If the Yellowstone supervolcano blows, it's pretty much game over for most of the human population of the planet. The global cooling and ash deposition would result in worldwide famine for a decade or more. Power production is somewhere near the bottom of the world's concerns in that situation unless and until we build a huge underground cave underneath the entire American south with fertile soil and giant light fixtures.
Scrapers are not a violation of the law, per se. Scrapers access material that is made publicly available. Claims that downloading that data are somehow illegal are downright silly, IMO.
As to whether it was a violation of their terms of service or not, that likely depends on whether the bots were logged in and on whether the person logged in was aware that the bots were being used in his/her name. If the bots were not logged in, then it is no different from scraping a website, which is likely not illegal unless you then use that scraped data in a way that would be illegal. If the bots were logged in, then it is a violation of terms of service if the user was aware of the bot activity, or illegal if the user was not.
There's a huge difference between Mac users and iPhone users. A Mac user, on average, carries the laptop around in a bag that has room for carrying a few random adapters without thinking about it. An iPhone user, on average carries a phone around in his or her back pocket.
From what I have read, this was not an obvious WTF moment. Delta apparently has a complete disaster recovery facility with duplicate hardware. But they had a single point of failure in their infrastructure, which caused them to lose power to the entire datacenter, and everything went down. That part might be a WTF.
No, the WTF is not that the datacenter had a single point of failure. If their IT setup had been designed properly, that would have been a minor inconvenience. The WTF is that they didn't have at least three datacenters in geographically isolated locations with hot failover and regularly test the hot failover to ensure that it worked reliably and quickly in the event of a sudden, catastrophic loss of their primary datacenter.
- You need a small adapter for your regular headphones. This can get lost. So don't lose it.
Losing it isn't the problem. Not having it with you when you need it is the problem. If you only have one pair of headphones, that's fine. It's an unholy level of obnoxious if you think, "Oh, I'll plug my iPhone into my friend's stereo system to listen to a song," and your friend uses an Android phone and doesn't have the specialized adapter, because odds are approximately 100% that you won't have it with you.
- They can fit a slightly bigger battery in the phone, so it will last slightly longer
About two or three minutes, by my math. The headphone jack isn't very big, and doesn't stick that much farther into the device than a lightning port.
- Headphone port will no longer break if you yank the cord sideways. It will no longer get plugged up with pocket lint.
Lightning jacks get clogged at least as badly. And now, if you yank the cord sideways, not only will you break the port, but also you'll be unable to charge your phone. Oh, were you thinking about Bluetooth? Hope you like losing five seconds of audio every time you pause playback and restart it.
- You can get noise cancelling headphones that are powered by your phone instead of a separate battery
You can do that now. Nothing prevents headphone companies from building headphones with a Lightning connector. And they'll work all the way back to the iPhone 5.
- Charging while listening remains a question? How can you do it? Wireless charging built in? Y-adapter?
Two Lightning ports, I hope. Otherwise, this design is a disaster rivaled in the entire history of computing only by the current single-port MacBook.
- Apple will sell bluetooth earbuds
Which will suck because there's not enough space inside an earbud for a battery that will last longer than an hour or two under the best of circumstances. Apple will then insist that you need to grow bigger ears.
P.S. I say the above as someone who has used Facebook's ad platform as an advertiser. The management at Facebook are being complete and utter morons here. The last thing I want as an advertiser is to force my ads upon someone who will be annoyed by them. That's why I deliberately tailor my ads with careful targeting, even to the point that a few people who might be interested won't see my ads.
How about if you agree to use Facebook, you stop trying to block their ads. You are in the moral wrong.
How about if you buy a DVD, you stop trying to skip the previews. After all, you bought the DVD knowing that there would be previews. You are in the moral wrong. See how silly that argument is?
The reason it is silly is that the manufacturer of the DVD didn't give you an option—$5 for a DVD with previews or $6 for a DVD without. Similarly, Facebook doesn't give you the option of paying a small fee for an ad-free experience. If Facebook made that option available and you chose to sign up for Facebook but not pay, then you would be morally dubious at best. As long as the only options they offer are free-with-ads or nothing, I would argue that you are morally obligated to break their business model repeatedly until they recognize that providing an ad-free option is important to a significant segment of their customers.
This is doubly true on mobile, where their ads actually cost you real money in bandwidth bills.
That's okay. The faster the data rate, the better the SNR has to be, which means either ramping the power way up (battery life problems) or increasing tower density. By the time we reach 5G, the tower density will likely be high enough that the rain fade won't be a problem. You'll just use a little more battery power on rainy days.
He was built up by the media, because the media likes a horserace, and wanted opposition to Hillary. He never had a chance in the first place, but the media touted all of his wins--even though he never won enough to make him competitive-- and downplayed all of his losses, even though he was losing the delegates he needed to win.
