Incremental or differential backups would've noticed "Hey, this file has changed from before. I'd better keep a copy of the previous version around just in case."
All taxes come from people's income. Let me repeat that - all taxes comes from people's income.
A corporate income tax gets passed on as cuts to the wages of the corporation's employees (i.e. their income), reduction in dividends given to shareholders (i.e. their income), and as higher prices (i.e. your income). If you are employed by a corporation or own stocks or collect interest on a savings account, "their income" in the previous sentence is also "your income."
A sales tax gets paid out of your pocket (i.e. your income).
A tariff on imports gets paid out of your pocket (i.e. your income).
An excise tax on your property gets paid out of your pocket (i.e. your income). An excise tax on corporate property gets passed on to you as with corporate income taxes.
People need to get over this nonsensical "us vs them" mentality with taxes, where they try their damnedest to make "someone else" pay for taxes, when in the end it still comes out of their pocketbook. Income is a representation of productivity, and taxes are a diversion of part of that productivity to government functions. Only people generate productivity, so all taxes eventually end up coming out of people's income.
Once you realize this, you realize the most efficient means of tax collection is to simply extract it all from one place. Having a hundred different taxes is tantamount to trying to fill a water bottle with a hundred different eyedroppers collecting water from a hundred different places in the sink, instead of just sticking the water bottle under the spigot and collecting all the water from one location. If you support progressive taxation, the easiest spigot to tax then is income - you can extract a higher tax rate from people with higher incomes. All other taxes should be eliminated as redundant and a waste of time and energy.
So what this stat means is that it takes 110x more people to generate each kWh of electricity with solar than with fossil fuels. If anything, this is an excellent argument for not using solar to generate electricity.
I just upgraded our building's 1080p security camera system storage from 4TB to 16TB (2x8TB). With 8 cameras recording at 6 fps, half of them on motion detection all the time, the others half the time, 4TB held about 35 days of video. We kept missing important footage due to the motion detection not triggering in time or not at all. I tried reducing the h.264 codec quality, but small details like license plate numbers started to become unreadable. 16TB should let us store 45+ days of always-on footage. Maybe even increase the framerate (not that we need smoother video, but more frames means more chances to get a legible still frame grab of a crucial license plate).
This is just 8 cameras. The amount of video storage a place like a shopping mall needs must be mind boggling.
The 10TB drives benchmark at around 240 MB/s on their outer track. Figure a 16 TB drive with 1.6x the areal density will be about 25% faster, or 300 MB/s. That's the speed of the outer track. The inner track is half that, or 150 MB/s. And the circumference is proportional to the radius, so the integral between these two speeds (taking into account more data being stored on outer tracks) yields an average speed 1/3 of the way from 300 to 150 MB/s, or 250 MB/s.
So a straight sector-by-sector (sequential) copy of 16 TB drive to another 16 TB drive would take 16000 GB / 250 MB/s = 64000 seconds, or just under 18 hours.
And touch controls are stupid because knobs and buttons allow you to rest your hand on them while you use them. This means your hand does not leave the control when you hit a bump in the road. With touch controls, you have to keep your hand floating in front of the screen, where every bump and jiggle causes it to shake around relative to the screen. It's actually worse than just having to take your eyes off the road to use them. You also have to concentrate on keeping your hand aligned with the screen while the car bumps along.
MP3s were the first time something widely considered to be a physical product (music records, tapes) became a virtual product, transcending any physical encumbrances. Earlier software-only products (computer programs, TV broadcasts) had always been thought of as a virtual product. Since MP3s, other products have or are becoming virtual products (movies, books, product designs for printing on 3D printers).
Technically, stitching patterns were the first thing to make this transition. In the early 19th century, the textile industry started to use mechanical looms which could be "programmed" to make cloth with a certain pattern. These patterns were stored as holes punched into paper cards which would physically guide the looms into stitching the pattern. People quickly figured out that you could "steal" a pattern just by copying the sequence of holes, not actually stealing the physical card. But these were limited to the industry, not widely known about by the general public like MP3s.
