I'm all for fining Wal-Mart IF their store-brand (which they themselves manufacture) is guilty of not including aloe. Going after retailers for selling what they believed to be perfectly good products is insane, though. You don't sue a retailer for carrying a bad product unless they were negligent in the event of a recall. What you prescribe would easily put lots of retailers out of business very quickly by making them personally responsible for the content of every product they sell.
You presume that every retailer could investigate each product at the molecular level -- and every batch, no doubt! -- to ensure quality. No, that's the manufacturer's responsibility! You also assume that just any retailer could take on a huge financial penalty and then simply get immediately reimbursed by a manufacturer -- yeah, right. Litigation can take years -- or even decades with appeals. They may not survive the judgement and legal fees before they're reimbursed.
Government sets regulations for products, retailers are just middle-men. If a product is bad, you go after the manufacturer. It's the manufacturer's responsibility to deliver what was expected and to have a reasonable return policy and warranty for goods. Don't buy crap from brands you don't trust! If it's a quality brand, they won't want to hurt their brand by being involved with scandals like fraudulent goods. I imagine if Nike sold asbestos shoes, they'd be out the class action lawsuit money and a great deal more for damaging their brand. It's not Wal-Mart, Payless, Footlocker, etc.'s fault if Nike uses asbestos instead of memory foam or polyester.
As for your domestic argument... yeah... good luck with that with ALOE VERA. The plant doesn't grow well enough for agricultural production anywhere in the USA outside of parts of Arizona and southern Texas. Even there, it's considered to be not a great use of the land for the expense. Much of it is grown overseas and in Mexico. It's generally processed close to where it's grown for many reasons, but you're generally going to be working with a foreign distributor that slapped a label on the farm's aloe vera juice no matter what.
As an aside, we don't even know what constitutes "real" aloe vera gel as an ingredient. The article mentions 3 possible ingredients (mostly sugars/starches), but there's nothing that says what's in the bottle didn't actually come from an aloe vera plant but had those sugars removed as part of the refinement process! Did anyone do a mass spec analysis of all the chemicals in it to see what WAS really in there? Maybe it's fake... maybe it's just been refined. This may be similar to arguments against calling something chocolate because it has no cocoa fat solids, but instead has oils and corn syrup, but it still has organic bits that came from the cocoa plant and still tastes similar to other chocolates.
Creative solutions have to be worth the cost of implementing, and in most environments, corporations are huge slow-moving behemoths that get around to innovative solutions once every few months or years. Yay! You found a way to increase productivity by 1%. We would have to change all the manuals, rules of procedures, and disseminate the new method to everyone after we hold a few focus groups and make sure there's absolutely no downside to using this solution over our tried and true method... and maybe change it. Sure, let's pay you $60K+ a year to come up with an innovative solution once in a blue moon rather than just train the robots to do it the old way and maybe put that money towards a hardware/software upgrade for the robots which might boost them 20% instead of your crappy 1% boost.
Point is, robots will eventually be able to do all manual labor, and with the coming AI revolution, most sem-skilled and skilled labor, too. Most businesses fall into manufacturing (all robots) or service industries (all AI and robots) with very few real jobs that couldn't be automated with AI. Even most surgeons can be replaced with a competent AI.
Think of a job. Now ask why that job can't be replaced with an entity that is capable of physically doing things better, faster, cheaper, and longer than a human being and with the current AI revolution and quantum computing can also match the mental capabilities of most humans as well.
Drivers, pilots, delivery people, wait staff, cooking staff, assembly line workers, auto repair workers, clerks, tailors, nurses, pharmacists... so many jobs can be automated. Humans will be relegated to extremely complicated, creative, and/or niche work. Even fully autonomous robot surgeons will be able to do most routine surgeries.
I'm thinking.... plumber, carpenter, plastic surgeon, ER surgeon, brain surgeon, lawyer, judge, politician, actor, musician, writer, software coder, etc will stay largely human jobs for the foreseeable future, but their days are numbered, too. There is AI software that can analyze MRIs better than humans, and it's not much of a step to think it'd be able to choose a surgery option and perform it as well. There are AI law clerks as well. Recently, an AI teacher's assistant was given extremely high marks as the best TA who responded very quickly with helpful suggestions and answers at all hours. The students had no idea the TA was an automated system. Human jobs are often highly repetitive -- we're doomed, bro.
It's not silly. It's inevitable. Previous industrial and tech revolutions helped people to do things better/faster and sometimes replaced people in jobs. This one will replace ALL manual labor. Beyond that, it'll replace many office jobs, and eventually even high skilled jobs.
It doesn't take a crystal ball to see the writing on the wall. Everything a human can do physically at work can be done faster, better, and cheaper with a robot. Sooner or later, AI will be able to do everything a human is mentally capable of as well -- and better, faster, cheaper, for longer, etc. It'll take time, but we're on the cusp of humanity being completely obsolete in the workforce. Why pay a human being a salary when you can purchase what's essentially a slave labor robot force? And even buy robots to service the other robots?
Initially, we'll lose most of the rest of factory jobs (China is already replacing its workforce with robots in factories), then we'll lose most service jobs, then we'll lose delivery and taxi driving jobs, followed by doctors, lawyers, and one day possibly even writers, software coders, and engineers.