Were you watching the same media I was? They had basically called the country for Clinton before Super Tuesday, showing how she had so many superdelegates in her pocket that Sanders couldn't feasibly win.
And no, you're wrong about the left bias. Every single study I've seen that has analyzed the American media as a whole has found that there's a right-wing bias, on average. The notion that there's a left-wing bias is basically a fiction created by right-wing media. What we have are two basic categories of media outlets—one that is extreme right, and one that is just to the right of the center. Any way you add those up, that doesn't balance left, notwithstanding MSNBC's attempt to pull things back towards the center with their slightly-left-biased noise.
Of course, part of the difference in our views of media bias is probably caused by Americans' generally distorted view of what "left" means. Clinton is slightly right of center on average, or at best center. Our entire political spectrum basically occupies the space between the center and the far right by world standards. We basically don't have any left-wing politics remaining in the U.S. anymore. Obama is barely to the left of center. Sanders is moderate left. For some reason, we tolerate extreme conservative ideas in our politics, but we don't tolerate extreme liberal ideas at all. The result is that the left is but a shadow of its former self, and people perceive a left bias in media because it biases towards Democrat positions, when in fact, that's not the left at all; it's the center. That's the balanced view.
Americans would completely freak out if we got true left-biased media. We'd see stories every day advocating social justice, pushing for basic incomes/government-funded universal healthcare/dismantling of corporations, encouraging volunteerism... you'd have reality TV following the lives of people at the local soup kitchen. You'd have stories every day about teachers having to dip into their already meager salaries to buy school supplies for their students who don't have money to pay for paper. If we had actual left-wing media, they would make us look like a third-world country, because they would be exposing the public to the unpleasant truths that our society tries to sweep under the rug.
The location services do return an area. Specifically, they return a point plus a radius that indicates the confidence. If they know that the user is somewhere in the U.S., the point is in the middle, and the radius is half the width of the country.
The problem is likely either that A. too many apps fail to show this in a way that the user can recognize as being an "I have no idea" result (e.g. by failing to visually highlight the accuracy radius or by not zooming out far enough to fully show the entire area enclosed within the accuracy radius), or B. lots of users are too clueless to understand that the highlight area around the point indicates the area in which the location could potentially be.
Their only useful purpose in OS X, realistically, has been for controlling volume and screen brightness anyway. Maybe this will cause companies to come up with more interesting uses for them. I'm not holding my breath.
The bigger concern is that they're making it thinner yet again. That probably means:
No Magsafe 2
Less battery life under heavy CPU load
Still the same paltry 1 TB capacity as previous generations
Both of those are deal-breakers for me. We've already gotten to the point where my battery lasts for an average of only 2.5 hours on essentially brand new hardware because the battery capacity hasn't kept up with the CPU's non-idle power consumption, and several mission-critical apps that I run almost every day are horrible battery hogs (in no particular order, Chrome, Finale 2012, Lightroom 6, Photoshop CS6).
Want to know what would make me happy?
Longer battery life when doing more than just playing around with a web browser.
Reliable GPUs that don't overheat and unsolder themselves.
The original MagSafe connector. The new MagSafe 2 falls off a little too easily when you bump it vertically.
Storage capacities up to 8 TB at a reasonable price (translation: THICKER, with room for two HD bays).
Third-party MagSafe/MagSafe 2 licensing for clip-on battery sleeves with MagSafe pass-through or
A removable cover on the bottom with contact plates to allow an external battery to be charged by the laptop's charge circuitry in alternation with the main battery.
I couldn't care less about function keys. I couldn't care less about making the laptop thinner. I want the laptop to be more capable. And I think I speak for basically 100% of Mac laptop users when I say that. Absolutely nobody outside of Apple cares about making laptops thinner at this point. We passed the point where that matters at the point where it dropped below the thickness of a small paperback book—basically with the most recent pre-Retina MacBook Pro. Every bit of thinness after that is widely seen as engineers doing something solely because they can, rather than because it improves the product. And for the most part, the excessive thinness has made the product functionally WORSE with each generation.
If Apple is really serious about retaining actual pro users, they need to stop actively making the pro machines less functional and start moving in the exact opposite direction. What I'm seeing described here sounds like a MacBook, not a MacBook Pro. As far as I'm concerned, the last truly pro Macbook was discontinued about two years ago. Just saying.
If making more money increases the speed at which you get to the point where you make no money, given that most people don't save enough money, all things being equal, most people would be better off earning n dollars for x years than earning 1.2n dollars for x/1.2 years.
IMO, they're probably wrong, because they're ignoring fungibility. As the cost of the rarer metals goes up, other materials will take their place, and the net impact on society as a whole will be minimal.
