You can sue the government in many democracies. Not sure if Sweden is one of those places, but its certainly not something you can arbitrarily claim without looking into it. (Whether its useful to sue the government is another question of course..)
and giving the job to the more capable entity
Unfortunately neither organization has mastered preventing human error, so while you're not incorrect.. your statement is rather irrelevant to "someone f'd up," no matter how big an f they upped.
Win10 start menu works just fine for me, though you have to turn off Cortana (otherwise it spends huge amounts of time searching Bing when you just want to load a local app and stupid shit like that.) Hell, I've even learned to make use of the tiles (by clearing out all of the default junk and pinning the programs I use often, but not often enough to pin to my taskbar) and kind of miss them when I have to go back to a Win7 machine.
Control panel is still a mess. The article is right there. MS needs to either double down on converting it to the new "settings" style (meaning pulling in all those options that are currently unavailable) so that the control panel can be removed (or at least doesn't need frequent access).. or get rid of the new "settings" and just leave the control panel to do what its supposed to do. I definitely prefer the latter option since I'm not a fan of "appy" software on my desktop, but either is better than this arbitrary mix of crap forcing you to jump back and forth. Network settings are probably among the worst offenders here. Some options only available via control panel.. a couple only available via "settings," and then to actually connect to something you have to open up the connection page which is different yet again. 3 different sets of pages to do something relatively common like connecting a VPN that you could do in one place back in Win7.
The biggest issue though isn't a UI issue -- its the privacy issue. I'd be willing to bet a large portion of the Win7 hangers-on would have jumped to Win10 when it was free/practically forced if the privacy issues weren't such big news at the time (maybe not so many of them now even if MS did a 180 due to Win10 being already soured in their minds..)
Beyond those two things, I haven't really found too many "major design flaws." Everything pretty much works as I'd expect it to. There's a few things I think were better under Win7, but not to the extent that I'd call them "major" flaws. There's also a few things that it does way better than Win7.
Because the parents of teenagers like to forget (or occasionally remember too well) what it was like to be teenagers, and somehow manage to convince themselves that hormones will magically stop production if their precious children aren't told the "other" use for those bits between their legs. Roll it up into some infamously anti-sex religious fanaticism and you've got a ripe set of stupid laws just waiting to be written.
Really, all of it is kind of stupid. There are certain aspects to porn (online or not) that need to be dealt with. Porn addiction is a thing. Child abuse is a thing.
Misogyny and misrepresenting sex in porn is a thing.
But we tend to treat all of these somewhat delicate problems by bringing out the biggest sledgehammer we can find and trying to crush them out of existence, which either doesn't work or destroys things around it at the same time.. or more often than not, does both.
At the end of the day, teenagers are pervs. Its not their fault. Nature designed people to start reproducing in the 13-15 age range, give or take, and has steadfastly refused to give any craps about our social norms.
Perhaps if we maintain our current standard of living (or better) for another few thousand years, evolution will have a chance to compensate for our greatly extended lifespans and fertility that medical science has granted us.. but it won't be in our lifetimes, nor the lifetimes of the next several dozen to several hundred generations most likely.
Probably because you're (I'm assuming) an American for whom titties in a newspaper would be a national crisis.
I mean I'm sure UK folk like a good pair of titties as much as the rest of us, but equating a single weekly topless photo with internet porn is.. a little silly.
If anyone, it would be more the likes of Playboy or Hustler or other offline (actual) porn.. though of course the porn industry has long been at the head of the pack when it comes to adopting technology so they likely aren't interested in fighting a pointless battle either (if anything, they'd be fighting against it.. printing a magazine is way way way more expensive than sending a jpg to your browser.)
While I don't disagree with you, that link is entirely garbage. It spends 90% of the article talking about how coal also takes energy to be useful (no duh) and finally in the last paragraph or so it gets around to stating that solar does indeed generate more (lifetime) energy than is used to manufacture it.
Basically, they could have left out about 90% of the article and have something short and relevant instead of a huge irrelevant rant about coal that you have to skim over to get to the important part. Writing it in that manner just makes the article feel more zealotry-based than fact-based, and that's just not going to appeal much to skeptics.
Electricity is the motion of charge through a conductor.
I guess that's one way to define it. But that's not the same as the charge of the electron, which is intrinsic.
it is the electron, and not the proton, which is the charge carrier
They're both charge carriers. Equal and opposite charges, to be exact.
in materials baryons have enormously higher masses and are subject to the strong nuclear force
No, baryons have (relatively) the same mass regardless of whether they're in a material or not. The strong force energy is certainly responsible for generating much of that mass (via E=mc^2) but its also a very short-range force.
The strong force holds quarks together within a nucleon, and it also holds the nucleons together within the nucleus of atoms.. but outside of that the strength of the strong force is nearly irrelevant -- the electromagnetic force takes over at that scale and binds atoms together into molecules and crystals and other materials.
protons are not charge carriers
As noted before: Yes they are.
even less mobile than the already non-mobile protons
Mobility isn't really the issue. I mean sure you won't be able to use these to construct a wire where the electrons stay still and the proton(-substitutes) are moving but.. so what? Answering the "does it bind" question doesn't require a whole wire, never mind a wire where the + charges generate the current rather than the - charges. It only requires one nucleus and one electron to bind together into an atom (or fail to bind together in any manner that we consider theoretically plausible and we give up) which in turn "only" requires keeping the exotic particle around long enough and cool it enough for it to undergo recombination with the electron (or maybe two electrons, given its +2 charge.)