The pace of technology is rapidly increasing -- far faster than humans will be able to find niche jobs that exploit their creative talents which AI hasn't yet been able to master. Ever increasing human population, ever faster decreasing number of viable jobs. Doom. Doooooom without universal income.
Because it's been tried and PC gamers had a serious edge over console gamers. Think about it -- crappy console joysticks and various size TVs vs keyboards with lots of buttons, options, macros, and a mouse with multiple buttons -- not to mention the possible screen setups like multi-monitors.
For PVP, Starcraft console players would be smoked by PC players.
Also, the head's up display (HUD) is usually very different for console vs pc. And PC players have options for outside-game chat and voice programs that let teams coordinate or stealthily share info better.
I think you missed the point. Whoosh. GP is agreeing storage is not an issue.
He's saying capacity and actual output are apples and oranges, and it's not storage that's the problem. I can build a wind turbine with the capacity for so many megawatts, but if it's only windy on Thursdays and idle on the other 6 days, my output is only 1/7th my capacity. Wind and solar have a certain maximum expected capacity, but they rarely hit that except at peak times -- either when wind picks up at certain times of day or when the sun is perfectly overhead on a sunny day.
Capacity does not equal output for those renewables while a coal or nuclear plant can be worked at full capacity so that its capacity = its output constantly if that were desirable. (In the real world, most plants have more than one reactor/furnace and will fire up and shut down according to need and wouldn't necessarily run at full capacity either, though.)
It's... really a misnomer to even call it a smartwatch as that's not its intended use-case. It's really a wrist-mounted mini-phone/tablet that has a limited use-case.
1) The Chinese love them -- because you can tap and draw on their surface while talking to people of different dialects to communicate better
2) Bartenders and other busy people who don't have hands free to pull out their phones every time they ring (assuming they can hear or feel them vibrate).
3) Joggers and other athletes on the go. You don't have to take your phone with you - the Apple watch will take calls without the phone nearby.
Don't think of them as watches... no one that owns one does. I've met a few people that own them, and they love them. I won't get one because I don't have a reasonable use-case for the expense, but I can see how they're popular with those who can really put them to good use.
I think he's referring to the isoflavones in soybeans which mimic estrogen and are possibly linked to multiple hormone-related health issues.
While everything you eat affects your body in some way or another, consuming isoflavones in sufficient quantities which convert into phytoestrogensis a bad idea as hormone balance is especially sensitive to such consumption... well... for men anyway. For post-menopausal women, there have been beneficial effects in studies that show it's similar to taking low-dose hormone-replacement therapies -- ie estrogen pills. There's also a theory that increased soy products have aided in increased breast sizes, early puberty, and low sperm counts... though it's far from proven.
The National Institute of Health states results from various studies are mixed and that it supports further study, yet cautions women who are at high risk of breast or cervical cancer from eating lots of soy.
Eh, they could have put in a second lightning port, but that would be very un-Apple-like (this is the same company that refused to have 2-button mice for a while).
Also, it wouldn't have solved the real problem to add something back after they removed the jack. The issue wasn't just space, but interference between parts. Apple could have miniaturized the analog audio jack further, but the interference would have remained. Supporting analog audio was a losing battle from the beginning when blutooth and lightning both support digital audio output. If Apple could get away with it, they'd remove the lightning jack as well -- wireless power, audio, everything. In fact, I'm sure that's their ultimate goal. I expect the Iphone XII to be completely wireless -- though with a proprietary optical sensor/receiver to work with car stereos and beats audio, of course!
I quit using it several weeks ago when the new watchlist replaced my queue. Hulu only had 2 shows I still watched sem-regularly anyway, and I wasn't going to bother with the watchlist. I thought, perhaps with the hatred of the feature and loss of viewers, they'd wise up -- but no. Apparently my eyeballs aren't worth the money they make from targeted advertising towards me vs the bandwidth cost to serve me. That's fine.
Most of what I watch, I have to visit various websites directly anyway -- like syfy.com for 12 monkeys... which was never available on Hulu.
Now we wait until Hulu becomes completely irrelevant. The owners have tried to sell it several times, but no one was stupid enough to buy the middle-man distribution network from the content providers. Why would anyone purchase it? So they could then have to negotiate pricing for everything from the very people they bought the company from? lol. Hulu Plus was the owners' idea to monetize it further... and it was clear that they went kicking and screaming towards no commercials (as their ability to target customers for commercials was worth a lot of money)... and they HAD to kill off the free version as anyone could see the sales pitches all over every page and the intentional hiding of the free content you had to search for. Shoving the freebie stuff over to Yahoo for a fee made sense... b/c now the free stuff is on a completely different site that the owners hope you'll never visit.
A 14 year old knows the difference between building and inventing. Ask any 14 year old who invented the telephone, the car, or the cotton gin. They may not know the correct answers, but they know the meaning. Then, ask them who currently manufactures cars and telephones. Very different answers.
Your argument would work for a 5 year old, but not a 14 year old. Many 14 year olds are freshmen in high school and should have learned the difference between building and inventing back in elementary school.
He didn't even make the clock -- he removed it from its housing and placed it into another housing. He made a box for a clock... one he stated he specifically chose to disguise what it was.
