I can understand removal of the headphone jack from a phone (to some extent): modern phone design is extraordinarily tight and removing every little piece can help the overall design. But on a laptop? There's no design reason to do this. The cost of the jack is tiny. The utility isn't huge for all users, but it's definitely useful for a large number of them.
Why would they even need to field a survey for this? If Bluetooth or other wireless headphones become ubiquitous, maybe. But not until then.
I think it's mostly just Samsung that still has hardware home/back/switcher buttons for Android devices. Most other devices use the built-in software buttons. I strongly prefer the software buttons myself, for two main reasons:
1. There's a fourth menu option for some apps that isn't anywhere visible on phones with hardware buttons (it shows up as three dots and displays a small pop-up menu on phones with software buttons). If I remember correctly, you long-press either the back or app switcher buttons to view it on phones with hardware buttons. I think the use of this feature is less common in modern Android apps, though.
2. Especially when using the device in landscape mode, I very frequently hit either the back or switcher buttons accidentally, which, depending upon the app, can interrupt my activity. This is the #1 reason why I switched my Samsung tablet over to Cyanogenmod, as there's an option to disable the hardware buttons (the other reason being I really don't like Samsung's custom skin).
Google Play Services is just a library. It doesn't access locations itself, but offers an interface for retrieving location information. Apps still have to have location permission themselves to get location information through Google Play Services (See the description of the api here, particularly the "Specify App Permissions" section).
You can still use older USB-A chargers for a type-C device. Just get Type-A to Type-C cables. They're not very expensive (I recently got a 2-pack of 6.6ft Type A to Type C cables for $12 off Amazon). I'm sure that the costs of full USB-C chargers and cables will come down as they become more ubiquitous.
The problem is that the economic theory results that produce good outcomes for market systems have a number of major assumptions, assumptions that are entirely violated in this situation.
One of those assumptions is perfect information. For-profit schools are very good at deceiving their students with a variety of wild promises, and as new students don't usually have good access to the people who would be making decisions about hiring them later, those students just aren't adept at separating the truth from the lies.
Another issue is that these market arguments rely upon the concept of individual utility maximization. But education is one of those things that doesn't just benefit a single person in isolation: a more highly-educated populace is better for everybody, not just for those receiving the education. By ignoring overall utility, these simple macroeconomic arguments are maximizing the wrong thing.
Finally, the simple macroeconomic case here assumes that everybody has the same capacity to spend, even if they have differing desire to spend. In reality, making student loans less available will do nothing but price poor students out of college, which will exacerbate intergenerational income inequality (that is, it will serve to help keep the poor poorer and the rich richer). If we want a society where everybody has a chance to succeed based upon their own merits and work, then we need to have free education for all. Period.
1. Having a broad education is valuable for a number of different reasons. Not least of which is that it benefits society as a whole when people have a decent understanding of the world around them. University isn't and shouldn't be all about job preparation.
2. Most of the uptick in university costs has been a result of ballooning administrative pay. This has in large part mirrored the exploding pay of upper management in many private organizations. Making more schools private won't help this problem: it may well exacerbate it.
3. An actual solution to this kind of thing would involve more direct funding of the schools. If states and/or the federal government directly funded schools to the point that education was close to free for students, then they could quite reasonably put into place policies that would restrict administrative pay at such institutions. In fact, there would be a lot of pressure to do exactly this as expensive universities would look quite bad.
This is generally not true. Sometimes it's a matter of people picking the wrong degree. But these days a bigger problem is just people who graduated around 2008-2010. A huge fraction of the pain of this most recent crash fell squarely on the shoulders of recent grads, and this had nothing at all to do with their skills or the quality of their educations.
Today, new grads are doing better, though we're still not back to healthy levels. What we need for this kind of issue where it relates to education policy is that education should be publicly-funded to the point that it's free or nearly free, so that people can go to school without fear of winding up deep in debt and unable to pay that debt. Having better macroeconomic policy at the national level to prevent or mitigate this kind of crash would also be nice.
You might want to look into precisely why ITT lost their accreditation. They were essentially operating a scam: promising students that they would prepare them to enter the workforce, while actually providing nothing of the sort. This is the norm with for-profit institutions. I don't understand why you think that more for-profit institutions would help with this.
