You have to be careful with laws. What it claims to do and what it actually does are not always the same thing. There's very little oversight in the law as written. There are also no safeguards against clinics who might use it as a legal justification to sell patients ineffective drugs at 'you'll die without it' prices.
I think the problem is that the bill was not motivated by acting in the interests of patients, but by people following the ideological position that all regulation is wrong and the government needs to just step aside and let industry solve all our problems.
1. They choose a test which doesn't actually use the browser do do any processing - all it does it sit there while a video codec does all the hard, power-draining work. 2. They measured... runtime on batteries? That's ridiculous. Batteries have awful repeatability. Their performance depends on age, temperature, level of last charge cycle, recent depletion, pressure upon the cells, and sheer randomness. If you want to know how much power a program uses, just hook an ammeter up to the power cable and take the battery out. Worse, they did a time lapse of three identical devices - which means three different batteries, with doubtless some manufacturing variation. They could easily have just determined beforehand which had the best battery and made sure Edge ended up on that. 3. Publication bias? Even assuming this wasn't outright rigged (which it probably was), do you think MS would publish this if it didn't make them look good? No, they'd just bury it... and then re-run the test, or make up a new test, until they get a result that makes their product look good. 4. Firefox apparently doubles power consumption. It may not be the sleekest of browsers any more, but that seems a bit hard to believe. For one, I don't hear fans spinning quickly right now. Unless perhaps they had firefox using a different video decoder, maybe all software while the other two used hardware acceleration, in which case the problem isn't firefox - it's Netflix not handling it properly.
Perhaps one day. Right now, fully off-grid solar is very expensive. You need to have sufficient generation capacity for the winter when daylight hours are short, which means you are greatly over-capacity in summer. You could set up a system for selling this excess, but then you are back to the need for a distribution network - which remains as much a natural monopoly as before. Plus generating is simply cheaper in bulk, when you have economy of scale. Which do you think is cheaper: Sixty thousand little 100W rooftop wind turbines, or one 6MW monster of a commercial-scale turbine?
I can't see what the point of the comments process was: The results were sure to be so full of fake submissions as to be completely meaningless, and it's pretty clear the FCC knew this from the start and the whole process was just a charade.
I just assumed that the public comment process was required by law - some law that pre-dated the internet, when commenting actually meant going to the trouble of writing in a letter.
Did he ever even define the swamp? It's easy to promise to 'drain the swamp' when you never identify anyone specific as part of it. Your supporters naturally assume that anyone with policies they oppose must be part of this swamp.
There was an article I remember seeing in a tabloid paper about this. Being tabloidy, it was all anecdote rather than serious science, but they had a map that got the point across. They asked four (male) generations of a family how far they had been allowed to roam unsupervised when they were sixteen, and overlaid it onto a map. A huge blob of red for the great-grandfather. A smaller, deeper red within for the grandfather. A smaller, deeper circle still within that for the father - and a barely visible red dot for the latest generation, who was not permitted beyond the end of the driveway.
What the statistics say about childhood dangers and what parents perceive to be dangerous really have little connection.
The post I was replying to specifically mentioned Colorado. I don't know the US road system, so I just used google to check the journey time.
The point here is that with modern transpotation, people can travel fast, so the search radius for a missing child rapidly grows to the point where amber alerts end up annoying a very large number of people.
Imagine you are a very concerned public official in charge of this system, and you get a police alert for a missing child. You know that the child has probably just gotten lost, but may have been abducted - it happens, usually following an ugly divorce in which one parent gets custody. The child has been missing now for 24 hours - the time taken for the parent to notice they didn't come home from school, call the school, let the school search and check their records, call the police, have the police send an officer over to collect full details, organise a local search, and finally conclude that the child should be declared potentially abducted and an amber alert issued.
I ran that through the trip planner on Google: An abductor on the run, unable to use air travel but also willing to forgo sleep in their deperation to escape a search area, can do that in 27 hours drive time. Achievable if they take a bus part of the journey, or try for a desperation-fueled thirty-hours-without-sleep day. So that is actually a perfectly reasonable search radius.
There is an obvious problem with this: When the 'reasonable search radius' includes more than half the country, alerts are so frequent that people quickly learn to ignore them. Child abductions are very good at terrifying parents, but actual cases of children harmed are very rare - that's why they make headlines when it does happen, further fuelling the fear.
Because people are instinctually inclined to be very fearful for the safety of children. If there are not sufficient real threats to satisfy this need, they exaggerate the tiniest of risks or imagine entirely new ones.
We joke a lot about how "think of the children" are the magic words to get even the worst-written of laws to pass, but we joke about it because that approach actually does work. Some officials did the calculations and decided the applying a minor inconvenience for around 80,000 people* is justified for the very slim chance that it might save a lost child.
