Seems to me that eliminating the battery entirely is unlikely, but that this could be used in conjunction with smaller batteries to solve the "range anxiety". You're good to go with your batteries for your daily runaround routes (including getting off the highway to pee), and you use the highway's power for your inter-city travel. The car would be far cheaper if it needed only 50 miles worth of range rather than 300.
You might even be able to charge your battery, eliminating the need for a charging station at home in some circumstances. That's fraught, but it might find some applications.
Perhaps you can explain this to me... what is the value of oral arguments at all?
The justices get vast piles of paper documents, extensive briefs, case histories, etc etc etc. The oral arguments are generally given only a single hour; if I remember correctly the PPACA was given a whopping afternoon. These are complex issues; a case doesn't reach the Supreme Court unless there is genuine disagreement among very high level legal minds. They will proceed to hash it out among themselves and with their clerks, for many hours.
Is anything actually achieved by oral arguments? It seems mainly an opportunity for lawyers to get flustered, choose the wrong tack while thinking on their feet, be manipulated by the justices, and oversimplify.
Is Thomas' silence really a comment on the fact that this is a waste of his, and everybody else's, time?
I'm asking this in all seriousness. I'm not a lawyer and I wouldn't presume to tell them how to do their business. But as an outsider, I find this perplexing.
IANAP, but the Wiki article on linacs sez that the advantage of a linear accelerator is that you can use bigger, heavier ions since there's no need to continually accelerate them just to keep them in a circle. That energy is sometimes given off as synchrotron radiation, which would be wasted.
Another bonus: now that we know where to looking for the Higgs, we can make it for a lot less energy. The LHC needed extra power to make the Higgs in particular ways that left an easily-noticeable signal (in particle physics terms). Now that we know what to look for, we can produce more Higgs bosons for less energy, and make better measurements.
There is a point of view there, expressed in terms of which facts they included and which ones they left out. It's just that it doesn't tell you whom to hate, which is what "point of view" has come to mean in America.
I hadn't heard of the Beal Conjecture, so the first thought that ran through my brain was the Beale Cipher, a set of coded 19th century messages supposedly leading to millions of dollars in treasure.
Alas, they appear to be a hoax, and the Beal Conjecture is probably more solvable.
It's all of the other programs (I just met somebody who went on a partial bowling scholarship) that really seem to exemplify what college sports should be. They make for well-rounded students while simultaneously giving some kids a chance to hit a school they couldn't have done otherwise (or at all).
When people complain about college sports, it's really football that they have in mind, and basketball to a lesser extent. The relationship between colleges, the teams, and the professional industry that has sprung up around them has become rather pathological. But it's also so ingrained that I don't know if it can be fixed, and may simply have to be viewed as a loss-leader for the rest of the programs.
I'd feel better about it if the kids on scholarship took good advantage of their opportunity. If they're getting an education in exchange for providing a form of entertainment to their fellow students... yeah, I can see that. It's hard to quantify the value of entertainment, and a lot of alumni seem to feel pretty strongly about it.
But while sports fans among the alums may it, that seems too much like subsidizing their entertainment if there isn't any other benefit. If the student-athletes aren't also students for real, then the vast majority of them are wasting their time, and it seems a poor mission for the college to serve as a pro-sports incubator as well. Let the NFL teams pay the colleges for the privilege.
I'm not a baseball fan, but I know genuine baseball fans. The game is much more interesting with them around; they're seeing a lot more than I do and can point it out to me. I'm not gonna take the time that they have to put in to develop that much appreciation, but I appreciate that they do.
I suppose I should sit down with a soccer fan at a similar level one day and have the point out all the stuff that I'm missing.
The episodic nature of football can be an advantage. The ball is only in play for a few seconds at a time, but an awful lot happens in those few seconds. 22 players are each doing something very specific and highly coordinated. The play is worth watching from several different angles to appreciate all that's going on.
TV timeouts and other things have dragged that out much further than is interesting: commercials are never fun. But that's the thing with continuous play sports like soccer: you can cut away from it without feeling like you've missed all that much. What you did miss can be re-shown in highlights.
I agree that hockey manages to blend it exceptionally well. All 14 players are nearly continuously involved in a fairly active way. (OK, maybe the goalies spend time genuinely out of the action.) It makes a great spectator sport: there's always something important going on, not just when there are goals.
