Just disable the Windows Update service. That's how we deal with the problem on security camera computers which need to be running 24/7 with no reboots. For bonus points, you can disable BITS too to prevent it from exchanging downloaded data with other Windows computers on your network.
What's more annoying to me is how Microsoft blithely ignores your customized configuration and resets stuff after certain updates. Like re-enabling Cortana, and pinning Edge and the Windows Store back to your taskbar. It's a PITA to have to disable and unpin those all over again on dozens of computers after an update.
No its not better for the user. Its better for the large manufacturers and software shops. Its about the most anti freedom thing you could possibly do. Here we are in 2016 where the opportunity for anyone to learn program (books were expensive and knowledgeable mentors were hard to come by) etc is a reality, and the tools are available (buying a decent compiler used to cost both your arms and a leg, now great ones are free), except were are taking away the ability to execute a program once you write it, unless you pay the right people their tribute money. It might be easier for the user, but it isn't better.
The catch-22 is that when you make it easier for the end-user to reprogram the device, you make it easier for malware to reprogram the device.
I'm with you. I don't think locking down devices with proprietary software and putting them behind walled gardens is the right solution. I think each device should have a physical switch or dongle which needs to be flipped or plugged in to make the OS partition read/write. Otherwise the OS files are read-only and can't be modified. An attacker could still get in using an exploit, but they wouldn't be able to leverage it to gain root access to the system or rewrite how it works.
To be useful the probe has to send back some telemetry via radio. Otherwise how do you know it landed? And anyone can receive that telemetry, so you can't really do a sneaky moon landing
Not to feed the conspiracy theorists, but the Lagrange L1 and L2 points lie outside the Earth-Moon system and see the back side of the moon half the time. They are/were occupied by SOHO, WMAP (first link), and Planck. The James Webb Space Telescope is going to be parked at L2 as well.
Theoretically, any of them could be used to relay transmissions from the back side of the moon undetectable from Earth. For that matter, you could turn SOHO around to photograph the back side of the moon if you wanted to. (So could JWST, but it wouldn't have the benefit of sunlight lighting up the half of the moon it sees.) A few missions have been sent into orbit around the moon as well.
Say you do somehow land a robotic probe there for no reason at all, how would you conceal it from orbiting satellites that are photographing the surface? We can see the Apollo and Surveyor and various Russian probe landing sites on those photos, taking by various different countries.
Concealing something on the entire surface of the moon is easy. LRO produces the highest resolution images of the moon's entire surface, but the Apollo landing sites still barely show up. We know where to point the camera because we know where the sites are. If we didn't know where, well the moon's surface area is 38 million km^2, so the back side is 19 million km^2. If the lander you're trying to find is 1 square meter, that's like trying to find one special grain of sand 2 mm^2 sitting on top of 38 km^2 of beach. Good luck.
The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of Samsung over Apple decided the same thing. Samsung was only financially liable for patent infringement on the component which was found to be in violation, not the entire product.
Basically both of these rulings are saying if you own a patent used to make a special type of screw and you license it for 2% of the price, you are only entitled to 2% of the price of the screw. Not 2% of the price of a house because the screw happened to be used in making the house. They're both the right decision. Deciding otherwise leads to insanity like the band whose CD you played at your wedding and the company who designed the invite cards for the wedding being entitled to a percentage of the cost of your wedding.
Bates told police he went to bed at 1 a.m. after he, Collins and another man drank alcohol in his hot tub. Bates said he called police at 9:30 a.m. when he found Collins' body.
Bates' lawyer said a pair of cancelled calls around 1 a.m. and a series of short or cancelled calls around 4 a.m. on Bates' phone were mistakes.
As for Mr. Bates, court records suggest the device prosecutors got more from wasn't the Alexa but the home's smart water meter. It showed that someone used 140 gallons of water between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. at Mr. Bates' house, a much heavier than usual amount.
So basically the guy's alibi might have held up if (1) he hadn't used his phone after he claimed he went to sleep, and (2) the water meter didn't show significant activity in the house after he claimed he went to sleep (police think he was busy washing away any evidence).
That's the shareware model for software. Download the program and try it out for free. To continue using it after a certain amount of time, or to unlock certain features, or to get rid of an annoying nag screen, you pay for it. While not the most popular model, it's still used successfully pretty widely.
The record and movie companies are such Luddites that won't even try to explore new technologies and models. They fought the VCR tooth and nail, were forced to accept it by the courts, and a couple decades later most of their revenue came from videotape and later DVD sales and rentals. They fought movie rentals tooth and nail, were forced to accept it by the courts, and a decade later something like half of their revenue came from movie rentals.
I agree with you - I think the shareware model would work spectacularly well for movies. You get to watch the first half of the movie for free, but at a strategic point halfway through the movie, it stops and you have to pay for it if you want to watch the rest of it. It's a concept which dates back to antiquity - A Thousand and One Arabian Nights used it. The fictional storyteller, ordered by the king to be executed the next morning, would tell the king half a story at night, forcing him to keep her alive to hear the second half the next night, at which point she would weave in the first half of another story thus keeping her alive another day. But the studios are too closed-minded to even consider trying it.
The entire reason cities exist is because it's wasteful to have people separated by the amount of agricultural land needed to support them. A family of 4 needs about 2 acres (0.8 hectares) of land to grow the food needed to sustain them. Cities leveraged advances in transportation tech and a trade economy to decouple the food production from living spaces. The maximum size of a city is basically determined by the efficiency of the food transport and distribution network - the better those are, the larger the radius of land surrounding the city that can be used to feed its occupants.
Backyard and rooftop gardens are a good (and fun) way to supplement your diet with a few items which might be difficult or expensive to obtain at the grocery store. But they don't come anywhere close to putting a dent in self-sustainability. Given the premium that is placed on space is in cities, there's probably a much better use for that land area than for growing crops. The idea that you can feed yourself by planting a garden in your backyard is a delusion perpetuated by people who've never crunched the actual numbers. The entire reason the unit of an "acre" exists is because that was the amount of crop fields a single person could typically work in a day back when most everyone was living on a subsistence diet.
