Oracle's brief also argues that "When a plagiarist takes the most recognizable portions of a novel and adapts them into a film, the plagiarist commits the 'classic' unfair use."
All that goes out the window when the novel's author openly tells everyone to use the novel without charge, which they do. Then the author dies and the person who buys the rights to the author's estate unilaterally decides it can undo what the author did in the past and tries to charge back-royalties for past use.
A more fitting description here would be "bait and switch."
transmitting digital data at a rate of 105 Gbps (gigabits per second) over a single channel using the frequency range from 290GHz to 315GHz. Previously it was only possible to achieve such speeds by harnessing multiple channels at the same time.
Yeah, 290-315 GHz is a channel bandwidth of 25 GHz 802.11ac at 5 GHz has a channel bandwidth of up to 80 MHz (e.g channel 155 is 5735-5815 MHz).
Basically what they're doing is equivalent to "harnessing multiple channels at the same time." They've just elected to call their use of 312.5 80MHz bands a single channel, while if 802.11ac uses more than one 80 MHz band they're saying it's using multiple channels. Kinda like saying your road can only transport so many cars per lane, while my road can transport more cars in its "single" lane (which is 300x wider than your lanes, I just haven't painted lane stripes on it).
802.11ac can (with a single antenna) manage 433 Mbps over an 80 MHz channel, or 5.4 bps / Hz of bandwidth. 105 Gbps over 25 GHz is then 4.2 bps / Hz of bandwidth. Since there's no improvement in bps per Hz of bandwidth, basically you could get these results simply by scaling up existing technologies to higher frequencies and greater bandwidth. (Higher signal-to-noise ratio allows channel data rate to exceed frequency.)
Most if not all of those species went extinct because they were out-competed in their ecological niche by another species. Nature found a way - just via a different species.
That's an important distinction here because as best as I can tell from TFA, these mice are the dominant creatures occupying this ecological niche (having killed off the flightless birds which used to occupy it). So killing off the mice will open up that niche to competing species. Likely, if this works, it'll result in a bigger problem with other species (maybe opossum or weasel?), or a new subspecies of mouse will develop which somehow sniffs out male mice with this gene and the females refuse to mate with them.
Let's do a cost comparison as you suggest. Here's a graph of nuclear power generation over the last 45 years. Generation has been about 2300 TWh per year for the last 20 years. The 25 years before that ramped up roughly as a triangle, so call it 2200/2 = 1100 TWh per year average.
This gives us a total of 73,500 TWh generated by nuclear power over the last 45 years. 20*2300 + 25*(2200/2) = 73500.
Using a global average electricity price of $0.20 per kWh, this is $14.7 trillion dollars worth of electricity generated by nuclear over the last 45 years.
Chernoby cleanup costs (current and future) are estimated to total $235 billion, Fukushima is estimated to be around $200 billion. Three Mile Island was about $1 billion. These are the only major commercial nuclear accidents in history, and their total cost is estimated to be $436 billion.
$436 billion / $14.7 trillion = 0.02966. Or about 3%.
So the cleanup costs for nuclear accidents is about 3% of the price of the electricity nuclear generates. Or 0.6 cents per kWh. This is so "excessively more expensive" that it would cost the average American home less than $8/year. (Average American home uses 10,812 kWh/yr * $0.12/kWh average electricity price * 20% of electricity produced by nuclear * 3% cleanup cost = $7.78/yr.)
Insurers refuse to cover nuclear because of how statistics work. The more incidents there are, the narrower the bell curve and the more confident you can be about predicting how many accidents will happen. A 10d50 will be much more likely to yield a result near 55 than a 2d50 is to yield a result near 51. Consequently, even though their long-term mean is almost the same, a bookie will give you better odds on the 10d50 because it's more predictable and thus harder for them to lose money on it.
Nuclear plants generate massive amounts of power. You need about 10 coal plants to equal a single nuclear plant. Several thousand wind turbines. Consequently you need much fewer nuclear plants to meet your energy needs compared to these other power sources. So even though statistically nuclear plants are safer than other power sources (mean accident rate is lower), their small number means there's larger uncertainty about how many accidents will happen. Insurers compensate for this by erring on the safe side (for them) and charging much higher rates. e.g. If there are 100 nuclear plants and the mean says 1 will suffer an accident in 30 years, the insurer may err on the safe side and charge a premium based on, say, 2 or 3 accidents, just in case they get a bad die roll. Whereas if there are 1000 coal plants and the mean says 10 will suffer an accident in 30 years, the insurer can be much more confident that even if they get a bad die roll, they can charge a premium assuming only 15 accidents and still make money.
Trucks have a harder time making left turns than cars. When in your car, you only need to wait for a short gap between cars to squeeze through and make your left turn. A truck needs a considerably larger gap - not just so it can physically squeeze its longer length through, but because it takes more time to get up to speed.
They're not shutting down the store though. They're inspecting all traffic on the road going past the store, and preventing anyone going to that store from using the road.
