There are no borders on the Internet. As best as I can tell, Steam (Valve) doesn't have any presence in Australia. They set up a payment-based website which distributes games over the Internet, and people in Australia happened to use it.
You probably have a website or a Facebook page or a Twitter feed. Since it's online, it's accessible from nearly every country in the world. Did you check to make sure everything you post complies with every law in every country on the planet?
That supermarket has aisles full of cruelty-free and healthy alternative foods that you can buy.
Your philosophy seems to be predicated on minimizing cruelty. Please meditate on the following.
Contrary to what you learned in Disney movies, it is incredibly rare for an animal to die of disease or old age. The ultimate fate of nearly every living non-human animal on this planet is to be eaten alive. The fortunate ones die early in the process. Being diseased simply makes it easier for something to catch you and eat you (usually while you're still alive).
You are incorrectly assuming a zero base state - that by not consuming meat, you are somehow saving these animals from suffering being eaten. That is not the case. You are merely delaying the inevitable. If you allow these animals to live out their natural lives, you consign the vast majority of them to suffer a cruel death just like in the above videos.
OTOH, when I go fishing, I bleed my catch prior to taking it home to prepare as food. Based on testimony from people who have almost bled to death, this is one of the best ways to die - it feels like falling asleep. So given that (1) everything eventually dies, (2) your actions almost always lead to animals suffering a natural death by predation, and (3) my actions lead to them suffering the most painless death possible, my way actually results in less cruelty than yours.
Put another way, your philosophy is based on the incorrect belief that an action (eating meat) means you are responsible for the consequences (an animal has to die), but inaction means you are not responsible for the consequences. But everything has consequences - both action and inaction. Choosing the route of inaction may make you feel better in a self-centered world-view, but in this case it actually increases the amount of cruelty that animals suffer.
Magsafe's primary failure mode is at the other end - the wall wart. I've had numerous Mac owners aski me if I could fix their wall wart because they don't want to shell out $79 for another one. The frayed cables are an easy fix (electrical tape), and the broken plug can usually be fixed with some epoxy and/or soldering. But the cable fraying where it enters the adapter is pretty much fatal. These things simply shouldn't be happening to a power brick which costs $79.
Most of the broken power connectors on PC laptops went away when manufacturers switched to 90 degree plugs. The straight plugs meant any lateral tension on the cord (e.g. laptop on desk, cord draped off the edge of desk) had a huge lever arm with which to bend/break the power socket off the motherboard. The 90 degree plugs reduce that lever arm to almost the minimum possible length, massively reducing the forces on the power socket.
Consumer Reports isn't a tech rag. They don't give a damn about technical specs except as guidelines for what to buy (e.g. "get at least 8 GB of RAM").
They test products based on how the average person will use them. So if the average person spends 80% of their computer time in a browser on Facebook or YouTube, by God they're going to test how the laptop performs running a browser on Facebook or YouTube.
If you're about to blow a spaceship's worth of cash on something [...] And would that influence your decision to blow a few tens of millions on it?
If you're going to launch something into space anyway, then the cost of adding this experiment to the spacecraft is only about $5000/kg. So if you can whittle it down to a few kg, you're not talking about much cost at all. Heck, one of the ISS crew members could request it as part of their personal allowance.
You'd lose all the fancy instrumentation you have on the ground to measure exactly what's going on. But putting one of these in orbit is probably a cheaper way to settle the question "Does this thing really work?" than all the money we've already spent testing it on the ground. It's like when I'm helping friends with computer problems - some things (e.g. reboot) take so little time and effort to do that I ask them to do it right off the bat before even trying to diagnose the actual problem.
Unless they're selling it as a subscription service, I really doubt that line in the TOS would hold up in court. For a contract to be legally valid, there has to be an exchange of consideration - you have to get something for the money you paid. Putting a line in the contract which allows them to unilaterally revoke everything you paid for nullifies that consideration, essentially invalidating the contract. They'd have to give you your money back to enforce that clause.