In other words, even if you had enough land area to actually be able to grow enough in your backyard garden to feed yourself, (1) it would be your full-time job, and (2) you would pretty much be on a starvation-level diet. For all the flak agri-business gets, they've done a remarkable job improving farming efficiency. During pre-industrial times, each farmer grew enough food to feed 1.1 people. Today, a single farmer produces enough food to feed 150 people (2.1 million farmers vs 319 million population).
Some of the things described in TFA are just plain stupid. Growing plants in shipping containers with light from LEDs? So rather than grow the plants on a farm so 100% of the sunlight reaches the plants, you're going to use 16% efficient solar panels to generate electricity to power 10% efficient LEDs so only 1.6% of the sunlight reaches the plants? Are you insane? Cannabis grow labs have to do this to evade law enforcement (in places where it's illegal), but there is no logical reason to do this for food crops.
2FA works great for an individual or couple. It doesn't work so well for a group-shared account. If a dozen employees have access to an account and one quits or is fired, you'd have to regenerate a new 2FA key and update it to the remaining 11 employees. It's the same reason Sony's passwords were stored in an unencrypted text file during the original PS Network hack (and the reason your company probably posts shared passwords on the refrigerator in the break room) - it becomes tedious to send updated passwords to all the employees who need access to that account.
These online services (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc) really need to come up with a better system for handling group-shared accounts. They need a master user who can create, assign, and revoke privileges to sub-users (pretty similar to how Google Apps for Domains works). Then the company's IT admin can own the master account. Employees who need to be able to send tweets as "Sony" would be given subaccounts, each with their own individual password and 2FA key. If one of these employees loses a device which has his password or 2FA token generator, IT can use the master account to reset only that employee's password and 2FA key. If one of those employees quits or is fired, IT just uses the master account to delete that employee's account. Everyone else with access to the account just carries on as if nothing happened. Nobody else is affected, nobody else needs to be informed of a new password or have their 2FA key updated.
A genome study concluded that cheetahs experienced two genetic bottlenecks in their history, the first about 100,000 years ago and the second about 12,000 years ago, greatly lowering their genetic variability. These bottlenecks may have been associated with migrations across Asia and into Africa (with the current African population founded about 12,000 years ago), and/or with a depletion of prey species at the end of the Pleistocene.
As cool as cheetahs are, it would seem their genetic design is just not a very good one. While there was a mass extinction event about 12k years ago, it was mostly limited to Australia and the Americas. Africa has retained well over half its large mammal species through both extinction events approx 120k and 10k years ago. In other words, the cheetah appears to have problems coping with events which the great majority of other large African mammal species survived. The morphologically similar American cheetah (which is suspected to be the reason why American pronghorns are so damned fast) also went extinct. Suggesting that from an evolutionary standpoint their design is simply not a very good one, and extinction may be the inevitable judgement of Nature.
Then Android wouldn't be open source anymore. Which do you want? An OS which is open and that anyone can fork and modify if they don't like how the original author made it? Or an OS which is closed and proprietary so you have to take it the way the original author made it, no alterations?
Way I see it, the carrier problem isn't Google's responsibility. It's a market problem - vertical integration causing lack of customer fluidity. The carriers own the towers, the service, and also sell the phones. GSM tackled the problem by requiring SIM cards, basically forcing all phones to be interchangeable between carriers. The U.S. doesn't have that so your phone is frequently tied to your carrier, giving them an unprecedented level of control over your phone.
Have you actually read the Canadian Supreme Court decision against Schmeiser? It's a complete repudiation of all of Monsanto's claims except for their claim of patent ownership of the seed. And that claim was later disproven.
The lower court judgement against Schmeiser was reduced to just $1. Why? Because (and the Monsanto apologists never tell you this) Schmeiser never used Round-Up on his crops. He only used Round-Up to kill weeds in the gulleys between his crops and the road. Never on his crops. As such, there was no way for him to benefit from using Monsanto's patented gene (and in fact no incentive for him to steal it).
He "acquired" the seed when he noticed that some stray canola which was growing in the gulleys survived his anti-weed spraying of Round-Up. Since his canola crop was not Round-Up-Ready, the only way the Round-Up-resistant canola could've gotten there is by falling off a passing truck (the explanation the Court decided was correct), or via natural cross-pollination of his crop with a neighbor's Round-Up-Ready crop (the explanation Schmeiser gave for his behavior).
The Court decided for Monsanto (5 to 4) because Monsanto claimed it was impossible for the gene to spread by natural cross-pollination as Schmeiser claimed. The Court took Monsanto at their word and decided in their favor because Schmeiser "ought to have known" that any canola which survived spraying with Round-Up was Monsanto's patented seed, not the result of natural cross-pollination.
Monsanto's argument was disproven a decade later when researchers found the Round-Up-Ready gene could spread to weeds via cross-pollination. Basically, Schmeiser was right and Monsanto was wrong. The gene could spread through cross-pollination, meaning the Round-Up resistant canola he found next to his fields may very well have been the result of natural cross-pollination, and not Monsanto's patented seed. And the only reason the Canadian Supreme Court decided in Monsanto's favor was erroneous.
CR will work with companies regarding details of test conditions and procedures to help them isolate any problems the testing might have turned up (which is probably the case here).
The actual products that are tested though are bought off of store shelves by undercover CR employees posing as regular customers. That way a company can't rig the actual sample of the CR product being tested, unless they're specifically invited by CR to see if the product is defective (which has happened a few times with cars which failed some of CR's minimum safety tests.)
This is one of the reasons I maintain a CR subscription even though the vast majority of their testing is too "average user" to be relevant to me. I think it's incredible valuable to have at least some published reviews based on random samples, instead of manufacturer-provided samples.
This problem (after a few years, battery life being half what it was when new) has pretty much been solved with larger battery capacities and lower power components. Lithium-ion batteries do degrade this way based on the number of charge/discharge cycles. But the depth of discharge matters more. A battery which will only last 300+ cycles when charged to 100% and discharged until dead, can last 1200+ cycles when charged to 75% and discharged to just 25% before being recharged. The relationship is non-linear - reducing the cycle depth by half results in about triple the battery longevity. So it isn't just a matter of shallower discharges using the battery less. In other words, the worst thing you can do to the battery is to charge it all the way to 100% and discharge it all the way to 0%.
