All valid points that should be absolutely be part of the legislation but, even if all that information was readily available, it doesn't help with some of the latest trends that are obstructing efficient and cost effective repairs. Firstly, the use of snap-fix connectors to assemble plastic components that are almost certainly break when you try and tease them back apart, requiring the replacement of another component - most often some form of chassis to which other components are fixed, increasing labour time and thus repair cost. Second, and even worse, is the use of glue to basically fix stuff together, as exemplified by the Surface 5 Pro which is "made of glue" according to Ars. Hyperbole aside (the glue is clearly just holding in components, not filling every void... yet) it's another worrying trend that pushes up the overall cost of repairs to the point at which it's probably going to exceed the cost of simply getting a new device.
One thing the EU is good at is enabling consumer choice, and during any transition period as this legislation gets phased in we'll have a chance to let the markets decide while both options are available to purchase. Given that choice, would customers want the current style of almost unrepairable device designs, or would they want to pay a bit extra and get something that might be slightly larger and heavier, but enables repairs, upgrades, and a longer useful life? It's a no brainer for most of us here, I suspect; we'd go for the latter option and probably start upgrading storage and memory almost from day #1, but some people really do like to know that their phone is a fraction of a mm thinner and a few grams lighter than the still perfectly functional one they bought last year, regardless of whether they actually notice that in practice.
Depending on the size of the latter group, passing the legislation is only the start, and probably actually the easiest part of the lifecycle problem to fix. The hard part is going to be convincing all those people who have been brainwashed by marketing departments into thinking that they *need* the latest version, no matter whether their current version is still up to the task or not, to change their point of view. Having a right to repair will absolutely help some consumers, but if you're not going to tackle the vast number of perfectly functional devices that are getting replaced in needless upgrade cycles then you're not going to really address the underlying problem that people have become not only accepting of the discard and replace approach, but have actually embraced it.
United isn't the only airline that has that kind of entertainment system or some variation of it (some also let you watch the inflight movies on your own device), and some people prefer to provide their own entertainment on their own devices anyway, which is why I specifically suggested tweaking the current size limits to allow smaller tablets to still qualify for the express screening option. You'd also have the option of a full-size notebook or tablet if you wanted it, but you'd have to opt for the full-on screening. The point of the idea isn't to stop passengers from bringing their electronics or whatever into the cabin, it's to give people a choice between whichever is the more convenient of faster screening or larger devices, while at the same time enabling more thorough screening of just those devices that are deemed large enough to be repurposed as an IED.
Actually, one thing the electronics ban (it doesn't just apply to computers) does suggest is having multiple options for carry-on screening. Every one hates the hassle of going through security, so why not incentivise that? For most people, a phone or Kindle/mini-tablet (yeah, currently too big where the ban is still in place but let's assume we tweak things a bit) is all the in-flight entertainment they need. If you were to provide the equivalent of the express aisles at supermarkets where your carry-on bag can basically zip straight through the X-ray and you get into the departure lounge faster and with less hassle, you might just get people deciding that maybe they don't need their big laptop on their holiday after all.
For others, that really do need to bring their laptop or DSLR camera gear (my main concern with the ban), you get the extra screening with more thorough visual inspections, mandatory residue swabs, sniffer dogs, or whatever else it is that Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Istanbul have put in place to get the ban removed. Sure, that's going to mean you spend a little longer going through the process, but if enough people qualify to go through the express aisles, then maybe the queues won't be as long as as all that and it'll all mostly balance out. That could also potentially incur some extra expense as a further encouragement to travel light (not to mention providing the airlines with some more upselling opportunities), but you do get to choose - and as long as it's not too exhorbitant maybe that would be a price worth paying.
Actually, adoption rates are almost certainly going to start as a typically gaussian (bell curve) distribution but petering out into a long tail as people get older - at least according to most of the statistics I've seen on the subject. In other words, you have a modest number of people who are likely to start smoking regularly before they can legally do so, most do so in the first few years after it becomes legal, then a gradual tail off to a point where adoption is highly unlikely. That's probably a long way before 65 though; I can't see very many people who make it into their 30s without taking up smoking are ever going to start - probably to the point that any that do would be more of statistical outlier than anything else. Still waiting to see some stats on how the adoption of vaping has skewed the stats of actual tobacco smokers though.