I actually would've selected Napster instead of MP3s. While MP3 was the format which freed music from a physical body, it was just a format. If it hadn't been MP3, it would've been some other format like.au (Sun's PCM format which supported u-law lossy compression). Napster is the software which taught the public that music was a virtual concept that could be exchanged just as easily as exchanging ideas, not a physical thing.
The rate of change in the expansion over a distance is measured as a (change in) velocity / distance. i.e. relative to the observer, a distant point is (due to the expansion of the universe) receding at x miles/sec for every y megaparsecs distance from the observer. This does result in having the units of a frequency (1/time).
Line of sight distance depends on the height of both the object as well as the observer. 90 MW capacity / 15 turbines = they're using 4 MW capacity turbines. Those have a rotor diameter of 130 meters (about 430 feet). Add in, say, 10 meters for the base, and that gives a line of sight distance to the horizon of 42.2 km (about 26 miles). A person standing on the beach with eyes 5 ft off the ground has a line of sight distance of 2.7 miles. So the top of the rotors would be visible from the beach at 26 + 2.7 = 29 miles away.
If the person is looking out the second story window of their beach house 20 ft up, that adds 5.5 miles, for a rotor tip visibility range of 31 miles away. If you're standing on a 100 ft high bluff, that gives 12.2 mile LoS. You'd be able to see something 210 feet high at 30 miles away. Basically the top half of the turbine.
Go read Azimov's The Dead Past if you haven't yet. He makes a great point - the ultimate endgame of this type of surveillance technology isn't the government or corporations spying on everything we do. It's regular people using it to spy on each other.
The voyeurs are going to have a field day with this. You'll never know anymore if your bedroom, your shower stall, the inside of your car as you drive to work, your work office are truly private. Even if you lined a room with metal to create a faraday cage, an insect could be programmed to enter, loiter while a camera records for a few hours, then exit so it can upload the recorded video. You thought companies tracking your web browsing habits with cookies was invasive? You ain't seen nothing yet.
Have you looked at a newspaper? They're also filled with thousands of ads. No single reader will look at all thousand. What the advertisers are counting on are the one in a thousand readers who sees their ad.
I agree with you and TFA though that this is a terrible and inefficient way to do it. Unfortunately, the better way to do it - fewer but targeted ads tailored to better suit your interests and needs - is vehemently opposed by the pro-privacy crowd. The more accurately they can target the ads to you, the more people oppose it as a bigger invasion of their privacy. There's a solution in here somewhere, we just have to find it. (Maybe prohibit collecting and selling of profile info, but allow a user to generate/reset his/her own profile. Advertisers are then allowed to read that profile and present an appropriate ad.)
Wouldn't help because the batteries aren't the problem per se. It's the charging circuitry and charge history. Lithium-ion batteries become unstable if overcharged, or over-discharged and then recharged. Any Li-ion battery which is tested and certified as safe can still catch fire or explode if it's been charged/discharged in an unsafe manner.
Way back when Li-ion smart phones and laptop batteries first appeared, manufacturers attempted to address this problem by putting the charging circuitry in the battery pack. The phone or laptop merely presented the battery pack with a certain amount of voltage and current. The battery's charging circuitry decided how to use that to charge the battery. And if it decided the battery was in an unsafe state or behaving strangely, it killed it. Unfortunately, the market got flooded with cheap knockoff "compatible" battery packs which either had poor charge protection circuitry, or didn't even have any protection. This is what led to the spate of battery fires in early cell phones and Li-ion laptops.
A certification / testing program might have helped back then. But it didn't happen, so manufacturers were forced to move the charge control circuitry into the phone or laptop as a result. That way you could put in a cheap aftermarket battery, and still be reasonably protected (lithium-ion cells are fairly generic in terms of how their voltage responds to charge). Consequently, testing and certifying the battery packs won't do much good.
A modular phone is a good idea, it's just too soon to introduce them to the smartphone market. The idea behind the modules is that your phone's display, memory, and radio technology (4G) may be just fine, but the CPU is starting to get a little long in the tooth and you'd like to upgrade it. Or maybe all the other components are fine, but you want to use the phone with newer 5G service. Or maybe you just want a higher-resolution screen.
