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d41vxr | why are balls called ball bearings? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d41vxr/eli5_why_are_balls_called_ball_bearings/ | {
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"It's a misunderstanding. Often people who learn a word don't know its origin or the exact boundaries of its definition, so they stretch it to refer to something unrelated. If this becomes popular, the meaning gets permanently altered."
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2r5cq4 | if insurance companies will cover the cost of an expensive procedure like a vasectomy, why wouldn't they give allowances for condoms? | I hope that makes sense.
Edit: So i did a little digging just to see costs and such. And im going to use my own personal life (i get not everyone will be the same) so i found that on the high end price tag a vasectomy can cost up to $3500 so im going to use that and im going to use the pack of condoms i just bought which were Trojan 36ct for $17. Lets say i go threw that 36 pack in... 2 or 3 months. If they gave me an allowance for $20 every 3 months thats $80 a year. Lets say i started being sexually active at 17 and im not ready to get a vasectomy until im 47 (just to make it easy) that would end up costing $2400 over the course of 30 years which is still $1100 less then that $3500 price tag. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2r5cq4/eli5_if_insurance_companies_will_cover_the_cost/ | {
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"because condoms are indefinite. You could be paying for condoms for the rest of someone's life. Pay for one vasectomy, and it's all said and done.",
"Not everyone is willing to get a vesectomy but EVERYONE would jump on free condoms.. Per case its Cheaper for the insurance company..but as a WHOLE its thousands of times more expensive.. Look at some poll results and find out how many men are willing to get vasectomys..i gaurentee the answer is MUCH LOWER than those who would accept free condoms for life."
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1r6tro | what impact does a suspension have for a player/coach/team in the nfl? | I read about suspensions all the time in the NFL.. such as the 1 day suspension of Erik Walden for a headbutt (helmet on) against Delanie Walker (without a helmet). But I could find nothing about what this penalty really means for the player or the team. It seems longer suspensions definitely have more teeth.. but that is about all I could surmise. I guess I'm just trying to get a better sense of what a penalty like this really does.
- What kind of impact does a penalty like this really have (especially a 1 day suspension)?
- Do the player still get paid during that time?
- Does the player just sit in the locker room during the next game or so?
- What do the coaches usually do when they find one of their players has been suspended for a period?
I tried to find some kind of article online that stated exactly what happens during a suspension for a player or coach but I came up short.
Thank you! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1r6tro/eli5_what_impact_does_a_suspension_have_for_a/ | {
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"My friend worked for a trainer and equipment manager on an NFL team and used to deal with this:\n\nThere is no one day suspension, its a one-game (one-week) suspension. Yes, technically they only play on one day though, however you are suspended from team activity for the whole week usually.\n\nGenerally they do not get paid for the week(s) they are suspended, and often are not allowed to practice with the team for the suspended time, but usually have access to the teams facilities to work out on their own and receive medical treatment.\n\nThe player is generally not allowed to be involved with the team, team activities, or the coaches during the suspension or attend the games etc. But this can vary substantially depending on what the suspension ruling was, but rarely would they be allowed at the game, they sit at home like the rest of us.\n\n"
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d1fncd | how is fruit flavor “essence” captured? if soda water is unsweetened and zero-calorie, how is the flavor added? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d1fncd/eli5_how_is_fruit_flavor_essence_captured_if_soda/ | {
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"Essence is created by heating the fruits and their skins/rinds, hot enough that it produces vapor. This vapor contains microscopic oil particles that have the flavor of the fruit, so when you collect that vapor, you're collecting some flavor. It's like fruit flavored steam. Then you can add that collected liquid to all kinds of foods and drinks to add a subtle fruit flavor without adding actual chunks of fruit.",
"For the first question :\nYou have 2 ways of getting fruit flavor.\nEither you use the fruit itself, and you use a liquid (could be dichloromethane for instance) that doesn’t mix with water, and that “captures” the flavor molecules but not the rest of the fruit. Then you remove that liquid and the fruit particles, and you get a mix of all the flavor molecules of the fruit, without the rest. That’s called extraction.\nWhat is often done is that chemists identify the main molecule responsible for flavor, and synthesize it. Sometimes multiple different molecules are synthesized to make a flavor that is closer to the real fruit (there can be hundreds of kinds flavor molecules in a fruit, so they pick the most important ones).\n\nFor the second question :\nFlavored soda water can be 0 calories because they only add the flavor molecules of the fruit (often the artificial flavor molecules). The calories in sweetened soda comes from sugar, because your body uses sugar as a source of énergie (calories measure the amount of energy you get from food). The main thing is : your body doesn’t use flavor molecules for energy. So by drinking water with flavor, you get no energy, so no calories. In other drinks, the sugar is added for a better taste, but the flavor always come from other molecules.\nIf you want the sweet taste without the calories, you need to add an artificial sweetener : that’s a molecule that tastes like sugar, but that your body doesn’t use for energy. You can also use a sweetener that is used for energy, but doesn’t give enough energy for it to really affect the calorie count of the drink.\n\nIf you have any follow up questions or if I answered badly, feel free to ask me again\n\nEdit : also look at u/peacheserratica ‘s answer above for the first question : you can get the flavor of the molecule without using a liquid for extraction by recolting the vapor that comes from heated fruits. You will get a different mix of molecules from the other methods I gave",
"In addition to what the top comment said, if a food has fewer than 5 calories per serving, it can be labeled as 0 calories. I’m guessing many of those flavored waters do have trace calories per serving from the flavor added.",
"Using two types of chemicals, esters and artificial sweeteners. Esters are the Chemical ingredients that give fruits, vegetables, plants... their smell and flavor. Esters have no calories. And artificial sweeteners like aspartame and many others have close to zero calories.",
"Essence is captured by the Scientist using a machine he developed primarily for the Gelfling. But it can be repurposed for strawberries."
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1hyfh7 | how do you type in a language that doesn't have an alphabet? | I was curious at how people type if they're typing in Chinese or Japanese or similar. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hyfh7/eli5_how_do_you_type_in_a_language_that_doesnt/ | {
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"Writing in Japanese using the English alphabet is called romaji. So what happens is you write the word in romaji on your keyboard, and the computer inserts the symbols. For example if you set microsoft word to Japanese and typed the word \"konbanwa\" it will revert it to the hirigana symbols. (I don't have the full version of microsoft so I can't provide the example... sorry).\n\nsource: This is how we typed essays in Japanese on the computer when I was taking Japanese in school",
"Japanese doesn't have an alphabet, but it's characters have a pronunciation that can be spelled out with a qwerty keyboard. Most keyboards can be switched between \"English\" and \"phonetic Japanese\". In English, I can type the word \"sushi.\" But if I switch my keyboard (it even works on my iPhone ) to Japanese, it automatically changes it into すし, (す=\"su\", し=\"shi\"). Those characters are \"hiragana\", the basic writing system in Japanese. But if I type in the Japanese keyboard, and enter すし, I have the option, by tapping on the space bar, to change those Hiragana into the complex character system of kanji, similar to Chinese. Thus, すし, with a tap on the space bar gives me 寿司 (寿=su, 司=shi). \n\nMake sense?",
"One topic you should definitely look up, closely related to this, is the Navaho code talkers of World War II.\n\nThe US used speakers of the Navaho language during World War II to send coded messages. This had several advantages:\n\n* Quick encryption and decrytion: Navaho speakers would hear the coded messages, and quickly write down what hey heard in English\n* Difficult for enemy to find a starting point: Navaho originally developed completely separately from languages spoken in Europe, Asia, And Africa, so the enemy have very little reference to even start decoding.\n* BIG BONUS: At the time, Navaho was ONLY a spoken language - there was no way to write it down!",
"For Chinese, like someone said, you can type in the \"sound\" of the word. Like 你好 is \"ni hao\". To type those Chinese characters, I had to type in \"ni\" and then \"hao\". Then every character that makes the \"ni\" and \"hao\" sound shows up, and I choose the one I am looking for. "
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ed06t7 | how do people start when making music? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ed06t7/eli5_how_do_people_start_when_making_music/ | {
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"There are tons of tools for making music, but nothing can make up for actually understanding it besides playing it. Pick an instrument (piano most readily translates to digital tools, but any will do) and pick up some music theory while you learn to play some of your favorite songs.\n\nTrying to learn how to make music using software without understanding how to play it is like wanting to write a screenplay without knowing how to read or write."
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3ffh3w | how do machines like cars and boats, use gasoline | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ffh3w/eli5_how_do_machines_like_cars_and_boats_use/ | {
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"That's a long-ish story, the key here is the internal combustion engine, you might want to look it up.\n\nA very short version: Gasoline, when in vapor form and mixed readily with lots of oxygen, doesn't just burn as it would if you light it while liquid, it actually explodes (i.e. the gasoline vapor reacts nearly instantly with oxygen and is consumed, releasing all its chemical energy).\n\nThe combustion engine has cylinders that move up and down and turn this linear motion into rotary motion of the engine using a crankshaft. The cylinders are essentially moved by the gasoline combusting when they're compressed, pushing them down and turning the crankshaft. This happens in all cylinders multiple times a second, resulting in a quickly turning crankshaft. You then have the rest of the mechanisms, the gearbox, differentials etc. that translate this turning motion into turning of the wheels (basically just a whole bunch of gears)."
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37g910 | why has the us, instead of any european country, filed charges against fifa? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37g910/eli5_why_has_the_us_instead_of_any_european/ | {
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"This is answered in the megathread but basically the bribery happened inside the US and the money passed through US banks. "
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6s7no2 | most animals lick their fur to clean it. so, how come they don't get their mouths full of fur which would be extremely annoying and uncomfortable? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6s7no2/eli5most_animals_lick_their_fur_to_clean_it_so/ | {
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"You know how cats cough up fur balls from time to time? That's from licking their fur to clean it.\n",
"Yes, they do. Cats vomit balls of fur every now and then. Their tongues are different than human tongues and probably don't *feel* it as gross and annoying as you imagine."
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24bxvn | why does the english language have so many exceptions? | Specifically relating to grammar and spelling. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24bxvn/eli5why_does_the_english_language_have_so_many/ | {
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"It's a living language. Unlike Latin, which is an example of a dead language, English is constantly being altered by its users. The way we speak, write, and communicate is constantly changing, and since not all of the changes have been logical, we are left with many inconsistencies. "
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3xxi5b | why does anyone allow their property to go into foreclosure? if you're no longer able to afford the mortgage why not just sell for whatever you can get? | Seems like that would be the best option in any case but I'm clearly misunderstanding something. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xxi5b/eli5_why_does_anyone_allow_their_property_to_go/ | {
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"There are a few reasons:\n\n-They could be upside down. So they can't even sell it. The bank would never let the sale go through. Sometimes people call up the bank in this situation and you end up with what is called a short sale. That has it's own problems.\n\n-They keep believing it will get better, or something will turn around. Stubborn. \n\n-Sometimes it's just to keep living somewhere. When you are broke w/ no where to go it takes a long time to kick you out. So it's a good option to ride it out. \n\n",
"Selling a property can take MONTHS. Also, if you purchase a property, and only make a few payments on it, even selling it for what you bought it for will leave you very much in debt. A mortgage payment consists of (usually) three things: principle, insurance, and interest. \n\nFor the first half of the mortgage's lifespan, most of your payment is going toward interest, with very little actually paying off the principle.\n\nOn my home, after one year, I think I had paid off roughly $200 of my actual principle, for example. "
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6yxi8b | why do we groan and make deep noises when lifting weights and in pain? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6yxi8b/eli5_why_do_we_groan_and_make_deep_noises_when/ | {
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"It's to do with the expulsion of air from our lungs. The more effort you put in to lift (or serve at tennis!) the more air is expelled and this can manifest as a grunt. \nPain is a bit different. Research says people who shout a swear word (cuss) experience less pain afterwards. We don't know why. Groaning in pain may be the same sort of thing. In any case, it could gain you more sympathy ;-) ",
"It tightens up your core and many people say you get strength from emotions. Theory here: maybe you get more strength because a grunt is somewhat a emotion.\n"
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6ep487 | why does exhaust smell different from car to car? | Older cars with loud mufflers smell different to me. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ep487/eli5_why_does_exhaust_smell_different_from_car_to/ | {
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"In perfect combustion, the only emissions would be water, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen from the air (plus trace elements), all of which are odorless. A car, particularly on older or modified one, may have issues that deviate from that. One running 'rich' has too much gas in the mix (or one cylinder isn't working right), and smells like gas. It might have oil getting past the piston rings, so smells like burnt oil and puts out black smoke. It might have coolant getting past the head gasket, which smells sickly sweet and produces white smoke. "
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cvjzip | why do video games cost so much to make? | I always hear that Triple A video games cost millions to make why is that? Is it that all cost of workers? Does it cost money for a single person to make a game? Thanks in advance | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cvjzip/eli5_why_do_video_games_cost_so_much_to_make/ | {
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"Get 100-200 highly smart and highly paid people on a team and pay them for a year to make a game. It adds up real quick.",
"Let's just take the basics of producing a game (and I'm sure I missed A LOT). From the top of my head:\n\n\\- Licensing an engine \n\\- Licensing an IP (if not working with an original one) \n\\- Paying the writer \n\\- Paying the design team, layout team, animation team, level design team, texture team, coding team, scripting team, management, \n\\- Contracting a voice acting company for recording, paying actors, mixing, editing, SFX \n\\- Contracting a composer (or several), hiring an orchestra, paying for the recording studio, mixing, editing, etc. Licensing any existing tracks vital for the score. \n\\- Paying/contracting a software testing team \n\\- Paying the overheads, electricity, 401K, insurances, cars, coffee, etc. \n\\- Paying for marketing, ad presence, con presence, news presence \n\\- Printing and producing physicxal copies, merch, etc. \n\n\nNow you CAN do nearly all of that yourself, and drastically cut down on cost, but you will have to be a trained programmer/writer/musician/businessman/marketing expert. And there's not much of those running around since the Commodore days.",
"It's just the sheer amount of work required. Think about, say, GTA or Assassin's Creed, or something similar. Someone has modelled an ENTIRE CITY to the finest detail, wrote hours worth of music, created, animated and voiced tons of characters, including the one you're playing, designed and tested hours upon hours of gameplay. Even excluding all technical work (e. g. working on a game engine, which some games do), the sheer amount of artwork is staggering. This is, mainly, why it requires large teams of people and huge sums of money to make one of these, and the only reason it is economically feasible to sell it for like 60 bucks is because many people play it.",
"Teams can be quite large, and a small number of teams I've worked on have had over 200 employees. \n\n\nOffice space has to be paid.\n\n\nSalaries have to be paid. The lowest paid devs usually still make 50k annually. I suspect (but am not sure) the average salary is at least double that. \n\n\nHardware has to be bought and paid for. This includes monitors, computers, accessories, and if it's for a console game, special consoles known as dev kits. I haven't worked on console in a long time, but I seem to recall back in the early/mid 2000s, a console dev kit could be over 20k. And you'd need a lot more than one. \n\n\nIf you are publishing for a console, you also have to submit your game to the console manufacturer for testing to ensure it meets minimum specified requirements and a few other requirements. That's also expensive because you have to pay the console manufacturers to submit the game for their review. And you cannot publish on their platform without their sign off. \n\n\nIf there is an online component, you also have to pay for the server farms.\n\n\nTo circle back to the salary bit... 100 * 50,000 = 5,000,000. So that is for headcount alone, and lowballing, for some of the larger game teams.",
"Because it takes a lot of time and you have to pay all those coders/artists for their hours of hard work.\n\nThen, you have to rent a studio for your team to work. Need motion capture ? Well those devices are not cheap, and you'll have to pay the actors as well.\n\nOh, and did I speak about marketing already ? Video-games market is saturated with indie productions so you better invest into ads if you want people to actually hear about your game and buy it."
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1wv1ln | why is windows vista so hated? | I have absolutely no clue why Vista has become so hated over the years, and from personal experience with it, I really didn't find it bad at all. In fact, I actually liked it. So why all the hate?
Edit: I already marked this as explained, but I feel the need to thank you for all your informative answers and opinions. Much appreciated clarification from everyone who answered. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wv1ln/eli5_why_is_windows_vista_so_hated/ | {
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"Vista's system requirements were much higher than XP's, and it dropped compatibility for a lot of software including drivers. For some people this meant that Vista ran slowly and either didn't support their hardware/software or crashed trying.\n\nThere were a lot of other changes made from XP to Vista, both in the interface and under the hood; and people don't usually like change.\n\nVista to 7 on the other hand had relatively little change, hardware and drivers had also gotten better, and old software was generally replaced.",
"**I'm pretty sure it is because of the complicated file management and performance/security/drivers issues when it was released.\n\nSource: Vista user",
"Three things pop up in my mind immediately from my experience: A lot of people didn't like User Account Control, because it made the computer stop practically every five seconds to ask you if you really wanted to run the program you just clicked on. It also took a ridiculously large amount of RAM to run compared to XP, which isn't really so much of an issue anymore. Third, it didnt support 16 bit programs, so a ton of programs and drivers that people were used to using suddenly didnt work.\n\nEdit: So, apparently my third point was way more complicated than I thought it was! Thanks to everyone who replied who explained it way better than I did.",
"It was kind of like Windows 95, in that Windows 95 wasn't really the finished product. Windows 98 was. Windows 95 had tons of problems, while 98 was really quite good.\n\nFor Vista, the finished product was Windows 7. Vista had a slew of problems, while 7 feels finished.",
"Here is a nicely explained (like eli5) blog-post regarding your question: _URL_0_",
"I bought Vista the day it was available and I remember being wowed by it. However I ran into problems almost straight away. There were no drivers for my video card at the time, nor could I get the audio to work. It took at least two months down the line until I could listen to music or play some games on my system.\n\nDisastrous start but I thought Vista was a good OS once the driver problems were ironed out. I honestly liked it, unlike ME and 8 - those were genuinely horrible to use. Vista made me happy to use Windows again.\n\nI only really use my computer for games, music and browsing. I'm sure it was very different for those who had to work, edit or compose media on Vista. I'm currently on Windows 7, which feels like the real 'Vista'.",
"The biggest [most widespread] issue was drivers. MS shipped Vista out before manufacturers had written driver updates. Many programs failed the transition. It left a lot of people hanging. It took weeks [and in some cases months] to get the drivers out to customers.",
"Prior to Vista SP2, there had been a notorious [memory leak] (_URL_0_) issue due to a change in memory management. \n\nMuch of the resentment to Vista lingered on due to the poor memory management, despite the fact that SP2 had operated significantly better than the initial release.",
"one thing that seems to have gone unmentioned was that Vista introduced the set of enhancements called Aero, that made the desktop environment prettier. However, for a long time, there was no way to turn aero OFF, which ended up meaning a serious performance hit on lower end systems. ",
"It crashed soooo much on me, I had to restart my computer so many times.\n\nEdit: I remember my friend said that when they unveiled vista, it crashed. ",
"For many people, there was no good reason to switch from Windows XP. This didn't have the wow factor of going to a shinier OS when all it seemed to do was create more hassles without increased functionality.",
"Higher system requirements, driver issues, and poor branding which implied that lower end systems could be able to run it acceptably when in fact they couldn't.",
"A quick added piece of information. When Vista first came out it claimed that it was easy to search for things. Finally windows would be good for searching better/faster. But you didn't now that the damn thing would eat your computer alive indexing stuff. Also it was the first to really do the whole UAC thing. That flashing black stuff etc.. This was new to people. Lots of this stuff is kinda in 7 but it is better and also people understand it more. But a lot of new users to Vista had a hard time getting used to all its administrator/UAC/safety/indexing crap. I remember trying to turn everything off. \n\nDrivers were a big issue. Compatibility was a big issue. This also happened around the switch to 64 bit so we saw some oddness in those growing pains. Really Vista was a growing pain, I think. \n\nIf you go from 7 back to Vista (now) you will mostly only notice a few small things that you will realize probably should have been in Vista to begin with. Some of the usability is a bit off in Vista and much better in 7. Those things are small but are probably the true problems with Vista. Most everything else (back in its day) was just bugs/issues/growing pains/new tech based.",
"Vista was reasonably stable for me, but very slow. My hardware at the time was Athlon 64 3200+, 4GB ram, ATI 9700 128mb, and 60gb/7200rpm HDD. Ran XP (32 and 64) very well. On Vista it was unbearable. I jumped to 7 when it was still beta, and even at that stage it was faster than XP and much better than Vista on that same hardware. \n\nW8 is not Vista 2.0. Its actually faster than 7 on the same hardware, driver support is better (more shit works on a fresh install), etc. The biggest problem with 8 is the bipolar UI that doesn't know what it wants to be - and that creates confusion with the users. Vista's UI was not that big of a paradigm shift from XP.",
"Oh, you young people... Now Windows Millennium Edition, *that* was a cluster-fuck-up of proportions.",
"Here, like you're five.\n\n* Shitty driver support\n\n* Bloated graphics features\n\n* Ate up too much memory\n\n* XP was still good, no reason to upgrade",
"When Vista was introduced, it only had driver support for 22% of hardware devices on the market. It seems that was the reason for the hate.",
"I can only speak from personal experience. Vista was glitchy and resource heavy on my computer and I noticed a huge performance increase after upgrading to Windows 7. ",
"Because a dual-core Vista computer with 1 GB of RAM ran slower than my Celeron XP computer with 512 MB.",
"Looking at a lot of comments here, this is not ask reddit, but ELI5. I'll take my shot for the less tech-savy:\n\nWhen Vista was new, the experience was similar to how Windows 8 is today. There were new features that people either found confusing or frustrating(Think of switching from Office 2003 to Office 2007 - huge difference). It felt very unstable before windows 7 even came out, whereas it's been patched over the years to be faster and **much** more reliable.\n\nWithout getting into technical details (Other comments cover those), I think that covers it",
"Vista SP1 was a resource hogging, buggy shambles. The later service packs fixed the buttons and by then the hardware has improved to satisfy the former of the two problems.\n\nEssentially. Buy an old vista laptop that came with SP1 and you'll feel our pain",
"As a Microsoft user from MS-Dos v3.3, I hated Vista because they had to just go and change everything for no good reason. They completely changed the control panel, which made it hard to set things they way you wanted to.\n\nI mean, they offered a lot of good stuff as well, but you had to get through the crap to get there. MS feel that have to give you a lot of changes, because they charge do damn much for the OS.",
"The ideas behind Vista were good, but hard to execute. All subsequent OS from Microsoft owe a lot to Vista. \n\nPrior to Vista, drivers ran at a privileged level on the OS, this made drivers run fast, but had a fatal flaw, a faulty driver could crash the entire system. To this day, Microsoft is still mocked for the blue screen of death, even though it doesn't happen anymore and in most cases it was caused by a third party driver crashing in privileged space.\n\nVista moved the drivers(*) out of privileged space, which had a profound effect. It was far more stable than XP, but it was slower (which is to be expected from this change) and the drivers were harder to program. Older drivers would not work under the new model and third parties were having a hard time playing by the new rules. Hence, many peripherals did not work.\n\nI did appreciate the change back then, seeing the computer blink and come back to life after a few seconds with the message \"Your display driver crashed\" was gold. I knew that would have been a blue screen in XP.\n\nAnother contentious issue was the User Access Control. Microsoft had a major problem in its hands, back then, many programs demanded to run as Administrator for no good reason other than laziness from the developers. This was a major security hazard and the internet was starting to make the threat very real. So Microsoft clamped hard on misbehaving programs. That's the reason for the never ending stream of UAC prompts. They did this on purpose to get everyone in line, but it bothered the hell out of users. \n\nYou can add to this a PR disaster with the Vista Compatible program. Machines that could barely do squat were flagged as compliant because Microsoft bowed to the demands of hardware manufacturers. There's even an email from a Microsoft exec complaining that he got caught by the misleading advertising. \n\nMicrosoft managed to polish the ideas and by Windows 7 it was all sorted. Like most of us, you probably haven't seen a blue screen in many, many years if ever. You have Vista to thank for that.\n\n(*) Correction: As noted in the comments below, this only applies to the Graphics Drivers.",
"I went from Windows XP to Windows 7. And I'll wait until Windows 7 support ceases, before I upgrade again, which should be another 10 years. Then I'll die.",