I guess the main rationale behind this is that "age 25" comment. Most countries consider a person an adult by the time they are in their 20s, but physically we do quite a bit of further positive development for a few years after that before going into decline as we age. By pushing out the legal age of adoption, they're basically playing around with the distribtion of the bell curve with the hope of achieving two main goals. Firstly, by shifting the bell curve to the right, they should reduce also its volume due to lower adoption rates as people get older, and secondly, by delaying when more people start smoking, they'll reduce the extent of the mental hardwiring and make it easier for them to quit should they try. There's possibly a couple of additional goals too; besides making it harder for under age smokers to pass themselves off as legally able to purchase cigarettes, reducing the number who start smoking before reaching legal age, a reduction in the total numbers of smokers could also reduce the extent of the peer pressure that gets many people into smoking in the first place.
He doubly an idiot because it's clearly not going to make much difference. Microsoft was *giving* Windows 10 away for free (and still is, in some situations) because they were clearly hoping to monetise the data they could acquire from telemetry and the rest, plus sales from the Windows store and so on instead. They even had a not-quite-official amnesty for those with dodgy copies that enabled individuals with pirated copies of Windows (or no copy, if you thought it through) to get a legitimised copy of Windows 10, again entirely for free. Even now, if you download a trial of Windows 10 (again, for free), all it does when your trial period expires is nag at you; it's still perfectly functional otherwise and can be patched with a little manual work. For whatever their specific individudal reason(s), people still on older versions of Windows - legit or otherwise, in India or elsewhere - don't want to move Windows 10, and no "one-off price reductions" are going to make any significant in roads into that mindset.
Nope, that's the best part. Not only are the victims going to get schooled on the importance of good backups and security, but they are also going to get schooled on the importance of *not giving in to blackmail*. I'm hoping that the media will be full of stories of people who paid up and still didn't get their files back - sucks to be them, but it could well make subsequent attempts at ransomware not worth the risk for such a pitiful reward. How much did WannaCry yield in the end? A few $100k (assuming they even managed to claim it all)? It isn't going to take much of a change in victim mindset to make even the relatively tiny cost and effort of launching a ransomware campaign not worth the risk of getting caught.
Most malware these days is multi-stage; the initial exploit package will then download a payload which, in this case, would likely be the ransomware toolkit, and that would also most likely include the email. A quick update to the payload would fix the scammer's problem with the Posteo email, but that's not going to help all that much now anyway. None of the PCs that are already infected are likely to be re-infected by the updated payload - they're stuck on the ransom screen for the old version - and AV vendors will be probably getting updates out fairly soon as well which negates the old exploit package. Their only real option is to re-spin both packages and start over.
I wonder if anyone has managed to make a violin shape by pushing some individual atoms around with an STM yet, because that's the only way there would be one small enough to properly express how little I care for their troubles.
Perhaps after some system of golden tickets hidden in chocolate bars to select the lucky winners/unlucky victims?
Actually, assuming this actually gets implemented somewhere (no doubt in some phallic monument to excess), I can well imagine that the owners of the building would do a Willy Wonka themed "Golden Ticket" competition to select some people for an all expenses paid trip to their opening night. Pretty obvious PR move for your new building as, while those who win are unlikely to care much beyond their prize, it's also going to raise your profile in the awareness of those that might be looking for new office space, apartments, retail, or hotel space that your building would presumably have quite a bit of available to rent/lease at sky high prices.
Presumably some form of clamp on the elevator car that can be used as an emergency brake and safety lock against either the maglev power rail or an auxilliary safety rail as and when required, just as many current conventional elevators have. It may be able to move in any direction, but that's still dependant on there being a power rail alongside it in the direction it needs to go, which means many of the same safety designs would still apply - the only change is that to make the most of the maglev you need to avoid physical contact until required.
You might not be giving random people shell access to your server, but if they've managed to acquire it through some other means (e.g. a compromised acccount or some other form of compromise) this means that they can pretty much be assured of being able to go from there to root until you install the patch. Not as bad as a remote root exploit, but still very nasty and worth the "Patch Now".
