Depends on the renewable source (geothermal can easily be 24/7 for instance, not that it's currently a realistic supply generation option within the UK) and whether you are integrating any kind of energy retention system into your generator, e.g. an "Electric Mountain" or Telsa battery bank. You've also got the averages to factor in; we have a National Grid, so if it's overcast and reducing solar capacity in the South, as long as the wind is blowing in the North that might be able to make up the shortfall.
Not that traditional power plants don't have their problems. Coal and some types of gas-fired plants simply cannot be fired up quickly enough to respond to sudden spikes in demand, but since you can usually find a use for any excess are often left to at least idle 24/7, even if the energy produced is essentially being dumped. What's needed is diversification of sources, both geographically and by type, with an emphasis on deprecating the least economical and highest polluting power plants first. That's been the UK's strategy for some years now, but these things do take time, and as you say, there is still a long way to go before we can completely remove any need for fossil fuels from the system.
You can bet your ass they'll be preserved eternally, they may just not be *public*.
I'd actually say that "may" was the operative word here. Sure, *you* might have 10 minutes to retract a message, but that also means a 10 minute window of opportunity for someone to take a screencap for posterity, repost it, tell HR to put your temination notice in the post, etc. If you've got a high-profile with a lot of followers and especially foes that's going to be more than long enough.
It's not an acronym but is short for "leg godt", meaning "play well". As for the writing form I don't think it really matters, although there have been heated debates over both the capitalisation and whether the plural should an "s" or not. Grammatically it should be "Lego", but is generally stylised in block caps as "LEGO", which is also how it is trademarked, so that's how most people are used to seeing it written. Finally, while the company name is officially "Lego Systems", they do business as "Lego Group", which they also tend to stylise as "LEGO Group" - so even they seem split over the issue.
Clearly not even LEGO thinks this since there are several other systems of building block toys out there and readily available. The clue was the use of the term "bootleg product"; that basically implies a knock-off that either pretends to be the official product or is an obvious clone of it. In this specific case it's a rip-off of LEGO's product, right down to replacing the LEGO logo with their own "Lepin" version and replication of the Mini-Fig form, as can be seen in this article. You can quibble over "IP" in the context of imaginary property, but LEGO's case was on the grounds of registered trademark infringment which isn't doesn't get much more black and white than that.
In general, yes, but for radio there's also signal attenuation and power requirements to take into account. Higher frequencies might be able carry more data, but they are also more likely to suffer from signal loss due to intervening structures like buildings and so on, which is often at least partly offset by using more power at the transmitter. 5G is going to try and get around that by using multiple antenna systems, similar to MIMO for WiFi, but realistically usage of the higher frequencies is likely to be mostly in the form of nano/picocell type devices located in dense urban environments or large structures such as office blocks and retail/entertainment complexes.
You mean something like this on-going sequence of events concerning Georgia's equally exploitable voter registration system? It might not be the actually voting machines here, but the whole sequence of events and actions by those involved is sketchy as hell, so it's sure going to be interesting to see how many "dead people" etc. turn out to have voted in this one...
If it's anything like Stuxnet in terms of how it operates then the payload will be extremely specific to the environment it was targeting - e.g. require a specific control app, managing, a given make/model of PLC, connected to a given type of mechanical/electrical plant, and so on. What it might potentially do is provide victims with access to one or more zero-day vulnerabilities for those tools/products they may not have been previously aware of if they can successfully reverse engineer them, but they'd still need to repurpose those to their own ends, find suitable targets, and design their own payloads. The clock on that is also ticking, because copies of the code will get out into the security community at large, and once that happens CVE numbers will eventually get assigned and patches produced. Stuxnet might still be revealling hidden depths, but it's highly unlikely that most of the delivery mechanisms it employed would still be effective in delivering payloads anywhere except for locations that have almost no concept of security and the importance of software/firmware updates.
Bringing up Tobacco seems rather odd as well especially since there now seems to be a war on vaping heating up.
