If you don't like Facebook's policies don't use them. Nothing forces you to use Facebook, there are plenty of other social websites many without policies similar to Facebooks.
I personally encourage Facebook to actually enforce it's rules. I hope more people run around reporting rule violations so that these incidents keep happening. Maybe at some point people will realize Facebook is pure evil and stop using it. I don't use it, and neither should you.
And don't give me any shit about you can't because your friends aren't using any of the other sites, because your friends are saying the same thing. It takes guts to stand up and say I won't play that game.
There's a bunch of research going into reducing the costs. There are huge areas where the installation cost can be reduced. Integrated and standardized framing, cheaper roof mount systems or even integral mounting systems that become the roofing material, flush roof mount with tracking, integrated, cheaper and more efficient micro-inverters, etc. In fact solar city just dumped about 50 million bucks into some heavy research on just that and the beauty is that because they are an installer and directly involved in the research they can test each idea directly and have first hand knowledge on where the expensive parts of the process are and what works and what doesn't. The quickest way to drive down install costs is to get the inspectors, the engineers, the installers and the panel designers all in the same room which they can do. If they can drive down the install cost they'll be greatly simplifying the install process which will in turn drive down the inspection costs and a bunch of similar follow on costs. And of course they aren't the only one pouring money into installation cost reduction.
There's a ton of waste in residential installs right now because they are using 100 year old methods. With real research going into this I expect they'll be able to at least halve the installation costs. If they succeed at that they'll drive solar power prices below the cost of coal almost immediately. This doesn't include the other things that are being researched like technology that will heat the panel just enough to dump snow in the winter, better heat tolerance and things like automatic tracking without having to move the panel (tilting the cell in the frame or focusing lens/prisims).
There's so much money being poured into research it's pretty darn cool IMO. Solar PV is getting more research than almost any other industry out there because of it's potential. Companies like Solar City have been turning down investment money because so much is pouring in that they can't invest it all.
Stadium revenue isn't even 5% of the teams earnings anymore. It's so ridiculously small in fact that it's the entire reason cited by the FCC for abolishing the blackout restriction. They could literally give the tickets away and it wouldn't impact earnings in any significant manner.
The reason they don't cheapen the tickets is that by keeping prices high the owners can use the tickets like money. Court-side tickets are so expensive when they hand the mayor a season's worth of tickets he's bound to whatever the owner wants because they've given him the equivalent of $100K. But because they set the pricing on the seats they can declare the tickets worth less than $5. Those high priced tickets are essentially their own untraceable money that they can print at will.
Real Celebrities don't do anything. They call their agent (actually they have their assistant call their agent). The agent or their staff generally has a few brain cells to rub together and does something sensible then tells the celebrity they did something about it and the issue goes away because the celebrity has the attention span of a hyperactive 2 year old who just ate a pound of candy.
Occasionally the celebrity is a primadonna or insists on doing things themselves or forces their agent to do something the agent advised against. Those cases usually end up being like when Streisand tried to have pictures of her home removed from the internet and coined an entire phrase for what happens when you try to use a court to censor the internet (namely the Streisand effect). Usually after doing something like this a couple times the celebrity learns to trust that their agent is smarter than them and starts listening to them and then they become like the rest of the celebrities.
As you said, lawyers who run around tossing around 100 million dollar figures and talk about suing Google (who has the money to drag the case out for a decade, just for spite) don't actually represent real celebrities, though they may represent some hack. Lawyers that represent real celebrities are hired by the agent and are totally professional. They'll send nice nonthreatening letters and ask to meet with the Google executives. Being the smooth talking devils they are they will likely convince Google's execs to do something even if it's nothing that will affect it. They will then bill the celebrity about $100K and say they did all that's legally possible and if the celebrity wants to do more they need a million dollar retainer and a contract and that they'll probably lose the case and cause a ton of bad publicity (which the Agent will tell them is totally stupid).
As the years roll by, you can't help wondering what we're actually giving up in exchange for holding the minimum system spec at a single-core 1GHz, 32-bit chip with just 1GB of RAM. The average smartphone is more powerful than this these days.
Considering Microsoft's goal is to unite all their operating systems and have the same system running on all platforms this means they WANT to run windows on smartphones. So keeping the systems requirements less than the average smartphone would be their intent if they want that initiative to succeed. DUH.
