Most of academic economists are non-partisan. Or if they are, they normally have pretty solid theory and numbers to back their claims. The economists who do give the study of economics a bad reputation are those who actually make very opinionated and authoritative statements and reports, but hardly publish anything in a peer reviewed academic journal, where such antics wouldn't pass. Unfortunately, there are a few well known economists who had built a solid reputation in the research circles years ago, and then moved on past producing publishable academic research into the realm of partisanship. Any economist knows who they are. There are some well known liberals and conservatives among those.
The solution is pretty simple. Every author must reveal the codes that were used to produce the results.
However, one interesting issue is that once every author reveals the codes, you could find out that half of them code in MATLAB with a proficiency comparable to a 3rd grader who just learned BASIC programming up to about the "goto" statement. Not only there is lots of spaghetti code, but it may also contain serious errors that may filter through into the papers. Hence, I suspect a lot of people will not be happy to reveal their codes.
"..russians sure do treat their slavic brothers like shit"
Highly inaccurate statement. For one, the excuse for the annexation of Crimea was to protect the majority Russian population against the hegemony of the nationalist Ukrainian government. Likewise, there is a big campaign in support of East Ukraine rebels specifically because they fight for the cause of protecting ethnic Russians and their rights. Russians have always supported and still support Serbians in whatever ethnic and territorial disputes they still have in the Balkans.
A more correct statement is that being a slav does not mean you're an enemy or foe to another slav. Russia and Poland have always been adversarial. Russia and Ukraine, I'd say somewhere in between. The west Ukrainian nationalists, the part of Ukraine that used to be Poland before WWII, are very anti-Russian, the central Ukraine and south Ukraine population is more or less neutral to Russia, and the east Ukraine is very pro Russian. I'd say, it's all about the geopolitical influence of Poland and Russia, than anything else.
I don't think it's wise to try to visit Phobos because the aliens have already disabled two Soviet probes en route to it. Can't we stick with less dangerous space exploration missions?
Don't forget the scandalous one and a half trillion dollar F-35 program. It's just shocking. One BAD light fighter-bomber jet ends up costing almost like the entire Pentagon budget for three years. If this is not the proof that Pentagon exists these days to enrich the shareholders of the military-industrial complex, rather than protect our country, I don't know what what else could be..
I disagree. I recall hearing that an UltraHD stream of decent quality requires 20-50Mbps. Netflix is already offering a pilot UltraHD service, but the specifically require that you have 100Mbps connection.
So I personally think, one way or another the geekdom and nerddom will move onto 100Mbps broadband eventually. At the same time, I fail to see a genuine "must have" application for the gigabit broadband in most homes.
It's indeed very interesting, specially to compare USA and Russia. People argued that relatively poor average adoption of broadband has to do with the fact that USA is a huge country with most population centers in the coastal areas, while the middle states are rural with low population density and very high population dispersion. Well, guess what, Russia is in the same boat, only worse. Only 110 million Russians are living in the European Russia, resulting in population density below 30 people per sq km, which is already lower than USA average or European. And once you count the Asian part of Russia, the population density is below 10 per square km.
You need somewhere between 20-50Mbps of dedicated bandwidth for a smooth decent quality compressed stream. Netflix requires UltraHD streamers to have 100Mbps broadband.
Depends on the size of household. At my place in the late afternoon, there may be three video streams be running into different rooms, and I guess that's ok even with 12Mbps, but 30Mbps is better specially considering you need something closer to 10Mbps for a single decent quality 1080p stream.
I guess if you have lots of patience, 3Mbps is fine. However, I don't have patience when a 10GB file is downloading with that sort of speed. I think the 20-22Mbps I am getting is a more of a sweet spot. I can stream an HD video from netflix, and somebody else can run a network video game or torrent without us slowing down each other.
We don't need to stream BD quality. Netflix has this sample video that lets you see the quality and the bitrate. I believe when they reach 1080p, the bitrate is somewhere in the neighborhood of 8000bps.