I had to track that down on my Firefox (was taking 2-3 seconds to open a new tab). It's all the extensions I had installed to block the ads, scripts, flash, autoplay vidoes, etc. Apparently many of them do some preliminary setup housekeeping when you open a new tab. I only ran into the problem once in Chrome (also with a tracking-blocking script), but since it was being caused by a single extension I just removed the extension. There are lots to choose from.
Twitter's IPO price was $26 a share. After the initial climb following the IPO, it's been more or less downhill since then.
Since they didn't do any stock splits, the price of a single share is directly proportional to the entire company's valuation. So if the price of a single share is going down, that means the company's valuation is going down. Every investor should care about that.
If you've ever sat on a committee charged with the responsibility of awarding a scholarship (I have), you realize very quickly there are thousands of worthy candidates who won't get the money, and that most of them will wind up without access to post-secondary education, or access only to low-end courses that won't lead to any kind of doctorate or medical degree.
Oh the irony in that statement. Widespread availability of scholarships, grants, and loans is what allowed post-secondary education to become so expensive in the first place that it's unaffordable by half the student population. Normally higher demand leads to higher supply (more schools being set up to meet that demand). But college-level education is different in that there are a handful of well-known colleges and universities that everyone wants to get into, and their physical size constrains the number of students they can accept. Consequently the widespread availability of financial assistance allows them to raise their tuition until the number of people applying is reduced to a manageable level. Those higher tuitions have led to wage inflation among school staff, and a ballooning of unnecessary and redundant administrative staff. (Not to mention that these external sources of funding also distort the economics of various degrees, basically allowing people to "afford" degrees in careers where they'll never be able to make enough money to pay back to society the financial assistance they got.)
Basically, the solution to unaffordable post-secondary education is to put schools on a financial diet, not to feed them more money in the form of more grants, scholarships, and loans.
It's like global warming. A single person generating excess CO2 is not a problem. But if half the world's population does it, it destroys the environment. Likewise, giving the occasional person a scholarship or the occasional laid off worker unemployment assistance is not a problem. But if half the students and all the ex-workers are getting it, it destroys the economy.
You have to come up with solutions which won't have unintentional feedback effects which exacerbate the original problem. In the case of colleges, this means banning all scholarships, grants, and loans except in very limited casts - say 5% of the student population. Instead focus your financial assistance in the state university programs. The extra money they receive will allow them to hire good professors so they're regarded to be as good as private colleges, but with tuition locked at affordable levels. That will provide competition with private schools and help drive prices down. (Once college is affordable again, then we can decide where to go from there - the current state is too screwed up to even begin considering long-term solutions right now.)
Likewise, for employment, you could enact a law which recognizes that automation is inevitable, but which requires companies help pay for the re-training of a worker that they're replacing by automation (for existing companies), or for start-up companies that are automated from the get-go, paying into a fund which helps re-train workers laid off by automation (so the former requirement doesn't put existing companies at a competitive disadvantage). Basically set it up so that a portion of the productivity increase due to automation is guaranteed to be distributed to the displaced worker's re-training for a new job in an automated industry. Then just like pollution, the cost of retraining the worker is no longer externalized and borne by society, it's placed back upon the primary beneficiary of the automation. If automation is truly better for society (which I believe it is), then the long-term financial gain from automating will make it the cost-effective choice even when saddled with this additional re-training cost. So companies will still want to automate, except now they won't be dumping unemployed and unskilled workers into the social safety net for someone else (i.e. society via the government) to pay for.
Law and Harm: Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in this Privacy Policy, we may preserve or disclose your information if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request; to protect the safety of any person; to address fraud, security or technical issues; or to protect our or our usersâ(TM) rights or property. However, nothing in this Privacy Policy is intended to limit any legal defenses or objections that you may have to a third partyâ(TM)s, including a governmentâ(TM)s, request to disclose your information.
The rubber word in there is "reasonably" but I think most people would agree this is a reasonable disclosure of user information.