No sane person would believe his story that he invented a clock and wanted to show it off to his teacher at school -- no, he pulled a clock out of its housing, hid it inside another housing on purpose to disguise it, and then showed it to kids knowing they'd think it could be a bomb. 14 year olds aren't innocent 'lil ignorant angels that don't know what words mean. They have sex, do drugs, lie their asses off to their parents and elders, sneak out of their houses at night, and yes -- make fake bombs for attention. Not ALL of them, obviously, but yeah... he's 2 years shy of driving and holding down a part-time job in most states, not a baby to be coddled and forgiven for doing something he damned well knew was stupid and made up lies to cover it up.
Wrong. Jamming EM frequencies or using EM frequencies to cause interference is illegal. It's damned well legal to put any ol' wire mesh in your building if you please. People put wire mesh in their attics to keep critters out.
I hate to break it to you, but even though your cell phone can dial 911, your cell phone is not an official emergency service either. You can grab a payphone or use the office's phone to dial 911 if the establishment even has a phone -- which, by the way, isn't a requirement either.
For those that don't understand the concept, EM radiation has a very difficult time penetrating wet concrete and thick metal. That's why basements of large concrete buildings and around elevator shafts have no phone signal. Anyone who wishes can build out of concrete and steel and have no cell phone service in their building also -- and perfectly legally.
Just FYI, there are wallpaper manufacturers which sell EM shielding wallpaper for commercial and private use -- lots of places use it to block FM/AM/UHF/VHF and cell phone signals -- especially government offices.
QoS is tedious and nearly impossible to set up and maintain properly and fairly. The easiest and most cost-beneficial way to use it is to favor content and services the ISP/Cable provider offers -- to the detriment of other providers. Also, QoS is basically useless for prioritizing anything over an encrypted VPN... and it's highly dependent on applications being fair and sticking to RFCs. All one has to do is write a program to send their data with a different packet header that lies and says the data is a critical VOIP packet to get routed into the fast lane -- unless the fast lane only allows packets with certain origin or destination IP addresses.
QoS was for private networks with limited resources that could control what was on their networks (and their employees, PCs, and apps to some extent). In the wild, it's just a way for corporations to favor their own services.
Common carrier has nothing to do with whether something is unidirectional, bidirectional, or omnidirectional.
Any service that allows anyone to pay a fee to have their goods &/or services picked up from one location and delivered to another is a common carrier. Airlines, telephone companies, electric companies, freight and railway companies, and internet service providers are all common carriers... because they "carry" a thing from A to B for a fee -- generally from any random member of the public.
The key term is "common" -- as opposed to a contracted or private carrier.
You are correct that Cable TV is not a common carrier... mostly. The FCC does require cable TV providers to carry broadcast TV stations within their respective areas (with some restrictions) The key being they don't just broadcast whatever any random person wants for fee. They could, but it'd be a nightmare for scheduling, payment, censorship, etc. They contract with individual stations, networks, and networks of networks to broadcast rather than allow just anyone to pay to push content to peoples' homes.
VOD is actually a sticking point with ISPs and the FCC.
Modern cable systems are digital, and they push content... so a video on demand service from a cable service is extremely similar to any other video on demand service -- like Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon. The FCC has warned ISPs not to degrade the quality of other VOD services to favor their own, but they can provide their own for free or for a fee to compete with others.
The sticking point is net metering -- should cable companies be allowed to exclude their own VOD services from data metering while counting the streaming from others VODs as data that goes towards metering? Some say it should be excluded because it is on the cable company's network and they don't have to pay a fee to pull it over an internet connection. Others say data is data, and excluding it from metering is unfair and might harm other VOD services from competing with non-metered data. Cable companies might even heavily raise fees and impose data caps to strangle VOD competition.
The latest Time Warner Cable + Charter merger requires them not to meter internet connections for another 5 years... so, for TWC/Charter, that can is kicked down the road a bit.
Executive orders are when presidents (heads of the executive branch) give orders to federal agents under their command. The internet is regulated by the FCC -- an independent executive organization outside of the president's chain of command. A president giving an order to any person or agency not under their command would be null and void. Obama could issue an executive order for all ice cream shops to give out free ice cream on Thursdays, and it would be null and void. It's nonsensical to give an order to anyone who doesn't take orders from you.
As for federal courts, judges only take cases from those with standing and with which the court has jurisdiction... so... since the FCC is the only federal agency with the authority to regulate the internet, what grievance do you have with the FCC (or your ISP if it's a federal issue) that personally affects you that you want to sue and/or prosecute them for doing? Considering how federal court rulings generally only apply to the district level, even if you were successful in petitioning a federal district court judge to take your case, and you somehow won based on federal law, any decision, verdict, and/or ruling would only apply to that District... the other 8 Districts wouldn't have to do jack about it --unless others won cases there as well... and then maybe it'd head to the supreme court.
The thing is, you're stuck with the FCC. Congress gave them the authority to do as they like with the internet. We're lucky it's now common carrier under Title II. Maybe one day they'll decide it's a utility and regulate it further. Maybe.
Technically not true. It depends on the merchant, the amount charged, and the risk of the transaction.