As has been posted multiple times, this has serious privacy implications - akin to the Post Office reading everyone's letters to make sure nobody is using it to mail child porn to each other. Common Carrier status was invented to avoid this situation. A Common Carrier agrees to allow all traffic without inspecting it, and in exchange they are shielded from liability for any illegal traffic that happened to pass upon their road (or wires). But if they start inspecting cars / letters / packets, they're giving up their Common Carrier status, and they become liable for any illegal traffic crossing their road / wires, even the stuff they miss You either blindfold yourself and dutifully move the packets along, and are not liable for any bad packets you happened to move. Or you closely examine the packets to filter them, and are liable for any bad packets you failed to spot.
I ran a non-union shop. You need to document your reasons for firing regardless. If the ex-employee sues you for wrongful termination, you need to be able to prove your reasons for firing the person were legit. For minor offenses (things that don't warrant immediate firing), you need to show that you warned the employee multiple times. That's why the boss makes you sign that paper saying you were warned to stop showing up late - it's their documented proof that they warned you.
So whether or not the shop is union is irrelevant - any employer wanting to stay in business will document reasons for dismissal. Just like employees worry about dishonest bosses firing them in at-will states for some made-up reason, employers worry about dishonest employees suing them for made-up wrongful dismissal charges in all states.
If elimination of left turns makes the delivery time shorter, the trucks can get more deliveries done each day. This means they need fewer trucks out on the road to make that day's deliveries, which can mean fewer total miles driven for the fleet (less redundancy in routes between multiple trucks, fewer trips between the depot to the start/end of delivery).
1st place by a mile is very different from 1st place by a whisker. The best example I've seen is a couple webcomics who got into an argument with each other. One tried to point out that it was ranked like 1000th in popularity while the other was ranked around 3000th. That's irrelevant and in fact downright deceptive when the viewership numbers between the two only differed by about 30% (both were well down in the bell curve, so a small difference in viewership translated into a huge difference in ranking)..
Rank placement is not a property of the thing being analyzed. It's an artificial property which arises from putting data into a database. it has about as much meaning as the number and letter of the cell in a spreadsheet. Only stupid marketers crow about ranking. Real data analysis would use a scatter plot (with both axes starting at zero) so you can easily see how close or far apart the different competitors are.
Would you rather buy a computer which tells you the exact processor speed, amount of RAM, and HDD storage; or a computer which says it has the 5th fastest processor, the 3rd most RAM,and the 2nd largest HDD that the brand name sells?
The online service providers who will be mandated to make these services available range from video-on-demand platforms (Netflix, HBO Go, Amazon Prime, Mubi, Chili TV) to online TV services (Viasat's Viaplay, Sky's Now TV, Voyo), music streaming services (Spotify, Deezer, Google Music) and game online marketplaces (Steam, Origin).
Those service providers would love nothing more than to provide their service anywhere in the world to all their subscribers. It would vastly simplify their software and infrastructure.
They only reason they restrict their services based on geography is because they're forced to do so by the music, TV/movie, and game studios, who insist on different release schedules and different pricing in different countries and regions in order to eek out a tiny bit more profit.
As I said last time, this is not a positive stat for solar. Coal accounts for 33% of U.S. electricity production, vs 0.6% for solar. So if solar employs 2x as many people as coal, that means solar is 2 * 33% / 0.6% = 110x more labor-intensive than coal per kWh of electricity generated. If anything, this is a great argument against solar power. They need to get those labor figures way, way, way down (two orders of magnitude) if they want solar to become an economically viable (without subsidies) source of electricity.
Paper has some useful properties that help it remain popular. If we can replicate or better these properties with technology, we can finally go paperless.
Something like this was already invented about a decade ago and posted on slashdot. I'll repeat the info from what I thought was the most insightful post from that discussion:
We shouldn't be trying to replace paper. We shouldn't even be recycling it. We should be using as much of it as we can and throwing it all away in the trash.
Why do we have a problem with global warming? Because we're digging up carbon that's been buried in the earth, and releasing it into the atmosphere as CO2.
Where does paper come from? Trees pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, and use photosynthesis (and water) to convert the carbon into wood. We cut down the tree, and convert that wood into paper.
What happens when we throw away paper? It gets sent to a landfill - it is buried underground. Drilled core samples from landfills have shown that newspapers over a century old are still intact and pristine inside the landfill. So this is an effective means of burying that carbon underground again. Microbes aren't consuming it and turning it into natural gas or something.
So digging up and burning coal, oil, and gas removes carbon from the ground and puts it into the atmosphere as CO2. Throwing away paper in landfills removes CO2 from the atmosphere and sequesters that carbon underground. This is one of the tools in our fight against global warming, It's been proven to work, and unlike other sequestration tools which are all in the research stages this one is already widely in use. But because people just mindlessly jump onto the recycling bandwagon without actually thinking about if it's really a good idea, we're trying to shut down the most successful form of carbon sequestration we've invented.