Most newer batteries integrate this into their design. When they report 100%, the battery is actually at 80% or 90%. When they report 0%, the battery is actually at 10% or 20%. The Li-ion battery packs in EVs are a good example - they're limited between 20%-80% charge, or 15%-85% charge. Many laptops also add software which further limits the charge - stopping the recharge process when the battery reads 80% or 90% (which probably corresponds to 65% - 80% of the battery's real capacity). Couple this with the user making sure s/he never discharges the device completely, and you've eliminated the deep charge/discharge cycles which degrade the battery the most.
In the old days, laptops used a lot of power and batteries were bulky. So manufacturers had to use 100% of the battery's capacity just to eek out 2-3 hour battery lives. This is what led to many of those batteries dying after a few years. Nowadays, battery energy density has improved, and mobile electronics use a lot less power. So manufacturers can put in a small or medium-sized battery in a laptop and still get 5-8 hours using only 60%-80% of the battery's capacity. So they've taken advantage of this to replace the swappable battery with an integrated battery and cut down on weight and size. The charging circuitry limits it so it can't actually charge to 100% or discharge to 0%, thus allowing these integrated batteries to be used for well over 1000 cycles - usually more than enough to last the lifetime of the device.
After several days of trying different settings while attempting to digitize my old VHS tapes and DVDs, I gave up on HandBrake. The decomb/deinterlace filter they use to convert interlaced video to progressive is atrocious. Diagonal lines end up looking like jaggies in 1990s video games before anti-aliasing became a thing. It seems to be fine for progressive -> progressive conversions, but it was a huge waste of time for interlaced -> progressive conversions.
Last time Samsung won, but Apple got bailed out by Obama. Which has the unfortunate side-effect of encouraging companies to play chicken in the game of MAD because they might get a last-minute reprieve even after they've lost.
This is why when naming your product, you should make up a completely new word (Vaio, Camry, iPhone, etc), or use an existing word which describes something so different there are no confusing context problems with your product (Galaxy, Mustang, Nexus). The former method also makes searches for the product a lot easier, as the only search results you'll get are about the product.
The company which is the worst at violating this rule is Microsoft - Windows, Office, Word, Live, Passport, etc. But Google seems to be doing its best to follow in their path - Pixel, Docs, Sheets, News, Shopping, etc. Just imagine how difficult it'll be to search for a solution if Google Pixel phones had a problem with their screens developing a dead pixel.
A few years back, I wrote a program which generated every possible pronounceable English word by combining consonant and vowel phonemes, then queried a DNS server to see if the corresponding.com domain had been registered. Limiting it to 3 syllables and 7 characters resulted in millions of possible names. IIRC 6 characters was close to 1 million. Granted most of them sucked, but there are a lot of possible made-up pronounceable names out there if the people hired to name these products would actually do their job.
Don't act like a newspaper which needs clever headlines to get you to notice the paper and buy it. We're already reading the site. You don't need to hook us.
Because of the puns, I thought this was a story about some Chinese battery manufacturer which had cracked the quick charge problem (the biggest problem holding back EV battery tech today). Instead it's just another regular battery company getting funding. Thanks for wasting my time.
I'm not saying their legal argument will hold up, but:
As another commenter pointed out, they claim to sell the video for $20, then immediately buy it back for $19, they also stream it the customer (bandwidth costs) and edit it (server farm / cpu costs). It's quite obvious they're charging $1 to stream it to you, the "sell it for $20 and buy it back for $19" is a gimmick, it's bullshit. Nobody is buying movies from them, they're paying $1 to stream it.
This is exactly how the videotape rental market worked. A store would buy the videotape of the movie, you'd borrow it from them, give them a deposit for $20, take it home, and watch the movie. Then you'd return it to the store and get your deposit back, minus a $1 rental fee. The dollar amounts are different, but the concept is the same. (Deposits were later moved to a hold against your credit card if you signed up for membership at the store.)
The studios sued the first video rental stores about this too. They claimed it was going to destroy their income stream, but within a decade something like half their movie income was coming from rentals. The compromise which got them to drop the lawsuits was that the rental stores had to buy "special" rental videotapes. These were identical to the movie videotapes you'd find for sale at a retail store, but typically cost 3-5x more. That was their way of getting a bigger slice of the rental market pie. (This was also why if you lost a tape, the fine was substantially more than the cost of a new tape or DVD at a retail store. The store wasn't overcharging you as many people believed; they were charging you exactly how much the tape cost them.)
Where I see them running into problems is that buying a DVD doesn't give you streaming rights. I think the distinction between the two is BS (probably why they're doing this), but copyright law as it currently stands gives distribution rights to the copyright holder. So a physical copy sent to your home is different from a software copy streamed to your home; even though they both result in sending the exact same bits to your home.
Also, wasn't there a Supreme Court case where a company offered to censor your movies if (say) you wanted all the swearing bleeped out? The studios sued saying they hadn't authorized this alteration of their copyrighted work, and the SCotUS agreed.
Corporations give to charity for three reasons: Tax write offs,
There's a huge misconception about how tax deductions (tax write-offs) work. You can't make money from a tax deduction for money* donated to charity. Mathematically, a tax deduction just eliminates the tax you would've paid if you'd kept the money for yourself. Without the tax deduction, if you donated $1000 to charity, your actual expense would be $1000 + taxes on that $1000. The $1000 would still be part of your income, so you'd still have to pay taxes on it even though you gave the money away.
The tax deduction simply eliminates the "taxes on that $1000" portion. So the net effect to the donor is that it's like you never received that $1000. If Google donated $18,130 to teachers, the tax deduction makes it so that it's like Google's advertisers paid that money directly to the teachers instead of to Google. Google's coffers have been reduced by $18,130 minus whatever taxes they would've had to pay if they'd kept that money. So it is a genuine donation.