How would you even know if you are affected. By your own admission you've not run anything other that what you have installed. You have NOTHING to compare it against. It could be 10 times slower than it should be an you wouldn't know because you haven't done a clean install. This is common knowledge to those that do routine format/reinstall. In the enthusiast category of user it's not uncommon to have this be a standard twice a year operation. If you want to verify it, do a format reinstall and compare the speed. You will find your computer feels new because it's so much faster and responsive.
What stops your average hobbyist is that if you screw it up it will blow up in your face and likely kill you. Even if that risk is minimal for even a minimally skilled person using known plans it is still a non trivial risk that will deter quite a few people.
I also grew up in a time where I had to do things by hand with pencil and paper. I remember learning long division, but I don't think I could do it even if I had hours to try to figure it out. We should teach kids about these old methods and the theories behind them but we shouldn't be wasting time teaching them the method and making them memorize how to do it. They will never do long division by hand in their entire life.
Although it's important to teach theory and the methods behind things, what you talking about isn't that. It was the rote memorization that dominated education for a very long time and thankfully is going away. Much of the criticism that I've seen of the new common core standards in math is much more focused on teaching the theory rather than the rote memorization. Yet even such a significant improvement in how math is taught is being attacked by people that think the old way to teach is the only way to teach. You learn almost nothing memorizing something.
You learn all kinds of cool things when you learn the theory behind it and can take that theory and apply it to other things. About 90% of your average college Engineering school is spent trying to unteach people the rote memorization stuff they were trained to do in primary and secondary education. I don't have a problem with kids using calculators to do simple math when they are being taught the theory and how to use it.
Application lock-in, Microsoft is trying to leverage their existing large application comparability for leverage.
The second is related to the first, in the MS is trying to use there large monopoly in the desktop market to build a monopoly in handheld, tablet and phone.
I believe both will be a failure, they sat on their hands two long while Apple and Google built OS's and now have significant application catalogs. Android and iOS will be very difficult to displace at this point. They'd do better to focus their attention on maintaining and building their enterprise services and continuing to build and support desktop computers. That would probably mean porting office and other major enterprise applications to both the iOS and Android. I simply don't believe they can displace android or iOS at this point.
Moving off grid is not only possible, it's viable cost wise. The more people that move off grid the fewer people will be paying for the plant. The more people move off grid the cheaper going off grid becomes. It's a real problem for the power companies and it's happening right now. They drive up costs on the grid and it only becomes more cost effective to go off grid.
That's the way it works fucktard, no one is obligated to stay on grid and keep paying for it. Drive people offgrid and costs go up. That's what the power company is competing against, they just haven't realized it yet. Forward looking states like California have, they've disconnected power costs and management from the grid, they've mandated storage and renewable generation to force the companies to do what in the end is their only chance of survival in a world where going off grid is not only viable it's cost effective. Solar is cheap and getting cheaper, storage is beginning to follow the curve as well and in a decade both will be cheap enough that almost everyone can afford it.
The problem the utilities have here is that solar is dropping so fast in cost that it's now cost effective on a 10 year ROI to install. You can put panels on your roof with a loan right now where the monthly loan cost will be cheaper than the cost of the electricity it offsets. That's true right now in almost every state in the union. The utilities see this and see a death spiral because their entire business is built around making money generating power from dirty central hydrocarbon based power plants.
So the power companies do the natural thing, they try to get tariffs raised on the solar panels to make them more expensive and halt the installations. But the problem is the panel prices are dropping so fast that anything they do is just going to be temporary. The problem with chasing the "raise the cost of solar" method of competing is that at some point those increased costs make homeowner owned storage viable. Because of the screwing around with Tariffs that happened in Hawaii they now have a booming power storage market and people are beginning to disconnect from the grid entirely.
The power companies are scared that they'll sell less power to customers with solar panels and make less money (which will hit their dividends badly) but what they should really be worried about is customers disconnecting from the grid entirely. Every customer that disconnects from the grid raises the fixed cost transfer to everyone else, which raises power prices and makes solar more attractive. You end up with a self feeding harmonics that starts a slide into a situation that doesn't just destroy the power companies dividend but destroys the company all together.