"As developer that went through the whole XP- > Vista- > Win 7 transition perhaps I can explain.\n\nXP had a lot of security and stability issues. It also had issues with memory management. When MS went down the Vista path, they made several significant changes. The main change that would affect most people was a new driver model. The reason they changed the driver model, was to make the OS more robust, and to try and prevent those pesky blue screen issues that occurred when you had a bad driver. MS attempted to get people out of kernel mode (where you have most control over the os) and into user mode. The problem is, for us driver developers, we are in new territory, and still learning, so a lot of our drivers were really unstable, and of course they were not backward compatible. MS's new model is good, and is a step in the right direction for security and stability, however the transition period that was Vista pissed a lot of people off.\n\nThe second issue was that Vista was transitioning to a new memory management model. In win XP, memory size and allocation was fairly static, but with Vista it became more dynamic, so that the OS and programs could make better use of memory.\n\nWin 7 is more or less the same kernel as Vista, its just been refined a lot more, and a lot of the smaller issues have been ironed out. There is still significant changes, but not like the XP- > Vista transition.\n\nTL;DR; Microsoft was transitioning to a new kernel. Lots of new changes and third party developers were still learning it.",
"Alright, I'm going to chime in here... because some things I see are close, some things are incorrect, and somethings I have personal relationship with....\n\nWe'll start small. Intel pushed hard on microsoft to set the recommended and minimum requirements for vista below their shit level chip so that it would be, \"Windows Vista\" certified... because they didn't want to take a loss on the chips they had already made. Vista came in 32 bit and 64 bit flavors, but driver support for 64 bit was lacking most of the life of Vista, and even 32 bit driver support at launch was paltry. I remember an install I did where a woman had bought a new HP printer with her new HP computer, and it wouldn't work, and I told her it wouldn't work until HP put out drivers for the printer. So at that point, I got tore a new one, and she returned everything. Microsoft also made major retailers pull most PC's that still had XP before launch so that Vista was a big push. This meant that when people returned vista pc's they had slim pickings on XP machines unless they went through a business channel. Vista also had new changes like UAC that broke many older programs, and at the same time, was not properly coded for by a lot of program makers, including quickbooks, which rather than update their software, wanted people to purchase a whole new version just to fix things. Vista also had a horrible knack for fucking up updates, which would hybrid the machine and the SxS folder(side by side) folder or the registry, which would leave the machine unable to do any further updates, and fuck up all sorts of other things... including permissions to keys on the registry. On rare cases where things reaaaaallly had to work, and the client was aware of the security issues, we would run cacls with a script that would damn near make everything writeable to everyone, and magically everything would work, but you now had a machine completely insecure. Adobe reader had a bad problem with doing the same thing. Service pack 1 improved things by a mile if you could get it to install, and service pack 2 greatly improved that. This was also the burgeoning time of .net 2.0-3.0ish time, and a lot of .net shit broke a lot of things. Biggest finger pointing I have is HP Printer Software shit on the consumer side. I've been fucked in the Ass more times by HP than a donkey in Tijuana. They had this really great install where it would install to 97 percent, fail, and then completely undo all the things it just did... except that it wouldn't, and it would break shit. They had shit uninstallers(L1,L2,L3, for the god of you, don't ever run L4.... it uninstalled .net) that rarely fixed things, and that gave people an overall impression that vista was shit. On top of that, I had a bitchin machine and it ran pretty well, but I didn't install anything on it, and the active backgrounds that came with Vista Ultimate had a memory leak, and your machine would run out of ram, and the desktop background would crash all the time... so fuck you vista for that. Also Antivirus had the ability to hose the network stack pretty regularly, and the only thing that typically fixed that was the standalone uninstaller tools for those programs(mcpr, symnrt, avgproductremovaltool....) all of those gave the operating system a pretty shit show.",
"It also was overly \"whiny\" about security requests and requirements. Users, without any technical knowledge, were constantly persisted to answer for permissions for which they had not prior knowledge or information (UAC).\n\nIt was very much a beta for Win7, which may be the best OS Microsoft ever released.",
"Switching to Linux was far easier then dealing with Windows Vista. I'm glad I did my will never look back! ",
"Lot of different things. But I guess what started it was UAC and from that on the hate started out to develop. UAC settings were incane. Windows asked you for permissions for every little change. Microsoft changed the setting later on, but the hate already developed beyond this and it was to late.",
"You're all wrong. The *real* reason Vista was hated so much is ***because XP SP2 was so good***.\n\nMany of you are probably too young to remember when XP first came out, but it had almost as many complaints as Vista did when it launched. Compatibility was a nightmare, it didn't run well on older machines, the UI was completely overhauled and people hate change...but most people were upgrading from Windows ME (which was a piece of shit through and through) or 98 (which was ancient) so it still felt like a step up. Anyone running 2K Pro (an extremely solid OS) wouldn't touch XP with a 10-foot pole before SP1 came out. But by SP2, XP was a phenomenal operating system and the best iteration of Windows up to that point. And that was over two years before Vista was released.\n\nVista SP1 fixed most of the issues people complained about (including UAC), and Vista SP2 was actually pretty good, but the damage was already done. Vista was a victim of XP's success.",
"bluescreens and compatibility, and again stability(bluescreens)",
"Way too high system requirements made it slow as fuck at release. It needed over 50% of the ram on a standard pc back then. Like if windows 8 would need 6gb ram. For todays pcs the requirements are insignificant of course.",
"It's probably been said, but I got about 1/4 way down and thought I'd just chime in, incase it clears up any other questions.\nWhen Vista came out it was a new model of OS. It was \"Mostly\" compatible of all the stuff you were used to. But imagine having maybe 20% of your stuff just 'not working'. No drivers. And drivers there were, were pretty lousy and had degraded performance/crashed often. \nDevelopers were still catching up. And the OS accelerated too far ahead. You had problems. \nThen the developers caught up. But the stigma was attached. So release Windows 7. (Built on Vista). The drivers were there. The support was there. And you had a new OS. \nVista *could* have been good, if MS got more manufacturers on-board with driver support, rather than trying to do it all themselves (Check MS Nvidia/AMD drivers vs official drivers for a brilliant example.)\n\nMS have learnt some lessons and failed in others. Windows 8 had some quite excellent driver support on release. Truly it did. But it tried too hard with it's UI and failed there. (Look at 8.1 for the backpedal). Touchscreens are cute, but a novelty. Much like 3D TVs. Great for Tablets. Lousy for PCs. And we will being \"Working\" (Read: Reddit'ing) at PC's for a long while longer yet.",
"When vista came out a lot of OEM computer makers were slapping vista on computers that were actually made for XP. And trying to get around the higher requirements. \n\nSo when the average person went out and bought a new HP only to find it slow and laggy, they blamed vista. \n\nThe problem is Vista was a huge leap forward , regular pentium 4 with 1GB of ram wasn't enough for vista to be decent. \n\nBy the time hardware had caught up (dual core, core2duo etc) we were near windows 7 release. \n\nMany OEMs did not have drivers in time. I remember when i got Vista my webcam, mouse, and graphics card had constant issue for months to come. \n\nWindows XP at the time ran all the apps with less resources , and by the time windows 7 came out it ran much better on the same hardware as Vista. ",
"A collection of things that resulted in (when compared to the solid Windows XP):\n\n- Poor performance\n- Poor compatibility\n- Poor user experience\n\nPeople realized fast that the same machine with windows XP was faster, easier and more compatible.\n\nAs simple as that, that's why it failed miserably. Windows 8 is going the same way.",
"When it first came out it was terribly bloated and it was advised that people go out and buy a new computer to run vista, people thought why would I spend all that money when XP runs fine on my machine anyway. Then Windows 7 was released as an improved OS with people saying this is what Vista should have been like in the first place. People switched to Win 7 and never looked back at Vista so assume it is still as bad as it ever was.",
"* it was slow and had high system requirements\n\n* driver incompatibilities \n\n* full of unnecessary gimmicks\n\n* xp still worked fine and oem's \"pushed\" vista\n\n* a lot of xp software didn't work on vista\n\nfor me a new pc with vista felt like an old pc with xp and tons of malware / bloatware \n",
"Vista is a weird case. It doesn't deserve all the criticism it got, but at the same time it did have a lot of faults.\n\nIf you had a PC with enough performance (specially 2 GB of ram or more) it was an excellent OS. It was stable and fast. After SP1 Vista would outperform XP by a decent margin in games. During my time using it (got it roughly 2-3 months after release) I didn't have a single computer crash. If something went wrong it would only affect that specific application unlike XP were it commonly would freeze up the entire PC.\n\nOne of the main things that caused all of this was OEM's shipping computers that weren't good enough to use Vista properly. They would make it \"Vista Ready\" then ship it with 512 mb of ram, suddenly you had thousands of users with their vista ready laptops who would just falter on the weight of Vista.\n\nAnother thing was people not understanding how prefetch works, those who came from XP would look at available memory then scream in despair \"VISTA IS HOGGING ALL THE MEMORY OMG\" when it reality it was just prefetch reserving memory for a faster user experience",
"there are already many good answers, but i still want to tell how i feel about this topic.\n\ni personally could understand if people have somewhat of a love/hate relationship to vista, but the pure badmouthing of the os is exaggerated, if you ask me.\n\nto the bad parts.\n\nvista was ressource hungry. that would have been less of a problem if it came out a year later or two, because ram would probably not have been so limited then and cpus, gpus and hard disks would also have been a bit better then. but what we got was this fat, relative to a fresh install of xp, os, struggling to run smoothly on hardware which was no problem for xp.\nand even if the hardware could handle vista, like my cheap core2duo dell from 2008, vista loved to run a hundred processes in the background, constantly keeping the hard disk active and sucking valuable power, when running on battery.\ni actually had to research for hours and come up with something like a 6-step-plan including some user unfriendly things like accessing the comand line to limit those activities to a minimum.\nbut other than that vista ran fine on this old machine with only 2gb of ram.\n\nanother thing was driver and program incompatibilies. so when upgrading to vista, you didn't just need faster/better hardware than using xp, there also were some things that just didn't work. was it a printer, scanner, audio cards.\ni was lucky i bought my laptop at a time when vista wasn't completely new anymore and the machine came with comaptible drivers out of the box. but upgrading and older xp-laptop, or even a self-assembled desktop was often not the best idea.\n\nso lets say you had a pc with enough power and compatible drivers for all of your hardware, vista still had some tricks to drive the average user insane and the best one was UAC: user account control.\nthis was a security measure which popped up a security message and completely dimmed your entire screen at the default setting as soon as you wanted to change a setting, or install a program.\nof course when you get your new pc, or want to start using a fresh install of vista in general, you first want to set up everything to your liking. change dozens of setting, install maybe dozens of programs and just twek everything to be comfy. now imagine for every action you make to get uac right into your face, dimming your entire screen and waiting for your permission to continue the task you yourself told the os to do.\nof course you could quickly type uac in the start menu, and practically disable uac with just a few clicks and a reboot/relogin, only having to deal with this nuisance once. that's always been one of the first things i do on a new system, even on windows 7, but that's not something the average user even knew was possible.\n\ni think those are the biggest cons of vista and of course it was and still is easy to argue against it, when xp was much more lightweight and still accomplished everything the average user wanted from it.\n\nbut after a little getting used to it, i actually didn't want to get back to xp. to me, vista just looked much more modern, and also was somewhat more intelligent.\n\nthe search function in every windows prior to vista has been a bad joke for example, if you ask me. i had to open a search window, type some letters, maybe even chosing other attributes to speed up the search.\nsince vista i just hit the windows key (or start button) and type three letters. chances are that the desired program/file/setting is already in the results or even highlighted and i can just press enter to access it. for me this was a game changer. no more dozens of shortcuts on a messed up desktop, no more tediously clicking through the start menu or control panel. launching programs suddenly was a breeze and all without havin to organise any shortcuts.\n\nof course you can argue that the search still was far from perfect, hell, not even in 7, or 8 it's anywhere near that. also, you could always go a head and install a third party search like google, or launchy on a machine running xp.\nbut i still think that integrating a usable and fast search in vista was huge and actually to me that is the biggest advantage everything after xp has.\n\nfurther regarding my \"more intelligent\" statement from above, i think it was vista, where the help function and troubleshooting tools of windows became something else than the farce they have been prior to that.\ni don't want to count the times when something in xp didn't work and i faithfully clicked on \"help\", just to be greeted by pages of generic and unhelpful documentation.\nbut in vista, sometimes when my wifi connection stopped working, clicking on \"troubleshoot\" really got it working again! if you had told me this in my xp-days i would have dumped you in a river to see if you were a witch!\n\nthere are probably tons of additional pros and cons, but for me those listed are the most important ones - and the ones i can think of from the top of my head.\n\nit may seem as if the negative aspects would far outweigh the positives and for many people that was probably true. i mean, what good is an os that doesn't run well on your hardware and is incompatible to your stuff?\nbut when you got it working and tweaked it to your liking it was a beautiful and extremely usable os and - like i said - one that i'd prefer instead of xp any day of the week.\n\nthe funny thing is that to me the much applauded windows 7 is nothing but an improve vista. much improved in some regards, yes, but still, the main changes have already been present with vista.\n\nbut in the end, it doesn't really matter what os you use, as long as you get accomplished whatever you want to do. just stay somewhat open minded and don't blindly follow the bandwagon as soon as people start to bash this piece of software, or that other thing.\n\ncheers!",
"It is dead slow, and asks \"is this ok? is that ok?\" more than a nervous child. Also, things everyone knew how to do and where to find were changed for no reason, forcing even seasoned veterans to go get a \"for dummies\" book.\n\nIn spite of that, I would rather use Vista forever than 8 even for a day.",
"Wow, I had (and helped others who have had) so much trouble with Vista. My first experience was on a new Vista machine. It came packaged with Vista, but was underpowered for the OS (unbeknownst to me). In fact, I don’t think there was any computer out that could run the OS at the time of its release.\n \nVista, throughout its lifespan, had a lot of problems. First of all, it crashed a lot. I often found something as simple as deleting a desktop shortcut, or an empty text file, would lock up a computer for minutes (or even permanently). Vista would just display a \"Calculating time remaining\" message. This was my biggest annoyance with the system. It would lock up trying to move a couple of bytes to the recycle bin. Ultimately I found that it was often quicker to go into command prompt and delete things that way.\n\nBut, best of all, Vista would become extremely bloated very quickly. Within a couple of weeks, even a well maintained install of Vista would slow down a great deal. After a couple of months a fresh install would be in order.\n\nReally the performance issues were too numerous to list – so I’ll stop here.\n\nI work with computers, and yes, they make me angry. But I ended up smashing a couple of (my own) computers in misplaced Vista rage during that time. I stuck with that rubbish OS for far too long, as MS always promised everything would be fixed come the next service pack. It wasn’t true.\n\nIn short Vista was rushed out, poorly designed, slow, buggy, falsely advertised, and unnecessary. XP was fine, but MS still decided that it could make more money by releasing Vista, so it rushed out a half arsed OS and pissed of a lot of customers.",
"I bought a computer with Vista that came originally with one gig of ram. It was not enough memory to run Vista well, so the computer froze and lagged and was generally unpleasant to use. Later, I upgraded the ram to two gigs, and it worked much better. In 2012, I upgraded that computer to Windows 8, and now it works great. People sometime compare Vista and Windows 8, but they are very different. Vista was unpopular because it did not work well. Windows 8 works quite well, but some people, at least, complaint because they do not want to learn a new interface (but it's really not hard to learn, and it adds a lot of new functionality). ",
"Hi, I'm someone who worked at a well known, high-end, gaming computer company that I will not mention. Some and a lot of the issues with Vista also falls on OEM's and hardware manufactures. For quite a few years before Vista was mentioned, we already knew about and were playing with early builds, and the general tone from Microsoft was \"hey, 64 bit is the future, here is vista in 32 bit and 64 bit, its coming soon, get working on it\" And we did what mostly everyone in the industry did and dragged our feet with it. No one wanted to let go of XP and everyone felt like having to develop 64 bit drivers was a waste because \"no one had compatible software anyways, right\"? If anything Microsoft was a little too ambitious with Vista, I mean it had XP to compete with and with the cost of memory quickly falling they figured that most OEM's would configure 64 bit and throw in plenty of memory to handle all the things Vista was doing in the background. I short, a lot of the blame also falls on the OEM's and hardware manufactures that just honestly, didn't care and knew MS wasn't going to throw them under the bus.",
"I worked in a call centre doing Vista networking support (hurray!). \n\n* XP was released in 2001. Vista was released in 2007. People got very cosy with XP and were going to be resistant to change. \n* It was really bloated and people were encouraged to upgrade on some systems that should not have upgraded. So performance was a problem.\n* Couple that with user account control, which was far more invasive in Vista, and on a slow system would take FOREVER to load.\n* New OS means new drivers, and Vista was a big change from XP. As a result, a lot of hardware stopped working and it took a long while for drivers to be released, if they ever got released at all.",
"- bad stability before service pack 1, DWM resets and blue screens galore\n- bad driver support, especially for 64 operating system\n- 64 bit versiuons memory caps, where you had to pay M$ more money if you wanted to use all the ram in your system\n- achingly slow\n- UAC badly implemented, causing endless interruption of workflow\n- none of the dos security model problems addressed (still the case, POSIX security model which is virtually unchanged for decades is widely acknowledged to be inherently more secure by everyone in the know)\n- vulnerable to a huge array of security hacks\n- windows networking broke compatibility with previous versions of windows unless you are part of a windows domain with a domain controller. people who used network shares at home faced hell with no help\n- not a reason, but as a supporting fact, vista was not adopted in virtually any enterprise/corporate setting, except for the most incompetent.",
"Because John Hodgeman is a chubby, middle aged man in a drab suit, while Justin Long wears a hoodie and has just a hint of facial hair. ",
"It was still better than Windows ME",
"Vista wasn't all bad, a clean installation of vista on a realy fast desktop worked just fine. I had built myself a new desktop after vista arrived due to a motherboard failure. I remember I got a intel quadcore Q9450. I tried both vista and xp. In vista the computer was actually a little bit quicker. It didn't have any problems running on modern hardware, but vista was poorly optimized so it was very sluggish on any thing other than top notch hardware. \n \nAt the time the average user were replacing desktops with laptops. With laptop you generally get less performance for the same amount of money. You are paying extra for mobility. These and a few other factors meant that computer stores were selling laptops that was under powered and had no hope of running vista properly.\n\nThis was especially true in the low end of the market. You needed a beast of a laptop to run vista back in those days. People that weren't tech savvy didn't understand what vista required from a laptop. When most people buy a laptop, price is one of the most important criteria. So many users ended up with computers that couldn't run vista properly, and when you add in bloatware and slow antivirus and all the other programs people install, the result was very poor performance.\n\nThe situation I just explained is just one of the reasons why vista failed. There were many other factors contributing. Nvidia had drivers problems with their graphic cards in windows vista, blue-screens were common. Creative didn't have proper drivers for vista for their sound cards. Many applications had to updated to run in vista. Some of the problems was also outside of Microsoft control, but we all know the result. Vista became a disaster.\n ",
"People are prone to groupthink. Once an idea, mindset or opinion becomes in vogue, you'd be hard pressed to find a take that goes against the grain. People like to fit in. This is very common online. It's why you see a lot of the same jokes come up over and over. \"Did you film this with a potato?\" I'm sure you're familiar with that one. \"Doge. Shibe. Much wow\" etc... \"Over 9000\" whatever, you get the point. It's much easier to defer to the hivemind than it is to exercise your own creativity. Nobody seems to have a problem with it either, as you often see those who make the umpteenth Doge joke get heaps of praise as if they were the genius who came up with it themselves. So yeah, pandering. Lots of pandering. It's no different than bro culture, just a different language. Mindless repetition in lieu of critical thinking.",
"You asked for an ELI5 version: Because Windows XP was the best. ",
"When over half of the internet isn't compatible with a software you are running, it will piss you off. \n\nI took that garbage off my PC and switched back to my beloved XP. \n\nI'm sorry baby, I should have never left you in the first place. ",
"Vista was a prematurely released OS. It added a lot of new features, but it was very bloated. It had significantly higher spec requirements than XP at the time, and many new computer manufacturers during the vista era would sell computers w/o enough RAM, among other things, and these weren't necessarily budget computers either. Windows 7 took all the vista bloat, and cleaned it up. \n\nMy 2006 dell e1405 could run windows 7 smoothly, but had speed problems with vista. \n\nSource: Worked at University IT during time when Vista was primary OS, had innumerable people asking to somehow give them XP. ",
"Nice try, Bill.",
"Here's why I hated it:\n\n* On the same hardware, it was *much* slower than XP. Just a massive, massive memory hog.\n* Tons of bugs at release, and just absolutely *brain-dead* bugs. For example: As you type in the search bar in the start menu, each keystroke starts a new search process, but originally didn't kill the old one. If your disk wasn't completely indexed, typing a five letter word meant you had five separate processes crawling through your entire disk, bringing your machine to a halt.\n* Tons of new features that nobody asked for, like desktop widgets and shiny effects, yet XP was still better for pretty much everything else.\n* The very few improvements, like a new version of DirectX and Internet Explorer, were blatantly artificial -- reverse engineers very quickly found a way to install the new DirectX on Windows XP.\n* The very best new features, like UAC, were broken -- on Win7 and later, you really don't get bugged much with UAC prompts, maybe *once* when you install. With Vista, installing anything significant required several UAC prompts.\n* Broken compatibility in a big way. I'm convinced Win7 is more compatible with WinXP than Vista is. Even stuff like dropping the DOS support -- not a huge deal, because DOSBox is a thing, but why'd you have to do that?\n* Broken drivers, especially, for similar reasons.\n\nThe list just goes on and on. Maybe Vista was better by SP1, but by then, it already had the reputation, and no one was going to touch it with a 10 foot pole so long as XP still worked. Win7 basically fixed all the stuff Vista did wrong, and is the release Vista should've been -- though part of that is because programs were patched for Win7, but even Win7's compatibility mode seems better.\n\n* Win7 was usable at release. Actually, tons of people were happy with the *beta* builds. That's a first for Microsoft.\n* On the same hardware, Win7 is faster than Vista, and if you have enough RAM for it (which is cheap), Win7 is faster than XP.\n* UAC pretty much works the way it should -- you get one prompt at install time.\n* Better compatibility, better drivers, *fixed* drivers.\n\nBut you could argue Win7 is basically a long-awaited service pack for Vista. It's basically Vista, but with everything fixed.\n\nProbably a more interesting thing to look at is Win7 vs Win8. Win8, to me, is an example of how Vista should have gone. It adds a ton of new functionality to Win7, changes things around so people hate it, and so on... but it *doesn't break stuff.* Everything you could do in Win7 still works fine in Win8. It's *faster* on the same hardware. The biggest thing Win8 changed was adding all that tile stuff, but even if you hate it, it at least *works properly* -- Vista's new search bar is an example of a shiny new feature that was *broken* on release.\n\nSo in the worst case, if you absolutely hate Win8, chances are you just hate [that tile shit](_URL_1_), which means you could download something like [Classic Shell](_URL_0_) and Win8 would actually be an *improvement* over Win7 for you. Whereas if you didn't like the new stuff Vista was doing, it was very much a *downgrade* from XP on the same hardware.",
"Due to higher system requirements, Vista felt bloated, buggy and clumsy when compared to its predecessor, XP (Which was on its 2nd service pack, mostly bug-free with ~100% compatible drivers built in). Also, while we all impressed by the glossy bubbly aero themes, they were resource hungry and noticeably affected performance.\n\nEarly adopters of Vista found that for the first year or so, their USB peripherals no longer functioned properly and for some older model accessories, manufacturers chose not to provide updated drivers and we had to go out and buy new webcams. ahem Logitech cough cough\n\nAs Windows ME was a like an unfinished prototype version of XP, Vista was like a prototype for Windows 7. With most new technologies, both hardware and software, after a total overhaul and new implementation, it's usually best to wait for its second iteration. ",
"well since all i see are lies here I guess its my job to educate.\n\n1. Vista can be run on 300Mb of ram with a single core processor.\n\n2. Aero glass had to be turned on it was off unless you told it to turn on at first set up.\n\n3. Microsoft did not get sued for putting out vista on PCs that couldn't handle it. HP and other OEMs got sued for selling Windows XP computers as \"vista ready\" upgrades, without Dvd drives. meaning you could not install Vista at all since it only came on Dvd. \n\n4. 3rd party companies are responsible for making there products work with New OS's not the otherway around. So saying that Product XYZ didnt work on vista is not a reason for people to have hated vista but a reason people should have hated the company that refused to write an update to there program.\n\n5. Vista was tested more then you would have believed possible. at one point i spent 2 weeks straight attempting to create major issues that Vista could not recover from and failed the vast majority of the time. \nlet me say that again, \"I Failed to break the OS\" as in i attempted to gut the registry i turned it off in the middle of installs I infected it with viruses I tried everything i had ever heard of someone doing wrong to a PC to try and get that shit to fail and it recovered from just about everything. It was tested retested and when the testing was done here they shipped it out to beta and had us test it for 2 months with live customers and everything worked fine. The only things that had issues that could be blamed on the OS is the failure to authenticate issue which is the one thing they didnt think to test since they had used it for hundreds of products before this..\n\n\nTLDR vista was hated because 3rd party companies were not ready to upgrade and users are too stupid to realize whose at fault for this. users blamed Microsoft and the other companies threw them under the bus.\n\n",
"The main issue(aside from certain hardware incompatibilities) was that OEMs everywhere slapped a \"vista ready\" sticker on their hardware that was far below the specs required to run it. Aside from lack of RAM, Vista is largely dependent on a GPU to handle its GUI, so that's where a large part of the memory hole came from(that is, you'll almost never see a non-integrated GPU in an OEM computer).\n\nVista on a capable system is all fine and dandy, but on your average OEM computer at the time, it was complete shit.",
"This all reminds me when i took the windows vista sticker thingy off my old laptop, and on my washing machine as a joke. A few days later said washing machine stopped working. I still think this cannot be a coincidence."