You can get away with using a credit card for purchases up to $25 without a signature at all. (typical fast food restaurants) The merchant takes the risk of a chargeback situation -- especially for fraud -- if they don't take proper steps to ensure the transaction is authorized. If you buy a shiny new BMW with a credit card, you'd better believe they're going to check your ID, make sure the back of your card is signed, and that your signature matches what's on the back of the card as well.
It's all about risk, and the truth is for most transactions, the risk is very low -- and when a chargeback happens, it's often cheaper to agree to refund the charges and claim any losses as cost of doing business than to fight with the customer's CC processor over the transaction anyway -- even if the merchant thinks they'd win by contesting the chargeback. (Chargebacks disputes can last months with multiple lengthy forms back and forth between the merchant, the CC processor, and the card holder's bank.) (fyi, this is why a lot of processors don't do business with porn sites or adult industry related businesses in general -- so many chargebacks and the CC processors take on a lot of work and risk dealing with them)
That'd be the biggest whopper of a lie I've heard yet. lol... a camera. That's a good one.
I used to work for a Credit Card processor, and we knew about the changes years before they took place in the USA -- Canada's had the Chips forever. Cameras are not part of the standard for the transactions. Though, I could totally see them doing that in another 20 years. (It takes forever to push a new standard in the industry... b/c there are so many players involved and so much push-back over changes.)
No, there's no photo involved in the transaction, though I wouldn't be surprised if individual merchants trained their store cameras on that spot should there ever be a need to confront a customer over a contested charge.
They were charged with conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, copyright infringement, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Conspiracy means they had to intentionally help others on a large scale to commit a crime or crimes. One could say, hey, it's all just 1s and 0s... but, the truth is that they acted in a large scale (globally) to intentionally help others pirate copyrighted materials. It's not so much the torrent or magnet links... it's the business model they created that shuttled funds through various dummy corps, countries, and bank accounts (money laundering) and that it was built on the back of supporting international copyright infringement.
Not sayin' I approve or disapprove... just... legally, KAT made the mistake of crossing into USA jurisdiction and the jurisdiction of various countries with similar laws, treaties with the USA, and extradition treaties with the USA. Still.... innocent until proven guilty & a jury might not convict on the conspiracy charges - though I doubt it. If I were him, I'd take a deal and plead to the lesser charges.
Mostly because it's over the internet, and the charges were for conspiracy. If any party of the conspiracy is within the jurisdiction, they can charge the whole group or any member of the group and extradite as long as there are treaties to allow it. Also, if they're facilitating a crime within the USA and/or people within the USA have access to the website, it's under Federal jurisdiction because the internet is a forum for national and international commerce. It's possible if KAT had blocked all access to North America and Hawaii, it might have avoided charges due to jurisdiction, but even then, It'd be facilitating criminal copyright infringement using a method of international commerce while harming US corporations and there's likely trade treaties with various countries to allow prosecution anyway.
He's charged with criminal copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The first 2 have a max sentence of 5 years each, the latter has a max of 20 years. If he's lucky, he'll be allowed to plea guilty for the conspiracy to commit copyright infringement in exchange for dropping the money laundering charge, pay a huge fine and lose seized equipment and frozen bank accounts... and get a max of 5 years -- maybe as little as 1 year. That's really not bad for a 30 year old making millions a year off of a website for pirating.
The USA has its legal tendrils everywhere -- and very few countries won't extradite. Brazil and Venezuela are among a few nice places to live that refuse to extradite citizens... though, they will prosecute their citizens under their own laws if the crime is recognized there.
oh, how I miss Futurama. It came back from the dead a few times, but each time, it was a little less than it was before -- as if some fire god had something to do with its resurrection.
Awesome... now we know the exact areas of the brain to manipulate so that our corporate overlords can control us better.
I'm betting the next gen VR headsets will have electrodes to stimulate those areas properly for future mind control -- especially during election seasons. lol.
I'm kidding.... at least... I think I'm kidding. Oh, dear god, they might actually go there with this tech.
Maybe. We've learned that galaxies are often in clusters, and that many are moving either together or towards a single location known as "the great attractor." If we can figure out these new galaxies' red-shifts and motion, we might learn more about the structure of the universe and in turn learn more about dark matter, dark energy, and other mysteries.
It's not a file format, it's a compression algorithm that happens at the data storage level. This is similar to compressing a hard drive -- the files are individually compressed, but the file formats are the same, and the OS handles the compression/decompression seamlessly so that the applications don't even know they're accessing compressed versions of the file formats they normally use.
You can keep all your JPEGs, and with the open-source license, compress the contents of a drive or partition with this algorithm and save maybe 20% or so of the space the JPEG files took up. Not worth it for most people but photographers and image sites might save a lot of money using this.
Why? The USA is roughly the same size as Europe. Do all the countries in the EU have the exact same laws?
The states in the USA are separate sovereign governments united by a federal constitution that mostly exists for mutual defense, protection of civil rights, and control of commerce across various borders. Think of the USA as the EU and the states as EU member countries. The USA just has a much stronger union than the EU... and unfortunately, no defined method for states to secede. (The South tried to leave, but we were too stupid to let them.... which is why the USA isn't as progressive as the EU... with Republicans blocking universal health care, etc. etc.)