The companies need to be evolving to be that backup power supply. They need to be shifting generation strategy and bringing online storage so they can displace the gaps so customers don't do it themselves. That's their future business, moving power around and storing it for use when the sun isn't shining. It's going to mean smaller companies and less revenue but that's better than no company at all. Forward looking states realize that the games the companies are playing with the solar tariffs right now are just that games, these states are mandating the companies invest in renewables and storage so they are ready for the change. The states without foresight are allowing the companies to put a big tariff on solar customers thereby driving them towards disconnecting from the grid entirely.
I think centrally managed storage and distribution is better than everyone running their own storage array. These companies are public utilities, that is government granted monopolies that the taxpayer has control over. We should be encouraging solar installation and investing in the grid changes necessary to support it because no matter what the solar is coming. The costs are dropping rapidly and have reached the mass acceptance pricing. Solar is already cheaper without any subsidies than nuclear power. In a few years it's going to be cheaper than coal with the subsidies and within the decade it'll be cheaper than coal without. If we don't make the changes to the grid right now we won't be ready for that colossal shift in generation and everyone will be installing their own backup systems and disconnecting from the grid (which is going to hurt the poor and those living in apartments very hard). I'd be willing to bet that by 2050 half of the homes in the US will have solar arrays on the roof and solar will comprise nearly 50% of the generation capacity.
I wouldn't be investing long term in residential power companies with heavy carbon assets right now.
I'd prefer that they fix the bug that's known about immediately then look for additional ones. That delay to find other similar bugs is how lots and lots of servers get exploited. You close each hole as quickly as you can. The day the Bash exploit came out there were exploits actively scanning within a few hours. Had they delayed to look for similar bugs for a day or week everyone's servers would be compromised.
Yes you should search for similar bugs and do some extensive testing, but delaying fixes for remotely exploitable bugs is beyond stupid. Particularly where the exploit is trivial, requires no permissions and is already in the wild being exploited. Microsoft has a history of delaying those fixes, sometimes for as long as 7 months. That's not a good policy.
Everyone is the press. There is no accreditation or state licensing for reporters that limits their ranks. Any attempt to call actions that are clearly reporting because it's done by a private citizen are nothing but attempts to suppress speech. See, free speech IS free press.If you don't have free speech you don't have a free press, and if you don't have a free press you don't have free speech. It's why they are grouped in the 1st amendment, they ARE the same thing.
The only thing required for you to be a reporter is for you to report on something.
Because it's harder and would require real police work. Without encryption they can look then claim they didn't after they use the information to determine a way to construct probable cause using parallel construction. This is why some people think parallel construction is an end run around warrants and the constitution.
And Deutsche Telekom would sell T-Mobile America in a heartbeat because it has made little to negative profit over it's entire existence. T-Mobile America has been for sale for about 6 years that I'm aware of and DT has been willing to sell it to any serious offer.
Which will ALWAYS cost more than the rest of the world because rather than build it once and regulate access we've created a system that requires all the cellular companies to build out the exact same infrastructure. The result being that we pay for everything 2-5 times.
Whereas for example in the European system they allow providers to build only one tower to service an area then force the provider to provide access and tower space to their competitors at mandated fair pricing. The result is fewer towers, better coverage and lower prices and better profits for the wireless companies. All because government regulated the business.
I believe the thought is they can't get the votes to get the legislature to give the CRTC (or FCC in the US) such broad ranging authority and they are exceeding their current legislative mandate. Companies and individuals should challenge government over reach. If they haven't been granted legal authority to regulate something and pass a bunch of regulations the regulatory body SHOULD be slapped down in court otherwise we've got a serious problem with governance and separation of powers.
Titanium will be significantly heavier than aluminum. Carbon fiber is both lighter and stronger than aluminum but it doesn't bend, it shatters. There are always trade offs, if there weren't they would already be making everything out of the perfect material that is strong, light and flexible (non-plastic) but not too flexible such that it damages anything and is inexpensive. Much like everything there are trade-offs. Aluminum and magnesium alloys currently meet most of the targets to acceptable levels without being too costly. You move to the stronger materials and you will either pay for it in weight, durability or cost.
If the even horizon was actually the body of the object then I don't believe we would be seeing some of the effects we see. Not being an astrophysicist I can't put it in words but there are observed phenomenon relating to black holes that are tied to matter collapsing into the singularity from the event horizon (at least that's our current understanding) if the event horizon is the edge of the body then these phenomenon wouldn't happen.