But they will represent a smaller and smaller proportion of the population due to population increase
That might be a problem since population is currently decreasing. That would be fine if you offset it with increased immigration, but we all know how the current administration feels about that..
First of all, the bank is not the government and while I'm sure the banks cooperate when the FBI asks for a card trace, I suspect there would be a stink made should the government start asking to use CC info for fishing expeditions in the same way that a stink was made when they asked for ISP metadata for that purpose.
Secondly, having an audit trail is helpful to you too. I know that kind of follows the "nothing to hide then nothing to fear" rhetoric but there's a significant difference: You never benefit from the government (or anyone else really) knowing your business (though sometimes you benefit from them knowing other peoples' business..,) whereas you can benefit from them being able to do things like track your CC purchases after the card gets stolen. If someone steals your cash well, the anonymity you're promoting works equally in the thief's favor.
Never mind modern conveniences like online purchases, recurring fees, etc which are either super annoying or just don't really work with cash (and even if it did, the tracking is already done at point of sale so having it doubly tracked on your CC audit isn't exactly a major detriment at that point.)
I don't know.. perhaps they see you buy something with cash? Or you're thumbing through your wallet for some reason.. or any number of other ways they might notice.
But the way you can look at it is not "having more cash makes it more likely to get robbed," but "if I get robbed, having more cash will mean a bigger loss." If someone steals your credit or debit (and I mean physically robbing you of course, as they would do for cash) you just call up your bank and cancel it. Even if the thief has managed to use it, those companies insure against theft (especially the CC companies) and you generally get refunded. And their usage of it also makes it easier for the police to track them down if you're privileged enough for the police to care about you.
Whereas if the robber takes a couple fresh hundred dollar bills, you will definitely never see that money again.
Remember, risk is not just probability of an event happening.. its probability of it happening multiplied by the incurred cost.
Actually if you read more than the first sentence, I was explicitly outlining that distinction.
But there are numbskulls on both sides.. On the NN favoring side are people who are only going to be happy with full neutrality, including type-based neutrality. And on the other side are people who use type-based neutrality as a scare tactic (all those evil pirates with their downloads will block your VOIP calls!)
So what you're saying is exactly my point: We need QoS and other type-based shaping, so we don't get 100% "net neutrality" by the strictest definition. Yet at the same time we don't really want other forms of shaping (such as source-based.)
Also, the current legislation isn't the problem. The current legislation is (mostly) working find, minus a few edge cases like zero rating that try to jump through some loopholes. The problem is that the current legislation is quite likely to be revoked under Pai and the republican administration, and we need to focus this discussion on whatever new rules they come up with (which, barring significant public backlash, will likely be along the lines of "incumbents can do whatever they want and everyone else has the 'freedom' to go offline if they don't like it.")
The president isn't publishing those tweets -- Twitter is.
Which of course confuses things greatly. Twitter is under no obligation to publish your remarks.. and yet the Twitter leaves the decision to publish to Trump, who is obligated to not suppress free speech by virtue of his being a government official.
That's before we even start discussing whether POTUS posting about policy on a private account is considered private or public information. I suspect if brought to it, SCOTUS would call it public.. but then again SCOTUS is Republican controlled as well now and may side with Trump purely for partisan reasons, which they're of course not supposed to do (they're supposed to be impartial) but of course they're people too..
Except presentation is super important, at least for promotional and PR purposes. Graphic design is a major industry specifically because you're wrong.
Sure if its just your coworker giving you a 2 sentence status update about some project or other they probably shouldn't be spending a bunch of time screwing around with fonts and colors and strong lines and whatever other graphic design BS that's way over my head.
But the front page for a company website? It damned well better look good and the easiest / best way to do that is if you can fully control the layout. That's why you see websites that are strictly formatted for 1024 pixels width for example -- the designer decided that restricting the size to the largest "common" screen width they felt they could get away with rather than letting the browser fuck up their layout (you could rightfully argue that there are better ways to write webpages that still give you sufficient control over the layout, but they're much more complex and not everybody knows how to do that or has time/motivation to educate themselves in the latest tech when what they already know mostly does the job.)
Basically, appearances matter, and fonts are part of appearance.
I don't know what you're talking about. Most countries are fighting this same battle. The difference is that most countries (at least most developed countries) lean more toward protecting peoples' rights rather than corporate profits, a strong difference from the US mentality, so quite often NN rules just got implemented right away with little obstruction. It has little or nothing to do with competition in most countries. Just those damned socialist governments protecting peoples' rights like the commies they are.
I haven't read through it all, but Wikipedia has a fairly extensive list of countries and the state of their net neutrality fights. I mean its Wikipedia and who knows how current those entries are (I see some with 2011 dates.. which may mean its been sitting since then or it may mean the wiki just hasn't been updated.) But at the very least, it should give you a place to start further research if you really care about the state of NN around the world.
Hulu and Netflix should be given the same priority as say, Dailymotion. Why should DM (and the people who use it) get screwed just because its not the most popular streaming site on the planet?