* The picture gets muddled when you donate goods. Then you get the tax deduction as if you'd sold the good for money and donated the money. Except since you never did the selling part, you didn't receive any income which is taxable. For goods which haven't appreciated in value, this isn't a problem. The tax deduction basically eliminates the taxes paid on the prior income you spent to buy the good which you're donating, and all the numbers line up. For goods which have appreciated in value however, you can make money from a tax deduction. If you bought a stock for $100, and a few years later it's appreciated to $1000 and you donate it, you get a tax deduction for a portion of that $1000. However, if you first sold the stock for $1000 and donated the $1000, you would owe $135 in taxes on the sale ($100 basis, so 15% of $900 appreciation = $135), and the tax deduction would save you $135 in taxes, for a net effect of zero. So by donating the stock directly, you can save more money on taxes than if you'd sold it and donated the money. I used stocks as an example, but another way this is commonly (mis)used is to donate goods which have depreciated in value over the year, and take a deduction for the original purchase price (non-depreciated value). That's how the deduction for donating your old car used to work - the recipient would overstate the value of your old car for tax deduction purposes.
But since this was apparently a cash donation, there's no tax weirdness going on, and it's a legitimate donation. Google has less money, the teachers have more money, and the government has just as much money as it would've had if the advertisers had paid the teachers instead of Google.
"The most critical learning resources that teachers need are often exercise books, pen and paper, but incentives built into the process steer educators to request and receive Google hardware, rather than humble classroom staples,"
The U.S. is near the top in education spending per student among OECD countries (change Perspectives to "primary to non-tertiary" to eliminate college costs). Only Austria, Norway, Switzerland, and Luxembourg spend more. If a U.S. teacher doesn't have enough money for "humble classroom staples" like exercise books, and pen and paper, it is not Google's fault.
About 5 years ago I stumbled across a full internal accounting report of a local school district online. The biggest expense wasn't teacher salaries, classroom supplies, or building construction and maintenance. It was administrative salaries. Think about that. The administrators at the school - the people who sit in offices, push paper, and rarely interact with parents or kids - take a bigger chunk of the school's budget than the teachers.
I'm convinced the administrators massage the numbers to cover their tracks in the official budgets. You can see a side-effect of this in the published stats. According to ED, the salaries of teachers, student support, and instructional staff is $4271, $388, and $291 per student respectively - total $4950. The benefits these teachers resceive is $1596, $142, and $102 per student - $1840 total.
The student to teacher ratio has been about 16:1 since 2000. So according to these ED stats, the average teacher salary is $80,000/yr, and benefits just under $30k/yr. Yet ED lists the average teacher salary as just $56,383. These numbers don't match up, not by a long shot. My hunch is administrators have shifted some of their salaries into the teacher salary figures to hide just how big a slice of the pie they're taking.
I suspect what's going on is a scam of epic proportions. Every time the education budget is cut, instead of applying the cuts to the least important programs and staff like any good business, the administrators apply the cuts to the most essential items like exercise books, pen and paper. They tell the teachers there's not enough money in the budget, and the teachers go into a frenzy telling the public we're not spending enough on education. When the education budget is increased, the administrators spend a few dollars per student to restore the textbooks, pen and paper, and siphon off most of the increase for themselves. How else can you explain teachers not having money for exercise books, pen and paper, when we spend more on education per student than all but 4 other countries on Earth?
Anyhow, Google is donating money - giving it for free. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Yeah it would've been great if the donation didn't have restrictions on how the money was to be used. But from the school's perspective, a donation with restrictions is still better than no donation at all.
Careful what you wish for. If it were illegal to sell one seat to two different people, yes your flight would never be overbooked. But if you missed your flight, you wouldn't be able to get a refund or rebook. The airline would say tough - by law that was your seat and only your seat. Once you bought it, by law they weren't allowed to sell it to anyone else. So once you bought it it was yours period. If you missed the plane, that's not their problem. If you want to get to your destination, you'll have to buy another ticket.
I like the current system. The airlines usually have enough people overbooked or on standby that they don't lose money when you miss your flight, and they extend the favor to you by rebooking you on a later flight at no extra charge. No need to buy a new ticket. And usually there are enough volunteers willing to be bumped that a forced bump is very rare.
The quote in TFS has it backwards - you arrive at the conclusion that overbooking is bad if you only consider what makes perfect sense for the customer, and completely ignore what makes sense for the airline. If you forcibly implement a system that costs the airlines more money, well they have to make that money up somewhere. In this case it would be from the wallets of passengers who miss their flight. The current system represents a good compromise where the desires of both the airlines (to have full flights) and passengers (to be allowed to rebook without penalty or with minimal penalty if they miss a flight) are taken into account.
The claim is true. The big problem right now is that what's needed to gain access to accounts or complete financial transactions is a piece of information. And as we all know, information wants to be free - it can easily be duplicated, and (with modern technology) transmitted anywhere around the world almost instantly.
These keys tie the generation of that information to a physical object which cannot be duplicated and cannot be transported around the world any faster than other physical objects. And because each piece of information the key generates is one-time use, intercepting a previous transaction doesn't help you fake future transactions. They're basically the chip in chip and pin. The only reason they haven't caught on is because being a physical object, they suffer the same problems as all physical keys - it's inconvenient to carry them, inconvenient to take them out when you need them (especially if you have a lot of them), and you can lose them.
They're still vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks though. If someone can fool you into thinking you're at a legit website, they can make you authorize a transaction different from what they're showing you on the screen. e.g. Someone who owns arnazon.com sets it up to look identical to amazon.com. You click a "helpful" referral link on a review site which sends you to the fake amazon.com. It acts as a man-in-the-middle and relays everything you do to the real amazon.com to create an authentic-seeming transaction. But when you click "Buy" and touch the button on the physical key to authorize it, your screen shows a $39.99 purchase but the site is actually charging you $3999.
Then you get rid of market index funds. The market index funds (DJIA, S&P500, etc) are weighted based on market capitalization. "Popular" stocks have a higher market cap, so tend to be over-represented in these funds. But a stock being popular means it has already experienced a value gain. It's less likely to appreciate more than the "unpopular" stocks.