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3mbyps | if states like co and others can legalize marijuana outside of the federal approval, why can't states like ms or al outlaw abortions in the same way? | I don't fully understand how the states were able to navigate the federal ban, but from a layman's perspective - if some states can figure out how to navigate the federal laws to get what THEY want, couldn't other states do the same?
(Note: let's not let this devolve into a political fight, I'm curious about the actual legality and not whether one or the other is 'right') | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mbyps/eli5_if_states_like_co_and_others_can_legalize/ | {
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"Both are cases of states choosing not to follow the federal law. The difference is, in one case the federal government decided not to bother enforcing its laws on states that don't want to follow it.",
"The federal government prohibits the sale of pot in interstate commerce. This is a federal criminal law based on Congress's ability to regulate commerce among the states. \nJust like a police officer can choose not to pull you over if you're going 56 mph in a 55 mph zone, federal law enforcement officers can choose not to enforce the criminal laws. Of course, the police officers could enforce that law if they wanted, and if circumstances change they may (a new sheriff, increased fatalities on a particular stretch of road because of speeding, or even the weather making the road more dangerous).\n\nJust like my 55 mph example, the FBI and DOJ have been instructed not to enforce federal criminal laws related to marijuana in the states that have legalized its sale, so long as a number of safeguards are in place. That all could change tomorrow, and the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government does have the right to charge folks criminally for drug laws even when their state has legalized the drug (because the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution makes federal laws superior to state laws, when Congress has the authority to act, and when the laws conflict).\n\n\nThe right to an abortion isn't a federal law -- it's a right guaranteed by the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. This is an individual right-- just like the right to free speech, to bear arms, and not to be searched without a warrant. Like those other constitutional rights, Congress, and the states can put reasonable restrictions (no gun possession for felons, no speech that incites riots, searches incident to arrests) but can't pass a law that says \"No one can own a gun; no one can criticize our governor; officers can search your house whenever they want.\"\n\nIf Alabama prohibited all abortions, an individual would challenge that in court, saying their individual rights were violated and the law was unconstitutional, and the court would agree and prohibit the law from taking effect. It doesn't matter what Congress would want, or what the President would want. The abortion right (for now, at least) exists in the constitution and is guaranteed to individuals.",
"Colorado and Washington are not so much legalizing marijuana as removing state laws that make it illegal. States aren't required to enforce federal laws, and in many cases, like immigration, are discouraged from doing so. Marijuana remains illegal on the federal level, but the feds lack the resources and the inclination to go after state level operations.\n\nAbortion is legal, not due to federal law, but a supreme court ruling on the constitution, that covers all federal, state, and municipal laws. Any law passed contrary to this is unconstitutional.",
"Law student here. Basically, the Supreme Court struck down the state laws banning abortion. So those laws cannot be enforced.\n\nHowever, marijuana is regulated by state and federal laws. So a state can remove their prohibition, but it's still illegal at the federal level. The federal law would need to be repealed, or struck down in order to no longer be in effect.",
"While most of the responses on this have been correct in terms of the power of the SCOTUS and the Supreme Clause, but I think one thing that hasn't been discussed that would be quite important is being able to show judicial standing.\n\nStanding is the legal term for a person to have the capacity to bring a case to court. In order to show standing, you have to show that you have somehow been damaged by the governments action/inaction (Note, Have been, not will be. The damage generally needs to have actually happened). So, lets look at these two items: Not enforcing a Marijuana federal standard, and outlawing an abortion.\n\nMarijuana: By the feds declining to enforce a federal standard (Which is within the power of the Executive branch, they have the power of priority), you haven't taken away a person's right. If you don't smoke, there is no change to your rights (You didn't smoke before, you don't smoke now), and if you do, you have been given expanded rights, so no infringement there. Therefore, it would be VERY difficult for a person to show standing to even start a case to force the Feds to enforce said laws.\n\nAbortion: Here, it's different. Here the Feds say it's okay and the State says it is not. The moments that State forbids you from having the abortion, you are able to show direct harm from the states actions (Being forced to take the pregnancy to full term, the money required to have a child and the care around it, etc etc.). By showing direct harm, you have now shown that you have Judicial Standing to bring a case against the State for a violation of the rights given to you by the Federal government. Which means you can take the case to court and they would be obligated to rule on it (For or against, doesn't matter in this instance, but they would be obligated to rule).\n\nA rule of thumb on these sort of things is the States can go above a federal standard, but they can never go below. Since the feds in the Marijuana issue are deciding non-enforcement (Thus, there is no rule at this moment), the States can work above that level of rule (Whatever they decide, but it's above the level that the Feds have enforced). But, with abortion, since the Feds have stated a minimum level of a right, a state can't go below that. By doing so, they would give immediate standing to anyone denied that federal right and I would expect a challenge either from the first person that gets standing, or in some instances, a group that gets standing simply by showing that the violation is so large and imminent that standing is given by the court to represent.\n\nSo there you go.. hopefully a ELI5 on Standing, and how that would be the first thing that would come up if someone decided to move on these two items. =)",
"It's a question of active or passive change.\n\nLegalizing marijuana against the will of the feds requires that the state do precisely *nothing.* Don't arrest them. Don't try them. Don't jail them. Don't fine them. Don't even report it as happening.\n\nBanning abortion, on the other hand, is an *active* change. In order to do so, they have to send people to prevent it from happening. They have to arrest people. They have to actively do *something* for that to happen. At that point, all it takes is a single wronged individual to sue in federal court, and the state is out a few million dollars. And this can continue until the state stops, or they're bankrupt.\n\nBut with legalization of things, what action can the feds use as grounds for lawsuit when actions are specifically not being taken? Oh, sure, they could *try* to bring up the state for not enforcing laws, but that would set a precedent that would effectively neutralize executive orders, and neither Feds nor the States want that.",
"Two things. Marijuana is illegal because of federal law. It just so happens that this administration isn't interested in enforcing it. That could change literally tomorrow. \n\nAbortion is a legal right in America since Roe V Wade. As such, states don't have the right to outlaw it. They can restrict it reasonably as long as they don't create an undue burden. ",
"Your right to abortion access is protected by the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe V. Wade. There is as yet no equivalent supreme court ruling regarding legality of marijuana outside of the supremacy clause which states that federal law surmounts state law. This clause, however powerfully it is written, remains subject to application. If the attorney general declines to pursue marijuana cases, federal law effectively becomes null in that regard. \n\nBut again, since there is a SCOTUS ruling protecting the legality of abortion, attempts to illegalize or even minimize access to the point of unobtainability are a violation of law. ",
"Forgetting the whole federal vs. state law issue, and even SCOTUS. Think of it this way: You can do anything you want until it's made illegal. That includes selling pot and getting an abortion. \n\nIn the case of marijuana in Colorado, there's a state law *missing* (i.e., one banning the sale of pot). In the case of banning abortions, a state law would have to *exist* — and the federal government has said that those laws cannot be enacted.\n\nSo states \"legalize\" marijuana by, in a sense, *not* passing a law, but they would have to ban abortions by *passing* one... which they cannot.\n\n",
"They can't legalize marijuana. The feds can, at any time, step in and throw every single person with pot -- medical or otherwise -- into federal-fuck-my-ass-prison. They haven't because they're worried about public backlash.\n\nRed states haven't done this with abortion because they know they wouldn't get away with it. Public demand for legal abortions are way higher than for strict pot enforcement.",
"1. They haven't exactly legalized it *per se*. They repealed state laws against it, but it remains illegal under Federal law. The Federal government could enforce the federal law, it just currently is not doing so under President Obama. However, a future President could begin enforcing the federal law again.\n\n2. Basically this is possible because (a) states aren't required to enforce federal laws, and (b) courts can't force the executive branch to enforce laws.\n\n3. Banning abortion however, would require prosecutions to go through the court system, which would reject the state law due to the Supreme Court rulings. Basically, this type of thing only works to \"legalize\" things, not to make things illegal, since prosecutions require the cooperation of the judicial branch.\n\n4. An appropriate analogy might be, suppose that Indiana repealed its minimum wage law and a future Republican president refused to enforce the federal minimum wage. (Or laws requiring companies to allow the formation of unions.) In those situations they could do something similar.",
"Federal Law trumps State Law, and a Supreme Court ruling trumps legislation. Remember that, it's important.\n\n*Enforcing* federal law is an executive function, and the president is the Chief Executive. The Obama administration has instructed the DEA and the DOJ not to pursue action against states that are passing laws to legalize and regulate (and tax) marijuana.\n\n*Everyone selling or possessing marijuana in states where it has been legalized is breaking federal law*. The Federal government has just said \"hey, if your state wants to try out legalization, we'll not interfere for now\". This could literally change any day. The government has the only standing to insist that the law be followed.\n\nIf a State bans abortion, then they're also breaking federal law. The thing with abortion is that a woman who is refused an abortion has standing to go to court herself and demand that the federal law be followed. Lawsuits like that are out of the executive branch's hands.\n\nWhich means every state that tries it gets sued in Federal court and loses.",
"Allowing ppl to choose weed or not has no affect in the constitution. I could argue denying ppl that right IS unconstitutional. \n\nDenying a woman the right to decide what happens inside her own body IS an infringement in her rights. Believe it or not.\n\nThat is the difference. ",
"I'm surprised that nobody is mentioning that Nebraska and Kansas (I think those are the states) are suing Colorado (or planning to). My understanding is that disputes between states go directly to the Supreme Court. If the legality of Colorado's laws concerning pot goes to SCOTUS then those laws will be struck down because they have no defense at a federal level. Haven't read up on I in a while, but reading these comments it's like nobody knows about this.",
"It's because the people of CO are mostly cool with it and not causing a big fuss. Since they are happy, the fed is staying out of it knowing that they will probably adopt the same laws soon. On the other hand, if states starting convicting people of having abortions there would rioting in the streets. The fed would have to step in",
"/u/kouhoutek has a great answer. What I will add to this is that after California legalized medical marijuana, the DEA still raided dispensaries. ",
"The Federal prohibition on abortion is a matter of Constitutional law, which, through the Fourteenth Amendment, prevents states from restricting the right involved. Additionally, any individual can enforce this right by challenging a state law which impinges on their right.\n\nThe Federal prohibition on marijuana, on the other hand, is a matter of statutory law, and the Federal government is the only entity that can choose to enforce it (unless a state has chosen to do so...but that's not relevant here). If they choose not to, then no one else can.",
"Abortion technically has a Supreme Court protection through Roe v. Wade; the only way to really make it illegal is a Constitutional Amendment.",
"ELI5: Why would you want to outlaw abortions?",
"Marijuana legalization does not infringe on a persons civil liberties, Banning abortion does.",
"Technically they can. Likely they don't have the voting climate needed to do so & if they did manage to get it done there is a massive liberal legal machine waiting to pounce & take them to court which is a fight they would lose & they know it. ",
"Abortion has been found to be a fundamental right by the Supreme Court. Therefore, States can't outlaw it in the same way that they can't ban interracial marriages, and now, gay marriage.",
"Considering there's literally just one abortion clinic in MS, and it's under CONSTANT nitpickering and legalese-loopholing to try and get it shut down (seriously, opponents have tried to get it closed down for things as insignificant as parking-lot lighting and storage-closet door sizes), then really, MS almost already has outlawed it, by virtue of efforts at making it impossible to get one in the state.",
"Abortion is a Constitutional Issue. The Supreme Court has said that laws prohibiting abortion are unconstitutional (Roe v. wade). US Constitutional issues trump all other state and federal laws. So no state law prohibiting abortion would survive as the US Constitution is the ultimate law of the land.\n\nMarijuana is currently legal at the state level in a few states, but still illegal at the Federal level. Technically, everyone in Colorado, Washington, etc, who buy and consume pot that is legal at the state level, are likely violating Federal criminal law. \n\nHowever, the Federal government criminal enforcement arm has indicated that it will not prosecute people for marijuana criminal issues for ordinary users in the states that have legalized it at the state level, in order to respect state rights. This is simply presidential policy, and could change with a new president, who might deciding to start enforcing federal drug law in Colorado, Washington etc. against pot users.",
"Basically, marijuana laws are not a constitutional issue.\n\nAccording to the supreme court, abortion is.\n\nStates are not requited to enforce federal laws, nor are they required to pass laws in accord with federal law.\n\nBut they are required to abide by the constitution of the united states.\n\nFederal Legislation and the constitution are not the same thing.",
"Here's my interpretation, but IANAA. \n\nThe law of the land is the United States Constitution. \nThe Constiution states that federal laws trump state laws. \n(Article 6, Clause 2, i.e. \"the supremacy clause\")\n\nThe 10th Amendment then says that federal laws are limited to powers granted explicitly by the Constitution and that \"all is retained which has not been surrendered\", or in other words anything not stated as a federal power is to be left up to the states. \n\nThe Constitution grants Congress (the feds) the power to levy taxes, mint money, declare war, establish post offices, punish piracies on the high seas, regulate interstate commerce, and a few other things but pretty much nothing as far as I can tell about prohibiting the possession of marijuana. \n\nThe Supreme Court of the United States determines what is or is not Constitutional, and as the highest court in the land whatever they say goes. \n\nThe SCOTUS determined that abortion is Constitutional, and as such no lower courts can create a law against it, because that would violate the Constitution. \n\nThey have yet to rule on marijuana, but I suspect they will rule in favor of non-prohibition when they do. ",
"Very simply a State can always give _more_ rights to an individual than the Constitution or Federal law mandates, but never less.\n\nSo a State can say, \"It's all right to smoke pot.\" They are not restricting anybody's rights, in fact, they are granting one.\n\nA State cannot say, \"Sorry, you are three seconds pregnant but you cannot get an abortion,\" because it was essentially held at a Federal level that in the first trimester there can be no restrictions on a woman's right to end a pregnancy. The State cannot restrict that right which was found to be a fundamental one.\n\nIf a State wanted to pass a law saying, \"You may abort up until the time of birth\" that would be allowed because it is a broader granting of rights, not a more restrictive one.",
"If there are two states in the union that NEED Planned Parenthood, they would have to be Alabama and Mississippi.\n\nSource - I live in Alabama",
"The right to abortion is guaranteed by the US constitution (or at least, by the Supreme Court's interpretation of the US Constitution).\n\nMarijuana is banned by a law passed by Congress. Federal officials can enforce this law nationwide. However, states do not have to cooperate with it. If a state does not have a law banning marijuana, then state law enforcement can't do anything about it because they are not federal agents. That is why, in states like Colorado, marijuana won't get you into trouble, because the local cops can't do anything, and federal agents are few and far between.",
"The government cracks down a lot harder on states that remove rights compared to those that grant them.",
"Roe v. Wade was a Supreme Court decision in 1973 that made it unconstitutional for states to altogether outlaw abortion. Thus, any law passed in contravention of Roe v. Wade is unconstitutional and unenforceable. The only thing remotely resembling this in re marijuana was Gonzales v. Raich, which held that the federal government has the power under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to prohibit the growing and use of marijuana in any state and to enforce that prohibition even in states where marijuana is legal, BUT, they can't make the states do their dirty work and enforce their laws, nor can they stop states from legalizing marijuana inside their own boundaries. So, the Feds could still come to Colorado and arrest a Coloradan sitting on his front steps smoking a J, but they can't force the Boulder Police to do the arresting. They could butt in if state laws were in direct contravention of the Controlled Substances Act (the big drug law), like if state officials started growing and selling marijuana themselves, but short of that, the feds really can't do shit, nor do I really think they would- not worth the time and $. Also, not trying to pick on Kouhoutek, but he's wrong- Colorado and Washington definitely legalized marijuana in their respective states. There's a difference between decriminalization and legalization, and they did the latter. ",
"remember that state law trumps federal law unless the constitution specifically grants that power to the federal gov. now it is a fact that the constitution does not give the federal govt any power over drug enforcement(although it becomes federal domain if you ship pot across state boarders, or if you ant to get a loan for your dispensary) ",
"Because marijuana is not explicitly outlawed by the Supreme Court, where abortion is explicitly allowed by it.",
"Some people are posting that it is because the federal government isn't enforcing marijuana laws. And that is mostly true. But I should mention that there is a good chance that if the federal government tries to enforce Marijuana laws with a state, they would likely fail.\n\nThe Supreme court would be the first place that the fed. government would have to go to over turn legalization laws of states.\n\nThe States would likely argue with the Commerce Clause of the US constitution.\n\nLink: _URL_0_\n\nIn short, the commerce clause gives the federal government with the power to regulate interstate and international trade, but limits its ability to interfere with trade inside the state.\n\nThere is a strong case to be made that as a good/service, the federal government can't interfere with the sell and consumption of marijuana within a state.\n\nWith abortion, it really isn't a matter of trade, but rather the rights of a women to control her body. And the supreme court has set the precedent of ruling that it is a women's right, at least up to a certain time. ",
"Good question -- and I'll give a point of view a bit different from the top commenters.\n\nAbortion is a *right*. If a state bans abortion, you can go sue that state because your right to have an abortion was violated by the state. I, as an American, have the right to have an abortion (though I'll never exercise that right because I'm male, but I have it). On the other hand, I don't have the right to stop people from smoking marijuana. They don't have the right to do it, sure, but I don't have the right to stop them either. So what a state can do is decide that they will stop considering marijuana illegal. I can't sue them, because I'm not an injured party. There's a federal law against marijuana, but that doesn't mean that the state needs to have this kind of law as well, so I don't really have any grounds to be upset if my state legalizes it.\n\nHowever, it's still against federal law. The federal government could come and arrest people for possessing marijuana, and that would be totally fine. Thing is, the federal government has other priorities. Basically, it's bad policing -- it's like if a cop saw you jaywalk but didn't ticket you! But if the federal government wanted to crack down on marijuana, they certainly could, and they do on occasion. The state laws that legalize it or decriminalize it only affect the behavior of the state law enforcement.\n\nSo, to sum up, abortion is a right that you have and it can't be taken away from you by the state. Marijuana is a crime according to state and federal law, but the state can stop considering it a crime and the federal government can stop giving a shit.",
"Woah woah woah. MS resident here. They actually have practically outlawed abortions here. There is 1 women's clinic in the entire state, and they aren't allowed to advertise or anything. So yeah, nobody is getting an abortion in MS.",
"In some respects, several states have nearly banned abortion. Texas for example passed a law which required the procedure to be performed at faculties that met certain criteria (I don't remember what it was specifically, but it effectively mandated that abortions could only be performed with in a few miles of a full-fledged hospital of which only Dallas-Ft Worth, Austin, Houston, and San Antonio have). The wording was specific enough not to outright ban abortion, but even the Republican party pushing the law outright admitted to the point of the bill to be eliminating access to abortion. \n\nIn a similar way, this is what CO did. Not only was marijuana illegal at the federal level, it was also illegal at the state level, because of this, a state or municipal officer was granted the power to arrest and fine a person in possession without the need of a federal agent. By rescinding the state prohibition, officers in that state can not arrest anyone as it is not illegal at the state level, unless they proceed to try the case in a federal court, which would be far too time consuming and costly. That said, a federal officer could arrest because they are able to enforce federal laws and would have immediate access to federal courts. This is part of the reason why if you go into Denver International Airport with pot, you will be arrested because almost every airport, although owned and operated by local municipalities, are considered federal lands.\n\nTL;DR its all about loopholes to get around the law without directly being in violation of the law",
"So to piggy back on /u/kouhoutek said, Supreme Court Rulings, because of Madison V. Monroe, apply to all scopes of constitutional law, from federal to municipal. You can remove a state's criminal law prohibiting a drug, but a state can't force the Feds to change the rest of the states' laws about it, unless the Supreme Court Rules so, or a constitutional amendment is passed.",
"2 reasons. \n\n1. Ignoring what the federal government says you MUST do (allow abortions) is much more serious than ignoring what the government says you CAN'T do (allow marijuana consumption)\n\n2. The Fed gov't doesn't actually care about marijuana. ",
"States can essentially only add rights, not take them away. So abortion cannot be outlawed but Marijuana can be decriminalized",
"Technically because the federal laws trump state laws the DEA could come knocking down the doors at any time for MJ legal states. Although it's legal in CO and other states its still against federal law, so if you get caught by a DEA officer you can still go to prison. The states can state whatever laws they want, but the federal government can come in at any times and punish you. The feds haven't done anything because in the end people are starting to look at MJ differently",
"The government isn't required to enforce all of its laws unless someone can demonstrate that they are being harmed. So if the government failed to enforce the clean water act someone could show harm and sue the government for failing to enforce the law. It's really hard for someone to show harm from a lack of enforcement of marijuana prohibition. \n\nBy contrast what MS and AL want to do is prevent people from having an abortion. It's incredibly simple to find a plaintiff that has standing since the first person who wants an abortion but is denied has a case to be made against the state for interfering with their rights. \n\nUltimately laws thought are judged on whether they interfere with constitutionally protected rights. It's way easier to say that you have the right to smoke marijuana than it is to argue that you can't smoke marijuana. Similarly it's far easier to argue you have the right to an abortion than it is to say you can't have an abortion. The law is tilted towards personal freedom except when it interferes with someone else's rights (you can't stab me). There are obviously exceptions and pro life advocates would argue the fetus is a person however Roe v Wade concluded that a fetus is not a person therefore the only person's rights who are being infringed is the woman seeking an abortion. ",
"Rights. State laws against abortion ( and racial, gender, and other types of discrimination) were found by the supreme court to violate the basic rights of citizens.\n\nThere's no question of rights about legalizing marijuana, so states are free to do what they do. The court won't likely find you have a right to be free from others getting high.\n\nTry to remember, the stated purpose of laws is to protect citizens' rights, or the rights of the community ( collective citizens), and it may be easier to reason it out?\n\nEdit: spelling, grammar",
"Abortion was found, at least in the American context, to be in the \"penumbra\" of an unenumerated \"right to privacy\". Essentially, it was created whole cloth by the SCOTUS at the time. And the reason why groups want to challenge it constantly because, even for abortion supporters, they know the case law is shaky and could face reversal in front of a friendly court. this is not advocating one way or the other. just a professional legal opinion--Roe v. Wade is terrible case law. if it were decided on a bit more solid basis, less groups would attempt to challenge it.",
"Because no one cares about marijuana anymore. If they legalized / illegalized abortion, they would lose it as an issue to mobilize voters against.",
"I aborted a chipotle burrito about an hour ago. I'm sure it would have grown up to be a fine young man, but I'm not about to raise a Mexican",
"According to the majority opinion on Roe v. Wade, banning abortions abridges the rights women who seek a safe way to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Per Justice Blackmun:\n\n\"...the fundamental right of single women and married persons to choose whether to have children is protected by the Ninth Amendment, through the Fourteenth Amendment...\"\n\nNow the Ninth Amendment's text is: \"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.\"\n\nWhich, really, is a very arcane argument to make: The Constitution outlines certain rights, which everyone indisputably has, and the 14th Amendment conveys those rights to individuals, via the due process of law clause, \"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.\"\n\nThe enumeration of the Bill of Rights being inalienable rights of citizens isn't explicitly spelled out in the Constitution, rather it's the result of many court cases which began to use the first 10 Amendments as a readily accessible quantification of what the due process clause meant by 'Life, Liberty and Property'.\n\nAnd it's this vagueness, this extremely subjective interpretation of what really constitutes 'Liberty' which lies at the heart of the ongoing controversy over abortion. The Ninth Amendment rights could theoretically be interpreted to guarantee the right to do ANYTHING not explicitly condoned by the powers of government to regulate, unless the exercise of such a right would infringe on the rights of other people. Which is why the issue keeps defaulting back to the controversy of the 'personhood' of a foetus.",
"It's hard to see from reading the text of the constitution or the bill of rights where it guarantees the right to abortion. Supreme Court justices over the years have been able to find it though. This illustrates the importance of realpolitik, the constitution is meaningless if the people in power do not uphold it. Of course, abortion is a good thing on net.\n\nAnyways the supreme court ruled the states laws were against the constitution so the laws were repealed. The states where people don't want abortion have enacted many restrictions to limit the proliferation of abortions and these are semi effective.\n\nOn Marijuana the federal government has not brought the issue to trial and has not tried with all its might to stop it, probably because it's unpopular and the sympathies of those in charge are with the legalization movement. The federal government can't force state to enforce federal laws. The federal government could stop the states from legalizing marijuana in other ways (by withholding funding on medicare or highways etc.) or have its agents directly enforce the federal laws.",
"The second one would be preventing people from doing something they are constitutionally allowed to do. The first is about allowing people to do something that Congress prevents them from doing --not the Constitution.\n\nThankfully (in most ways), this country tends to have a bias towards allowing things.",
"People are mentioning that there is a difference between banning something and not banning something. A factor to consider is political will as well, there is little to enforce drug laws compared to the political will for gay marriage. If a state refused to enforce federal labor laws the feds would be there to break it up because that position is politically popular."