It's tenuous, and technically a subset of what they are complaining about, but I'd assume they are trying to draw an analogy between the effects of breathing in pollutants (regardless of where gaseous or particulate) on the lungs and respiratory health, mostly though passive smoking that many people are familiar with. No idea why they singled out tobacco rather than including vaping though; that "war" is mostly done at this point with more any more people at least aware it's not a healthy thing to do and numbers of active tobacco smokers falling year on year.
As for the upcoming backlash against vaping, yeah, that's definitely heating up and should reach the point of vaporisation soon.:) I've no idea on the relative health benefits over smoking, and since I don't smoke or vape don't really care beyond any potentially harmful passive effects, but I have noticed that a subset of vapers tend to have much less consideration of others when they vape/exhale than traditional smokers, which is probably a major factor in that. Whichever way you cut it that's anti-social behaviour, especially since many of the flavours are not exactly appealing to all tastes and non-smokers/vapers find some of them quite repugnant, so it's hardly surprising that a pushback from the rest of society is on the cards, is it?
I've never heard of it either, which is almost certainly exactly why it is now folding, regardless of the makeup of its leadership team. Still, that's a really crap turn of phrase from Joanna Scutts at Slate, who probably needs to either think a little more about what she's writing or get a better editor. Clearly, since the company is apparently folding, these "smart women" can't actually have been all that smart since they failed to come up with a sustainable business model, because I highly doubt that she's suggesting the alternative; that even a group of the smartest of women are not actually capable of running a successful company.
Similar here, but for slightly different reasons. I tried it and agree that VR hardware tech still isn't quite there (although it's definitely getting close and is vastly better than the previous serious attempts), but never thought that the first gen headsets from Oculus and HTC were going to take off and become "must have" products. My initial feeling was that perhaps by the second gen, or maybe the third if vendors stick it out that long, it might get somewhere, but I pretty much gave up on that notion after last year's sales figures and the lack of v2 products in the new year.
Right now, I think it's never going to happen as pure VR, e.g. as implemented by the Rift/Vive, but rather be supplanted by AR headsets that can also do 100% overlays to replicate VR. Unlike VR, AR headsets like Hololens do at least have offer some capacity for doing things that can't really be done easily any other way that could become a potential "killer app", especially in STEM fields - being able to walk around a factory and see new installations projected over the existing equipment for instance. Sure, the technology to do all that effectively and portably is even further off and prices several times higher, but if this attempt at VR is now essentially dead in the water, then AR's price and performance issues are likely to be addressed before vendors give it another go, in which case why bother with "just" VR?
No, because they're not abusing a position of dominance in the market to gain an unfair advantage over their competitors. Same reason why Apple didn't get into legal hot water for doing exactly the same thing as Microsoft at the same time (IIRC they had about 5-10% of the desktop market share at the time); not being a near monopoly gives you a lot more latitude in what you are able to do or, conversely, why Google is being pressured into allowing Android device makers to optionally unbundle Google's own apps, even if it is for a fee, because they currently have about 75% of the mobile device OS market.
It's really not about the users. It's about cold hard cash flowing from ProtonVPN to the Mozilla Foundation in return for the advertisement and any click throughs it might generate. Ultimately, Mozilla's business model requires they have cashflow to operate, so they need to use partnerships like this or having a search engine paying to be the default for the browser to generate enough of it, albeit with a choice of partnership that is somewhat questionable due to the number of users that will have no interest in the VPN but still have to deal with the notification popups. It's also kinda redundant long term, assuming that Project Fusion's efforts to integrate more functionality from TorBrowser directly into the Privacy Mode code come to fruition.
I dunno, some frames are pretty heavy, especially the wooden ones, so it wouldn't be too difficult to put the shredder in the bottom and some batteries in the top and sides to balance it all up. Having the frame cover the guides wouldn't be too unusual either; it's quite common for the outer edge of a canvas or print to be behind the frame - usually it's wrapped all the way around and fixed on the rear. There are any number of release mechanisms that don't suck much juice either; you just need to think beyond the couple of days of your typical smartphone with all feature enabled - a modified camera remote could work very well for instance.