*Assuming 80% of Thunder Bay residents own cellphones.
Just "a" common cold. There are a lot of viruses that can cause the common cold, but as they are essentially identical in symptoms and treatment*, they all get lumped together.
We are very close on polio. It's holding on, mostly due to inaccessible areas acting as reservoirs, but those areas shrink each year. Making good progress on guinea worm too.
The Seasteading institute proposed an idea some years back for a business ship in international waters, just of the US coast, so employees could live on the mainland but commute by ferry each day and work in a place free of things like a minimum wage, mandated health coverage or income tax. It didn't take.
Probably not. If it was on steam I may have purchased it, especially if it was in the last Christmas sale. I seldom have reason to visit physical stores now. Everything is more convenient online.
While the idiocracy effect would certainly happen given enough time, if you think about it in terms of generations you see just how long that would take. One generation every twenty years - five every century, and it's going to take a lot more than five to achieve that level of change. Just ask any dog breeder.
Not so much any more. The electronics industry has gotten very good at minimising the need for those expensive minerals. Copper, certainly. But gold? Not really. The only gold you'll find in your Internet of tat is the microscopically thin wire connecting a chip die to the package. You don't get gold circuit boards any more, and you rarely even get gold-plated contacts. The minerals aren't worth the costs of separating them out.
Trump did not get elected as a third party candidate. He got elected by somehow convincing one of the major parties that he should be their candidate. A combination of force of personality and a giant heap of money allowed him to bypass the usual years of climbing the political ladder and start at the top, but even he could not succeed without siding with one of the big two.
When I was in school (which would be circa 2000) I got in semi-serious trouble for messing around on the computers. I can't remember exactly what I had been doing, but it involved using a command prompt to launch notepad (a restricted application) so I could work on a website creation project without having to deal with the appalling WYSIWYG editor I was supposed to use. Something that scared a teaching assistant, who panicked and thought I was up to serious no-good. I was promptly hauled before the principle under accusations that I'd been 'hacking.'
There followed a long misunderstanding in which I was asked if I had been 'hacking the school network.' My attempts to dispute the meaning of the term hacking were interpreted as a confession of guilt. The more I tried to explain, the more serious the crimes the teachers concluded I was confessing to. I tried to explain with examples of personal projects I had come up with creative hack solutions to solve, but to the teachers who had only seen the word in news stories about cyber-criminals and terrorists all hacking was by definition illegal and every example only added to my rap sheet. I was banned from using the computers, expelled from the IT course, and suspended from school for a week.
Even across subcultures, simple misunderstandings of word definitions can have serious consequences.
The IT course sucked anyway. It was a joke at the time, a glorified secretarial course in how to use a word processor. There have been some attempted reforms in more recent years to put real computer science and engineering into the IT curriculum, but with only partial success.
It could be argued that GNU has outgrown the hobbyist era. GNU carries the weight of many billions of dollars each year of business activity and of safety-critical systems. There are hobbyists, but there are also professional programmers hired by businesses who need to improve the software they depend upon. The glory days of the hacker culture in which GNU originated have passed.
This is why I don't like the in potentia argument. Once you start granting rights to people who may hypothetically exist in future, you end up reaching some very strange conclusions which most people would find abhorent. By that logic any men here need to be getting out there right now and finding some women to impregnate - and if none are willing, just rape as many women as possible. Doing anything else means denying existence to future children, a crime on par with murder.
The question is not really over 'taking a life.' People kill all the time - for food, for medicine or for pest control. My whole household had to take antiparasitics last week because we adopted a rescue cat that was riddled with intestinal worms - does that count as murder? Not all life has equal ethical value, and some life has negligible value. A consistent framework for handling the issue of abortion needs to somehow evaluate this worth: What makes humans worth more than rats and worms, and does the fetus have it?
Unfortunately humans are superficial creatures, and easily swayed by simple physical features like a cute little baby face or a bizarre fixation on the heartbeat.
The majority of Americans - and here in the UK too - are moderates. They support restrictions on abortion, but also believe that it should be legal under some circumstances. This moderation has little political representation though. The passionate ones, the people who actually drive the political debate and write the laws, are the extremists. The pro-lifers who want to see abortion banned entirely even if this means women dying needlessly, and the pro-choicers who believe abortion must be legal in every case as a matter of principle.
The US legal situation only worsens the situation due to the fear of incrimentalism.
I'd respect the pro-life side a lot more if almost every one of their pressure groups were not also opposed to sex education and access to contraception. The best tools we have to minimise the need for elective abortion, yet shunned by the organised pro-life movement for 'promoting sin' or some such nonsense.
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You have to be careful with laws. What it claims to do and what it actually does are not always the same thing. There's very little oversight in the law as written. There are also no safeguards against clinics who might use it as a legal justification to sell patients ineffective drugs at 'you'll die without it' prices.