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I'm all for fining Wal-Mart IF their store-brand (which they themselves manufacture) is guilty of not including aloe. Going after retailers for selling what they believed to be perfectly good products is insane, though. You don't sue a retailer for carrying a bad product unless they were negligent in the event of a recall. What you prescribe would easily put lots of retailers out of business very quickly by making them personally responsible for the content of every product they sell.
You presume that every retailer could investigate each product at the molecular level -- and every batch, no doubt! -- to ensure quality. No, that's the manufacturer's responsibility! You also assume that just any retailer could take on a huge financial penalty and then simply get immediately reimbursed by a manufacturer -- yeah, right. Litigation can take years -- or even decades with appeals. They may not survive the judgement and legal fees before they're reimbursed.
Government sets regulations for products, retailers are just middle-men. If a product is bad, you go after the manufacturer. It's the manufacturer's responsibility to deliver what was expected and to have a reasonable return policy and warranty for goods. Don't buy crap from brands you don't trust! If it's a quality brand, they won't want to hurt their brand by being involved with scandals like fraudulent goods. I imagine if Nike sold asbestos shoes, they'd be out the class action lawsuit money and a great deal more for damaging their brand. It's not Wal-Mart, Payless, Footlocker, etc.'s fault if Nike uses asbestos instead of memory foam or polyester.
As for your domestic argument... yeah... good luck with that with ALOE VERA. The plant doesn't grow well enough for agricultural production anywhere in the USA outside of parts of Arizona and southern Texas. Even there, it's considered to be not a great use of the land for the expense. Much of it is grown overseas and in Mexico. It's generally processed close to where it's grown for many reasons, but you're generally going to be working with a foreign distributor that slapped a label on the farm's aloe vera juice no matter what.
As an aside, we don't even know what constitutes "real" aloe vera gel as an ingredient. The article mentions 3 possible ingredients (mostly sugars/starches), but there's nothing that says what's in the bottle didn't actually come from an aloe vera plant but had those sugars removed as part of the refinement process! Did anyone do a mass spec analysis of all the chemicals in it to see what WAS really in there? Maybe it's fake... maybe it's just been refined. This may be similar to arguments against calling something chocolate because it has no cocoa fat solids, but instead has oils and corn syrup, but it still has organic bits that came from the cocoa plant and still tastes similar to other chocolates.
Creative solutions have to be worth the cost of implementing, and in most environments, corporations are huge slow-moving behemoths that get around to innovative solutions once every few months or years. Yay! You found a way to increase productivity by 1%. We would have to change all the manuals, rules of procedures, and disseminate the new method to everyone after we hold a few focus groups and make sure there's absolutely no downside to using this solution over our tried and true method... and maybe change it. Sure, let's pay you $60K+ a year to come up with an innovative solution once in a blue moon rather than just train the robots to do it the old way and maybe put that money towards a hardware/software upgrade for the robots which might boost them 20% instead of your crappy 1% boost.
Point is, robots will eventually be able to do all manual labor, and with the coming AI revolution, most sem-skilled and skilled labor, too. Most businesses fall into manufacturing (all robots) or service industries (all AI and robots) with very few real jobs that couldn't be automated with AI. Even most surgeons can be replaced with a competent AI.
Think of a job. Now ask why that job can't be replaced with an entity that is capable of physically doing things better, faster, cheaper, and longer than a human being and with the current AI revolution and quantum computing can also match the mental capabilities of most humans as well.
Drivers, pilots, delivery people, wait staff, cooking staff, assembly line workers, auto repair workers, clerks, tailors, nurses, pharmacists... so many jobs can be automated. Humans will be relegated to extremely complicated, creative, and/or niche work. Even fully autonomous robot surgeons will be able to do most routine surgeries.
I'm thinking.... plumber, carpenter, plastic surgeon, ER surgeon, brain surgeon, lawyer, judge, politician, actor, musician, writer, software coder, etc will stay largely human jobs for the foreseeable future, but their days are numbered, too. There is AI software that can analyze MRIs better than humans, and it's not much of a step to think it'd be able to choose a surgery option and perform it as well. There are AI law clerks as well. Recently, an AI teacher's assistant was given extremely high marks as the best TA who responded very quickly with helpful suggestions and answers at all hours. The students had no idea the TA was an automated system. Human jobs are often highly repetitive -- we're doomed, bro.
It's not silly. It's inevitable. Previous industrial and tech revolutions helped people to do things better/faster and sometimes replaced people in jobs. This one will replace ALL manual labor. Beyond that, it'll replace many office jobs, and eventually even high skilled jobs.
It doesn't take a crystal ball to see the writing on the wall. Everything a human can do physically at work can be done faster, better, and cheaper with a robot. Sooner or later, AI will be able to do everything a human is mentally capable of as well -- and better, faster, cheaper, for longer, etc. It'll take time, but we're on the cusp of humanity being completely obsolete in the workforce. Why pay a human being a salary when you can purchase what's essentially a slave labor robot force? And even buy robots to service the other robots?
Initially, we'll lose most of the rest of factory jobs (China is already replacing its workforce with robots in factories), then we'll lose most service jobs, then we'll lose delivery and taxi driving jobs, followed by doctors, lawyers, and one day possibly even writers, software coders, and engineers.
The pace of technology is rapidly increasing -- far faster than humans will be able to find niche jobs that exploit their creative talents which AI hasn't yet been able to master. Ever increasing human population, ever faster decreasing number of viable jobs. Doom. Doooooom without universal income.