However, I agree with you that 10Mbit is no longer enough. While my household has three TVs, streaming video from uverse and netflix is also popular, and two streams can easily clash. As I mentioned in that example, you effectively need 10Mbps for a single 1080p stream. But besides the stream, people my my household are also frequently playing online games, use torrent and skype. We get by with 20-22Mbps uverse connection pretty well though.
I hope there will be a switch to turn off this feature permanently. I for one enjoy the process of driving a car myself and being in control. I don't need nannies telling me how to maintain speed, stay in lane or when to brake.
I don't think anybody in the AF believes that F-35 seriously replaces the A-10. It was just an excuse to get rid of A-10. The Air Force simply wants out of CAS business, hoping that the Army helicopters and precision strike from fighter-bomber jets will be good enough.
Even though AF's main job for the last 20 years was about trucking the American troops and equipment back and forth to the site of deployment as well as providing CAS operations, the Air Force generals hate to be seen that way. Their minds are flying in the blue skies, where the non-existing glorious dog fights will be happening between super duper high tech fighter jets. That's why they spend their brain power so much on procuring those fighter jets, even though those are the least likely AF aircraft to see any real action.
I recall another (optional) check-box for the fifth generation fighter jets to meet is the "super cruise" capability (supersonic flight without afterburner).
I personally don't believe that conventional all-out warfare between USA and a big player, like China or Russia, is likely to happen. Just imagine the impact on the world economy. Russia is armed with nukes and nuke delivery platforms up to teeth, while any conflict with China will create a financial panic, seriously harm the world economy, etc. Say hello to a new great depression.
But perhaps we could see proxy conflict and wars, possibly involving "hybrid" warfare. Possible focal points: Taiwan, Ukraine, Moldova, South East Asia, or some place in middle-east, with at least one big opponent operating through proxies rather than directly involved (just like it used to be since WWII).
That's a far fetched claim. For all we know, F-35 is still an excellent fighter jet for beyond visual range engagement due to its stealth features. The Russian and Chinese stealth aircraft are still either on drawing board, or in early stages of testing. While the timing of the Chinese and Russian stealth projects is quite delayed, I think they could benefit from observing the struggles of JSF program in order not to commit the same errors.
It is commonly believed that the F-35 isn't as good as it could have been because it tries to do too many things. As the Joint in the JSF name suggests, this aircraft was designed to replace many different types of aircraft in various branches of the military. There will be three versions:
F-35A (conventional fighter jet, for the Air Force) F-35C (carrier version for the navy) F-35B ( short takeoff and vertical landing, for Marine Corps, royal navy, etc)
It turns out that in order to meet the STOVL requirement, the more conventional F-35A and F-35C designs have been compromised in a variety of ways.
Considering that the united air force already has F-22, one of the best fighter jets in the world, or possibly the best, I suppose that on a lot of missions the F-35A could used for strike role while being escorted by an F-22 to counter any aerial threats. On the other hand, for a lot of countries that planned the F-35 to be _THE_ main fighter-bomber jet, lousy dog-fighting capabilities can be a problem as they now have to deal with this gap in the F-35s capabilities somehow.
Honestly, for the last four years or so, the only news I see about Firefox here on Slashdot is the "bad news". The foundation keeps introducing new features nobody asked for and keeps changing the familiar user interface. About the only time I thought something good is coming out of the Firefox is when they announced that Firefox will block third-party cookies by default, thus ending one of the biggest routes to privacy violation on the web.. then nothing happened. Firefox has already sold itself to commercial interests, but some how we continue using it by default as if there were no alternatives.
The rebels had shot down many MANY Ukrainian aircraft in the preceding days prior to the Malaysian air tragedy. Who was the genius who considered this a "negligible risk"? I bet one way or another, eventually the lawyers will be lining up to sue Ukrainian government for letting civilian aircraft fly there.