Many higher end SAN systems are capable of identifying duplicate copies of the same data in different locations and only saving one copy with some form of link for subsequent copies via a general process known as Data Deduplication, although there are also specific tweaks for specific storage types. In other words, if a thousand people have got the same document stored in their Google Drive, or received the same email to the GMail account, then Google's storage systems should be detecting that and dropping the repeated data. You're never going to get to 100% of the theoretical maximum de-dupe optimization, but you can get well up into the 70-80% range without too much effort, and I've seen mid-90% on some email systems. Getting rid of all those multiple copies of PowerPoints, PDFs, images, and all the other bulky documents that people CC to all and sundry adds up fast and can save a *lot* of storage space.
I'm skeptical of the figures too, but I'll wait and see the math. LEO is a lot cheaper to reach than GEO, and you are well within the Van Allen belts so don't need as much radiation hardening and associated mass, both of which are going to bring the price per launch down substantially. Of course, the plan also involves nearly 10x as many satellites, albeit presumably much smaller and more "disposable", which will push it back up again.
From the illustrations on OneWeb's website it appears that we're essentially talking about a few hundred slightly oversized cube-sats that could potentially be thrown up a few dozen at a time by SpaceX's Falcon 9 heavy or a similar booster, so you could easily end up with a smaller price tag than Iridium. Still likely to have a total price tag of a few billion, but not tens of billions, and potentially still commercially viable if you can resell enough bandwidth at the low, low prices that are all that their primary customers can afford. It's all going to depend on the unit cost and how many they can launch per booster - if they can bring both of those down low enough, provide enough bandwidth, and some higher end services (real time global tracking of ships and aircraft, perhaps?) then I don't see why it wouldn't be viable.
17GB if you did a security check or whatever it was a few years back. Thing is though, that's not just your email space - it's the total of your Google storage space for Drive and Photos as well, so if you are really into the Google ecosystem it can add up fast. Sure, you can have multiple free accounts, but that removes a lot of the convenience. As the poster above said, "we already know all about you and no longer need to continue to read your email"; for some users Google has well into diminishing returns on scanning their email, so why waste the CPU cycles?
I suspect the hope now is that once people's free storage allocations are used up they'll switch to a paid for plan rather than delete stuff, which is basically paying through the nose per GB. Looking at the current plans, Google gets ~$200 per annum for each TB of disk sold in 100GB chunks, which is a pretty good RoI even before you factor in that Google is almost certainly doing a *lot* of de-duplication on the stored data.
Not sure if there's a wiki, but I did stumble across this link which analyses the structure of some of the books published by ChooseCo. Apparently new editions (yes, they are still printing them) are including the maps that reveal a broad range of structures that range from quite simplistic to positively labyrinthine with numerous loops and jumps between branches.
No, I said there is absolutely a place for multiple choice, and was talking about testing in general rather than SATs specifically - which I didn't mention at all. The trick is to find the right balance between establishing that the student *knows* the subject, for which multiple choice tests are fine, and that they *understand* the subject, for which free form text/essays/dissertations or verbal discussion is usually much better. The problem is that the costs and skills required for marking the assessment go up as you progress from multiple choice, leading to more of a bias towards multi-choice, which in turn leads to more bias towards teaching the exam rather than teaching the subject. The solution is have a better mix of question types - multi-choice, set answer, *and* essay - that is appropriate for the subject at hand, but someone is going to ultimately have to pay more for it and that's where the real problems are.
The issue is the nature of the questions. While there's absolutely a place for multi-choice, or questions that only have one correct written answer, the only way to test on whether a student has truly comprehended something is to get them to explain it, or better still extrapolate from it, in the test. The problem with that approach is that it introduces more ambiguity into the scoring and actually requires that the person (and it currently has to be a person) marking the test knows something about the subject(s) at hand. Unfortunately, that means a lot more expense than simple machine readable multi-choice forms or easily outsourced reviews of basic written questions, which isn't exactly compatible with either for-profit education systems or those that have tight budgets
In this case it was obvious a long time before the VW thing that the power consumption figures were understated, although the specific usage of defeat devices of the kinds being described is new. Anyone who has deployed some of those power monitors that sit between an appliance and the socket to see how much power a given device is drawing over time will be well aware that peak, average and idle power draws for a given device are typically above those stated, and often by a considerable margin. The only real question here is why it took so long for those that were doing the regulatory tests to realise that something was amiss and dig a little deeper - more average Joes complaining after deploying smart meters in efforts to go green, perhaps?