In the grand scheme of things, you really only need a couple of metals to get things done—iron and copper. Fortunately, these are also two of the most plentiful metals in Earth's crust, so we're not going to run out of either one for the foreseeable future, though the cost of extracting copper may go up as the quality of ore deposits decreases.
As for the others, right now, people use chromium because of stainless steel, but powder coats or sealants could serve the same purpose in many situations. We might run low on lithium, which is a problem for batteries, but we're also on the cusp of getting supercapacitor capacity to the point where many uses of lithium will no longer be needed, making that largely moot in the long term. And so on. And we use metal for many things that we could use plastics for, too (either oil-based or plant-based).
It isn't that simple. The growth rate of plant life depends on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. More CO2 leads to faster plant growth. Within a certain band (which we're likely well inside), the planet corrects for variations in levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. That's why we don't have a global extinction event every time a volcano erupts and belches methane into the atmosphere.
Well, it's based on empirical data. You'll have to provide your personal definition of "real science" for me.
Empirical data of the rate of consumption is insufficient. Without measuring whether we're really depleting resources faster than they can be replenished, any so-called "allotment" is little more than a fiction. It's an arbitrary number.
If you had done this study in the late 1700s, they would have said that we were at the limits for how many people the world could support, too. Since then, modern agriculture has increased crop yields, brought water to fertile soil that was previously too dry to grow crops, and provided machines that can pick crops at a rate that makes it possible to support a much larger population.
Thus, any discussion of an "allotment" is predicated upon the false assumption that resource shortages are fundamental problems with the world that cannot be corrected through technological means of increasing those resources. It is also predicated upon the dubious assumption that resource shortages won't take care of themselves without out intervention. For example, we panic about CO2 levels, worrying about a runaway greenhouse effect, forgetting that our greenhouse gas percentages are dramatically lower than they were in the distant past. This isn't an experiment. We already have empirical data from previous periods with high greenhouse gas numbers, and we know what happened: plant life flourished, died, got buried, turned into coal, and served as a carbon sink. Anyone arguing that this won't happen again is making an extraordinary claim that demands extraordinary proof.
This is not to say that global warming isn't a concern. It is. It has the potential to turn fertile lands into deserts and vice versa. It has the potential to seriously disturb the geopolitical climate of our planet, and to make the U.S. become much more dependent upon foreign food sources (Canada in particular). It has the potential to raise the sea level, flooding coastal areas where lots of people live. It can make hurricanes and tornadoes more prevalent, costing human lives. But I think it is important to talk about the concern realistically instead of Chicken Littling the subject and acting like we're about to destroy the world. We really aren't. Earth was around for billions of years before us, and will probably be around for billions of years after we're gone.
This would be pretty easily discovered—not to mention that it would probably bring down the servers if it happened to a degree that would actually change the election results meaningfully.
Besides, that can be easily avoided through a local app that does certificate pinning, combined with an operating system that enforces signed executables. And without those things, it is arguable whether the vote can be trusted anyway.
What temporarily embarrassed millionaires never bother to think about: companies always set prices to maximize revenue, and they always look to cut costs. It doesn't matter if you pay your workers 25 cents or $250 per hour, those two market forces will remain unchanged.
That's pedantically true, but the panicked rapidity with which companies try to cut labor costs is directly proportional to the difference between what that company is paying for labor and what its competition is paying for labor. That's why so many small retail businesses support minimum wage hikes on a state and/or national level. It makes it easier for them to pay their workers a decent salary because they know their competition will have to do the same.
That's as brilliant as saying the little people no longer need the right to vote, because politicians are no longer corrupt.
That's absurd because the reason for choosing politicians has nothing to do with corruption. Your ad hominem doesn't actually rebut my point. If anything, it's more like saying that people don't need the right to vote, because politicians are so universally corrupt that it won't do any good....
Because unions act as a counter-balance to corporate greed, when the board DGAF if the company goes under, as long as they make 7 figure salaries while the ship is going down.
No, they actually don't. You're still as expendable as toilet paper with a union. You obviously missed the part where unions have absolutely no power once the company decides to offshore everyone. What, you think the executives are going to walk out in solidarity? When the plant closes, and nobody has a job. It doesn't matter if the workers all go on strike, because the company doesn't need them anymore anyway. And that Chinese (statistically) factory that takes over production won't be a union shop.
And the people who should be regulating those Chinese factories to ensure that workers are paid reasonably, are not forced to work unreasonable hours, etc. are the Chinese government. They (along with the governments of many other countries) have not done so to nearly the degree that we in the U.S. would prefer, which is a big part of why we have such problems with offshoring in the first place. And the U.S. government hasn't done enough to prevent Chinese companies from dumping goods into American markets made by workers in such conditions. These are all things that only government can fix, and that unions are completely powerless to defend against. And unless government is willing to enact those regulations and enforce them, the unions don't make a bit of difference except in the very short term. And if government did enact adequate regulations, then the union wouldn't be needed.