Use as much paper as you can. Throw it all away when you're done. The cost of the paper itself becomes a tax that funds the fight against global warming (pays for more trees to be planted to meet the demand for more paper). If you're recycling paper, you're making global warming worse.
WD has been buying up SSD companies - mostly small ones in the enterprise market. My brother-in-law (international trade lawyer) interviewed with one of these small SSD companies, rejected their offer, then got a job at WD. A year later, WD bought that SSD company and he got put in charge of prepping them for International sales.
I would never trust their drives with anything important.
Nobody with truly important data trusts any drives with anything important. Local and cloud storage have gotten so cheap it's trivial to have multiple backups and RAID redundancy. If I could have a nickel for every person who comes to me begging to help them recover data off a drive which stopped working... Often they're faced with paying a recovery service $500+, all because they were too cheap to spend $80 on an external backup drive, or $20 for a USB flash drive (need to refresh these every few years for maximum safety) or some blank DVDs.
If you have a Gmail account, Google already gives you free unlimited cloud storage of all your photos up to 16 MP. They also let you store videos for free, although I haven't been able to find what the limits are (used to be 15 minutes max per video, but I believe the new limit is just 1080p). If you have Amazon Prime, it also includes unlimited storage of any size photos. And if you subscribe to Office 365, it includes 1 TB of cloud storage. Please, take advantage of these to back up the irreplaceable photos and videos of your wedding, your child's birth, your child's first steps, etc. It's disheartening having to tell people they will have to choose between recovering these precious memories and a half month's rent.
Marketers seem eager to abuse and misuse establish terms for advertising purposes. First "hoverboard", now "hologram".
As best as I can tell (TFA is devoid of details), this is a glorified version of the system used at Hatsune Miku" concerts - a simple rear projection onto a glass screen. A slightly more sophisticated version uses multiple cameras surrounding the person whose image is being broadcast, and switches between them depending on where the observer camera is positioned. That creates the illusion that the observer can move around the image in 3D, but the illusion only works for the observer being tracked. Anyone else sees a 2D image which rotates depending on where the designated observer moves, not based on where they themselves move.
A true hologram is not conveyed as an image. It is conveyed as an interference pattern created by taking a Fourier transform of a 3D light field. When you take another Fourier transform of that interference pattern (e.g. shine onto it coherent light equivalent to the light that originally created the pattern), it reconstructs the original 3D light field - a hologram.
Really, they should've compared the ratio of per capita malware infection rate, to per capita computer ownership rate. That'll give you malware infection rate per computer, which is the stat you really want.
That was the point of the Microsoft ruling. Rulings like in this Google case can put companies (and by precedent, people) in an impossible position where in order to comply with one country's laws, they're forced to break another country's laws. Kinda like the U.S. policy that U.S. citizens have to pay U.S. taxes on income earned abroad could hypothetically cause a U.S. citizen to owe more than 100% in taxes (if the combined tax rates of the U.S. and other country exceeded 100%).
Other countries avoid the problem by accepting that their laws end at their borders, and if they want something from another country they have to work with that country for joint law enforcement action or extradition. But for some reason politicians and judges in the U.S. keep thinking U.S. law should apply all around the world.
The problem isn't regulation or lack of it. The problem is one of classification.
How do you distinguish between someone finding out another person is going to the same place they are and agreeing to split car expenses for the trip, vs someone paying another person to drive them to a destination? Or how do you distinguish between someone finding out another person wants to visit their home town the same dates they're going to be on vacation so he agrees to rent his house, vs someone regularly renting a second home out as a business?
In the old days, running a taxi or hotel commercially required advertising, and advertising meant mass exposure (mailers, billboards, TV). That made it easy for regulators to spot who was doing these things as a business. But like music distribution, the Internet destroyed that distinction. It dropped the cost of distributing information (e.g. music, or advertising) to near zero, allowing anyone running the above businesses commercially to advertise to people directly (spam, targeted ads, craigslist, Uber/Airbnb). It's a lot harder, if not impossible, for regulators to distinguish between two people coming to a friendly arrangement, vs someone secretly running a business.
Just like with music, the Internet has changed the world. Many of the old models don't work anymore - including regulatory models. And like with music, a new regulatory model is needed. Unless you want to move to an extremely invasive regulatory system which monitors everyone's personal interactions with other people (for one, eliminating cash thus allowing all financial transactions to be traceable).
I've been on the Internet since 1988. We had the same problem back then with USENET trolls. The advice then is the same advice as today - just ignore them.
The trolls thrive on the attention - they get off of knowing that they've pissed you off. The fact that you were so annoyed you wrote up a complaint about them and it's been posted on slashdot probably gave them a collective orgasm. The best way to frustrate them is to ignore them. If you run a forum and don't have the time or manpower to delete their posts, I'd suggest adding ignore lists and setting any troll account to default to Ignore for everyone (except themselves and other troll accounts so it's not obvious to them).