So now you've got an algorithm which randomly picks stocks with an equal chance to pick any given stock (i.e. the proverbial monkey throwing darts at the financial page of a newspaper). That is your baseline. Until you come up with an AI which can beat that, this is just more marketers spending large quantities of money on ways to generate a slick prospectus which fools naive investors into investing in their fund so they can leech fees (which admittedly may be what they're trying to do).
The longer you allow a market economy to continue, the more optimized it becomes. The low-hanging fruit of economic efficiency has already long been picked. The remaining efficiency improvements are mostly so small that variances due to random chance usually swamp out their effect. That makes the market extremely difficult to predict because the better it has optimized the economy, the more it acts like gambling as its critics like to claim. (The key difference being this is one gambling game which is fixed in your favor, rather than in the house's favor. You just have to pick a strategy which minimizes your risk, which usually means some sort of broad unweighted index fund.)
My point is, just as different countries have different legal standards for returns of game sales, different countries have different legal standards for what you're allowed to say or post online.
You don't get to arbitrarily pick and choose that one is ok and the other isn't. If you abstract the argument here, you believe an entity operating in one country should be subject to the laws of another country because people in that country choose to interact with that entity. That's what makes the two situations I outlined equivalent, whether those laws are governing commerce or speech.
My personal position on this issue is the same as what someone else has already posted. The Internet is a great big shared global bulletin board. By allowing access to it, your home country is implicitly giving you permission to interact with it. If your country doesn't like something someone else in another country is doing on the Internet, it is your country's responsibility to prevent its citizens from seeing or interacting with what other people are doing on the Internet. They can set up a firewall, or require their ISP to blacklist websites, or whatever. What your country should not be able to do is apply its laws to someone who is outside that country has nothing to do with it other than some of its citizens interacting with that someone on their own initiative.
If Australia doesn't like its citizens buying stuff from foreign websites, then it needs to prohibit its citizens from buying stuff from foreign websites (and figure out a way to enforce it). It does not get to say "Every business on earth operating on the Internet must now comply with Australian law."
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Just disable the Windows Update service. That's how we deal with the problem on security camera computers which need to be running 24/7 with no reboots. For bonus points, you can disable BITS too to prevent it from exchanging downloaded data with other Windows computers on your network.
What's more annoying to me is how Microsoft blithely ignores your customized configuration and resets stuff after certain updates. Like re-enabling Cortana, and pinning Edge and the Windows Store back to your taskbar. It's a PITA to have to disable and unpin those all over again on dozens of computers after an update.
The catch-22 is that when you make it easier for the end-user to reprogram the device, you make it easier for malware to reprogram the device.
I'm with you. I don't think locking down devices with proprietary software and putting them behind walled gardens is the right solution. I think each device should have a physical switch or dongle which needs to be flipped or plugged in to make the OS partition read/write. Otherwise the OS files are read-only and can't be modified. An attacker could still get in using an exploit, but they wouldn't be able to leverage it to gain root access to the system or rewrite how it works.
Not to feed the conspiracy theorists, but the Lagrange L1 and L2 points lie outside the Earth-Moon system and see the back side of the moon half the time. They are/were occupied by SOHO, WMAP (first link), and Planck. The James Webb Space Telescope is going to be parked at L2 as well.
Theoretically, any of them could be used to relay transmissions from the back side of the moon undetectable from Earth. For that matter, you could turn SOHO around to photograph the back side of the moon if you wanted to. (So could JWST, but it wouldn't have the benefit of sunlight lighting up the half of the moon it sees.) A few missions have been sent into orbit around the moon as well.
Concealing something on the entire surface of the moon is easy. LRO produces the highest resolution images of the moon's entire surface, but the Apollo landing sites still barely show up. We know where to point the camera because we know where the sites are. If we didn't know where, well the moon's surface area is 38 million km^2, so the back side is 19 million km^2. If the lander you're trying to find is 1 square meter, that's like trying to find one special grain of sand 2 mm^2 sitting on top of 38 km^2 of beach. Good luck.
The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of Samsung over Apple decided the same thing. Samsung was only financially liable for patent infringement on the component which was found to be in violation, not the entire product.
Basically both of these rulings are saying if you own a patent used to make a special type of screw and you license it for 2% of the price, you are only entitled to 2% of the price of the screw. Not 2% of the price of a house because the screw happened to be used in making the house. They're both the right decision. Deciding otherwise leads to insanity like the band whose CD you played at your wedding and the company who designed the invite cards for the wedding being entitled to a percentage of the cost of your wedding.
So basically the guy's alibi might have held up if (1) he hadn't used his phone after he claimed he went to sleep, and (2) the water meter didn't show significant activity in the house after he claimed he went to sleep (police think he was busy washing away any evidence).
So did I. Her main scene in the movie for those who haven't seen it.
That's the shareware model for software. Download the program and try it out for free. To continue using it after a certain amount of time, or to unlock certain features, or to get rid of an annoying nag screen, you pay for it. While not the most popular model, it's still used successfully pretty widely.
The record and movie companies are such Luddites that won't even try to explore new technologies and models. They fought the VCR tooth and nail, were forced to accept it by the courts, and a couple decades later most of their revenue came from videotape and later DVD sales and rentals. They fought movie rentals tooth and nail, were forced to accept it by the courts, and a decade later something like half of their revenue came from movie rentals.
I agree with you - I think the shareware model would work spectacularly well for movies. You get to watch the first half of the movie for free, but at a strategic point halfway through the movie, it stops and you have to pay for it if you want to watch the rest of it. It's a concept which dates back to antiquity - A Thousand and One Arabian Nights used it. The fictional storyteller, ordered by the king to be executed the next morning, would tell the king half a story at night, forcing him to keep her alive to hear the second half the next night, at which point she would weave in the first half of another story thus keeping her alive another day. But the studios are too closed-minded to even consider trying it.
The entire reason cities exist is because it's wasteful to have people separated by the amount of agricultural land needed to support them. A family of 4 needs about 2 acres (0.8 hectares) of land to grow the food needed to sustain them. Cities leveraged advances in transportation tech and a trade economy to decouple the food production from living spaces. The maximum size of a city is basically determined by the efficiency of the food transport and distribution network - the better those are, the larger the radius of land surrounding the city that can be used to feed its occupants.
