You don't need to do it on that large a scale, especially for the Presidential elections. In 2012, which wasn't a particularly close election, flipping 63 electoral college votes would have let the Republicans win. Either Washington State or Colorado and California turning red would have changed the election outcome. Changing California red (by one vote) would have required changing 1,507,164 votes. Los Angeles alone had enough votes for Obama that compromising it and making it around 80% Romney would have been enough to flip California. It would probably be quite suspicious if polling were that wrong, but scattering a few attack devices throughout Democrat-voting areas and reducing the majority there would probably not have been picked up, and if it's only two states where the polling is particularly different from the eventual outcome then people won't be too suspicious.
2000 was a lot closer. Changing only 5 Electoral College votes would have changed the outcome. If Al Gore had carried his home state, no one would have been particularly surprised and that would have ensured that he won with a fairly large margin. Rigging the voting machines so that 40,115 Republican votes across the state were counted as Democratic wouldn't have raised any eyebrows, but would have inverted the outcome of the national election. The election was hotly contested because Bush won Florida by a mere 537 votes, giving him all of the state's 24 Electoral College votes. A single compromised voting machine could easily have moved 269 votes from Bush to Gore and changed the election outcome. Of course, some will claim that compromised voting machines did flip around that number in the opposite direction...
It depends on where you are. Places like San Francisco are as expensive as Zurich. Parts of the midwest are a fraction of the cost. The real oddity is that more companies don't move to the cheaper cities in the US: Same infrastructure, but you can pay a much lower salary and still give your employees as higher quality of life.
The thing that you're missing about Japan's rise is that, as quality increased, so did price. The same thing is happening in India and China and this is a big part of why quality usually sucks when you outsource to India. If you're someone competent in India, then you quickly learn that many of the companies that are paying you 10% of what they're paying an American will happily pay you 50% of a US salary, which works out as a lot more than the US salary in terms of local purchasing power and quality of living. If you're not competent, then you stay with the outsourcing firms.
The only companies that are doing well out of moving development to India are the ones that establish a big local presence, focus on retention, and pay well relative to the local market. Companies that aren't willing to do this are slowly learning that offshoring isn't worth the extra costs. The end result of this is more inflation in India, which will push up wages (this has already happened a lot and is a big driver for Indian companies moving work to China).
The only change in the last 20 years is the quantity. Synthetic diamonds have been cheaper to produce and higher quality than mined diamonds for a couple of decades, they just haven't been produced in sufficient quantity to be much of a threat. This is partly because diamond's value is massively inflated by the De Beers marketing and supply restrictions. If synthetic diamonds become a significant fraction of total sales then the prices will quickly plummet to the point that people are likely to regard diamonds as the cheap and tacky stones that they are and move on to whatever the next hyped object is.
In short, can't a company change the version number for just overhauling the underlying kernel, even if the UI remains the same? It's already the case in Linux and BSD - I can go from PC-BSD 10.2 to 10.3 w/o changing the look of Lumina
You're someone who runs PC-BSD and has unix in their username, so you're probably someone who knows (or, at the very least, has some self identity associated with pretending to know) about operating systems. If someone advertises a new OS based on kernel features, you'll probably look at it and say 'those are good and useful features that are worth an update'. You are not even slightly representative of the general public. If the UI doesn't change, they won't believe that there are significant new features.
A study a few years ago asked people how much they'd sell their vote for. I seem to recall that it worked out a bit less than the candidates were spending on the elections in the USA per voter. It would probably be simpler to just replace the system with the one-dollar-one-vote system that the current oligarchs want. You never know, you might find it's a good way of getting the rich to pay taxes!
The weird thing is that Microsoft seems to have adopted suicide as a business model. Their main competitor is Android creeping up with the 'it's all free, in exchange for all of your personal data' business model. They had a perfect opportunity for differentiating all of their products: you pay for them, but Microsoft protects your privacy and if you don't want to use their cloud offerings then they'll happily sell you the software to run the server parts for your organisation. They even ran some adverts about Hotmail not scanning your mail for targeted ads. Instead, they decided to compete directly with Google in a field in which Google is far more experienced.
It depends. One legal dodge would be for England and Wales to secede from the UK. The UK (Northern Ireland and Scotland) would remain in the EU, the new country of England and Wales (or new two countries) would leave both the UK and the EU. The advantage of this strategy is that Article 50 wouldn't be involved at all. Of course, places like London, Manchester, Birmingham, Cambridge, and so on that voted remain would probably also want to stay in the UK and EU, so we'd really just be losing the roughly half of England that doesn't have much of a functioning economy and depends on EU grants and farming subsidies to exist...