The problem in the smartphone industry right now is that the technology in all these categories is improving so rapidly that you rarely want to upgrade just one or two components. By the time the CPU starts to feel slow, smartphones have doubled in memory and storage, higher resolution displays which are brighter and more colorful while using less battery are available, and the next gen cellular standard is released. There's no point replacing every module on your phone when you can just get an entirely new phone.
In a decade or two, when people are on average using the same phone for 5-7 years like they do with a PC, modularity will become more important.
Is there some payola going on? Google was actually first to implement a voice assistant. Nearly a year before Siri, I was using it on my Android phone to send texts, initiate map navigation, make appointments and to-do lists, make general web queries, as well as make phone calls like most phones have been able to do since the early 2000s. It's just that most people never knew about it because Google never thought to give it a catchy anthropomorphized name like Siri or Alexa.
Approximately 81% of the Android devices out there can use OK Google (Android 4.4 or newer). With 1.4 billion Android devices, that's 1.1 billion devices with access to Android's voice assistant. iOS has about a half billion users, the vast majority of whom can use Siri. Yet the press is saturated with stories about a mere 8.2 million people with an Amazon Echo?
Apple said it was getting out of the monitor business, and instead chose to work more closely with third-party partners, heavily featuring LG's 5K and 4K UltraFine displays at its recent MacBook Pro unveiling.
AFAIK, Apple was never in the panel manufacturing business. They used to make Apple-branded monitors, but those simply used panels manufactured by and bought from a third party (Samsung, LG, Sharp, and lately JDI - Japan Display Inc).
So when the reviews rave about a Macbook's display, it's an Apple screen. When the reviewers complain about it, it's an LG screen.
It's probably due to financial markets being global, and the U.S. and most of Asia using the period as a decimal point and the comma as the thousands separator (e.g. 1,234.50), but most of Europe using the comma as a decimal point and the period as a thousands separator (1.234,50).
A number like 12.345% is then ambiguous across the two systems. In the U.S. it would mean twelve and 345 thousandths of a percent. But in Europe it would mean twelve thousand three hundred forty five percent.
If you just call hundredths of a percent a basis point, you avoid this problem. (A programming analogy would be assigning a unit to the smallest number you'll ever use, so that you can use ints instead of floats, thereby eliminating the risk of errors due to misplacing the decimal.)
I hear people say that about health care and it's hilariously stupid because the US pays the most per capita for health care and covers way less people than other countries do.
That was the most common argument i saw for Obamacare. Unfortunately, it's wrong. Before Obamacare was passed, the U.S. already spent just about as much government money ("public expenditure") as percent of GDP and per capita as Canada did on its single payer system. Since Obamacare, it's actually gotten worse, with the U.S. government now spending 25% more per capita on health care than Canada.
The reason for the high health care costs in the U.S. isn't because of lack of government provided health care as the socialists want to think it is. In fact, given that medicare ("public expenditure") recipients are only 17% of the population but account for roughly half of the U.S. health care costs, there's a strong argument to be made that government-provided health care is the problem.
No, Apple got slapped down for a scheme where they colluded with publishers to raise ebook prices. In that case, their "give us the lowest price" clause forced publishers to charge Amazon and other ebook retailers higher prices to match Apple's prices.
In this case, Amazon isn't colluding with the publishers to raise prices, so the clause just forces the publisher to give Amazon a lower price if they give another retailer a lower price. Still kinda sleazy (kind of a perpetual price-match policy; arguably unfair to publishers - I don't exactly see Amazon offering a perpetual price match policy for stuff I buy from them), but nowhere near as bad as what Apple tried to pull.
It reset the default browser after the big October update; re-enabled Cortana and put it back on the task bar if you'd disabled it IIRC. Several updates (including the big October one) have also put Edge and the Windows Store back in your task bar if you had unpinned them.
Source: I maintain a few dozen computers spread among various clients (small businesses) as a side job. My SOP was to disable Cortana and remove it, Edge, and the Windows Store from the task bar. It was a major PITA having to do this over and over on so many computers. I seriously doubt it was user error - that would've required a few dozen users to simultaneously decide "I think I'll re-enable Cortana and pin it, Edge, and the Windows store back to my task bar" to jive with my experience Microsoft may have done it again recently - I got fed up with it and just disabled the update service on my personal Win 10 machine so I wouldn't know. My next planned update is beginning of Feb. Haven't yet made the rounds this month to check my clients' computers.