That said, I'm pretty sure that Sotheby's was aware to at least expect *something* out of the ordinary, if not exactly what was going to happen. Note also it appears to have stopped shredding with the image partially intact and still in the frame in a manner that still allows for display, probably by design so that the buyer is going to be upset either. Quite the opposite in fact; they now have an extremely famous piece of art that is now an extremely famous piece of performance art as well - instant appreciation in value, for those that are into that kind of thing.
Oh yes, I can see it now. The colonists arrive expecting to find their Amazon Prime delivery of several metric tons of habit construction materials, food, water, and so on waiting for them, but instead get a little card apologizing for being unable to deliver on account of there being no one available to sign for it.
Auditing revealling financial irregularities that led to delayed SEC filings that predated even the earliest claims made in the Bloomberg article - ultimately it was about breaching SEC filing requirements, rather than the underlying financial issues, that led to the delisting.
Complete lack of any hard evidence to support Bloomberg's claims aside, if you were to take it at face value then you've got to hand the Amazon team some *serious* respect for noticing that there was an additional chip the size of a pencil tip on some of a their server boards that was not present on others or in the design spec. And that's before you consider that they didn't just blow it off and supposedly figured out at least some of the things that it was up to.
Still not quite as much respect as I'm giving the writer of the piece for coming up with this gem though: "Two of Elemental’s biggest early clients were the Mormon church, which used the technology to beam sermons to congregations around the world, and the adult film industry, which did not.", (beaming of the Missionary Position around the world not withstanding).
Stipulate the special scenarios where the human has to take over and let the machines handle all other scenarios.
Fine for a family car with self-drive (or even Tesla's driver assistance) functionality, but we're specifically talking about self-driving taxis here. What is the humans in the taxi are using it because they are not able (legally and/or physically) to drive, and that's why they are taking the taxi in the first place? It's going to be kind of limiting for a taxi if it can only accept passengers that are able to drive it as well, especially on a Friday or Saturday night, are they also going to have to require the designated driver to scan their driver's license and to breathe into a breathalyzer before setting off?
I guess there would be slightly less chance of the floor getting covered in vomit though, so there is that.
You're probably right on that, but there are still a lot of assumptions here - including that the thing even exists and is a single entity; it could turn out to be a collection of gravitationally bound objects in a common orbit similar to Pluto and Charon, for instance. In that case, even if the combined mass is similar to Uranus/Neptune and the individual mass of the larger objects is larger than (say) Earth, would that still a planet, singular, or even an ETNO? What about the individual larger masses - planets or ETNOs?
Personally, I don't really care whether Pluto is officially a planet or not; because it was when I was first learning about space that's still how I think of it, but on a practical level given the range of other objects we now know are out there it probably does make more sense to have it in some other category. Alternatively, if you're going to officially classify Pluto as a planet, then what about Eris, which has more mass but with a much greater orbital eccentricity? With a little luck, this new object will turn out to be something that doesn't fit the current classification schema, force the IAU back to the drawing board on definitions, and they'll then figure out a way to include Pluto as a planet again (based on mass and orbital inclination/circularity, perhaps?) to stop at least some of the bickering.
By that definition it's probably "Planet 69" or something given how many large Kuiper Belt objects/Plutoids have been discovered, but assuming this object actually exists then referring to it as "Planet 9" is highly likely to be incorrect regardless. Take your pick:
You think Pluto should still be a planet, in which case this would be "Planet X" or "Planet 10".
You think some of the other Plutoids and Kuiper belt objects should qualify as planets as well, in which case it could be anything depending on where you set the bar on mass, volume, etc., but still definitely not "Planet 9".
You agree with the IAU's new definition of planets and exclude Pluto, in which case this is almost certainly likely to be excluded as well, in which case "Planet 9" is still going to be incorrect.
Assuming it does exist, then based on the IAU's current position on what constitutes a planet and where it's orbiting, the most likely current classification would seem to be either a Kuiper Belt Object or a Plutoid. Alternatively, they could go back to the drawing board again and revamp the classification system to try and make arbitrarily pigeon-holing lumps of rock and gas going around stars into types at least a little less confusing and contentious.