Because it's been tried and PC gamers had a serious edge over console gamers. Think about it -- crappy console joysticks and various size TVs vs keyboards with lots of buttons, options, macros, and a mouse with multiple buttons -- not to mention the possible screen setups like multi-monitors.
For PVP, Starcraft console players would be smoked by PC players.
Also, the head's up display (HUD) is usually very different for console vs pc. And PC players have options for outside-game chat and voice programs that let teams coordinate or stealthily share info better.
I think you missed the point. Whoosh. GP is agreeing storage is not an issue.
He's saying capacity and actual output are apples and oranges, and it's not storage that's the problem. I can build a wind turbine with the capacity for so many megawatts, but if it's only windy on Thursdays and idle on the other 6 days, my output is only 1/7th my capacity. Wind and solar have a certain maximum expected capacity, but they rarely hit that except at peak times -- either when wind picks up at certain times of day or when the sun is perfectly overhead on a sunny day.
Capacity does not equal output for those renewables while a coal or nuclear plant can be worked at full capacity so that its capacity = its output constantly if that were desirable. (In the real world, most plants have more than one reactor/furnace and will fire up and shut down according to need and wouldn't necessarily run at full capacity either, though.)
It's... really a misnomer to even call it a smartwatch as that's not its intended use-case. It's really a wrist-mounted mini-phone/tablet that has a limited use-case.
1) The Chinese love them -- because you can tap and draw on their surface while talking to people of different dialects to communicate better
2) Bartenders and other busy people who don't have hands free to pull out their phones every time they ring (assuming they can hear or feel them vibrate).
3) Joggers and other athletes on the go. You don't have to take your phone with you - the Apple watch will take calls without the phone nearby.
Don't think of them as watches... no one that owns one does. I've met a few people that own them, and they love them. I won't get one because I don't have a reasonable use-case for the expense, but I can see how they're popular with those who can really put them to good use.
I think he's referring to the isoflavones in soybeans which mimic estrogen and are possibly linked to multiple hormone-related health issues.
While everything you eat affects your body in some way or another, consuming isoflavones in sufficient quantities which convert into phytoestrogensis a bad idea as hormone balance is especially sensitive to such consumption... well... for men anyway. For post-menopausal women, there have been beneficial effects in studies that show it's similar to taking low-dose hormone-replacement therapies -- ie estrogen pills. There's also a theory that increased soy products have aided in increased breast sizes, early puberty, and low sperm counts... though it's far from proven.
The National Institute of Health states results from various studies are mixed and that it supports further study, yet cautions women who are at high risk of breast or cervical cancer from eating lots of soy.
https://nccih.nih.gov/health/s...
Eh, they could have put in a second lightning port, but that would be very un-Apple-like (this is the same company that refused to have 2-button mice for a while).
Also, it wouldn't have solved the real problem to add something back after they removed the jack. The issue wasn't just space, but interference between parts. Apple could have miniaturized the analog audio jack further, but the interference would have remained. Supporting analog audio was a losing battle from the beginning when blutooth and lightning both support digital audio output. If Apple could get away with it, they'd remove the lightning jack as well -- wireless power, audio, everything. In fact, I'm sure that's their ultimate goal. I expect the Iphone XII to be completely wireless -- though with a proprietary optical sensor/receiver to work with car stereos and beats audio, of course!
https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnp...
This.
I quit using it several weeks ago when the new watchlist replaced my queue. Hulu only had 2 shows I still watched sem-regularly anyway, and I wasn't going to bother with the watchlist. I thought, perhaps with the hatred of the feature and loss of viewers, they'd wise up -- but no. Apparently my eyeballs aren't worth the money they make from targeted advertising towards me vs the bandwidth cost to serve me. That's fine.
Most of what I watch, I have to visit various websites directly anyway -- like syfy.com for 12 monkeys... which was never available on Hulu.
Now we wait until Hulu becomes completely irrelevant. The owners have tried to sell it several times, but no one was stupid enough to buy the middle-man distribution network from the content providers. Why would anyone purchase it? So they could then have to negotiate pricing for everything from the very people they bought the company from? lol. Hulu Plus was the owners' idea to monetize it further... and it was clear that they went kicking and screaming towards no commercials (as their ability to target customers for commercials was worth a lot of money)... and they HAD to kill off the free version as anyone could see the sales pitches all over every page and the intentional hiding of the free content you had to search for. Shoving the freebie stuff over to Yahoo for a fee made sense... b/c now the free stuff is on a completely different site that the owners hope you'll never visit.
A 14 year old knows the difference between building and inventing. Ask any 14 year old who invented the telephone, the car, or the cotton gin. They may not know the correct answers, but they know the meaning. Then, ask them who currently manufactures cars and telephones. Very different answers.
Your argument would work for a 5 year old, but not a 14 year old. Many 14 year olds are freshmen in high school and should have learned the difference between building and inventing back in elementary school.
He didn't even make the clock -- he removed it from its housing and placed it into another housing. He made a box for a clock... one he stated he specifically chose to disguise what it was.