But American football is also a really good spectator sport. It just takes a bit of assistance to see everything that's going on. (It's better live than on TV, but even in a stadium there are replays on the giant monitors. I honestly don't know what it is people see in high school football, which lacks that.)
If you ask them, they'll tell you that the sports programs pay for themselves by attracting donations from alumni with fond memories of school spirit at games.
Studies do not actually back that up, and in fact contradict it. However, if you try to abolish the sports programs, you will hear it from enraged alumni.
Over the past 12 months, Yahoo's revenue was $4.91B, for a gross profit of $3.37B. They have enough cash on hand to buy Tumblr three times over ($3.01B), and practically no debt ($.036B).
Whatever is is wrong with Yahoo (and it's a LOT) it's still a massive revenue-generating machine. (Whether this Tumblr acquisition will contribute to that in the future... that's far less clear.)
Software patents are actually defined in terms of a physical object, the medium on which it's stored. They often include magic phrases like "a computer readable memory device having stored thereon a computer program".
IMHO, the problem isn't with the physicalness of the invention. After all, in the end it's really the insight and effort that you're trying to reward. The problem, I believe, is that the USPTO has done a terrible job of encouraging insight and effort by granting vague and obvious patents which contain neither, and the only "insight" was in how to game the patent office.
Judging what's insightful enough to merit a patent is tricky, but the patent trolls rely exclusively on patents where anybody "skilled in the art" would tell you that it was too trivial to bother writing down. The trolls rely on the fact that judges and juries are not skilled in the art, and are easily confused. Even in this case, the judge who came to the correct conclusion ends up making it (IMHO) needlessly complicated:
He explicitly makes "obviousness" a matter of law, i.e. a thing defined by the details of previous cases, rather than the universal opinion of those who would have done precisely the same thing if presented with the same problem.
Yeah, I was afraid of that. Fortunately, the "medical marijuana" back door appears to be much more effective than the "really, you need it for industrial applications for which no other plants are as magical" back door. At least within some states, that one is slowly wedging the door into recreational use.
That doesn't solve the federal problem, which still presents problems even in legal states, and which will have to be solved before the actual (as opposed to delusional/wishful) advantages of hemp over other products can be realized. That one, I'm afraid, make take a few decades, even after public opinion shifts.
The wiki link to "bast" refers to a dozen species that produce basts, including flax, wisteria, mulberry, and kudzu.
Is there a reason to go for hemp in particular, aside from the usual hemp-will-solve-everything? Flax is also produced in industrial quantities. TFA doesn't mention why they chose hemp bast.
Look, I'm all for legalized weed and hate the propaganda that makes it out as a devil drug, but I'm not any bigger fan of exaggerations about the wonders of hemp. At least on this web site, it would be nice to look at actual data, rather than who can out-propagandize everybody else.
Obama and the Democrats did what was politically possible. The public option would have been too politically unpalatable for the most conservative Democrats. Under the rules, they needed every single Democrat; no Republican would have given serious consideration to any plan, even the one that is actually substantially similar to their own (and could have been even more similar if they'd participated in the development of it).
In hindsight, they might as well have gone for a public option: most of the conservative Democrats who put the kibosh on it to protect their right flanks lost anyway in the resulting outrage (a bizarre combination of complaints about the cost with complaints about nonexistent "death panels" whose actual purpose was to reduce costs). If they'd plotted it out better, they'd have just expanded Medicare as an insurance provider, which would have been far neater and cleaner than the state-run exchanges that are supposed to do the job. (People like to praise state governments over federal ones, largely because people are so focused on what they imagine is The Big Picture that they have no idea how badly their state governments mismanage things, and how little scrutiny they get for it, while suffering from massive losses to scale than the federal government achieves.)
Given the bigger the number, the more smaller numbers that could divide into it, suggests primes should be getting further and further apart.
Further apart _on average_, which they do. This result doesn't change that; the density of primes still goes to zero.
The question is whether despite that increasing _average_ distance, there is also an increase in the _minimum_ distance. That was unproven, and now we know: the greatest minimum distance is at most 70 million. It could be as small as 2, and in fact I think most mathematicians strongly suspect that it is: no matter how high you go, there will always be some pair of primes larger than that, separated only by 2. But they'll be rarer and rarer, just as the primes themselves are harder and harder to find.
So whether it's a campaign contribution or whatever, it's paid with after tax dollars like you would buy any other thing.