Backyard and rooftop gardens are a good (and fun) way to supplement your diet with a few items which might be difficult or expensive to obtain at the grocery store. But they don't come anywhere close to putting a dent in self-sustainability. Given the premium that is placed on space is in cities, there's probably a much better use for that land area than for growing crops. The idea that you can feed yourself by planting a garden in your backyard is a delusion perpetuated by people who've never crunched the actual numbers. The entire reason the unit of an "acre" exists is because that was the amount of crop fields a single person could typically work in a day back when most everyone was living on a subsistence diet.
In other words, even if you had enough land area to actually be able to grow enough in your backyard garden to feed yourself, (1) it would be your full-time job, and (2) you would pretty much be on a starvation-level diet. For all the flak agri-business gets, they've done a remarkable job improving farming efficiency. During pre-industrial times, each farmer grew enough food to feed 1.1 people. Today, a single farmer produces enough food to feed 150 people (2.1 million farmers vs 319 million population).
Some of the things described in TFA are just plain stupid. Growing plants in shipping containers with light from LEDs? So rather than grow the plants on a farm so 100% of the sunlight reaches the plants, you're going to use 16% efficient solar panels to generate electricity to power 10% efficient LEDs so only 1.6% of the sunlight reaches the plants? Are you insane? Cannabis grow labs have to do this to evade law enforcement (in places where it's illegal), but there is no logical reason to do this for food crops.
2FA works great for an individual or couple. It doesn't work so well for a group-shared account. If a dozen employees have access to an account and one quits or is fired, you'd have to regenerate a new 2FA key and update it to the remaining 11 employees. It's the same reason Sony's passwords were stored in an unencrypted text file during the original PS Network hack (and the reason your company probably posts shared passwords on the refrigerator in the break room) - it becomes tedious to send updated passwords to all the employees who need access to that account.
These online services (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc) really need to come up with a better system for handling group-shared accounts. They need a master user who can create, assign, and revoke privileges to sub-users (pretty similar to how Google Apps for Domains works). Then the company's IT admin can own the master account. Employees who need to be able to send tweets as "Sony" would be given subaccounts, each with their own individual password and 2FA key. If one of these employees loses a device which has his password or 2FA token generator, IT can use the master account to reset only that employee's password and 2FA key. If one of those employees quits or is fired, IT just uses the master account to delete that employee's account. Everyone else with access to the account just carries on as if nothing happened. Nobody else is affected, nobody else needs to be informed of a new password or have their 2FA key updated.
As cool as cheetahs are, it would seem their genetic design is just not a very good one. While there was a mass extinction event about 12k years ago, it was mostly limited to Australia and the Americas. Africa has retained well over half its large mammal species through both extinction events approx 120k and 10k years ago. In other words, the cheetah appears to have problems coping with events which the great majority of other large African mammal species survived. The morphologically similar American cheetah (which is suspected to be the reason why American pronghorns are so damned fast) also went extinct. Suggesting that from an evolutionary standpoint their design is simply not a very good one, and extinction may be the inevitable judgement of Nature.
Then Android wouldn't be open source anymore. Which do you want? An OS which is open and that anyone can fork and modify if they don't like how the original author made it? Or an OS which is closed and proprietary so you have to take it the way the original author made it, no alterations?
Way I see it, the carrier problem isn't Google's responsibility. It's a market problem - vertical integration causing lack of customer fluidity. The carriers own the towers, the service, and also sell the phones. GSM tackled the problem by requiring SIM cards, basically forcing all phones to be interchangeable between carriers. The U.S. doesn't have that so your phone is frequently tied to your carrier, giving them an unprecedented level of control over your phone.
CR will work with companies regarding details of test conditions and procedures to help them isolate any problems the testing might have turned up (which is probably the case here).
The actual products that are tested though are bought off of store shelves by undercover CR employees posing as regular customers. That way a company can't rig the actual sample of the CR product being tested, unless they're specifically invited by CR to see if the product is defective (which has happened a few times with cars which failed some of CR's minimum safety tests.)
This is one of the reasons I maintain a CR subscription even though the vast majority of their testing is too "average user" to be relevant to me. I think it's incredible valuable to have at least some published reviews based on random samples, instead of manufacturer-provided samples.
This problem (after a few years, battery life being half what it was when new) has pretty much been solved with larger battery capacities and lower power components. Lithium-ion batteries do degrade this way based on the number of charge/discharge cycles. But the depth of discharge matters more. A battery which will only last 300+ cycles when charged to 100% and discharged until dead, can last 1200+ cycles when charged to 75% and discharged to just 25% before being recharged. The relationship is non-linear - reducing the cycle depth by half results in about triple the battery longevity. So it isn't just a matter of shallower discharges using the battery less. In other words, the worst thing you can do to the battery is to charge it all the way to 100% and discharge it all the way to 0%.
Most newer batteries integrate this into their design. When they report 100%, the battery is actually at 80% or 90%. When they report 0%, the battery is actually at 10% or 20%. The Li-ion battery packs in EVs are a good example - they're limited between 20%-80% charge, or 15%-85% charge. Many laptops also add software which further limits the charge - stopping the recharge process when the battery reads 80% or 90% (which probably corresponds to 65% - 80% of the battery's real capacity). Couple this with the user making sure s/he never discharges the device completely, and you've eliminated the deep charge/discharge cycles which degrade the battery the most.
In the old days, laptops used a lot of power and batteries were bulky. So manufacturers had to use 100% of the battery's capacity just to eek out 2-3 hour battery lives. This is what led to many of those batteries dying after a few years. Nowadays, battery energy density has improved, and mobile electronics use a lot less power. So manufacturers can put in a small or medium-sized battery in a laptop and still get 5-8 hours using only 60%-80% of the battery's capacity. So they've taken advantage of this to replace the swappable battery with an integrated battery and cut down on weight and size. The charging circuitry limits it so it can't actually charge to 100% or discharge to 0%, thus allowing these integrated batteries to be used for well over 1000 cycles - usually more than enough to last the lifetime of the device.