The entire premise behind the iOS walled garden ecosystem is that Apple knows better than you what apps you should be using. This includes phasing out older versions of apps which Apple decides are no longer "suitable" for use. If you don't like it when their decision runs counter to yours, you need to be questioning the net benefit of living in a walled garden.
Google at least lets you poke holes in their walls. If you don't like the limitations of the Play store, you can load another store, or side-load the old version of the app. The only impediment is a warning that doing so may be dangerous. I bet it's sounding a lot better than the Apple way about now, no?
Note: the (in)famous "hockey stick" graph only covered the Little Ice Age period from about 1400 to present. That was one of the reasons I didn't like "An Inconvenient Truth" even though I agreed with the overall message. When you cherry pick data to try to exaggerate what is already a good point, you just give fodder to the opposition. The above graph would've been just as effective as the hockey stick graph, without being deceptive and providing an easy counterpoint.
Trump's "ban" is pretty much the same thing - a 120 day freeze while he reviews and puts together new policies. The media is just calling it a ban because they don't like it (apparently fake news is OK if it advances your opinion).
Trump's mistake was in retroactively invalidating visas and green cards which had already been approved. If he had limited it to freezing new applications like Obama's "ban" did (to use what the media's terminology), then I think the judges would be deciding in his favor.
Have we ever considered it's a BAD thing to steal all these talented people from their own societies and hog them all for ourselves?
The program was started after research showed that there was a net drain of talented people out of the U.S. (i.e. to use your terminology, other countries were stealing talented people from the U.S.), and that a disproportionate number of students at U.S. colleges were foreigners who came here for the education, then went right back home, thus ostensibly depriving an American of a spot in that college. Most other developed countries have similar programs (Annex 5.D).
And you do realize the same reasoning works for political and economic refugees, right? The repressive government in the country these people are fleeing will only go away when citizens of that country upset by the government overthrow it. But by accepting refugees, we're depriving the opposition to the repressive government of potential members and fighters. Thus accepting political refugees and people seeking better economic conditions to immigrate also allows repressive foreign government to remain in power longer.
Personally, I intensely disagree with your implicit assumption that each country "owns" its citizens like cattle, and that providing incentives for people to move from one country to another is "stealing". Freedom of movement is a fundamental human right. If a person wishes to change their citizenship to another country, that is their decision to make and theirs alone. I grew up during the Cold War, when half the people on earth were deprived of their right to leave their country of birth. The country of your current citizenship should have no say in whether an individual can leave - all it can do is try to make domestic conditions better to entice you to stay.
So programs like this in first world countries do actually provide a service to developing countries - it encourages them to develop in a way which provides more opportunity and better living conditions for its citizens, lest they flee. Without it, the developing nation can (or is even likely to) develop into a feudal state, where a few people in political power rule over the masses by oppression. Failure to recognize this possibility is what doomed the socialist idealists who implemented Communism.
I see that more as a problem with the definition of full time employment. Because all sorts of new legal requirements kick in at 40 hours/week, companies will seek to keep employees just under 40 hours. (Actually, based on the few laws I ran into with hourly workers, I think most requirements kick in at 30 hours, but I digress...)
If you instead gradually ramp up those legal requirements, then there's no spike in employee cost as they reach 40 hours, and thus no disincentive for companies to have 40 hour workers. To make up a non-existent example, say you require companies to offer full health insurance for anyone fully employed (40 hours). That creates a huge incentive for companies to have a bunch of employees working 39 hours. So instead you make it a requirement that the company has to pay for a fraction of the employee's health insurance proportional to hours per week / 40. So if someone works 20 hours the company pays half their health insurance. If someone works 30 hours the company pays 75% of their health insurance. And if someone works 40+ hours, the company pays 100% of their health insurance. This creates a gradual ramp-up in cost, no jarring discontinuities, thus eliminating any incentive to keep employees under a certain legal threshold.
It's fascinating to watch how both sides are hypocritical and have flip-flopped their arguments on this.
The left which used to argue that cheap Chinese imports were killing American jobs, is now arguing that ending those cheap Chinese imports is going to kill American jobs.
The right which used to argue that cheap Chinese imports gave people more money to spend thus creating more American jobs, is now arguing that ending those cheap Chinese imports will preserve and create American jobs.
You can't have it both ways. If increased trade with China meant the loss of American jobs, then reducing trade with China (increased tariffs) means more American jobs. If tariffs on Chinese imports means fewer American jobs, then increased trade with China in the past created more American jobs.
Because Apple did not develop a tool for the FBI to tease out the encrypted data from one phone, the FBI basically offered a cash prize for such capability (went shopping for someone who could). This caused multiple companies / hackers to seek out a way to tease out the data. And eventually when one of them succeeded, they had a fiscal incentive to not disclose the vulnerability to Apple (so they could use it again in the future to make more money). Until it eventually leaked out onto the internet.