Oh, come on Kendall, it's all down to how you fit the curve to the data points (oblig. XKCD) and you know it. Depending on the approach you use, you can make any one of the lines in that graph other than India's have the best overall downward trend over the next few years. It's lies, damn lies, and statistics, pure and simple, so unless the person making the claim that A is doing better than B is caveating it with their methodology they're just as credible/full of it as someone claiming that B is doing better than A.
So much this. This is just another part of what happens when parents wrap their precious snowflakes up in cotton wool and bubblewrap and only allow them to frequent "safe spaces" instead of letting them start to figure things out for themselves, including all the accompanying cuts and bruises to body and ego, and building up their self-confidence and life skills in a controlled manner. No matter how much we'd prefer it to be otherwise, life can - and does - suck from time to time, and other people can be - and are - assholes from time to time, so the sooner kids start to realise that and begin acquiring the tools they'll need to deal with it the better.
It's called "parenting" folks, and remember - how you treat your own kids will often be returned in kind when your looking to retire and rely on them for support, so best make a good job of it. If, on the otherhand, you're looking for an almost guaranteed path to a 20- or 30-something fuckup, then denying them that gradual learning curve throughout their adolescence and just shoving them off the deep end when it's time to leave home for college, career, or jail, sure seems like a great way to do it.
Advertising RoI is a notoriously difficult things to pin down, no matter what the snake oil salespeople in ad-sales, SEO, and marketing would have you believe. For the right ad, that hits the right audience, at the right time, I have no doubt that you'd easily be able to exceed that 7% figure; the rest are far more subjective - there was a story doing the rounds recently that Google's ad-sales people know that statistically most ad-agencies - the middle-men between Google and the company trying to shift an actually product or service - will fail within a year, so just try and bleed them for as much as they can, while they last. Basically, it's an MLM model of blowing smoke and peddling snake oil all the way down, and with a failure rate like that the norm is probably indicative of an typical RoI that's better summed up as "don't bother".
There have also been several reports of quite high-profile companies that might be starting to realise that and have slashed their ad-budgets - especially for online spend - recently, usually accompanied by anecdotal evidence of near zero impact on retail turnover. YMMV though; there's a big difference between an established company/product - especially in cases of near monopolies or where the brand is synonymous with the product (Hoover vs. vacuum cleaner, for instance) and a new company trying to break into the market that currently has almost zero customer awareness they even exist, let alone why they might want to buy their products/services.
I think it's probably the fittingly named "Enormous Theorem" on Symmetry that took dozens of mathemeticians decades to complete. That runs to over 15,000 pages just for the calculations, and even the "guide" runs to a further 1,200 pages.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on the renewable source (geothermal can easily be 24/7 for instance, not that it's currently a realistic supply generation option within the UK) and whether you are integrating any kind of energy retention system into your generator, e.g. an "Electric Mountain" or Telsa battery bank. You've also got the averages to factor in; we have a National Grid, so if it's overcast and reducing solar capacity in the South, as long as the wind is blowing in the North that might be able to make up the shortfall.
Not that traditional power plants don't have their problems. Coal and some types of gas-fired plants simply cannot be fired up quickly enough to respond to sudden spikes in demand, but since you can usually find a use for any excess are often left to at least idle 24/7, even if the energy produced is essentially being dumped. What's needed is diversification of sources, both geographically and by type, with an emphasis on deprecating the least economical and highest polluting power plants first. That's been the UK's strategy for some years now, but these things do take time, and as you say, there is still a long way to go before we can completely remove any need for fossil fuels from the system.
I'd actually say that "may" was the operative word here. Sure, *you* might have 10 minutes to retract a message, but that also means a 10 minute window of opportunity for someone to take a screencap for posterity, repost it, tell HR to put your temination notice in the post, etc. If you've got a high-profile with a lot of followers and especially foes that's going to be more than long enough.
It's not an acronym but is short for "leg godt", meaning "play well". As for the writing form I don't think it really matters, although there have been heated debates over both the capitalisation and whether the plural should an "s" or not. Grammatically it should be "Lego", but is generally stylised in block caps as "LEGO", which is also how it is trademarked, so that's how most people are used to seeing it written. Finally, while the company name is officially "Lego Systems", they do business as "Lego Group", which they also tend to stylise as "LEGO Group" - so even they seem split over the issue.