Um, no - you need to read the quote in the summary more carefully. It's talking about technology companies that want to help run Walmart's IT services for them and, if they do, that "they can't run applications _for_ the retailer on Amazon's leading cloud-computing service". That's pretty clearly discussing managed IT services being provided to Walmart, not tangible products being sold through them. Other than the dick move nature of it to lock out a competitor rather than on technical grounds, it does actually make sense as a practice and is perfectly legal in every single area around the globe I've dealt with tenders. It's called a mandated or preferred supplier list depending on how strict you want it to be and it's to ensure that when you go to tender the respondants are all going to propose a solution that is compatible with what you already have in place and won't require that you introduce new training and skill set requirements on your staff.
Not a lawyer either, but I do deal with tenders for contracts such as this and in general it's absolutely above board to specify a list of preferred suppliers as part of a tender, so unless the US has some specific exception this falls foul of I'm not aware of then Walmart is perfectly entitled to do this. Their systems/data, their rules. It's no different from someone insisting on a given vendor's hardware or software - e.g. Munich mandating that their application stack be open source, to give a more Slashdot friendly example of the practice. That *is* a sane idea, particularly if you're a company or organization of the scale of Walmart and don't want your infrastructure to be built on a grab bag of different platforms selected by whatever vendor happened to win each contract.
Azure isn't owned by a company that is in direct competition with some of Walmart's businesses. This has nothing to do with sane or cost effective business practices for their IT service vendors and everything to do with trying to leverage the fact that Walmart is the bigger player (than the vendors) to deny revenue for a competitor.
Sadly, while some are already throwing words like "monopoly" around, I suspect this is perfectly above board - these are businesses looking to provide a service *for* Walmart, not sell their products *through* Walmart. As such Walmart is perfectly entitled to specify entirely arbitrary requirements for how Walmart's data and services are provisioned such as mandating a the use of one of their preferred suppliers. If Walmart wants to pay its IT service vendors more to use Azure, Google, or whoever instead of Amazon (assuming Amazon is actually the cheaper option) that's their business, dick move or not. It is, however, probably also going to impact on their bottom line, which might be something the shareholders might want to take note of.
Those numbers are definitely really fishy and don't stand up to even basic scrutiny. Even if you allow for the device magically extracting the O2 and releasing it directly back into the atmosphere with 100% efficiency that still leaves almost 1 metric ton *per week* of carbon that has to go somewhere. Growth of the moss might take up some of it, but nothing like 1 metric ton/week, so where's the rest of it meant to be going?
And yet, according to TFA, The Whitehouse is going to honour that four-year withdrawal clause over a "treaty" that is both legally non-binding and doesn't include any real penalties for failing to meet its conditions in the first place. Sure sounds more like a way to be able to claim that something promised in a campaign has been achieved without actually doing anything meaningful than anything else. Sure enough, the Pro-Trump side of the gallery is pointing to a campaign goal met and the other that it's meaningless because of promises (as yet unmet) by major corporations and numerous US States to meet their Paris obligations anyway.
Actually, just to nit a little further, the party with the most seats gets to *nominate* a PM, who then has to ask for the Queen's permission to form a government - hence May's visit to the Queen on Friday morning. That's generally a formality - the party (or coalition) with the most MPs gets to ask for permission first and gets it - but the Queen could in theory decline the request, which is partly why there was also some talk of Corbyn also making a request. You've also got corner case scenarios, such as the party with the most MPs is prevented from forming a government by two smaller parties forming a coalition with a greater number of seats and gaining the Queen's assent, or the chaos of Wilson/Heath in 1974.
Despite the Conservatives being the largest part in 2010 under Cameron who was then PM via the LibDem coalition through 2015, then on their own merit until 2016 (almost six years), the UK has *never* had an elected Prime Minster. We elect MPs to the House of Commons and the party with the most MP then gets to put forward whoever they want to be Prime Minister and form the government. Normally that's the leader of the party at the time of the election, but that doesn't actually have to be the case, and couldn't be the case if the party leader in question had lost their seat for some reason.
No, there's one more step, it's just that we haven't got that far yet:
Soap box - marketing lies about which is the best product.
Ballot box - the market chooses the best product.
Jury box - lawyers bicker over which product has the biggest dick^W patent portfolio.
Ammo box - two products enter...
I hope to get tickets but, failing that, I'm sure it'll be livestreamed in 8K HDR Augmented Reality to any suitable mobile computing device.