If Apple had developed a tool to reverse-engineer their encryption and tease out the data from one phone, it would've been as safe as they could keep it, and they would've had the option to patch whatever vulnerability they used immediately after the FBI was satisfied. There would've been no additional fiscal incentive for someone else to find a vulnerability, because the FBI would've been satisfied and not offered a cash prize for someone else finding a vulnerability. So there would've been a lower chance of such a vulnerability being found, and remaining in the wild (someone who found it might've turned it in to Apple for a bounty, rather than held out hoping to sell it to government agencies).
So basically, Apple refusing to help the FBI increased the chances of this type of exploit being found and spread in the wild.
You would've been right if Apple had created a back door in their encrypted backup servers to satisfy the FBI's request. But that's the kinda of "worst case" thinking that political advocates use to try to make strawmen to win arguments. Engineers think in terms of "least effort" and "least cost" (fiscal and other). Finding an exploit in just this one older phone model would've been an engineer's preferred solution to the problem, not putting a backdoor into the backup servers that would defeat the purpose of encrypting the backups.
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All that goes out the window when the novel's author openly tells everyone to use the novel without charge, which they do. Then the author dies and the person who buys the rights to the author's estate unilaterally decides it can undo what the author did in the past and tries to charge back-royalties for past use.
A more fitting description here would be "bait and switch."
Yeah, 290-315 GHz is a channel bandwidth of 25 GHz 802.11ac at 5 GHz has a channel bandwidth of up to 80 MHz (e.g channel 155 is 5735-5815 MHz).
Basically what they're doing is equivalent to "harnessing multiple channels at the same time." They've just elected to call their use of 312.5 80MHz bands a single channel, while if 802.11ac uses more than one 80 MHz band they're saying it's using multiple channels. Kinda like saying your road can only transport so many cars per lane, while my road can transport more cars in its "single" lane (which is 300x wider than your lanes, I just haven't painted lane stripes on it).
802.11ac can (with a single antenna) manage 433 Mbps over an 80 MHz channel, or 5.4 bps / Hz of bandwidth. 105 Gbps over 25 GHz is then 4.2 bps / Hz of bandwidth. Since there's no improvement in bps per Hz of bandwidth, basically you could get these results simply by scaling up existing technologies to higher frequencies and greater bandwidth. (Higher signal-to-noise ratio allows channel data rate to exceed frequency.)
Most if not all of those species went extinct because they were out-competed in their ecological niche by another species. Nature found a way - just via a different species.
That's an important distinction here because as best as I can tell from TFA, these mice are the dominant creatures occupying this ecological niche (having killed off the flightless birds which used to occupy it). So killing off the mice will open up that niche to competing species. Likely, if this works, it'll result in a bigger problem with other species (maybe opossum or weasel?), or a new subspecies of mouse will develop which somehow sniffs out male mice with this gene and the females refuse to mate with them.
Let's do a cost comparison as you suggest. Here's a graph of nuclear power generation over the last 45 years. Generation has been about 2300 TWh per year for the last 20 years. The 25 years before that ramped up roughly as a triangle, so call it 2200/2 = 1100 TWh per year average.
This gives us a total of 73,500 TWh generated by nuclear power over the last 45 years. 20*2300 + 25*(2200/2) = 73500.
Using a global average electricity price of $0.20 per kWh, this is $14.7 trillion dollars worth of electricity generated by nuclear over the last 45 years.
Chernoby cleanup costs (current and future) are estimated to total $235 billion, Fukushima is estimated to be around $200 billion. Three Mile Island was about $1 billion. These are the only major commercial nuclear accidents in history, and their total cost is estimated to be $436 billion.
$436 billion / $14.7 trillion = 0.02966. Or about 3%.
So the cleanup costs for nuclear accidents is about 3% of the price of the electricity nuclear generates. Or 0.6 cents per kWh. This is so "excessively more expensive" that it would cost the average American home less than $8/year. (Average American home uses 10,812 kWh/yr * $0.12/kWh average electricity price * 20% of electricity produced by nuclear * 3% cleanup cost = $7.78/yr.)
Insurers refuse to cover nuclear because of how statistics work. The more incidents there are, the narrower the bell curve and the more confident you can be about predicting how many accidents will happen. A 10d50 will be much more likely to yield a result near 55 than a 2d50 is to yield a result near 51. Consequently, even though their long-term mean is almost the same, a bookie will give you better odds on the 10d50 because it's more predictable and thus harder for them to lose money on it.
Nuclear plants generate massive amounts of power. You need about 10 coal plants to equal a single nuclear plant. Several thousand wind turbines. Consequently you need much fewer nuclear plants to meet your energy needs compared to these other power sources. So even though statistically nuclear plants are safer than other power sources (mean accident rate is lower), their small number means there's larger uncertainty about how many accidents will happen. Insurers compensate for this by erring on the safe side (for them) and charging much higher rates. e.g. If there are 100 nuclear plants and the mean says 1 will suffer an accident in 30 years, the insurer may err on the safe side and charge a premium based on, say, 2 or 3 accidents, just in case they get a bad die roll. Whereas if there are 1000 coal plants and the mean says 10 will suffer an accident in 30 years, the insurer can be much more confident that even if they get a bad die roll, they can charge a premium assuming only 15 accidents and still make money.