There are almost no independent countries in the world. All countries (even the US and China) have large dependencies on international trade. There are basically four categories of country in the world:
Those that are superpowers and have huge economic and military advantages in negotiating treaties.
Those that are members of blocs that negotiate on their behalf and are able to bring superpower-like leverage on their behalf.
Those that get fucked over in trade deals and other treaties.
Those that don't do any meaningful amount of international trade and barely have functioning internal infrastructure.
The UK hasn't been in the first category since we lost the Empire. We're currently in the second category. Is it the third or fourth that you want us to be in as an 'independent' country?
No idea. I don't run an IDS on my phone. It probably helps that I'm one of only three people who run Firefox on Android, so I get a little bit of security from not being a large enough market to bother attacking and that I don't run most of the other default apps.
As TFA says, the problem is the present. Unifying USB, DisplayPort and Thunderbolt in a single (reversible, hurrah!) connector is great. I'm really looking forward to a future where basically everything uses the same connector. In 3-5 years, not having a C-type USB port will probably mean that you need dongles for all new stuff. Today, however, everything needs a dongle. Having one USB A-type port and HDMI would have dramatically reduced that need. Sure, by the time the laptop is end-of-life you won't be using them anymore, but you will for the first year or two.
There is a third-party magsafe-like adaptor, but Apple has patents on the MagSafe connector and so no one else can sell compatible things in the USA. The one thing that I'd actually like for them to have required a dongle for is power - a small dongle that plugs into USB-C and exposes a MagSafe port so that you still get the MagSafe goodness.
That said, no upgrade for me until they come with 32GB of RAM. 16GB in the current one is my biggest performance limit, so a slightly faster CPU and GPU with only 16GB of RAM won't improve things much for me.
the PM can put the question to Parliament, and if the question fails, she can call for elections
Actually, she can't under the Fixed-Term Parliament Act. Calling an election requires either a 2/3 majority or a vote of no confidence in the government. If 51% of MPs voted against Brexit and thought that they'd be in danger of being replaced in a general election then they could block it.
Sorry, besides being a blatant and pathetic attempt to ask the British voters if they somehow changed their minds, that's not possible, given how the procedure works. Two years after article 50 of the Lisbon treaty has been invoked, the UK will be out of the EU anyways, even if no "exit deal" is reached. That's what article 50 says.
Actually, that's not quite correct. Article 50 requires that the leaving party satisfies its own constitutional requirements, which is a very vague requirement. If Parliament passes an act allowing Article 50 to be invoked conditionally on a referendum on the final terms, then we'd be in the interesting situation where, if the final terms were not approved then the original triggering of Article 50 would retroactively be unconstitutional. This is one of the proposed mechanisms for improving the British bargaining position.
Two years ought to be enough, given the demographics. Young voters were overwhelmingly in support for remain, old ones of leave. Assuming normal mortality rates and current 16-year-olds becoming eligible to vote, the result is expected to be the other way around if we wait two years. That's why the leave campaign wants to push it through in a hurry. Ironically, even if we invoked Article 50 now, we'd likely have a majority against Brexit by the time the process finishes. That's why it's quite interesting to have Parliament involved: unless there's an emergency general election, the next election will likely have a majority of voters supporting remain and MPs who vote along with the current demographics are likely to suffer.
Because David Cameron promised it in his election manifesto because he was terrified that UKIP would split the Conservative vote and let Labour win the election. He was hoping that they'd get another coalition and he'd be able to blame not having the referendum on his coalition partner.
And its been good so far. Sterling has fallen in value, exports are cheaper, imports are more expensive. Bubble is gently deflating.
No it isn't. The property bubble is still expanding because the weak Sterling is making it cheaper for foreign investors to buy property in the UK. It already looked like a good investment, with a sudden 20% discount it's even better.
Please stop repeating this. Democracy and republic are completely orthogonal terms. A democracy is a state in which the people[1] hold power (either via directly voting on issues in a direct democracy, or by electing representatives in a representative democracy), a republic is one in which the head of state is not selected by the hereditary principle. The US is a democratic republic, the UK is a democratic constitutional monarchy (but not a republic).
[1] Literally, 'the city', which in the case of the UK is a bit more true than we'd like: has far too much power.