In all likelihood there is going to be a review that finds some mistake on their part that invalidates their conclusions. Otherwise if they did just solve the contradiction between relativity and quantum mechanics they're going to get the Nobel prize. I wouldn't put odds on the Nobel prize.
Thermal expansion, ocean currents, how the heat uptake/loss changes as the ice melts, salt concentrations, etc.
There are a LOT of variables here that we either have little to no data on or little to no understanding of how it will impact climate. The climate is very complicated. As with another poster I think the climate models are being a bit alarmist in their predictions but the fact is there is so much we don't understand about how it's going to be affected that we'd be remiss if they weren't alarmist because they could be vastly wrong, in the wrong direction! We could find out 20 years down the road that melting the north pole 50% dilutes the salt levels to the point that the ocean currents halt or speedup in some way that dramatically changes climate worldwide (what would happen if the desert band shifted 200 miles toward the poles?). We know almost nothing about the bottom of the ocean and these currents. And that's just one variable. There are dozens that there has been little to no research on.
Maybe it won't be a gradual warming, maybe it will hold for a period as the oceans suck up energy then it will be like a cork popping and within a decade temperatures will jump several degrees (which would be far far more catastrophic than the models are predicting right now). I find global climate change rather scary, adding 1.6watts per m^2 is a tremendous amount of energy and we probably won't know exactly what it does until after we've done it.
Up until ISIS invaded Iraq ISIS was ignored by Syria because they were fighting the other rebel groups. Assad made the mistake of thinking they were happy controlling Raqa (they left other areas alone including a major military base in the area) and wouldn't move outward and that fighting with the other rebel groups served his cause. He didn't realize they were biding their time, building forces and structure for the big invasion. Shortly after taking much of Iraq they dramatically expanded and seized significantly more territory and became much more threatening to the regime. In fact ISIS is probably Assad's most dangerous opponent at this point as they control almost the entire north of Syria. This was double bad for Assad because there were thousands of Iraqi Shia volunteers in Syria fighting and 90% of them left after IS threatened Baghdad and the Shia shrines.
Assad made a HUGE mistake ignoring ISIS. Assad is worried the US will strike his own forces while attacking ISIS but I seriously doubt he's gonna do much to prevent the US striking ISIS. Oh he'll yell and holler about needing his permission, and about Syria's sovereignty but he's not going to try to shoot the planes down unless they come after him. At this point attacking ISIS helps him as much as it helps the ordinary rebels. So the enemy of my enemy shifts again and he'll ignore the US attacks until ISIS is weakened enough to not be a threat to him.
Though he didn't ask for it, congress didn't want him setting the precedent that he was commander in chief so they hurried and passed a resolution allowing it anyway.
You aren't looking at it from the point of view of U2 and Metallica and others. See they get a check every month from their record company. For a decade or so those checks were nice and stable and these people grew fat and lazy. Recently over the last decade those checks have been declining. When Bono and Hetfield get their checks and it's less than the previous month they call up the record company and ask why the check is smaller this month.
The record companies blame it all on piracy rather than tell them the truth, which is that fewer people buy the music today because of streaming services, that the sales that do take place are no longer albums priced at $20, that the single tracks no longer sell for $8 (instead they are individual songs sold at $1-$2 and that competition keeps these prices low) and that the record company even though they do less these days has not lowered the amount of money they take and instead has reduced the royalty fees. After all the record company can't report declining profits, that's for the artists to eat. The model has simply changed, people only buy the songs they like, they are no longer willing to buy an entire album of 8-12 songs when only two of them are good. And there are a LOT of people that no longer even purchase music, instead opting for a monthly fee and streaming whatever music they are interested in. This reduces sales and the those record companies haven't reduced their cut with the drop, they simply give fewer royalties to the artist.
The record industry is FULL of thieves. Any smart artist would have long ago abandoned the major producers and produced and sold their own music. Those that did, have likely seen steady royalties rather than a drop because they cut out the middle man.
Blackberry was never secure. They could tap and listen to whatever they wanted to, RIM simply required a warrant. The India case was a GENERAL warrant not tied to a specific person, the Indian government wanted to be able to monitor ALL cellular traffic and messages without specific probable cause on a user. This was contrary to how RIM had set the system up. To comply with the Indian government requirement RIM installed a server in India that decrypted and offered up for inspection all traffic within the country without a warrant being required.
General warrants (something our founders specifically forbid in the US) exist in the rest of the world, American's tend to forget this.