No sane person would believe his story that he invented a clock and wanted to show it off to his teacher at school -- no, he pulled a clock out of its housing, hid it inside another housing on purpose to disguise it, and then showed it to kids knowing they'd think it could be a bomb. 14 year olds aren't innocent 'lil ignorant angels that don't know what words mean. They have sex, do drugs, lie their asses off to their parents and elders, sneak out of their houses at night, and yes -- make fake bombs for attention. Not ALL of them, obviously, but yeah... he's 2 years shy of driving and holding down a part-time job in most states, not a baby to be coddled and forgiven for doing something he damned well knew was stupid and made up lies to cover it up.
A Faraday cage is PASSIVE obstruction and perfectly legal. Active jamming would be creating EM interference on the same frequency...
Lots of places have EM shielding to block radio waves of all sorts -- especially hospitals, research facilities, factories, and government facilities.
They even sell wallpaper with the mesh built in so it's easier to set up.
Wrong. Jamming EM frequencies or using EM frequencies to cause interference is illegal. It's damned well legal to put any ol' wire mesh in your building if you please. People put wire mesh in their attics to keep critters out.
I hate to break it to you, but even though your cell phone can dial 911, your cell phone is not an official emergency service either. You can grab a payphone or use the office's phone to dial 911 if the establishment even has a phone -- which, by the way, isn't a requirement either.
For those that don't understand the concept, EM radiation has a very difficult time penetrating wet concrete and thick metal. That's why basements of large concrete buildings and around elevator shafts have no phone signal. Anyone who wishes can build out of concrete and steel and have no cell phone service in their building also -- and perfectly legally.
Just FYI, there are wallpaper manufacturers which sell EM shielding wallpaper for commercial and private use -- lots of places use it to block FM/AM/UHF/VHF and cell phone signals -- especially government offices.
QoS is tedious and nearly impossible to set up and maintain properly and fairly. The easiest and most cost-beneficial way to use it is to favor content and services the ISP/Cable provider offers -- to the detriment of other providers. Also, QoS is basically useless for prioritizing anything over an encrypted VPN... and it's highly dependent on applications being fair and sticking to RFCs. All one has to do is write a program to send their data with a different packet header that lies and says the data is a critical VOIP packet to get routed into the fast lane -- unless the fast lane only allows packets with certain origin or destination IP addresses.
QoS was for private networks with limited resources that could control what was on their networks (and their employees, PCs, and apps to some extent). In the wild, it's just a way for corporations to favor their own services.
Common carrier has nothing to do with whether something is unidirectional, bidirectional, or omnidirectional.
Any service that allows anyone to pay a fee to have their goods &/or services picked up from one location and delivered to another is a common carrier. Airlines, telephone companies, electric companies, freight and railway companies, and internet service providers are all common carriers... because they "carry" a thing from A to B for a fee -- generally from any random member of the public.
The key term is "common" -- as opposed to a contracted or private carrier.
You are correct that Cable TV is not a common carrier... mostly. The FCC does require cable TV providers to carry broadcast TV stations within their respective areas (with some restrictions) The key being they don't just broadcast whatever any random person wants for fee. They could, but it'd be a nightmare for scheduling, payment, censorship, etc. They contract with individual stations, networks, and networks of networks to broadcast rather than allow just anyone to pay to push content to peoples' homes.
VOD is actually a sticking point with ISPs and the FCC.
Modern cable systems are digital, and they push content... so a video on demand service from a cable service is extremely similar to any other video on demand service -- like Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon. The FCC has warned ISPs not to degrade the quality of other VOD services to favor their own, but they can provide their own for free or for a fee to compete with others.
The sticking point is net metering -- should cable companies be allowed to exclude their own VOD services from data metering while counting the streaming from others VODs as data that goes towards metering? Some say it should be excluded because it is on the cable company's network and they don't have to pay a fee to pull it over an internet connection. Others say data is data, and excluding it from metering is unfair and might harm other VOD services from competing with non-metered data. Cable companies might even heavily raise fees and impose data caps to strangle VOD competition.
The latest Time Warner Cable + Charter merger requires them not to meter internet connections for another 5 years... so, for TWC/Charter, that can is kicked down the road a bit.
Executive orders are when presidents (heads of the executive branch) give orders to federal agents under their command. The internet is regulated by the FCC -- an independent executive organization outside of the president's chain of command. A president giving an order to any person or agency not under their command would be null and void. Obama could issue an executive order for all ice cream shops to give out free ice cream on Thursdays, and it would be null and void. It's nonsensical to give an order to anyone who doesn't take orders from you.
As for federal courts, judges only take cases from those with standing and with which the court has jurisdiction... so... since the FCC is the only federal agency with the authority to regulate the internet, what grievance do you have with the FCC (or your ISP if it's a federal issue) that personally affects you that you want to sue and/or prosecute them for doing? Considering how federal court rulings generally only apply to the district level, even if you were successful in petitioning a federal district court judge to take your case, and you somehow won based on federal law, any decision, verdict, and/or ruling would only apply to that District... the other 8 Districts wouldn't have to do jack about it --unless others won cases there as well... and then maybe it'd head to the supreme court.
The thing is, you're stuck with the FCC. Congress gave them the authority to do as they like with the internet. We're lucky it's now common carrier under Title II. Maybe one day they'll decide it's a utility and regulate it further. Maybe.
Technically not true. It depends on the merchant, the amount charged, and the risk of the transaction.
