Those Russian basta... Oh, um, well, thank you for pointing out this vulnerability.
Now that the US is pressuring people to dump their product, they should only tell their customers - at least for a week or two - when they find big new threat like this.
Want the warnings in a timely fashion? Pay up! B-)
Really? Are you saying electric cars can cruise at highway speeds at under 2 HP?
For ICE cars, to avoid the real math just figure you need 20hp for 25mpg at highway speed
Internal combustion engine cars have been able to cruise at 65 on about 18 HP for decades. There have been some improvements in aerodynamics since then. (There have been improvements in tire materials that would also help, but most of those haven't been deployed.)
Another poster, below, claims about 4 miles per kWh in "mixed driving". Let's assume that maps to 65 MPH highway speed. (Electric cars with regenerative braking don't take as big a hit with city driving.) At 65 MPH that's 16.2 kW, which would be 21 2/3 HP with a perfect motor, about 14.2 HP with 66% efficiency.
Looks like I'm well within less than factor of 2, not worse than a factor of 10.
Two to four kilowatts in an electric automotive application? So what's the problem? Accelerating a ton of metal takes a HYSTERICAL amount of electric power.
A horsepower is almost exactly 3/4 of a kilowatt. So four kilowatts is 5 1/3 horsepower.
A vehicle just cruising at highway speeds takes teens of HP just to fight wind resistance and rolling friction. (Numbers from a long while back, so aerodynamic improvements may have brought it down a bit, though I doubt it's under ten HP.) Accelerating takes a lot more, like over 100 HP if you're not going to hold up traffic. Then there's hill and mountain climbing.
Meanwhile the motors and their controllers are not 100% efficient at converting electricity to motion, but the computer load is electric.
So start with the computers adding another 30% to the load for the long-term cruise - about the minimum cycle for the car. Yes, that will cost nontrivial miles per kilowatt hour. But the computer algorithms might save more than that by driving more efficiently than a random human.
Now look at those computers. They're laboratory experiments. Getting the car to go where you want and not kill or break something on the way is the hard engineering task right now. So they're not optimized for power consumption. They're designed to have enough processing power that they let the engineers try out any stack of new bright ideas. Once the algorithms are debugged and a desirable set picked, so the engineers know the peak computational load, you can be sure there will be a stage where they design a computer that can handle the crisis-peak load, but not a WHOLE lot more, and can scale back its power consumption when it doesn't have to think that hard.
Meanwhile, Moore's law isn't dead yet, so the load for a given amount of crunch is still dropping.
I'm betting that, by the time the tech is ready to be deployed beyond the rich early-adopter stage, the fuel energy cost for the computers will be substantially less that the fuel energy cost of carrying around the extra weight of a chauffeur skilled enough to drive as well as his silicon competition.
If DJT tells me one thing and CNN tells me another, I know who I'm going with. Because that keeps happening and DJT is wrong every time.
How does that Strawberry Flavor Ade taste?
Trump may not be right every time, and often exaggerates. But he has also often been proven right when his stories conflict with those of a number of major media outlets, including CNN and NYT.
But of course you won't hear much about THAT on CNN.
A thing to remember about Trump utterances: Many of them are distractions; -"Look at this shiny thing!" - to get the media yammering about it while he's working on getting something unrelated accomplished.
Two approaches come to mind,... One is to cool the magma, by drilling a grid of holes and pumping water into them. (Use the heated water or steam for electric power plants.) The other is to break up the surface to a depth of several miles (underground nuclear bombs), so that any eruption will be just magma flows rather than an explosion....
Would either attempt cause more problems than it solved?
Both of those sound like things that are more likely to encourage, rather than prevent, an eruption. IMHO they're right up there with drilling an exploratory well to see if there is another magma flow down there and as a result leading it up to the surface.
Cool with water injection: Krakatoa comes to mind. But deep cracks and shifts from the shrinkage of the cooled mass might be a bigger issue than a mountain-sized steam explosion.
With "leading the magma toward the surface"' as the problem, "break[ing] up the surface to a depth of several miles" also looks like a solution becoming the problem it attempts to solve.
It's the same logic as with gun freedoms - even the most abject set of mass murders with guns is seen as socially acceptable in aggrigate, because in theory, a 'good' person could have popped up and shot the mass murderers with a gun also - therefore, it's no problem.
Gun ownership isn't just about self-defence from retail violence. It helps a lot there (privately owned guns are used about 6 times more often to stop a crime than to commit one), but it's not the main point.
Private guns are an insurance policy against a runaway government. Even the possibility that they might be used tends to deter tyranny (as when the think-tank, commissioned to predict the outcome, told president Nixon that he shouldn't delay or cancel elections becuse the armed population would likely act as a result) and they have been used, from time to time, to overthrow tyrants and political machines, both petty and grand.
I'd almost agree that one ISP could count as competition, but that's missing the major problem with the scenario. In those markets, you have the Cable ISP with great speeds, high price, and unrealistic data caps. The "competition" is usually a Telco ISP that has crappy speeds, average price, and no data caps.
As I understand markets (I am NOT an economist, so if you are one, check me): Even if the two competitors were comparable, two is not enough for market forces to push prices down toward cost-plus-modest-return. Three is iffy and you need four before it's close to certain.