I think the problem is that the bill was not motivated by acting in the interests of patients, but by people following the ideological position that all regulation is wrong and the government needs to just step aside and let industry solve all our problems.
Your peak usage maybe. Where I live, domestic air conditioning is a rare thing.
1. They choose a test which doesn't actually use the browser do do any processing - all it does it sit there while a video codec does all the hard, power-draining work.
2. They measured... runtime on batteries? That's ridiculous. Batteries have awful repeatability. Their performance depends on age, temperature, level of last charge cycle, recent depletion, pressure upon the cells, and sheer randomness. If you want to know how much power a program uses, just hook an ammeter up to the power cable and take the battery out. Worse, they did a time lapse of three identical devices - which means three different batteries, with doubtless some manufacturing variation. They could easily have just determined beforehand which had the best battery and made sure Edge ended up on that.
3. Publication bias? Even assuming this wasn't outright rigged (which it probably was), do you think MS would publish this if it didn't make them look good? No, they'd just bury it... and then re-run the test, or make up a new test, until they get a result that makes their product look good.
4. Firefox apparently doubles power consumption. It may not be the sleekest of browsers any more, but that seems a bit hard to believe. For one, I don't hear fans spinning quickly right now. Unless perhaps they had firefox using a different video decoder, maybe all software while the other two used hardware acceleration, in which case the problem isn't firefox - it's Netflix not handling it properly.
Perhaps one day. Right now, fully off-grid solar is very expensive. You need to have sufficient generation capacity for the winter when daylight hours are short, which means you are greatly over-capacity in summer. You could set up a system for selling this excess, but then you are back to the need for a distribution network - which remains as much a natural monopoly as before. Plus generating is simply cheaper in bulk, when you have economy of scale. Which do you think is cheaper: Sixty thousand little 100W rooftop wind turbines, or one 6MW monster of a commercial-scale turbine?
I can't see what the point of the comments process was: The results were sure to be so full of fake submissions as to be completely meaningless, and it's pretty clear the FCC knew this from the start and the whole process was just a charade.
I just assumed that the public comment process was required by law - some law that pre-dated the internet, when commenting actually meant going to the trouble of writing in a letter.
Did he ever even define the swamp? It's easy to promise to 'drain the swamp' when you never identify anyone specific as part of it. Your supporters naturally assume that anyone with policies they oppose must be part of this swamp.
There was an article I remember seeing in a tabloid paper about this. Being tabloidy, it was all anecdote rather than serious science, but they had a map that got the point across. They asked four (male) generations of a family how far they had been allowed to roam unsupervised when they were sixteen, and overlaid it onto a map. A huge blob of red for the great-grandfather. A smaller, deeper red within for the grandfather. A smaller, deeper circle still within that for the father - and a barely visible red dot for the latest generation, who was not permitted beyond the end of the driveway.
What the statistics say about childhood dangers and what parents perceive to be dangerous really have little connection.
The post I was replying to specifically mentioned Colorado. I don't know the US road system, so I just used google to check the journey time.
The point here is that with modern transpotation, people can travel fast, so the search radius for a missing child rapidly grows to the point where amber alerts end up annoying a very large number of people.
Imagine you are a very concerned public official in charge of this system, and you get a police alert for a missing child. You know that the child has probably just gotten lost, but may have been abducted - it happens, usually following an ugly divorce in which one parent gets custody. The child has been missing now for 24 hours - the time taken for the parent to notice they didn't come home from school, call the school, let the school search and check their records, call the police, have the police send an officer over to collect full details, organise a local search, and finally conclude that the child should be declared potentially abducted and an amber alert issued.
I ran that through the trip planner on Google: An abductor on the run, unable to use air travel but also willing to forgo sleep in their deperation to escape a search area, can do that in 27 hours drive time. Achievable if they take a bus part of the journey, or try for a desperation-fueled thirty-hours-without-sleep day. So that is actually a perfectly reasonable search radius.
There is an obvious problem with this: When the 'reasonable search radius' includes more than half the country, alerts are so frequent that people quickly learn to ignore them. Child abductions are very good at terrifying parents, but actual cases of children harmed are very rare - that's why they make headlines when it does happen, further fuelling the fear.
Because people are instinctually inclined to be very fearful for the safety of children. If there are not sufficient real threats to satisfy this need, they exaggerate the tiniest of risks or imagine entirely new ones.
We joke a lot about how "think of the children" are the magic words to get even the worst-written of laws to pass, but we joke about it because that approach actually does work. Some officials did the calculations and decided the applying a minor inconvenience for around 80,000 people* is justified for the very slim chance that it might save a lost child.
*Assuming 80% of Thunder Bay residents own cellphones.