This is the problem I've had with governments putting pressure on Google (and Facebook) to "remove" hate speech. Those two entities do not promote hate speech - they merely reflect what hate speech is already present in society. Forcing them to remove (hide) it is literally shooting the messenger. It doesn't solve the fundamental problem - the people who believe in and are spreading the hate speech are still out there and still spreading it. The garbage is still out there same as before; all you've done is ordered the carpenter to move your window so you can't see it from your living room anymore.
Fixing this requires educating the population, teaching them history, exposing them to different people so they realize that others are not that different from themselves. But that requires work and effort. It seems governments would rather take the easy way out and try to cover up the problem, rather than actually fix it. Even if you think hate speech doesn't deserve free speech rights, the solution is to go after the websites and individuals promoting hate speech. Knock them off the web or suspend their accounts. Then they'll disappear from the Google results naturally. No need to mess with the ranking algorithms.
What gives? Slashdotters have never been wrong about technology./s
Slashdotters are usually pretty good at being right about technology. What they suck at is predicting how popular a technology will be with non-slashdotters, where nebulous things like fashionableness, lack of options (simplicity), and peer pressure (desire to conform to other people's expectations) become a factor. In the case of the iPod, the idiot-proof UI (simplicity) was the predominant factor. Slashdotters didn't mind the complicated procedure to transfer your MP3 playlists from your computer to your Nomad. So they only saw the simplicity (reduced features) of the iPod as a negative. The general public OTOH hated that complexity, and latched on to the simplicity with which you could transfer your MP3 collection from iTunes to your iPod.
They're playing some tricks with the numbers to get capacity factors close to 0.3, which is physically impossible unless all your PV panels are super-high efficiency and track the sun. But this isn't the sort of thing you can just cover up. It's trivial to calculate the actual capacity factor for PV solar:
Installed peak capacity at the end of 2014 and 2015 was 18,173 MW and 25,459 MW respectively. So figure average capacity for 2015 was (25459 + 18173)/2 = 21,816 MW.
PV solar generation for 2015 was 23,232 GWh.
There are 8766 hours in a year (factoring in leap years).
So that 9.5 GW of solar capacity is only generating about 1.15 GW of power on average. If you add the 2 GW of distributed solar (rooftop panels) it works out to 1.39 GW average generation.
Natural gas is a bit of a wild card, since it (and hydro) is typically used to follow peaking demand. That is, you don't run them full tilt. They top off power generation to match demand. But its (and hydro's) capacity factor is historically around 0.40. So NG's 8 GW translates into 3.2 GW of average generation. Hydro's 0.3 GW translates into 0.12 GW of average generation.
Wind's capacity factor is about 0.25. So its 6.8 GW capacity works out to 1.7 GW of average generation.
Nuclear's capacity factor is about 0.9. So the lone new nuclear plant at 1.1 GW capacity translates into 1 GW of average generation.
Clinton didn't win the popular vote. She won a plurality of the popular vote - 48.06%. Not a majority.
Mathematically, there is no perfectly fair election system. They're all flawed, and in certain circumstances can yield a result which is contrary to a reasonable definition of "fair". You have to pick a system which you think will be least likely to have an unfair outcome, and you just live with it if you lose the roll of the dice and the unfair outcome happens.
An instant-runoff system is generally regarded as fairer than a pluralty system, and is already used in many countries. In an instant run-off system, people vote a ranked preference for the candidates. Then you eliminate the lowest vote-getters until you're left with just two candidates. That way the winner has to get a majority.
If we'd used an instant run-off system, the Green party identifies as liberal, but the other three major third parties - Libertarian, Independent, and Constitution - all identify as conservative. If you add up the popular vote along those lines, then liberals (Democrat + Green) would've gotten 49.12% of the popular vote. Conservatives (Republican + Libertarian + Independent + Constitution) would've gotten 49.92% of the popular vote. 0.96% voted for other candidates, but I think it's safe to say conservatives probably could've gotten at least 0.09% of that, putting them over 50% of the votes cast this election.
