Slashdot Mirror

I think there needs to be a recycling tax (on everything) to mitigate this new disaster.

The problem is, where do you apply that tax? Because almost all of the ocean plastics come from the third world (and China, I don't really think of them as third world)... can they afford the tax you are proposing? I think instead of a tax some kind of viable alternative for the plastics they are using needs to be in place.

I agree that plastic trash is a problem everywhere but a lot of first world areas (like the U.S. or Europe) have done a pretty good job greatly reducing plastic waste that gets into the environment, especially by reducing the use of plastic bags from stores.

I do a lot of work picking up trash around my community and elsewhere, in recent years there has been a notable reduction in the amount of plastic bags blowing around outside (there are still some).

Combined, Sprint and T-Mobile will still only be the third largest carrier in the US behind Verizon and AT&T, hardly monopoly territory.

It seems more likely they haven't greased the right wheels in Washington.

India is now up to about 90% of housholds having a toilet: https://www.statista.com/chart...

They built 80 million of the things.

Well, it looks like waymo is way ahead of everyone else, so if google gives an update that they were also overly optimistic, I would take that as the indicator of where the industry is at.

http://infographic.statista.co...

I think your premise would have likely been the case in the early days of the Internet. When I first started working with the Internet you didn't have very many people online who were over 40. I certainly remember old people who were proud of their lack of technical skills.

That being said, in the years since most of the US adult population has joined the Internet with 89% of adults in the US using it.

https://www.statista.com/stati...

In the old days algorithms were indeed influenced by the data that they received. This certainly resulted in comical results as well as politically incorrect results. The problem is that algorithms are being trained to produce certain results.

https://www.washingtontimes.co...
http://www.canirank.com/blog/a...
https://www.nationalreview.com...

macOS is the only alternative that has a reasonable chance to beat windows out of the marketplace.

I've abandoned Linux on the desktop in favor of macOS for many happy years now. Gone are the days where I fight with the kernel to get some module installed or resolve dependencies. I'm still running all my servers on Linux and can't think of a better alternative. But on the desktop? I've seen several non-IT people up close (i.e. family and good friends) trying to jump from windows to either Linux or Mac. The Linux ones were largely failures and all but one went back after some time. The Mac ones were largely successful and created a much lower support burden for me.

Linux won't replace windows. It's been trying for two decades where it was always the next year that will be the year of Linux on the Desktop. We've been through a dozen window managers, some (like E) definitely more interesting, powerful and beautiful than windows, some bare-bones, some competing standards (who remembers the Gnome vs. KDE wars?), some attempts to copy windows, some attempts to copy NeXT (I still have a sweet spot for windowmaker in my heart), some completely new ideas.

None of them had any measurable success. None of the Wine and Parallels have impacted the windows stranglehold. Here's a chart from 2013 to 2019 - Linux barely appears: https://www.statista.com/stati...

Do you know what's eating Microsofts lunch? Android. As soon as you include smartphones and tablets, windows is a minority player in the market. But on the desktop, macOS has ten times the market share of Linux. Forget Linux on the Desktop, after 20 years it's time to get off the dead horse.

Technically, coal is going down, but it goes to natural gas. So, title is sorta misleading https://www.statista.com/stati...

What is it about Facebook that makes it so special?

I'm guessing it's the 2.32 billion monthly active users.

Actually, zero rating is specifically permitted in the net neutrality regs. And folks forget, the reason comcast was throttling netflix was because they were overloading a public gig-e link in order to get to part of the comcast network.

The Netflix drama originally started with Netflix dropping normal bandwidth / CDN services people who need to distribute data at scale normally call upon and instead took it in-house.

As you can imagine this pissed off a lot of ISPs who saw bandwidth from Netflix going to plaid as result of cost cutting measure undertaken by Netflix.

Eventually over time Comcast started pushing back with TE policy that unnecessarily disadvantaged Netflix with side effects well beyond just Netflix.

This lead to the now infamous Netflix chart:
https://www.statista.com/chart...

netflix didn't have a direct peerage agreement with comcast back then, nor did their ISP. (which is how ISPs get paid for sinking traffic, BTW). the bottom line is, that model has worked well since day 1. It only appears unfair if you don't understand that it does, in fact, cost money to carry someone's traffic, and the 'no cost' peering arrangements are predicated on the idea that the traffic flow is fairly even. pretty much every peering contract I've ever seen sets forth penalties and fees if your traffic starts going too much in one direction or the other, because at that point, one is using the link as a transit connection, which requires payment. Only folks who don't understand this seem to think that comcast was 'out to get' netflix.