The advantage of giving someone welfare over paying them to do unnecessary work is that the person on welfare would have time to learn new skills plus you lose the overhead costs
Welfare: Give the person the money to live. Whether he takes the time to learn new skills is up to him.
Subsidized labor: In order to get the money to live, the person is forced to learn new skills to work a job (or use skills s/he already knows).
I'm actually pro-free trade and globalization. But it's been obvious for over a decade that China has been keeping its labor costs artificially low by manipulating its currency. In other words, the low prices of Chinese-made goods are actually below what the free market says they should cost. This creates an economic inefficiency where work that should be necessary and remain in the U.S. is unnecessarily moved to China to the detriment of the U.S. and benefit of China. (Because it's an inefficiency, the U.S. loses more than China gains.) While I'm generally opposed to tariffs, in this case in moderation they would help restore balance and put the economy back closer to where it should be. (The U.S. gains more than China loses.)
If the pricing of Chinese-made goods were truly dictated by the free market, then we would be in an ideal economic efficiency state, and what you say would be true. But without China's currency manipulation, most of our offshored manufacturing would've moved to other developing countries or (due to transport costs and lack of sufficient low-labor production overseas) come back to the U.S.
Article is paywalled so I can't read their actual data. If R is the rate at which women die of cervical cancer, n is the number of women who die of cervical cancer, N is the population of women, and h is the fraction who have had hysterectomies.
For black women, R_adjusted / R_initial = 1.77, so
h = 1 - 1/1.77 = 0.435
43.5% of black women have had hysterectomies.
For white women, R_adjusted / R_initial = 1.44, so
h = 1 - 1/1.44 = 0.306
30.6% of white women have had hysterectomies.
According to this site over 1/3 of women over age 60 have had hysterectomies. Which seems to agree with the above calculated rates. I had no idea hysterectomies were that prevalent.
The beauty of the modern world is that you don't have to get math to be able to use it. There are lots of budgeting spreadsheets and websites available for free. You can just key in your expenses and your income, and it'll spit out how much you should expect to make/save or lose.
The problem is, as OP said, we don't teach basic financial skills in high school. People who don't know how what a budget is won't even know to seek out one of these free services. I've been taking a few hours to teach these skills to my younger cousins and nephews/nieces as they get to high school because it's such an important skill that's so easy to grok, yet our school system completely ignores it.
First, you have to be in exactly the right situation - there cannot be background noise or crosstalk - so essentially, a nearly SILENT room
That's what I used to think. Google lets you browse and replay your past voice recognition history. I was surprised to find the noise cancellation mics they have on modern phones are really, really good. Even stuff I said while driving on the highway with the phone in a cup holder is perfectly intelligible.
Ever since, I've been using "Ok Google" more often in noisy background situations. And most of the time it works surprisingly well.
Keep in mind this is a country with 2.5x the population of New York state squashed into an area about 2/3 the size of New York state. Of countries larger than 10,000 km^2, only Bangladesh, Taiwan, and Lebanon are more densely populated. The highway system is easily overburdened. During the lunar new year, when nearly everyone tries to travel to their home town, it's not unusual for an approx 400 km drive to take 24 hours.
I've traveled between Seoul and Busan by highway, regular train, and airliner. The highway takes way too long when there's traffic. Train is slower than car because of all the stops. Air travel is way too expensive and annoying (flight is 40 minutes, about same as NYC to DC, but takes about 2.5 hours due to time tied up at and getting to the airport). The country badly needs something in-between. They started a high speed rail service, so this is just a natural progression of what they're already building.
I believe the question here is one of scope. The DMCA was created to protect copyrighted works - stuff that's supposed to be distributed throughout the public, but the creator still retains ownership rights.
These companies (and printer manufacturers with their ink cartridges) have been trying to extend the DMCA to cover what's traditionally considered a trade secret - stuff that nobody except the creator is supposed to know about. The "problem" with trade secrets (from the owner's perspective) being that if anyone figures out or reverse engineers the secret, it's no longer a secret.