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91wa94 | how do they lay the foundation for structures in water without it being pushed away by the water? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/91wa94/eli5_how_do_they_lay_the_foundation_for/ | {
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"They generally divert the water to another area or build a coffer dam in the middle of the body of water and then pump the water out. Really going to depend on the specifics of the project. ",
"I always thought, for small jobs like supports for a pier they use hydrostatic cement to anchor the pilings."
]
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94d1ts | why do fizzy drinks sometimes release smoke when opened. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/94d1ts/eli5_why_do_fizzy_drinks_sometimes_release_smoke/ | {
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"The \"smoke\" you're seeing is actually CO2 being released from the drink.\n\nDrinks are carbonated using carbon dioxide, which is most commonly found as a gas. It is more soluble (able to be put into a liquid) when the pressure is higher. That is why when you squeeze a soda bottle, or can, it has very little give.\n\nWhen you open the bottle or can for the very first time, the pressure inside wants to equalize with the pressure outside. Most of the CO2 will stay in the liquid, but some will force itself out.\n\nAs it comes out of the liquid, it very briefly creates a weak vacuum within the bottle. This means the pressure is incredibly low for a moment, especially compared to outside of the bottle. At such a low pressure, ~~the CO2 is not longer a gas,~~ but some of the water in the drunk briefly becomes a liquid mist. This is the mist you see.\n\nEdited some incorrect details. "
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78x37t | why there does not seem to be a protected right to bear arms for any major country except the us? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/78x37t/eli5_why_there_does_not_seem_to_be_a_protected/ | {
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"Many other countries do not consider the population to have the right to determine the rules that the country operates under, instead reserving such powers for a privileged class such as royalty or a dictator. Even countries which have moved toward incorporating feedback from the population into law making did so from the top down. In contrast the United States seized control of the government via popular revolution and ensure the right to retain weapons in order to prevent the government ever seizing back power and becoming oppressive. "
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8lzj3g | why is atmospheric pressure high at the poles, but low at higher altitudes? | If the basic principle is that cold air is denser, therefore high pressure exists in lower temperature areas such as the poles, why do hilly areas which are cold experience low pressure?
EDIT: \(added to the question after receiving some replies\)
Okay, so do higher altitudes always experience low pressure? What about, say, mountains in Iceland? If I've understood what you're saying, then these particular mountains due to proximity to the poles would exist in a relatively high pressure zone \(since the sun's ray would not be as strong on their surface\)? Or have I got that wrong? :3
Also, thank you for your replies! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8lzj3g/eli5_why_is_atmospheric_pressure_high_at_the/ | {
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"At higher altitudes you are above some of the atmosphere, so the remaining atmosphere upon you weighs less.\n\nKeep going up and you'll reach outer space, where the atmospheric pressure is zero.",
"Because at the poles there is a large area of descending air due to the fact that the sun doesn't heat up that area as much as the equator which causes a high-pressure at the equator it's the opposite basically the sun is much more direct to the surface which heats the air and causes large areas of air to rise causing a low pressure \n\nWhat you are describing isn't quite correct the pressure at poles is due to what I described the low pressure on mountains is due to them being high in altitude thus in a low pressure area and cold due to their height , temperature drops at about 2 °C per every 1000 ft you climb \n\n_URL_0_"
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3spu9f | how does a nuclear reactor keep lights on in my house? | So how does the reactor convert the radioactive materials into an electric current? How long does the material last and how much electricity will each "rod" produce? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3spu9f/eli5_how_does_a_nuclear_reactor_keep_lights_on_in/ | {
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"Reactors use the radioactivity of their fuel to produce heat. The heat boils water into high-pressure steam, and that steam then turns a turbine, which uses moving magnets to create an electric current. Coal plants do the same thing, except they produce heat by burning coal.\n\nThe fuel in reactors doesn't get completely used up, but it produces less and less power over time as the radioactive material in it decays, so it's ultimately replaced by new fuel that can run at full power.",
"Nuclear engineer here. Typical enriched uranium235 fuel produces 40-50 GWd of energy per standard ton. \n\nThat is gigawatt days. That means each ton of can fuel produce about 40-50 gigawatts of energy for 24 hours. \n\nThis assumes a once through fuel cycle with no recycling in a conventional light water reactor. "
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2uuq9u | how can the brain produce thoughts, imagination, and the mental world if its physical? | Can't really explain it, its been bugging me | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2uuq9u/eli5_how_can_the_brain_produce_thoughts/ | {
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"Very interesting question. You made me wonder how chemical reactions and small electronic impulses can do this too (and I'm not the only one). Science has not - as far as I know - provided us with a clear answer.",
"There is currently no finished explanation for consciousness, though people are working on it. What we do know is that almost all processing happens without our awareness, and that processed thoughts are presented to our consciousness to consider. For example, everything you see, whether you should take another shot, and so on. Many things that are conscious decisions can become uncoscious, like how to walk. At the moment, though, how and why is an utter mystery to science, and anyone claiming otherwise should be taken with an extreme grain of salt. Like, not your normal salt, rather, salt that could be competitive in the X-Games."
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61n4fv | is vegan diet better (healthier) than omnivorous diet? why/why not? can babies and small children thrive on it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/61n4fv/eli5_is_vegan_diet_better_healthier_than/ | {
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"There is some debate and people have strong opinions both ways. So somebody out there is going to swear on their life its either way.\n\nCertainly, a vegetarian diet can be healthy for an adult There is a notable decrease in cardiovascular disease with such diets, but the risk of some deficiencies if it is not carefully managed. Which most vegans do without problem.\n\nHowever, there are challenges, such as ensuring the diet has enough calcium. Which is of course more critical in growing children.\n\nThere is some conjecture that animal diets, particularly fish, are best for children to provide proper brain health.\n\nGiven the possible repercussions, most parent's wouldn't risk a baby's health without knowing more. Some always will, buts its not like there's a study proving their kids wind up dumber as a result."
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1ssstj | if led's have a longer lifespan than incandescent bulbs, why do led christmas lights die just as quickly as their shitty predecessors? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ssstj/if_leds_have_a_longer_lifespan_than_incandescent/ | {
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"text": [
"badly made wiring between the leds, low quality wire, low quality leds, all in the name of making you buy new lights every year"
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ae41nm | how can anything apart from bacteria live in the bottom of the ocean? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ae41nm/eli5_how_can_anything_apart_from_bacteria_live_in/ | {
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"Something can live just about anywhere there's liquid water and some nutrients and some way to get oxygen. All these are available there.",
"In the same way that we evolved to go from ocean pressure to atmospheric pressure (lower pressure), things like amphipods found at the bottom of trenches went the other way, lower (or perhaps were always at that depth), and (possibly) [evolved special proteins and enzymes that work better under pressure](_URL_1_)\n\n_URL_0_\n\nthat ncbi link is not exactly ELI5, but is exactly what you're talking about. \n\n > Acclimation to pressure may be of widespread occurrence among species that undergo large changes in depth, e.g. during ontogeny. Pressure acclimation may require pressure-regulation of gene expression",
"I'm assuming you mean because the pressure is so great. Things that live at the bottom of the ocean have bodies that grew at the bottom of the ocean. If you took a balloon and inflated it at the bottom of the ocean it would still be inflated even though it's under miles of ocean water. If you took it to the surface the balloon would burst. Deep sea creatures will usually die if you take them up too fast. You can also acclimate yourself down to a certain dept and stay down for extended periods of time in a device called a [diving bell](_URL_0_)"
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"https://schmidtocean.org/cruise-log-post/the-deepest-living-animals/"
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k3swv | how do implosions work? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/k3swv/eli5_how_do_implosions_work/ | {
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"As in for demolition?\n\nYou put quite small explosives on bits of a building that hold it up, and then you blow them up in the right places at the right times to make sure the building collapses on top of itself instead of falling sideways or exploding everywhere! :)",
"The principle involved is the same as explosion. Explosions happen when there is more pressure in an area than outside it. The pressure is equalized by that energy moving out. An bomb, for instance, releases lots of chemical energy, which balances with the surrounding environment. \n\nImplosions happen when there is more pressure outside something than in. Think of a submarine; there's lots of pressure outside the hull from all the water pressing in. If the submarine dives too deep, the pressure becomes more than the hull can take, and the submarine crumbles up like a beer can against a frat boy's forehead. \n\nDemolishing a building is a bit of both, but mostly explosion. At key points in the building, charges are set off. These points are selected because they support the massive weight of a building. After the charges go off, it's kind of like an implosion (but not exactly). Instead of balancing the sudden pressure, gravity takes over and the building's support is no longer able counteract the force of gravity. Hence, the building collapse. It's not actually an implosion.\n\n",
"As in for demolition?\n\nYou put quite small explosives on bits of a building that hold it up, and then you blow them up in the right places at the right times to make sure the building collapses on top of itself instead of falling sideways or exploding everywhere! :)",
"The principle involved is the same as explosion. Explosions happen when there is more pressure in an area than outside it. The pressure is equalized by that energy moving out. An bomb, for instance, releases lots of chemical energy, which balances with the surrounding environment. \n\nImplosions happen when there is more pressure outside something than in. Think of a submarine; there's lots of pressure outside the hull from all the water pressing in. If the submarine dives too deep, the pressure becomes more than the hull can take, and the submarine crumbles up like a beer can against a frat boy's forehead. \n\nDemolishing a building is a bit of both, but mostly explosion. At key points in the building, charges are set off. These points are selected because they support the massive weight of a building. After the charges go off, it's kind of like an implosion (but not exactly). Instead of balancing the sudden pressure, gravity takes over and the building's support is no longer able counteract the force of gravity. Hence, the building collapse. It's not actually an implosion.\n\n"
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1h4a1s | what makes thunderbolt different from usb, usb 2.0, usb 3.0, pcie, firewire, etc. isn't it all just metal touching metal, so more surface area = faster speeds? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1h4a1s/eli5_what_makes_thunderbolt_different_from_usb/ | {
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"To use a car analogy, that is like saying, As long as rubber hits the road, wider roads = more speeds? The answer obviously is no.\n\nIf roads were rather narrow, it would be difficult to go fast. But if roads were wide, they dont matter anymore, your speed now depends on other factors like engine, tyres etc.\n\nIn the case of data connectors, as long as there is \"enough\" metal contact, how much contact doesn't matter anymore. What determines speed is what is called \"protocol\". A protocol is what defines how data signals are sent over the wire/connector and is established when the connector is designed. How fast bits are sent over a single \"lane\" is called the frequency or datarate. Newer protocols allow faster datarates over the lane. (newer better hardware allows faster datarates). \n\nThunderbolt and all 3 generations of USB are \"serial\" which means all data is sent over a single lane. PCIe uses several lanes in parallel, allowing it to send data even faster. the x multiplier usually written next to PCIe devices is the number of lanes for eg: PCIe 16x can be twice as fast as PCIe 8x.\n\nThunderbolt actually uses the same protocol as PCIe for data transfer over a single lane. Uses a different connector shape though."
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2ib6v5 | the contact rules in ice hockey | I'm watching *Miracle* on the advice of a redditor and it is really quite good, but as an Englishman I don't really understand the sport. Ice hockey is something that only really reaches our shores in cinematic form. A lot of it just seems like a fight. Can someone explain to me what is within the rules regarding physical contact in ice hockey? From what I'm seeing, maybe it would be easier to explain what is *not* within the rules. Thanks. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ib6v5/eli5_the_contact_rules_in_ice_hockey/ | {
"a_id": [
"cl0jkom"
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"text": [
"You cant hit (*check*) a guy if he is not actively involved in a play (*interference*). You can not use your stick to impede a players progress (*tripping* or *hooking*). You cannot elbow someone (*elbowing*). You cant intentionally push someone head first into the wall in an unnecessary manner (*boarding*). You cant smack someone with your stick to make them fall down (*slashing*). You rrally cant do anything the ref says was unnecessary. (*roughing*).\n\nProbably missing a few."
]
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5qw0yw | what's the difference in meaning of the word "liberal" as in 1) liberal democracy and 2) liberal political candidate? | There seems to be significant overlap in fundamental Liberal social values (ala John Locke) and the 20th Century meaning of *liberal* (as opposed to *conservative*). But traditional political conservatives also embrace some of the Lockean Liberal values as well.
Is there a clear distinction between the two? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5qw0yw/eli5_whats_the_difference_in_meaning_of_the_word/ | {
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"Liberals (in the US at least) tend to be more progressive and social. \nThe main cause for confusion is that progressives in the US don't call themselves socials (because they don't want to be associated with socialism).\n\nLiberalism originally was opposed to (monarchical) conservatism and promoted the equality of all citizens and a small government that does not interfere with people's lives. \n\nLiberal democracy means that, a society where the state does interfere with your private life and does not tell you what to do, what to believe, who to love, etc.\nModern conservatives are very liberal in the sense that they want a small government, low taxes, no affirmative action, etc.\n\nIn the US however, the term \"liberal\" has been associated with the Democratic Party, opposed to the Republican's conservatism.\n\nThe modern Democrats are also liberal in many aspects (pro-choice, against police violence, etc), but are social in most cases.\nSocial in this sense means the belief that the government must actively interfere with its citizens to ensure a healthy society. For example gun regulation, social welfare, bank regulations, etc.\n\nThis makes it rather confusing.",
"'Liberalism' is basically broken down into two broad schools of thought. \"Social liberalism\" is basically what most people think of as \"left-wing\", whereas \"classical liberalism\" is something closer to libertarianism. \n\nThis explains the difference. Some conservatives embrace aspects of classical liberalism, free market economics, etc. In Australia, the main conservative party is actually called the \"Liberal Party\", based on this broader definition of liberalism. But these people would not identify as social liberals or \"left wing\". \n\nThe confusion in the US comes because this broader definition of liberalism seems to have been lost, and \"liberal\" seems to mean exclusively \"social liberalism\".\n\n(Also note that like many other political terms, \"liberal\" is sometimes just thrown out there as a generic grab-bag political insult, and may not be meant in any literal or meaningful sense)."
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2pv6sm | why does the extra oxygen molecule make hydrogen peroxide more dangerous than water? | Why is it that hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) can be used as a bleach, and is dangerous to swallow or get in your eyes, etc. but it's really just water with an extra oxygen molecule? Is it not just H2O (water) + O (oxygen)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pv6sm/eli5_why_does_the_extra_oxygen_molecule_make/ | {
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"The extra oxygen is just barely hanging on to the molecule. Any little disturbance, even photons, will knock it off. When that oxygen goes rogue, it will attach to pretty much anything in the vicinity, effectively \"bleaching\" whatever it attaches to.\n\nEdit: you guys are right, but this is ELI5, I'm trying to keep it really simple.",
"Gonna get technical, but it's the best explanation.\n\nLike /u/waniou said, water looks like : H-O-H and peroxide looks like H-O-O-H.\n\nThe bond between the two oxygens is pretty easy to break, and in the process of breaking, each of the oxygen's gets one of the electrons from the bond, forming two hydroxide radicals. In concentrated hydrogen peroxide just in a container on a bench, these radicals are pretty harmless (though highly reactive) and degrade further into O2 gas and water. In a body (or solution) there are lots of things these radicals can bump into and react with before they ever hit another radical. It's these side reactions that cause toxicity.\n\nOr simply: atoms like to have 8 electrons in their outer shell. Hydrogen peroxide brakes up such that both oxygens only have seven. They steal an extra electron by reacting with stuff around them, which is real bad for the molecules that make up your body.",
"Basically, the different # of electrons in the outer shell of oxygen cause a higher reactivity in hydrogen peroxide. The extra oxygen atom is like bringing a fat chick to a threesome. The two hydrogens are happy with one oxygen, but the extra oxygen needs love too, so she will go off on her own and hookup with many other molecules, and cause havoc with other desperate elements to fill those outer holes.",
"This is ELI5 so let's talk VERY basic chemistry. (as explained by someone who got a C in chemistry... no, seriously lol) \n\nSo, the Compounds (the mixture of atoms (simplified)) have a sort of force that pulls them together. Compounds like to have balance of charge (usually electrons) which means the out-most electron ring usually likes to be divisible by 8. \n\nIn order to reach that state of balance, it will either give up or share electrons with other nearby compounds.\n\nThe reason some substances are more dangerous is because some of them want that special something your flesh and internal organs are made of. Some stuff doesn't react to the skin, but some of it does because it wants the atoms our skin is made of. \n\nThere are of course things that make these attractions more or less powerful, but for ELI5, I think this is enough. "
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jnp1m | magic eye images and why i can't see them! | I still remember actually being five and visiting the public library. I was trying to figure out one of those magic eye books and this prick could just look at it and see the picture in like 5 seconds.
How does it work and how can I figure out how to get in on seeing them? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jnp1m/eli5_magic_eye_images_and_why_i_cant_see_them/ | {
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"I can't either, drives me insane as my house mates have no problems with them at all.",
"The only way i could see them is by going crosseyed - as far as possible then relaxing my eyes back gradually. \n\nWhat you will eventually 'see' is a silhouette shape within in the messy pattern, as though it is cut out with scissors. The jumbled up mess does not morph into a photograph or painting [which was what I was expecting initially].\n\nThe more complex the silhouette image is, the harder it is to know what it is supposed to be. If it was a box, that would be easy, if it was a dolphin or fish shape, harder still, some are so elaborate that it still looks nonsensical no matter how hard you try.",
"They are difficult because you are essentially overriding two naturally reflex actions to view them. When you have let your brain handle these two functions subconsciously all your life it is difficult to override them. And because it is not something you usually need to do, its pretty difficult to convince your brain it needs to do it.\nPersonally, I can't do them either.",
"I can't either, drives me insane as my house mates have no problems with them at all.",
"The only way i could see them is by going crosseyed - as far as possible then relaxing my eyes back gradually. \n\nWhat you will eventually 'see' is a silhouette shape within in the messy pattern, as though it is cut out with scissors. The jumbled up mess does not morph into a photograph or painting [which was what I was expecting initially].\n\nThe more complex the silhouette image is, the harder it is to know what it is supposed to be. If it was a box, that would be easy, if it was a dolphin or fish shape, harder still, some are so elaborate that it still looks nonsensical no matter how hard you try.",
"They are difficult because you are essentially overriding two naturally reflex actions to view them. When you have let your brain handle these two functions subconsciously all your life it is difficult to override them. And because it is not something you usually need to do, its pretty difficult to convince your brain it needs to do it.\nPersonally, I can't do them either."
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26awl0 | why does my face tingle and my eyes water sometimes when my mustache is played with? | When something brushes against it. it tingles like it is sensitive and even sometimes my eyes water. Just curious. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26awl0/eli5why_does_my_face_tingle_and_my_eyes_water/ | {
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"Your face has a ton of sensory receptors, especially around your lips. Follicles of hair (such as your mustache) go pretty deep subdermally, and are connected to nerves ( that's why when you pull on it, it hurts ). When something brushes it, it tingles so your brain knows that something is brushing up against it and can send the correct response. Your eyes water due to naturally occurring responses. Look up _URL_0_ \nThat might help!"
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cagyk6 | why are kids so much better at learning and absorbing information than adults are? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cagyk6/eli5_why_are_kids_so_much_better_at_learning_and/ | {
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"Neuroplasticity and neurogenesis.\n\nYounger mammalian brains are more readily able to create new neural pathways, and they also create new brain cells at a greater rate than older brains.\n\nContrary to previously held conventional wisdom, adult brains DO produce new brain cells (limitations do apply) and are quite capable of creating new neural pathways. Just far less easily than young brains.",
"I think there's a misconception about it caused by the language learning process. \n\nChildren are able to start speaking a language quite fluently at age 3-4. Their vocabulary is not impressive, but they can communicate without problems and they understand adults speaking to them (of course with an exception of harder words). \n\nAdults often think \"Oh, I've been learning this language at school for three years and I bet three year old children (from the country which has this language as its native) speak it better than me.\n\nThe problem here is, the child spent all his life listening to people speaking it. You spent maybe two hours a week for three years. The child spent significantly more time learning that language.\n\nI spent half a year teaching English. I taught both adults and children. As much as children are good with memorizing new words, when it comes to more complex stuff (which is any grammar at all), children do much much worse than adults. So my conclusion is children memorize better than adults cause of reasons that have already been posted, but in my experience, adults learn new mechanisms better.\n\nNow this is falling a bit far from answering your question, but I felt like it was a valuable comment to post, to maybe help someone.",
"Quite often for an adult to learn something, they have to unlearn something else first before they can learn the new thing. This also causes adults to question things more and resist the new information.\n\nKids generally just accept the new information and take it on board."
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c392ma | why is being fat looked down upon in asian cultures yet sumo wrestlers are fat and celebrated? | Thanks for the answers everyone | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c392ma/eli5_why_is_being_fat_looked_down_upon_in_asian/ | {
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"Because Sumo wrestlers are athletes who have possibly spent their entire life perfecting their sport.\n\nA fat person is just fat.",
"Although sumo wrestlers have enormous bellies, most of their abdominal fat is stored immediately under the skin, and not behind the stomach wall within the gut or visceral area. In fact, sumo wrestlers had about half of the visceral fat of regular people with visceral obesity.\n\n Their plasma glucose and triglyceride levels are normal. Even their cholesterol levels are low. "
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3k3sst | why do people with 1 asian (say chinese) parent and 1 western/white parent always look noticeably chinese? | Or is it simply because I'm white/Western I can see the Chinese side in them, but a Chinese person would swear they looked Western?
Genuinely wondering for no other reason than curiosity, not looking to offend anyone :) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3k3sst/eli5why_do_people_with_1_asian_say_chinese_parent/ | {
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" > Or is it simply because I'm white/Western I can see the Chinese side in them, but a Chinese person would swear they looked Western?\n\nThere's almost certainly a bit of this going on. However, it's also possible that some of the traits Western people associate with \"looking Chinese\" are very likely to show up provided even one parent has them.\n\nTo use a slightly different example to get at this point: A child of a black parent and a white parent will generally have pretty dark skin, far closer to the black parent's skin tone than the white parent's.",
"I think what you might be seeing is that they are looking more noticeably *not white*... even a subtle shift in skin tone and eye shape may stand out against white norms. So they are not so much looking \"more Chinese\" as much as you are more easily able to detect the subtle changes when compared to the \"white parent\" ",
"Many don't, you just don't realize you've met them. My older daughter doesn't look Chinese at all, my younger one does. ",
"Many don't. My friend looks half asianish. His sister looks Asian. Another friend's is a mixed couple, daughter looks Asian, son looks white. Another friend mixed couple, daughter looks white."
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8tvdcf | where did the trend of a s ranking being higher than an a ranking come from? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8tvdcf/eli5_where_did_the_trend_of_a_s_ranking_being/ | {
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"I think you'll need to add more context around what an \"s ranking\" is. Are you asking about hotels, movies, games, plays?\n\n\nI suspect that it's this, but it's hard to tell from the question. \n_URL_0_",
"The S-rank comes from Japan, but we can only speculate what the s stands for (some say super, other say special) as we dont know for sure."