Trucks have a harder time making left turns than cars. When in your car, you only need to wait for a short gap between cars to squeeze through and make your left turn. A truck needs a considerably larger gap - not just so it can physically squeeze its longer length through, but because it takes more time to get up to speed.
They're not shutting down the store though. They're inspecting all traffic on the road going past the store, and preventing anyone going to that store from using the road.
As has been posted multiple times, this has serious privacy implications - akin to the Post Office reading everyone's letters to make sure nobody is using it to mail child porn to each other. Common Carrier status was invented to avoid this situation. A Common Carrier agrees to allow all traffic without inspecting it, and in exchange they are shielded from liability for any illegal traffic that happened to pass upon their road (or wires). But if they start inspecting cars / letters / packets, they're giving up their Common Carrier status, and they become liable for any illegal traffic crossing their road / wires, even the stuff they miss You either blindfold yourself and dutifully move the packets along, and are not liable for any bad packets you happened to move. Or you closely examine the packets to filter them, and are liable for any bad packets you failed to spot.
I ran a non-union shop. You need to document your reasons for firing regardless. If the ex-employee sues you for wrongful termination, you need to be able to prove your reasons for firing the person were legit. For minor offenses (things that don't warrant immediate firing), you need to show that you warned the employee multiple times. That's why the boss makes you sign that paper saying you were warned to stop showing up late - it's their documented proof that they warned you.
So whether or not the shop is union is irrelevant - any employer wanting to stay in business will document reasons for dismissal. Just like employees worry about dishonest bosses firing them in at-will states for some made-up reason, employers worry about dishonest employees suing them for made-up wrongful dismissal charges in all states.
If elimination of left turns makes the delivery time shorter, the trucks can get more deliveries done each day. This means they need fewer trucks out on the road to make that day's deliveries, which can mean fewer total miles driven for the fleet (less redundancy in routes between multiple trucks, fewer trips between the depot to the start/end of delivery).
1st place by a mile is very different from 1st place by a whisker. The best example I've seen is a couple webcomics who got into an argument with each other. One tried to point out that it was ranked like 1000th in popularity while the other was ranked around 3000th. That's irrelevant and in fact downright deceptive when the viewership numbers between the two only differed by about 30% (both were well down in the bell curve, so a small difference in viewership translated into a huge difference in ranking)..
Rank placement is not a property of the thing being analyzed. It's an artificial property which arises from putting data into a database. it has about as much meaning as the number and letter of the cell in a spreadsheet. Only stupid marketers crow about ranking. Real data analysis would use a scatter plot (with both axes starting at zero) so you can easily see how close or far apart the different competitors are.
Would you rather buy a computer which tells you the exact processor speed, amount of RAM, and HDD storage; or a computer which says it has the 5th fastest processor, the 3rd most RAM,and the 2nd largest HDD that the brand name sells?
Those service providers would love nothing more than to provide their service anywhere in the world to all their subscribers. It would vastly simplify their software and infrastructure.
They only reason they restrict their services based on geography is because they're forced to do so by the music, TV/movie, and game studios, who insist on different release schedules and different pricing in different countries and regions in order to eek out a tiny bit more profit.
As I said last time, this is not a positive stat for solar. Coal accounts for 33% of U.S. electricity production, vs 0.6% for solar. So if solar employs 2x as many people as coal, that means solar is 2 * 33% / 0.6% = 110x more labor-intensive than coal per kWh of electricity generated. If anything, this is a great argument against solar power. They need to get those labor figures way, way, way down (two orders of magnitude) if they want solar to become an economically viable (without subsidies) source of electricity.
Something like this was already invented about a decade ago and posted on slashdot. I'll repeat the info from what I thought was the most insightful post from that discussion:
We shouldn't be trying to replace paper. We shouldn't even be recycling it. We should be using as much of it as we can and throwing it all away in the trash.
So digging up and burning coal, oil, and gas removes carbon from the ground and puts it into the atmosphere as CO2. Throwing away paper in landfills removes CO2 from the atmosphere and sequesters that carbon underground. This is one of the tools in our fight against global warming, It's been proven to work, and unlike other sequestration tools which are all in the research stages this one is already widely in use. But because people just mindlessly jump onto the recycling bandwagon without actually thinking about if it's really a good idea, we're trying to shut down the most successful form of carbon sequestration we've invented.
Use as much paper as you can. Throw it all away when you're done. The cost of the paper itself becomes a tax that funds the fight against global warming (pays for more trees to be planted to meet the demand for more paper). If you're recycling paper, you're making global warming worse.
Nobody with truly important data trusts any drives with anything important. Local and cloud storage have gotten so cheap it's trivial to have multiple backups and RAID redundancy. If I could have a nickel for every person who comes to me begging to help them recover data off a drive which stopped working... Often they're faced with paying a recovery service $500+, all because they were too cheap to spend $80 on an external backup drive, or $20 for a USB flash drive (need to refresh these every few years for maximum safety) or some blank DVDs.