As Congress hasn't made any moves to address whether or not the scope of the DMCA covers trade secrets under the guise of copyright, these states are. That way the conflict between these state laws and DMCA can be resolved through the courts, and case law setting the boundary on whether the DMCA can be extended to protect trade secrets in this manner..
Slashdot Mirror
Incremental or differential backups would've noticed "Hey, this file has changed from before. I'd better keep a copy of the previous version around just in case."
People need to get over this nonsensical "us vs them" mentality with taxes, where they try their damnedest to make "someone else" pay for taxes, when in the end it still comes out of their pocketbook. Income is a representation of productivity, and taxes are a diversion of part of that productivity to government functions. Only people generate productivity, so all taxes eventually end up coming out of people's income.
Once you realize this, you realize the most efficient means of tax collection is to simply extract it all from one place. Having a hundred different taxes is tantamount to trying to fill a water bottle with a hundred different eyedroppers collecting water from a hundred different places in the sink, instead of just sticking the water bottle under the spigot and collecting all the water from one location. If you support progressive taxation, the easiest spigot to tax then is income - you can extract a higher tax rate from people with higher incomes. All other taxes should be eliminated as redundant and a waste of time and energy.
Of electricity generated in the U.S., solar generates just 0.6% of the total. Coal, gas, and oil generates 67% of it.
So what this stat means is that it takes 110x more people to generate each kWh of electricity with solar than with fossil fuels. If anything, this is an excellent argument for not using solar to generate electricity.
I just upgraded our building's 1080p security camera system storage from 4TB to 16TB (2x8TB). With 8 cameras recording at 6 fps, half of them on motion detection all the time, the others half the time, 4TB held about 35 days of video. We kept missing important footage due to the motion detection not triggering in time or not at all. I tried reducing the h.264 codec quality, but small details like license plate numbers started to become unreadable. 16TB should let us store 45+ days of always-on footage. Maybe even increase the framerate (not that we need smoother video, but more frames means more chances to get a legible still frame grab of a crucial license plate).
This is just 8 cameras. The amount of video storage a place like a shopping mall needs must be mind boggling.
The 10TB drives benchmark at around 240 MB/s on their outer track. Figure a 16 TB drive with 1.6x the areal density will be about 25% faster, or 300 MB/s. That's the speed of the outer track. The inner track is half that, or 150 MB/s. And the circumference is proportional to the radius, so the integral between these two speeds (taking into account more data being stored on outer tracks) yields an average speed 1/3 of the way from 300 to 150 MB/s, or 250 MB/s.
So a straight sector-by-sector (sequential) copy of 16 TB drive to another 16 TB drive would take 16000 GB / 250 MB/s = 64000 seconds, or just under 18 hours.
As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case 73 words.
And touch controls are stupid because knobs and buttons allow you to rest your hand on them while you use them. This means your hand does not leave the control when you hit a bump in the road. With touch controls, you have to keep your hand floating in front of the screen, where every bump and jiggle causes it to shake around relative to the screen. It's actually worse than just having to take your eyes off the road to use them. You also have to concentrate on keeping your hand aligned with the screen while the car bumps along.
MP3s were the first time something widely considered to be a physical product (music records, tapes) became a virtual product, transcending any physical encumbrances. Earlier software-only products (computer programs, TV broadcasts) had always been thought of as a virtual product. Since MP3s, other products have or are becoming virtual products (movies, books, product designs for printing on 3D printers).
.au (Sun's PCM format which supported u-law lossy compression). Napster is the software which taught the public that music was a virtual concept that could be exchanged just as easily as exchanging ideas, not a physical thing.
Technically, stitching patterns were the first thing to make this transition. In the early 19th century, the textile industry started to use mechanical looms which could be "programmed" to make cloth with a certain pattern. These patterns were stored as holes punched into paper cards which would physically guide the looms into stitching the pattern. People quickly figured out that you could "steal" a pattern just by copying the sequence of holes, not actually stealing the physical card. But these were limited to the industry, not widely known about by the general public like MP3s.