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5hdyn9 | why do laptops and other rechargeable devices shut off when there is still 5-15% battery still left. | Edit: Thanks for the explanations everyone. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5hdyn9/eli5_why_do_laptops_and_other_rechargeable/ | {
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"I work in IT, and the laptops I've dealt with here at work will go to sleep automatically at 5%. I am not a lawyer, as the saying goes, but I've always assumed that it's a built-in feature so that your computer doesn't go straight to 0% and you potentially lose everything you've been working on. You've at least got a chance to get it to a charger before it drains the rest of the way, and it would drain much slower being asleep as well.",
"Most modern devices run on Lithium Ion batteries Li-Ion. When these batteries are completely discharged, they can become useless. I do not wanna go into details but if you have basic knowledge in electrochemistry or know redox you can look it up perhaps?",
"Combination of a couple things. First, if you keep a tiny trickle of power and it goes to sleep, you don't lose any work. Secondly, pretty much everything today runs on lithium ion. Lithium ion batteries can actually become damaged or unusable if they hit 0%, so there are various safeguards in place to keep it from getting there. Even if you show 0%, there is more than likely a little bit of charge hidden away to keep the battery safe.",
"Modern batteries for such devices are Lithium-Ion batteries, which hold relatively lots of energy in a small package. These batteries discharge, and the rate of discharge is somewhat linear up until a certain point: [here is a nice graph](_URL_1_). \n\nYour device needs [some] amount of energy to work, if energy is too low, it'll not work. It depends on the circuitry, but I can assume most hardware is designed to not catastrophically fail somewhere below the \"0%\" voltage. The devices shut themselves down to prevent this energy level from being reached.\n\nThe batteries themselves also need protection. [This page](_URL_0_) shows what happens when a lithium-ion battery is outside the safe range - it gets physically damaged. This is why most lithium battery packs also contain regulation circuitry with the package.\n\nAs you could see from the graph, the voltage drops very quickly after 3.6V or so, which is where most devices and batteries should say - \"stop, no further\". When going further, you permanently damage the battery due to chemical reactions happening.\n\nThe \"100%-0%\" display you see is entirely up to who programmed your laptop or phone. You can set Windows, Linux or whatever desktop OS you have to sleep, shutdown or hibernate at any percentage you want. Depending on who made this function, the percentage meter can show the battery power percentage or the \"usability\" percentage, both on the upper and lower end. This is to save your work, prevent hardware damage due to a sudden shut-down due to the battery controller saying \"no\" and to make batteries just work longer.\n\ntl;dr:\nMany reasons.\n\n* OS level: Save work and data and let the OS shut down gracefully\n* Battery level: Prevent permanent battery damage.\n\nDisclaimer - I'm no expert on any of these things, so feel very free to correct me if I'm wrong.",
"In some cases, this isn't just sleep. They hibernate, or suspend to the hard drive, which allows the machine to pick up right where it left off even after a power failure.",
"Generally speaking, you do not want anything on a computer to end abruptly without having a chance to shut down. It's hard to program things that are truly prepared to be terminated at any time without warning. So as a basic rule, it's better if things have a chance to go through their shutdown routine, to make sure things are saved and nothing gets corrupted. When a computer gets to a very low battery, the system knows it is almost dead and there is a high chance it will run out of power. So to try to make the shutdown as graceful as possible, it will generally go into a sleep/hibernate mode when it gets very low to avoid the abrupt shutoff. This is also why it is good to have desktops hooked up to a UPS, so that there is a window to do a proper shutdown.",
"Rc cars and planes use lithium batteries and require a low voltage shutoff to reduce risk of damaging the battery.\n\nSame principal with any electronic that uses Li batteries",
"Voltage (the push behind electricity) drops slowly as the battery discharges. Near the end of the discharge, voltage can drop too low to push the required amount of electricity (current) through the device. At that point it stops working.",
"As a battery changes its 'charge level' its characteristics change--discharge rates, charging rates, etc. The important thing here is that the charger can only output a certain voltage/current to your laptop battery. As we said before, remember that the battery characteristics change as it drains. When batteries are in a certain range(100% to 5-15% as you noticed) those characteristics stay the same, so those batteries can be reliably charged/recharged. The problem is that, when the charge level is dropped below that 5-15%, the characteristics start to change pretty quickly, with potentially disastrous consequences-the battery could be damaged or potentially even explode!\n\nFun fact! Your phone/laptop/whatever actually doesn't actually know how much juice is left in the battery. It checks by monitoring the characteristics we mentioned before(discharge/charge rates). You can actually increase the accuracy of that battery level indicator by occasionally using your phone until it automatically shuts off itself.\n\nSource-worked on power circuits for a CubeSat in college, the grad student in charge of our subteam explained all these concepts to us",
"You can damage lithium batteries when you take them to low. The laptop either has software or hardware designed to protect the battery from you.",
"Entering Hibernation (saving machine state and shutting down) necessitates a bunch of activity which leads to a spike in power usage. Even while turned off, the machine still needs some battery power to maintain state for the internal clock.",
"The estimate for your charge is based on a brand new battery. Eventually the battery doesn't last that long anymore, so your computer or phone thinks the battery will still last X amount of time based on voltage, but it actually won't. So you phone gets to 15% but it is really at 1% and it promptly dies.\n\nIf your laptop or phone is doing this, it is time for a new battery.",
"To add to some of the excellent information already in this thread: Your computer or cell phone cannot determine the charge level of the battery with 100% accuracy. It can extrapolate based on voltage and amperage characteristics, keeping track of its own run time, and comparing the current discharge cycle with previous discharge cycles and how long those lasted.\n\nThe farther down towards the low end of your battery's charge level you get, the less accurate the information your device is able to cook up about the state of its own battery becomes. This is exacerbated by the fact that as rechargeable batteries age their characteristics change, their discharge curves change, and their overall capacity shrinks.",
"Most answers I'm seeing here contain a lot of true facts but omit an even more fundamental fact: \n**That percentage is a computed estimate.**\n\nYou can't directly measure \"percentage used\" from a battery. What you can measure is voltage. Battery voltage over time, even under constant load, is not a straight line but [looks like this](_URL_0_). As you can see, voltage stays about the same then drops sharply when the battery is almost depleted.\n\nAs you can see, the line is curvy and irregular, so you need to do some fancy math to tell you how much battery life you have left; it's almost as complicated as estimating how many more minutes your battery will last. Also, notice from the graph that at which point the final drop starts varies from battery to battery (and probably varies a little over the lifetime of the same battery), so it can be hard to predict. This is why a lot of devices shut off around 5% and why a lot of devices seem to last at 1% forever.\n\nAnother way to measure battery percentage is to measure the amount of charge (in coulombs) that has passed through the wire and compare it to that of an earlier run. But the number of coulombs per battery cycle can vary and charge is \"leaked\" (or, depending on your perspective, the meter can be inaccurate) in various ways, so this method is also not effective at predicting battery life near the end.\n\nWhen a flashlight starts to run out of battery, it just gets dimmer, but advanced electronic devices contain parts that can malfunction or break outside the voltage range it was designed for, so when the voltage goes below a certain point they need to turn off completely. So 0% battery is not 0 volts but rather the minimum operating voltage. Modern laptops might also account for the energy it takes to go into hibernation, or throw in some leeway for the energy required to sleep for a few minutes so it doesn't have to go into hibernation if you charge it right away.\n\nSo to answer your question, there are two main reasons:\n\n1. The voltage curve is very steep and unpredictable when the battery is almost used up, so it's hard to predict how much longer you can use it.\n2. The computer/battery/OS manufacturer's definition of 5% and 0% might be different from yours or different from each others'. (Example: Computer manufacturer calibrates 0% to mean 0 volts, but you expect 0% to mean when the computer starts to hibernate.)",
"You can change when your laptop shuts down due to a low battery. \n Go to Control Panel - > Power Options - > Change Plan Settings - > Change Advanced Power Options - > Critical Battery Level and change it to whatever percentage you desire.",
"I dunno about 5-15% None of my devices do that: they all scale so that it just goes down to 0% faster as less charge is left.\n\nIt is three reasons.\n\n1. to prevent data corruption. If your power was lost outright in the middle of services/tasks running operations of files, you're going to have corrupted files.\n\n2. to prevent hardware damage. Both the battery and components within your computer can be damaged if allowed to drain too far in the case of the battery and can cause surges on hardware.\n\n3. Because batteries are not 100% output as they discharge. So at some non 0% of battery left, you're not outputting 100% of the power. Depending on the temperature, this could mean your last 15% goes bye bye as fast as the previous 1-2%. Devices have requirements, so they shut off before the battery cannot fulfill them.\n\nA simple example is anything that emits a constant sound, like a guitar pedal or whatever noisy toy. You can hear the sound literally break up and change pitch as the battery dies. You can hear pitch / frequency changes (which effects things like how games would work) at even 30-40% battery life.\n\n\n\n\n\n",
"It's because the device needs time to actually perform a shut down. You wouldn't just unplug your desktop PC whenever you're done with it, or you'd lose your files, what you're working on and possibly corrupt the hard drive. Devices shut down before they are totally dead so that they can do a clean shut down and not lose power in the middle of an update for example."
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5u5svw | why was helium discovered on the sun before it was discovered on earth? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5u5svw/eli5why_was_helium_discovered_on_the_sun_before/ | {
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"The sun is a very bright light source. Helium was discovered to to its absorption spectra. Its dark lines were discovered first in the suns rays.",
"Hydrogen and helium are light enough to escape Earth's gravity into space. That means there is essentially no elemental hydrogen or helium in our atmosphere. So, what's the difference between hydrogen and helium?\n\nHydrogen can react with other elements and form molecules. The most obvious source of hydrogen is water, which is basically everywhere. Basically, hydrogen got stuck to elements that were heavy enough to be held down by gravity.\n\nHelium's chemical properties make it so it basically doesn't react with anything. That means that any helium that gets released will stay a gas, mix with the atmosphere, and eventually bleed off into space. There simply wasn't any helium around for scientists to discover.\n\nOnce scientists started to understand the [emission spectra](_URL_0_) of the elements, they realized they could look at sunlight and figure out what the sun is made of. Scientists started matching up the frequencies of light emitted by known elements with the frequencies the sun was emitting. They matched up all the frequencies and there were some frequencies coming from the sun that didn't match anything we knew. That eventually led people to look for helium and the other noble gases."
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20zmr4 | whats the advantage of a pension over just storing the money in a bank account | Whats the difference? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20zmr4/eli5whats_the_advantage_of_a_pension_over_just/ | {
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"Typically pensions set up by your employer are tax deferred, meaning you don't pay income taxes on any money going into it, and instead the money is taxed once you retire and start withdrawing from the pension.",
"A pension isn't a blob of money (from the recipient's perspective). It's a guaranteed payment at regular intervals. \n\nIt can't run out, it can't drop in value due to a market crash or bank default...it is essentially risk free and lasts your whole life regardless of how long you live as long as the company who issued the pension doesn't go bankrupt. ",
"* you don't pay taxes on money that goes to your pension\n* you are forced to put it away for retirement, instead of using it to improve your lifestyle today at the expense of your retirement",
"I'm someone who works in the pension plan field in the U.S. Below is a quick summary about U.S. pension plans. \n\n\"Pension\" is a broad term, but there are generally two kinds of pension plans: defined benefit plan and defined contribution plans. Pensions originally were set up as \"defined benefit plans\", where in exchange for mandatory employee contributions, the employer is on the hook for paying out retirement benefits for life under a formula typically related to years of service and salary, no matter what. The main advantage of a DB plan to the employee is that the risk of funding and investing the plan assets is entirely on the employer, providing retirement security. However, this is also the main disadvantage for employers. If employer revenues and investment returns on plan assets aren't keeping in step with plan liabilities, then the employer can become saddled over time with huge pension liabilities that it can't pay. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is a federal \"pension insurance\" agency that protects retirement benefits for private sector employees to a certain extent should the company go belly-up.\n\nIn the 1980s, defined contribution plans (e.g., 401(k), 403(b), 457(b) plans) began gaining popularity among employers. Instead of having the employer shoulder the burden of funding and investing the plan, the employer lets the employee take his contributions (sometimes with an employer match) and invest it in an investment portfolio. Whatever the account earns over time is what the employee is left with when it comes time to retire. Employers love it because the funding obligations are less onerous (or non-existent) and the risk of poor market performance is borne by the employee. The downside for employees is that retirement security is lessened because benefits are directly impacted by market performance, and investment and annuitization fees are a constant drag on return.\n\nThere are hybrids between DB and DC plans, like money purchase and cash balance plans, which although are technically DB plans, behave like DC plans in that they are either tied to market performance or grow at a stated interest rate.\n\nWhatever form they take, pension plans are usually set up as qualified plans, tax-deferred annuities, or deferred compensation plans that aim to take employee contributions before taxes and let the pension \"account\" grow tax-free. The distributions then get taxed at retirement as they are paid out. This is usually good for the employee because they usually make less taxable income after retirement than during their careers, and so get taxed at lower rates. There are exceptions to this, such as \"Roth\"-type accounts, where contributions are after-tax, but earnings and distributions are completely tax free on distribution.\n\nStoring money in a bank account for retirement is usually a bad choice because 1) inflation will usually outpace bank interest rates, 2) you get no employer matches or subsidies, 3) you get no tax sheltering whatsoever on money you put in or interest you earn, 4) the FDIC only insures up to $100,000, 5) creditors can get to it, 6) the assets have to pass through the estate upon your death, and 7) the temptation to use the money for other things is always pounding on our weak-willed brains, among other things."
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1uwd0n | why does water pressure drop if its let to sit under pressure? | In firesprinkler systems it is necessary to pressurize the system for a test. If you put it to say 180 psi and come back the next day the pressure is significantly lower even with zero leaks | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1uwd0n/eli5_why_does_water_pressure_drop_if_its_let_to/ | {
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" > the pressure is significantly lower even with zero leaks\n\nBecause it is leaking. It might just be leaking dissolved gasses, but something is escaping the system."
]
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5s4wwo | why are all tv's on sale all of a sudden | I have been somewhat researching televisions and cant help to notice that most tv brands such as samsung and sony have dropped the prices of 4k tvs. Huge price drops too such as 400-500$ off. Isnt 4k suppose to be the new standard of televisions? Is this not the right time to buy a tv? I have not seen anything about 5k or newer tvs. But like macbooks and iphones I know there is new technology yearly, but what goes for tvs? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5s4wwo/eli5_why_are_all_tvs_on_sale_all_of_a_sudden/ | {
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"text": [
"We are coming up on spring. Spring is the time when the newer TVs come out. So, dropping prices to make room for the new.\n\nI used to work as a TV salesman.",
"Also, tomorrow is the Super Bowl. That makes it a time where people would want to upgrade what they have. 4K has been around for awhile but hasn't caught on for cable, it's mostly for internet/Netflix stuff.\n\nThey are wanting to push the OLED technology now as the premium priced TV's, so LED TVs are going to dive in price.",
"It's the day before the super bowl, a last chance to push TV sales before everyone loses interest in TVs",
"It's the day before the super bowl, a last chance to push TV sales before everyone loses interest in TVs",
"among other reasons, its tax season. people are getting back large sums of money and it burns a hole in their pocket."
]
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3mc988 | gravity on earth explained using space-time (as opposed to massive things "attract") | I am trying to grasp the concept of how a massive object bending space-time affects how i experience gravity.
I am trying to picture how the bending of space-time keeps me firmly on earth. How does it affect me, a bullet, soccer ball? How does the curvature of space-time do this? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mc988/eli5_gravity_on_earth_explained_using_spacetime/ | {
"a_id": [
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"This video is probably the best way of explaining it, that I've seen:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBasically Newton's first law says that an object will continue moving in a straigth line, but the curvature of space-time changes what \"straight\" actually means."
]
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e54et9 | what an ltd, a plc and an llp company is and the differences between them. | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e54et9/eli5_what_an_ltd_a_plc_and_an_llp_company_is_and/ | {
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"A Limited Company (LTD) is a type of company in which the owners are not personally legally answerable for the liability of said company. For example, if a limited company were to go bankrupt, the credit of the owner(s) would not be impacted directly.\n\nIn the US, these companies are designated as \"Limited Liability Companies\" (or LLCs) - though some (all?) states allow for the \"Ltd.\" abbreviation. These companies have owners who collectively own all of the company, and this ownership isn't traded publicly.\n\nA LLP is a \"Limited Liability Partnership\", and it follows the same principle. The only difference is that ownership is held in a partnership, where pass-through taxation applies (i.e. partners report gains/losses based on their overall ownership and pay taxes on their individual returns rather than the company handling all that as a collective entity). This is most typical among large law firms.\n\nA \"PLC\" is just a limited company that has offered shares publicly, most likely through a stock exchange.\n\nEdit: clarification for LLPs and LTDs"
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262605 | why can't cities use eminent domain to buy cable lines from internet companies and make them common? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/262605/eli5_why_cant_cities_use_eminent_domain_to_buy/ | {
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"The internet is comprised of multiple networks interconnected. [Use this tool to get an idea.] (_URL_0_) Imagine if Chicago claimed AT & T's fiber network to make ChicagoNet, and resold access at half the price. AT & T would sue, and not let ChicagoNet access their network, or overcharge them for any access. ChicagoNet is a 200mph sports car stuck in a never ending school zone. Want to go faster? AT & T owns an on-ramp to the expressway right here, but you'll have to pay $10 to use it. Verizon has a toll ramp to the expressway for $3, but it will take an extra 10 minutes of driving to get to. Oh no, a traffic jam going to the Verizon toll-ramp, guess you'll have to drive another 10 minutes to the next one owned by Verizon. If you just paid the $10 you'd already be where you were going. \nYou're paying $50 for 200mpbs internet from ChicagoNet, and it barely gets to 20! AT & T charges $100 for 100mpbs, and it stayed above 90 most of the time. ChicagoNet lost a lawsuit to AT & T and 200mpbs internet just went up to $100. No one is buying ChicagoNet because it's too slow compared to other ISP's. The city of Chicago just enacted a $5 broadband tax per month for any person using high speed internet from any ISP to cover the lost revenue from ChicagoNet. A class action lawsuit against ChicagoNet has been filed by the 5 major ISP's, and they won. ChicagoNet has been shut down, and Chicago just lost 50 million after the dust settles. Why not just pay the ISP's $50 mil to double their speed? The government tried something like that once, and the companies weren't able to improve their own networks despite insane profits. Why don't municipalites build their own networks? They try, and get sued to death by ISP's. \n\"I only get money from people that buy my 10 mpbs service for $10 a month, and you tax everyone in your city $1 per month for public 10 mpbs network access. That's not fair! Now you've dropped the tax, and are charging $5 for the service. You're price gouging me! You're only able to afford those prices because you dont have to pay property taxes on land you own as a city where your network is buried! I have to raise my own prices to $20 a month for 10mpbs service because of the customers I've lost to you. So what if I have 1 million subscribers in your city, and you only have a hundred thousand. That's a 10% profit loss because you're stealing my customers! By the way here is your million dollars this month for no reason other than I like you. I heard that another ISP wants to build a network here with faster speeds than I offer for a better price, it would be a shame if I stopped paying you that million dollars every month.\" "
]
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"http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/visual-tracert/"
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375d9u | why are seatbelt laws considered constitutional? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/375d9u/eli5_why_are_seatbelt_laws_considered/ | {
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"Driving is considered a privilege, not a right. In order to maintain that privilege, you must abide by all the laws that accompany it.",
"The argument is that by not buckling your seat belt, one endangers others, such as pedestrians, bicyclists, and even other drivers, by turning your body into a missile that can possibly eject through the windshield. ",
"One might ask one's self \"how might laws mandating seatbelts be considered **_un_**constitutional?\". \n\nDoes forcing someone to wear a seatbelt while they operate a motor vehicle on public roads somehow deny them some right or freedom that they could not otherwise have?\n\nIt is not apparent that mandating a seatbelt during the operation of a motor vehicle on a public road curtails *any* liberties or freedoms, except the possible freedom to move about the cabin, which is a distraction to the driver and demonstrably negatively affects safety.\n\n",
"The people, via the government, own the roads. So we (they) have the right to institute whichever laws we think best in the governance of those roads. You are not obligated to drive the roads, especially with your own car.\n\nAlso note that there is no federal seat belt law. States are free not to make seat belt laws, but the Federal government will then cut off any road construction money. ",
"My understanding is the laws that require you to wear a seat belt are state laws and aren't bound by Constitution.\n\nThe federal law that requires car manufacturers to install seat belts is constitutional under the Commerce Clause. The clause that gives congress the ability to regulate intestate commerce.",
"The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution states:\n\n*The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people.*\n\nThis means that the states can create their own laws, as long as the federal government hasn't already legislated on that issue. These are also called \"police powers.\" Generally, issues that concern public health and safety fall under these police powers. Seatbelt safety is most definitely a public health and safety issue.\n\nThat is why in 1968 the federal government legislated that all motor vehicles must contain seatbelts; this is a regulation on industry, which is considered interstate commerce. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the Constitution and several Supreme Court cases allow the federal government to regulate interstate commerce, or commerce between multiple states. \n\nHowever, since it is up to the states to regulate/patrol its own roads, seatbelt safety is considered intrastate commerce (which occurs within the confines of a single state) and therefore a police power (again, several Supreme Court cases have determined this). New York was the first state to create a mandatory seat belt law, but that wasn't until 1984. Several states have tried and failed to deem seatbelt laws unconstitutional. Today, New Hampshire is the only state without any such law.\n\nTL;DR: seatbelts -- > public health and safety -- > police power < -- intrastate commerce < -- state patrol\n\nStates can create laws within the scope of police powers.",
"Where in the constitution does it say that you are free to drive without a seatbelt? \n\nConstitutionality is not nearly as broad or open ended as some would have you believe. A law is unconstitutional if it violates something specifically listed in the constitution. It is not enough to simply impose a restriction on the populace that was not previously imposed. "
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19lbjq | why we don't have virtual reality yet. | I'm ready for some Johnny quest shit. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19lbjq/eli5_why_we_dont_have_virtual_reality_yet/ | {
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"Right now it's kind of too expensive aside from some practical limits.\n\nYou're not going to see the same Johnny Quest or matrix style VR where you just beam your conciousness in to a computer. That's pure fiction (for now).\n\nIt's technically possible to get sensory imput from all a person's limbs and related body parts and use it to control a virtual puppet. But all those sensors together are pretty expensive. And with motion controllers like the Wii, Kinect etcetera not really becoming popular there's not enough incentive for developers to really invest in full VR just yet."
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912bgn | why is it when you drive for a long time your eyes get heavy and tired? | Physically not exhausted or tired but eyes just wanna drop. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/912bgn/eli5_why_is_it_when_you_drive_for_a_long_time/ | {
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"text": [
"If you are driving your eyes get exhausted because of the constantly changing \"picture\" and you watching the street carefully. Compare it to watching TV. It's also very exhausting for the eyes after some time."
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5hh060 | how is botulinum toxin measured in safe doses for botox? | If 2 pounds of botulinum toxin could reportedly kill the world's population, how tiny of an amount must be used for for body application? How are these tiny amounts produced and measured? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5hh060/eli5_how_is_botulinum_toxin_measured_in_safe/ | {
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"text": [
"You produce a concentrated solution of toxin where the concentration can be easily measured, then dilute it a known amount. With appropriate dilution, you can administer as little of something as you want.\n\nEDIT: According to [this](_URL_0_), each vial of Botox used for a single treatment contains 4.8 ng of dried botulinum toxin powder, or 0.00000000001 pounds. This is diluted in 1 mL to 10 mL of saline for injection, depending on how strong the dermatologist wants to it to be and how much they want to inject."
]
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| []
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"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2856357/"
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5ktjcm | why do babies instinctively clap their hands/applaude when they enjoy something? and is it related to adult humans giving applause? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ktjcm/eli5_why_do_babies_instinctively_clap_their/ | {
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"text": [
"In my experience, it's babies imitating what they see adults do when adults are happy. When a baby does something, adults tend to clap and cheer to encourage the baby.\n\nFor example, when you're encouraging a baby to crawl in your direction, to call its name, talk in a pleasant voice, and often clap. \"Come on, Tommy, come over here, that's a good boy, yay! You made it!\""
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25dpen | what is the fcc thing in the usa that people are talking about? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25dpen/eli5_what_is_the_fcc_thing_in_the_usa_that_people/ | {
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"It is the Federal Communications Commission. A US agency originally charged with regulating over-the-air broadcast of radio waves. It has come to govern other forms of communications distribution, such as telephone.\n\nWhile the regulations it puts in place are generally useful, it is widely considered out-of-touch, slow, and in the pocket of telecommunications companies.",
"I know I'm technically not explaining it, but the youtube user Vihart gives a fairly good explanation [using stick figure drawings](_URL_0_) of what's going on. It's about 11 minutes long, but definitely a good watch.",
"Oh yeah, I know all about the FCC\n\nThey will clean up all your talking in a manner such as this\nThey will make you take a tinkle when you want to take a piss\nAnd they'll make you call felatio a trouser friendly kiss\n\nIs the plain situation\nThere's no negotiation\nwith the fellows at the freakin FCC\n\nThey're as stuffy as the stuffiest of speical interest groups\nMake a joke about your bowels and they order in the troops\nAny baby with a brain could tell them everybody poops\n\nTake a tip take a lesson\nyou'll never win by messin'\nwith the fellows at the freakin FCC",
"so are the FCC trying to make it fair or unfair for sites? I'm getting lost here."