I thought that was the case already. As I understand it, donations to 501(c)4 and 527 groups aren't tax deductible. Donations to 501(c)3 groups are, but they're not allowed to do political campaigning.
(501(c)4 groups are supposed to do only a little political campaigning, which is at the center of the current IRS kerfluffle: they investigated what are almost certainly political groups, who were supposed to file as 527s [whose donor lists are not secret]. But since many of these were conservative political groups, who all sprang into existence at the same time, Obama bad and Sarah Palin gets to be President. or some such.)
There's also more concern about churches, who are 501(c)3 and therefore have tax-deductible donations, who are explicitly doing political campaigning. But since it's a church-state matter, the IRS is reluctant to call them on it.
I'm having a hard time sorting out their methodology, but it looks as if the problem is that there just weren't any "anti-" groups opposing the measure, at least by their calculation. They totted up only $1.4 million spent by all the "anti-" groups, which is practically nothing compared to the billions spent on all of the Senate campaigns put together.
Neither, in fact, is that $55M spent by "pro-" groups all that large. This is the problem with the "campaign fund bribery" theory. These groups are heavily constrained in how much money they can give, just $10,000 to each candidate. These candidates need millions.
Their contributions just aren't big enough to make a bribe. It's not even enough to get them to take a meeting with you. Rather, it's the other way around: they contribute to the candidates that they want to see win the election.
EVERYBODY on this list got more money from the "pro-" groups than from the "anti-" groups. Kelly Ayotte voted no; she got $326,335, compared to $31,751. Mike Crapo, $181,414 vs $15,020. Ted Cruz, $529,897 vs $19,050.
What this data indicates, if anything, is that there just weren't many groups who opposed this. The direct marketers, the catalog sales, and computer manufacturers. That's it. Weren't there any consumer groups? Consumers are the ones who pay the tax. None of the consumer groups took a stand? Or did their crappy methodology just miss them?
That engages them in the process of actually doing science, as once they have proposed a hypothesis as to what may be causing an increase in CO2, those hypotheses can be tested.
I really wish that were true, but nobody except a few working climatologists actually does the tests. For 99.999% of the population, "science" means "looking up the arguments that agree with me, and repeating them." They don't even read the primary sources, nor are they capable of tracking back their arguments to them.
That's true even for people who are correct about climate change. The difference isn't that they've engaged in actual science, but rather that they're on the side of those who have. They're not even necessarily any less ideology-bound. Though these days, the fierce devotion of the right to its own echo chamber is unparalleled. The problem isn't so much that they're wrong on climate change, but that their entire view of what science does is completely wrong, and the processes themselves are treated with suspicion when they contradict their beliefs. If the scientific data doesn't tell them what they want to hear, they'll tell you that the scientists who gathered the data are lying.
My point being: you're not going to convince them with a socratic argument based on verifiable data, and they're not going to go out and gather the data themselves. They'll continue to cherry-pick their arguments (i.e. every graph they show you will begin in 1998), and I can't think of any mechanism for changing that. (Except perhaps time: the denialists tend to be older, and are eventually going to die off.)
It's standard fare for science press releases. If the actual advance you're making is boring (using different hardware to speed up processing), then tell them about the part that's been done all along and take credit for it. (Alternatively: take credit for being "just about there" from some far off future goal, to which you've just made a non-trivial but still minor advancement.)
Most "science" journalists eat it up, slightly rewriting it and passing it over to their editors so that they can knock off early and grab a beer. One would hope for slightly more from a web site "for nerds", but their editors also would like to knock off early and grab a beer.
I wonder how bad a problem identity theft is in those cases. "Hi, I'm Jim Jones, and I'd like to withdraw all of the money out of my account." "Why sure, Mr. Jones, if that's who you say you are. Since I've got no pic on file, I'm going to take you at your word."
It's hardly the worst problem banks have in terms of security: everybody you've ever handed a check has everything they need to empty your account, since the only ID verification is the signature and they're not checking that, either. We've always had these problems, though the increased reliance on computers means that the thefts can be automated more effectively.
I'd pay more for an account which took better steps to verify my identity before giving out money from my account, or worse, loaning out money to somebody claiming to be me.
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Seems to me that eliminating the battery entirely is unlikely, but that this could be used in conjunction with smaller batteries to solve the "range anxiety". You're good to go with your batteries for your daily runaround routes (including getting off the highway to pee), and you use the highway's power for your inter-city travel. The car would be far cheaper if it needed only 50 miles worth of range rather than 300.