Just "a" common cold. There are a lot of viruses that can cause the common cold, but as they are essentially identical in symptoms and treatment*, they all get lumped together.
*ie, there isn't one.
We are very close on polio. It's holding on, mostly due to inaccessible areas acting as reservoirs, but those areas shrink each year. Making good progress on guinea worm too.
Maybe they should go full-on fantasy and make it submersible.
The Seasteading institute proposed an idea some years back for a business ship in international waters, just of the US coast, so employees could live on the mainland but commute by ferry each day and work in a place free of things like a minimum wage, mandated health coverage or income tax. It didn't take.
Probably not. If it was on steam I may have purchased it, especially if it was in the last Christmas sale. I seldom have reason to visit physical stores now. Everything is more convenient online.
And I feel not one even the tiniest trace of guilt for that.
As much as we may love the products of the entertainment industry, most of that industry is seriously lacking a sense of social responsibility.
While the idiocracy effect would certainly happen given enough time, if you think about it in terms of generations you see just how long that would take. One generation every twenty years - five every century, and it's going to take a lot more than five to achieve that level of change. Just ask any dog breeder.
Not so much any more. The electronics industry has gotten very good at minimising the need for those expensive minerals. Copper, certainly. But gold? Not really. The only gold you'll find in your Internet of tat is the microscopically thin wire connecting a chip die to the package. You don't get gold circuit boards any more, and you rarely even get gold-plated contacts. The minerals aren't worth the costs of separating them out.
It's not recidivism. It's a returning customer.
Trump did not get elected as a third party candidate. He got elected by somehow convincing one of the major parties that he should be their candidate. A combination of force of personality and a giant heap of money allowed him to bypass the usual years of climbing the political ladder and start at the top, but even he could not succeed without siding with one of the big two.
When I was in school (which would be circa 2000) I got in semi-serious trouble for messing around on the computers. I can't remember exactly what I had been doing, but it involved using a command prompt to launch notepad (a restricted application) so I could work on a website creation project without having to deal with the appalling WYSIWYG editor I was supposed to use. Something that scared a teaching assistant, who panicked and thought I was up to serious no-good. I was promptly hauled before the principle under accusations that I'd been 'hacking.'
There followed a long misunderstanding in which I was asked if I had been 'hacking the school network.' My attempts to dispute the meaning of the term hacking were interpreted as a confession of guilt. The more I tried to explain, the more serious the crimes the teachers concluded I was confessing to. I tried to explain with examples of personal projects I had come up with creative hack solutions to solve, but to the teachers who had only seen the word in news stories about cyber-criminals and terrorists all hacking was by definition illegal and every example only added to my rap sheet. I was banned from using the computers, expelled from the IT course, and suspended from school for a week.
Even across subcultures, simple misunderstandings of word definitions can have serious consequences.
The IT course sucked anyway. It was a joke at the time, a glorified secretarial course in how to use a word processor. There have been some attempted reforms in more recent years to put real computer science and engineering into the IT curriculum, but with only partial success.
It could be argued that GNU has outgrown the hobbyist era. GNU carries the weight of many billions of dollars each year of business activity and of safety-critical systems. There are hobbyists, but there are also professional programmers hired by businesses who need to improve the software they depend upon. The glory days of the hacker culture in which GNU originated have passed.
This is why I don't like the in potentia argument. Once you start granting rights to people who may hypothetically exist in future, you end up reaching some very strange conclusions which most people would find abhorent. By that logic any men here need to be getting out there right now and finding some women to impregnate - and if none are willing, just rape as many women as possible. Doing anything else means denying existence to future children, a crime on par with murder.
The question is not really over 'taking a life.' People kill all the time - for food, for medicine or for pest control. My whole household had to take antiparasitics last week because we adopted a rescue cat that was riddled with intestinal worms - does that count as murder? Not all life has equal ethical value, and some life has negligible value. A consistent framework for handling the issue of abortion needs to somehow evaluate this worth: What makes humans worth more than rats and worms, and does the fetus have it?
Unfortunately humans are superficial creatures, and easily swayed by simple physical features like a cute little baby face or a bizarre fixation on the heartbeat.
The majority of Americans - and here in the UK too - are moderates. They support restrictions on abortion, but also believe that it should be legal under some circumstances. This moderation has little political representation though. The passionate ones, the people who actually drive the political debate and write the laws, are the extremists. The pro-lifers who want to see abortion banned entirely even if this means women dying needlessly, and the pro-choicers who believe abortion must be legal in every case as a matter of principle.
The US legal situation only worsens the situation due to the fear of incrimentalism.
I'd respect the pro-life side a lot more if almost every one of their pressure groups were not also opposed to sex education and access to contraception. The best tools we have to minimise the need for elective abortion, yet shunned by the organised pro-life movement for 'promoting sin' or some such nonsense.