It's perfectly reasonable for law enforcement to allow some informants to commit certain crimes while attempting to shut down a larger organization. Simply reporting the number of times that this happens says nothing one way or the other about whether the FBI is doing a good job at making use of this power.
Personally, I'm much more worried about the times that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies engage in sting operations where they use such informants to urge people to commit legal activity and then arrest them for it. Some fraction of these informants may well be doing just this sort of thing, but the report of merely the number of informants doesn't say anything about that. Here is one example of such entrapment. Quoted from the above page:
The judge criticized not only the defendants, but also what she viewed as the government's overzealous handling of the investigation. Referring to Cromitie, she said, "The essence of what occurred here is that a government, understandably zealous to protect its citizens from terrorism, came upon a man both bigoted and suggestible, one who was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own. It created acts of terrorism out of his fantasies of bravado and bigotry, and then made those fantasies come true." She added, "The government did not have to infiltrate and foil some nefarious plot – there was no nefarious plot to foil." She said the defendants were "not political or religious martyrs," but "thugs for hire, pure and simple."
The main thing that the doze mode does is make it so that while your phone is sitting in your pocket, it uses almost no battery. With older Android phones, they rarely last much more than a day without draining the full battery even if you don't use them much. With an Android M or N OS, the devices should last a few days with light usage.
This feature provides little to no benefit for battery usage while the phone is being actively used.
Actually, it's guaranteed to happen to Earth, though not until long after all humans have died.
Human-caused global warming is highly unlikely to result in temperatures warm enough to trigger a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth, even though human-caused global warming will cause quite a lot of damage to human societies.
However, the Sun is very, very slowly getting brighter as more hydrogen turns into helium at its core. In about a billion years or so, the Sun will become warm enough that the Earth's oceans will evaporate faster and faster, leading to more water vapor in the atmosphere, which will amplify the greenhouse effect further. Once this is triggered, the oceans will boil entirely and the Earth will become very much like Venus. If there is an additional release of CO2 from the crust due to the higher temperatures as there is in Venus, then that will amplify the effect even more. The Earth probably won't ever become quite as hot as Venus, just because Venus is closer to the Sun. But it will get extremely hot in the far future.
Of course, this is the far, far future. Human activities can push the Earth's temperature for a few hundred, perhaps a few thousand years. We can't have any impact at all on the temperature of the Earth over a billion years (barring the development of ridiculous new technologies sometime in the future).
I only read the ScienceMag article. They state that they're injecting plasma into people, and measuring their blood for markers of age.
This is utterly meaningless. Plasma includes a number of proteins, and it's entirely possible that they're simply measuring the injected plasma itself. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that this plasma is causing any changes to the subject's body, and until there are long-term studies which measure health consequences, there will be no reason to believe that this is anything but rank quackery.
Noise cancelling headphones already are pretty terrible at eliminating sound from conversations (they're best at eliminating sounds from nearly-constant sources, such as from an HVAC or an airplane engine). Seems like a worthless feature to me, unless they can also come up with a mechanism to effectively cancel speech (which is really, really difficult).
Cost would be my bet. HBM2 is set to be used in their Tesla P100 GPU, which will have a far higher price. They probably couldn't get the manufacturing costs low enough for a consumer part with both the monstrous GPU die and HBM.
You're assuming that all revenue goes to gains, whereas only a relatively small portion is actually the operating margin. Then there's the fact that customers may lay down their own lures if the proprietor does nothing.
I imagine there's probably still a net benefit, but it's not quite as clear as you claim here. The largest benefit would probably coming from geeky spots (e.g. gaming bars) having regular events (e.g. Wednesday night Pokemon).
It's really a good idea to have automatic backups off the device for anything important, independent of this issue. After all, your phone could become broken to the point it doesn't even boot, or it could be stolen.
Also described in the blog post, the particular error correction method they use means that they can recover from up to 16-24MB of consecutive corrupted memory.
Unless the most basic boot functionality is compromised, you could probably still boot into the FastBoot mode and re-flash the device image from there. This may have to be done by an OEM if it's a locked device.
What you'd have, in principle, is relays approx. every km. Presumably it would be better to make the relay length shorter so that you could build in some redundancy. But this kind of solution is still not very good as it is impacted very strongly by weather.
Perhaps, but laser-based wireless wouldn't be very useful in urban settings due to line-of-sight issues. What places like Seattle really need is public investment in new wired infrastructure. But public investment in such things is very hard to come by in the US.