If you have a Gmail account, Google already gives you free unlimited cloud storage of all your photos up to 16 MP. They also let you store videos for free, although I haven't been able to find what the limits are (used to be 15 minutes max per video, but I believe the new limit is just 1080p). If you have Amazon Prime, it also includes unlimited storage of any size photos. And if you subscribe to Office 365, it includes 1 TB of cloud storage. Please, take advantage of these to back up the irreplaceable photos and videos of your wedding, your child's birth, your child's first steps, etc. It's disheartening having to tell people they will have to choose between recovering these precious memories and a half month's rent.
Marketers seem eager to abuse and misuse establish terms for advertising purposes. First "hoverboard", now "hologram".
As best as I can tell (TFA is devoid of details), this is a glorified version of the system used at Hatsune Miku" concerts - a simple rear projection onto a glass screen. A slightly more sophisticated version uses multiple cameras surrounding the person whose image is being broadcast, and switches between them depending on where the observer camera is positioned. That creates the illusion that the observer can move around the image in 3D, but the illusion only works for the observer being tracked. Anyone else sees a 2D image which rotates depending on where the designated observer moves, not based on where they themselves move.
A true hologram is not conveyed as an image. It is conveyed as an interference pattern created by taking a Fourier transform of a 3D light field. When you take another Fourier transform of that interference pattern (e.g. shine onto it coherent light equivalent to the light that originally created the pattern), it reconstructs the original 3D light field - a hologram.
Grandma is also less likely to own a computer.
Really, they should've compared the ratio of per capita malware infection rate, to per capita computer ownership rate. That'll give you malware infection rate per computer, which is the stat you really want.
That was the point of the Microsoft ruling. Rulings like in this Google case can put companies (and by precedent, people) in an impossible position where in order to comply with one country's laws, they're forced to break another country's laws. Kinda like the U.S. policy that U.S. citizens have to pay U.S. taxes on income earned abroad could hypothetically cause a U.S. citizen to owe more than 100% in taxes (if the combined tax rates of the U.S. and other country exceeded 100%).
Other countries avoid the problem by accepting that their laws end at their borders, and if they want something from another country they have to work with that country for joint law enforcement action or extradition. But for some reason politicians and judges in the U.S. keep thinking U.S. law should apply all around the world.
The problem isn't regulation or lack of it. The problem is one of classification.
How do you distinguish between someone finding out another person is going to the same place they are and agreeing to split car expenses for the trip, vs someone paying another person to drive them to a destination? Or how do you distinguish between someone finding out another person wants to visit their home town the same dates they're going to be on vacation so he agrees to rent his house, vs someone regularly renting a second home out as a business?
In the old days, running a taxi or hotel commercially required advertising, and advertising meant mass exposure (mailers, billboards, TV). That made it easy for regulators to spot who was doing these things as a business. But like music distribution, the Internet destroyed that distinction. It dropped the cost of distributing information (e.g. music, or advertising) to near zero, allowing anyone running the above businesses commercially to advertise to people directly (spam, targeted ads, craigslist, Uber/Airbnb). It's a lot harder, if not impossible, for regulators to distinguish between two people coming to a friendly arrangement, vs someone secretly running a business.
Just like with music, the Internet has changed the world. Many of the old models don't work anymore - including regulatory models. And like with music, a new regulatory model is needed. Unless you want to move to an extremely invasive regulatory system which monitors everyone's personal interactions with other people (for one, eliminating cash thus allowing all financial transactions to be traceable).
I've been on the Internet since 1988. We had the same problem back then with USENET trolls. The advice then is the same advice as today - just ignore them.
The trolls thrive on the attention - they get off of knowing that they've pissed you off. The fact that you were so annoyed you wrote up a complaint about them and it's been posted on slashdot probably gave them a collective orgasm. The best way to frustrate them is to ignore them. If you run a forum and don't have the time or manpower to delete their posts, I'd suggest adding ignore lists and setting any troll account to default to Ignore for everyone (except themselves and other troll accounts so it's not obvious to them).
The entire premise behind the iOS walled garden ecosystem is that Apple knows better than you what apps you should be using. This includes phasing out older versions of apps which Apple decides are no longer "suitable" for use. If you don't like it when their decision runs counter to yours, you need to be questioning the net benefit of living in a walled garden.
Google at least lets you poke holes in their walls. If you don't like the limitations of the Play store, you can load another store, or side-load the old version of the app. The only impediment is a warning that doing so may be dangerous. I bet it's sounding a lot better than the Apple way about now, no?
Here it is pictorally. We're currently warmer than even the Medieval Warm Period.
Note: the (in)famous "hockey stick" graph only covered the Little Ice Age period from about 1400 to present. That was one of the reasons I didn't like "An Inconvenient Truth" even though I agreed with the overall message. When you cherry pick data to try to exaggerate what is already a good point, you just give fodder to the opposition. The above graph would've been just as effective as the hockey stick graph, without being deceptive and providing an easy counterpoint.