But please, educate me about how a union is going to prevent offshoring—how a union has even the slightest bit of power to do so. Better yet, educate all the folks from my hometown who lost their jobs when two of the largest union shops shifted manufacturing to other countries. Ask them whether that 20% was worth having to get by on unemployment until it ran out....
So, are there no longer any greedy corporate executives looking to abuse their employees, or is your anti-union line as tired as you accuse unions of being?
Of course there are greedy corporate executives looking to abuse their employees. I never even remotely implied otherwise. What I said was that unions have no real power to stop it, because when push comes to shove, they don't have the legal authority to tax the bajeezus out of those companies' imports to punish them when they shift most or all the jobs to another country.
In my experience, union shops generally turn into train wrecks—union grievances for daring to touch the wrong piece of equipment (even if you weren't forced to do so by management), corruption in the union leadership (to the
Unions raise wages at first. The dark side that they don't tell you about is that this causes the companies to try to find other ways to cut costs, and eventually leads to the jobs moving overseas.
Unions are not the answer. Unions are a hack workaround for a failed government that isn't raising the minimum wage fast enough to keep up with inflation, that isn't protecting workers from what should be illegal cuts to employee pensions, that isn't protecting worker safety enough, that isn't doing enough to protect workers from wrongful termination, and so on. Everything a union does is something that our government is supposed to be doing, but has failed to do.
And because they aren't the government, unions don't have the power to punish companies that decide to move the entire labor force overseas. A union's power exists only up to the point at which the company decides that they no longer need U.S. labor. After that, the union has no power whatsoever. Thus, unions will always be poor substitutes for proper government oversight and regulation of businesses, at least as long as we live in a global economy.
They're probably not lazy, but rather they probably all obtained the electronic guts from some Chinese manufacturer that builds lock guts for hundreds of different companies, using basically the same firmware, just changing the VID/PID pairs. The lock manufacturer probably played no part in the development of the electronics or in the firmware that runs on the device, which means that any fix would require them to lean on the actual hardware vendor, who would then do anything and everything to avoid actually fixing the problem—assuming the firmware is even field-upgradable in the first place.
Or if it is going to be a physical museum, then the majority of exhibits need to justify their not being on a web page. That means really hands on, tactile exhibits designed to give an experience that you can't do online.
The thing is, G.Wiz was all of those things. It still couldn't cover its ongoing costs. Now maybe it was mismanaged, or maybe they overestimated the draw of certain expensive exhibits that they were locked into a rental contract on... I couldn't say, because I haven't seen their financial reports, but they were apparently hiding their failing finances for years by taking donations that were supposed to go towards future improvements and using them to cover their basic operating costs. That tells me that their basic operating costs were probably too high, which likely either means gross mismanagement (unsustainable staffing levels), failing infrastructure (e.g. their roof leaks and ongoing HVAC problems), insufficient visitors, or some combination of the three. Of those, two of the three would plague any new museum that tried to set up shop there.
To play devil's advocate here, the idea of children's computer museums and science museums is nice and all, but realistically there's a reason why these things close down, and it usually comes down to not making enough money to keep the lights on. Perhaps a nice interactive science website with VR would be a better way to spend the money, rather than restoring a building whose design results in high upkeep costs, plus the cost of staffing and renting exhibits and so on.
I mean, the city of Sarasota was spending something like $150k+ in maintenance every year just to keep the building from deteriorating further. At ten bucks a head, it takes 15,000 visitors every year (almost 10% of their total during the final years) just to pay for the absolute minimum level of upkeep. I'd imagine the real numbers to keep the building in good shape were at least double that. A good target for a business is closer to 5%. Basically, that building is a money pit.
Blockchains do nothing to help with this problem. The only way to ensure that no one else other than the voter can see the vote is to implant an LCD panel inside the voter's eyeball and require the voter to close his/her eyes before showing the vote info....
The problem of ensuring that only the voter's computer can see the vote is a trivial one and does not require a blockchain or anything like it. You just give the voter a unique identifier, hash the ballot using the voter's unique identifier as a nonce, and submit the hash alongside the ballot data. Then, you store the ballot data on the local computer.
To verify the vote, the voter's computer provides the voter's unique identifier and the result of re-hashing the ballot data with that identifier as a nonce. The server verifies that A. the provided hash exists in the database, and B. when the hash is recomputed by combining the stored vote data with that unique ID, the result matches the stored hash value.