Like it or not, Trump is probably the correct winner for this election - both in terms of Electoral College, and in terms of majority of popular votes.
Google Hangouts supported multi-user video chats too. Up to 9 people at once using a phone, tablet, netbook/chromebook, or computer. Right up until they ripped the feature out and replaced it with a new app which only supports video chat between two people on phones. (Actually I think the video call function in Hangouts still works, just the ability to initiate a video call via Hangouts from your contact list or web browser has been removed. If you manually type in a number or contact name from Hangouts' video call tab, it seems to work.)
The psychopath CEO study only found that 4% of CEOs are psychopaths, vs 1% of the general population. Since publication, that study has morphed into fake news that somehow the other 96% of CEOs are also psychopaths. If I called 93% of blacks criminals because 7% of them were in prison, I'd be exhibiting prejudice, racism, and non-critical thinking. Yet an even smaller percentage of CEOs test as psychopaths, and suddenly people think it's OK to assume every CEO is a psychopath.
(And if you're trying to bring up the recent Australian study which put the figure at 21%, don't bother. That too was fake news generated by people in the media wanting to perpetuate this psychopath CEO prejudice. The study found that 21% of supply chain managers strongly exhibited at least one psychopathic trait. This was the maximum score out of many groups of business professionals tested. The overall scores of these groups ranged from 3% to 21%. Unfortunately the press has gone so wild propagating the fake news version of this story (21% of CEOs are psychopaths!) that I haven't been able to find the actual paper using a search engine.)
For example, the Obama administration's drone program is something that is worth examining in a critical manner, but there is nothing racist in do so.
That's because the left was critical of the drone program, and since they're the ones who cry racism their own criticisms are immune.
I'd say it's hyperbole that any criticism of Obama was condemned as racism. But it did happen pretty frequently. e.g. If you opposed his pro-abortion policies, you were a racist because you wanted to make it harder for low-income black women to get abortions.
That's the problem with overplaying the racism or sexism card. Play it too often, and the general public (not the press, which is predominantly left-biased so this falls in one of their blind spots) begins to see what's happening, calls your bluff, and votes for Trump. (Note: I did not vote for Trump. I'm just agreeing that people tend to try to cast ambiguous divisive arguments in terms of unrelated "safe" arguments like racism to try to Godwin the debate.)
Southern California isn't the best place for a subway. There are currently only two underground subway lines, and they came in vastly over budget - the Metro Red line's original cost estimate was $400 million; it was completed for $4.5 billion. It held the record for the most expensive civic construction project until Boston's Big Dig.
The reason is that SoCal is full of oil. If you visit, you'll see functioning oil pumps scattered around in random places. It bubbles out of the ground naturally in the La Brea Tar Pits, and into the surrounding ocean as underwater oil seeps. When they dug the first tunnels for the Red line, the workers returned the next day to find oil and tar seeping in through the walls of the freshly-dug tunnel. They had to stop construction until they could come up with new ways to hold back the seepage and insure it wouldn't become a problem in the future decades of subway operation. (The Big Dig was expensive because of similar problems, except with seawater seepage.)
Oh yeah, the earthquakes tend to be a problem too. Especially if your tunnel crosses over a fault line.
Despite being the rumored supplier for Apple's upcoming OLED phone displays, LG doesn't use OLED panels in their phones. Otherwise I would buy one in an instant. The Nexus 5 (LG-manufactured) I'm currently using is my first non-OLED phone in a while. And the screen glow from a black LCD at night drives me nuts. It makes it impossible to use the phone as an alarm clock (display always on) like I did my previous phones, because it lights up the entire room at night.
125 million households in the U.S., so on average a house gets a package stolen once every 12.5 years. If you figure the average package value is $50, that's a cost of $4 per year due to theft. A small enough amount that most people would just shrug and let the retailer's/shipper's insurance take care of it rather than actively try to combat it.