By this standard Comcast should be paying Netflix because Comcast was receiving way more data from Netflix than was transmitted in the other direction.

The reality is they were out to get Netflix and only because of the sheer size of Comcast did it seem like good business strategy to even attempt to leverage captive Comcast eyeballs.

Under the same condition smaller shops would be happy for cheap incoming.

Beyond a certain limit companies increasingly seek to leverage their positions and things go to shit as a result.

Search engines are a thing now. https://www.statista.com/stati... California by itself has 100k busses... https://www.bloomberg.com/news...

Yes, Scotland and Wales will be OK, because basically nobody lives there. They've never had to accommodate the huge numbers of people that come with being capital of a world empire, largely outsourcing their housing problems to England.

I see.

You do know I was actually educated in a former colony, and am totally aware the reason why they're less populated is that England exported the population - whether rebels, religious dissidents, or those deemed criminals - to other places like the USA, Canada, NZ, and Australia.

But keep promoting your myths.

Yes, Scotland and Wales will be OK, because basically nobody lives there. They've never had to accommodate the huge numbers of people that come with being capital of a world empire, largely outsourcing their housing problems to England.

Contrary to popular belief, the population growth rate in developed countries is nearly zero. Nearly all of the world's population growth is happening in developing countries, and Africa has the highest growth rate by far. So as well-intentioned as these humanitarian measures are (saving babies, food, medicine, clean water, etc), they actually exacerbate the suffering of these people. Medicine, clean water, and saving babies will cause their population to increase faster than it should be growing, forcing them to spread already-limited resources even thinner. Food aid puts local farmers out of business by depressing the market value of their crops, and discouraging others from taking up farming.

The correct way to help them is to help them develop their economies - improve their education systems (that's what the One Laptop per Child project was trying to do), help them build their civil infrastructure, keep criminals and militants in check, and promote private businesses. Then they can train their own doctors, build their own hospitals, grow their own food, pump their own clean water, and save their own babies. As barbaric as it sounds, right now the babies need to die at a high rate to keep their population growth in check. The high infant mortality rate there is symptom of their undeveloped economy. Treating the symptom with addressing the root cause just exacerbates the problem and their suffering.

It most definitely is not "primarily" relevant, it's market share is dwindling every year and is a fraction of what it used to be.

Uh, no, it's not.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/576473/united-states-quarterly-pc-shipment-share-apple/

A value added tax to fund a UBI/Universal Basic Services is another approach and one harder to circumvent with tax or production location loopholes. Say you wanted to implement a UBI of 12k per person per year for adults. That's roughly 3 trillion per year in the US given 250 million on the payroll. Projected US population and projected GDP show that the GDP is outpacing population growth by a large margin. Even if you take inflation into account, the price of goods and services is dropping as automation takes over. You can save money by cancelling other welfare programs, and all that cash would trickle up into the economy as well which has positive benefits. These alone could make a meager straight UBI doable in a 20-40 year timeframe, maybe even 12k/year, if the population and GDP keep growing roughly as expected.

Wait... won't automation and Weak AI/AI bring down the costs of goods and services? What would people absolutely have to spend that money on? Housing? Food? Child care? Education? Healthcare? Access to information? Given the lower future costs it may be best to give out 500 dollars today's equivelant per month and offer free basic housing around the nation, free basic food, free child care, free education, free healthcare, and free basic internet access. The costs of all of these could go quite low in the future and a regulated non profit market like Germany has health insurance or a government run solution could be quite efficient with low overhead if done right. That way the most needy benefit the most with the basic services, and everyone is lifted by the basic income while reasonably well off people will forgo their basic services and pay for better ones.