You might even be able to charge your battery, eliminating the need for a charging station at home in some circumstances. That's fraught, but it might find some applications.
The joke is often written as a "blind carpenter", which helps make the pun a bit tighter.
Perhaps you can explain this to me... what is the value of oral arguments at all?
The justices get vast piles of paper documents, extensive briefs, case histories, etc etc etc. The oral arguments are generally given only a single hour; if I remember correctly the PPACA was given a whopping afternoon. These are complex issues; a case doesn't reach the Supreme Court unless there is genuine disagreement among very high level legal minds. They will proceed to hash it out among themselves and with their clerks, for many hours.
Is anything actually achieved by oral arguments? It seems mainly an opportunity for lawyers to get flustered, choose the wrong tack while thinking on their feet, be manipulated by the justices, and oversimplify.
Is Thomas' silence really a comment on the fact that this is a waste of his, and everybody else's, time?
I'm asking this in all seriousness. I'm not a lawyer and I wouldn't presume to tell them how to do their business. But as an outsider, I find this perplexing.
IANAP, but the Wiki article on linacs sez that the advantage of a linear accelerator is that you can use bigger, heavier ions since there's no need to continually accelerate them just to keep them in a circle. That energy is sometimes given off as synchrotron radiation, which would be wasted.
Another bonus: now that we know where to looking for the Higgs, we can make it for a lot less energy. The LHC needed extra power to make the Higgs in particular ways that left an easily-noticeable signal (in particle physics terms). Now that we know what to look for, we can produce more Higgs bosons for less energy, and make better measurements.
There is a point of view there, expressed in terms of which facts they included and which ones they left out. It's just that it doesn't tell you whom to hate, which is what "point of view" has come to mean in America.
I hadn't heard of the Beal Conjecture, so the first thought that ran through my brain was the Beale Cipher, a set of coded 19th century messages supposedly leading to millions of dollars in treasure.
Alas, they appear to be a hoax, and the Beal Conjecture is probably more solvable.
It's all of the other programs (I just met somebody who went on a partial bowling scholarship) that really seem to exemplify what college sports should be. They make for well-rounded students while simultaneously giving some kids a chance to hit a school they couldn't have done otherwise (or at all).
When people complain about college sports, it's really football that they have in mind, and basketball to a lesser extent. The relationship between colleges, the teams, and the professional industry that has sprung up around them has become rather pathological. But it's also so ingrained that I don't know if it can be fixed, and may simply have to be viewed as a loss-leader for the rest of the programs.
I'd feel better about it if the kids on scholarship took good advantage of their opportunity. If they're getting an education in exchange for providing a form of entertainment to their fellow students... yeah, I can see that. It's hard to quantify the value of entertainment, and a lot of alumni seem to feel pretty strongly about it.
But while sports fans among the alums may it, that seems too much like subsidizing their entertainment if there isn't any other benefit. If the student-athletes aren't also students for real, then the vast majority of them are wasting their time, and it seems a poor mission for the college to serve as a pro-sports incubator as well. Let the NFL teams pay the colleges for the privilege.
I'm not a baseball fan, but I know genuine baseball fans. The game is much more interesting with them around; they're seeing a lot more than I do and can point it out to me. I'm not gonna take the time that they have to put in to develop that much appreciation, but I appreciate that they do.
I suppose I should sit down with a soccer fan at a similar level one day and have the point out all the stuff that I'm missing.
The episodic nature of football can be an advantage. The ball is only in play for a few seconds at a time, but an awful lot happens in those few seconds. 22 players are each doing something very specific and highly coordinated. The play is worth watching from several different angles to appreciate all that's going on.
TV timeouts and other things have dragged that out much further than is interesting: commercials are never fun. But that's the thing with continuous play sports like soccer: you can cut away from it without feeling like you've missed all that much. What you did miss can be re-shown in highlights.
I agree that hockey manages to blend it exceptionally well. All 14 players are nearly continuously involved in a fairly active way. (OK, maybe the goalies spend time genuinely out of the action.) It makes a great spectator sport: there's always something important going on, not just when there are goals.
But American football is also a really good spectator sport. It just takes a bit of assistance to see everything that's going on. (It's better live than on TV, but even in a stadium there are replays on the giant monitors. I honestly don't know what it is people see in high school football, which lacks that.)