But Hulu and Netflix (and DM) all should also be given priority over say, bittorrent. This is called traffic shaping (or sometimes QoS) and most people want this to happen even though, by strictest definition, its not "neutral."
Of course there's absolutely no reason why a law couldn't be written to effectively say "protocol-based traffic shaping is fine but provider-based or user-based prioritization is not fine." Just because "net neutrality" is a catchy phrase doesn't mean we have to accept it as an strictest-sense-all-or-nothing rule. We're can aim for a middle-ground point that allows for necessary shaping practices without also allowing significant abusive practices.
Except that's laughable too. A dedicated network or leased lines are fine if you're in one single spot and need to talk to one other single spot, but if you're say a specialist in the UK and trying to do telesurgery around the world, running dedicated lines going to be unfathomably expensive.
The big issue everyone likes to overlook (usually intentionally to muddy the waters and confuse things) is that "network neutrality" has a few different levels. First, there's the absolutely 100% pure neutral networks. This is the raw definition that zealots espouse because they're idiots and don't want to look past their ideals. Under this definition, bittorrent traffic, email spam and other high-capacity but low-value packets are going to end up flooding the entire network. Nobody really wants that.
Then there's packet shaping. This is saying "VOIP packets are more important that bittorrent packets" and similar. This is what most internet users and websites and the such actually want when they say network neutrality. Each person may have a different idea of how the shaping should be done, but almost everybody wants it in one form or another.
But then there's the what AT&T and others want: They want to be able to say "My VOIP packets are more important than your VOIP packets." And of course their definition of important isn't based on the value of the packets, its based on the dollar amount of the contract they've made with each VOIP provider. That is, they want the ability to charge/extort VOIP providers in order to provide better service, above and beyond whatever they're already paying for basic connectivity.
And to make it even worse, as if it needed to be, they can (and want to) do this kind of prioritization against VOIP providers they don't have any other business arrangements with. So if I'm a VOIP provider who purchases my internet access through Verizon, and you're a user of my service but your internet access is through AT&T.. AT&T can still de-prioritize me unless I also pay them off in addition to paying for my Verizon service. So now to be a VOIP provider, not only do I have to buy large bandwidth from my local ISP, I also have to effectively pay "prioritization" fees to literally every single other provider in the country.
(and obviously all of my arguments apply to any protocol.. VOIP vs bittorrent is just a common illustrative dichotomy since most people at least recognize the names of both protocols and understand their relative importance in the world.)
The Enron trick (at least how you've laid it out.. I'm sure it was more complicated in practice) doesn't work because revenues is a useless concept beyond marketing BS. If I tell you I have a billion dollars in revenues you might think that I'm doing great. Until I tell you that I also have 1.2 billion dollars debt. Then I suddenly don't look quite as fantastic.
That's the problem with the Enron trick.. that false revenue would have had an equal debit on some other ledger (assuming they at least did proper double-entry accounting and didn't fudge the numbers on a basic mathematical level.) So it only looks good if you only look at half the story. Which of course is what they did -- all the real numbers are kept secret and the public only gets to see the ones that look good. Until the shit hits the fan because all of the optimistic press releases in the world don't change the fact that the other half of the story actually exists somewhere, biding its time.
Actually you don't need profits. A business can operate for years or decades on zero profits (and we have an entire class of business -- non-profits -- which intentionally do exactly that.)
You just can't have negative profits (ie: losing money.) Breaking even is fine.
if all else failed you'd be Too Big to Fail and get a government bail out
That one's not really true. "Too big to fail" only gets applied when the government suspects that your collapse would have serious and widespread economic impact. A venture capital investment, no matter how big, its pretty unlikely to have that sort of impact and thus wouldn't get covered.
Car companies keep getting them because, even with all of the bitching about manufacturing being moved to Mexico, they still employ tens of thousands of American workers across the country. If GM shut down that would be an enormous number of people suddenly without work and becoming a strain on society themselves.
If the banks shut down, suddenly there's massive economic collapse. And with the position of the US in the world stage, its not even limited to that country. There are literally banks (not just in the US) that are big enough that failure could potentially trigger an even greater worldwide depression than the 30s. I mean we already saw some of that in 2008. Without the bailouts it would have continued to get worse instead of being curtailed.
Now a lot of that is our own damned fault to be sure. We allow the banks to get that big. We allow them to make bogus loans and we allow them to hide the risk of those loans through obscure trading artifacts. But regardless of the reasons, when the bubble finally bursts its generally better for everybody to be subsidizing the rich assholes rather than letting the entire country (or even the world) fall into chaos, no matter how much it stings.
This is why socialists exist
No it isn't. It might be why you're a socialist yourself, but the concept of socialism covers far more than simply rich people being rich.
We're realists
From what I've seen, most hardcore socialists are just as delusional if not more so than hardcore capitalists. As with most things in life, a balance between the two extremes is generally the optimal solution.
Rich people can be as rich as they want, but you don't really have to be a hardcore socialist to think that non-rich people should be able to obtain at least the basic essentials -- food, clothing, housing, medical attention. Unfortunately we live in a world mostly run by the rich and the rich are generally heavy on the capitalist side of the coin.. so when they see increasing poverty rates they think "those people should do something!" rather than "we should do something to help those people!", completely ignoring (or even not comprehending) the fact that there is often literally nothing those people can do on their own. Because they've never been in a situation where they didn't have at least one option when things go sour.