From a purely legal perspective, no they can't, because one of the principles of the British constitution is that no Parliament can bind a future one (which actually made signing the Maastricht treaty in the first places a little bit tricky, legalistically). The electoral reform referendum was the closest that we've had to a binding referendum, where the act that invoked the referendum also included the act that would be passed if the referendum had gone the other way. When MPs voted for that referendum, they were also effectively voting to pass the act that changed the electoral system, with a caveat that it would only happen if FPTP didn't win. Even if that had happened, there is nothing that would have prevented Parliament from repealing the act the day after the referendum. A lot of MPs would probably have found themselves unemployed after the next election if that had happened, but that's a different matter.
Bullshit. This was the only possible outcome. The British constitution (which is a complicated written but not codified body of things from the Magna Carta onwards) is very clear that Parliament is sovereign. Nothing overrides that. People complaining that it's undemocratic seem to have forgotten several things:
We elect MPs and we can vote them out next time if they don't do what we want. The idea that the executive mustn't bypass the legislature is not undemocratic (and there's a really easy Godwin here).
Democracy is not the same as mob rule. We have no precedent in the UK that we must do things just because slightly more than half of the population thinks we should. We have a representative democracy for a reason. Reintroducing the death penalty has a far higher public approval rating than Brexit in the UK, yet I've not heard anyone claim that we absolutely must do it because it's the will of the people.
The referendum had a 72.2% turnout. That makes the final results 37.5% leave, 34.7% remain, 27.8% abstain. That's a really crappy majority to claim that you have a mandate.
Given the demographics of the voters in the referendum, I would expect that most MPs will vote to invoke Article 50, but it would set a very dangerous precedent if the Prime Minister could do so without their vote.
I've not tried the latest Windows Phone version, but my partner has one that's running an older release and I'd agree with the parent. It's the first phone I've used with a UI that hasn't pissed me off. Unfortunately, it has some stability issues (sound stops working about once a month requiring a reboot, which makes using it as an alarm clock interesting) and Microsoft completely failed to get developers interested in the platform: they really needed to hand out a few thousand high-end Windows phones free to developers to bootstrap the ecosystem, but they didn't (not allowing native code also crippled it early on, as it made ports impossible and by the time they removed this restriction it was too late). It's a shame. Google and Apple need more competition.
iOS users are more likely to pay for apps than Android users. Apple supports phones from the last 3-4 years on the latest OS, so you can use the latest APIs and still expect stuff to work for most potential customers. Apple releases 1-2 phones a year, so you can literally test on all of the possible deployment devices. The first of these points increases the potential income, the last two decrease the development costs. Oh, and Apple employs a few people who actually know about API design, Google throws out poorly conceived APIs that are painful to use.
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You don't need to do it on that large a scale, especially for the Presidential elections. In 2012, which wasn't a particularly close election, flipping 63 electoral college votes would have let the Republicans win. Either Washington State or Colorado and California turning red would have changed the election outcome. Changing California red (by one vote) would have required changing 1,507,164 votes. Los Angeles alone had enough votes for Obama that compromising it and making it around 80% Romney would have been enough to flip California. It would probably be quite suspicious if polling were that wrong, but scattering a few attack devices throughout Democrat-voting areas and reducing the majority there would probably not have been picked up, and if it's only two states where the polling is particularly different from the eventual outcome then people won't be too suspicious.
2000 was a lot closer. Changing only 5 Electoral College votes would have changed the outcome. If Al Gore had carried his home state, no one would have been particularly surprised and that would have ensured that he won with a fairly large margin. Rigging the voting machines so that 40,115 Republican votes across the state were counted as Democratic wouldn't have raised any eyebrows, but would have inverted the outcome of the national election. The election was hotly contested because Bush won Florida by a mere 537 votes, giving him all of the state's 24 Electoral College votes. A single compromised voting machine could easily have moved 269 votes from Bush to Gore and changed the election outcome. Of course, some will claim that compromised voting machines did flip around that number in the opposite direction...
It depends on where you are. Places like San Francisco are as expensive as Zurich. Parts of the midwest are a fraction of the cost. The real oddity is that more companies don't move to the cheaper cities in the US: Same infrastructure, but you can pay a much lower salary and still give your employees as higher quality of life.
The thing that you're missing about Japan's rise is that, as quality increased, so did price. The same thing is happening in India and China and this is a big part of why quality usually sucks when you outsource to India. If you're someone competent in India, then you quickly learn that many of the companies that are paying you 10% of what they're paying an American will happily pay you 50% of a US salary, which works out as a lot more than the US salary in terms of local purchasing power and quality of living. If you're not competent, then you stay with the outsourcing firms.