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I can understand removal of the headphone jack from a phone (to some extent): modern phone design is extraordinarily tight and removing every little piece can help the overall design. But on a laptop? There's no design reason to do this. The cost of the jack is tiny. The utility isn't huge for all users, but it's definitely useful for a large number of them.
Why would they even need to field a survey for this? If Bluetooth or other wireless headphones become ubiquitous, maybe. But not until then.
I think it's mostly just Samsung that still has hardware home/back/switcher buttons for Android devices. Most other devices use the built-in software buttons. I strongly prefer the software buttons myself, for two main reasons:
1. There's a fourth menu option for some apps that isn't anywhere visible on phones with hardware buttons (it shows up as three dots and displays a small pop-up menu on phones with software buttons). If I remember correctly, you long-press either the back or app switcher buttons to view it on phones with hardware buttons. I think the use of this feature is less common in modern Android apps, though.
2. Especially when using the device in landscape mode, I very frequently hit either the back or switcher buttons accidentally, which, depending upon the app, can interrupt my activity. This is the #1 reason why I switched my Samsung tablet over to Cyanogenmod, as there's an option to disable the hardware buttons (the other reason being I really don't like Samsung's custom skin).
Google Play Services is just a library. It doesn't access locations itself, but offers an interface for retrieving location information. Apps still have to have location permission themselves to get location information through Google Play Services (See the description of the api here, particularly the "Specify App Permissions" section).
There are public news sources. But yes, most news organizations are private, for-profit entities.
You can still use older USB-A chargers for a type-C device. Just get Type-A to Type-C cables. They're not very expensive (I recently got a 2-pack of 6.6ft Type A to Type C cables for $12 off Amazon). I'm sure that the costs of full USB-C chargers and cables will come down as they become more ubiquitous.
The problem is that the economic theory results that produce good outcomes for market systems have a number of major assumptions, assumptions that are entirely violated in this situation.
One of those assumptions is perfect information. For-profit schools are very good at deceiving their students with a variety of wild promises, and as new students don't usually have good access to the people who would be making decisions about hiring them later, those students just aren't adept at separating the truth from the lies.
Another issue is that these market arguments rely upon the concept of individual utility maximization. But education is one of those things that doesn't just benefit a single person in isolation: a more highly-educated populace is better for everybody, not just for those receiving the education. By ignoring overall utility, these simple macroeconomic arguments are maximizing the wrong thing.
Finally, the simple macroeconomic case here assumes that everybody has the same capacity to spend, even if they have differing desire to spend. In reality, making student loans less available will do nothing but price poor students out of college, which will exacerbate intergenerational income inequality (that is, it will serve to help keep the poor poorer and the rich richer). If we want a society where everybody has a chance to succeed based upon their own merits and work, then we need to have free education for all. Period.
1. Having a broad education is valuable for a number of different reasons. Not least of which is that it benefits society as a whole when people have a decent understanding of the world around them. University isn't and shouldn't be all about job preparation.
2. Most of the uptick in university costs has been a result of ballooning administrative pay. This has in large part mirrored the exploding pay of upper management in many private organizations. Making more schools private won't help this problem: it may well exacerbate it.
3. An actual solution to this kind of thing would involve more direct funding of the schools. If states and/or the federal government directly funded schools to the point that education was close to free for students, then they could quite reasonably put into place policies that would restrict administrative pay at such institutions. In fact, there would be a lot of pressure to do exactly this as expensive universities would look quite bad.
This is generally not true. Sometimes it's a matter of people picking the wrong degree. But these days a bigger problem is just people who graduated around 2008-2010. A huge fraction of the pain of this most recent crash fell squarely on the shoulders of recent grads, and this had nothing at all to do with their skills or the quality of their educations.
Today, new grads are doing better, though we're still not back to healthy levels. What we need for this kind of issue where it relates to education policy is that education should be publicly-funded to the point that it's free or nearly free, so that people can go to school without fear of winding up deep in debt and unable to pay that debt. Having better macroeconomic policy at the national level to prevent or mitigate this kind of crash would also be nice.
You might want to look into precisely why ITT lost their accreditation. They were essentially operating a scam: promising students that they would prepare them to enter the workforce, while actually providing nothing of the sort. This is the norm with for-profit institutions. I don't understand why you think that more for-profit institutions would help with this.