This does not prevent someone from obtaining the voting record from the user's computer, however, unless the user chooses to destroy the local copy of the vote data, in which case the user will be unable to verify the vote later (short of remembering who he/she voted for and painstakingly reconstructing the ballot). Technically, the user's computer could throw away the vote data and keep only the hash. However, that would mean that it would be unable to show the user who he/she voted for, and thus the verification would tell you only that the server has a vote for that user ID that matches a hash that you can only assume had something to do with your actual vote. By contrast, if you keep the vote data, the user could manually compute the hash and trust would be much more absolute.
There's also the option of making that nonce be temporary, generated randomly by the user's computer, and independent from the authentication system. That would ensure that the vote is tied only to the sending IP address, rather than to the original voter, to the maximum extent possible (though during the initial vote submission itself, the server would temporarily know the user's ID for authentication purposes; I think that is probably very nearly unavoidable, though you could possibly add some layers of indirection to make it so that multiple servers would have to be compromised to determine who voted for which candidate). Subsequent vote changes would not require authentication (the hashed vote and the original vote data would be sufficient proof, assuming communication is properly encrypted).
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If the Yellowstone supervolcano blows, it's pretty much game over for most of the human population of the planet. The global cooling and ash deposition would result in worldwide famine for a decade or more. Power production is somewhere near the bottom of the world's concerns in that situation unless and until we build a huge underground cave underneath the entire American south with fertile soil and giant light fixtures.
Scrapers are not a violation of the law, per se. Scrapers access material that is made publicly available. Claims that downloading that data are somehow illegal are downright silly, IMO.
As to whether it was a violation of their terms of service or not, that likely depends on whether the bots were logged in and on whether the person logged in was aware that the bots were being used in his/her name. If the bots were not logged in, then it is no different from scraping a website, which is likely not illegal unless you then use that scraped data in a way that would be illegal. If the bots were logged in, then it is a violation of terms of service if the user was aware of the bot activity, or illegal if the user was not.
There's a huge difference between Mac users and iPhone users. A Mac user, on average, carries the laptop around in a bag that has room for carrying a few random adapters without thinking about it. An iPhone user, on average carries a phone around in his or her back pocket.
No, the WTF is not that the datacenter had a single point of failure. If their IT setup had been designed properly, that would have been a minor inconvenience. The WTF is that they didn't have at least three datacenters in geographically isolated locations with hot failover and regularly test the hot failover to ensure that it worked reliably and quickly in the event of a sudden, catastrophic loss of their primary datacenter.
Tell them they're coming to take away their gun videos.
- You need a small adapter for your regular headphones. This can get lost. So don't lose it.
Losing it isn't the problem. Not having it with you when you need it is the problem. If you only have one pair of headphones, that's fine. It's an unholy level of obnoxious if you think, "Oh, I'll plug my iPhone into my friend's stereo system to listen to a song," and your friend uses an Android phone and doesn't have the specialized adapter, because odds are approximately 100% that you won't have it with you.
- They can fit a slightly bigger battery in the phone, so it will last slightly longer
About two or three minutes, by my math. The headphone jack isn't very big, and doesn't stick that much farther into the device than a lightning port.
- Headphone port will no longer break if you yank the cord sideways. It will no longer get plugged up with pocket lint.
Lightning jacks get clogged at least as badly. And now, if you yank the cord sideways, not only will you break the port, but also you'll be unable to charge your phone. Oh, were you thinking about Bluetooth? Hope you like losing five seconds of audio every time you pause playback and restart it.
- You can get noise cancelling headphones that are powered by your phone instead of a separate battery
You can do that now. Nothing prevents headphone companies from building headphones with a Lightning connector. And they'll work all the way back to the iPhone 5.
- Charging while listening remains a question? How can you do it? Wireless charging built in? Y-adapter?
Two Lightning ports, I hope. Otherwise, this design is a disaster rivaled in the entire history of computing only by the current single-port MacBook.
- Apple will sell bluetooth earbuds
Which will suck because there's not enough space inside an earbud for a battery that will last longer than an hour or two under the best of circumstances. Apple will then insist that you need to grow bigger ears.
P.S. I say the above as someone who has used Facebook's ad platform as an advertiser. The management at Facebook are being complete and utter morons here. The last thing I want as an advertiser is to force my ads upon someone who will be annoyed by them. That's why I deliberately tailor my ads with careful targeting, even to the point that a few people who might be interested won't see my ads.
How about if you buy a DVD, you stop trying to skip the previews. After all, you bought the DVD knowing that there would be previews. You are in the moral wrong. See how silly that argument is?
The reason it is silly is that the manufacturer of the DVD didn't give you an option—$5 for a DVD with previews or $6 for a DVD without. Similarly, Facebook doesn't give you the option of paying a small fee for an ad-free experience. If Facebook made that option available and you chose to sign up for Facebook but not pay, then you would be morally dubious at best. As long as the only options they offer are free-with-ads or nothing, I would argue that you are morally obligated to break their business model repeatedly until they recognize that providing an ad-free option is important to a significant segment of their customers.