Depends on your definition of "wealth creation" I guess. Sure you can get 8-10% on some relatively safe tracking funds, but that's not exactly going to bring you into the realm of the elite if you weren't already there.
You used to be able to get filthy rich by playing the market to be sure.. but that's not really plausible anymore. I mean it was always difficult since you were essentially betting against people who traded stocks for a living.. but with some dedication and some luck you could do so. The whole day trading industry was grew up around this when suddenly everybody could potentially run their own stocks rather than having to call their broker and wait for him to get around to making the trade (by which point the price may have shifted unfavorably.)
But you don't hear about day traders too much anymore.. and there's a reason for that. High frequency trading (HFT.) These systems have essentially destroyed the stock market as a method to make big money. Because if there's big money to be made, they've already made it within microseconds or even nanoseconds and you're stuck behind your slow human thought processes (not to mention your internet connection.)
Basically its the same issue as calling your broker, but instead of the market shifting unfavorably.. its potentially completely different by the time you've spent a few minutes considering your data.
Now you could (and people have) written essentially their own HFT software.. but without the direct fiber to the market computers that the "real" HFT companies have, you're stuck in the realm of milliseconds while they're operating in microseconds or less. Certainly you can do a lot better than if you were trying to trade manually but its still a significant disadvantage. And that's if your software is good -- the HFT companies of course have a large investment in development and tweaking of their systems to ensure optimal trading patterns. And even if you're a really good programmer, you still aren't a dozen or more really good programmers with dedicated analysts backing them up.
So yes, if you play it safe the market can still create wealth for you. But calling it the "greatest" at this point is probably a bit more questionable than it would have been even 20 years ago. Its just not possible to win against those HFTs short of an absurd stroke of luck (like say deciding to buy Apple stock just by pure coincidence right before the iPhone was announced.)
Americans shipped American industry jobs overseas in part because there was low or no tariffs on imports, and the labor overseas is super cheap.
If GM saves themselves $5,000 per car in labor and whatnot by building it in Mexico, and there's no import fees.. then why wouldn't they move to Mexico? If on the other hand the US Govt charged a $8,000 import fee for Mexican-based cars well.. now GM isn't going to be so happy to move. Even if the US Govt only charged a $4000 import fee (still saving GM $1000 per car,) they have to then compare the expected long-term savings against the immediate cost of having to build the factories and re-hire, re-train or re-locate employees.
Now to that first approximation, Trump's "omg lets stop all imports!" logic actually makes a good amount of sense. Unfortunately there's other issues at stake here. Yes, Detroit gets screwed when GM closes a plant and relocates it to Mexico in order to save $5000 per car. But at the same time, everyone who doesn't live in Detroit is probably going to see at least a $4000 drop in price when they go to buy their next car, since a good portion of GM's savings will indeed get passed on to the consumer in order to undercut Ford or whoever (or compete with them, if Ford had moved first.)
Think of how many people in the US today would be screwed if we imposed massive tariffs on Chinese imports and those people couldn't buy cheap shit from Walmart anymore. Its easy to say that you should be buying quality American items in the first place.. when you're living comfortably in the middle class or higher.
But when you have a monthly budget of say $300 for food, clothes and other living expenses.. it becomes a hell of a lot easier to justify buying a $15 pair of crap jeans made by 12 year olds in Bangladesh rather than the $60 equivalent made in the USA, even if you're fully aware that they're crap and won't last as long and whatnot.
Basically, if Trump chooses the import tariffs as the one thing he'll actually manage to succeed at.. be prepared for a significantly increased cost of living and an equally increased poverty rate. These things are somewhat self-correcting in the long term but that's a lot of suffering in the meantime (factories don't get built and restarted overnight!) and even after the self-corrections the US would be comparably further behind other countries.
International trade because its a net benefit to all parties (ignoring things like arms trading in dictatorships which doesn't really follow economic principles so much as asshole principles.) And like the "return to coal" crap Trump's always spouting, his lack of deeper understanding may indeed benefit a few thousand local workers but it will be at the expense of everybody else in the country.
This aspect really bothers me. I'd love to be able to play WoW or Minecraft or any number of other 3D games in VR but I don't really have any interest in getting off my fat ass and flailing around my small room until I break something.
But it seems like most if not all the VR people -- hardware and game devs alike -- have decided that "VR" has to include motion sensors and hand trackers and this and that and the other bloody gimmick that all drive up the already-high cost without really adding much to the experience once the initial novelty wears off. And oh yeah, the novelty of "wow it knows when I move!" already mostly wore off during the Wiimote era.
Not that I've checked out a whole lot of VR games (given that I haven't been able to justify the price tag myself yet) so maybe there's a few hidden gems I don't know about.. but that "hidden" part would still leave my point standing with regards to the majority of potential VR adopters.
I guess Microsoft has kind of toyed around with VR in Minecraft but they've been rather coy with it (and their VR research in general for that matter) so who knows if or when they'll ever release that to a mainstream audience. (And yes I know there's a third party MCVR mod out there, but its kind of getting back into the "hidden" end of things since its just a mod and relatively obscure.)