After several days of trying different settings while attempting to digitize my old VHS tapes and DVDs, I gave up on HandBrake. The decomb/deinterlace filter they use to convert interlaced video to progressive is atrocious. Diagonal lines end up looking like jaggies in 1990s video games before anti-aliasing became a thing. It seems to be fine for progressive -> progressive conversions, but it was a huge waste of time for interlaced -> progressive conversions.
Last time Samsung won, but Apple got bailed out by Obama. Which has the unfortunate side-effect of encouraging companies to play chicken in the game of MAD because they might get a last-minute reprieve even after they've lost.
This is why when naming your product, you should make up a completely new word (Vaio, Camry, iPhone, etc), or use an existing word which describes something so different there are no confusing context problems with your product (Galaxy, Mustang, Nexus). The former method also makes searches for the product a lot easier, as the only search results you'll get are about the product.
.com domain had been registered. Limiting it to 3 syllables and 7 characters resulted in millions of possible names. IIRC 6 characters was close to 1 million. Granted most of them sucked, but there are a lot of possible made-up pronounceable names out there if the people hired to name these products would actually do their job.
The company which is the worst at violating this rule is Microsoft - Windows, Office, Word, Live, Passport, etc. But Google seems to be doing its best to follow in their path - Pixel, Docs, Sheets, News, Shopping, etc. Just imagine how difficult it'll be to search for a solution if Google Pixel phones had a problem with their screens developing a dead pixel.
A few years back, I wrote a program which generated every possible pronounceable English word by combining consonant and vowel phonemes, then queried a DNS server to see if the corresponding
Don't act like a newspaper which needs clever headlines to get you to notice the paper and buy it. We're already reading the site. You don't need to hook us.
Because of the puns, I thought this was a story about some Chinese battery manufacturer which had cracked the quick charge problem (the biggest problem holding back EV battery tech today). Instead it's just another regular battery company getting funding. Thanks for wasting my time.
This is exactly how the videotape rental market worked. A store would buy the videotape of the movie, you'd borrow it from them, give them a deposit for $20, take it home, and watch the movie. Then you'd return it to the store and get your deposit back, minus a $1 rental fee. The dollar amounts are different, but the concept is the same. (Deposits were later moved to a hold against your credit card if you signed up for membership at the store.)
The studios sued the first video rental stores about this too. They claimed it was going to destroy their income stream, but within a decade something like half their movie income was coming from rentals. The compromise which got them to drop the lawsuits was that the rental stores had to buy "special" rental videotapes. These were identical to the movie videotapes you'd find for sale at a retail store, but typically cost 3-5x more. That was their way of getting a bigger slice of the rental market pie. (This was also why if you lost a tape, the fine was substantially more than the cost of a new tape or DVD at a retail store. The store wasn't overcharging you as many people believed; they were charging you exactly how much the tape cost them.)
Where I see them running into problems is that buying a DVD doesn't give you streaming rights. I think the distinction between the two is BS (probably why they're doing this), but copyright law as it currently stands gives distribution rights to the copyright holder. So a physical copy sent to your home is different from a software copy streamed to your home; even though they both result in sending the exact same bits to your home.
Also, wasn't there a Supreme Court case where a company offered to censor your movies if (say) you wanted all the swearing bleeped out? The studios sued saying they hadn't authorized this alteration of their copyrighted work, and the SCotUS agreed.
There's a huge misconception about how tax deductions (tax write-offs) work. You can't make money from a tax deduction for money* donated to charity. Mathematically, a tax deduction just eliminates the tax you would've paid if you'd kept the money for yourself. Without the tax deduction, if you donated $1000 to charity, your actual expense would be $1000 + taxes on that $1000. The $1000 would still be part of your income, so you'd still have to pay taxes on it even though you gave the money away.
The tax deduction simply eliminates the "taxes on that $1000" portion. So the net effect to the donor is that it's like you never received that $1000. If Google donated $18,130 to teachers, the tax deduction makes it so that it's like Google's advertisers paid that money directly to the teachers instead of to Google. Google's coffers have been reduced by $18,130 minus whatever taxes they would've had to pay if they'd kept that money. So it is a genuine donation.
* The picture gets muddled when you donate goods. Then you get the tax deduction as if you'd sold the good for money and donated the money. Except since you never did the selling part, you didn't receive any income which is taxable. For goods which haven't appreciated in value, this isn't a problem. The tax deduction basically eliminates the taxes paid on the prior income you spent to buy the good which you're donating, and all the numbers line up. For goods which have appreciated in value however, you can make money from a tax deduction. If you bought a stock for $100, and a few years later it's appreciated to $1000 and you donate it, you get a tax deduction for a portion of that $1000. However, if you first sold the stock for $1000 and donated the $1000, you would owe $135 in taxes on the sale ($100 basis, so 15% of $900 appreciation = $135), and the tax deduction would save you $135 in taxes, for a net effect of zero. So by donating the stock directly, you can save more money on taxes than if you'd sold it and donated the money. I used stocks as an example, but another way this is commonly (mis)used is to donate goods which have depreciated in value over the year, and take a deduction for the original purchase price (non-depreciated value). That's how the deduction for donating your old car used to work - the recipient would overstate the value of your old car for tax deduction purposes.
But since this was apparently a cash donation, there's no tax weirdness going on, and it's a legitimate donation. Google has less money, the teachers have more money, and the government has just as much money as it would've had if the advertisers had paid the teachers instead of Google.
The U.S. is near the top in education spending per student among OECD countries (change Perspectives to "primary to non-tertiary" to eliminate college costs). Only Austria, Norway, Switzerland, and Luxembourg spend more. If a U.S. teacher doesn't have enough money for "humble classroom staples" like exercise books, and pen and paper, it is not Google's fault.
About 5 years ago I stumbled across a full internal accounting report of a local school district online. The biggest expense wasn't teacher salaries, classroom supplies, or building construction and maintenance. It was administrative salaries. Think about that. The administrators at the school - the people who sit in offices, push paper, and rarely interact with parents or kids - take a bigger chunk of the school's budget than the teachers.