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If you don't like Facebook's policies don't use them. Nothing forces you to use Facebook, there are plenty of other social websites many without policies similar to Facebooks.
I personally encourage Facebook to actually enforce it's rules. I hope more people run around reporting rule violations so that these incidents keep happening. Maybe at some point people will realize Facebook is pure evil and stop using it. I don't use it, and neither should you.
And don't give me any shit about you can't because your friends aren't using any of the other sites, because your friends are saying the same thing. It takes guts to stand up and say I won't play that game.
There's a bunch of research going into reducing the costs. There are huge areas where the installation cost can be reduced. Integrated and standardized framing, cheaper roof mount systems or even integral mounting systems that become the roofing material, flush roof mount with tracking, integrated, cheaper and more efficient micro-inverters, etc. In fact solar city just dumped about 50 million bucks into some heavy research on just that and the beauty is that because they are an installer and directly involved in the research they can test each idea directly and have first hand knowledge on where the expensive parts of the process are and what works and what doesn't. The quickest way to drive down install costs is to get the inspectors, the engineers, the installers and the panel designers all in the same room which they can do. If they can drive down the install cost they'll be greatly simplifying the install process which will in turn drive down the inspection costs and a bunch of similar follow on costs. And of course they aren't the only one pouring money into installation cost reduction.
There's a ton of waste in residential installs right now because they are using 100 year old methods. With real research going into this I expect they'll be able to at least halve the installation costs. If they succeed at that they'll drive solar power prices below the cost of coal almost immediately. This doesn't include the other things that are being researched like technology that will heat the panel just enough to dump snow in the winter, better heat tolerance and things like automatic tracking without having to move the panel (tilting the cell in the frame or focusing lens/prisims).
There's so much money being poured into research it's pretty darn cool IMO. Solar PV is getting more research than almost any other industry out there because of it's potential. Companies like Solar City have been turning down investment money because so much is pouring in that they can't invest it all.
Stadium revenue isn't even 5% of the teams earnings anymore. It's so ridiculously small in fact that it's the entire reason cited by the FCC for abolishing the blackout restriction. They could literally give the tickets away and it wouldn't impact earnings in any significant manner.
The reason they don't cheapen the tickets is that by keeping prices high the owners can use the tickets like money. Court-side tickets are so expensive when they hand the mayor a season's worth of tickets he's bound to whatever the owner wants because they've given him the equivalent of $100K. But because they set the pricing on the seats they can declare the tickets worth less than $5. Those high priced tickets are essentially their own untraceable money that they can print at will.
Real Celebrities don't do anything. They call their agent (actually they have their assistant call their agent). The agent or their staff generally has a few brain cells to rub together and does something sensible then tells the celebrity they did something about it and the issue goes away because the celebrity has the attention span of a hyperactive 2 year old who just ate a pound of candy.
Occasionally the celebrity is a primadonna or insists on doing things themselves or forces their agent to do something the agent advised against. Those cases usually end up being like when Streisand tried to have pictures of her home removed from the internet and coined an entire phrase for what happens when you try to use a court to censor the internet (namely the Streisand effect). Usually after doing something like this a couple times the celebrity learns to trust that their agent is smarter than them and starts listening to them and then they become like the rest of the celebrities.
As you said, lawyers who run around tossing around 100 million dollar figures and talk about suing Google (who has the money to drag the case out for a decade, just for spite) don't actually represent real celebrities, though they may represent some hack. Lawyers that represent real celebrities are hired by the agent and are totally professional. They'll send nice nonthreatening letters and ask to meet with the Google executives. Being the smooth talking devils they are they will likely convince Google's execs to do something even if it's nothing that will affect it. They will then bill the celebrity about $100K and say they did all that's legally possible and if the celebrity wants to do more they need a million dollar retainer and a contract and that they'll probably lose the case and cause a ton of bad publicity (which the Agent will tell them is totally stupid).
Considering Microsoft's goal is to unite all their operating systems and have the same system running on all platforms this means they WANT to run windows on smartphones. So keeping the systems requirements less than the average smartphone would be their intent if they want that initiative to succeed. DUH.
How would you even know if you are affected. By your own admission you've not run anything other that what you have installed. You have NOTHING to compare it against. It could be 10 times slower than it should be an you wouldn't know because you haven't done a clean install. This is common knowledge to those that do routine format/reinstall. In the enthusiast category of user it's not uncommon to have this be a standard twice a year operation. If you want to verify it, do a format reinstall and compare the speed. You will find your computer feels new because it's so much faster and responsive.