Slashdot Mirror
You can sue the government in many democracies. Not sure if Sweden is one of those places, but its certainly not something you can arbitrarily claim without looking into it. (Whether its useful to sue the government is another question of course..)
and giving the job to the more capable entity
Unfortunately neither organization has mastered preventing human error, so while you're not incorrect.. your statement is rather irrelevant to "someone f'd up," no matter how big an f they upped.
Sure, in the same way that you'd still eat an apple that's 90% rotten..
Win10 start menu works just fine for me, though you have to turn off Cortana (otherwise it spends huge amounts of time searching Bing when you just want to load a local app and stupid shit like that.) Hell, I've even learned to make use of the tiles (by clearing out all of the default junk and pinning the programs I use often, but not often enough to pin to my taskbar) and kind of miss them when I have to go back to a Win7 machine.
Control panel is still a mess. The article is right there. MS needs to either double down on converting it to the new "settings" style (meaning pulling in all those options that are currently unavailable) so that the control panel can be removed (or at least doesn't need frequent access).. or get rid of the new "settings" and just leave the control panel to do what its supposed to do. I definitely prefer the latter option since I'm not a fan of "appy" software on my desktop, but either is better than this arbitrary mix of crap forcing you to jump back and forth. Network settings are probably among the worst offenders here. Some options only available via control panel.. a couple only available via "settings," and then to actually connect to something you have to open up the connection page which is different yet again. 3 different sets of pages to do something relatively common like connecting a VPN that you could do in one place back in Win7.
The biggest issue though isn't a UI issue -- its the privacy issue. I'd be willing to bet a large portion of the Win7 hangers-on would have jumped to Win10 when it was free/practically forced if the privacy issues weren't such big news at the time (maybe not so many of them now even if MS did a 180 due to Win10 being already soured in their minds..)
Beyond those two things, I haven't really found too many "major design flaws." Everything pretty much works as I'd expect it to. There's a few things I think were better under Win7, but not to the extent that I'd call them "major" flaws. There's also a few things that it does way better than Win7.
Slashdot screwing up my formatting and me not using preview is also a thing. Dammit.
Because the parents of teenagers like to forget (or occasionally remember too well) what it was like to be teenagers, and somehow manage to convince themselves that hormones will magically stop production if their precious children aren't told the "other" use for those bits between their legs. Roll it up into some infamously anti-sex religious fanaticism and you've got a ripe set of stupid laws just waiting to be written.
Really, all of it is kind of stupid. There are certain aspects to porn (online or not) that need to be dealt with. Porn addiction is a thing. Child abuse is a thing.
Misogyny and misrepresenting sex in porn is a thing.
But we tend to treat all of these somewhat delicate problems by bringing out the biggest sledgehammer we can find and trying to crush them out of existence, which either doesn't work or destroys things around it at the same time.. or more often than not, does both.
At the end of the day, teenagers are pervs. Its not their fault. Nature designed people to start reproducing in the 13-15 age range, give or take, and has steadfastly refused to give any craps about our social norms.
Perhaps if we maintain our current standard of living (or better) for another few thousand years, evolution will have a chance to compensate for our greatly extended lifespans and fertility that medical science has granted us.. but it won't be in our lifetimes, nor the lifetimes of the next several dozen to several hundred generations most likely.
Probably because you're (I'm assuming) an American for whom titties in a newspaper would be a national crisis.
I mean I'm sure UK folk like a good pair of titties as much as the rest of us, but equating a single weekly topless photo with internet porn is.. a little silly.
If anyone, it would be more the likes of Playboy or Hustler or other offline (actual) porn.. though of course the porn industry has long been at the head of the pack when it comes to adopting technology so they likely aren't interested in fighting a pointless battle either (if anything, they'd be fighting against it.. printing a magazine is way way way more expensive than sending a jpg to your browser.)
While I don't disagree with you, that link is entirely garbage. It spends 90% of the article talking about how coal also takes energy to be useful (no duh) and finally in the last paragraph or so it gets around to stating that solar does indeed generate more (lifetime) energy than is used to manufacture it.
Basically, they could have left out about 90% of the article and have something short and relevant instead of a huge irrelevant rant about coal that you have to skim over to get to the important part. Writing it in that manner just makes the article feel more zealotry-based than fact-based, and that's just not going to appeal much to skeptics.
So that's the real reason for SpaceX?
OK so this is old but just.. wow..
Electricity is the motion of charge through a conductor.
I guess that's one way to define it. But that's not the same as the charge of the electron, which is intrinsic.
it is the electron, and not the proton, which is the charge carrier
They're both charge carriers. Equal and opposite charges, to be exact.
in materials baryons have enormously higher masses and are subject to the strong nuclear force
No, baryons have (relatively) the same mass regardless of whether they're in a material or not. The strong force energy is certainly responsible for generating much of that mass (via E=mc^2) but its also a very short-range force.
The strong force holds quarks together within a nucleon, and it also holds the nucleons together within the nucleus of atoms.. but outside of that the strength of the strong force is nearly irrelevant -- the electromagnetic force takes over at that scale and binds atoms together into molecules and crystals and other materials.
protons are not charge carriers
As noted before: Yes they are.
even less mobile than the already non-mobile protons
Mobility isn't really the issue. I mean sure you won't be able to use these to construct a wire where the electrons stay still and the proton(-substitutes) are moving but.. so what? Answering the "does it bind" question doesn't require a whole wire, never mind a wire where the + charges generate the current rather than the - charges. It only requires one nucleus and one electron to bind together into an atom (or fail to bind together in any manner that we consider theoretically plausible and we give up) which in turn "only" requires keeping the exotic particle around long enough and cool it enough for it to undergo recombination with the electron (or maybe two electrons, given its +2 charge.)