A value added tax to fund a UBI/Universal Basic Services is another approach and one harder to circumvent with tax or production location loopholes. Say you wanted to implement a UBI of 12k per person per year for adults. That's roughly 3 trillion per year in the US given 250 million on the payroll. Projected US population and projected GDP show that the GDP is outpacing population growth by a large margin. Even if you take inflation into account, the price of goods and services is dropping as automation takes over. You can save money by cancelling other welfare programs, and all that cash would trickle up into the economy as well which has positive benefits. These alone could make a meager straight UBI doable in a 20-40 year timeframe, maybe even 12k/year, if the population and GDP keep growing roughly as expected.

Wait... won't automation and Weak AI/AI bring down the costs of goods and services? What would people absolutely have to spend that money on? Housing? Food? Child care? Education? Healthcare? Access to information? Given the lower future costs it may be best to give out 500 dollars today's equivelant per month and offer free basic housing around the nation, free basic food, free child care, free education, free healthcare, and free basic internet access. The costs of all of these could go quite low in the future and a regulated non profit market like Germany has health insurance or a government run solution could be quite efficient with low overhead if done right. That way the most needy benefit the most with the basic services, and everyone is lifted by the basic income while reasonably well off people will forgo their basic services and pay for better ones.

The TRUTH is, Spotify is ruining music in many ways by paying fractions of pennies in royalties. Some artists with millions of song plays have received on $80 for a year of royalties.

I wonder how much their publisher received though. I bet it was a lot more than $80.

Spotify pays $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream to the holder of music rights. That works out to $6000 to $8400 in royalty payments per million song plays. If the artist is only getting $80 for a song that's listened to millions of times in a year, their publisher is the one screwing them over. The publisher is keeping more than 99% of the royalty payments, passing on less than 1% to the artist.

(Sanity check: Spotify averaged 1.7 billion listening hours per month in 2015. At 3.5 minutes per song, that's 29 billion song plays per month, or 350 billion song plays per year. At the above royalty rates, they'd be paying about $2-$3 billion in royalties per year. And indeed that's about how much they pay in royalties - $3.9 billion in 2018. So yes, it is in fact the record labels who are screwing the artists over, not Spotify.)

IBM bought RedHat to help them compete in this space.

For 34 billion dollars. ($34,000,000,000.00)

It might be prudent to wait to see what services they roll out before you write them off.

That $34b sounds like a lot, but in this space it's not really a huge sum - Amazon has already spent far more on AWS and is literally a decade ahead. Heck, $34b is not drastically more than what AWS *made* in 2018 revenue, and every indication is that it will far surpass that in 2019 (see e.g. https://www.statista.com/stati...).

IBM's purchase of RedHat just supports this point - they are far behind and haven't really done any significant innovation in this space, so the RedHat purchase could be seen as trying to buy their way out of being just a small niche player (https://www.geekwire.com/2018/state-cloud-amazon-web-services-bigger-four-major-competitors-combined/). To me it looks more like them moving away from a general cloud compute offering.

Like I said, their and Oracle's offerings will probably always exist in some form, but at this stage there's little or no evidence that they'll ever threaten the top dogs in the general cloud space that the article is talking about. They can probably carve out a nice spot somewhere, providing less general services or something (and doubling down on a specific Linux distro speaks to a narrowing focus, not a broadening one) and probably make some good money as a niche player.

Sales in general - media or downloaded - is dead. It's streaming, making up 75% of music consumption. CDs, albums, online sales are duking it out to see who can be the winner of the irrelevancy segment.

U.S. companies installed more robots last year than ever before

Shipments hit 28,478, nearly 16 percent more than in 2017

According to https://www.statista.com/stati... industrial robot shipment for China in 2018 is 165,000

Not good, indeed !!

There are about 240 million 911 calls each year. There are about 900,000 sworn police officers nationwide. That's about 266 calls annually per police officer. Given there are about 240 work days per year (5 per week, 2 weeks vacation, 2 weeks of holidays), that's a little more than 1 call per day. There were about 10,550,000 arrests in 2017, or about 1 per month per police officer. So they're responding to about 22 more dispatches (from 911) than they are arresting. What are the odds your average police officer will only arrest things he sees happening on the street, and not any from the 22 dispatches per month?

Yeah, the linked article can't even manage to be factually accurate at the most basic level. For example, Men are a majority now? Nope.

There is no institutional bias against men? The author of the article has apparently never heard of schools, or universities, who literally advertise that they don't accept men for everything from scholarships to groups and centers paid for by male student fees.