The only companies that are doing well out of moving development to India are the ones that establish a big local presence, focus on retention, and pay well relative to the local market. Companies that aren't willing to do this are slowly learning that offshoring isn't worth the extra costs. The end result of this is more inflation in India, which will push up wages (this has already happened a lot and is a big driver for Indian companies moving work to China).
The only change in the last 20 years is the quantity. Synthetic diamonds have been cheaper to produce and higher quality than mined diamonds for a couple of decades, they just haven't been produced in sufficient quantity to be much of a threat. This is partly because diamond's value is massively inflated by the De Beers marketing and supply restrictions. If synthetic diamonds become a significant fraction of total sales then the prices will quickly plummet to the point that people are likely to regard diamonds as the cheap and tacky stones that they are and move on to whatever the next hyped object is.
In short, can't a company change the version number for just overhauling the underlying kernel, even if the UI remains the same? It's already the case in Linux and BSD - I can go from PC-BSD 10.2 to 10.3 w/o changing the look of Lumina
You're someone who runs PC-BSD and has unix in their username, so you're probably someone who knows (or, at the very least, has some self identity associated with pretending to know) about operating systems. If someone advertises a new OS based on kernel features, you'll probably look at it and say 'those are good and useful features that are worth an update'. You are not even slightly representative of the general public. If the UI doesn't change, they won't believe that there are significant new features.
You might want to read all of the words, and then you won't be so surprised.
A study a few years ago asked people how much they'd sell their vote for. I seem to recall that it worked out a bit less than the candidates were spending on the elections in the USA per voter. It would probably be simpler to just replace the system with the one-dollar-one-vote system that the current oligarchs want. You never know, you might find it's a good way of getting the rich to pay taxes!
The system state will be the same i both cases, but one results in your doing a lot more work.
The weird thing is that Microsoft seems to have adopted suicide as a business model. Their main competitor is Android creeping up with the 'it's all free, in exchange for all of your personal data' business model. They had a perfect opportunity for differentiating all of their products: you pay for them, but Microsoft protects your privacy and if you don't want to use their cloud offerings then they'll happily sell you the software to run the server parts for your organisation. They even ran some adverts about Hotmail not scanning your mail for targeted ads. Instead, they decided to compete directly with Google in a field in which Google is far more experienced.
It depends. One legal dodge would be for England and Wales to secede from the UK. The UK (Northern Ireland and Scotland) would remain in the EU, the new country of England and Wales (or new two countries) would leave both the UK and the EU. The advantage of this strategy is that Article 50 wouldn't be involved at all. Of course, places like London, Manchester, Birmingham, Cambridge, and so on that voted remain would probably also want to stay in the UK and EU, so we'd really just be losing the roughly half of England that doesn't have much of a functioning economy and depends on EU grants and farming subsidies to exist...
There are almost no independent countries in the world. All countries (even the US and China) have large dependencies on international trade. There are basically four categories of country in the world:
The UK hasn't been in the first category since we lost the Empire. We're currently in the second category. Is it the third or fourth that you want us to be in as an 'independent' country?
No idea. I don't run an IDS on my phone. It probably helps that I'm one of only three people who run Firefox on Android, so I get a little bit of security from not being a large enough market to bother attacking and that I don't run most of the other default apps.
As TFA says, the problem is the present. Unifying USB, DisplayPort and Thunderbolt in a single (reversible, hurrah!) connector is great. I'm really looking forward to a future where basically everything uses the same connector. In 3-5 years, not having a C-type USB port will probably mean that you need dongles for all new stuff. Today, however, everything needs a dongle. Having one USB A-type port and HDMI would have dramatically reduced that need. Sure, by the time the laptop is end-of-life you won't be using them anymore, but you will for the first year or two.
There is a third-party magsafe-like adaptor, but Apple has patents on the MagSafe connector and so no one else can sell compatible things in the USA. The one thing that I'd actually like for them to have required a dongle for is power - a small dongle that plugs into USB-C and exposes a MagSafe port so that you still get the MagSafe goodness.
That said, no upgrade for me until they come with 32GB of RAM. 16GB in the current one is my biggest performance limit, so a slightly faster CPU and GPU with only 16GB of RAM won't improve things much for me.