Evidently you haven't had to deal with them as much as I have. USPS is clumsy and inefficient. Their workers don't work quickly and shipping anything through them is a pain in the ass.
The mailman who does my route has come up with a unique way to be lazy. If I get a package, certified letter, anything that needs my signature, he simply doesn't deliver it. The day before the USPS is scheduled to return the package to the sender (about two weeks), I get a slip in my mail saying the first delivery attempt was two weeks ago (on a day I was home because I work from home), no second delivery attempt was made, and that since I wasn't there on the third delivery attempt that day (also home), they will return the package/letter unless I pick it up at the post office that afternoon. Apparently all in an effort to avoid having to walk up to my door and ring my doorbell. I'm not sure why he waits until the last day to give me the notification slip. It's not like it saves him any work over giving it to me the first day.
i've spoken with his supervisors at the Post Office branch about it twice, but it's still happening. The last time he let a certified letter (signature required) with a $7000 refund check from my mortgage refinance sit for two weeks before notifying me I had to pick it up from the branch that day.
I built and installed a network-based security camera system at my office. Security cameras are one of the IoT devices which frequently seem to be in the news as having security flaws, so I figured I should check for firmware updates. One rolled out and I installed it on one camera.
It reduced the camera's operating resolution from 2048x1536 to 1920x1080. The whole reason I had bought that particular camera was for the 4:3 aspect ratio - that combined with the lens' focal length provided the exact coverage we needed in the area that particular camera was aimed at. I searched for a week for the old firmware, inquired with the U.S. manufacturer (probably a reseller for a Chinese manufacturer) but got no response. I was going to buy new cameras to expand the coverage anyway, so I ended up making sure one of the new cameras was 2048x1536. Then I moved the now-crippled camera to a different location and put the new 2048x1536 camera in its original spot. Fortunately I had been careful to test the new firmware on a single camera before rolling it out to our other cameras (we originally had four 2048x1536 cameras). But the three remaining cameras are still on their older original firmware.
I would love to be able to update devices like this with just security updates. But as long as manufacturers think it's OK to fiddle with functionality in firmware updates, you're forced to choose between risking network security or risking loss of functionality.
(1) Suicide rates -- In the US I think the increase in suicide rate is likely attributable to increased firearm ownership.
Suicide rates are up in many OECD countries over the last 10 years, many of whom have strict restrictions on firearm ownership. Several countries which ban or restrict guns have higher suicide rates than the U.S.. Also, it's predominantly males in the U.S. who opt for suicide by gun; females usually try to overdose or slit their wrists. Yet the ratio of male to female suicide rate is practically the same for the U.S. (3.73), UK (3.77), Germany (3.54), France (3.22), Spain (3.73), and Italy (4.0). Suggesting that guns are merely a tool of choice among male U.S. suicides, not an enabler of higher suicide success rates.
The U.S. is more diligent about collecting this sort of data and making it available to the public. So global trends tend to show up sooner in U.S. data sets. Not because the U.S. is special or atypical. Most of the OECD suicide stats I was able to find still date from 2011. It took quite a bit of searching to find that chart of suicide rates in non-U.S. countries up to 2013.
Lunch breaks are unpaid. This is a fine for not giving employees an unpaid lunch break as mandated by law. Not compensation for failure to pay them for time worked.
Contrary to some of the comments, this is one of those labor laws that I think make a lot of sense (I'm an employer). The exact verbiage is a bit complex, but it basically boils down to:
Unpaid 30 min meal break if you work more than 5 hours in a day. Second 30 min meal break at 10 hours.
Paid 10 min breaks every 4 hours worked. So two such breaks in a 8 hour workday. Employees can combine this with the meal break for one long lunch break.
There are some miscellaneous aspects of it covering consecutive hours worked to make allowances for split shifts, but that's the jist of it.