Oh man, and is this ever causing a problem. Males are a marked minority among college students https://www.theatlantic.com/ed... and getting worse.

Very little attention ois being paid to this at the college level, I suspect that it is considered a little less of a problem for the victims - but it is the beginnings of a real problem. The path chosen for modern women is to get a degree, then work until your mid 30's early 40's, then find a husband and immediately start fertility treatments in order to have a child.

But these ladies are having a problem finding a male that meets their expectation. To Google "where have all the good men gone brings up a plethora of results. Most often posed by women, discussed by women, and solutions proposed by women. And usually with a fine smattering of misandry.

When in fact, the qualifications for a "good man" means a college education, having their own place, making more than her, and then there are the physical qualifications. Tall, handsome, ripped. Then there are the life choice demands, which are to be ready to immediately start fertility treatments in a race against the clock.

Oh-ohhh, that college education demand. As we are nearing a 75 to 25 Percent female versus male degree status, right away we have a severe problem.

Coupled with the other demands, these women are going to have a real problem finding mates. A male that fits their demands is probably not looking for a woman of that age and is not looking to become a father at such a late age.

Probably the best article about the problem is https://www.dailymail.co.uk/fe...

Even then, the article starts out: "Where have all the good men gone? These sassy, sophisticated, solvent women say they are struggling to find other halves that can measure up.

No shit.

Yeah, the linked article can't even manage to be factually accurate at the most basic level. For example, Men are a majority now? Nope.

There is no institutional bias against men? The author of the article has apparently never heard of schools, or universities, who literally advertise that they don't accept men for everything from scholarships to groups and centers paid for by male student fees.

Up a bit: https://www.statista.com/stati...

They started rising slightly in 2017, and all indications are that slight increase continued in 2018. So yes, they are slowly coming back - far from dead.

Wrong - you always just look at that one report that supports your claim, and then make up the rest as you go.

'cause the death by firearm yearly rate is about 13,000 in the US, not "over 39,000."

My figures come direct from the Center for Disease Control, which is part of the Executive Branch of the United States government. Would you care to tell us where your "13,000" figure comes from?

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/press...

https://www.statista.com/stati...

The "over 39.000" was what the Center for Disease Control reported for the calendar year 2018 as of December 28, 2018.

Mozilla is clearly doing something right.

Firstly they have Microsoft telling them they're wrong.
Secondly the latest stats I've found show Firefox market share increased by 10% in the most recent monthly statistics plot the top google search shows (from 9.1% to 10.05%)

See:

https://www.statista.com/stati...

Keep up the good work Firefox devs!

In general, Apple's form over function has been the cause of a number of big issues. At least in the Jobs era, he would not let something ship unless he personally checked it out that things were decent.

Well that wasn't always true and Jobs opinion of "decent" wasn't infallible. But you are right that they seem to have trouble keeping focused without someone at the top playing red-light/green-light. The Mac line seems to have been relegated to the garage and isn't seeing much love these days. The iPad has proven to be nothing more than a supersized iPhone without the ability to make calls - unfortunate since it could be so much more with the right software and a decent stylus (the current ones suck).

IMHO, they don't seem to be selling as many devices, so they are jacking up the price

It's not a matter of opinion whether or not they are selling more/less. Their unit volume sales have been flat to modestly rising for the last three years. They aren't losing sales so much as they aren't growing them. Not shocking since the market is getting near saturated, at least where Apple has a solid presence. So to keep revenue increasing in the absence of a new shiny product that isn't an iPhone/iPad/Mac they have been increasing prices. I think they may have reached the limit of their ability to do that. This will be a problem for their stock price if they cannot continue to grow revenue.

So I think we are seeing a combination of prices getting too high as well as a generation of iPhones that wasn't a big enough improvement over the previous year models.

While you're certainly espousing a popular sentiment, the facts don't bear out anything you've said.

Take a look at the mobile malware reports from the last few years and if you parse through the details you'll see two consistent trends:

1) Android accounts for the vast majority of malware—about 98% in 2013, rising to within a rounding error of 100% at this point—but that...
2) Nearly all Android malware is coming from sources outside the Google Play Store, mostly via stores in the Middle East and Asia.