Slashdot Mirror
All valid points that should be absolutely be part of the legislation but, even if all that information was readily available, it doesn't help with some of the latest trends that are obstructing efficient and cost effective repairs. Firstly, the use of snap-fix connectors to assemble plastic components that are almost certainly break when you try and tease them back apart, requiring the replacement of another component - most often some form of chassis to which other components are fixed, increasing labour time and thus repair cost. Second, and even worse, is the use of glue to basically fix stuff together, as exemplified by the Surface 5 Pro which is "made of glue" according to Ars. Hyperbole aside (the glue is clearly just holding in components, not filling every void... yet) it's another worrying trend that pushes up the overall cost of repairs to the point at which it's probably going to exceed the cost of simply getting a new device.
One thing the EU is good at is enabling consumer choice, and during any transition period as this legislation gets phased in we'll have a chance to let the markets decide while both options are available to purchase. Given that choice, would customers want the current style of almost unrepairable device designs, or would they want to pay a bit extra and get something that might be slightly larger and heavier, but enables repairs, upgrades, and a longer useful life? It's a no brainer for most of us here, I suspect; we'd go for the latter option and probably start upgrading storage and memory almost from day #1, but some people really do like to know that their phone is a fraction of a mm thinner and a few grams lighter than the still perfectly functional one they bought last year, regardless of whether they actually notice that in practice.
Depending on the size of the latter group, passing the legislation is only the start, and probably actually the easiest part of the lifecycle problem to fix. The hard part is going to be convincing all those people who have been brainwashed by marketing departments into thinking that they *need* the latest version, no matter whether their current version is still up to the task or not, to change their point of view. Having a right to repair will absolutely help some consumers, but if you're not going to tackle the vast number of perfectly functional devices that are getting replaced in needless upgrade cycles then you're not going to really address the underlying problem that people have become not only accepting of the discard and replace approach, but have actually embraced it.
United isn't the only airline that has that kind of entertainment system or some variation of it (some also let you watch the inflight movies on your own device), and some people prefer to provide their own entertainment on their own devices anyway, which is why I specifically suggested tweaking the current size limits to allow smaller tablets to still qualify for the express screening option. You'd also have the option of a full-size notebook or tablet if you wanted it, but you'd have to opt for the full-on screening. The point of the idea isn't to stop passengers from bringing their electronics or whatever into the cabin, it's to give people a choice between whichever is the more convenient of faster screening or larger devices, while at the same time enabling more thorough screening of just those devices that are deemed large enough to be repurposed as an IED.
Actually, one thing the electronics ban (it doesn't just apply to computers) does suggest is having multiple options for carry-on screening. Every one hates the hassle of going through security, so why not incentivise that? For most people, a phone or Kindle/mini-tablet (yeah, currently too big where the ban is still in place but let's assume we tweak things a bit) is all the in-flight entertainment they need. If you were to provide the equivalent of the express aisles at supermarkets where your carry-on bag can basically zip straight through the X-ray and you get into the departure lounge faster and with less hassle, you might just get people deciding that maybe they don't need their big laptop on their holiday after all.
For others, that really do need to bring their laptop or DSLR camera gear (my main concern with the ban), you get the extra screening with more thorough visual inspections, mandatory residue swabs, sniffer dogs, or whatever else it is that Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Istanbul have put in place to get the ban removed. Sure, that's going to mean you spend a little longer going through the process, but if enough people qualify to go through the express aisles, then maybe the queues won't be as long as as all that and it'll all mostly balance out. That could also potentially incur some extra expense as a further encouragement to travel light (not to mention providing the airlines with some more upselling opportunities), but you do get to choose - and as long as it's not too exhorbitant maybe that would be a price worth paying.
Actually, adoption rates are almost certainly going to start as a typically gaussian (bell curve) distribution but petering out into a long tail as people get older - at least according to most of the statistics I've seen on the subject. In other words, you have a modest number of people who are likely to start smoking regularly before they can legally do so, most do so in the first few years after it becomes legal, then a gradual tail off to a point where adoption is highly unlikely. That's probably a long way before 65 though; I can't see very many people who make it into their 30s without taking up smoking are ever going to start - probably to the point that any that do would be more of statistical outlier than anything else. Still waiting to see some stats on how the adoption of vaping has skewed the stats of actual tobacco smokers though.