Half of which are suicides. Personally I'd rather you compare actual homicides, not the silly gun death numbers where better than 50% are suicides.
What stops your average hobbyist is that if you screw it up it will blow up in your face and likely kill you. Even if that risk is minimal for even a minimally skilled person using known plans it is still a non trivial risk that will deter quite a few people.
I also grew up in a time where I had to do things by hand with pencil and paper. I remember learning long division, but I don't think I could do it even if I had hours to try to figure it out. We should teach kids about these old methods and the theories behind them but we shouldn't be wasting time teaching them the method and making them memorize how to do it. They will never do long division by hand in their entire life.
Although it's important to teach theory and the methods behind things, what you talking about isn't that. It was the rote memorization that dominated education for a very long time and thankfully is going away. Much of the criticism that I've seen of the new common core standards in math is much more focused on teaching the theory rather than the rote memorization. Yet even such a significant improvement in how math is taught is being attacked by people that think the old way to teach is the only way to teach. You learn almost nothing memorizing something.
You learn all kinds of cool things when you learn the theory behind it and can take that theory and apply it to other things. About 90% of your average college Engineering school is spent trying to unteach people the rote memorization stuff they were trained to do in primary and secondary education. I don't have a problem with kids using calculators to do simple math when they are being taught the theory and how to use it.
Two reasons.
Application lock-in, Microsoft is trying to leverage their existing large application comparability for leverage.
The second is related to the first, in the MS is trying to use there large monopoly in the desktop market to build a monopoly in handheld, tablet and phone.
I believe both will be a failure, they sat on their hands two long while Apple and Google built OS's and now have significant application catalogs. Android and iOS will be very difficult to displace at this point. They'd do better to focus their attention on maintaining and building their enterprise services and continuing to build and support desktop computers. That would probably mean porting office and other major enterprise applications to both the iOS and Android. I simply don't believe they can displace android or iOS at this point.
Moving off grid is not only possible, it's viable cost wise. The more people that move off grid the fewer people will be paying for the plant. The more people move off grid the cheaper going off grid becomes. It's a real problem for the power companies and it's happening right now. They drive up costs on the grid and it only becomes more cost effective to go off grid.
That's the way it works fucktard, no one is obligated to stay on grid and keep paying for it. Drive people offgrid and costs go up. That's what the power company is competing against, they just haven't realized it yet. Forward looking states like California have, they've disconnected power costs and management from the grid, they've mandated storage and renewable generation to force the companies to do what in the end is their only chance of survival in a world where going off grid is not only viable it's cost effective. Solar is cheap and getting cheaper, storage is beginning to follow the curve as well and in a decade both will be cheap enough that almost everyone can afford it.
The problem the utilities have here is that solar is dropping so fast in cost that it's now cost effective on a 10 year ROI to install. You can put panels on your roof with a loan right now where the monthly loan cost will be cheaper than the cost of the electricity it offsets. That's true right now in almost every state in the union. The utilities see this and see a death spiral because their entire business is built around making money generating power from dirty central hydrocarbon based power plants.
So the power companies do the natural thing, they try to get tariffs raised on the solar panels to make them more expensive and halt the installations. But the problem is the panel prices are dropping so fast that anything they do is just going to be temporary. The problem with chasing the "raise the cost of solar" method of competing is that at some point those increased costs make homeowner owned storage viable. Because of the screwing around with Tariffs that happened in Hawaii they now have a booming power storage market and people are beginning to disconnect from the grid entirely.
The power companies are scared that they'll sell less power to customers with solar panels and make less money (which will hit their dividends badly) but what they should really be worried about is customers disconnecting from the grid entirely. Every customer that disconnects from the grid raises the fixed cost transfer to everyone else, which raises power prices and makes solar more attractive. You end up with a self feeding harmonics that starts a slide into a situation that doesn't just destroy the power companies dividend but destroys the company all together.