But they will represent a smaller and smaller proportion of the population due to population increase
That might be a problem since population is currently decreasing. That would be fine if you offset it with increased immigration, but we all know how the current administration feels about that..
First of all, the bank is not the government and while I'm sure the banks cooperate when the FBI asks for a card trace, I suspect there would be a stink made should the government start asking to use CC info for fishing expeditions in the same way that a stink was made when they asked for ISP metadata for that purpose.
Secondly, having an audit trail is helpful to you too. I know that kind of follows the "nothing to hide then nothing to fear" rhetoric but there's a significant difference: You never benefit from the government (or anyone else really) knowing your business (though sometimes you benefit from them knowing other peoples' business..,) whereas you can benefit from them being able to do things like track your CC purchases after the card gets stolen. If someone steals your cash well, the anonymity you're promoting works equally in the thief's favor.
Never mind modern conveniences like online purchases, recurring fees, etc which are either super annoying or just don't really work with cash (and even if it did, the tracking is already done at point of sale so having it doubly tracked on your CC audit isn't exactly a major detriment at that point.)
I don't know.. perhaps they see you buy something with cash? Or you're thumbing through your wallet for some reason.. or any number of other ways they might notice.
But the way you can look at it is not "having more cash makes it more likely to get robbed," but "if I get robbed, having more cash will mean a bigger loss." If someone steals your credit or debit (and I mean physically robbing you of course, as they would do for cash) you just call up your bank and cancel it. Even if the thief has managed to use it, those companies insure against theft (especially the CC companies) and you generally get refunded. And their usage of it also makes it easier for the police to track them down if you're privileged enough for the police to care about you.
Whereas if the robber takes a couple fresh hundred dollar bills, you will definitely never see that money again.
Remember, risk is not just probability of an event happening.. its probability of it happening multiplied by the incurred cost.
Actually if you read more than the first sentence, I was explicitly outlining that distinction.
But there are numbskulls on both sides.. On the NN favoring side are people who are only going to be happy with full neutrality, including type-based neutrality. And on the other side are people who use type-based neutrality as a scare tactic (all those evil pirates with their downloads will block your VOIP calls!)
So what you're saying is exactly my point: We need QoS and other type-based shaping, so we don't get 100% "net neutrality" by the strictest definition. Yet at the same time we don't really want other forms of shaping (such as source-based.)
Also, the current legislation isn't the problem. The current legislation is (mostly) working find, minus a few edge cases like zero rating that try to jump through some loopholes. The problem is that the current legislation is quite likely to be revoked under Pai and the republican administration, and we need to focus this discussion on whatever new rules they come up with (which, barring significant public backlash, will likely be along the lines of "incumbents can do whatever they want and everyone else has the 'freedom' to go offline if they don't like it.")
The president isn't publishing those tweets -- Twitter is.
Which of course confuses things greatly. Twitter is under no obligation to publish your remarks.. and yet the Twitter leaves the decision to publish to Trump, who is obligated to not suppress free speech by virtue of his being a government official.
That's before we even start discussing whether POTUS posting about policy on a private account is considered private or public information. I suspect if brought to it, SCOTUS would call it public.. but then again SCOTUS is Republican controlled as well now and may side with Trump purely for partisan reasons, which they're of course not supposed to do (they're supposed to be impartial) but of course they're people too..
Except presentation is super important, at least for promotional and PR purposes. Graphic design is a major industry specifically because you're wrong.
Sure if its just your coworker giving you a 2 sentence status update about some project or other they probably shouldn't be spending a bunch of time screwing around with fonts and colors and strong lines and whatever other graphic design BS that's way over my head.
But the front page for a company website? It damned well better look good and the easiest / best way to do that is if you can fully control the layout. That's why you see websites that are strictly formatted for 1024 pixels width for example -- the designer decided that restricting the size to the largest "common" screen width they felt they could get away with rather than letting the browser fuck up their layout (you could rightfully argue that there are better ways to write webpages that still give you sufficient control over the layout, but they're much more complex and not everybody knows how to do that or has time/motivation to educate themselves in the latest tech when what they already know mostly does the job.)
Basically, appearances matter, and fonts are part of appearance.
I don't know what you're talking about. Most countries are fighting this same battle. The difference is that most countries (at least most developed countries) lean more toward protecting peoples' rights rather than corporate profits, a strong difference from the US mentality, so quite often NN rules just got implemented right away with little obstruction. It has little or nothing to do with competition in most countries. Just those damned socialist governments protecting peoples' rights like the commies they are.
I haven't read through it all, but Wikipedia has a fairly extensive list of countries and the state of their net neutrality fights. I mean its Wikipedia and who knows how current those entries are (I see some with 2011 dates.. which may mean its been sitting since then or it may mean the wiki just hasn't been updated.) But at the very least, it should give you a place to start further research if you really care about the state of NN around the world.
Hulu and Netflix should be given the same priority as say, Dailymotion. Why should DM (and the people who use it) get screwed just because its not the most popular streaming site on the planet?