I guess the main rationale behind this is that "age 25" comment. Most countries consider a person an adult by the time they are in their 20s, but physically we do quite a bit of further positive development for a few years after that before going into decline as we age. By pushing out the legal age of adoption, they're basically playing around with the distribtion of the bell curve with the hope of achieving two main goals. Firstly, by shifting the bell curve to the right, they should reduce also its volume due to lower adoption rates as people get older, and secondly, by delaying when more people start smoking, they'll reduce the extent of the mental hardwiring and make it easier for them to quit should they try. There's possibly a couple of additional goals too; besides making it harder for under age smokers to pass themselves off as legally able to purchase cigarettes, reducing the number who start smoking before reaching legal age, a reduction in the total numbers of smokers could also reduce the extent of the peer pressure that gets many people into smoking in the first place.
He doubly an idiot because it's clearly not going to make much difference. Microsoft was *giving* Windows 10 away for free (and still is, in some situations) because they were clearly hoping to monetise the data they could acquire from telemetry and the rest, plus sales from the Windows store and so on instead. They even had a not-quite-official amnesty for those with dodgy copies that enabled individuals with pirated copies of Windows (or no copy, if you thought it through) to get a legitimised copy of Windows 10, again entirely for free. Even now, if you download a trial of Windows 10 (again, for free), all it does when your trial period expires is nag at you; it's still perfectly functional otherwise and can be patched with a little manual work. For whatever their specific individudal reason(s), people still on older versions of Windows - legit or otherwise, in India or elsewhere - don't want to move Windows 10, and no "one-off price reductions" are going to make any significant in roads into that mindset.
Nope, that's the best part. Not only are the victims going to get schooled on the importance of good backups and security, but they are also going to get schooled on the importance of *not giving in to blackmail*. I'm hoping that the media will be full of stories of people who paid up and still didn't get their files back - sucks to be them, but it could well make subsequent attempts at ransomware not worth the risk for such a pitiful reward. How much did WannaCry yield in the end? A few $100k (assuming they even managed to claim it all)? It isn't going to take much of a change in victim mindset to make even the relatively tiny cost and effort of launching a ransomware campaign not worth the risk of getting caught.
Most malware these days is multi-stage; the initial exploit package will then download a payload which, in this case, would likely be the ransomware toolkit, and that would also most likely include the email. A quick update to the payload would fix the scammer's problem with the Posteo email, but that's not going to help all that much now anyway. None of the PCs that are already infected are likely to be re-infected by the updated payload - they're stuck on the ransom screen for the old version - and AV vendors will be probably getting updates out fairly soon as well which negates the old exploit package. Their only real option is to re-spin both packages and start over.
I wonder if anyone has managed to make a violin shape by pushing some individual atoms around with an STM yet, because that's the only way there would be one small enough to properly express how little I care for their troubles.
Perhaps after some system of golden tickets hidden in chocolate bars to select the lucky winners/unlucky victims?
Actually, assuming this actually gets implemented somewhere (no doubt in some phallic monument to excess), I can well imagine that the owners of the building would do a Willy Wonka themed "Golden Ticket" competition to select some people for an all expenses paid trip to their opening night. Pretty obvious PR move for your new building as, while those who win are unlikely to care much beyond their prize, it's also going to raise your profile in the awareness of those that might be looking for new office space, apartments, retail, or hotel space that your building would presumably have quite a bit of available to rent/lease at sky high prices.
Presumably some form of clamp on the elevator car that can be used as an emergency brake and safety lock against either the maglev power rail or an auxilliary safety rail as and when required, just as many current conventional elevators have. It may be able to move in any direction, but that's still dependant on there being a power rail alongside it in the direction it needs to go, which means many of the same safety designs would still apply - the only change is that to make the most of the maglev you need to avoid physical contact until required.
Two words: "priviledge" and "escalation".
You might not be giving random people shell access to your server, but if they've managed to acquire it through some other means (e.g. a compromised acccount or some other form of compromise) this means that they can pretty much be assured of being able to go from there to root until you install the patch. Not as bad as a remote root exploit, but still very nasty and worth the "Patch Now".