With only one, maximum profit is achieved by raising prices until anything higher will lose more from people who decided to do without than it gains from people who stick around and pay more.
With two, maximum profit is achieved by adjusting prices until the customers are split evenly and ramping them up until, again, further price hikes lose more than gain. This is a "duopoly". It prices like a cartel. But no back-channel collusion is required. The price signals alone are enough to keep the players in sync and even drive toward the optimum.
With several competitors the maximum profit would still be "split the customers fairly and charge all the traffic will bear" - a cartel. But the more players you have, the more you need communication among them to keep the customer base distributed and the prices in sync. Without it, a player who is being squeezed out (with too small a share of the customers) can drop his prices and gain more by improving market share than he loses by the sale price. This can get a price war going, shake out the weak players, and stabilize at cost plus enough profit that several players (three or more) survive.
With three strong players the market MIGHT be stable for a ong while at the pricey cartel-like point without actual collusion. But with four or more it tends to collapse into the consumer-friendly state unless there's an actual cartel.
(Variants include providing a degraded product at a lower price point. But that's iffy, more complicated to discus, and doesn't really change the "two is about as bad as one, three is iffy, you want four or more" rule of thumb.)
Unfortunately, the government (composed more of lawyers and bureaucrts than businessmen) considers two to be "competition". And that's built into the FCC rules at a number of points. (For instance, the early cellphone channel allocations, which allowed only two companies in an area, or the "One telco wireline ISP and one cable ISP is competition" thing that led to the telco/cable duopolies.)
So now "competition" is supposed to include two of which one is a threat of a hypothetical competitor?
Seems to me the court should insist that there be a minimum of four non-hypothetical competitors in a market before they let the FCC treat the market as "competitive".
[2014 numbers]... 33,594 [deaths] by firearms, most of that accidental. (Out of 15.872 homicides, 11,008 were by firearms, so two thirds of firearms deaths are accidents.)
the 2013 numbers on wikipedia have almost ALL the non-homicide deaths due to suicide, a small fraction due to accident:
These deaths consisted of 11,208 homicides, 21,175 suicides, 505 deaths due to accidental or negligent discharge of a firearm, and 281 deaths due to firearms use with "undetermined intent". Of the 2,596,993 total deaths in the US in 2013, 1.3% were related to firearms.
Little secret about "deaths by gun accidents": MOST of them are suicides.
Police usually report a suicide as an accident, both to save the feelings of the family members and to help them avoid difficulty collecting on any life insurance. (Suicide voids a life insurance policy, so the family may both lose a loved one and be impoverished if the police or coroner's report mentions the "s" word in the cause-of-death slot.)
the solution is to just say 'nope - never seen a gun in my life'.
And in the gun culture it's considered moral to lie in that way to such an improper question, even by people who consider lying to be improper in essentially every other context. (If somebody is asking that, the assumption is the information may be used for is to enable confiscating the gun(s), leaving the family defenceless. So telling the truth is enabling crime and/or tyranny.)
This, by the way, is why Kellerman's Seattle-Vancouver study was so thoroughly debunked that even Kellerman retracted it. (That's the source of many of the pithy, but utterly bogus, statistical soundbites, such as "A gun kept in the house is 21 times more likely to kill a family member...")
Guess what: If you ask people in the emergency room whether there's a gun in the house, you're only likely to get a "yes" when they're in the E-room because somebody was shot by it, so "no" is obviously false. That's the most extreme case of "selection bias" you're ever likely to see.
- The green revolution - Modern agriculture and our food supply
You're confusing "genetics" (the overall science of genes and their manipulation) with "eugenics" (the attempt to "improve" human populations by such means as selective breeding and culling of "defectives".)
Back in the early '50s (and probably for decades before that) my grandparents' house had a delivery box, mainly for milk.
This practice originated in the time when refrigeration was absent or iffy, so milk was delivered fresh, sometimes daily, by a deliveryman who typically came by before the occupants of the house were up for breakfast.
In their case the box was a somewhat-insulated compartment, about 14" by 14" by the thickness of the wall, between the outside (adjacent to the driveway) and the "mud room" (an entryway / "airlock" between the main outer door and an inner door to the living room (both locked), with closets for outdoor coats and the like.
The box was big enough to hold several bottles, and they'd stay cold until the family was up to collect them and transfer them to the fridge / ice box. If a large delivery was expected, then inner door could be left open so oversize items could be pushed through. But the opening was too small for even a child to pass through, and if someone DID manage it, they'd still end up outside the locked inner door.
Seems to me there's lots of variants that might be useful if Amazon-style delivery services become an ongoing feature of life, rather than a business model that is displaced, within a few years, by something the invisible hand pushes even harder.
The author was actually Alan E. Nourse, and Burroughs wrote a film adaptation from it.
And Nourse's _Blade Runer_ was excellent.
Setting: Dystopia with eugenics gone wrong: If you want to get medical treatment (from the official sources) you have to get sterilized, too. So there's an underground of illegal doctors, surgeons, etc. (A "Blade runner" is a courier for a supplier of loaner surgical kits.)
Along comes a really nasty flu - with essentially 100% lethaltity if you don't get an immunization. Oops! Complications ensue.
(This is becoming topical again, with the government taking control of medical care and both parties using it for social policy implementation. Though the original Eugenics craze went away when the NAZIs ran it into the ground, some of its ideas are resurfacing.)
