognize one!
In the wake of a wave of stabbing attacks in Israel, a company decided to produce and start marketing what they billed as a protective vest that would guard the wearer against knife assaults.
On Wednesday, reporter Eitam Lachover, who according to an announcement by the Israel Broadcasting Authority, was working on a story for Channel 1's evening news ("Mabat"), dealing with protective vests, ended up in hospital after testing the vest.
During the story's preparation, Lachover met with representatives of a company that manufactures vests for security forces, as well for as the civilian market. While trying one on, Lachover asked the representatives to stab him in order to test how effective the vest was.
Unfortunately, the vest failed to protect Lachover sufficiently. The knife penetrated the garment, causing light stab wounds to his back.
#1
Lachover asked the representatives to stab him in order to test how effective the vest was.
There's a tie for the Darwin award, contested between the stabber and stabee.
#1
Along with Yellowstone, there is a big one lying under Naples and if it goes it will kill millions of Italians almost instantly. And its caldera is bulging too. They don't yet know if it is steam or magma, but a steam eruption could still be very devastating to Naples.
#6
Alas RJ, the magma chemistry is fundamentally different from the stuff in Hawaii. Hawaiian volcanics flow very nicely and don't explode since there is very little in the way of trapped gas. The amount of silica involved has a lot to do with it also. Etna, Mt. St. Helens are explosive events as will be Yellowstone and Mt. Ranier. Statically speaking the last supervolcano at Yellowstone happened about 640MM years ago and they happen every 600-700 MM. The likelihood of that happening in our lifetimes is very remote. But hey, if I'm wrong, there will be no one around to call me on it
#7
All of the US - hell all of North Am. - could be run off of the geothermal energy available in Yellowstone. Unfortunately Interior Dept and Green Idiots would never approve of it.
#8
So there's a 10% chance we don't have to worry about the horrific impacts of man-made climate change? Izzat factored into "The Model"?
Posted by: Bobby ||
01/07/2016 17:08 Comments ||
Top||
#9
Warthog is right. The magma is different. How viscus it is with how much gas is dissolved in the magma is what makes it run or explode.
Hawaiian magma is very runny with little gas dissolved so it flows with small fountains of erupting magma.
Magma in stratovolcanos (Vesuvius, Mt. St. Helens)is very thick and sticky with lots of gas dissolved in it. It moves slowly and can build plugs very easily and all the gas building up behind it makes it blow like a champagne cork when the plug fails. Mix this kind with water as well and you get the Krakatoa and Santorini (Thera) massive explosions that take islands apart. Letting off the pressure may just pop their corks since there would be so much force following the path to the surface. Much better to predict them and get the hell out of the way.
#10
Warthog and Darth know their Pahoehoe (very small amount of trapped gases, so very smooth) from their A'a (more gas retention, so MUCH rougher), that's for sure.
(I always remember the A'a name, if you walk on that type barefoot, you'll say "Ah..ah")
You'll say that with both though, if it hasn't cooled down yet.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
01/07/2016 22:45 Comments ||
Top||
Via pro Putin site Fort Russ
Forensic medical examination has shown that the 58 year old General-major Igor Sergun died of acute heart failure.
The doctors who conducted the autopsy on the body of General Sergun, who died on the 3rd of January in the Moscow region, made preliminary conclusions about the causes of his death. According to sources familiar with the situation, the doctors concluded that the body of 58-year-old man was overworked.
"One of the reasons for his death was fatigue: over-processing, early morning blogging, not getting enough sleep were all accompanying signs and "symptoms," commented a source in medical circles.
However, as it became known to LifeNews, the official cause of death was called acute heart failure.
The head of the Main intelligence Directorate of the General staff of the Armed forces of the Russian Federation, Igor Dmitriyevich Sergun died on the 3rd of January in his house in the Podolsk district of the Moscow region.
#1
Becca valley is only a short chopper ride away for that Hezbollah grown Lebanese Blond Hash. So acquiring it shouldn't be a problem.
Sort of like Obama's Mexican Fast & Furious adventure.
Drug lords do like guns.
[Wash Examiner] The new surge of illegal immigrant youths has forced the federal government to look at an emergency plan to house them at six military bases at at least two federal worker centers, according to the administration.
The Pentagon is beginning "site assessments" at bases as far north as North Dakota and Massachusetts.
"The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) at HHS is expanding its capacity to provide shelter for the current influx of unaccompanied children at the U.S. Southern Border. This temporary increased shelter capacity is a prudent step needed to ensure ORR meets its statutory responsibility to provide shelter for the unaccompanied children referred to its care and to assist CBP in ensuring that the US Border Patrol continues its vital national security mission to prevent illegal migration and trafficking, and to protect the borders of the United States," said a Pentagon memo to Rep. Martha Roby, Alabama Republican.
She led a previous fight to block the sheltering of the youths at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base near Montgomery, Ala.
According to the Pentagon email she forwarded, the other bases are:
-- Tyndall Air Force Base, FL (nearest city: Panama City, FL)
-- Grand Forks Air Force Base, ND (nearest cities: Emerado, ND and Grand Forks, ND)
-- Naval Support Activity Philadelphia, PA (nearest city: Philadelphia, PA)
-- Hanscom Air Force Base, MA (nearest city: Bedford, MA)
-- Travis Air Force Base, CA (nearest city: Fairfield, CA)
Another 1,600 beds are being set aside at the Homestead Job Corps, in Florida, and Denver Federal Campus, in Lakewood.
The latest surge of minors reached 5,600 caught at the southern border in November, more than double the number apprehended last year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Roby said that she is girding for another fight. (Her letter is below.)
"A military base is no place to house illegal immigrant children. Bases like Maxwell are engaged in real military activities - training, education, cyber warfare - many times in classified settings that are very sensitive. Their mission does not need to be distracted by housing, feeding and securing hundreds of detainees.
"Housing illegal immigrant children at an active military base like Maxwell-Gunter is a terrible idea. We shut it down the first time and we are working every angle to shut it down again," she said.
#10
The President of the United States of America who cast off his Christian name for a Muslim name is now moving HIS people into the very fortresses to destroy the Christian Heratige for once and for all as this generation lays barr its throat via ignorance and cowardley inaction.
Posted by: Unelet Protector of the Sith2424 ||
01/07/2016 19:14 Comments ||
Top||
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