The companies need to be evolving to be that backup power supply. They need to be shifting generation strategy and bringing online storage so they can displace the gaps so customers don't do it themselves. That's their future business, moving power around and storing it for use when the sun isn't shining. It's going to mean smaller companies and less revenue but that's better than no company at all. Forward looking states realize that the games the companies are playing with the solar tariffs right now are just that games, these states are mandating the companies invest in renewables and storage so they are ready for the change. The states without foresight are allowing the companies to put a big tariff on solar customers thereby driving them towards disconnecting from the grid entirely.
I think centrally managed storage and distribution is better than everyone running their own storage array. These companies are public utilities, that is government granted monopolies that the taxpayer has control over. We should be encouraging solar installation and investing in the grid changes necessary to support it because no matter what the solar is coming. The costs are dropping rapidly and have reached the mass acceptance pricing. Solar is already cheaper without any subsidies than nuclear power. In a few years it's going to be cheaper than coal with the subsidies and within the decade it'll be cheaper than coal without. If we don't make the changes to the grid right now we won't be ready for that colossal shift in generation and everyone will be installing their own backup systems and disconnecting from the grid (which is going to hurt the poor and those living in apartments very hard). I'd be willing to bet that by 2050 half of the homes in the US will have solar arrays on the roof and solar will comprise nearly 50% of the generation capacity.
I wouldn't be investing long term in residential power companies with heavy carbon assets right now.
I'd prefer that they fix the bug that's known about immediately then look for additional ones. That delay to find other similar bugs is how lots and lots of servers get exploited. You close each hole as quickly as you can. The day the Bash exploit came out there were exploits actively scanning within a few hours. Had they delayed to look for similar bugs for a day or week everyone's servers would be compromised.
Yes you should search for similar bugs and do some extensive testing, but delaying fixes for remotely exploitable bugs is beyond stupid. Particularly where the exploit is trivial, requires no permissions and is already in the wild being exploited. Microsoft has a history of delaying those fixes, sometimes for as long as 7 months. That's not a good policy.
Everyone is the press. There is no accreditation or state licensing for reporters that limits their ranks. Any attempt to call actions that are clearly reporting because it's done by a private citizen are nothing but attempts to suppress speech. See, free speech IS free press.If you don't have free speech you don't have a free press, and if you don't have a free press you don't have free speech. It's why they are grouped in the 1st amendment, they ARE the same thing.
The only thing required for you to be a reporter is for you to report on something.
Because it's harder and would require real police work. Without encryption they can look then claim they didn't after they use the information to determine a way to construct probable cause using parallel construction. This is why some people think parallel construction is an end run around warrants and the constitution.
And Deutsche Telekom would sell T-Mobile America in a heartbeat because it has made little to negative profit over it's entire existence. T-Mobile America has been for sale for about 6 years that I'm aware of and DT has been willing to sell it to any serious offer.
Which will ALWAYS cost more than the rest of the world because rather than build it once and regulate access we've created a system that requires all the cellular companies to build out the exact same infrastructure. The result being that we pay for everything 2-5 times.
Whereas for example in the European system they allow providers to build only one tower to service an area then force the provider to provide access and tower space to their competitors at mandated fair pricing. The result is fewer towers, better coverage and lower prices and better profits for the wireless companies. All because government regulated the business.
The free market doesn't fix everything.
I believe the thought is they can't get the votes to get the legislature to give the CRTC (or FCC in the US) such broad ranging authority and they are exceeding their current legislative mandate. Companies and individuals should challenge government over reach. If they haven't been granted legal authority to regulate something and pass a bunch of regulations the regulatory body SHOULD be slapped down in court otherwise we've got a serious problem with governance and separation of powers.
Titanium will be significantly heavier than aluminum. Carbon fiber is both lighter and stronger than aluminum but it doesn't bend, it shatters. There are always trade offs, if there weren't they would already be making everything out of the perfect material that is strong, light and flexible (non-plastic) but not too flexible such that it damages anything and is inexpensive. Much like everything there are trade-offs. Aluminum and magnesium alloys currently meet most of the targets to acceptable levels without being too costly. You move to the stronger materials and you will either pay for it in weight, durability or cost.
If the even horizon was actually the body of the object then I don't believe we would be seeing some of the effects we see. Not being an astrophysicist I can't put it in words but there are observed phenomenon relating to black holes that are tied to matter collapsing into the singularity from the event horizon (at least that's our current understanding) if the event horizon is the edge of the body then these phenomenon wouldn't happen.