I actually would've selected Napster instead of MP3s. While MP3 was the format which freed music from a physical body, it was just a format. If it hadn't been MP3, it would've been some other format like
The rate of change in the expansion over a distance is measured as a (change in) velocity / distance. i.e. relative to the observer, a distant point is (due to the expansion of the universe) receding at x miles/sec for every y megaparsecs distance from the observer. This does result in having the units of a frequency (1/time).
Line of sight distance depends on the height of both the object as well as the observer. 90 MW capacity / 15 turbines = they're using 4 MW capacity turbines. Those have a rotor diameter of 130 meters (about 430 feet). Add in, say, 10 meters for the base, and that gives a line of sight distance to the horizon of 42.2 km (about 26 miles). A person standing on the beach with eyes 5 ft off the ground has a line of sight distance of 2.7 miles. So the top of the rotors would be visible from the beach at 26 + 2.7 = 29 miles away.
If the person is looking out the second story window of their beach house 20 ft up, that adds 5.5 miles, for a rotor tip visibility range of 31 miles away. If you're standing on a 100 ft high bluff, that gives 12.2 mile LoS. You'd be able to see something 210 feet high at 30 miles away. Basically the top half of the turbine.
Go read Azimov's The Dead Past if you haven't yet. He makes a great point - the ultimate endgame of this type of surveillance technology isn't the government or corporations spying on everything we do. It's regular people using it to spy on each other.
The voyeurs are going to have a field day with this. You'll never know anymore if your bedroom, your shower stall, the inside of your car as you drive to work, your work office are truly private. Even if you lined a room with metal to create a faraday cage, an insect could be programmed to enter, loiter while a camera records for a few hours, then exit so it can upload the recorded video. You thought companies tracking your web browsing habits with cookies was invasive? You ain't seen nothing yet.
Have you looked at a newspaper? They're also filled with thousands of ads. No single reader will look at all thousand. What the advertisers are counting on are the one in a thousand readers who sees their ad.
I agree with you and TFA though that this is a terrible and inefficient way to do it. Unfortunately, the better way to do it - fewer but targeted ads tailored to better suit your interests and needs - is vehemently opposed by the pro-privacy crowd. The more accurately they can target the ads to you, the more people oppose it as a bigger invasion of their privacy. There's a solution in here somewhere, we just have to find it. (Maybe prohibit collecting and selling of profile info, but allow a user to generate/reset his/her own profile. Advertisers are then allowed to read that profile and present an appropriate ad.)
Wouldn't help because the batteries aren't the problem per se. It's the charging circuitry and charge history. Lithium-ion batteries become unstable if overcharged, or over-discharged and then recharged. Any Li-ion battery which is tested and certified as safe can still catch fire or explode if it's been charged/discharged in an unsafe manner.
Way back when Li-ion smart phones and laptop batteries first appeared, manufacturers attempted to address this problem by putting the charging circuitry in the battery pack. The phone or laptop merely presented the battery pack with a certain amount of voltage and current. The battery's charging circuitry decided how to use that to charge the battery. And if it decided the battery was in an unsafe state or behaving strangely, it killed it. Unfortunately, the market got flooded with cheap knockoff "compatible" battery packs which either had poor charge protection circuitry, or didn't even have any protection. This is what led to the spate of battery fires in early cell phones and Li-ion laptops.
A certification / testing program might have helped back then. But it didn't happen, so manufacturers were forced to move the charge control circuitry into the phone or laptop as a result. That way you could put in a cheap aftermarket battery, and still be reasonably protected (lithium-ion cells are fairly generic in terms of how their voltage responds to charge). Consequently, testing and certifying the battery packs won't do much good.
A modular phone is a good idea, it's just too soon to introduce them to the smartphone market. The idea behind the modules is that your phone's display, memory, and radio technology (4G) may be just fine, but the CPU is starting to get a little long in the tooth and you'd like to upgrade it. Or maybe all the other components are fine, but you want to use the phone with newer 5G service. Or maybe you just want a higher-resolution screen.