This is doubly true on mobile, where their ads actually cost you real money in bandwidth bills.
Maybe this is just another silo experiment on a broader scale—split HP in two and encourage them both to go after each other mercilessly....
That's okay. The faster the data rate, the better the SNR has to be, which means either ramping the power way up (battery life problems) or increasing tower density. By the time we reach 5G, the tower density will likely be high enough that the rain fade won't be a problem. You'll just use a little more battery power on rainy days.
Were you watching the same media I was? They had basically called the country for Clinton before Super Tuesday, showing how she had so many superdelegates in her pocket that Sanders couldn't feasibly win.
And no, you're wrong about the left bias. Every single study I've seen that has analyzed the American media as a whole has found that there's a right-wing bias, on average. The notion that there's a left-wing bias is basically a fiction created by right-wing media. What we have are two basic categories of media outlets—one that is extreme right, and one that is just to the right of the center. Any way you add those up, that doesn't balance left, notwithstanding MSNBC's attempt to pull things back towards the center with their slightly-left-biased noise.
Of course, part of the difference in our views of media bias is probably caused by Americans' generally distorted view of what "left" means. Clinton is slightly right of center on average, or at best center. Our entire political spectrum basically occupies the space between the center and the far right by world standards. We basically don't have any left-wing politics remaining in the U.S. anymore. Obama is barely to the left of center. Sanders is moderate left. For some reason, we tolerate extreme conservative ideas in our politics, but we don't tolerate extreme liberal ideas at all. The result is that the left is but a shadow of its former self, and people perceive a left bias in media because it biases towards Democrat positions, when in fact, that's not the left at all; it's the center. That's the balanced view.
Americans would completely freak out if we got true left-biased media. We'd see stories every day advocating social justice, pushing for basic incomes/government-funded universal healthcare/dismantling of corporations, encouraging volunteerism... you'd have reality TV following the lives of people at the local soup kitchen. You'd have stories every day about teachers having to dip into their already meager salaries to buy school supplies for their students who don't have money to pay for paper. If we had actual left-wing media, they would make us look like a third-world country, because they would be exposing the public to the unpleasant truths that our society tries to sweep under the rug.
And that would be a good thing.
The location services do return an area. Specifically, they return a point plus a radius that indicates the confidence. If they know that the user is somewhere in the U.S., the point is in the middle, and the radius is half the width of the country.
The problem is likely either that A. too many apps fail to show this in a way that the user can recognize as being an "I have no idea" result (e.g. by failing to visually highlight the accuracy radius or by not zooming out far enough to fully show the entire area enclosed within the accuracy radius), or B. lots of users are too clueless to understand that the highlight area around the point indicates the area in which the location could potentially be.
Their only useful purpose in OS X, realistically, has been for controlling volume and screen brightness anyway. Maybe this will cause companies to come up with more interesting uses for them. I'm not holding my breath.
The bigger concern is that they're making it thinner yet again. That probably means:
Both of those are deal-breakers for me. We've already gotten to the point where my battery lasts for an average of only 2.5 hours on essentially brand new hardware because the battery capacity hasn't kept up with the CPU's non-idle power consumption, and several mission-critical apps that I run almost every day are horrible battery hogs (in no particular order, Chrome, Finale 2012, Lightroom 6, Photoshop CS6).
Want to know what would make me happy?
I couldn't care less about function keys. I couldn't care less about making the laptop thinner. I want the laptop to be more capable. And I think I speak for basically 100% of Mac laptop users when I say that. Absolutely nobody outside of Apple cares about making laptops thinner at this point. We passed the point where that matters at the point where it dropped below the thickness of a small paperback book—basically with the most recent pre-Retina MacBook Pro. Every bit of thinness after that is widely seen as engineers doing something solely because they can, rather than because it improves the product. And for the most part, the excessive thinness has made the product functionally WORSE with each generation.
If Apple is really serious about retaining actual pro users, they need to stop actively making the pro machines less functional and start moving in the exact opposite direction. What I'm seeing described here sounds like a MacBook, not a MacBook Pro. As far as I'm concerned, the last truly pro Macbook was discontinued about two years ago. Just saying.
If making more money increases the speed at which you get to the point where you make no money, given that most people don't save enough money, all things being equal, most people would be better off earning n dollars for x years than earning 1.2n dollars for x/1.2 years.
IMO, they're probably wrong, because they're ignoring fungibility. As the cost of the rarer metals goes up, other materials will take their place, and the net impact on society as a whole will be minimal.
In the grand scheme of things, you really only need a couple of metals to get things done—iron and copper. Fortunately, these are also two of the most plentiful metals in Earth's crust, so we're not going to run out of either one for the foreseeable future, though the cost of extracting copper may go up as the quality of ore deposits decreases.