]
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2dnyic | why do school teachers need a fundraiser every year for school supplies? | I have seen this my entire life. It makes no sense that your employer would habitually leave you without the equipment to do your job. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dnyic/eli5_why_do_school_teachers_need_a_fundraiser/ | {
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"Their \"employer\" is the taxpayer, and the taxpayer is not directly concerned with the outcome of their taxes.",
"School budgets are very tight. Many schools require students to buy a list of supplies, some for their own use and some for classroom use (communal boxes of tissues, etc). But kids may not have things, plus a teacher needs supplies for all the things you see on the wall, etc. ",
"My cousin is a teacher in a poor area. She buys the supplies for the kids whose families cannot afford them. Schools don't pay for individual students, so if she didn't pay out of pocket half her class wouldn't have a notebook or pencil to write with.",
"The taxpayer doesn't like to actually pay money for services provided. ",
"Because schools are woefully underfunded.",
"As a former teacher in a somewhat rural area with a relatively high rate of poverty, I'll try to explain. \n\nFirst, schools only allot a certain amount of money for supplies that get expended yearly: paper, pens and pencils, staples, tape, markers, chalk, paper clips, printer cartridges/toner, index cards... these are just a few things off the top of my head. Once you get into specific curricular necessities (especially in the sciences and classes that have a lot of project-based learning), there are tons of supplies that don't last longer than a unit, if not a year. \n\nThere are also, of course, supplies that students need. While many students can buy their own notebooks, binders, folders, etc., a school should be able to provide these supplies for those who cannot. After all, education is a fundamental right, and there's no reason for a student to have less access due to his or her parents' jobs. Unfortunately, schools (and their taxpayers) don't always provide such materials for students in need, so it falls upon the teachers who actually care about their students' education. \n\nThen there are the materials that aren't necessary, but can make a substantial difference. Think of all the things that make teachers and their classrooms unique - posters on the wall, bookshelves loaded with books for students to borrow, games, videos/documentaries for use, etc. These may not be replaced every year, but they can easily become outdated or simply damaged from use. I was actually lucky in that our school had a good number of supplies, usually shared among departments. Even then, though, I submitted a 40 dollar order of supplies for the year and had one item (a $14 stapler) rejected. I couldn't even get $40 worth of supplies for the year. I can only imagine what it's like for schools who can't afford paper (and yes, I've seen this). \n\n > It makes no sense that your employer would habitually leave you without the equipment to do your job. \n\nHere's the thing: from a business perspective, supplies are seen as an investment. If your employees do their jobs to the best of their ability, your business will profit and the money invested in those supplies will be returned with added profit. On the other hand, schools that do their jobs well do not result in a monetary return. The profit--students' education--is not valued by any one particular person. Yes, parents should be appreciative, as should society in general, but when taxpayers and governments allot budgets, this appreciate does not seem particularly well reflected. Instead, schools are told to get by with whatever means necessary because the employer is the public, and let's face it: the public has never been very informed or rational when it comes to investing in their own future. "
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9et6lv | host vs server vs client | This is not particular to websites (yes, I did a search and found that ELI5). I am referring to basic network terminology that I can explain to some 4th and 5th graders without getting too technical. Analogies would be great! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9et6lv/eli5_host_vs_server_vs_client/ | {
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"1. Network host: any device connected to a network that has a network *address.*\n\n2. Server: A network host that provides functionality to other hosts.\n\n3. Client: A network host that receives services from servers.\n\nFor instance, an Active Directory server allows for user account authentication and auditing across a network. Clients ask the server for services related to user account authentication.\n"
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ccpt1e | engines | Quite a few questions:
1a) How does gearing work?
b) How can the fuel consumption not be higher at higher gears, as youre moving faster, therefore needing more fuel.
2) Turbos! What are they!
3) Electricity, how does the engine make power to charge stuff in the vehicle, is there a seperate generator?!?!?!
4) How come, at low rpm, the entire vehicle shakes?
5) Last one, how does clutches work?
Sorry if this is stupid, but it's been bugging me for a while!
*Edit: Thank you all so, so, so much for the amazing explainations! You actually made this difficult topic easy for me to understand, and i love y'all! Thank you so much! These things have been bugging me for so long, but the answers have always been in a difficult language.*
*I wish I could give each and every one of you a platinum, thank you so much.* | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ccpt1e/eli5_engines/ | {
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"Not an expert on all your questions, but I’ll have a stab at it:\n\nThe gearbox (speaking of a manual) is full of pairs of gears of different ratios. Like a bicycle, when you use a bigger gear on the driven side and a smaller gear on the non-driven side you get more power (your top speed is higher) but less torque (you accelerate slower). To understand how the shifting etc works you’d be best looking up a howstuffworks video.\n\nFuel efficiency is a function of how hard the engine is working - as with the gears, when you’re traveling quickly you will usually be in a higher gear with the engine turning (relatively) slowly, and the power multiplying effect of the gearbox making it more efficient for a given engine speed. The other factor is that it’s very energy intensive to accelerate the car, but quite easy to maintain speed so cruising will use much less fuel.\n\nA turbo is a compressor that forces more air into the cylinders, which means more fuel can be injected, which means more energy is generated in the combustion stroke.\n\nThere’s a generator (called an alternator) driven by one of the belts connected to the engine. The alternator produces power to charge the battery while the engine is on, which is why if you leave your lights on and have a flat battery it’s important to go for a decent length drive to give it a chance to recharge.\n\nEngines are designed to be ‘balanced’, which means the forces of an explosion in one cylinder are counteracted by the force in the opposite cylinder (ie the front left and back right cylinders fire at the same time). When the engine is running properly at its idle speed or better the engine seems to be running smoothly, but if the rpm drops too low or the combustion in each cylinder isn’t equal any more (which can happen for a number of reasons, like spark plugs failing, the fuel/air mix not being right, or compression leaks) then the engine will become unbalanced and rock the whole car.\n\nClutches are several plates of high friction material that are forced together by springs to join the drive forces of the engine to the gearbox. When you push the clutch pedal the plates are forced apart which separates the drive forces from the gearbox and allows the car to stop while the engine is still running, or to change gears without destroying the gearbox. \n\nThere’s a heap of videos out there that can help you visualize how these systems work - I really learned how to drive a manual well once I watched a few videos of how the clutch works and understood what happens at each step of changing gears",
"1a - Gearing, this is a huge topic. So, the engine literally 'spins' at a certain speed. But it only creates torque at a very specific spinning speed. So if you want to go faster or slower than that speed you need to gear it up (revolve the powertrain more times per rotation of the engine) or lower (revolve the powertrain fewer times per rotation of the engine). When I say 'rotation of the engine', think of the flywheel that is attached to the cylinder, so just a spinning disk. That spinning disk only has enough torque at very specific speeds to move a car. This is why electric cars don't have transmissions. Electricity delivers full torque at every speed. \n\n1b - So if I am spinning the wheels at a higher rate than the engine, I will be more efficient at that speed. This is called 'overdrive', where the ratio of flywheel to rubber tire turns. You *could* only be in 'drive' which is 1-1, but like gears on your bicycle (which are technically cogs and not 'gears') you have to spin your legs faster for the same speed. Same thing in a car, the cylinders fire more quickly, consuming more fuel per mile. \n\n2 - A turbo is a turbine (a device that compresses air with fan blades) that returns high pressure air to the cylinders. When the compression stage happens, normal cars simply compress the air it took in on the intake stage. If I have a 'blower', then I pack in a bunch more air into the cylinder as a result of that turbine. More air is more combustible gases, hence the more power part. Fact - most of the explosive energy is from the oxygen in the air, not the gasoline. This is why you lose power as you go up in altitude - which can be mitigated by a turbo. \n\n3 - Yes, there is literally a generator, it is called an alternator which is two magnets that get spun by the engine which causes an AC current that is used to charge the battery. If your car can run but you shut it off and can't turn it back on, you probably have a busted alternator. \n\n4 - A rough idle is either a mixture problem (rare nowadays) or you are idling too low and the combustion isn't efficient, making the car shake\n\n5 - A clutch is a very powerful lever that when not depressed presses a rough material over the flywheel that delivers power to the wheels. If you press the clutch, that lever pulls the rough material away from the flywheel which disconnects the motor from the driving wheels. At high RPMs, when the flywheel speed closely matches the speed of the wheels, you don't really need to press the clutch to shift between close ratios. However, a 1-2 shift almost always needs clutch input. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nClear as mud?",
"Man, each one of these could be it’s own post. \n\n1a. Gears are a simple machine where you exchange how much you turn one gear for another. If the first gear is large and the second one is small, then it’s relatively easy to turn it. If the first gear is smaller, then it can be harder to turn. For any vehicle, most of the time this first gear is a LOT smaller, so it has to turn a lot just to move the second. A transmission allows you to change the size of these gears. \n\n1b. In the case of traveling at high speeds, the gear ratio by then is usually at 1:1 or less, meaning that the first gear is the same size or smaller. \n\n2. Turbos (and superchargers) compress the air going into an engine. Usually, at one atmosphere of pressure there is only so much oxygen, so only so much fuel can be burned. By cramming more air into the engine, there’s more oxygen, and thus more fuel can be burned. This has the effect of a small engine being able to output the same power as a larger engine when it’s needed but have a lower consumption of fuel when power isn’t needed. \n\n3. Alternators. A belt on the front of the engine is attached to the crankshaft (which is what turns the up/down motion of pistons into rotation) is attached to a smallish device that contains magnets and coils of copper wire. Moving magnets near copper induces electricity. (Again, deserving its own post)\n\n4. Pistons man. They are rapidly shaking back and forth. There’s counter balancing that’s used on the crankshaft, but it’s not perfect. The reason why it seems to smooth out at higher rpm isn’t that it’s not there, but more because at a higher frequency of vibration it’s harder to tell individual shakes. Think of driving on a rough road; at slow speeds you can feel every bump, but at high speed you kinda just glide over the bumps. \n\n5. A clutch... there’s a lot of explanation here, but the power of the engine has to be put to the ground at some point, but it has to be stopped too, right? There has to be a way to disengage the engine from the wheels so that the car can stop but the engine keeps running, but also allow a slow transfer of power from the engine to the wheels. A clutch allows the engine to disengage from the wheels. Essentially, the engine and the transmission both have a metal plate. When disengaged, the plates rotate independently. When engaged, they’re essentially stuck together. The process of engaging them allows slippage, as they can slide over each other until friction is too high and then one plate turns the other.\n\nHope this helps.",
"# **ELI5 Answers:**\n\nHow does gearing work?\n\n* Gears transfer the rotations of the engine to the drive train. Low gears provide more (low speed) torque/power to the wheels and high gears provide more speed (but less power) to the wheels. \n\nHow can the fuel consumption not be higher at higher gears, as youre moving faster, therefore needing more fuel.\n\n* This is an effect of gearing. Higher gears require less torque, and therefore less revolutions (RPM's), to maintain a higher speed. It's the RPM's that affect fuel consumption rather than the speed of the vehicle.\n\nTurbos! What are they!\n\n* It's a device that \"forces\" more fuel and air into the combustion chamber of an engine. This causes the engine to create more \"power\" than a regular (factory installed) fuel/air system.\n\nElectricity, how does the engine make power to charge stuff in the vehicle, is there a seperate generator?!?!?!\n\n* Yes. Every vehicle includes a generator (referred to as an alternator) to keep the car's battery charged and operate the electrical systems included in the car.\n\nHow come, at low rpm, the entire vehicle shakes?\n\n* This is not normal and is beyond the scope of an ELI5 answer. If your vehicle is doing this, take it to a mechanic.\n\nLast one, how does clutches work?\n\n* Clutches disengage the rotating components between the engine and drive train (wheels). This allows you to manually change gears from a lower to a higher gear ratio (and vice versa).",
"Turbo: usually engine sucks in the air it needs. The volume it can suck is less than the full amount of air actually needed: the only action that sucks air in is when the piston moves down. So it can never get all the air in before the piston has to move back up. With turbo and superchargers, we ram the air in, blow it at higher pressures. Just getting to 1bar makes a difference, that is just the theoretical optimal for non turbo engine: the same air pressure as is in the ambient air. But we can pack in more air, it is after all: compressible. More air means we can use more fuel and get even bigger bang (and since we are adding WAY more air, the pressure inside the cylinder grows even before we add the effect of having more fuel burning. This makes turbos very efficient, enough that the energy taken to turn the turbo fan is offset while we also have more power in the engine output.\n\nWe also have superchargers. The difference is that supercharger takes the power it needs from the engine crankshaft, direct from the engine, mechanically linked via belts. Turbo on the other hand uses the exhaust gases to turn a turbine. That turbine is connected to a compressor fan. So the waste gas are used to drive in more air. This is a positive feedback loop, more air in means more exhaust gases which means faster turbine speed which means more air is coming in.\n\nThe downside of course being that the exhaust gases have some resistance, it also takes away a little bit of power so it is not \"free\" energy. The biggest problem is however the fact that turbos can rotate at 150 000RPM... This means problems since tolerances, the space between the fan blades and the chassis have to be VERY tight. Everything has to be tight, there are high pressures inside. Also the hot exhaust gases are warming up the turbine side. Since turbos turn at very high RPM, the shaft connecting the input and output can not be long. This means that the hot side and cold side are right next to each other. They also can NOT exchange gases between them, that route has to be sealed. Bearings in a turbo is liquid, there is a layer of oil that the whole thing is floating on but in tight enough gap that pressure can't blow thru it. Mercedes F1 engine was one of the first done in any scale that have separated input and output, input at the front of the engine, shaft going THRU the engine to the exhaust side. It took them tens of millions to develop it, the problem is just that shaft that has huge energies going thru it, has to be super light, spin at 150k RPM and not flex at all (basically, a 40cm carbon fibre rod has to have same mechanical properties as 50mm of steel.\n\nTurbos main disadvantage to naturally aspirated engine is turbo lag. This is cause be the fact that to get power, we need to first get everything spinning. It takes a while to create the pressures. In practice, it means you push the pedal to the floor and nothing really happens... And then suddenly as the revs in the engine start to reach a magical number, the full power comes at once. Electric motors can be used to spin the turbo up first (F1 also uses this system as part of their hybrid power unit). Compression also adds heat, combined with the heat exhange that happens between the hot and cold means that we are actually compressing the air, then we feed it to high flow radiators that cool it down, then we give it to the engine. This packs even more air in (density is higher in cold air, more O2 molecules) and cools down the engine. The greater temperature difference we can get between unburned fuel/air mixture and burned, the more power we will get. \n\n\nExtra detail: Generator and electric motor are the same thing. Feed electricity into your generator and it will start to turn... Same thing with motors, if you turn it, it will generate electricity. I once cooked a battery for having a bushfix on the starter motor: a rocker switch was used to start the car.. I stalled on one intersection (i was 15 so give me a break...) and had to hurry. So i left the starter motor on.. I drove for 6km and stopped for a smoke, the battery was boiling. As we inspected it from some distance, the caps popped off from it... Nothing else bad happened thou, i was just surprised that the wires didn't have any damage.. It was one boring walk back. The battery was most likely destroyed in the process, it did not take any charge anymore.",
"Here. Efficiency answers: the fuel consumption is lower at higher gears because you are forcing your engine to do less revs per minute. This slows work of pistons, slowing fuel intake and explusion of gases. \n\nTurbos are a way for you to use the gases that would go to the exhaust to get a boost of speed with a bit of latency by swinging the gases (oxygen is what you're looking for) back into the engine by spooling the turbo."
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9ie2pm | multiple sclerosis - why have we not found a cure for it yet? what is lacking in research? | I'm doing a class project on Sodium-based MRI and it's applications. I somehow stumbled onto a page on Multiple Sclerosis and I remembered hearing about MS in a lecture briefly a few years ago. I'm just wondering if anyone has any intimate knowledge on current research in this area and what is hindering progress on its cure. I understand that current treatment is symptom-management based and slowing of progression but just wondering what it 'would take' or what's missing to find a cure? Many thanks in advance | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ie2pm/eli5_multiple_sclerosis_why_have_we_not_found_a/ | {
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"It's relatively simpler to target something foreign and kill/remove it.\n\nIt's much more difficult when your body is attacking itself and the thing you need to kill to stop it is something you need to keep living.",
"MS is a disorder in which your body's immune system attacks your nervous system. We are unable to cure it yet because to do so you would have to completely destroy someone's immune system....",
"Part of the problem is that researching cures for a specific disease is not the best way to advance medicine. When we don't know enough about how the body works, attempts at cures aren't anything more than a shot at the dark, efforts that could better be applied to basic science to better our understanding as a whole.\n\nIt is kind of like buying lottery tickets instead of letting your money earn interest in a bank. Unfortunately, people with these diseases don't have time for that, so they and their families pushing for cures *now*, even if it makes cures of all diseases slower to find in the long run.",
"Ms can be cured. But they have to essentially bring the person to the edge of death by killing there entire immune system and then rebooting it with stem cells. I'll try and find some info for you\n\nEdit: _URL_0_"
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3kf2s4 | what differentiates species, e.g. how do we know homo naledi is different enough? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kf2s4/eli5_what_differentiates_species_eg_how_do_we/ | {
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"A general rule of thumb that is used is 'can these two individuals breed and produce fertile offspring'? If yes, they are one species, if no, they are a separate species.\n\nThat is not the full story though. While 'can they breed y/n' is a good starting point, it is not the only criteria used. Diet, geographic location, DNA, anatomical differences and several others... all of those can be used as well to determine whether population A and population B are one species. In the case of Homo naledi, it is consistent morphological differences (as in, differences in how the skeleton is formed) that differ quite a lot from all the other species we have found that makes us say 'this is a separate species'. As far as I know, they haven't yet tried any DNA testing on the bones found, but that might be a further step to determine exactly how genetically different this species is from our own, and when we last shared a common ancestor. ",
"The definition of a species is all organisms that can have a FERTILE offspring with one and other. Obviously we dont force every animal to attempt to mate with eachother to see who belongs to what species, we just make educated guesses. Naledi shows a lot of characteristics unlike any other early human/late ape that we have discovered so far so its highly improbable it could successfully produce fertile offspring with any of them. (there are also other factors such as when and where it lived. If it lived before or after and in a completely different area than another species they clearly would not have reproduced)"
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5gxzdi | why do some people become more attractive to you the more you see them? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gxzdi/eli5_why_do_some_people_become_more_attractive_to/ | {
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"It's known as propiquity (spelling not guarenteed) and Matt Patt goes over it quite well in his [Dating sim game theory episode](_URL_0_). But to boil it down. The more you see someone the more likely you are to like them. Your brain trusts then more. ",
"This is likely a subset of the [mere-exposure effect](_URL_0_). Psychologically, people tend to like things more the more they're exposed to those things. This applies to music, paintings, and even people's faces."
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1uwf5p | how long after a global catastrophe would things like gps and satphones work? | Assuming a catastrophe on a global scale that eliminated the power grid and cellular networks, how long do you think the existing global positioning satellites and the satellites that are used for SatPhones would be able to function without maintenance or replacement? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1uwf5p/eli5_how_long_after_a_global_catastrophe_would/ | {
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"The satellites would operate for years (something like 1-20 depending on how old they were when the disaster happened). However, without updates from the ground the GPS satellites would lose accuracy long before they stopped working. "
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1o1enf | how are the drive shafts on submarines water tight? | How are the drive shafts on submarines water tight, but able to freely rotate even at high pressures ? What about the joints on nuit suits ?
Thanks !
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o1enf/eli5_how_are_the_drive_shafts_on_submarines_water/ | {
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"Gaskets are pretty flexible because they are made from 100% rubber."
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1k7ajv | how exactly does a fetus just "switch over" to breathing on its own during birth. while in the uterus, it gets o2 from the placenta and umbilical cord. then what happens at birth to just causes the switch to be flipped and the lungs to start taking in o2? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1k7ajv/eli5_how_exactly_does_a_fetus_just_switch_over_to/ | {
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"According to this article, a drop in temperature in the skin is signaled to the brain. This triggers the baby's first breath within moments of leaving the mother.\n\n_URL_0_",
"There are a whole bunch of factors that enable the newborn to breath. As /u/flipstables pointed out, the change in surrounding environment plays a role. There are also huge hormonal changes during labor, more intense than the newborn will ever experience for the rest of its life. Hormones like adrenaline and oxytocin promote breathing. \n\nThere is also the matter of fluid movement. Prior to birth, the lungs are filled with fluid and circulation of blood is different. The hormone surge causes the lungs to drain. As for the blood to the lungs and heart, there are some holes in the tubes carrying blood that close once the infant is exposed to the air pressure outside the womb. (The holes are called the ductus arteriosus, ductus venosus, and foramen ovale.) The change in air pressue pushes the holes shut and allows blood to flow through the heart and to the lungs like in a normal, healthy human. As a result, oxygen can be carried from the lungs, through the blood, and to the rest of the body. ",
"Here's a quote from [this article](_URL_0_)\n\nWhile the fetus is in the womb, it \"breathes\" by exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide through the mother's circulation via the placenta. Most of the blood does not go through the developing baby's lungs. Instead, it travels through the heart and flows throughout the baby's body.\n\nAt birth, the baby's lungs are filled with amniotic fluid and are not inflated. The baby takes the first breath within about 10 seconds after delivery. It sounds like a gasp, as the newborn's central nervous system reacts to the sudden change in temperature and environment.\n\nOnce the umbilical cord is cut and the baby takes the first breath, a number of changes occur in the infant's lungs and circulatory system:\n\n- Increased oxygen in the lungs causes a decrease in blood flow resistance to the lungs.\n- Blood flow resistance of the baby's blood vessels also increases.\n- Amniotic fluid drains or is absorbed from the respiratory system.\n- The lungs inflate and begin working on their own, moving oxygen into the bloodstream and removing carbon dioxide by breathing out (exhalation).\n\nI also know from experience that there is a hole in the heart called the [foramen ovale](_URL_1_) that is designed to bypass the lungs while the fetus is in utero. It is supposed to close in the newborn but remains partly open in some of the population (including myself). It's associated with increased migraines and higher risk of stroke. "
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2ugycx | when to use heat vs cold on an injury? | So I'm trying to figure out when to use a hot compression vs an ice bath or etc. Are certain injuries better with either one? Is a combination always the best method? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ugycx/eli5when_to_use_heat_vs_cold_on_an_injury/ | {
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"It's a matter of increasing or decreasing blood flow: if you have a bruise, you want to reduce the blood flow, if you have some kind of stretch pain, heat might move more blood to the affected area",
"Let me give you two injuries to explain this. A strained quad and an ankle sprain. With the quad strain, you would want to use heat because that muscle is \"muscle guarding\"; or tightening itself up to prevent further injury. The heat will increase blood flow thus increasing the elasticity of the muscle fibers which means the muscle relaxes to allow it to restore back to it's natural function. Now the ankle sprain. In an ankle you would want to use ice because in joints your body uses swelling to protect itself (note that muscle tightened up to protect itself while bones/ligaments swell). This is so that you have less range of motion in your ankle and decrease your chances of further injuring yourself. Back to the ice. The ice constricts the arteries in the area to promote blood flow back to your heart (also note that this should be done as well as raising your ankle about heart level to encourage venous return). You can not prevent swelling. So the ice only helps reduce the inevitable swelling. You also want this because you are able to restore function to the joint a lot sooner without losing any functionality. \n\nSo- ice to reduce swelling. Heat to relax a muscle. Both effective modalities if used properly. ",
"Step 1: See a doctor. \nStep 2: Take any advice from the internet with a grain of salt. (Google \"first aid heat ice injury\" to get many articles. In other words, a polite \"Let me google that for you\").\nStep 3: If not sure, my doctors advice was \"Rule of thumb: Ice in the first 48 hrs, heat after 48 hrs\""
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8ybmqe | how do photoshoppers and video editors accurately recreate the scene behind a person or object that they have removed from a piece of media? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8ybmqe/eli5_how_do_photoshoppers_and_video_editors/ | {
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"text": [
"If the background is just single color or otherwise simple, they can copy other parts of the picture over the object. If it's complex they can take multiple pictures of the same place. One without the object and just copy the background from that picture."
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23u4zg | why do solid batteries seem to 'charge' when you hit them? or they don't? | I'm talking about AA and that sort | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23u4zg/eli5why_do_solid_batteries_seem_to_charge_when/ | {
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"The energy in a battery is from a reaction between chemicals (in alkaline batteries, it's in the form of a paste) and metals. The reaction causes the metals in contact with the chemical to corrode. The metals get kind of crusty with corrosion inside. Banging a battery (or even better, slightly squeezing it in a few places with pliers or even biting into it, not too much, though) breaks up the corrosion enough for more chemicals to react to the metals."
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7j6jun | why is utc 0 set on the uk? is it just a replacement for gmt? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7j6jun/eli5_why_is_utc_0_set_on_the_uk_is_it_just_a/ | {
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"Yes, UTC is a replacement for GMT. The idea being that (1) Greenwich moves due to continental drift, and (2) GMT doesn't belong to an international standards body.",
"There nothing wrong with having some arbitrary zero point, and you might as well base it on something that is already in use. You just want to have control over it and make sure it defined precisely.",
"This is actually a couple of questions in one.\n\n0. UTC is just UTC, rarely known as Zulu from the letter \"Z\" put at the end of date-times with time zone information. \"UTC 0\" is slightly redundant, but it's sometimes good to disambiguate. Humans could always use extra explicit time zone information.\n\n1. Why is UTC \"equal\" to GMT? This was an entirely arbitrary decision. Some people got together and managed to agree on it. In retrospect, having agreed on *something* was much better than everybody huffing off and setting their own standards.\n\n2. Why is GMT 0? Well, it wasn't always 0! The French had their own standard for a long time, the Paris Meridian. It wasn't until 1884 that people got together, collectively said \"alright, we've had it with this difference in times and scheduling\", and decided on Greenwich as 0. It was quite like the cardinals being locked together in a room until they elected a Pope- the consequences of having no international standard for navigation, time, and schedules would be mass chaos.\n\n3. Why the quote marks? Isn't UTC equal to GMT? In general use yes, but technically, no. UTC, Coordinated Universal Time, is an international time standard, hence the weird acronym- a compromise with French-speaking countries. It's pegged to International Atomic Time, TAI- another international standard with a funny-looking acronym. GMT, on the other hand, isn't defined by an international body. It's whatever them Brits- God save the Queen- define it to be.",
"As the first part of your question has been answered, I'll have a go at the second.\n\nGreenwich Mean Time was first created to help with navigation over long distances. In the 1600s when Britain still ruled the waves the Royal Observatory in Greenwich was established.\n\nBy using an accurate clock set to GMT and by establishing the exact point where the sun is at the highest point in the sky at your location you can determine your longitude from Greenwich, and thus exactly where you are, horizontally, in the world. Very important when navigating at sea."