The problem in the smartphone industry right now is that the technology in all these categories is improving so rapidly that you rarely want to upgrade just one or two components. By the time the CPU starts to feel slow, smartphones have doubled in memory and storage, higher resolution displays which are brighter and more colorful while using less battery are available, and the next gen cellular standard is released. There's no point replacing every module on your phone when you can just get an entirely new phone.
In a decade or two, when people are on average using the same phone for 5-7 years like they do with a PC, modularity will become more important.
Is there some payola going on? Google was actually first to implement a voice assistant. Nearly a year before Siri, I was using it on my Android phone to send texts, initiate map navigation, make appointments and to-do lists, make general web queries, as well as make phone calls like most phones have been able to do since the early 2000s. It's just that most people never knew about it because Google never thought to give it a catchy anthropomorphized name like Siri or Alexa.
Approximately 81% of the Android devices out there can use OK Google (Android 4.4 or newer). With 1.4 billion Android devices, that's 1.1 billion devices with access to Android's voice assistant. iOS has about a half billion users, the vast majority of whom can use Siri. Yet the press is saturated with stories about a mere 8.2 million people with an Amazon Echo?
AFAIK, Apple was never in the panel manufacturing business. They used to make Apple-branded monitors, but those simply used panels manufactured by and bought from a third party (Samsung, LG, Sharp, and lately JDI - Japan Display Inc).
So when the reviews rave about a Macbook's display, it's an Apple screen. When the reviewers complain about it, it's an LG screen.
It's probably due to financial markets being global, and the U.S. and most of Asia using the period as a decimal point and the comma as the thousands separator (e.g. 1,234.50), but most of Europe using the comma as a decimal point and the period as a thousands separator (1.234,50).
A number like 12.345% is then ambiguous across the two systems. In the U.S. it would mean twelve and 345 thousandths of a percent. But in Europe it would mean twelve thousand three hundred forty five percent.
If you just call hundredths of a percent a basis point, you avoid this problem. (A programming analogy would be assigning a unit to the smallest number you'll ever use, so that you can use ints instead of floats, thereby eliminating the risk of errors due to misplacing the decimal.)
That was the most common argument i saw for Obamacare. Unfortunately, it's wrong. Before Obamacare was passed, the U.S. already spent just about as much government money ("public expenditure") as percent of GDP and per capita as Canada did on its single payer system. Since Obamacare, it's actually gotten worse, with the U.S. government now spending 25% more per capita on health care than Canada.
The reason for the high health care costs in the U.S. isn't because of lack of government provided health care as the socialists want to think it is. In fact, given that medicare ("public expenditure") recipients are only 17% of the population but account for roughly half of the U.S. health care costs, there's a strong argument to be made that government-provided health care is the problem.
No, Apple got slapped down for a scheme where they colluded with publishers to raise ebook prices. In that case, their "give us the lowest price" clause forced publishers to charge Amazon and other ebook retailers higher prices to match Apple's prices.
In this case, Amazon isn't colluding with the publishers to raise prices, so the clause just forces the publisher to give Amazon a lower price if they give another retailer a lower price. Still kinda sleazy (kind of a perpetual price-match policy; arguably unfair to publishers - I don't exactly see Amazon offering a perpetual price match policy for stuff I buy from them), but nowhere near as bad as what Apple tried to pull.
It reset the default browser after the big October update; re-enabled Cortana and put it back on the task bar if you'd disabled it IIRC. Several updates (including the big October one) have also put Edge and the Windows Store back in your task bar if you had unpinned them.
Source: I maintain a few dozen computers spread among various clients (small businesses) as a side job. My SOP was to disable Cortana and remove it, Edge, and the Windows Store from the task bar. It was a major PITA having to do this over and over on so many computers. I seriously doubt it was user error - that would've required a few dozen users to simultaneously decide "I think I'll re-enable Cortana and pin it, Edge, and the Windows store back to my task bar" to jive with my experience Microsoft may have done it again recently - I got fed up with it and just disabled the update service on my personal Win 10 machine so I wouldn't know. My next planned update is beginning of Feb. Haven't yet made the rounds this month to check my clients' computers.
Welfare: Give the person the money to live. Whether he takes the time to learn new skills is up to him.
Subsidized labor: In order to get the money to live, the person is forced to learn new skills to work a job (or use skills s/he already knows).