You sound like an audiophile that think people can hear 96KHz/24bit audio.
You CAN hear the difference (with good speakers and perhaps moderately crummy electronics). You're thinking "nyquist" and signal-to-noise, but you're not taking into account some real-world pathology.
There are two issues: Sampling rate and sampling resolution. The original CD digitization standard was inadequate on both of them.
If you had perfect (and phase-constant) bandpass filters before the A-to-D step, you'd only need a sampling rate of twice the highest frequency audible to the listeners with the best-at-the-high-end ears: Children and (especially younger) women. (Men tend to lose the high end of their hearing sooner, and more profoundly, partly due to some of the same sex-hormone related circulatory system changes that are involved in pattern baldness, high blood pressure, and hyposmia.)
But "phase-constant" and "sharp" are at odds on an analog filter. And frequency-dependent phase errors make sharp sounds sound "fuzzy", as the different frequencies from things like percussion effectively arrive at different times. So filters aren't all that sharp. And thus some of the frequencies higher than the nyquist frequency get through to the A-to-D, get digitized, and are "folded back down" at the nyquist frequency and appear as noise. With good enough speakers you can hear them, mainly in the high end. They're REALLY annoying, because they're not harmonically related to the audio source causing them, so they don't blend in well with the desired sound from the same instrument. (It's particularly bad with synthesizers, such as the Moog, which uses discontinuous-function waveforms (like L and delta) that have strong harmonics to very high frequencies - theoretically going up forever.)
Using a higher sampling rate moves the nyquist frequency "fold point" up farther, drastically reducing this effect.
You'd think ordinary sampling resolution would put quantization error down into the inaudible weeds. But the mapping from signl to digital sample is linear. So while the sampling is adequate for passages loud enough to get the high bit set occasionally, every 3 dB quieter than "blow out the speakers loudest peak in the entire piece" is one less bit of resolution - while the quantization noise remains at full force.
For program material with only moderate dynamic range this is still fine. Rock music, as an art form, evolved on AM radio with audio compression. So the distinction between loud and soft passages was wiped out. As a result, rock does not use this distinction to any significant extent.
For program material (such as classical music) which DOES have a broad dynamic range it's a disaster. If the signal level is set so the loud passages don't distort, the soft passages are so quiet that the "waterfall" of quantization noise becomes audible - but only when there's a sound, so it make instruments in quiet passages sound "hissy" when they shouldn't.
Sample-sizes with more bits (provided the equipment really is that low-noise) can reduce this phenomenon. So can volume compression-reexpansion systems (such as the Dolby variants). (They can also increase the effective signal-to-noise ratio on the pre-digitization recording equipment, so it can provide a signal to the digitization step such that a high-bit-count sampling is accurate enough for the lower level of quantization noise to make a difference.)
In the analog TVs and monitors, there was pixelization of a sort.
- In the vertical dimension there were scan lines.
- In the horizontal there was bandwidth / sweep rate, which limited the sharpness of focus, creating what amounted to a "pixel width" and thus a "pixel count", though there weren't discrete pixels with well-defined boundary locations.
In black-and-white that was it. In color it got more complicated:
- The shadow mask and pattern of color phosphors created physical pixels - but the spacing of them was tight compared to the focus of the electron beam and the bandwidth of modulation. So the information/focus/bandwidth-vs-sweep-rate pixels covered several of these physical dots.
- While directly cabled R-G-B signals were three separate analog signals, in NTSC the color information was separated and transmitted at a lower bandwidth (and thus lower resolution) on a phase-and-amplitude modulated subcarrier. This both limited the bandwidth - widening the "pixels" of color information - and tended to quantize it into discrete dots centered on particular phases of the subcarrier. (The subcarrier phase was shifted by 180 degrees between scans, both to make the color information collide less with the black-and-white information and to reduce visual moire patterns from the dots lining up and from crosstalk between the B&W and the color info signals.)
It makes a much better hypothetical than the case the opinion was applied to. I'll pay for your movie ticket if you'll go and try it.
I'm reminded of a story about Abbie Hoffman ("Free speech is the right to shout 'Theater!' in a crowded fire. "), back in the '60s.
Story goes he was being interviewed (in a crowed studio theater, of course) and the subject of free speech came up. After he'd said something to the effect that free speech was absolute, the interviewer asked him:
Q: ~But, surely, you don't thing it's right to shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theater?~
A: "Fire!"
But are other things the equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded movie theatre?
Did you know that the "(falsely) cry fire in a crowded theatre" argument was coined by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. - in a Supreme Court opinion (for Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919)) that it was legal to suppress such speech?
Did you know the speech in question was printing and distributing pamphlets opposing the draft for WW I?
Holmes, writing for a unanimous Court, ruled that it was a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917 (amended by the Sedition Act of 1918), to distribute flyers opposing the draft during World War I. Holmes argued this abridgment of free speech was permissible because it presented a "clear and present danger" to the government's recruitment efforts for the war.
So the question -- is peddling this stuff online really "free speech"? You are promising something grandiose in exchange for hard cash that you know doesn't deliver any benefits at all.
That's the wrong question - because any claim that there is ANY subset of speech that is NOT free speech pitches you over the cliff and onto the slippery slope:
* If there is a non-free subset of speech it's allegedly OK to restrict it.