Trump's "ban" is pretty much the same thing - a 120 day freeze while he reviews and puts together new policies. The media is just calling it a ban because they don't like it (apparently fake news is OK if it advances your opinion).
Trump's mistake was in retroactively invalidating visas and green cards which had already been approved. If he had limited it to freezing new applications like Obama's "ban" did (to use what the media's terminology), then I think the judges would be deciding in his favor.
The program was started after research showed that there was a net drain of talented people out of the U.S. (i.e. to use your terminology, other countries were stealing talented people from the U.S.), and that a disproportionate number of students at U.S. colleges were foreigners who came here for the education, then went right back home, thus ostensibly depriving an American of a spot in that college. Most other developed countries have similar programs (Annex 5.D).
And you do realize the same reasoning works for political and economic refugees, right? The repressive government in the country these people are fleeing will only go away when citizens of that country upset by the government overthrow it. But by accepting refugees, we're depriving the opposition to the repressive government of potential members and fighters. Thus accepting political refugees and people seeking better economic conditions to immigrate also allows repressive foreign government to remain in power longer.
Personally, I intensely disagree with your implicit assumption that each country "owns" its citizens like cattle, and that providing incentives for people to move from one country to another is "stealing". Freedom of movement is a fundamental human right. If a person wishes to change their citizenship to another country, that is their decision to make and theirs alone. I grew up during the Cold War, when half the people on earth were deprived of their right to leave their country of birth. The country of your current citizenship should have no say in whether an individual can leave - all it can do is try to make domestic conditions better to entice you to stay.
So programs like this in first world countries do actually provide a service to developing countries - it encourages them to develop in a way which provides more opportunity and better living conditions for its citizens, lest they flee. Without it, the developing nation can (or is even likely to) develop into a feudal state, where a few people in political power rule over the masses by oppression. Failure to recognize this possibility is what doomed the socialist idealists who implemented Communism.
I see that more as a problem with the definition of full time employment. Because all sorts of new legal requirements kick in at 40 hours/week, companies will seek to keep employees just under 40 hours. (Actually, based on the few laws I ran into with hourly workers, I think most requirements kick in at 30 hours, but I digress...)
If you instead gradually ramp up those legal requirements, then there's no spike in employee cost as they reach 40 hours, and thus no disincentive for companies to have 40 hour workers. To make up a non-existent example, say you require companies to offer full health insurance for anyone fully employed (40 hours). That creates a huge incentive for companies to have a bunch of employees working 39 hours. So instead you make it a requirement that the company has to pay for a fraction of the employee's health insurance proportional to hours per week / 40. So if someone works 20 hours the company pays half their health insurance. If someone works 30 hours the company pays 75% of their health insurance. And if someone works 40+ hours, the company pays 100% of their health insurance. This creates a gradual ramp-up in cost, no jarring discontinuities, thus eliminating any incentive to keep employees under a certain legal threshold.
It's fascinating to watch how both sides are hypocritical and have flip-flopped their arguments on this.
The left which used to argue that cheap Chinese imports were killing American jobs, is now arguing that ending those cheap Chinese imports is going to kill American jobs.
The right which used to argue that cheap Chinese imports gave people more money to spend thus creating more American jobs, is now arguing that ending those cheap Chinese imports will preserve and create American jobs.
You can't have it both ways. If increased trade with China meant the loss of American jobs, then reducing trade with China (increased tariffs) means more American jobs. If tariffs on Chinese imports means fewer American jobs, then increased trade with China in the past created more American jobs.
Because Apple did not develop a tool for the FBI to tease out the encrypted data from one phone, the FBI basically offered a cash prize for such capability (went shopping for someone who could). This caused multiple companies / hackers to seek out a way to tease out the data. And eventually when one of them succeeded, they had a fiscal incentive to not disclose the vulnerability to Apple (so they could use it again in the future to make more money). Until it eventually leaked out onto the internet.
If Apple had developed a tool to reverse-engineer their encryption and tease out the data from one phone, it would've been as safe as they could keep it, and they would've had the option to patch whatever vulnerability they used immediately after the FBI was satisfied. There would've been no additional fiscal incentive for someone else to find a vulnerability, because the FBI would've been satisfied and not offered a cash prize for someone else finding a vulnerability. So there would've been a lower chance of such a vulnerability being found, and remaining in the wild (someone who found it might've turned it in to Apple for a bounty, rather than held out hoping to sell it to government agencies).
So basically, Apple refusing to help the FBI increased the chances of this type of exploit being found and spread in the wild.
You would've been right if Apple had created a back door in their encrypted backup servers to satisfy the FBI's request. But that's the kinda of "worst case" thinking that political advocates use to try to make strawmen to win arguments. Engineers think in terms of "least effort" and "least cost" (fiscal and other). Finding an exploit in just this one older phone model would've been an engineer's preferred solution to the problem, not putting a backdoor into the backup servers that would defeat the purpose of encrypting the backups.