A lot of people seem to think employers are out to squeeze every drop of life they can from their employees at the lowest wage possible. That might be true for some big companies or awful employers, but the vast majority of us (mostly small businesses) care about our employees. Having small details like break times laid down in law makes our lives easier too, since we don't have to stumble around in a legal grey area guessing what's acceptable and what's not. (That's the situation with illegal immigrants as workers. We're not supposed to hire illegal immigrants, but the government doesn't give us any tools to determine if someone is an illegal immigrant so that we can not-hire them. According to my lawyer, having acceptable copies of government-issued ID on file is enough. Except sometimes we get IDs which are fake, or worse, which might or might not be fake. You can get in trouble for hiring someone whose ID is obviously fake, and you can get in trouble for not-hiring someone whose ID is real. Which leaves you in a pickle when faced with an applicant whose ID looks like could be fake but you're not really sure.)
Slashdot Mirror
There are no borders on the Internet. As best as I can tell, Steam (Valve) doesn't have any presence in Australia. They set up a payment-based website which distributes games over the Internet, and people in Australia happened to use it.
You probably have a website or a Facebook page or a Twitter feed. Since it's online, it's accessible from nearly every country in the world. Did you check to make sure everything you post complies with every law in every country on the planet?
Your philosophy seems to be predicated on minimizing cruelty. Please meditate on the following.
Contrary to what you learned in Disney movies, it is incredibly rare for an animal to die of disease or old age. The ultimate fate of nearly every living non-human animal on this planet is to be eaten alive. The fortunate ones die early in the process. Being diseased simply makes it easier for something to catch you and eat you (usually while you're still alive).
You are incorrectly assuming a zero base state - that by not consuming meat, you are somehow saving these animals from suffering being eaten. That is not the case. You are merely delaying the inevitable. If you allow these animals to live out their natural lives, you consign the vast majority of them to suffer a cruel death just like in the above videos.
OTOH, when I go fishing, I bleed my catch prior to taking it home to prepare as food. Based on testimony from people who have almost bled to death, this is one of the best ways to die - it feels like falling asleep. So given that (1) everything eventually dies, (2) your actions almost always lead to animals suffering a natural death by predation, and (3) my actions lead to them suffering the most painless death possible, my way actually results in less cruelty than yours.
Put another way, your philosophy is based on the incorrect belief that an action (eating meat) means you are responsible for the consequences (an animal has to die), but inaction means you are not responsible for the consequences. But everything has consequences - both action and inaction. Choosing the route of inaction may make you feel better in a self-centered world-view, but in this case it actually increases the amount of cruelty that animals suffer.
Magsafe's primary failure mode is at the other end - the wall wart. I've had numerous Mac owners aski me if I could fix their wall wart because they don't want to shell out $79 for another one. The frayed cables are an easy fix (electrical tape), and the broken plug can usually be fixed with some epoxy and/or soldering. But the cable fraying where it enters the adapter is pretty much fatal. These things simply shouldn't be happening to a power brick which costs $79.
Most of the broken power connectors on PC laptops went away when manufacturers switched to 90 degree plugs. The straight plugs meant any lateral tension on the cord (e.g. laptop on desk, cord draped off the edge of desk) had a huge lever arm with which to bend/break the power socket off the motherboard. The 90 degree plugs reduce that lever arm to almost the minimum possible length, massively reducing the forces on the power socket.
Consumer Reports isn't a tech rag. They don't give a damn about technical specs except as guidelines for what to buy (e.g. "get at least 8 GB of RAM").
They test products based on how the average person will use them. So if the average person spends 80% of their computer time in a browser on Facebook or YouTube, by God they're going to test how the laptop performs running a browser on Facebook or YouTube.
If you're going to launch something into space anyway, then the cost of adding this experiment to the spacecraft is only about $5000/kg. So if you can whittle it down to a few kg, you're not talking about much cost at all. Heck, one of the ISS crew members could request it as part of their personal allowance.