Clearly not even LEGO thinks this since there are several other systems of building block toys out there and readily available. The clue was the use of the term "bootleg product"; that basically implies a knock-off that either pretends to be the official product or is an obvious clone of it. In this specific case it's a rip-off of LEGO's product, right down to replacing the LEGO logo with their own "Lepin" version and replication of the Mini-Fig form, as can be seen in this article. You can quibble over "IP" in the context of imaginary property, but LEGO's case was on the grounds of registered trademark infringment which isn't doesn't get much more black and white than that.
In general, yes, but for radio there's also signal attenuation and power requirements to take into account. Higher frequencies might be able carry more data, but they are also more likely to suffer from signal loss due to intervening structures like buildings and so on, which is often at least partly offset by using more power at the transmitter. 5G is going to try and get around that by using multiple antenna systems, similar to MIMO for WiFi, but realistically usage of the higher frequencies is likely to be mostly in the form of nano/picocell type devices located in dense urban environments or large structures such as office blocks and retail/entertainment complexes.
You mean something like this on-going sequence of events concerning Georgia's equally exploitable voter registration system? It might not be the actually voting machines here, but the whole sequence of events and actions by those involved is sketchy as hell, so it's sure going to be interesting to see how many "dead people" etc. turn out to have voted in this one...
If it's anything like Stuxnet in terms of how it operates then the payload will be extremely specific to the environment it was targeting - e.g. require a specific control app, managing, a given make/model of PLC, connected to a given type of mechanical/electrical plant, and so on. What it might potentially do is provide victims with access to one or more zero-day vulnerabilities for those tools/products they may not have been previously aware of if they can successfully reverse engineer them, but they'd still need to repurpose those to their own ends, find suitable targets, and design their own payloads. The clock on that is also ticking, because copies of the code will get out into the security community at large, and once that happens CVE numbers will eventually get assigned and patches produced. Stuxnet might still be revealling hidden depths, but it's highly unlikely that most of the delivery mechanisms it employed would still be effective in delivering payloads anywhere except for locations that have almost no concept of security and the importance of software/firmware updates.
It's tenuous, and technically a subset of what they are complaining about, but I'd assume they are trying to draw an analogy between the effects of breathing in pollutants (regardless of where gaseous or particulate) on the lungs and respiratory health, mostly though passive smoking that many people are familiar with. No idea why they singled out tobacco rather than including vaping though; that "war" is mostly done at this point with more any more people at least aware it's not a healthy thing to do and numbers of active tobacco smokers falling year on year.
:) I've no idea on the relative health benefits over smoking, and since I don't smoke or vape don't really care beyond any potentially harmful passive effects, but I have noticed that a subset of vapers tend to have much less consideration of others when they vape/exhale than traditional smokers, which is probably a major factor in that. Whichever way you cut it that's anti-social behaviour, especially since many of the flavours are not exactly appealing to all tastes and non-smokers/vapers find some of them quite repugnant, so it's hardly surprising that a pushback from the rest of society is on the cards, is it?
As for the upcoming backlash against vaping, yeah, that's definitely heating up and should reach the point of vaporisation soon.
+1 :)
I've never heard of it either, which is almost certainly exactly why it is now folding, regardless of the makeup of its leadership team. Still, that's a really crap turn of phrase from Joanna Scutts at Slate, who probably needs to either think a little more about what she's writing or get a better editor. Clearly, since the company is apparently folding, these "smart women" can't actually have been all that smart since they failed to come up with a sustainable business model, because I highly doubt that she's suggesting the alternative; that even a group of the smartest of women are not actually capable of running a successful company.
Oblig. link to relevant comic strip. Timely too.
Similar here, but for slightly different reasons. I tried it and agree that VR hardware tech still isn't quite there (although it's definitely getting close and is vastly better than the previous serious attempts), but never thought that the first gen headsets from Oculus and HTC were going to take off and become "must have" products. My initial feeling was that perhaps by the second gen, or maybe the third if vendors stick it out that long, it might get somewhere, but I pretty much gave up on that notion after last year's sales figures and the lack of v2 products in the new year.