It's called plausible deniability. Everybody knows that Russia helps the rebels in many ways. They're being armed with the latest Russian-made ATGMs and a recent Russian T-72B3 tank, which was never exported, has been sighted in east Ukraine. But "formally" Russia maintains neutrality and wants others to acknowledge this.
Who said there was an invasion? There are ethnic Russians in East Ukraine who are very unhappy with what they believe an illegitimate government in Kiev. They have been demanding political and cultural autonomy for a long time. Russia may have done its thing to stir up this conflict and it helped the rebels in various ways, but I wouldn't call it an invasion.
An irrefutable proof of what? That somebody shot down the airplane? Look at the million of possibilities:
1. Plane shot down by Ukrainian BUK manned by Ukrainian forces 2. Plane shot down by a Ukrainian BUK system captured and manned by Pro-Russian rebels. 3. Plane shot down by a BUK system provided by Russia to Pro-Russian rebels and manned by Pro-Russian rebels. 4. Plane shot down by a Russian BUK system which was manned by regular russian troops.
I don't think studying the wreckage will ever conclusively prove or disprove any of these possibilities.
It is Ukraine's fault because Ukraine did not close airspace over a war zone where at least half dozen military aircraft had been shot down out of sky in the preceding says.
There is a serious problem. What is one of your contacts has a seriously malicious intent? They can park a car with tinted windows across street, and then access your LAN, which is a huge privacy AND security issue. At once, this feature of Windows 10 not only compromised privacy, but also the security of your entire home LAN. There will be a million interesting ways to exploit it. In fact, you don't even need to be a friend with the target. You simply need to be friend of his friend, and all will be good as long as the friend of the target has once visited targets home and cached his wifi network password. The possibilities are limitless. Would you like to snoop around on your boss or do you want to stalk your ex? Want to snoop around on their LAN? Find unsecured PC, SMB shares, or media servers? Well now you can, thanks to Microsoft.
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Most of academic economists are non-partisan. Or if they are, they normally have pretty solid theory and numbers to back their claims. The economists who do give the study of economics a bad reputation are those who actually make very opinionated and authoritative statements and reports, but hardly publish anything in a peer reviewed academic journal, where such antics wouldn't pass. Unfortunately, there are a few well known economists who had built a solid reputation in the research circles years ago, and then moved on past producing publishable academic research into the realm of partisanship. Any economist knows who they are. There are some well known liberals and conservatives among those.
The solution is pretty simple. Every author must reveal the codes that were used to produce the results.
However, one interesting issue is that once every author reveals the codes, you could find out that half of them code in MATLAB with a proficiency comparable to a 3rd grader who just learned BASIC programming up to about the "goto" statement. Not only there is lots of spaghetti code, but it may also contain serious errors that may filter through into the papers. Hence, I suspect a lot of people will not be happy to reveal their codes.
4GB was a decent amount of memory for a new PC in 2010. It's now five years past since then. Even $300 smartphones now have so much ram.
"..russians sure do treat their slavic brothers like shit"
Highly inaccurate statement. For one, the excuse for the annexation of Crimea was to protect the majority Russian population against the hegemony of the nationalist Ukrainian government. Likewise, there is a big campaign in support of East Ukraine rebels specifically because they fight for the cause of protecting ethnic Russians and their rights. Russians have always supported and still support Serbians in whatever ethnic and territorial disputes they still have in the Balkans.
A more correct statement is that being a slav does not mean you're an enemy or foe to another slav. Russia and Poland have always been adversarial. Russia and Ukraine, I'd say somewhere in between. The west Ukrainian nationalists, the part of Ukraine that used to be Poland before WWII, are very anti-Russian, the central Ukraine and south Ukraine population is more or less neutral to Russia, and the east Ukraine is very pro Russian. I'd say, it's all about the geopolitical influence of Poland and Russia, than anything else.
I don't think it's wise to try to visit Phobos because the aliens have already disabled two Soviet probes en route to it. Can't we stick with less dangerous space exploration missions?