Taken together, iOS and Android account for nearly the entire smartphone market, yet the number of threats within their walls (i.e. available in Apple's App Store or Google's Play Store) is less than 0.1% of what is outside their walls. As such, despite the baseless assertions of a random Slashdotter that "the garden wall provides no safety", there's actually a fairly meaningful and measurable amount of safety being provided by those walls. And even when there are leaks, they tend to be caught quickly. The malware mentioned in the summary affected 5,000 devices (at most) before it was removed, which is a drop in the bucket compared to 2+ billion Android devices that are in active use. It's important to keep things in perspective, lest you be misled into thinking that a problem is bigger than it is.

Hell, the only reason why these sorts of lapses are still newsworthy is because the walled gardens have been so successful at keeping their users safe.

The bottom-most blue segment is desktop format factor sales over time.

It's not a bright future.

Gaming moved to phones and consoles.

You're probably looking at US rather than worldwide. As we see with this announcement, worldwide is what matters. And worldwide, iOS devices - the iPhone, the iPad - are losing market share. They get little bumps when a new phone is released, but the trend is continuing downward.

This one, which sees them down around 13% and continuing to drift lower. They'll probably reach 10% around the end of 2020, and then it's essentially game over. You get into the single digits? You're no longer worth supporting/considering.

CO2 is on a downward trend in Germany (at a much smaller per capita level than the US):
https://knoema.com/atlas/Germa...

For 2017 to 2018 CO2 emissions decreased by 6%. https://www.ag-energiebilanzen...

Electricity prices also didn't really increase it seems:
https://www.energy-charts.de/t...

Of course, residential electricity price are rather high.
https://www.statista.com/stati...

But the renewable surchagre is onlyl part of this:
https://1-stromvergleich.com/p...

It will go down in the future as it is mainly for old installations whose garantueed feed-in tariff will run out sooner or later while the cost of new wind and solar is much lower now. It is also important to understand that is was an intentional political decision to support renewables by a feed-in tariff which is paid directly from electricity prices. Coal and nuclear also got (and still get) a substantial amount subsidies but those are hidden in general taxes. Still, the high electricity price is a problem because it hits the poor, but one has to keep in mind that German households also consume much less electricity (due to better efficiency) than US households, so the overall energy bill is not as high as one might expect. Also the percentage of households who have trouble paying their electricity bills is still smaller than most of the rest of europe and certainly much smaller than in the US.

Finally, the exit from nuclear power had wide support in the German population:
https://www.unendlich-viel-ene...

Having said all this, shutting down nuclear plants first instead of coal plans was clearly a mistake.

Their sales start dropping and they simply start increasing prices to keep increasing profits.

That's sometimes referred to as a death spiral. However, so far iPhone sales have just flattened out, not dropped significantly. If they do start tanking, we'll see if Apple can figure out what to do about it.

https://www.statista.com/stati...

Further, their share of smartphones is growing with respect to Android. So their 30% commission isn't in danger.

But this stupid article quotes stock market analysts and a random tourist. No evidence that Apple is messing up. Just opinions unconnected to data, and instead the analysts are just comparing to some ideal that they imagine.

Where did you get this data? A quick search on Google shows a different story. In the US, Apple has a larger market share than each of the individual competitors, but not when you combine the Android manufacturers. In fact, Apple's market share slipped this last quarter by 1%. In the Global market, Apple is in third place. In regards to Phone activations in the US Apple has remained steady or declined a bit.

The only place where Apple made gains is in China where they increased their market share by 5%, from 19.7% to 24.7%. Android dropped by 5%.

US Phone Activations
https://www.statista.com/stati...

Global Market
https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp...
https://www.businessinsider.co...

US Market
https://www.counterpointresear...

That's the cruel joke that all the Fandroids like to play. Apple is a BRAND (and a Platform). Android is NOT a BRAND.

You simply cannot compare the two.

Firefox? That thing that people use to install Chrome?

It only matters for one invocation, for most people. Then they're on to Chrome.

Apple's share of the phone market has been below 15% for several years. There are quarters where it blips above (coincides with new iPhone releases), but the average has been below 15%. You probably didn't notice because the media seems extremely reluctant to publish negative news about Apple products. I still remember when iPad market share slipped below 50%, the only mention I found was buried two thirds of the way through a market analysis report.