If you ask them, they'll tell you that the sports programs pay for themselves by attracting donations from alumni with fond memories of school spirit at games.
Studies do not actually back that up, and in fact contradict it. However, if you try to abolish the sports programs, you will hear it from enraged alumni.
But they will need to be aware of your tethers. Probably best used away from other air traffic.
Over the past 12 months, Yahoo's revenue was $4.91B, for a gross profit of $3.37B. They have enough cash on hand to buy Tumblr three times over ($3.01B), and practically no debt ($.036B).
Whatever is is wrong with Yahoo (and it's a LOT) it's still a massive revenue-generating machine. (Whether this Tumblr acquisition will contribute to that in the future... that's far less clear.)
Software patents are actually defined in terms of a physical object, the medium on which it's stored. They often include magic phrases like "a computer readable memory device having stored thereon a computer program".
IMHO, the problem isn't with the physicalness of the invention. After all, in the end it's really the insight and effort that you're trying to reward. The problem, I believe, is that the USPTO has done a terrible job of encouraging insight and effort by granting vague and obvious patents which contain neither, and the only "insight" was in how to game the patent office.
Judging what's insightful enough to merit a patent is tricky, but the patent trolls rely exclusively on patents where anybody "skilled in the art" would tell you that it was too trivial to bother writing down. The trolls rely on the fact that judges and juries are not skilled in the art, and are easily confused. Even in this case, the judge who came to the correct conclusion ends up making it (IMHO) needlessly complicated:
http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/stories/opinions-orders/2011-1009.Opinion.1-17-2013.1.PDF
He explicitly makes "obviousness" a matter of law, i.e. a thing defined by the details of previous cases, rather than the universal opinion of those who would have done precisely the same thing if presented with the same problem.
Yeah, I was afraid of that. Fortunately, the "medical marijuana" back door appears to be much more effective than the "really, you need it for industrial applications for which no other plants are as magical" back door. At least within some states, that one is slowly wedging the door into recreational use.
That doesn't solve the federal problem, which still presents problems even in legal states, and which will have to be solved before the actual (as opposed to delusional/wishful) advantages of hemp over other products can be realized. That one, I'm afraid, make take a few decades, even after public opinion shifts.
The wiki link to "bast" refers to a dozen species that produce basts, including flax, wisteria, mulberry, and kudzu.
Is there a reason to go for hemp in particular, aside from the usual hemp-will-solve-everything? Flax is also produced in industrial quantities. TFA doesn't mention why they chose hemp bast.
Look, I'm all for legalized weed and hate the propaganda that makes it out as a devil drug, but I'm not any bigger fan of exaggerations about the wonders of hemp. At least on this web site, it would be nice to look at actual data, rather than who can out-propagandize everybody else.
Obama and the Democrats did what was politically possible. The public option would have been too politically unpalatable for the most conservative Democrats. Under the rules, they needed every single Democrat; no Republican would have given serious consideration to any plan, even the one that is actually substantially similar to their own (and could have been even more similar if they'd participated in the development of it).
In hindsight, they might as well have gone for a public option: most of the conservative Democrats who put the kibosh on it to protect their right flanks lost anyway in the resulting outrage (a bizarre combination of complaints about the cost with complaints about nonexistent "death panels" whose actual purpose was to reduce costs). If they'd plotted it out better, they'd have just expanded Medicare as an insurance provider, which would have been far neater and cleaner than the state-run exchanges that are supposed to do the job. (People like to praise state governments over federal ones, largely because people are so focused on what they imagine is The Big Picture that they have no idea how badly their state governments mismanage things, and how little scrutiny they get for it, while suffering from massive losses to scale than the federal government achieves.)
Given the bigger the number, the more smaller numbers that could divide into it, suggests primes should be getting further and further apart.
Further apart _on average_, which they do. This result doesn't change that; the density of primes still goes to zero.
The question is whether despite that increasing _average_ distance, there is also an increase in the _minimum_ distance. That was unproven, and now we know: the greatest minimum distance is at most 70 million. It could be as small as 2, and in fact I think most mathematicians strongly suspect that it is: no matter how high you go, there will always be some pair of primes larger than that, separated only by 2. But they'll be rarer and rarer, just as the primes themselves are harder and harder to find.
Green strikes me as a pretty smart guy, but I don't think he has a PhD. I don't believe he even went to college.
Perhaps you're thinking of Brian May, the Queen guitarist who got a PhD in astrophysics.