Don't forget the scandalous one and a half trillion dollar F-35 program. It's just shocking. One BAD light fighter-bomber jet ends up costing almost like the entire Pentagon budget for three years. If this is not the proof that Pentagon exists these days to enrich the shareholders of the military-industrial complex, rather than protect our country, I don't know what what else could be..
I disagree. I recall hearing that an UltraHD stream of decent quality requires 20-50Mbps. Netflix is already offering a pilot UltraHD service, but the specifically require that you have 100Mbps connection.
So I personally think, one way or another the geekdom and nerddom will move onto 100Mbps broadband eventually. At the same time, I fail to see a genuine "must have" application for the gigabit broadband in most homes.
It's indeed very interesting, specially to compare USA and Russia. People argued that relatively poor average adoption of broadband has to do with the fact that USA is a huge country with most population centers in the coastal areas, while the middle states are rural with low population density and very high population dispersion. Well, guess what, Russia is in the same boat, only worse. Only 110 million Russians are living in the European Russia, resulting in population density below 30 people per sq km, which is already lower than USA average or European. And once you count the Asian part of Russia, the population density is below 10 per square km.
You need somewhere between 20-50Mbps of dedicated bandwidth for a smooth decent quality compressed stream. Netflix requires UltraHD streamers to have 100Mbps broadband.
Depends on the size of household. At my place in the late afternoon, there may be three video streams be running into different rooms, and I guess that's ok even with 12Mbps, but 30Mbps is better specially considering you need something closer to 10Mbps for a single decent quality 1080p stream.
I guess if you have lots of patience, 3Mbps is fine. However, I don't have patience when a 10GB file is downloading with that sort of speed. I think the 20-22Mbps I am getting is a more of a sweet spot. I can stream an HD video from netflix, and somebody else can run a network video game or torrent without us slowing down each other.
We don't need to stream BD quality. Netflix has this sample video that lets you see the quality and the bitrate. I believe when they reach 1080p, the bitrate is somewhere in the neighborhood of 8000bps.
However, I agree with you that 10Mbit is no longer enough. While my household has three TVs, streaming video from uverse and netflix is also popular, and two streams can easily clash. As I mentioned in that example, you effectively need 10Mbps for a single 1080p stream. But besides the stream, people my my household are also frequently playing online games, use torrent and skype. We get by with 20-22Mbps uverse connection pretty well though.
I hope there will be a switch to turn off this feature permanently. I for one enjoy the process of driving a car myself and being in control. I don't need nannies telling me how to maintain speed, stay in lane or when to brake.
While there is a place for $700-80 "flagship" phones, I hope this will force most smartphones to be sold at more realistic prices.
I don't think anybody in the AF believes that F-35 seriously replaces the A-10. It was just an excuse to get rid of A-10. The Air Force simply wants out of CAS business, hoping that the Army helicopters and precision strike from fighter-bomber jets will be good enough.
Even though AF's main job for the last 20 years was about trucking the American troops and equipment back and forth to the site of deployment as well as providing CAS operations, the Air Force generals hate to be seen that way. Their minds are flying in the blue skies, where the non-existing glorious dog fights will be happening between super duper high tech fighter jets. That's why they spend their brain power so much on procuring those fighter jets, even though those are the least likely AF aircraft to see any real action.
I recall another (optional) check-box for the fifth generation fighter jets to meet is the "super cruise" capability (supersonic flight without afterburner).
I personally don't believe that conventional all-out warfare between USA and a big player, like China or Russia, is likely to happen. Just imagine the impact on the world economy. Russia is armed with nukes and nuke delivery platforms up to teeth, while any conflict with China will create a financial panic, seriously harm the world economy, etc. Say hello to a new great depression.
But perhaps we could see proxy conflict and wars, possibly involving "hybrid" warfare. Possible focal points: Taiwan, Ukraine, Moldova, South East Asia, or some place in middle-east, with at least one big opponent operating through proxies rather than directly involved (just like it used to be since WWII).