Personally I wouldn't find it wise to live in a country where 18 million people think that I deprived them of their votes.
how about living in a country where 16M people think that you're fucking up their future because you're terrified?
the PM can put the question to Parliament, and if the question fails, she can call for elections
Actually, she can't under the Fixed-Term Parliament Act. Calling an election requires either a 2/3 majority or a vote of no confidence in the government. If 51% of MPs voted against Brexit and thought that they'd be in danger of being replaced in a general election then they could block it.
Sorry, besides being a blatant and pathetic attempt to ask the British voters if they somehow changed their minds, that's not possible, given how the procedure works. Two years after article 50 of the Lisbon treaty has been invoked, the UK will be out of the EU anyways, even if no "exit deal" is reached. That's what article 50 says.
Actually, that's not quite correct. Article 50 requires that the leaving party satisfies its own constitutional requirements, which is a very vague requirement. If Parliament passes an act allowing Article 50 to be invoked conditionally on a referendum on the final terms, then we'd be in the interesting situation where, if the final terms were not approved then the original triggering of Article 50 would retroactively be unconstitutional. This is one of the proposed mechanisms for improving the British bargaining position.
Two years ought to be enough, given the demographics. Young voters were overwhelmingly in support for remain, old ones of leave. Assuming normal mortality rates and current 16-year-olds becoming eligible to vote, the result is expected to be the other way around if we wait two years. That's why the leave campaign wants to push it through in a hurry. Ironically, even if we invoked Article 50 now, we'd likely have a majority against Brexit by the time the process finishes. That's why it's quite interesting to have Parliament involved: unless there's an emergency general election, the next election will likely have a majority of voters supporting remain and MPs who vote along with the current demographics are likely to suffer.
So why have the vote?
Because David Cameron promised it in his election manifesto because he was terrified that UKIP would split the Conservative vote and let Labour win the election. He was hoping that they'd get another coalition and he'd be able to blame not having the referendum on his coalition partner.
What? I didn't say it was a good reason...
And its been good so far. Sterling has fallen in value, exports are cheaper, imports are more expensive. Bubble is gently deflating.
No it isn't. The property bubble is still expanding because the weak Sterling is making it cheaper for foreign investors to buy property in the UK. It already looked like a good investment, with a sudden 20% discount it's even better.
[1] Literally, 'the city', which in the case of the UK is a bit more true than we'd like: has far too much power.
From a purely legal perspective, no they can't, because one of the principles of the British constitution is that no Parliament can bind a future one (which actually made signing the Maastricht treaty in the first places a little bit tricky, legalistically). The electoral reform referendum was the closest that we've had to a binding referendum, where the act that invoked the referendum also included the act that would be passed if the referendum had gone the other way. When MPs voted for that referendum, they were also effectively voting to pass the act that changed the electoral system, with a caveat that it would only happen if FPTP didn't win. Even if that had happened, there is nothing that would have prevented Parliament from repealing the act the day after the referendum. A lot of MPs would probably have found themselves unemployed after the next election if that had happened, but that's a different matter.
Bullshit. This was the only possible outcome. The British constitution (which is a complicated written but not codified body of things from the Magna Carta onwards) is very clear that Parliament is sovereign. Nothing overrides that. People complaining that it's undemocratic seem to have forgotten several things:
Given the demographics of the voters in the referendum, I would expect that most MPs will vote to invoke Article 50, but it would set a very dangerous precedent if the Prime Minister could do so without their vote.
I've not tried the latest Windows Phone version, but my partner has one that's running an older release and I'd agree with the parent. It's the first phone I've used with a UI that hasn't pissed me off. Unfortunately, it has some stability issues (sound stops working about once a month requiring a reboot, which makes using it as an alarm clock interesting) and Microsoft completely failed to get developers interested in the platform: they really needed to hand out a few thousand high-end Windows phones free to developers to bootstrap the ecosystem, but they didn't (not allowing native code also crippled it early on, as it made ports impossible and by the time they removed this restriction it was too late). It's a shame. Google and Apple need more competition.
iOS users are more likely to pay for apps than Android users. Apple supports phones from the last 3-4 years on the latest OS, so you can use the latest APIs and still expect stuff to work for most potential customers. Apple releases 1-2 phones a year, so you can literally test on all of the possible deployment devices. The first of these points increases the potential income, the last two decrease the development costs. Oh, and Apple employs a few people who actually know about API design, Google throws out poorly conceived APIs that are painful to use.