* But that opens the can of worms: How - and by whom - is this subset defined?
* Answer to that is, of course, government. But government has an incentive to suppress speech that is inconvenient for it.
* The most inconvenient speech for government, of course, is speech that exposes wrongdoing by its officials, exposes systematic abuses of power, and organizes opposition to those in power - either the individuals or the system itself.
* So the arbiters of what is non-free speech suppress THAT. And suppressing THAT is what the whole prohibition on interfering with speech is supposed to prevent.
Reporting credit issues to any of the 3? That's libel (deliberate, you should know better) without that proof.
Nice idea.
But truth is an absolute defence against claims of defamation (libel or slander). Seems to me you have a case if, and only if, the information reported is wrong (and the burden of proof for that would be on you).
I like it: A raft of libel suits could make the cost of doing business as a credit reporting agency high enough that it might finish off the business model. (And the time to hit them is when they're already weakened.)
About friggin' time! I've been doing my best to avoid giving out my SSN where it's not required by law since the '80s.
One big hole that has been going on for decades is Medicare:
* Once you're old enough to be on it, you can't get regular health insurance to pay for the portion of your medical work (often all or the bulk of the cost) that Medicare pays for. Regular health plans turn into cover-the-difference supplements. You must sign up for Medicare or pay the charges yourself. (And if you don't have the government imposing price levels or the insurance companies negotiating deep discounts you get to pay the drastically inflated "regular price" that makes up for their discounts.)
* But if you DO sign up for Medicare, what do you get for an ID? Your SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER with a single letter appended after it. They won't provide any alternative (though they have "been thinking about it" for years). You have to give this to ALL your medical providers. Get a prescription or an immunization at a pharmacy, hand in your Medicare ID. Go to a doctor, hand in your Medicare ID. Get a lab test, hand in your Medicare ID. Go to a specialist, hand in your Medicare ID.
Dozens, or even hundreds, of medical billing paperwork operations, with unknown numbers of clerks doing data entry (often offshore) and unknown competency of IT people configuring their databases, get your name and SS#. Some have even been CAUGHT selling them. Oops!
* So then we get stories about how people over 65 have a much higher rate of identity theft - typically trying to imply that these oldsters are lax in guarding their SS numbers. Well, DUH!
... Google and Facebook did not fail people. Ass-holes at the Atlantic and Buzzfeed, that think Google and Facebook need to think for us, failed us.Google and Facebook did not fail people. Ass-holes at the Atlantic and Buzzfeed, that think Google and Facebook need to think for us, failed us.
IMHO it's the dying old-media flaming their competition.
A Free Press doesn't work by each outlet covering everything accurately and without bias, sorting TRUTH from Fake News, and serving as an omniscient gatekeeper which decides what the population needs to hear.
A Free Press works by many, competing, unregulated outlets each covering what they want to cover, reporting it with their particular biases, filters, and attempts at accuracy, and each member of the public making their own choices on which to believe and which to patronize.
For centuries we've had such media - word-of-mouth, minstrels story-telling news, movable type printing presses enabling pamphleteers, etc. - and people understanding they must do their own sorting of truth from rumor, bias (self-serving or otherwise), propaganda, delusion, and other chaff. Then we had a period of several generations where the cost of printing presses and broadcast networks, along with regulations on broadcast licensing and economic fallout from it, has progressively concentrated the news media into the hands of a tiny number of players with a reasonably consistent bias.
Now we have the (still reasonably) unrestricted Internet dropping the barriers to entry. So we're back to the explosion of different viewpoints, augmented by the exposure of the biases of the old mainstream media by unfiltered coverage. The honeymoon is over and we've been shocked at the bias exhibited by the mainstream media. We're back to "drinking from the firehose" and making our own judgements of what to believe.
This has reduced the mainstream media from the only team in town to just one small cluster in the mob of biased sources. That impacted their revenue. They're trying to get their market back, and one way to do that is to "sell" their particular set of filters as a service - and try to convince everyone that it's better than any of the alternatives.
Of course, when a breaking event IS breaking, there's a flood of rumor. The rush to fill a demand for information and to "scoop" the competition leads to a flurry of under-vetted reportage, much of it in error. And with ALL sources available to the users of the Internet, there's plenty of errors to chose from.
So it's a golden opportunity for the old and dying media outlets to point to the most egregious falsehoods in the flood and claim that ALL the alternatives to THEIR filtering are as bad.
Thus the Atlantic article, flaming Google (which started as an indexer of ALL the content of the Internet and still claims to be mostly that) for not refusing to index any report that doesn't fit THEIR OWN set of filters, and implying that any such indexer SHOULD join a de-facto conspiracy to hide such competing outlets from public view.
Usually what happens... If the defendant doesn't show up... to contest the order that has been presented by the plaintiff... [the judge] may be inclined to use the plaintiff's proposed order and enter it as a default judgment
Also: The site was created by a Kazakhstani graduate student, is hosted in St. Petersburg, Russia, and has used domain name registrars in various countries.