In all likelihood there is going to be a review that finds some mistake on their part that invalidates their conclusions. Otherwise if they did just solve the contradiction between relativity and quantum mechanics they're going to get the Nobel prize. I wouldn't put odds on the Nobel prize.
Thermal expansion, ocean currents, how the heat uptake/loss changes as the ice melts, salt concentrations, etc.
There are a LOT of variables here that we either have little to no data on or little to no understanding of how it will impact climate. The climate is very complicated. As with another poster I think the climate models are being a bit alarmist in their predictions but the fact is there is so much we don't understand about how it's going to be affected that we'd be remiss if they weren't alarmist because they could be vastly wrong, in the wrong direction! We could find out 20 years down the road that melting the north pole 50% dilutes the salt levels to the point that the ocean currents halt or speedup in some way that dramatically changes climate worldwide (what would happen if the desert band shifted 200 miles toward the poles?). We know almost nothing about the bottom of the ocean and these currents. And that's just one variable. There are dozens that there has been little to no research on.
Maybe it won't be a gradual warming, maybe it will hold for a period as the oceans suck up energy then it will be like a cork popping and within a decade temperatures will jump several degrees (which would be far far more catastrophic than the models are predicting right now). I find global climate change rather scary, adding 1.6watts per m^2 is a tremendous amount of energy and we probably won't know exactly what it does until after we've done it.
Up until ISIS invaded Iraq ISIS was ignored by Syria because they were fighting the other rebel groups. Assad made the mistake of thinking they were happy controlling Raqa (they left other areas alone including a major military base in the area) and wouldn't move outward and that fighting with the other rebel groups served his cause. He didn't realize they were biding their time, building forces and structure for the big invasion. Shortly after taking much of Iraq they dramatically expanded and seized significantly more territory and became much more threatening to the regime. In fact ISIS is probably Assad's most dangerous opponent at this point as they control almost the entire north of Syria. This was double bad for Assad because there were thousands of Iraqi Shia volunteers in Syria fighting and 90% of them left after IS threatened Baghdad and the Shia shrines.
Assad made a HUGE mistake ignoring ISIS. Assad is worried the US will strike his own forces while attacking ISIS but I seriously doubt he's gonna do much to prevent the US striking ISIS. Oh he'll yell and holler about needing his permission, and about Syria's sovereignty but he's not going to try to shoot the planes down unless they come after him. At this point attacking ISIS helps him as much as it helps the ordinary rebels. So the enemy of my enemy shifts again and he'll ignore the US attacks until ISIS is weakened enough to not be a threat to him.
Though he didn't ask for it, congress didn't want him setting the precedent that he was commander in chief so they hurried and passed a resolution allowing it anyway.
You aren't looking at it from the point of view of U2 and Metallica and others. See they get a check every month from their record company. For a decade or so those checks were nice and stable and these people grew fat and lazy. Recently over the last decade those checks have been declining. When Bono and Hetfield get their checks and it's less than the previous month they call up the record company and ask why the check is smaller this month.
The record companies blame it all on piracy rather than tell them the truth, which is that fewer people buy the music today because of streaming services, that the sales that do take place are no longer albums priced at $20, that the single tracks no longer sell for $8 (instead they are individual songs sold at $1-$2 and that competition keeps these prices low) and that the record company even though they do less these days has not lowered the amount of money they take and instead has reduced the royalty fees. After all the record company can't report declining profits, that's for the artists to eat. The model has simply changed, people only buy the songs they like, they are no longer willing to buy an entire album of 8-12 songs when only two of them are good. And there are a LOT of people that no longer even purchase music, instead opting for a monthly fee and streaming whatever music they are interested in. This reduces sales and the those record companies haven't reduced their cut with the drop, they simply give fewer royalties to the artist.
The record industry is FULL of thieves. Any smart artist would have long ago abandoned the major producers and produced and sold their own music. Those that did, have likely seen steady royalties rather than a drop because they cut out the middle man.
Blackberry was never secure. They could tap and listen to whatever they wanted to, RIM simply required a warrant. The India case was a GENERAL warrant not tied to a specific person, the Indian government wanted to be able to monitor ALL cellular traffic and messages without specific probable cause on a user. This was contrary to how RIM had set the system up. To comply with the Indian government requirement RIM installed a server in India that decrypted and offered up for inspection all traffic within the country without a warrant being required.
General warrants (something our founders specifically forbid in the US) exist in the rest of the world, American's tend to forget this.