It's perfectly reasonable for law enforcement to allow some informants to commit certain crimes while attempting to shut down a larger organization. Simply reporting the number of times that this happens says nothing one way or the other about whether the FBI is doing a good job at making use of this power.
Personally, I'm much more worried about the times that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies engage in sting operations where they use such informants to urge people to commit legal activity and then arrest them for it. Some fraction of these informants may well be doing just this sort of thing, but the report of merely the number of informants doesn't say anything about that. Here is one example of such entrapment. Quoted from the above page:
The main thing that the doze mode does is make it so that while your phone is sitting in your pocket, it uses almost no battery. With older Android phones, they rarely last much more than a day without draining the full battery even if you don't use them much. With an Android M or N OS, the devices should last a few days with light usage.
This feature provides little to no benefit for battery usage while the phone is being actively used.
Actually, it's guaranteed to happen to Earth, though not until long after all humans have died.
Human-caused global warming is highly unlikely to result in temperatures warm enough to trigger a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth, even though human-caused global warming will cause quite a lot of damage to human societies.
However, the Sun is very, very slowly getting brighter as more hydrogen turns into helium at its core. In about a billion years or so, the Sun will become warm enough that the Earth's oceans will evaporate faster and faster, leading to more water vapor in the atmosphere, which will amplify the greenhouse effect further. Once this is triggered, the oceans will boil entirely and the Earth will become very much like Venus. If there is an additional release of CO2 from the crust due to the higher temperatures as there is in Venus, then that will amplify the effect even more. The Earth probably won't ever become quite as hot as Venus, just because Venus is closer to the Sun. But it will get extremely hot in the far future.
Of course, this is the far, far future. Human activities can push the Earth's temperature for a few hundred, perhaps a few thousand years. We can't have any impact at all on the temperature of the Earth over a billion years (barring the development of ridiculous new technologies sometime in the future).
I only read the ScienceMag article. They state that they're injecting plasma into people, and measuring their blood for markers of age.
This is utterly meaningless. Plasma includes a number of proteins, and it's entirely possible that they're simply measuring the injected plasma itself. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that this plasma is causing any changes to the subject's body, and until there are long-term studies which measure health consequences, there will be no reason to believe that this is anything but rank quackery.
Noise cancelling headphones already are pretty terrible at eliminating sound from conversations (they're best at eliminating sounds from nearly-constant sources, such as from an HVAC or an airplane engine). Seems like a worthless feature to me, unless they can also come up with a mechanism to effectively cancel speech (which is really, really difficult).
Because it's both hilarious and disturbing?
That there are a number of rich people into junk science like this isn't too surprising to me, but this is particularly bizarre.
Cost would be my bet. HBM2 is set to be used in their Tesla P100 GPU, which will have a far higher price. They probably couldn't get the manufacturing costs low enough for a consumer part with both the monstrous GPU die and HBM.
You might be surprised to learn that many video games are quite social.
You're assuming that all revenue goes to gains, whereas only a relatively small portion is actually the operating margin. Then there's the fact that customers may lay down their own lures if the proprietor does nothing.
I imagine there's probably still a net benefit, but it's not quite as clear as you claim here. The largest benefit would probably coming from geeky spots (e.g. gaming bars) having regular events (e.g. Wednesday night Pokemon).
You don't have to actually meet people to play Pokemon Go. It can help for coordinating efforts on powerful gyms, but it's definitely not necessary.
For the most part, they do. It's not very easy to get past Android's protections and install malware that impacts the system image.
It's really a good idea to have automatic backups off the device for anything important, independent of this issue. After all, your phone could become broken to the point it doesn't even boot, or it could be stolen.
Also described in the blog post, the particular error correction method they use means that they can recover from up to 16-24MB of consecutive corrupted memory.
Unless the most basic boot functionality is compromised, you could probably still boot into the FastBoot mode and re-flash the device image from there. This may have to be done by an OEM if it's a locked device.
What you'd have, in principle, is relays approx. every km. Presumably it would be better to make the relay length shorter so that you could build in some redundancy. But this kind of solution is still not very good as it is impacted very strongly by weather.
Perhaps, but laser-based wireless wouldn't be very useful in urban settings due to line-of-sight issues. What places like Seattle really need is public investment in new wired infrastructure. But public investment in such things is very hard to come by in the US.