Right now, I think it's never going to happen as pure VR, e.g. as implemented by the Rift/Vive, but rather be supplanted by AR headsets that can also do 100% overlays to replicate VR. Unlike VR, AR headsets like Hololens do at least have offer some capacity for doing things that can't really be done easily any other way that could become a potential "killer app", especially in STEM fields - being able to walk around a factory and see new installations projected over the existing equipment for instance. Sure, the technology to do all that effectively and portably is even further off and prices several times higher, but if this attempt at VR is now essentially dead in the water, then AR's price and performance issues are likely to be addressed before vendors give it another go, in which case why bother with "just" VR?
No, because they're not abusing a position of dominance in the market to gain an unfair advantage over their competitors. Same reason why Apple didn't get into legal hot water for doing exactly the same thing as Microsoft at the same time (IIRC they had about 5-10% of the desktop market share at the time); not being a near monopoly gives you a lot more latitude in what you are able to do or, conversely, why Google is being pressured into allowing Android device makers to optionally unbundle Google's own apps, even if it is for a fee, because they currently have about 75% of the mobile device OS market.
It's really not about the users. It's about cold hard cash flowing from ProtonVPN to the Mozilla Foundation in return for the advertisement and any click throughs it might generate. Ultimately, Mozilla's business model requires they have cashflow to operate, so they need to use partnerships like this or having a search engine paying to be the default for the browser to generate enough of it, albeit with a choice of partnership that is somewhat questionable due to the number of users that will have no interest in the VPN but still have to deal with the notification popups. It's also kinda redundant long term, assuming that Project Fusion's efforts to integrate more functionality from TorBrowser directly into the Privacy Mode code come to fruition.
I dunno, some frames are pretty heavy, especially the wooden ones, so it wouldn't be too difficult to put the shredder in the bottom and some batteries in the top and sides to balance it all up. Having the frame cover the guides wouldn't be too unusual either; it's quite common for the outer edge of a canvas or print to be behind the frame - usually it's wrapped all the way around and fixed on the rear. There are any number of release mechanisms that don't suck much juice either; you just need to think beyond the couple of days of your typical smartphone with all feature enabled - a modified camera remote could work very well for instance.
That said, I'm pretty sure that Sotheby's was aware to at least expect *something* out of the ordinary, if not exactly what was going to happen. Note also it appears to have stopped shredding with the image partially intact and still in the frame in a manner that still allows for display, probably by design so that the buyer is going to be upset either. Quite the opposite in fact; they now have an extremely famous piece of art that is now an extremely famous piece of performance art as well - instant appreciation in value, for those that are into that kind of thing.
Oh yes, I can see it now. The colonists arrive expecting to find their Amazon Prime delivery of several metric tons of habit construction materials, food, water, and so on waiting for them, but instead get a little card apologizing for being unable to deliver on account of there being no one available to sign for it.
Auditing revealling financial irregularities that led to delayed SEC filings that predated even the earliest claims made in the Bloomberg article - ultimately it was about breaching SEC filing requirements, rather than the underlying financial issues, that led to the delisting.
Complete lack of any hard evidence to support Bloomberg's claims aside, if you were to take it at face value then you've got to hand the Amazon team some *serious* respect for noticing that there was an additional chip the size of a pencil tip on some of a their server boards that was not present on others or in the design spec. And that's before you consider that they didn't just blow it off and supposedly figured out at least some of the things that it was up to.
Still not quite as much respect as I'm giving the writer of the piece for coming up with this gem though: "Two of Elemental’s biggest early clients were the Mormon church, which used the technology to beam sermons to congregations around the world, and the adult film industry, which did not.", (beaming of the Missionary Position around the world not withstanding).
Fine for a family car with self-drive (or even Tesla's driver assistance) functionality, but we're specifically talking about self-driving taxis here. What is the humans in the taxi are using it because they are not able (legally and/or physically) to drive, and that's why they are taking the taxi in the first place? It's going to be kind of limiting for a taxi if it can only accept passengers that are able to drive it as well, especially on a Friday or Saturday night, are they also going to have to require the designated driver to scan their driver's license and to breathe into a breathalyzer before setting off?