It's primarily the English-speaking countries (U.S., UK, Canada, Australia), Scandinavia, and Japan (they have an anti-Korea bias, so few Samsung and LG devices sell there) where the iPhone has market share on par with Android. Everywhere else is dominated by Android.

Further, their share of smartphones is growing with respect to Android. So their 30% commission isn't in danger.

Well:

https://www.statista.com/stati...

Does not look like that...

Further, their share of smartphones is growing with respect to Android. So their 30% commission isn't in danger.

But this stupid article quotes stock market analysts and a random tourist. No evidence that Apple is messing up. Just opinions unconnected to data, and instead the analysts are just comparing to some ideal that they imagine.

Where did you get this data? A quick search on Google shows a different story. In the US, Apple has a larger market share than each of the individual competitors, but not when you combine the Android manufacturers. In fact, Apple's market share slipped this last quarter by 1%. In the Global market, Apple is in third place. In regards to Phone activations in the US Apple has remained steady or declined a bit.

The only place where Apple made gains is in China where they increased their market share by 5%, from 19.7% to 24.7%. Android dropped by 5%.

US Phone Activations
https://www.statista.com/stati...

Global Market
https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp...
https://www.businessinsider.co...

US Market
https://www.counterpointresear...

... about market share?

You should check your figures.

Global Terrorism Index 2018: https://www.statista.com/stati...

The US have a higher prevalence of terrorism than any European country (although Ukraine is only one place behind the US).

However the apps for the device, I download for the most part usually work well, and are not malware.

The same is true for Android. The apps I download for my Android device, for the most part usually work well and are not malware. I think we're just seeing the effect of Android's 88% market share vs iOS's 12%. Even if there's the same amount of malware for each OS, it has 7x the impact on Android so there are 7x as many news stories about it. And malware authors get 7x the return on investment attacking Android than they do iOS, so even if all other things are equal they're more likely to target it.

Obscurity is not security.

but there are others who are looking for something else

And on YouTube they find... PewDiePie and a million Fail videos (basically Americas Funniest Home Videos stretching out til the end of time).

I'm pretty sure that is not what the remaining 95%, according to your statistics, seek...

You figures also do not explain why Netflix subscriber counts keep going up. Seems like maybe you have that percentage reversed.

They do.

https://www.statista.com/stati...

Get rid of your filthy animal.

It's a fair question. In this link 1997 music sales in the US were around 750 million units, in 1996 that was around 780 million and in 1998 it was around 850 million which averages out at less than 3 albums per person. According to this the peak was 953 million units per year. The estimated total sales figures from the first link give approximately $13 per CD, which matches my recollections of those long ago days :)
Those figures are for the US, Europe and rest of world was lower (I am not in the US so my recollection will be different).

I don't have data on average CD's-purchased-per-person as that does not seem to be available (it's all units sold and revenue) but if we do a rough exercise and say that the population of the US was 282.2 million in 2000 and that half the population weren't buying music at all, that leaves us with an average of 6 albums per person for around 80 dollars per year, or 6 dollars per month.
You were clearly a music aficionado if you were spending way more than 120 per year on CDs!

My point really is that they can either go for quantity or quality. At $5 or $6 a month they will get more people than at $10 or $14. Only they can say if the numbers will add up.

Good point! It's about 15% and falling. We should push for another cut in our share of UN costs...

Mein Gott! I knew it was bad, but per these two sources, one and two, for households it's 33 US cents per kWh, 33.29 from the last and Bing's currency conversion calculator. Three times the general US price indeed, and I've heard its really pinching people in the winter. I guess it was more than low natural gas prices that prompted BASF to do their lastest rounds of expansion in the US, especially Texas, which has its own grid since it's big enough to have a stable one and that avoids a lot of Federal regulation.

Merkel had better hope the current anti-Green counter-revolution in France doesn't spread (which historically has been a bad bet).

And yet Canadians can expect to live ~5 years longer than USians: https://www.statista.com/stati...

There are reasons why people and businesses are fleeing the State in droves. This is but one of countless others.

Those reasons are figments of your imagination, since there's been a monotonic increase in both population and, excepting nationwide recessions, GDP.

Where's the flight, pray tell, you disingenuous hack.

US CO2 emissions dropping. Sucks to be wrong, eh AC?