As I understand it: Under US law, if you contact a court to contest jurisdiction, you've conceded that the court has jurisdiction if it decides that it does. So there isn't a good way for someone out of a court's jurisdiction to contest jurisdiction up front. This lets plaintiffs go court shopping (for courts that are cheap for them and expensive for their defendants and likely to rule in their favor if the case goes to trial) and get unconscionable default judgements if a defendant protects his/her rights by declining to appear or correspond with the court. Then it's up to the defendant to fight off attempts to enforce the execution of the judgement.
Slashdot Mirror
Those Russian basta... Oh, um, well, thank you for pointing out this vulnerability.
Now that the US is pressuring people to dump their product, they should only tell their customers - at least for a week or two - when they find big new threat like this.
Want the warnings in a timely fashion? Pay up! B-)
Your numbers are off by an order of magnitude.
Really? Are you saying electric cars can cruise at highway speeds at under 2 HP?
For ICE cars, to avoid the real math just figure you need 20hp for 25mpg at highway speed
Internal combustion engine cars have been able to cruise at 65 on about 18 HP for decades. There have been some improvements in aerodynamics since then. (There have been improvements in tire materials that would also help, but most of those haven't been deployed.)
Another poster, below, claims about 4 miles per kWh in "mixed driving". Let's assume that maps to 65 MPH highway speed. (Electric cars with regenerative braking don't take as big a hit with city driving.) At 65 MPH that's 16.2 kW, which would be 21 2/3 HP with a perfect motor, about 14.2 HP with 66% efficiency.
Looks like I'm well within less than factor of 2, not worse than a factor of 10.
Two to four kilowatts in an electric automotive application? So what's the problem? Accelerating a ton of metal takes a HYSTERICAL amount of electric power.
A horsepower is almost exactly 3/4 of a kilowatt. So four kilowatts is 5 1/3 horsepower.
A vehicle just cruising at highway speeds takes teens of HP just to fight wind resistance and rolling friction. (Numbers from a long while back, so aerodynamic improvements may have brought it down a bit, though I doubt it's under ten HP.) Accelerating takes a lot more, like over 100 HP if you're not going to hold up traffic. Then there's hill and mountain climbing.
Meanwhile the motors and their controllers are not 100% efficient at converting electricity to motion, but the computer load is electric.
So start with the computers adding another 30% to the load for the long-term cruise - about the minimum cycle for the car. Yes, that will cost nontrivial miles per kilowatt hour. But the computer algorithms might save more than that by driving more efficiently than a random human.
Now look at those computers. They're laboratory experiments. Getting the car to go where you want and not kill or break something on the way is the hard engineering task right now. So they're not optimized for power consumption. They're designed to have enough processing power that they let the engineers try out any stack of new bright ideas. Once the algorithms are debugged and a desirable set picked, so the engineers know the peak computational load, you can be sure there will be a stage where they design a computer that can handle the crisis-peak load, but not a WHOLE lot more, and can scale back its power consumption when it doesn't have to think that hard.
Meanwhile, Moore's law isn't dead yet, so the load for a given amount of crunch is still dropping.
I'm betting that, by the time the tech is ready to be deployed beyond the rich early-adopter stage, the fuel energy cost for the computers will be substantially less that the fuel energy cost of carrying around the extra weight of a chauffeur skilled enough to drive as well as his silicon competition.
If DJT tells me one thing and CNN tells me another, I know who I'm going with. Because that keeps happening and DJT is wrong every time.
How does that Strawberry Flavor Ade taste?
Trump may not be right every time, and often exaggerates. But he has also often been proven right when his stories conflict with those of a number of major media outlets, including CNN and NYT.
But of course you won't hear much about THAT on CNN.
A thing to remember about Trump utterances: Many of them are distractions; -"Look at this shiny thing!" - to get the media yammering about it while he's working on getting something unrelated accomplished.
Two approaches come to mind, ... One is to cool the magma, by drilling a grid of holes and pumping water into them. (Use the heated water or steam for electric power plants.) The other is to break up the surface to a depth of several miles (underground nuclear bombs), so that any eruption will be just magma flows rather than an explosion. ...
Would either attempt cause more problems than it solved?
Both of those sound like things that are more likely to encourage, rather than prevent, an eruption. IMHO they're right up there with drilling an exploratory well to see if there is another magma flow down there and as a result leading it up to the surface.
Cool with water injection: Krakatoa comes to mind. But deep cracks and shifts from the shrinkage of the cooled mass might be a bigger issue than a mountain-sized steam explosion.
With "leading the magma toward the surface"' as the problem, "break[ing] up the surface to a depth of several miles" also looks like a solution becoming the problem it attempts to solve.
It's the same logic as with gun freedoms - even the most abject set of mass murders with guns is seen as socially acceptable in aggrigate, because in theory, a 'good' person could have popped up and shot the mass murderers with a gun also - therefore, it's no problem.
Gun ownership isn't just about self-defence from retail violence. It helps a lot there (privately owned guns are used about 6 times more often to stop a crime than to commit one), but it's not the main point.
Private guns are an insurance policy against a runaway government. Even the possibility that they might be used tends to deter tyranny (as when the think-tank, commissioned to predict the outcome, told president Nixon that he shouldn't delay or cancel elections becuse the armed population would likely act as a result) and they have been used, from time to time, to overthrow tyrants and political machines, both petty and grand.
I'd almost agree that one ISP could count as competition, but that's missing the major problem with the scenario. In those markets, you have the Cable ISP with great speeds, high price, and unrealistic data caps. The "competition" is usually a Telco ISP that has crappy speeds, average price, and no data caps.