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1oxnc4 | what does "suing" somebody mean in us law? | Someone claimed one company sued another, and I said the filed an "opposition for the trademark" -- he said they were, essentially, the same thing and that suing just means to "institute legal proceedings against (a person or institution)"
I'm not trying to get you to settle the argument, it just got me curious. Growing up I always thought suing someone meant demanding money because of something. People always said you could "sue somebody and get tons of money" (if the court ruled in your favor) and therefore I always thought to sue someone specifically involved money.
I'm sure it differs between country, but in the US does filing a opposition for trademark count as suing someone? What does suing mean in a ELI5 way?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1oxnc4/eli5_what_does_suing_somebody_mean_in_us_law/ | {
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"Generally anything that involves going to court is called suing in the US. ",
" > People always said you could \"sue somebody and get tons of money\" (if the court ruled in your favor) \n\nPeople are misinformed :-p\n\n-----------------------------\n\nSuing someone: I want something to happen and I'm using the court to make it happen. \n\nIt could be:\n\n* I want you, the court, to force Bob to give me $10,000 because he ran into my car and caused $10,000 worth of damage.\n\nOr it could be something like:\n\n* I want you, the court, to force Company X to stop infringing on my trademark.\n\nYou don't have to be asking for money.\n\nEdit: Often we do ask for money because when someone is harmed they often can't be made \"whole\" again, the best we can do is money for them and to punish the tortfeasor (the person who harmed someone). For example, if you cause me to slip and and fall and break my arm I can't say \"you should go back in time and give me a non-broken arm\". I can't say \"you should go back in time and give me my car which has never been ran into\". I can't say \"you should go back in time and not cause my grandfather to die from you being reckless\". So we do the best we can which often means being made \"whole\" again through monetary compensation.",
"\"To sue\" means to bring a grievance to a civil court. This is different from criminal court where the equivalent would be \"to press charges.\"\n\nNo one is going to jail in a suit, they're just trying to get a judge to arbitrate a disagreement."
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cu9qjk | why median and mean are used at different times to display data. | For example I was watching a video and they mentioned a number for the median pay for a position, and I wondered why they didn’t use average. If it’s to prevent data from being skewed by outliers then why isn’t median being used all the time to depict the “average” | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cu9qjk/eli5_why_median_and_mean_are_used_at_different/ | {
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"Not an expert, but: Typically with things like jobs, you start at the low end and work your way up. Not only this, but pay tends to increase exponentially so people who are more advanced in the industry will offset the balance quite a bit. This means that the median pay is a much better representation of your salary for the first 1-10 years of your work than the average would be.",
"When the numbers are distributed fairly normally (most values in the middle, few at the extremes), the median and mean will be nearly the same. Choosing which one to use is a matter of preference and ease. Finding an average is pretty simple, while finding a median is generally not (you have to organize the numbers and count them twice, as opposed to just add them and count them).\n\nWhen there is a significant difference in the median and mean (due to a distribution to the extremes instead of averages) you can say different things with each number.\n\nIf all of the numbers in question work together, the average is still what makes the most sense. I don’t follow sports, but I assume baseball would speak about the average batting rates of a team, not their median.\n\nWhen the numbers work alone (and there aren’t many values to pick from), then the third value makes the most sense, the mode. That is whichever value is most common.\n\nYou can talk about wealth in this way, if you first create a series of brackets to group people in. Speaking about the mode wealth of a population tells you the most common experiences in that population.\n\nMedian works much like mode, but applies well when you don’t have a small number of options available to group people in, and so few data points are actually the same. This causes the mode to be somewhat arbitrarily placed wherever luck happened to give a triple alignment. But median always gives you a value to look at and say “half are better than this, and half are worse”. It doesn’t say how MUCH better or worse those halves are though, so isn’t often that useful in my experience. For a particular quiz full of trick questions, you may have a median of 10 out of 100, and yet have all scores at either 10 (you got one right by luck) or 100 (you have seen all of these before), your median winds up being 10 because 1 more person failed than passed."
]
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2mno5e | why don't animals from different areas in the world look different (why are there no "asian dogs" for example) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mno5e/eli5_why_dont_animals_from_different_areas_in_the/ | {
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"text": [
"They do... African vs Asian elephants. Siberian Tigers vs African Lions vs Canadian Lynx vs Felis silvestris lybica (the Middle-Eastern ancestor of the modern housecat). Polar bears vs black bears vs Grizzly bears. White-tailed deer vs red deer vs dikdik vs reindeer.",
"There clearly *are* regional differences in how different sub-species look. \n\nExamples abound, but there are Asian dogs (Shiba Inus, Shar Peis) that are very different from The Molossus breeds common in Europe or compare a Siamese cat to a Norwegian Forrest Cat..."
]
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axmfp6 | what is the difference between all of the usb types? (usb 3, type c, lightning, etc.) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/axmfp6/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_all_of_the/ | {
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"USB c is a connector: the double sided, oval connector.\n\nLightning is Apple's special connector for their iPhones and other devices.\n\nThunderbolt 3 is an alternate protocol that uses the USB C connector.",
"There are two different things being mixed in your question.\n\nUSB 2 vs USB 3 vs USB 3.1 vs the new USB 3.2 are all standards that define what the signals mean.\n\nUSB A vs micro-USB vs USB C vs Lightning vs Thunderbolt are \"standards\" (because Lightning and Thunderbolt aren't real standards) that define the mechanical arrangement of pins that have the USB signals on them.",
"OK, first off understand there are two different things here:\n\nConnectors - The shape and details of how a cord and port connect.\n\nProtocol - How the information is transmitted across a cable.\n\nAll of the USB numbers are protocols and updates to those protocols, sometimes requiring cables that can support those protocols. There are also USB connectors such as Type A (with mini and micro variants as well), B, and C. These connectors and protocols can mix and match, though we usually associate a protocol with a connector, as there's been a push for Type C connectors to become more standard with the latest protocols. \n\nLightning is Apple's proprietary connector (and I don't honestly know what protocol it uses). \n\nThunderbolt is Intel's proprietary protocol, though it typically uses a USB connector, typically Type C these days. So this can be confusing because you can usually use a Thunderbolt port like a USB port too. \n\nHowever, USB4 is now going to integrate Thunderbolt into its standard, no longer being proprietary. This will give us the benefits of the Thunderbolt protocol in the widespread open standard of USB. "
]
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zul3p | plagiarizing | When does it become plagiarizing if you cite sources? If you don't cite? Do you have to reword the information? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zul3p/eli5_plagiarizing/ | {
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"Always cite sources. If you're quoting directly, put it in quotation marks and indicate the source. If you re-word information that you got from somewhere else, you should still cite it but don't put it in quotes. But if the information is common knowledge, i.e., the sky is blue, George Washington was the first president of the US, etc, it's not necessary to cite.\n\nDepending on what you're writing and what it's for, the standards for citations will vary. For some things, you need to mark every individual use of a certain source with footnotes, endnotes or parenthetical notation. For some things, just putting a list of sources (bibliography) at the end is enough.",
"If you cite your sources, you typically aren't plaigiarizing. However, you do need to indicate that direct quotes ARE direct quotes. Plus, it can also be plaigiarism even if you DO cite your sources if you take the source material and modify it just enough that it appears like it's your own.\n\nWrite your paper, and cite your sources for facts. If, for whatever reason, you DO want to quote your source directly, go ahead, but quote the MINIMUM amount necessary.\n\nAt a more basic level, you can tell you're plaigiarising if you're using your sources in such a way as to give you the minimum amount of effort necessary in writing your paper.",
"If you cite your sources, you typically aren't plaigiarizing. However, you do need to indicate that direct quotes ARE direct quotes. Plus, it can also be plaigiarism even if you DO cite your sources if you take the source material and modify it just enough that it appears like it's your own.\nWrite your paper, and cite your sources for facts. If, for whatever reason, you DO want to quote your source directly, go ahead, but quote the MINIMUM amount necessary.\nAt a more basic level, you can tell you're plaigiarising if you're using your sources in such a way as to give you the minimum amount of effort necessary in writing your paper."
]
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2cikck | how do scientists calculate the path of space probes such as the voyager probes? | It would seem like there would be so many things that could hit it. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cikck/eli5how_do_scientists_calculate_the_path_of_space/ | {
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"If you are referring to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, it's not as dense as Star Wars or any other sci-fi movies make it seem to be. In fact, there is so much space between asteroids that the possibility of hitting one wihout prior planning is nearly [zero](_URL_0_).\n\nAs to the actual path, very complex mathematics and physics are used, such as the n-body problem, which is a classical problem in physics where the forces exerted upon each other of multiple bodies(like satellites, planets, and the sun) are analyzed.\n\nOf course, bad luck is to be expected, but as I said, outer space is *pretty roomy*."
]
} | []
| []
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[
"http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/New_Horizons_Crosses_The_Asteroid_Belt.html"
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38ow88 | viruses are crazy small. why don't they pass right through your skin? | As I understand it, you can come in contact with blood from someone who is HIV positive and you're unlikely to get it unless you have an open wound or it enters your body through another opening. Why not pass through the skin? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38ow88/eli5_viruses_are_crazy_small_why_dont_they_pass/ | {
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"The skin acts as a barrier. Skin cells are way bigger than a virus, but they're tightly packed together and they stick to each other. It would be like trying to put a penny through a brick wall. Sure, the penny is a good bit smaller than the bricks, but without a door or window the penny isn't going through.",
"Because viruses are really vulnerable to oxidization.\n\nImagine a super-sharp knife that you have to store in oil because if it ever comes in contact with water or oxygen, it will start corroding. To cut with it, you have to put whatever you are cutting in oil, then carefully move it from where you are storing it to the oil bath that the thing you are cutting is in, so that it never comes in contact with the air, and has it's blade rust.\n\nHIV is more vulnerable than that.\n\nBasically, DNA is very vulnerable to oxidation: our bodies spend a lot of effort making sure oxygen never comes close to our DNA. RNA is even more vulnerable, but our body doesn't use RNA to store information.\n\nHIV has it's genetics stored in RNA, and has nothing protecting that RNA. Which means that as long as it's in a body, attrition rates are low enough that it can keep going (one reason you can have sex with someone with HIV and not catch it is if all of the HIV that gets into you dies before it can infect you). But out of a body, HIV breaks down fast.\n\n\nSorry if that's a little too complicated. Feel free to ask questions so I can clarify."
]
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t0d09 | why do you dream less as you get older? | Why do you dream less as you get older? Can you do anything to dream more than usual? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/t0d09/eli5_why_do_you_dream_less_as_you_get_older/ | {
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"I've heard, although I have zero proof if it's true or not, that dreams are your subconscious making sense of the memories and experiences of the day. My guess would be that when you're younger you have more new experiences and more imagination which the subconscious needs to sort out when you sleep",
"a clean white blank page has alot of room to draw magnificant ideas on\nthats what your born with, feerless inocense is your engine\n\nas yu get older if your page of magnificant ideas forms into something that is growing(maybe into perfection) and or without failure, your dreams keep growing\n\nif your dreams fuck up and become broken wreckage inside your mind, that wreckage gets in the way of new ideas, inocence lost, then you make monsters for ideas, or the real monsters of myth, Medusa comes to mind, suddenly metaphysically is a real idea fuckin your shit up, turning your hero and life esance into stone",
"How old are we talking here? I've never attempted to \"quantify\" my dreams, but I wouldn't say I have significantly fewer dreams than I did when I was young.",
"You dream often, every night. Most often a recalled dream is the result of being interrupted in the middle of your sleep cycle. That's why, if you are somewhere unusual, if you are awoken unexpectedly, or if you are ill, you remember your dreams. It's not that you dream more, you just remember them. As we age, we get better at completing our sleep cycles and sleeping more soundly. We aren't sick as often (because we've had a lifetime to build immunity), and we are more comfortable in our surroundings (we know there are no monsters under our bed)\n\nIn adulthood, anxiety, stress, pregnancy and babies can interrupt our sleep patterns and cause us to remember our dreams",
"When you sleep there are different stages which happen, one of them is R.E.M., this is the stage that happens when you dream. For some reason babies are recorded having much more of this than others and as you get older the amount of R.E.M. sleep you have decreases. For adults R.E.M. occupies 20-25% of sleep. No one knows why it decreases yet, just that it does.\n\nThis probably isn't the issue though, the issue is that as you get older your brain learns that it doesn't need to hold on to the memories or information from your dreams so it \"discards\" the dream. You can't dream more than usual but you can start increasing your dream memory by keeping a dream journal. A dream journal is simply somewhere where you write down whatever you can remember in your dreams right after you wake up, by doing this you train your brain to start remembering dreams again. EVERYONE dreams all of the time, you just forget that it happens. You should check out lucid dreaming sites if you want more help with keeping a dream journal, Reddit even has a subReddit for it called r/luciddreaming. Hope this helps."
]
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3ux98h | why does michellin, a tire manufacturer, give out stars to fine dinning restaurants? | I never understood the relation of these two. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ux98h/eli5_why_does_michellin_a_tire_manufacturer_give/ | {
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"In order to answer this question, we have to keep in mind, that Michelin sold rubber tires. \n\nAnd Michelin defined a \"three star restaurant\" as \"being worth a trip on its own\". Going on a trip means going by car. Going by car means running down your rubber tires. Running down your rubber tires means buying more rubber tires. \n\nBuying more rubber tires means more money for Michelin.",
"Quoting my 2nd all-time top scoring post:\n\n---\n\nIn the early days of motoring, the Michelin company put together a travel guide which rated hotels and restaurants. The idea was to encourage people to drive to distant cities.\n\nOver the years, the travel guide grew more & more respected. At some point, it lost its connection to the tire business & became a stand-alone guide to the world's finest restaurants.\n\nIt's sort of like how the Guinness Book of World Records doesn't really have anything to do with beer anymore."
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1klix0 | why don't vocal microphones pick up the sounds of the imstruments? | You would think the instruments would be loud enough to be picked up by the microphones. How do they stop that happening? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1klix0/eli5_why_dont_vocal_microphones_pick_up_the/ | {
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"text": [
"Most vocal mics use a cardiod pickup pattern and this pattern rejects noise coming from the sides. However, vocal mics still do pickup instruments to some degree this is called instrument bleed and is common. What are you trying to figure out exactly?\n\n",
"They're directionally sensitive. If you can ever get ahold of a microphone, talk into it from different directions. From the sides, it'll pick up whatever you're saying, but not very loud or clear."
]
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[],
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74lb3d | how is it possible for you to be able to feel a arm or finger etc that's been reattached to the body? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/74lb3d/eli5_how_is_it_possible_for_you_to_be_able_to/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"They reattach as much of the nerves as possible. But nerves have a consistency of jello, so it is difficult to reattach them. "
]
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4ujqjx | why does bayern munchen/munich have the 2 names, and which one is "correct"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ujqjx/eli5_why_does_bayern_munchenmunich_have_the_2/ | {
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"text": [
"Bayern is the south-eastern most German state, Munich is its capital.\n\nI assume you are asking about the soccer club.\n\nThat is named Bayern Muenchen, because there are more than 1 soccer club in Bayern. It explicitly refers the the city it is in, aka Muenchen.",
"FC Bayern München is the official name; FC Bayern is frequently used as well. If you're not a fan, there are various other names for them depending on who you are a fan of.",
"Its official German name is \"Fußball-Club Bayern, München e.V.\", normally abbreviated to \"FC Bayern München\" or just \"Bayern München\".\n\n\"München\" is the name of the city -- its German name. To English-speaking people, the city is better known as \"Munich\", so in English-speaking countries the club is known as \"Bayern Munich\". That's not its official name, but the English version of the abbreviation of its official name.\n\nOf course, \"Bayern\" is German for \"Bavaria\", so you might expect the English name to be \"Bavaria Munich\". But English-speakers have no problem pronouncing \"Bayern\", so it's left as it is. \"München\", on the other hand, is really difficult for English-speakers: the sound written \"ch\" does technically exist in most English dialects but never in the middle of a word like this; while the sound written \"ü\" doesn't exist in English at all. As a result, English-speakers simply can't pronounce \"München\" correctly.\n\nIf you're in any doubt as to the \"correct\" form, just look at [their logo](_URL_0_) on their [official website](_URL_1_). However, to avoid embarrassing yourself, unless you speak German well, it's probably best to just stick with saying \"Bayern Munich\".",
"Bayern is English for Beieren. Beieren is a province located in the south of Germany. Munich is English for München. München is a city located in the province of Beieren."
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"http://www.fcbayernmunich.com/pics/logos/fcb.png",
"http://www.fcbayernmunich.com/"
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fr0qfk | why do crispy food (such as fried chicken, biscuits) lose its crispiness when left in the open for a certain amount of time? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fr0qfk/eli5_why_do_crispy_food_such_as_fried_chicken/ | {
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"Cooking something until crisp forces the water out of the object being cooked, effectively drying the object. As it sits in open air the object will absorb water and moisture from its surroundings, causing the object to go stale.",
"2 different yet related reasons\n\nFried foods lose crispness because the crispy parts absorb water and oil from the rest of the food, making it soggy\n\nBreads/crackers etc go stale because they absorb moisture from the air, and it changes the structure of the starch grains."
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sxhww | why judas sold/betrayed jesus. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/sxhww/eli5_why_judas_soldbetrayed_jesus/ | {
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"He was offered money.",
"[Because He asked him to](_URL_0_).",
"If you're looking for a serious answer try reading the book: Desire of Ages.\n\nIt is available for free online at numerous sites, even in book format.\n\nAccording to that book, Judas betrayed Jesus because he really didn't like that Jesus was not taking full advantage of his divinity. He was very frustrated that things seemed to be moving so slowly and there was so little advancement from a worldly point of view. (Someone with all that power and the ability to perform miracles and have thousands of followers should have been even more renowned and successful then he was, but Jesus of course didn't care for worldly fame. They both had differing ideas of what they wanted to achieve.)\n\nThus, Judas schemed on having him arrested and placed in a dire situation where he would HAVE to use his divine powers to save himself. In doing so, he would become even more famous, even among the Romans, and it would be a first step in him becoming a famous and powerful king. Of course being one of Jesus' disciples Judas would stand to benefit greatly from this and earn some fame and power for himself too.\n\nWell of course things didn't work out that way. Jesus' trial before his crucifixion took many hours and he was tortured and slapped and cursed all through it. It gradually dawned on Judas, to his horror, that Jesus wasn't going to save himself. That he may actually die from this. \n\nThat is why he gave back the money he received from the betrayal and hanged himself. He realized he had done a horrendous thing on an incomprehensible scale. That he had betrayed and caused the death and suffering of an innocent man (and the son of God if that's what you believe). \n\nFor him, it was never about the money. The money was a very small amount and just a tiny benefit he hoped to earn in the process of doing something he hoped would make Jesus more successful.\n\nWhat Judas did wasn't actually THAT bad perse. There is a reason Jesus referred to him as, \"It would have been better if he had never been born,\" but it wasn't necessarily because of the betrayal. ",
"because he was the hero the bible deserved"
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1ewwrs | the difference between ipv4 and ipv6 | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ewwrs/eli5_the_difference_between_ipv4_and_ipv6/ | {
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"Longer address space mainly.\n\nIPv4 uses 4 bytes per address (a byte being 8 bits, a bit being a on or off). \n\nAn IPv4 looks like 192.168.0.21\n\nAnd IPv6 uses 16 bytes for address, 4x what IPv4 uses. It writes them via 2001:0db8:85a3:0042:1000:8a2e:0370:7334",
"IPv4 uses 32-bit (four-byte) addresses, which limits the address space to 4294967296 (2^32) addresses. As addresses were assigned to users, the number of unassigned addresses decreased.\n\nIPv6 uses a 128-bit address, allowing 2^128, or approximately 3.4×10^38 addresses, or more than 7.9×10^28 times as many as IPv4, which uses 32-bit addresses. By comparison, this amounts to approximately 4.8×10^28 addresses for each of the seven billion people alive in 2011. IPv6 addresses are represented as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by colons, for example 2001:0db8:85a3:0042:1000:8a2e:0370:7334, but methods of abbreviation of this full notation exist. In addition to offering more addresses, IPv6 also implements features not present in IPv4.....etc\n\nStraight from Wikipedia. A simple google search would help you next time.",
"To a five-year-old:\n\nYour computer has an address, like an apartment address. It lets other computers in your home or in the world find it, if it wants to be found. We started to run out of addresses a few years ago with IPv4. So IPv6 mostly lets the world of computers have waaaaaay more addresses so we can fit waaaay more computers into the world *and* keep track of them so they can all talk to each other.",
"Back when they were first inventing the internet, they didn't know it was going to be as revolutionary as it is today. It was just a bunch of universities and government places. They designed IP addresses with the ability to have 4 billion unique addresses, thinking they would never need that many.\n\nThey were wrong.\n\nIPv6 addresses this by making IP addresses longer, thus allowing for many more addresses to be used. How many? Exactly 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456.\n\nIf you were to give all 7 billion people on earth 1 billion IPv6 addresses each, that would hardly be a drop in the bucket of how many unique addresses IPv6 allows for.\n\nThere are some other optimizations and additional functionality IPv6 adds, but this is the big one."
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3jbw4q | why is there not (really) a true international government? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jbw4q/eli5_why_is_there_not_really_a_true_international/ | {
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"Nobody who has complete power over one nation wants to give up that complete power, and no one nation has enough power to take over all of the other nations.\n\nIf people objectively thought through the best possible organization of governance and executed on it, there might be an \"all of humanity\" tier of government that could make humanity-spanning laws (or there might not, there are disadvantages to that as well as advantages), but that's unfortunately how governments are formed.",
"Because no single government has a military/police unit capable of enforcing international laws and policies and virtually no country is willing to give up forces and sovereignty to the UN to allow them to do that. ",
"Because countries don't want to give up their independence and sovereignty. \n\nPeople don't agree on a lot of things and so one and I have to add this obvious shit because of the fucking auto mod that hates brief answers."