But Hulu and Netflix (and DM) all should also be given priority over say, bittorrent. This is called traffic shaping (or sometimes QoS) and most people want this to happen even though, by strictest definition, its not "neutral."
Of course there's absolutely no reason why a law couldn't be written to effectively say "protocol-based traffic shaping is fine but provider-based or user-based prioritization is not fine." Just because "net neutrality" is a catchy phrase doesn't mean we have to accept it as an strictest-sense-all-or-nothing rule. We're can aim for a middle-ground point that allows for necessary shaping practices without also allowing significant abusive practices.
Except that's laughable too. A dedicated network or leased lines are fine if you're in one single spot and need to talk to one other single spot, but if you're say a specialist in the UK and trying to do telesurgery around the world, running dedicated lines going to be unfathomably expensive.
The big issue everyone likes to overlook (usually intentionally to muddy the waters and confuse things) is that "network neutrality" has a few different levels. First, there's the absolutely 100% pure neutral networks. This is the raw definition that zealots espouse because they're idiots and don't want to look past their ideals. Under this definition, bittorrent traffic, email spam and other high-capacity but low-value packets are going to end up flooding the entire network. Nobody really wants that.
Then there's packet shaping. This is saying "VOIP packets are more important that bittorrent packets" and similar. This is what most internet users and websites and the such actually want when they say network neutrality. Each person may have a different idea of how the shaping should be done, but almost everybody wants it in one form or another.
But then there's the what AT&T and others want: They want to be able to say "My VOIP packets are more important than your VOIP packets." And of course their definition of important isn't based on the value of the packets, its based on the dollar amount of the contract they've made with each VOIP provider. That is, they want the ability to charge/extort VOIP providers in order to provide better service, above and beyond whatever they're already paying for basic connectivity.
And to make it even worse, as if it needed to be, they can (and want to) do this kind of prioritization against VOIP providers they don't have any other business arrangements with. So if I'm a VOIP provider who purchases my internet access through Verizon, and you're a user of my service but your internet access is through AT&T.. AT&T can still de-prioritize me unless I also pay them off in addition to paying for my Verizon service. So now to be a VOIP provider, not only do I have to buy large bandwidth from my local ISP, I also have to effectively pay "prioritization" fees to literally every single other provider in the country.
(and obviously all of my arguments apply to any protocol.. VOIP vs bittorrent is just a common illustrative dichotomy since most people at least recognize the names of both protocols and understand their relative importance in the world.)
The Enron trick (at least how you've laid it out.. I'm sure it was more complicated in practice) doesn't work because revenues is a useless concept beyond marketing BS. If I tell you I have a billion dollars in revenues you might think that I'm doing great. Until I tell you that I also have 1.2 billion dollars debt. Then I suddenly don't look quite as fantastic.
That's the problem with the Enron trick.. that false revenue would have had an equal debit on some other ledger (assuming they at least did proper double-entry accounting and didn't fudge the numbers on a basic mathematical level.) So it only looks good if you only look at half the story. Which of course is what they did -- all the real numbers are kept secret and the public only gets to see the ones that look good. Until the shit hits the fan because all of the optimistic press releases in the world don't change the fact that the other half of the story actually exists somewhere, biding its time.
Actually you don't need profits. A business can operate for years or decades on zero profits (and we have an entire class of business -- non-profits -- which intentionally do exactly that.)
You just can't have negative profits (ie: losing money.) Breaking even is fine.
if all else failed you'd be Too Big to Fail and get a government bail out
That one's not really true. "Too big to fail" only gets applied when the government suspects that your collapse would have serious and widespread economic impact. A venture capital investment, no matter how big, its pretty unlikely to have that sort of impact and thus wouldn't get covered.
Car companies keep getting them because, even with all of the bitching about manufacturing being moved to Mexico, they still employ tens of thousands of American workers across the country. If GM shut down that would be an enormous number of people suddenly without work and becoming a strain on society themselves.
If the banks shut down, suddenly there's massive economic collapse. And with the position of the US in the world stage, its not even limited to that country. There are literally banks (not just in the US) that are big enough that failure could potentially trigger an even greater worldwide depression than the 30s. I mean we already saw some of that in 2008. Without the bailouts it would have continued to get worse instead of being curtailed.
Now a lot of that is our own damned fault to be sure. We allow the banks to get that big. We allow them to make bogus loans and we allow them to hide the risk of those loans through obscure trading artifacts. But regardless of the reasons, when the bubble finally bursts its generally better for everybody to be subsidizing the rich assholes rather than letting the entire country (or even the world) fall into chaos, no matter how much it stings.
This is why socialists exist
No it isn't. It might be why you're a socialist yourself, but the concept of socialism covers far more than simply rich people being rich.
We're realists
From what I've seen, most hardcore socialists are just as delusional if not more so than hardcore capitalists. As with most things in life, a balance between the two extremes is generally the optimal solution.
Rich people can be as rich as they want, but you don't really have to be a hardcore socialist to think that non-rich people should be able to obtain at least the basic essentials -- food, clothing, housing, medical attention. Unfortunately we live in a world mostly run by the rich and the rich are generally heavy on the capitalist side of the coin.. so when they see increasing poverty rates they think "those people should do something!" rather than "we should do something to help those people!", completely ignoring (or even not comprehending) the fact that there is often literally nothing those people can do on their own. Because they've never been in a situation where they didn't have at least one option when things go sour.