Many higher end SAN systems are capable of identifying duplicate copies of the same data in different locations and only saving one copy with some form of link for subsequent copies via a general process known as Data Deduplication, although there are also specific tweaks for specific storage types. In other words, if a thousand people have got the same document stored in their Google Drive, or received the same email to the GMail account, then Google's storage systems should be detecting that and dropping the repeated data. You're never going to get to 100% of the theoretical maximum de-dupe optimization, but you can get well up into the 70-80% range without too much effort, and I've seen mid-90% on some email systems. Getting rid of all those multiple copies of PowerPoints, PDFs, images, and all the other bulky documents that people CC to all and sundry adds up fast and can save a *lot* of storage space.
I'm skeptical of the figures too, but I'll wait and see the math. LEO is a lot cheaper to reach than GEO, and you are well within the Van Allen belts so don't need as much radiation hardening and associated mass, both of which are going to bring the price per launch down substantially. Of course, the plan also involves nearly 10x as many satellites, albeit presumably much smaller and more "disposable", which will push it back up again.
From the illustrations on OneWeb's website it appears that we're essentially talking about a few hundred slightly oversized cube-sats that could potentially be thrown up a few dozen at a time by SpaceX's Falcon 9 heavy or a similar booster, so you could easily end up with a smaller price tag than Iridium. Still likely to have a total price tag of a few billion, but not tens of billions, and potentially still commercially viable if you can resell enough bandwidth at the low, low prices that are all that their primary customers can afford. It's all going to depend on the unit cost and how many they can launch per booster - if they can bring both of those down low enough, provide enough bandwidth, and some higher end services (real time global tracking of ships and aircraft, perhaps?) then I don't see why it wouldn't be viable.
17GB if you did a security check or whatever it was a few years back. Thing is though, that's not just your email space - it's the total of your Google storage space for Drive and Photos as well, so if you are really into the Google ecosystem it can add up fast. Sure, you can have multiple free accounts, but that removes a lot of the convenience. As the poster above said, "we already know all about you and no longer need to continue to read your email"; for some users Google has well into diminishing returns on scanning their email, so why waste the CPU cycles?
I suspect the hope now is that once people's free storage allocations are used up they'll switch to a paid for plan rather than delete stuff, which is basically paying through the nose per GB. Looking at the current plans, Google gets ~$200 per annum for each TB of disk sold in 100GB chunks, which is a pretty good RoI even before you factor in that Google is almost certainly doing a *lot* of de-duplication on the stored data.
Not sure if there's a wiki, but I did stumble across this link which analyses the structure of some of the books published by ChooseCo. Apparently new editions (yes, they are still printing them) are including the maps that reveal a broad range of structures that range from quite simplistic to positively labyrinthine with numerous loops and jumps between branches.
No, I said there is absolutely a place for multiple choice, and was talking about testing in general rather than SATs specifically - which I didn't mention at all. The trick is to find the right balance between establishing that the student *knows* the subject, for which multiple choice tests are fine, and that they *understand* the subject, for which free form text/essays/dissertations or verbal discussion is usually much better. The problem is that the costs and skills required for marking the assessment go up as you progress from multiple choice, leading to more of a bias towards multi-choice, which in turn leads to more bias towards teaching the exam rather than teaching the subject. The solution is have a better mix of question types - multi-choice, set answer, *and* essay - that is appropriate for the subject at hand, but someone is going to ultimately have to pay more for it and that's where the real problems are.
The issue is the nature of the questions. While there's absolutely a place for multi-choice, or questions that only have one correct written answer, the only way to test on whether a student has truly comprehended something is to get them to explain it, or better still extrapolate from it, in the test. The problem with that approach is that it introduces more ambiguity into the scoring and actually requires that the person (and it currently has to be a person) marking the test knows something about the subject(s) at hand. Unfortunately, that means a lot more expense than simple machine readable multi-choice forms or easily outsourced reviews of basic written questions, which isn't exactly compatible with either for-profit education systems or those that have tight budgets
In this case it was obvious a long time before the VW thing that the power consumption figures were understated, although the specific usage of defeat devices of the kinds being described is new. Anyone who has deployed some of those power monitors that sit between an appliance and the socket to see how much power a given device is drawing over time will be well aware that peak, average and idle power draws for a given device are typically above those stated, and often by a considerable margin. The only real question here is why it took so long for those that were doing the regulatory tests to realise that something was amiss and dig a little deeper - more average Joes complaining after deploying smart meters in efforts to go green, perhaps?