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1zh65w | to the drag racing enthusiast, why does the car with the slower time win sometimes? | I know nothing about racing technicalities, or cars really, and the wikipedia explanation confuses me
NHRA 1000 feet races, for example | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zh65w/eli5to_the_drag_racing_enthusiast_why_does_the/ | {
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"It's called a holeshot win if the car with the fastest elapsed time does not cross the finish line first. If the reaction time to the green light is 0.00 seconds then it is a perfect reaction time, which means you left the stage beam at the exact time the light turned green. The timers don't start counting the elapsed time until you leave the stage beam. So, if I had a reaction time of .050 and my elapsed time was 10.60 seconds and you had a reaction time of .000 and your elapsed time was 10.64 seconds this would mathematically put you ahead at the finish line by .010 seconds. Since my elapsed time was faster than yours but you left the line before I did, that would give you the win.\n\nEdit: Spelling"
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5qbn11 | what does it mean that the us dollar is backed by silver/gold? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5qbn11/eli5_what_does_it_mean_that_the_us_dollar_is/ | {
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"It means that if you have a dollar bill in your hand, there is a dollar worth of silver or gold in a vault somewhere that this bill is representing. The US hasn't done this in a long time.",
"The US dollar is not backed by gold of silver any more.\n\nIn the past, the dollar was backed by gold. You could take a paper bill to the bank and get a gold coin of the same denomination. The government promised to sell you gold at a fixed price.\n\nNow the dollar floats, like other currencies. ",
"So this is all about the \"invention\" of money. Gold is something that humans have historical valued. While it's used in manufacturing it's real value is that it is soft enough to make jewelry and it shines up real nice. \n\nWAAAY back in the day, gold was the currency. If you went to a store to buy a new sword they would demand payment in gold. Since gold is quite heavy, this is very impractical, but the idea is that gold is money.\n\nTo overcome this obstacle (and for other reasons) governments started issuing their own money in the form of paper notes (or coins). They would print up some paper or mint some coins with an official stamp and tell everyone they can use this money rather than gold. \n\nThe public was skeptical to say the least. This was just paper, it has no real value, why should stores accept it? Why should employees accept it? Why should anyone take it for more then just the paper it is? Gold on the other hand, well gold was GOLD!\n\nAnd so the government had an idea. They had a whole pile of gold in the government's vault. So they wold make a promises to the citizens that anyone who wanted to could show up with some paper money and exchange it for a set amount of gold.\n\nSince people believed gold had value and always would, the little bits of paper became iou notes from the government. People were OK with trading this government paper because they could always go get the gold if they wanted to. Funny enough, there is no need to actually make that trade for gold. The knowledge that you could if you wanted to is enough. \n\nSo the government says, if you show up with a $20 bank note, we will give you 1 oz of gold. If the government has 5,000,000 oz of gold in the vaults, it could print $100,000,000 worth of paper notes. The gold would stay in the vaults and the notes would be used to buy and sell things. \n\nThis all worked \"fine\", for a while but it had a problem. The amount of gold in the world is not stable, the demand for gold is not stable and gold is not actually \"worth\" anything more than paper money is. If the apocalypse came today and all governments fell and there were people rioting and starving in the streets, no one would want gold anymore than anyone would want US dollars. So this idea that \"gold\" somehow has an intrinsic worth that can outlast governments is actually a fiction. \n\nThis ability to always exchange a set amount of money for a set amount of gold was known as the gold standard and it was used all over the world. Around 90 years ago, that stopped.\n\nAnd now for the complicated part. As it turns out, the ability to print or not print money is one of the primary tools that governments can use to prevent problems like recessions or depressions. Events like the grate depression or the 2008 crises used to be fairly common. Things like inflation was actually an every day sort of problem that effected peoples lives in very real ways. I know we don't feel like it, so close to 2008, but the truth is that since abandoning the gold standard those kinds of events are much less common than they used to be. \n\nSince the government has no requirement to keep a large vault of gold to backup it's money they are free to tweek the amount of money out there in the world in an effort to keep things flowing along. While there have been some major issues (like 2008) it's worked basically fine for nearly 100 years. \n\nSo to directly answer. The US dollar is NOT any longer backed by gold. It used to be, but it's not any longer. "
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12795a | how come prosecutors are paid for by the state? with that being the case, shouldn't defense attorneys also be paid for by the government? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12795a/eli5_how_come_prosecutors_are_paid_for_by_the/ | {
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"In criminal trials, if the defendant cannot afford an attorney, the state provides a public defender at no cost. This is actually in the Miranda warnings you hear in TV shows when someone gets arrested.",
"The Constitution allows for the prosecution of crimes. The Constitution states that the accused has the right to legal counsel. What the Constitution does not say is how the accused is prosecuted, it only gives rules for the trial. (Right to confront accusers, right to a trial, right to a jury of your peers, etc.) The Constitution also is silent on where the defense counsel comes from. \n\nUp until about the 1920's, the right to counsel was interpreted to mean that you could not be *denied* the opportunity to talk to a lawyer, not that you had to be provided a lawyer. From the 1920's to the 1960's, the right to counsel began to be broadened to mean that the states should provide you a lawyer if you were facing a loss of life, or significant freedom or a significant amount of property. \n\nGenerally, the Supreme Court felt that if you were facing a felony, you should not only be allowed to consult an attorney, you should have to refuse an attorney. The idea of a court appointed counsel spread, but the Constitution still did not say that the government had to pay for the attorney. An arrangement was made where the states, and the federal government began to appoint counsel for those who could not afford an attorney to keep the poor with the same rights as those who can afford an attorney. \n\nYou still can't get a court appointed lawyer to fight a speeding ticket, but at least you know if you are facing prison time, you will have to turn down a lawyer if you want to represent yourself in court and the judge will still have to approve your refusal. "
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4l8hbl | why does the spelling bee tend to be dominated by indian and asain kids? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4l8hbl/eli5why_does_the_spelling_bee_tend_to_be/ | {
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"Speaking from an indian person's perspective, our parents pressure us more to study and excell in any and all fields. I bet that anyone could win in a spelling bee if they were pressured or they tried hard enough. I still dunno why indian and asian parents pressure us more. My best guess is that it's a cultural thing, and it just kinda carried over when we immigrated.",
"It is specifically dominated by Indian kids. One of the reasons is Indian immigrants almost always know English at a decent level, considering India is one of the largest English speaking nations in the world (due the fact of centuries of British influence and rule). This specifically differentiates it from most other Asian cultures, like China and Japan, both of whom emphasize education, but the English language remains the main barrier for them. This is also one of the reasons for the prevalence of Indian physicians in the US. While most academic fields have large percentages of Asians, medicine specifically has more Indians mostly due to the language barrier being much easier for them to get past.\n\nAnother thing, for better or worse, is the emphasize on rote memorization in Asian educational institutions. Spelling bees largely test memorization ability, so this would be a natural field for people from those cultures to gravitate towards. As someone who has studied in both India and the US, I personally think this is the one of the worst aspects of the Indian educational system, and I hope something that stresses creativity rather than memorization ability becomes more of the norm in the future. "
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29zgr4 | why are we destroying the rainforest? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29zgr4/eli5_why_are_we_destroying_the_rainforest/ | {
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"Because we want trees/land. ",
"Someone is making a buck off it.",
"I'll give you $3.50 for that tree."
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36886w | why do batteries start working again if i roll them or turn the device off and on? | I noticed my toothbrush battery died the other day but if I keep turning it off and on with a few hours between, it's weaker but it works for a few more seconds | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36886w/eli5_why_do_batteries_start_working_again_if_i/ | {
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"text": [
"A little bit of corrosion can build up between the contacts and the battery preventing electricity from moving through. Spinning or scratching them removes the corrosion and you get a fresh contact area and it starts working again."
]
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[]
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24iuih | just what the heck is "psychogeography"? | I've had a look on wikipedia etc as well as searched, and I can only find gibberish explanations that probably only make sense if one already knows what psychogeography is. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24iuih/eli5_just_what_the_heck_is_psychogeography/ | {
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"If you realize geography is more than just \"Cambodia is right there on the map\" then this becomes more understandable. This geography is actually somewhere between anthropology, sociology and psychology. This is the study of the effects of the environment on people's mental states. Simply, it's studying how people feel about their surroundings. \n\nSource: _URL_0_ "
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1ixlrc | (as an american) why is freedom of speech protected from the government, but not corporations? | Question asked in light of Tumblr's new policies on NSFW-related blogs. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ixlrc/eli5_as_an_american_why_is_freedom_of_speech/ | {
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"The Freedom of Speech does not grant you the right to say whatever you want, whenever you want, it merely prevents the GOVERNMENT from restricting your right to free speech. When it comes to private institutions, they are free to set their own rules regarding things like speech, because you always have the option to not use them. \n\nYou are still allowed to keep your right to free speech, Tumblr is simply denying your ability to use THEIR website to do so. ",
"Let's say you have a children's amusement park that includes a karaoke machine for them to sing songs.\n\nI show up, and want to sing violent, obscene, sexually explicit songs.\n\nAre you violating my freedom of speech when you kick me out?\n\nThat's exactly what tumblr is doing. They pay the bills for the servers, not you. You might not agree, but if they want to take their ball and go home if they don't think you are playing nice, that is their prerogative.",
"Freedom of speech does not allow you to avoid the repercussion to what you say and let you say whatever you want. It prevents the government from persecuting you for saying whatever you want. Private citizens can object to what you say all they want. As can any private institution so long as their rules are made known. \n\nSo you cannot be arrested for saying something racist, but a store can deny you business, a restaurant can kick you out, and Tumblr can block your posting. The same goes for NSFW material. ",
"Moral answer: Imagine that I own a billboard outside his house. People can pay me to put a message on the billboard. One day, Bob offers me some money to put the message \"The guy who lives here is a stupid jerk!\" on the billboard. \n\nI should be able to say \"no\" (as long as I don't keep Bob's money.) If I put the message on the billboard, then in a sense I'm saying that I agree with it. Bob has the freedom of speech to tell people that I'm a stupid jerk, but he shouldn't be able to force ME to say it. \n\nAlternately, Bob might ask me to put something illegal or otherwise dangerous (like \"Please rob this house!\") on the billboard. If I put it on the billboard, then I'm assuming partial responsibility for it, and it becomes my problem too.\n\nQuasi-legal answer: Freedom of speech is part of the Constitution, which is an agreement between the government of the United States and \"The People.\" The agreement between Tumblr and its users is this: _URL_0_",
"Because you're opting to use a corporation's services. If you do not like their restrictions, you can simply not use them for their services.\n\nYou can't 'opt out' of your (federal) government, or choose a competitor. "
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380gy9 | what is the problem with a lot of consumer debt? | Apart from the fact that people may lose assets if they fail to repay or the business will lose out on money if the debtor fails to repay , what else is wrong with it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/380gy9/eli5_what_is_the_problem_with_a_lot_of_consumer/ | {
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"Those are two very good reasons, as well as those you suggest I would say at it's core, it is rarely necessary. It encourages over spending.\nInterest on finance acts as a tax on impatience. Reducing spending power of the individual.\n\nIt can lead to artificially inflated prices.\n\nPoor management of the debt can lead to severe consequences."
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5vgc97 | why is there a num lock key on the keyboard? in what situation would you not want the number keys to work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vgc97/eli5_why_is_there_a_num_lock_key_on_the_keyboard/ | {
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"The number keys can also be used as arrow keys, and have other typing related functions (like page down/page up). Disengaging num lock allows you to use those functions. ",
"In earlier days of computing, the NUM keys were also the ARROW keys and directional keys. The Num Lock was a necessary key to turn on and off the numerical vs. directional functions of the keyboard and is a feature that is still included to this day. Even my Razer Chroma has directional keys and other functions that work when Num Lock is off.\n\nNot all keyboards were made/designed with a seperate set of directional buttons or things like Home page down or page up.",
"It's just as the other posts have mentioned, you can use the number keys to perform functions such as page up and down. I personally turn num lock off very often to use these functions as they are generally right beside of where I use my mouse. It allows me to quickly scroll with minimal hand movement."
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1lan97 | why do moles/birthmarks stick around if skin replaces itself every so often? | Also, how does increased exposure to the sun over a long period of time raise skin cancer rates if skin regenerates anyway? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lan97/why_do_molesbirthmarks_stick_around_if_skin/ | {
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"Your skin contains several different types of cells. The skin cells you're thinking of that regenerate and slough off every so often are called keratinocytes. The cells that make up moles/birthmarks are a different cell type called melanocytes. Melanocytes do not get replaced by keratinocytes.\n\nAs far as cancer goes, the skin regeneration is the problem! UV light causes damage to cells by forming abnormal linkages in the DNA. Often this damage can be corrected, but the more UV exposure, the more damage that occurs. If it cannot be corrected, then it is possible that certain regions in the DNA are not read correctly during replication. Some mutations can cause this new cell to become immortal, and it will keep on replicating. This abnormal growth is cancer.",
"UV radiation can cause DNA damage in the form of Thymine Dimers. If this damage is not corrected by the excision repair system of the cell then a permanent DNA mutation occurs. This mutation is passed on to all future generations of the cell since it is now 'accepted' by the cell as being part of the 'correct' genetic code (since after replication of DNA the cell can not longer tell that it is an error because it is unable to differentiate between parent and daughter strands). The accumulation of these mutations caused by increased exposure to UV radiation can, over time, cause specific gene mutations that can (to name a few possible mechanism) activate oncogenes (genes that can cause cancer cell proliferation) or deactivate tumor suppressor genes (such as p53, which regulates the cell cycle) which can lead to cancer.\n\nsource- i am a first year med student (so lets hope for all our sakes that what I said was correct or else I am fucked for my exam friday and some of you might have rely on me for mediocre medical care some day)"
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49pzit | in a full screen video, how come you can hide the cursor to the right and bottom of a video but not the top and left? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49pzit/eli5_in_a_full_screen_video_how_come_you_can_hide/ | {
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"text": [
"The pointing end, the little point you actually point with is the top left tip. \nThe down and right part are just to make it more visible. \nSo the cursor pointing point can mode to the edge of the screen but the cursor body only overhangs to the right and down."
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1q7u99 | how is it no purchase necessary on those boxes you must open to win? | And presumably you must purchase the box to open it... | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1q7u99/how_is_it_no_purchase_necessary_on_those_boxes/ | {
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"Generally, there is a mail-in or online method to enter the contest, sweepstakes, or giveaway. Read the fine print on the box, and there is usually a brief description of how to enter without a purchase. If it's not there, sometimes they put it inside the box (making it hard to enter without a purchase), or just have the information on their website or available via a telephone number. Usually they make the rules for non-purchase entry very convoluted or difficult, with very specific instructions (such as hand-printing your name and address on a 3x5 index card with a first-class stamp, or sending them a Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope (which means you end up paying double postage). ",
"I believe you can register for a game piece online or mail in a request for a piece. That being said, some do make it extremely difficult, or at least more difficult than simply buying the item with the game piece, code, etc.\n\nAdditional info: _URL_0_"
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4dicwn | why aren't my muscles growing right after i'm done with working out? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dicwn/eli5_why_arent_my_muscles_growing_right_after_im/ | {
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"They are, just not at a rate you can observe. Your muscle grow through damage, working out creates micro tears in the muscle fibers. Your body *immediately* goes to work to repair that damage - filling in the tears with additional filaments. The reason you don't see \"same day\" muscle growth is that it takes time to add enough structure to a muscle to be visible. "
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ciuwpm | why are five cent coins often larger than ten cent coins? | For us Americans, we know that dimes are smaller than nickels. But I was just in Europe and the EU 10 cent coin is also smaller than the 5 cent coin. Why is that? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ciuwpm/eli5_why_are_five_cent_coins_often_larger_than/ | {
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"For US specifically, nickles contain once contined a decent amount of nickle. Whereas older dimes had silver content. The sizing of the coin may very well be related to the volume and type of precious metal that used to be in the US coinage.",
"I will preface with that I don't know the exact answer.\nHowever, what I do know is that dimes originate from back when people used silver dollars - a dollar, a coin which contained enough silver to be worth approximately one dollar. \n\nIt's important for a coin of any denomination that the value of your coin be equal or greater than the value of the material its made of, or people would melt them down in large quantities for profit. Thus, your 5-cent nickel would have to be half the size again of an already-small dime. Your coin would grow so tiny so as to be unpleasantly difficult to keep track of. \nSo in the end, people moved away from the use of actual precious metals for their coins, and nickels could be made larger than dimes - designed to be easily recognisable, and not hard to keep track of. \n\nThe case with the Euro is somewhat different since all Euro coins were introduced simultaneously. Again, I don't know the full and complete answer here, but we know the 10 eurocent coin is made out of copper, whereas the 5 eurocent coin is made out of copper-covered steel. It wouldn't be a long shot to assume that the size difference is simply to prevent the value of copper metal from mandating coins become too tiny to handle effectively.",
"Euro Coins are sorted into three groups:\n\nBi-Color: 2 Euro and 1 Euro \nNordic Gold: 50 cent, 20 cent and 10 cent \nCoppered Steel: 5 cent, 2 cent and 1 cent\n\nThey were designed to be distinguishable by touch, tiering them all by size would however cause some to be rather large or some to be rather small or them all being too close in size to tell apart by touch. Instead they are distinguishable by the pattern on the edge, the thickness and weight. The 50 cent coin also is heavier and larger than the 1 Euro coin, with a striated edge just like the 10 cent coin, telling it apart from the bi-colored coins of similar size. The 10 cent coins striated edge tells it apart from the 20 cent and 5 cent coin, so the 5 cent coin can be slightly larger and thus easier to handle.",
"Just as a side note. My first thought when I read this question was the practical application of coin sizes. In order to make any amount of change with the fewest coins you'll never need more than one nickel, while you might need 2-4 dimes depending on the amount. I wonder if that was considered when the relative size, value and material for each coin were first established."
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6ev2am | what is the logic behind the morse code pattern? i want to memorize it, but it all seems so random. is there any way besides just learning each letter? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ev2am/eli5_what_is_the_logic_behind_the_morse_code/ | {
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"The most common letters are the shorter sequences. For example, E, the most common letter in the English language, is just one dot.\n\n > the code was designed so that the length of each character in Morse varies approximately inversely to its frequency of occurrence in English.",
"The Koch method is a great way to start learning morse code. You start with 2 letters, K M, you learn those at full speed 20 words per minute, once you are able to copy at 90% you add a third letter and then a forth, and so on.\n\nThere are Koch apps that you can download for your phone.",
"Here's a program that claims to teach the Koch/Farnsworth. It's free.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThere is no rhyme or reason to the dots and dashes. Also, are you trying to learn International Morse or American Morse? If you are trying to get into CW/Ham you should learn International. ",
"in german we have a special word for every letter in the alphabet.\nexample.: A stands for Arnold\n B for Bonaparte\n C for Conditorei\n...\n\nYou basically have to memorize these 26 words and with a little trick you can get the combination out of them.\n\nEach word is preciecly chosen, so that the number of syllables match the number of symbols in the code.\n\nexample. K= Ko man do --- > -.-\n M= Mo tor --- > --\n\nso what you do is you want to translate the letter D for example.\n\nThe word for a D is Donnerstag (Thursday in german)\n\nIf you part the syllables you end up with Don-ners-tag \nNow you know that a D has 3 symbols, but which one??\n\nYou follow the rule that if a syllable contains the letter O u write a dash (-).\nIf there is no O in the Syllable u write a dot (.)\n\nI do not know if such a list of word exists for english but I'm pretty sure there must be one.\n\nglad I could help.\n\n(btw I'm from Switzerland)"
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1jwwe7 | what would it mean if the us were to have no debt | Let say magically our debt is paid, nothing out of our pockets. How does that change things in the world, in our country, in our lives? Does gas prices go down? Do I get paid more? Less taxes? No war? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jwwe7/eli5what_would_it_mean_if_the_us_were_to_have_no/ | {
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"I could start answering my phone again.",
"Well, it depends on where the money came from. If the government just passed a law that permitted it to print or otherwise invent all of that money (or, equivalently, if it was always in the government's \"bank account\" and no one did anything with it before), then we would expect significant inflation as all of the new money hit the markets. The national debt is a LOT of money. Of course, the national debt is held by investors who made a conscious decision to hold government debt, so in all likelihood many of them would try to buy more government debt. This would cause interest rates to plunge, except that they're already near zero at the present time.\n\nThe government would no longer be paying interest, which would have a measurable effect on the budget, even with near-zero interest rates. It could, conceivably, lower taxes, or more likely increase spending or just put the savings toward deficit reduction.\n\nSpeaking of deficits, by the time you had time to blink, we would once again have a national debt.\n\nGas prices go up due to inflation, along with virtually everything else. Wages go up less, because there is downward pressure on them from the poor job market. The lower real wages make it slightly easier to find a job, though in the long term lower wages would not help the economy.\n\nWar goes on as usual.",
"The USA (Federal Government) has a current national debt of 16 Trillion dollars. I assume your question is asking if this simply vanished what would happen?\n\nRealistically nothing really.\n\n You would probably see the interest rates Treasury Bonds dip, and drag interest rates down to some extent. The Federal Reserve would probably work to combat deflation.\n\nConfidence in the economy would probably increase because there would be a much higher likelihood of government bailouts/actions if needed.\n\nThe Federal government would have about 312 billion dollars to spend each year though there is currently a budget deficit of 600 billion dollars last I checked so. But if the confidence translated into higher revenue for the Federal government you could see a surplus.\n\nBy the end of the month there would be a small growing national debt because of the budget deficit. \n\nInteresting note the only time there has not been a Federal debt was in the 1835 under President Jackson.\n\nI have also heard J.P. Morgan offered to give the Federal Government a check for the value of the national debt (essentially to pay off the debt) but his offer was declined. I have never substantiated this claim so it probably just a legend. \n\n\nNow if the Government simply declared the debt null and void, well lots of bad things would happen. Probably a national or world depression for a decade. "
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|
2s85j9 | regarding rotation in space: i've read already asked questions, but something is still bothering me about rotating bodies. | I understand rotational reference frames are not valid for relative measurements because they are under acceleration etc. (sort of). What I don't understand is how we can know how fast the earth or any space object is spinning not relative to other bodies, but to its own "rest state." It appears that earth spins 365 times for every solar revolution, but isn't that relative to the solar system? How do we know that the earth's "rest state" would make it coincidentally appear to be stationary relative to its orbit around the sun? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2s85j9/eli5_regarding_rotation_in_space_ive_read_already/ | {
"a_id": [
"cnn1f1g"
],
"score": [
3
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"text": [
"Rotation isn't relative to external objects. It's relative to the axis of rotation, which is defined in the body itself."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
|
4f0vkm | once an animal is declared extinct is there a possibility of reappearing ? on what basis is a species declared extinct ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4f0vkm/eli5_once_an_animal_is_declared_extinct_is_there/ | {
"a_id": [
"d250eoi",
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"score": [
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"text": [
"[This](_URL_0_) might not give you exactly what you're looking for but its a click baity list of \"Lazarus\" species. They were thought to be extinct, sometimes only fossils of them had ever been found, but then it turns out they were just hiding. Interesting beans",
"The process for declaring extinction is that a bunch of scientist look for it really hard, confirm that nobody has seen it in a while and confirm that nobody has seen tracks or corpses in a long time. \nBut sometimes they get things wrong and it turns up in another place. \n \nThe Coelacanth is probably the more famous thought extinct animal to turn up alive. They thought it was extinct because they only found 65 million year old fossils of it, but it turned up off the east coast of Africa in 1938. \nOthers are more recently thought extinct like the Bermuda Petrel, declared extinct in the 17th century, found again in 1951, still endangered as all hell."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[
"http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/photos/lazarus-species-13-extinct-animals-found-alive/rediscovered"
],
[]
]
|
||
11e0i7 | why can an internet connection sometimes stop working with no visible cause? why would disconnecting and reconnecting fix it? what changed? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11e0i7/eli5_why_can_an_internet_connection_sometimes/ | {
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"c6ln416",
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"text": [
"There are lots of bugs that only emerge when a computer system has been running for, say, 4 days or something. It's nearly impossible to catch these before something is released, because of how much time it would take to replicate the conditions. So disconnecting and reconnecting is a bandaid over this; it basically \"resets\" all the relevant programs, to a point where they're definitely bug free.",
"Physically, there are (usually) hundreds, maybe thousands of individual connections and devices that data has to travel through between your computer and the server it's communicating with. That's hundreds or thousands of individual things that could go wrong! Maybe a cable connection burned out somewhere, or a switch has been reset along the line. Your ISP might be making changes to it's equipment for a couple of minutes, or maybe the guys working on the exchange accidentally a wire or two.\n\nLogically: Software is complicated! Each device your data passes through runs software that makes it able to pass on your data. If you leave a device running for long enough, it might decide to just throw a tantrum and stop working, for almost no reason!\nIn terms of the internet, this usually happens on your end unfortunately. Your computer is probably running a couple hundred individual programs at any one time, and any one of them might send a signal another one doesn't like, or decide it's had enough and stop working. If that program has something to do with enabling your networking capabilities, the whole thing might just stop working. In this case, resetting your computer will restart those programs, and they will have forgotten all of the little things that were annoying them in the first place!",
"An electronic device is a massive set of switches. Switch on does one thing, switch off does another. When these switches are grouped together in a pattern, this is known as a machine state. The machine state represents the pattern of on and off of the switches currently being used.\n\nMost of the time the switches will be in patterns the device recognizes and has built in plans for. There are times, however, that the switch pattern can become glitched and the device will not recognize the switch pattern that is in use. This is an unrecognized state, and there is no plan within the device for handling the unrecognized switch pattern. This unrecognized state causes an error within the device.\n\nMostly, the only way to recover from such a scenario is to return the machine to a known state. The return to a known state is normally referred to as a reboot, restart, or reset. This action places the device back into a known switch pattern, and can then go on doing whatever it is that device is used for.\n\nI hope this helps.",
"If disconnecting and reconnecting can fix your problem, then there is a glitch in the last part of your network (your router, your ISP). \n\nThe vast majority of links in the internet work and keep working. Only really crappy \"consumer level\" devices and services routinely fail in the way you described.",
"Worked as tech support for a while so I can answer this one. There are many things that can affect your Internet and cause it to go out randomly. Wireless routers are a big cause as they can sometimes overload them selfs and force restart thereby not reconnecting properly to the modem. As well there is always signal interference from other routers or appliances that can affect this. \n\nProblems can also happen at the modem such as receiving and transmitting bad signal levels (all Internet works on a signal frequency transmitted through a cable or phone line). If there is signal interference of some kind all of a sudden your Internet provider won't be able to communicate with you properly. In that case restarting the modem and making sure all cables are tight will most likely fix it but if there are more serious signal issues then it would be time to call your provider."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
|
||
89ki2y | what does it mean when they say an audio mixer has 2 bus? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/89ki2y/eli5_what_does_it_mean_when_they_say_an_audio/ | {
"a_id": [
"dws147v",
"dwsbphu"
],
"score": [
2,
2
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"text": [
"A bus is basically a path to send the signal you a destination. Think of it like a city bus transporting audio to wherever you need it to. Multiple buses mean that you can send the signal to several places at once. This might be something you would do as a professional or amateur ",
"It seems to depend on the exact mixer, but generally it seems to mean a mixed signal. So you can mix several input channels onto a bus, and then output it directly, or mix the bus output into some other bus (so the first bus is acting like an output and an input). On some mixers you could pass the bus output through an effect before mixing it further.\n\nA 2-bus mixer could either be a simple mixer with only the two main output buses (left and right), or it could mean it has two extra buses in addition to those.\n\nI have no sound mixing experience. \n[Source 1](_URL_0_) \n[Source 2](_URL_2_) \n[Source 3](_URL_1_) "
]
} | []
| []
| [
[],
[
"https://sound.stackexchange.com/questions/25206/what-exactly-is-a-bus-on-a-behringer-xenyx-mixer",
"https://www.pmtonline.co.uk/blog/2004/10/01/what-is-a-mixer-bus-and-why-do-i-need-them/",
"http://www.tomsguide.com/forum/42030-6-what-defintion-buss-mixers"
]
]
|
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