As I understand markets (I am NOT an economist, so if you are one, check me): Even if the two competitors were comparable, two is not enough for market forces to push prices down toward cost-plus-modest-return. Three is iffy and you need four before it's close to certain.
With only one, maximum profit is achieved by raising prices until anything higher will lose more from people who decided to do without than it gains from people who stick around and pay more.
With two, maximum profit is achieved by adjusting prices until the customers are split evenly and ramping them up until, again, further price hikes lose more than gain. This is a "duopoly". It prices like a cartel. But no back-channel collusion is required. The price signals alone are enough to keep the players in sync and even drive toward the optimum.
With several competitors the maximum profit would still be "split the customers fairly and charge all the traffic will bear" - a cartel. But the more players you have, the more you need communication among them to keep the customer base distributed and the prices in sync. Without it, a player who is being squeezed out (with too small a share of the customers) can drop his prices and gain more by improving market share than he loses by the sale price. This can get a price war going, shake out the weak players, and stabilize at cost plus enough profit that several players (three or more) survive.
With three strong players the market MIGHT be stable for a ong while at the pricey cartel-like point without actual collusion. But with four or more it tends to collapse into the consumer-friendly state unless there's an actual cartel.
(Variants include providing a degraded product at a lower price point. But that's iffy, more complicated to discus, and doesn't really change the "two is about as bad as one, three is iffy, you want four or more" rule of thumb.)
Unfortunately, the government (composed more of lawyers and bureaucrts than businessmen) considers two to be "competition". And that's built into the FCC rules at a number of points. (For instance, the early cellphone channel allocations, which allowed only two companies in an area, or the "One telco wireline ISP and one cable ISP is competition" thing that led to the telco/cable duopolies.)
So now "competition" is supposed to include two of which one is a threat of a hypothetical competitor?
Seems to me the court should insist that there be a minimum of four non-hypothetical competitors in a market before they let the FCC treat the market as "competitive".
[2014 numbers]... 33,594 [deaths] by firearms, most of that accidental. (Out of 15.872 homicides, 11,008 were by firearms, so two thirds of firearms deaths are accidents.)
the 2013 numbers on wikipedia have almost ALL the non-homicide deaths due to suicide, a small fraction due to accident:
the solution is to just say 'nope - never seen a gun in my life'.
And in the gun culture it's considered moral to lie in that way to such an improper question, even by people who consider lying to be improper in essentially every other context. (If somebody is asking that, the assumption is the information may be used for is to enable confiscating the gun(s), leaving the family defenceless. So telling the truth is enabling crime and/or tyranny.)
This, by the way, is why Kellerman's Seattle-Vancouver study was so thoroughly debunked that even Kellerman retracted it. (That's the source of many of the pithy, but utterly bogus, statistical soundbites, such as "A gun kept in the house is 21 times more likely to kill a family member ...")
Guess what: If you ask people in the emergency room whether there's a gun in the house, you're only likely to get a "yes" when they're in the E-room because somebody was shot by it, so "no" is obviously false. That's the most extreme case of "selection bias" you're ever likely to see.
You're confusing "genetics" (the overall science of genes and their manipulation) with "eugenics" (the attempt to "improve" human populations by such means as selective breeding and culling of "defectives".)
Back in the early '50s (and probably for decades before that) my grandparents' house had a delivery box, mainly for milk.
This practice originated in the time when refrigeration was absent or iffy, so milk was delivered fresh, sometimes daily, by a deliveryman who typically came by before the occupants of the house were up for breakfast.
In their case the box was a somewhat-insulated compartment, about 14" by 14" by the thickness of the wall, between the outside (adjacent to the driveway) and the "mud room" (an entryway / "airlock" between the main outer door and an inner door to the living room (both locked), with closets for outdoor coats and the like.
The box was big enough to hold several bottles, and they'd stay cold until the family was up to collect them and transfer them to the fridge / ice box. If a large delivery was expected, then inner door could be left open so oversize items could be pushed through. But the opening was too small for even a child to pass through, and if someone DID manage it, they'd still end up outside the locked inner door.
Seems to me there's lots of variants that might be useful if Amazon-style delivery services become an ongoing feature of life, rather than a business model that is displaced, within a few years, by something the invisible hand pushes even harder.
Still waiting for a "eugenics gone right" story..
Aren't we all? B-b
The author was actually Alan E. Nourse, and Burroughs wrote a film adaptation from it.
And Nourse's _Blade Runer_ was excellent.
Setting: Dystopia with eugenics gone wrong: If you want to get medical treatment (from the official sources) you have to get sterilized, too. So there's an underground of illegal doctors, surgeons, etc. (A "Blade runner" is a courier for a supplier of loaner surgical kits.)
Along comes a really nasty flu - with essentially 100% lethaltity if you don't get an immunization. Oops! Complications ensue.
(This is becoming topical again, with the government taking control of medical care and both parties using it for social policy implementation. Though the original Eugenics craze went away when the NAZIs ran it into the ground, some of its ideas are resurfacing.)
You sound like an audiophile that think people can hear 96KHz/24bit audio.
You CAN hear the difference (with good speakers and perhaps moderately crummy electronics). You're thinking "nyquist" and signal-to-noise, but you're not taking into account some real-world pathology.
