Germany's long distance trains are comfortable but the reliability of the Deutsche Bahn is abysmal. In 2023, more than one third of their long distance train were delayed, a metric that has been going down for quite a while. My own experience is much worse, with three out of five long distance trips canceled without notice and a fourth one replaced by a voucher for a 450km taxi ride.
In a country the size of Germany clamoring to have an environmentally oriented politic, train should be a convenient alternative to both car and airplane but unfortunately the train network is a joke.
In my anecdotal experience, arriving at work around 7 or earlier and leaving before 16:00 is absolutely not a problem. Arriving around 10 is also possible for those who prefer starting late.
People try to group the important meetings in the middle of the day to accommodate everyone. Working overtime when needed happens but those hours can be grouped to take a few days off.
I don't know if it is generalized but it's the case in the two companies I worked for in Germany.
Compared to Google, Bing has a huge problem with paid search results, at least in some non english languages.
My mother wanted to access Amazon last week and typed "my amazon account" in french in the windows search, which searched for those terms in Bing. One of the first (paid) results was a scam site triggering alarm sound, fake virus notifications and asking her to call a scam hotline.
At least DDG filters out the ads but the problem in this case is Bing's OS integration.
Those do not work for everyone. I bought some glasses from this company for my father, both he and a colorblind colleague could not see any improvement apart from a slight contrast increase after a few hours of wearing them. One of them was slightly red-green colorblind, the other one had a much stronger red-green color blindness.
The company seem to exaggerate a lot the effect of their lenses with carefully selected overenthusiastic testimonies.
The good thing is that the glasses could be returned and refunded.
Computational filtering techniques are difficult for a good reason. In the case of CT, high density objects like metal implants produce beam hardening by preventing the low energy photons from reaching the detector. With adversarial training, you can train a network to recognize and remove the artifacts, but you won't be able to reconstruct structures for which there is no physical measurement.
There were similar discussions a few year ago when deep learning was not commonly used yet and compressed sensing was the hot topic of the moment. It can reconstruct MRI or CT images from limited data (and thus allows for quick MR scans or low dose CT) but you have to satisfy a sparsity condition that is seldom granted. There are a few use cases (like MR angiography) where the data is sparse enough and compressed sensing works great.
For deep learning techniques, you need to be very cautious about which structures your network may remove or introduce.
The warmth is caused by the RF pulses and has nothing to do with the magnet or iron levels. Basically the scanner behaves the same as a microwave oven.
That's why you have to enter the patient weight and size before scanning, in order to keep the SAR within acceptable values and limit body heating.
I have trouble taking Michael Crichton's stories seriously partly because of his odd obsession with theme parks.
In Westworld, androids indistinguishable from humans are used for an amusement park. In Jurassic Park, it's engineering of fossil DNA to recreate dinosaurs that is used for a theme park and in Timeline, if I recall correctly, the first idea of a billionaire who manages to develop time-travelling technology is to use it to open a medieval theme park.
Given any of those technology, I think this kind of use would lie pretty low on the list of either interesting or profitable things to do...
I worked on pacemaker firmware about 15 years ago. Even back then, this kind a scenario would have been very improbable.
To reprogram a pacemaker, you needed first to activate a reed switch with a magnet, then transmit the right commands, properly encrypted and with their matching checksums.
Parameters could of course not be set outside of safe bounds and in case of software failure there was a safe default mode that was running on dedicated hardware.
Either there are some really dumb companies developing active implants out there, or the article and allegations are sensationalistic conjectures.
Edit: I don't know much about brain implants, maybe induced currents in the electrode are enough to trigger some kind of seizure. This scenario may be possible. For a pacemaker though, I doubt that it would be possible to trigger a single extrasystole with normal electric or RF devices.
First, given the track record of manufacturers with android security updates, I wouldn't install a bitcoin wallet on my phone.
Then, there is the problem with "buy $5 worth of bitcoin". Last time I checked, this was everything but trivial, at least here in Europe.
And finally, the last purchase I made with bitcoins on steam took more than 12 hours to get validated. I used the standard bitcoin fee of the bitcoin-qt client but it seems to be far from enough nowadays.
Amazon didn't really shock them into action as the service has been available for quite a few years. They are probably trying to show that Amazon shopping is not that disruptive.
It really depends on the controls used for moving. I am quite sensitive too, even slow movements in VR give me nausea when I am not moving. But games that use teleportation for moving like The Lab are absolutely not nausea-inducing for me. Walking arnoud in room scale is also not a problem at all. A Vive with room scale is probably the best option at the moment for someone sensible to motion sickness.
The funny thing about Google Earth is that even though you can "fly" over the map, it is coupled with a pulling motion with the hand controllers. My brain seems to interpret this hand motion coupled with the displacement as me pulling the landscape to me instead of me flying over the landscape. Because of this, I had absolutely no motion sickness at all in Google Earth.
It is a motion scheme that I have seen in no other VR app and for me it is a very interesting achievement of the software.
Cremating a person with a big lithium battery encased in an airtight metallic casing is also a bit of a hazard. Implantable cardioverter-defibrillators add also a few big capacitors to the mix. There have been quite a few crematoriums destroyed or damaged by pacemaker explosions in the last decades.