I'm convinced the administrators massage the numbers to cover their tracks in the official budgets. You can see a side-effect of this in the published stats. According to ED, the salaries of teachers, student support, and instructional staff is $4271, $388, and $291 per student respectively - total $4950. The benefits these teachers resceive is $1596, $142, and $102 per student - $1840 total.
The student to teacher ratio has been about 16:1 since 2000. So according to these ED stats, the average teacher salary is $80,000/yr, and benefits just under $30k/yr. Yet ED lists the average teacher salary as just $56,383. These numbers don't match up, not by a long shot. My hunch is administrators have shifted some of their salaries into the teacher salary figures to hide just how big a slice of the pie they're taking.
I suspect what's going on is a scam of epic proportions. Every time the education budget is cut, instead of applying the cuts to the least important programs and staff like any good business, the administrators apply the cuts to the most essential items like exercise books, pen and paper. They tell the teachers there's not enough money in the budget, and the teachers go into a frenzy telling the public we're not spending enough on education. When the education budget is increased, the administrators spend a few dollars per student to restore the textbooks, pen and paper, and siphon off most of the increase for themselves. How else can you explain teachers not having money for exercise books, pen and paper, when we spend more on education per student than all but 4 other countries on Earth?
Anyhow, Google is donating money - giving it for free. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Yeah it would've been great if the donation didn't have restrictions on how the money was to be used. But from the school's perspective, a donation with restrictions is still better than no donation at all.
Careful what you wish for. If it were illegal to sell one seat to two different people, yes your flight would never be overbooked. But if you missed your flight, you wouldn't be able to get a refund or rebook. The airline would say tough - by law that was your seat and only your seat. Once you bought it, by law they weren't allowed to sell it to anyone else. So once you bought it it was yours period. If you missed the plane, that's not their problem. If you want to get to your destination, you'll have to buy another ticket.
I like the current system. The airlines usually have enough people overbooked or on standby that they don't lose money when you miss your flight, and they extend the favor to you by rebooking you on a later flight at no extra charge. No need to buy a new ticket. And usually there are enough volunteers willing to be bumped that a forced bump is very rare.
The quote in TFS has it backwards - you arrive at the conclusion that overbooking is bad if you only consider what makes perfect sense for the customer, and completely ignore what makes sense for the airline. If you forcibly implement a system that costs the airlines more money, well they have to make that money up somewhere. In this case it would be from the wallets of passengers who miss their flight. The current system represents a good compromise where the desires of both the airlines (to have full flights) and passengers (to be allowed to rebook without penalty or with minimal penalty if they miss a flight) are taken into account.
The claim is true. The big problem right now is that what's needed to gain access to accounts or complete financial transactions is a piece of information. And as we all know, information wants to be free - it can easily be duplicated, and (with modern technology) transmitted anywhere around the world almost instantly.
These keys tie the generation of that information to a physical object which cannot be duplicated and cannot be transported around the world any faster than other physical objects. And because each piece of information the key generates is one-time use, intercepting a previous transaction doesn't help you fake future transactions. They're basically the chip in chip and pin. The only reason they haven't caught on is because being a physical object, they suffer the same problems as all physical keys - it's inconvenient to carry them, inconvenient to take them out when you need them (especially if you have a lot of them), and you can lose them.
They're still vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks though. If someone can fool you into thinking you're at a legit website, they can make you authorize a transaction different from what they're showing you on the screen. e.g. Someone who owns arnazon.com sets it up to look identical to amazon.com. You click a "helpful" referral link on a review site which sends you to the fake amazon.com. It acts as a man-in-the-middle and relays everything you do to the real amazon.com to create an authentic-seeming transaction. But when you click "Buy" and touch the button on the physical key to authorize it, your screen shows a $39.99 purchase but the site is actually charging you $3999.
First thing you do is fire all the hedge fund managers. Their fees make them consistently the worst way to invest in stocks.
Then you get rid of market index funds. The market index funds (DJIA, S&P500, etc) are weighted based on market capitalization. "Popular" stocks have a higher market cap, so tend to be over-represented in these funds. But a stock being popular means it has already experienced a value gain. It's less likely to appreciate more than the "unpopular" stocks.
So now you've got an algorithm which randomly picks stocks with an equal chance to pick any given stock (i.e. the proverbial monkey throwing darts at the financial page of a newspaper). That is your baseline. Until you come up with an AI which can beat that, this is just more marketers spending large quantities of money on ways to generate a slick prospectus which fools naive investors into investing in their fund so they can leech fees (which admittedly may be what they're trying to do).
The longer you allow a market economy to continue, the more optimized it becomes. The low-hanging fruit of economic efficiency has already long been picked. The remaining efficiency improvements are mostly so small that variances due to random chance usually swamp out their effect. That makes the market extremely difficult to predict because the better it has optimized the economy, the more it acts like gambling as its critics like to claim. (The key difference being this is one gambling game which is fixed in your favor, rather than in the house's favor. You just have to pick a strategy which minimizes your risk, which usually means some sort of broad unweighted index fund.)
My point is, just as different countries have different legal standards for returns of game sales, different countries have different legal standards for what you're allowed to say or post online.
You don't get to arbitrarily pick and choose that one is ok and the other isn't. If you abstract the argument here, you believe an entity operating in one country should be subject to the laws of another country because people in that country choose to interact with that entity. That's what makes the two situations I outlined equivalent, whether those laws are governing commerce or speech.
My personal position on this issue is the same as what someone else has already posted. The Internet is a great big shared global bulletin board. By allowing access to it, your home country is implicitly giving you permission to interact with it. If your country doesn't like something someone else in another country is doing on the Internet, it is your country's responsibility to prevent its citizens from seeing or interacting with what other people are doing on the Internet. They can set up a firewall, or require their ISP to blacklist websites, or whatever. What your country should not be able to do is apply its laws to someone who is outside that country has nothing to do with it other than some of its citizens interacting with that someone on their own initiative.
If Australia doesn't like its citizens buying stuff from foreign websites, then it needs to prohibit its citizens from buying stuff from foreign websites (and figure out a way to enforce it). It does not get to say "Every business on earth operating on the Internet must now comply with Australian law."