There are two issues: Sampling rate and sampling resolution. The original CD digitization standard was inadequate on both of them.
If you had perfect (and phase-constant) bandpass filters before the A-to-D step, you'd only need a sampling rate of twice the highest frequency audible to the listeners with the best-at-the-high-end ears: Children and (especially younger) women. (Men tend to lose the high end of their hearing sooner, and more profoundly, partly due to some of the same sex-hormone related circulatory system changes that are involved in pattern baldness, high blood pressure, and hyposmia.)
But "phase-constant" and "sharp" are at odds on an analog filter. And frequency-dependent phase errors make sharp sounds sound "fuzzy", as the different frequencies from things like percussion effectively arrive at different times. So filters aren't all that sharp. And thus some of the frequencies higher than the nyquist frequency get through to the A-to-D, get digitized, and are "folded back down" at the nyquist frequency and appear as noise. With good enough speakers you can hear them, mainly in the high end. They're REALLY annoying, because they're not harmonically related to the audio source causing them, so they don't blend in well with the desired sound from the same instrument. (It's particularly bad with synthesizers, such as the Moog, which uses discontinuous-function waveforms (like L and delta) that have strong harmonics to very high frequencies - theoretically going up forever.)
Using a higher sampling rate moves the nyquist frequency "fold point" up farther, drastically reducing this effect.
You'd think ordinary sampling resolution would put quantization error down into the inaudible weeds. But the mapping from signl to digital sample is linear. So while the sampling is adequate for passages loud enough to get the high bit set occasionally, every 3 dB quieter than "blow out the speakers loudest peak in the entire piece" is one less bit of resolution - while the quantization noise remains at full force.
For program material with only moderate dynamic range this is still fine. Rock music, as an art form, evolved on AM radio with audio compression. So the distinction between loud and soft passages was wiped out. As a result, rock does not use this distinction to any significant extent.
For program material (such as classical music) which DOES have a broad dynamic range it's a disaster. If the signal level is set so the loud passages don't distort, the soft passages are so quiet that the "waterfall" of quantization noise becomes audible - but only when there's a sound, so it make instruments in quiet passages sound "hissy" when they shouldn't.
Sample-sizes with more bits (provided the equipment really is that low-noise) can reduce this phenomenon. So can volume compression-reexpansion systems (such as the Dolby variants). (They can also increase the effective signal-to-noise ratio on the pre-digitization recording equipment, so it can provide a signal to the digitization step such that a high-bit-count sampling is accurate enough for the lower level of quantization noise to make a difference.)
In the analog TVs and monitors, there was pixelization of a sort.
- In the vertical dimension there were scan lines.
- In the horizontal there was bandwidth / sweep rate, which limited the sharpness of focus, creating what amounted to a "pixel width" and thus a "pixel count", though there weren't discrete pixels with well-defined boundary locations.
In black-and-white that was it. In color it got more complicated:
- The shadow mask and pattern of color phosphors created physical pixels - but the spacing of them was tight compared to the focus of the electron beam and the bandwidth of modulation. So the information/focus/bandwidth-vs-sweep-rate pixels covered several of these physical dots.
- While directly cabled R-G-B signals were three separate analog signals, in NTSC the color information was separated and transmitted at a lower bandwidth (and thus lower resolution) on a phase-and-amplitude modulated subcarrier. This both limited the bandwidth - widening the "pixels" of color information - and tended to quantize it into discrete dots centered on particular phases of the subcarrier. (The subcarrier phase was shifted by 180 degrees between scans, both to make the color information collide less with the black-and-white information and to reduce visual moire patterns from the dots lining up and from crosstalk between the B&W and the color info signals.)
It makes a much better hypothetical than the case the opinion was applied to. I'll pay for your movie ticket if you'll go and try it.
I'm reminded of a story about Abbie Hoffman ("Free speech is the right to shout 'Theater!' in a crowded fire. "), back in the '60s.
Story goes he was being interviewed (in a crowed studio theater, of course) and the subject of free speech came up. After he'd said something to the effect that free speech was absolute, the interviewer asked him:
Q: ~But, surely, you don't thing it's right to shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theater?~
A: "Fire!"
But are other things the equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded movie theatre?
Did you know that the "(falsely) cry fire in a crowded theatre" argument was coined by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. - in a Supreme Court opinion (for Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919)) that it was legal to suppress such speech?
Did you know the speech in question was printing and distributing pamphlets opposing the draft for WW I?
So the question -- is peddling this stuff online really "free speech"? You are promising something grandiose in exchange for hard cash that you know doesn't deliver any benefits at all.
That's the wrong question - because any claim that there is ANY subset of speech that is NOT free speech pitches you over the cliff and onto the slippery slope:
* If there is a non-free subset of speech it's allegedly OK to restrict it.
* But that opens the can of worms: How - and by whom - is this subset defined?
* Answer to that is, of course, government. But government has an incentive to suppress speech that is inconvenient for it.
* The most inconvenient speech for government, of course, is speech that exposes wrongdoing by its officials, exposes systematic abuses of power, and organizes opposition to those in power - either the individuals or the system itself.
* So the arbiters of what is non-free speech suppress THAT. And suppressing THAT is what the whole prohibition on interfering with speech is supposed to prevent.