So whether it's a campaign contribution or whatever, it's paid with after tax dollars like you would buy any other thing.
I thought that was the case already. As I understand it, donations to 501(c)4 and 527 groups aren't tax deductible. Donations to 501(c)3 groups are, but they're not allowed to do political campaigning.
(501(c)4 groups are supposed to do only a little political campaigning, which is at the center of the current IRS kerfluffle: they investigated what are almost certainly political groups, who were supposed to file as 527s [whose donor lists are not secret]. But since many of these were conservative political groups, who all sprang into existence at the same time, Obama bad and Sarah Palin gets to be President. or some such.)
There's also more concern about churches, who are 501(c)3 and therefore have tax-deductible donations, who are explicitly doing political campaigning. But since it's a church-state matter, the IRS is reluctant to call them on it.
I dunno, but TFA appears to be outraged about it.
I'm having a hard time sorting out their methodology, but it looks as if the problem is that there just weren't any "anti-" groups opposing the measure, at least by their calculation. They totted up only $1.4 million spent by all the "anti-" groups, which is practically nothing compared to the billions spent on all of the Senate campaigns put together.
Neither, in fact, is that $55M spent by "pro-" groups all that large. This is the problem with the "campaign fund bribery" theory. These groups are heavily constrained in how much money they can give, just $10,000 to each candidate. These candidates need millions.
http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/contriblimits.shtml
Their contributions just aren't big enough to make a bribe. It's not even enough to get them to take a meeting with you. Rather, it's the other way around: they contribute to the candidates that they want to see win the election.
EVERYBODY on this list got more money from the "pro-" groups than from the "anti-" groups. Kelly Ayotte voted no; she got $326,335, compared to $31,751. Mike Crapo, $181,414 vs $15,020. Ted Cruz, $529,897 vs $19,050.
What this data indicates, if anything, is that there just weren't many groups who opposed this. The direct marketers, the catalog sales, and computer manufacturers. That's it. Weren't there any consumer groups? Consumers are the ones who pay the tax. None of the consumer groups took a stand? Or did their crappy methodology just miss them?
That engages them in the process of actually doing science, as once they have proposed a hypothesis as to what may be causing an increase in CO2, those hypotheses can be tested.
I really wish that were true, but nobody except a few working climatologists actually does the tests. For 99.999% of the population, "science" means "looking up the arguments that agree with me, and repeating them." They don't even read the primary sources, nor are they capable of tracking back their arguments to them.
That's true even for people who are correct about climate change. The difference isn't that they've engaged in actual science, but rather that they're on the side of those who have. They're not even necessarily any less ideology-bound. Though these days, the fierce devotion of the right to its own echo chamber is unparalleled. The problem isn't so much that they're wrong on climate change, but that their entire view of what science does is completely wrong, and the processes themselves are treated with suspicion when they contradict their beliefs. If the scientific data doesn't tell them what they want to hear, they'll tell you that the scientists who gathered the data are lying.
My point being: you're not going to convince them with a socratic argument based on verifiable data, and they're not going to go out and gather the data themselves. They'll continue to cherry-pick their arguments (i.e. every graph they show you will begin in 1998), and I can't think of any mechanism for changing that. (Except perhaps time: the denialists tend to be older, and are eventually going to die off.)
It's standard fare for science press releases. If the actual advance you're making is boring (using different hardware to speed up processing), then tell them about the part that's been done all along and take credit for it. (Alternatively: take credit for being "just about there" from some far off future goal, to which you've just made a non-trivial but still minor advancement.)
Most "science" journalists eat it up, slightly rewriting it and passing it over to their editors so that they can knock off early and grab a beer. One would hope for slightly more from a web site "for nerds", but their editors also would like to knock off early and grab a beer.
I wonder how bad a problem identity theft is in those cases. "Hi, I'm Jim Jones, and I'd like to withdraw all of the money out of my account." "Why sure, Mr. Jones, if that's who you say you are. Since I've got no pic on file, I'm going to take you at your word."
It's hardly the worst problem banks have in terms of security: everybody you've ever handed a check has everything they need to empty your account, since the only ID verification is the signature and they're not checking that, either. We've always had these problems, though the increased reliance on computers means that the thefts can be automated more effectively.
I'd pay more for an account which took better steps to verify my identity before giving out money from my account, or worse, loaning out money to somebody claiming to be me.