As for the others, right now, people use chromium because of stainless steel, but powder coats or sealants could serve the same purpose in many situations. We might run low on lithium, which is a problem for batteries, but we're also on the cusp of getting supercapacitor capacity to the point where many uses of lithium will no longer be needed, making that largely moot in the long term. And so on. And we use metal for many things that we could use plastics for, too (either oil-based or plant-based).
Like I said, fungibility.
It isn't that simple. The growth rate of plant life depends on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. More CO2 leads to faster plant growth. Within a certain band (which we're likely well inside), the planet corrects for variations in levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. That's why we don't have a global extinction event every time a volcano erupts and belches methane into the atmosphere.
Empirical data of the rate of consumption is insufficient. Without measuring whether we're really depleting resources faster than they can be replenished, any so-called "allotment" is little more than a fiction. It's an arbitrary number.
If you had done this study in the late 1700s, they would have said that we were at the limits for how many people the world could support, too. Since then, modern agriculture has increased crop yields, brought water to fertile soil that was previously too dry to grow crops, and provided machines that can pick crops at a rate that makes it possible to support a much larger population.
Thus, any discussion of an "allotment" is predicated upon the false assumption that resource shortages are fundamental problems with the world that cannot be corrected through technological means of increasing those resources. It is also predicated upon the dubious assumption that resource shortages won't take care of themselves without out intervention. For example, we panic about CO2 levels, worrying about a runaway greenhouse effect, forgetting that our greenhouse gas percentages are dramatically lower than they were in the distant past. This isn't an experiment. We already have empirical data from previous periods with high greenhouse gas numbers, and we know what happened: plant life flourished, died, got buried, turned into coal, and served as a carbon sink. Anyone arguing that this won't happen again is making an extraordinary claim that demands extraordinary proof.
This is not to say that global warming isn't a concern. It is. It has the potential to turn fertile lands into deserts and vice versa. It has the potential to seriously disturb the geopolitical climate of our planet, and to make the U.S. become much more dependent upon foreign food sources (Canada in particular). It has the potential to raise the sea level, flooding coastal areas where lots of people live. It can make hurricanes and tornadoes more prevalent, costing human lives. But I think it is important to talk about the concern realistically instead of Chicken Littling the subject and acting like we're about to destroy the world. We really aren't. Earth was around for billions of years before us, and will probably be around for billions of years after we're gone.
Who said anything about profit? Most museums in the U.S. are nonprofits. They do, however, have to bring in enough money to pay their bills. :-)
This would be pretty easily discovered—not to mention that it would probably bring down the servers if it happened to a degree that would actually change the election results meaningfully.
Besides, that can be easily avoided through a local app that does certificate pinning, combined with an operating system that enforces signed executables. And without those things, it is arguable whether the vote can be trusted anyway.
That's pedantically true, but the panicked rapidity with which companies try to cut labor costs is directly proportional to the difference between what that company is paying for labor and what its competition is paying for labor. That's why so many small retail businesses support minimum wage hikes on a state and/or national level. It makes it easier for them to pay their workers a decent salary because they know their competition will have to do the same.
That's absurd because the reason for choosing politicians has nothing to do with corruption. Your ad hominem doesn't actually rebut my point. If anything, it's more like saying that people don't need the right to vote, because politicians are so universally corrupt that it won't do any good....
No, they actually don't. You're still as expendable as toilet paper with a union. You obviously missed the part where unions have absolutely no power once the company decides to offshore everyone. What, you think the executives are going to walk out in solidarity? When the plant closes, and nobody has a job. It doesn't matter if the workers all go on strike, because the company doesn't need them anymore anyway. And that Chinese (statistically) factory that takes over production won't be a union shop.
And the people who should be regulating those Chinese factories to ensure that workers are paid reasonably, are not forced to work unreasonable hours, etc. are the Chinese government. They (along with the governments of many other countries) have not done so to nearly the degree that we in the U.S. would prefer, which is a big part of why we have such problems with offshoring in the first place. And the U.S. government hasn't done enough to prevent Chinese companies from dumping goods into American markets made by workers in such conditions. These are all things that only government can fix, and that unions are completely powerless to defend against. And unless government is willing to enact those regulations and enforce them, the unions don't make a bit of difference except in the very short term. And if government did enact adequate regulations, then the union wouldn't be needed.
But please, educate me about how a union is going to prevent offshoring—how a union has even the slightest bit of power to do so. Better yet, educate all the folks from my hometown who lost their jobs when two of the largest union shops shifted manufacturing to other countries. Ask them whether that 20% was worth having to get by on unemployment until it ran out....
Of course there are greedy corporate executives looking to abuse their employees. I never even remotely implied otherwise. What I said was that unions have no real power to stop it, because when push comes to shove, they don't have the legal authority to tax the bajeezus out of those companies' imports to punish them when they shift most or all the jobs to another country.