You'd lose all the fancy instrumentation you have on the ground to measure exactly what's going on. But putting one of these in orbit is probably a cheaper way to settle the question "Does this thing really work?" than all the money we've already spent testing it on the ground. It's like when I'm helping friends with computer problems - some things (e.g. reboot) take so little time and effort to do that I ask them to do it right off the bat before even trying to diagnose the actual problem.
Unless they're selling it as a subscription service, I really doubt that line in the TOS would hold up in court. For a contract to be legally valid, there has to be an exchange of consideration - you have to get something for the money you paid. Putting a line in the contract which allows them to unilaterally revoke everything you paid for nullifies that consideration, essentially invalidating the contract. They'd have to give you your money back to enforce that clause.
I had to track that down on my Firefox (was taking 2-3 seconds to open a new tab). It's all the extensions I had installed to block the ads, scripts, flash, autoplay vidoes, etc. Apparently many of them do some preliminary setup housekeeping when you open a new tab. I only ran into the problem once in Chrome (also with a tracking-blocking script), but since it was being caused by a single extension I just removed the extension. There are lots to choose from.
Twitter's IPO price was $26 a share. After the initial climb following the IPO, it's been more or less downhill since then.
Since they didn't do any stock splits, the price of a single share is directly proportional to the entire company's valuation. So if the price of a single share is going down, that means the company's valuation is going down. Every investor should care about that.
Oh the irony in that statement. Widespread availability of scholarships, grants, and loans is what allowed post-secondary education to become so expensive in the first place that it's unaffordable by half the student population. Normally higher demand leads to higher supply (more schools being set up to meet that demand). But college-level education is different in that there are a handful of well-known colleges and universities that everyone wants to get into, and their physical size constrains the number of students they can accept. Consequently the widespread availability of financial assistance allows them to raise their tuition until the number of people applying is reduced to a manageable level. Those higher tuitions have led to wage inflation among school staff, and a ballooning of unnecessary and redundant administrative staff. (Not to mention that these external sources of funding also distort the economics of various degrees, basically allowing people to "afford" degrees in careers where they'll never be able to make enough money to pay back to society the financial assistance they got.)
Basically, the solution to unaffordable post-secondary education is to put schools on a financial diet, not to feed them more money in the form of more grants, scholarships, and loans.
It's like global warming. A single person generating excess CO2 is not a problem. But if half the world's population does it, it destroys the environment. Likewise, giving the occasional person a scholarship or the occasional laid off worker unemployment assistance is not a problem. But if half the students and all the ex-workers are getting it, it destroys the economy.
You have to come up with solutions which won't have unintentional feedback effects which exacerbate the original problem. In the case of colleges, this means banning all scholarships, grants, and loans except in very limited casts - say 5% of the student population. Instead focus your financial assistance in the state university programs. The extra money they receive will allow them to hire good professors so they're regarded to be as good as private colleges, but with tuition locked at affordable levels. That will provide competition with private schools and help drive prices down. (Once college is affordable again, then we can decide where to go from there - the current state is too screwed up to even begin considering long-term solutions right now.)
Likewise, for employment, you could enact a law which recognizes that automation is inevitable, but which requires companies help pay for the re-training of a worker that they're replacing by automation (for existing companies), or for start-up companies that are automated from the get-go, paying into a fund which helps re-train workers laid off by automation (so the former requirement doesn't put existing companies at a competitive disadvantage). Basically set it up so that a portion of the productivity increase due to automation is guaranteed to be distributed to the displaced worker's re-training for a new job in an automated industry. Then just like pollution, the cost of retraining the worker is no longer externalized and borne by society, it's placed back upon the primary beneficiary of the automation. If automation is truly better for society (which I believe it is), then the long-term financial gain from automating will make it the cost-effective choice even when saddled with this additional re-training cost. So companies will still want to automate, except now they won't be dumping unemployed and unskilled workers into the social safety net for someone else (i.e. society via the government) to pay for.
The rubber word in there is "reasonably" but I think most people would agree this is a reasonable disclosure of user information.