You have to deduct all the April 1st days.
Reporting credit issues to any of the 3? That's libel (deliberate, you should know better) without that proof.
Nice idea.
But truth is an absolute defence against claims of defamation (libel or slander). Seems to me you have a case if, and only if, the information reported is wrong (and the burden of proof for that would be on you).
I like it: A raft of libel suits could make the cost of doing business as a credit reporting agency high enough that it might finish off the business model. (And the time to hit them is when they're already weakened.)
About friggin' time! I've been doing my best to avoid giving out my SSN where it's not required by law since the '80s.
One big hole that has been going on for decades is Medicare:
* Once you're old enough to be on it, you can't get regular health insurance to pay for the portion of your medical work (often all or the bulk of the cost) that Medicare pays for. Regular health plans turn into cover-the-difference supplements. You must sign up for Medicare or pay the charges yourself. (And if you don't have the government imposing price levels or the insurance companies negotiating deep discounts you get to pay the drastically inflated "regular price" that makes up for their discounts.)
* But if you DO sign up for Medicare, what do you get for an ID? Your SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER with a single letter appended after it. They won't provide any alternative (though they have "been thinking about it" for years). You have to give this to ALL your medical providers. Get a prescription or an immunization at a pharmacy, hand in your Medicare ID. Go to a doctor, hand in your Medicare ID. Get a lab test, hand in your Medicare ID. Go to a specialist, hand in your Medicare ID.
Dozens, or even hundreds, of medical billing paperwork operations, with unknown numbers of clerks doing data entry (often offshore) and unknown competency of IT people configuring their databases, get your name and SS#. Some have even been CAUGHT selling them. Oops!
* So then we get stories about how people over 65 have a much higher rate of identity theft - typically trying to imply that these oldsters are lax in guarding their SS numbers. Well, DUH!
... Google and Facebook did not fail people. Ass-holes at the Atlantic and Buzzfeed, that think Google and Facebook need to think for us, failed us.Google and Facebook did not fail people. Ass-holes at the Atlantic and Buzzfeed, that think Google and Facebook need to think for us, failed us.
IMHO it's the dying old-media flaming their competition.
A Free Press doesn't work by each outlet covering everything accurately and without bias, sorting TRUTH from Fake News, and serving as an omniscient gatekeeper which decides what the population needs to hear.
A Free Press works by many, competing, unregulated outlets each covering what they want to cover, reporting it with their particular biases, filters, and attempts at accuracy, and each member of the public making their own choices on which to believe and which to patronize.
For centuries we've had such media - word-of-mouth, minstrels story-telling news, movable type printing presses enabling pamphleteers, etc. - and people understanding they must do their own sorting of truth from rumor, bias (self-serving or otherwise), propaganda, delusion, and other chaff. Then we had a period of several generations where the cost of printing presses and broadcast networks, along with regulations on broadcast licensing and economic fallout from it, has progressively concentrated the news media into the hands of a tiny number of players with a reasonably consistent bias.
Now we have the (still reasonably) unrestricted Internet dropping the barriers to entry. So we're back to the explosion of different viewpoints, augmented by the exposure of the biases of the old mainstream media by unfiltered coverage. The honeymoon is over and we've been shocked at the bias exhibited by the mainstream media. We're back to "drinking from the firehose" and making our own judgements of what to believe.
This has reduced the mainstream media from the only team in town to just one small cluster in the mob of biased sources. That impacted their revenue. They're trying to get their market back, and one way to do that is to "sell" their particular set of filters as a service - and try to convince everyone that it's better than any of the alternatives.
Of course, when a breaking event IS breaking, there's a flood of rumor. The rush to fill a demand for information and to "scoop" the competition leads to a flurry of under-vetted reportage, much of it in error. And with ALL sources available to the users of the Internet, there's plenty of errors to chose from.
So it's a golden opportunity for the old and dying media outlets to point to the most egregious falsehoods in the flood and claim that ALL the alternatives to THEIR filtering are as bad.
Thus the Atlantic article, flaming Google (which started as an indexer of ALL the content of the Internet and still claims to be mostly that) for not refusing to index any report that doesn't fit THEIR OWN set of filters, and implying that any such indexer SHOULD join a de-facto conspiracy to hide such competing outlets from public view.
Usually what happens ... If the defendant doesn't show up ... to contest the order that has been presented by the plaintiff ... [the judge] may be inclined to use the plaintiff's proposed order and enter it as a default judgment
Also: The site was created by a Kazakhstani graduate student, is hosted in St. Petersburg, Russia, and has used domain name registrars in various countries.
As I understand it: Under US law, if you contact a court to contest jurisdiction, you've conceded that the court has jurisdiction if it decides that it does. So there isn't a good way for someone out of a court's jurisdiction to contest jurisdiction up front. This lets plaintiffs go court shopping (for courts that are cheap for them and expensive for their defendants and likely to rule in their favor if the case goes to trial) and get unconscionable default judgements if a defendant protects his/her rights by declining to appear or correspond with the court. Then it's up to the defendant to fight off attempts to enforce the execution of the judgement.
I'm amazed it took this long to get down the comments to find this one ;-)
So was I when I posted it. B-)
I'm amazed it didn't get even one "funny". ;-)
(No explanation needed.)