Um, no - you need to read the quote in the summary more carefully. It's talking about technology companies that want to help run Walmart's IT services for them and, if they do, that "they can't run applications _for_ the retailer on Amazon's leading cloud-computing service". That's pretty clearly discussing managed IT services being provided to Walmart, not tangible products being sold through them. Other than the dick move nature of it to lock out a competitor rather than on technical grounds, it does actually make sense as a practice and is perfectly legal in every single area around the globe I've dealt with tenders. It's called a mandated or preferred supplier list depending on how strict you want it to be and it's to ensure that when you go to tender the respondants are all going to propose a solution that is compatible with what you already have in place and won't require that you introduce new training and skill set requirements on your staff.
Not a lawyer either, but I do deal with tenders for contracts such as this and in general it's absolutely above board to specify a list of preferred suppliers as part of a tender, so unless the US has some specific exception this falls foul of I'm not aware of then Walmart is perfectly entitled to do this. Their systems/data, their rules. It's no different from someone insisting on a given vendor's hardware or software - e.g. Munich mandating that their application stack be open source, to give a more Slashdot friendly example of the practice. That *is* a sane idea, particularly if you're a company or organization of the scale of Walmart and don't want your infrastructure to be built on a grab bag of different platforms selected by whatever vendor happened to win each contract.
Azure isn't owned by a company that is in direct competition with some of Walmart's businesses. This has nothing to do with sane or cost effective business practices for their IT service vendors and everything to do with trying to leverage the fact that Walmart is the bigger player (than the vendors) to deny revenue for a competitor.
Sadly, while some are already throwing words like "monopoly" around, I suspect this is perfectly above board - these are businesses looking to provide a service *for* Walmart, not sell their products *through* Walmart. As such Walmart is perfectly entitled to specify entirely arbitrary requirements for how Walmart's data and services are provisioned such as mandating a the use of one of their preferred suppliers. If Walmart wants to pay its IT service vendors more to use Azure, Google, or whoever instead of Amazon (assuming Amazon is actually the cheaper option) that's their business, dick move or not. It is, however, probably also going to impact on their bottom line, which might be something the shareholders might want to take note of.
Those numbers are definitely really fishy and don't stand up to even basic scrutiny. Even if you allow for the device magically extracting the O2 and releasing it directly back into the atmosphere with 100% efficiency that still leaves almost 1 metric ton *per week* of carbon that has to go somewhere. Growth of the moss might take up some of it, but nothing like 1 metric ton/week, so where's the rest of it meant to be going?
And yet, according to TFA, The Whitehouse is going to honour that four-year withdrawal clause over a "treaty" that is both legally non-binding and doesn't include any real penalties for failing to meet its conditions in the first place. Sure sounds more like a way to be able to claim that something promised in a campaign has been achieved without actually doing anything meaningful than anything else. Sure enough, the Pro-Trump side of the gallery is pointing to a campaign goal met and the other that it's meaningless because of promises (as yet unmet) by major corporations and numerous US States to meet their Paris obligations anyway.
Same swamp, different day.
Actually, just to nit a little further, the party with the most seats gets to *nominate* a PM, who then has to ask for the Queen's permission to form a government - hence May's visit to the Queen on Friday morning. That's generally a formality - the party (or coalition) with the most MPs gets to ask for permission first and gets it - but the Queen could in theory decline the request, which is partly why there was also some talk of Corbyn also making a request. You've also got corner case scenarios, such as the party with the most MPs is prevented from forming a government by two smaller parties forming a coalition with a greater number of seats and gaining the Queen's assent, or the chaos of Wilson/Heath in 1974.
Despite the Conservatives being the largest part in 2010 under Cameron who was then PM via the LibDem coalition through 2015, then on their own merit until 2016 (almost six years), the UK has *never* had an elected Prime Minster. We elect MPs to the House of Commons and the party with the most MP then gets to put forward whoever they want to be Prime Minister and form the government. Normally that's the leader of the party at the time of the election, but that doesn't actually have to be the case, and couldn't be the case if the party leader in question had lost their seat for some reason.
No, there's one more step, it's just that we haven't got that far yet:
Soap box - marketing lies about which is the best product.
Ballot box - the market chooses the best product.
Jury box - lawyers bicker over which product has the biggest dick^W patent portfolio.
Ammo box - two products enter...
I hope to get tickets but, failing that, I'm sure it'll be livestreamed in 8K HDR Augmented Reality to any suitable mobile computing device.