I'm actually pro-free trade and globalization. But it's been obvious for over a decade that China has been keeping its labor costs artificially low by manipulating its currency. In other words, the low prices of Chinese-made goods are actually below what the free market says they should cost. This creates an economic inefficiency where work that should be necessary and remain in the U.S. is unnecessarily moved to China to the detriment of the U.S. and benefit of China. (Because it's an inefficiency, the U.S. loses more than China gains.) While I'm generally opposed to tariffs, in this case in moderation they would help restore balance and put the economy back closer to where it should be. (The U.S. gains more than China loses.)
If the pricing of Chinese-made goods were truly dictated by the free market, then we would be in an ideal economic efficiency state, and what you say would be true. But without China's currency manipulation, most of our offshored manufacturing would've moved to other developing countries or (due to transport costs and lack of sufficient low-labor production overseas) come back to the U.S.
Article is paywalled so I can't read their actual data. If R is the rate at which women die of cervical cancer, n is the number of women who die of cervical cancer, N is the population of women, and h is the fraction who have had hysterectomies.
R_initial = n / N
R_adjusted = n / (N - h*N) = (n / N) * (1 / (1-h))
R_adjusted / R_initial = 1 / (1- h)
(1-h) = 1 / (R_adjusted / R_initial)
h = 1 - 1/(R_adjusted / R_initial)
For black women, R_adjusted / R_initial = 1.77, so
h = 1 - 1/1.77 = 0.435
43.5% of black women have had hysterectomies.
For white women, R_adjusted / R_initial = 1.44, so
h = 1 - 1/1.44 = 0.306
30.6% of white women have had hysterectomies.
According to this site over 1/3 of women over age 60 have had hysterectomies. Which seems to agree with the above calculated rates. I had no idea hysterectomies were that prevalent.
The beauty of the modern world is that you don't have to get math to be able to use it. There are lots of budgeting spreadsheets and websites available for free. You can just key in your expenses and your income, and it'll spit out how much you should expect to make/save or lose.
The problem is, as OP said, we don't teach basic financial skills in high school. People who don't know how what a budget is won't even know to seek out one of these free services. I've been taking a few hours to teach these skills to my younger cousins and nephews/nieces as they get to high school because it's such an important skill that's so easy to grok, yet our school system completely ignores it.
That's what I used to think. Google lets you browse and replay your past voice recognition history. I was surprised to find the noise cancellation mics they have on modern phones are really, really good. Even stuff I said while driving on the highway with the phone in a cup holder is perfectly intelligible.
Ever since, I've been using "Ok Google" more often in noisy background situations. And most of the time it works surprisingly well.
Keep in mind this is a country with 2.5x the population of New York state squashed into an area about 2/3 the size of New York state. Of countries larger than 10,000 km^2, only Bangladesh, Taiwan, and Lebanon are more densely populated. The highway system is easily overburdened. During the lunar new year, when nearly everyone tries to travel to their home town, it's not unusual for an approx 400 km drive to take 24 hours.
I've traveled between Seoul and Busan by highway, regular train, and airliner. The highway takes way too long when there's traffic. Train is slower than car because of all the stops. Air travel is way too expensive and annoying (flight is 40 minutes, about same as NYC to DC, but takes about 2.5 hours due to time tied up at and getting to the airport). The country badly needs something in-between. They started a high speed rail service, so this is just a natural progression of what they're already building.
I believe the question here is one of scope. The DMCA was created to protect copyrighted works - stuff that's supposed to be distributed throughout the public, but the creator still retains ownership rights.
These companies (and printer manufacturers with their ink cartridges) have been trying to extend the DMCA to cover what's traditionally considered a trade secret - stuff that nobody except the creator is supposed to know about. The "problem" with trade secrets (from the owner's perspective) being that if anyone figures out or reverse engineers the secret, it's no longer a secret.
As Congress hasn't made any moves to address whether or not the scope of the DMCA covers trade secrets under the guise of copyright, these states are. That way the conflict between these state laws and DMCA can be resolved through the courts, and case law setting the boundary on whether the DMCA can be extended to protect trade secrets in this manner..