That's a far fetched claim. For all we know, F-35 is still an excellent fighter jet for beyond visual range engagement due to its stealth features. The Russian and Chinese stealth aircraft are still either on drawing board, or in early stages of testing. While the timing of the Chinese and Russian stealth projects is quite delayed, I think they could benefit from observing the struggles of JSF program in order not to commit the same errors.
It is commonly believed that the F-35 isn't as good as it could have been because it tries to do too many things. As the Joint in the JSF name suggests, this aircraft was designed to replace many different types of aircraft in various branches of the military. There will be three versions:
F-35A (conventional fighter jet, for the Air Force)
F-35C (carrier version for the navy)
F-35B ( short takeoff and vertical landing, for Marine Corps, royal navy, etc)
It turns out that in order to meet the STOVL requirement, the more conventional F-35A and F-35C designs have been compromised in a variety of ways.
Considering that the united air force already has F-22, one of the best fighter jets in the world, or possibly the best, I suppose that on a lot of missions the F-35A could used for strike role while being escorted by an F-22 to counter any aerial threats. On the other hand, for a lot of countries that planned the F-35 to be _THE_ main fighter-bomber jet, lousy dog-fighting capabilities can be a problem as they now have to deal with this gap in the F-35s capabilities somehow.
Honestly, for the last four years or so, the only news I see about Firefox here on Slashdot is the "bad news". The foundation keeps introducing new features nobody asked for and keeps changing the familiar user interface. About the only time I thought something good is coming out of the Firefox is when they announced that Firefox will block third-party cookies by default, thus ending one of the biggest routes to privacy violation on the web.. then nothing happened. Firefox has already sold itself to commercial interests, but some how we continue using it by default as if there were no alternatives.
The rebels had shot down many MANY Ukrainian aircraft in the preceding days prior to the Malaysian air tragedy. Who was the genius who considered this a "negligible risk"? I bet one way or another, eventually the lawyers will be lining up to sue Ukrainian government for letting civilian aircraft fly there.
It's called plausible deniability. Everybody knows that Russia helps the rebels in many ways. They're being armed with the latest Russian-made ATGMs and a recent Russian T-72B3 tank, which was never exported, has been sighted in east Ukraine. But "formally" Russia maintains neutrality and wants others to acknowledge this.
Who said there was an invasion? There are ethnic Russians in East Ukraine who are very unhappy with what they believe an illegitimate government in Kiev. They have been demanding political and cultural autonomy for a long time. Russia may have done its thing to stir up this conflict and it helped the rebels in various ways, but I wouldn't call it an invasion.
An irrefutable proof of what? That somebody shot down the airplane? Look at the million of possibilities:
1. Plane shot down by Ukrainian BUK manned by Ukrainian forces
2. Plane shot down by a Ukrainian BUK system captured and manned by Pro-Russian rebels.
3. Plane shot down by a BUK system provided by Russia to Pro-Russian rebels and manned by Pro-Russian rebels.
4. Plane shot down by a Russian BUK system which was manned by regular russian troops.
I don't think studying the wreckage will ever conclusively prove or disprove any of these possibilities.
It is Ukraine's fault because Ukraine did not close airspace over a war zone where at least half dozen military aircraft had been shot down out of sky in the preceding says.
There is a serious problem. What is one of your contacts has a seriously malicious intent? They can park a car with tinted windows across street, and then access your LAN, which is a huge privacy AND security issue. At once, this feature of Windows 10 not only compromised privacy, but also the security of your entire home LAN. There will be a million interesting ways to exploit it. In fact, you don't even need to be a friend with the target. You simply need to be friend of his friend, and all will be good as long as the friend of the target has once visited targets home and cached his wifi network password. The possibilities are limitless. Would you like to snoop around on your boss or do you want to stalk your ex? Want to snoop around on their LAN? Find unsecured PC, SMB shares, or media servers? Well now you can, thanks to Microsoft.
I think MS will be eventually sued for that.