In my experience, union shops generally turn into train wrecks—union grievances for daring to touch the wrong piece of equipment (even if you weren't forced to do so by management), corruption in the union leadership (to the
Unions raise wages at first. The dark side that they don't tell you about is that this causes the companies to try to find other ways to cut costs, and eventually leads to the jobs moving overseas.
Unions are not the answer. Unions are a hack workaround for a failed government that isn't raising the minimum wage fast enough to keep up with inflation, that isn't protecting workers from what should be illegal cuts to employee pensions, that isn't protecting worker safety enough, that isn't doing enough to protect workers from wrongful termination, and so on. Everything a union does is something that our government is supposed to be doing, but has failed to do.
And because they aren't the government, unions don't have the power to punish companies that decide to move the entire labor force overseas. A union's power exists only up to the point at which the company decides that they no longer need U.S. labor. After that, the union has no power whatsoever. Thus, unions will always be poor substitutes for proper government oversight and regulation of businesses, at least as long as we live in a global economy.
They're probably not lazy, but rather they probably all obtained the electronic guts from some Chinese manufacturer that builds lock guts for hundreds of different companies, using basically the same firmware, just changing the VID/PID pairs. The lock manufacturer probably played no part in the development of the electronics or in the firmware that runs on the device, which means that any fix would require them to lean on the actual hardware vendor, who would then do anything and everything to avoid actually fixing the problem—assuming the firmware is even field-upgradable in the first place.
The thing is, G.Wiz was all of those things. It still couldn't cover its ongoing costs. Now maybe it was mismanaged, or maybe they overestimated the draw of certain expensive exhibits that they were locked into a rental contract on... I couldn't say, because I haven't seen their financial reports, but they were apparently hiding their failing finances for years by taking donations that were supposed to go towards future improvements and using them to cover their basic operating costs. That tells me that their basic operating costs were probably too high, which likely either means gross mismanagement (unsustainable staffing levels), failing infrastructure (e.g. their roof leaks and ongoing HVAC problems), insufficient visitors, or some combination of the three. Of those, two of the three would plague any new museum that tried to set up shop there.
To play devil's advocate here, the idea of children's computer museums and science museums is nice and all, but realistically there's a reason why these things close down, and it usually comes down to not making enough money to keep the lights on. Perhaps a nice interactive science website with VR would be a better way to spend the money, rather than restoring a building whose design results in high upkeep costs, plus the cost of staffing and renting exhibits and so on.
I mean, the city of Sarasota was spending something like $150k+ in maintenance every year just to keep the building from deteriorating further. At ten bucks a head, it takes 15,000 visitors every year (almost 10% of their total during the final years) just to pay for the absolute minimum level of upkeep. I'd imagine the real numbers to keep the building in good shape were at least double that. A good target for a business is closer to 5%. Basically, that building is a money pit.
Blockchains do nothing to help with this problem. The only way to ensure that no one else other than the voter can see the vote is to implant an LCD panel inside the voter's eyeball and require the voter to close his/her eyes before showing the vote info....
The problem of ensuring that only the voter's computer can see the vote is a trivial one and does not require a blockchain or anything like it. You just give the voter a unique identifier, hash the ballot using the voter's unique identifier as a nonce, and submit the hash alongside the ballot data. Then, you store the ballot data on the local computer.
To verify the vote, the voter's computer provides the voter's unique identifier and the result of re-hashing the ballot data with that identifier as a nonce. The server verifies that A. the provided hash exists in the database, and B. when the hash is recomputed by combining the stored vote data with that unique ID, the result matches the stored hash value.
This does not prevent someone from obtaining the voting record from the user's computer, however, unless the user chooses to destroy the local copy of the vote data, in which case the user will be unable to verify the vote later (short of remembering who he/she voted for and painstakingly reconstructing the ballot). Technically, the user's computer could throw away the vote data and keep only the hash. However, that would mean that it would be unable to show the user who he/she voted for, and thus the verification would tell you only that the server has a vote for that user ID that matches a hash that you can only assume had something to do with your actual vote. By contrast, if you keep the vote data, the user could manually compute the hash and trust would be much more absolute.
There's also the option of making that nonce be temporary, generated randomly by the user's computer, and independent from the authentication system. That would ensure that the vote is tied only to the sending IP address, rather than to the original voter, to the maximum extent possible (though during the initial vote submission itself, the server would temporarily know the user's ID for authentication purposes; I think that is probably very nearly unavoidable, though you could possibly add some layers of indirection to make it so that multiple servers would have to be compromised to determine who voted for which candidate). Subsequent vote changes would not require authentication (the hashed vote and the original vote data would be sufficient proof, assuming communication is properly encrypted).