You can get away with using a credit card for purchases up to $25 without a signature at all. (typical fast food restaurants)
The merchant takes the risk of a chargeback situation -- especially for fraud -- if they don't take proper steps to ensure the transaction is authorized. If you buy a shiny new BMW with a credit card, you'd better believe they're going to check your ID, make sure the back of your card is signed, and that your signature matches what's on the back of the card as well.
It's all about risk, and the truth is for most transactions, the risk is very low -- and when a chargeback happens, it's often cheaper to agree to refund the charges and claim any losses as cost of doing business than to fight with the customer's CC processor over the transaction anyway -- even if the merchant thinks they'd win by contesting the chargeback. (Chargebacks disputes can last months with multiple lengthy forms back and forth between the merchant, the CC processor, and the card holder's bank.) (fyi, this is why a lot of processors don't do business with porn sites or adult industry related businesses in general -- so many chargebacks and the CC processors take on a lot of work and risk dealing with them)
That'd be the biggest whopper of a lie I've heard yet. lol... a camera. That's a good one.
I used to work for a Credit Card processor, and we knew about the changes years before they took place in the USA -- Canada's had the Chips forever. Cameras are not part of the standard for the transactions. Though, I could totally see them doing that in another 20 years. (It takes forever to push a new standard in the industry... b/c there are so many players involved and so much push-back over changes.)
No, there's no photo involved in the transaction, though I wouldn't be surprised if individual merchants trained their store cameras on that spot should there ever be a need to confront a customer over a contested charge.
They were charged with conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, copyright infringement, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Conspiracy means they had to intentionally help others on a large scale to commit a crime or crimes. One could say, hey, it's all just 1s and 0s... but, the truth is that they acted in a large scale (globally) to intentionally help others pirate copyrighted materials. It's not so much the torrent or magnet links... it's the business model they created that shuttled funds through various dummy corps, countries, and bank accounts (money laundering) and that it was built on the back of supporting international copyright infringement.
Not sayin' I approve or disapprove... just... legally, KAT made the mistake of crossing into USA jurisdiction and the jurisdiction of various countries with similar laws, treaties with the USA, and extradition treaties with the USA. Still.... innocent until proven guilty & a jury might not convict on the conspiracy charges - though I doubt it. If I were him, I'd take a deal and plead to the lesser charges.
Mostly because it's over the internet, and the charges were for conspiracy. If any party of the conspiracy is within the jurisdiction, they can charge the whole group or any member of the group and extradite as long as there are treaties to allow it. Also, if they're facilitating a crime within the USA and/or people within the USA have access to the website, it's under Federal jurisdiction because the internet is a forum for national and international commerce. It's possible if KAT had blocked all access to North America and Hawaii, it might have avoided charges due to jurisdiction, but even then, It'd be facilitating criminal copyright infringement using a method of international commerce while harming US corporations and there's likely trade treaties with various countries to allow prosecution anyway.
He's charged with criminal copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The first 2 have a max sentence of 5 years each, the latter has a max of 20 years. If he's lucky, he'll be allowed to plea guilty for the conspiracy to commit copyright infringement in exchange for dropping the money laundering charge, pay a huge fine and lose seized equipment and frozen bank accounts... and get a max of 5 years -- maybe as little as 1 year. That's really not bad for a 30 year old making millions a year off of a website for pirating.
The USA has its legal tendrils everywhere -- and very few countries won't extradite. Brazil and Venezuela are among a few nice places to live that refuse to extradite citizens... though, they will prosecute their citizens under their own laws if the crime is recognized there.
oh, how I miss Futurama. It came back from the dead a few times, but each time, it was a little less than it was before -- as if some fire god had something to do with its resurrection.
Awesome... now we know the exact areas of the brain to manipulate so that our corporate overlords can control us better.
I'm betting the next gen VR headsets will have electrodes to stimulate those areas properly for future mind control -- especially during election seasons. lol.
I'm kidding.... at least... I think I'm kidding. Oh, dear god, they might actually go there with this tech.
Maybe. We've learned that galaxies are often in clusters, and that many are moving either together or towards a single location known as "the great attractor." If we can figure out these new galaxies' red-shifts and motion, we might learn more about the structure of the universe and in turn learn more about dark matter, dark energy, and other mysteries.
It's not a file format, it's a compression algorithm that happens at the data storage level. This is similar to compressing a hard drive -- the files are individually compressed, but the file formats are the same, and the OS handles the compression/decompression seamlessly so that the applications don't even know they're accessing compressed versions of the file formats they normally use.
You can keep all your JPEGs, and with the open-source license, compress the contents of a drive or partition with this algorithm and save maybe 20% or so of the space the JPEG files took up. Not worth it for most people but photographers and image sites might save a lot of money using this.
Why? The USA is roughly the same size as Europe. Do all the countries in the EU have the exact same laws?
The states in the USA are separate sovereign governments united by a federal constitution that mostly exists for mutual defense, protection of civil rights, and control of commerce across various borders. Think of the USA as the EU and the states as EU member countries. The USA just has a much stronger union than the EU... and unfortunately, no defined method for states to secede. (The South tried to leave, but we were too stupid to let them.... which is why the USA isn't as progressive as the EU... with Republicans blocking universal health care, etc. etc.)