I guess there would be slightly less chance of the floor getting covered in vomit though, so there is that.
You're probably right on that, but there are still a lot of assumptions here - including that the thing even exists and is a single entity; it could turn out to be a collection of gravitationally bound objects in a common orbit similar to Pluto and Charon, for instance. In that case, even if the combined mass is similar to Uranus/Neptune and the individual mass of the larger objects is larger than (say) Earth, would that still a planet, singular, or even an ETNO? What about the individual larger masses - planets or ETNOs?
Personally, I don't really care whether Pluto is officially a planet or not; because it was when I was first learning about space that's still how I think of it, but on a practical level given the range of other objects we now know are out there it probably does make more sense to have it in some other category. Alternatively, if you're going to officially classify Pluto as a planet, then what about Eris, which has more mass but with a much greater orbital eccentricity? With a little luck, this new object will turn out to be something that doesn't fit the current classification schema, force the IAU back to the drawing board on definitions, and they'll then figure out a way to include Pluto as a planet again (based on mass and orbital inclination/circularity, perhaps?) to stop at least some of the bickering.
Assuming it does exist, then based on the IAU's current position on what constitutes a planet and where it's orbiting, the most likely current classification would seem to be either a Kuiper Belt Object or a Plutoid. Alternatively, they could go back to the drawing board again and revamp the classification system to try and make arbitrarily pigeon-holing lumps of rock and gas going around stars into types at least a little less confusing and contentious.
Oh, come on Kendall, it's all down to how you fit the curve to the data points (oblig. XKCD) and you know it. Depending on the approach you use, you can make any one of the lines in that graph other than India's have the best overall downward trend over the next few years. It's lies, damn lies, and statistics, pure and simple, so unless the person making the claim that A is doing better than B is caveating it with their methodology they're just as credible/full of it as someone claiming that B is doing better than A.
So much this. This is just another part of what happens when parents wrap their precious snowflakes up in cotton wool and bubblewrap and only allow them to frequent "safe spaces" instead of letting them start to figure things out for themselves, including all the accompanying cuts and bruises to body and ego, and building up their self-confidence and life skills in a controlled manner. No matter how much we'd prefer it to be otherwise, life can - and does - suck from time to time, and other people can be - and are - assholes from time to time, so the sooner kids start to realise that and begin acquiring the tools they'll need to deal with it the better.
It's called "parenting" folks, and remember - how you treat your own kids will often be returned in kind when your looking to retire and rely on them for support, so best make a good job of it. If, on the otherhand, you're looking for an almost guaranteed path to a 20- or 30-something fuckup, then denying them that gradual learning curve throughout their adolescence and just shoving them off the deep end when it's time to leave home for college, career, or jail, sure seems like a great way to do it.
Advertising RoI is a notoriously difficult things to pin down, no matter what the snake oil salespeople in ad-sales, SEO, and marketing would have you believe. For the right ad, that hits the right audience, at the right time, I have no doubt that you'd easily be able to exceed that 7% figure; the rest are far more subjective - there was a story doing the rounds recently that Google's ad-sales people know that statistically most ad-agencies - the middle-men between Google and the company trying to shift an actually product or service - will fail within a year, so just try and bleed them for as much as they can, while they last. Basically, it's an MLM model of blowing smoke and peddling snake oil all the way down, and with a failure rate like that the norm is probably indicative of an typical RoI that's better summed up as "don't bother".
There have also been several reports of quite high-profile companies that might be starting to realise that and have slashed their ad-budgets - especially for online spend - recently, usually accompanied by anecdotal evidence of near zero impact on retail turnover. YMMV though; there's a big difference between an established company/product - especially in cases of near monopolies or where the brand is synonymous with the product (Hoover vs. vacuum cleaner, for instance) and a new company trying to break into the market that currently has almost zero customer awareness they even exist, let alone why they might want to buy their products/services.
I think it's probably the fittingly named "Enormous Theorem" on Symmetry that took dozens of mathemeticians decades to complete. That runs to over 15,000 pages just for the calculations, and even the "guide" runs to a further 1,200 pages.