Depends on your definition of "wealth creation" I guess. Sure you can get 8-10% on some relatively safe tracking funds, but that's not exactly going to bring you into the realm of the elite if you weren't already there.
You used to be able to get filthy rich by playing the market to be sure.. but that's not really plausible anymore. I mean it was always difficult since you were essentially betting against people who traded stocks for a living.. but with some dedication and some luck you could do so. The whole day trading industry was grew up around this when suddenly everybody could potentially run their own stocks rather than having to call their broker and wait for him to get around to making the trade (by which point the price may have shifted unfavorably.)
But you don't hear about day traders too much anymore.. and there's a reason for that. High frequency trading (HFT.) These systems have essentially destroyed the stock market as a method to make big money. Because if there's big money to be made, they've already made it within microseconds or even nanoseconds and you're stuck behind your slow human thought processes (not to mention your internet connection.)
Basically its the same issue as calling your broker, but instead of the market shifting unfavorably.. its potentially completely different by the time you've spent a few minutes considering your data.
Now you could (and people have) written essentially their own HFT software.. but without the direct fiber to the market computers that the "real" HFT companies have, you're stuck in the realm of milliseconds while they're operating in microseconds or less. Certainly you can do a lot better than if you were trying to trade manually but its still a significant disadvantage. And that's if your software is good -- the HFT companies of course have a large investment in development and tweaking of their systems to ensure optimal trading patterns. And even if you're a really good programmer, you still aren't a dozen or more really good programmers with dedicated analysts backing them up.
So yes, if you play it safe the market can still create wealth for you. But calling it the "greatest" at this point is probably a bit more questionable than it would have been even 20 years ago. Its just not possible to win against those HFTs short of an absurd stroke of luck (like say deciding to buy Apple stock just by pure coincidence right before the iPhone was announced.)
Ugh. I really should proofread.
International trade because
.. International trade exists because
Apologies, grammar Nazis!
Americans shipped American industry jobs overseas in part because there was low or no tariffs on imports, and the labor overseas is super cheap.
If GM saves themselves $5,000 per car in labor and whatnot by building it in Mexico, and there's no import fees.. then why wouldn't they move to Mexico? If on the other hand the US Govt charged a $8,000 import fee for Mexican-based cars well.. now GM isn't going to be so happy to move. Even if the US Govt only charged a $4000 import fee (still saving GM $1000 per car,) they have to then compare the expected long-term savings against the immediate cost of having to build the factories and re-hire, re-train or re-locate employees.
Now to that first approximation, Trump's "omg lets stop all imports!" logic actually makes a good amount of sense. Unfortunately there's other issues at stake here. Yes, Detroit gets screwed when GM closes a plant and relocates it to Mexico in order to save $5000 per car. But at the same time, everyone who doesn't live in Detroit is probably going to see at least a $4000 drop in price when they go to buy their next car, since a good portion of GM's savings will indeed get passed on to the consumer in order to undercut Ford or whoever (or compete with them, if Ford had moved first.)
Think of how many people in the US today would be screwed if we imposed massive tariffs on Chinese imports and those people couldn't buy cheap shit from Walmart anymore. Its easy to say that you should be buying quality American items in the first place.. when you're living comfortably in the middle class or higher.
But when you have a monthly budget of say $300 for food, clothes and other living expenses.. it becomes a hell of a lot easier to justify buying a $15 pair of crap jeans made by 12 year olds in Bangladesh rather than the $60 equivalent made in the USA, even if you're fully aware that they're crap and won't last as long and whatnot.
Basically, if Trump chooses the import tariffs as the one thing he'll actually manage to succeed at.. be prepared for a significantly increased cost of living and an equally increased poverty rate. These things are somewhat self-correcting in the long term but that's a lot of suffering in the meantime (factories don't get built and restarted overnight!) and even after the self-corrections the US would be comparably further behind other countries.
International trade because its a net benefit to all parties (ignoring things like arms trading in dictatorships which doesn't really follow economic principles so much as asshole principles.) And like the "return to coal" crap Trump's always spouting, his lack of deeper understanding may indeed benefit a few thousand local workers but it will be at the expense of everybody else in the country.
This aspect really bothers me. I'd love to be able to play WoW or Minecraft or any number of other 3D games in VR but I don't really have any interest in getting off my fat ass and flailing around my small room until I break something.
But it seems like most if not all the VR people -- hardware and game devs alike -- have decided that "VR" has to include motion sensors and hand trackers and this and that and the other bloody gimmick that all drive up the already-high cost without really adding much to the experience once the initial novelty wears off. And oh yeah, the novelty of "wow it knows when I move!" already mostly wore off during the Wiimote era.
Not that I've checked out a whole lot of VR games (given that I haven't been able to justify the price tag myself yet) so maybe there's a few hidden gems I don't know about.. but that "hidden" part would still leave my point standing with regards to the majority of potential VR adopters.
I guess Microsoft has kind of toyed around with VR in Minecraft but they've been rather coy with it (and their VR research in general for that matter) so who knows if or when they'll ever release that to a mainstream audience. (And yes I know there's a third party MCVR mod out there, but its kind of getting back into the "hidden" end of things since its just a mod and relatively obscure.)