This is the problem I've had with governments putting pressure on Google (and Facebook) to "remove" hate speech. Those two entities do not promote hate speech - they merely reflect what hate speech is already present in society. Forcing them to remove (hide) it is literally shooting the messenger. It doesn't solve the fundamental problem - the people who believe in and are spreading the hate speech are still out there and still spreading it. The garbage is still out there same as before; all you've done is ordered the carpenter to move your window so you can't see it from your living room anymore.
Fixing this requires educating the population, teaching them history, exposing them to different people so they realize that others are not that different from themselves. But that requires work and effort. It seems governments would rather take the easy way out and try to cover up the problem, rather than actually fix it. Even if you think hate speech doesn't deserve free speech rights, the solution is to go after the websites and individuals promoting hate speech. Knock them off the web or suspend their accounts. Then they'll disappear from the Google results naturally. No need to mess with the ranking algorithms.
Slashdotters are usually pretty good at being right about technology. What they suck at is predicting how popular a technology will be with non-slashdotters, where nebulous things like fashionableness, lack of options (simplicity), and peer pressure (desire to conform to other people's expectations) become a factor. In the case of the iPod, the idiot-proof UI (simplicity) was the predominant factor. Slashdotters didn't mind the complicated procedure to transfer your MP3 playlists from your computer to your Nomad. So they only saw the simplicity (reduced features) of the iPod as a negative. The general public OTOH hated that complexity, and latched on to the simplicity with which you could transfer your MP3 collection from iTunes to your iPod.
So that 9.5 GW of solar capacity is only generating about 1.15 GW of power on average. If you add the 2 GW of distributed solar (rooftop panels) it works out to 1.39 GW average generation.
Natural gas is a bit of a wild card, since it (and hydro) is typically used to follow peaking demand. That is, you don't run them full tilt. They top off power generation to match demand. But its (and hydro's) capacity factor is historically around 0.40. So NG's 8 GW translates into 3.2 GW of average generation. Hydro's 0.3 GW translates into 0.12 GW of average generation.
Wind's capacity factor is about 0.25. So its 6.8 GW capacity works out to 1.7 GW of average generation.
Nuclear's capacity factor is about 0.9. So the lone new nuclear plant at 1.1 GW capacity translates into 1 GW of average generation.
So in terms of actual power generation:
Clinton didn't win the popular vote. She won a plurality of the popular vote - 48.06%. Not a majority.
Mathematically, there is no perfectly fair election system. They're all flawed, and in certain circumstances can yield a result which is contrary to a reasonable definition of "fair". You have to pick a system which you think will be least likely to have an unfair outcome, and you just live with it if you lose the roll of the dice and the unfair outcome happens.
An instant-runoff system is generally regarded as fairer than a pluralty system, and is already used in many countries. In an instant run-off system, people vote a ranked preference for the candidates. Then you eliminate the lowest vote-getters until you're left with just two candidates. That way the winner has to get a majority.
If we'd used an instant run-off system, the Green party identifies as liberal, but the other three major third parties - Libertarian, Independent, and Constitution - all identify as conservative. If you add up the popular vote along those lines, then liberals (Democrat + Green) would've gotten 49.12% of the popular vote. Conservatives (Republican + Libertarian + Independent + Constitution) would've gotten 49.92% of the popular vote. 0.96% voted for other candidates, but I think it's safe to say conservatives probably could've gotten at least 0.09% of that, putting them over 50% of the votes cast this election.
Like it or not, Trump is probably the correct winner for this election - both in terms of Electoral College, and in terms of majority of popular votes.
Google Hangouts supported multi-user video chats too. Up to 9 people at once using a phone, tablet, netbook/chromebook, or computer. Right up until they ripped the feature out and replaced it with a new app which only supports video chat between two people on phones. (Actually I think the video call function in Hangouts still works, just the ability to initiate a video call via Hangouts from your contact list or web browser has been removed. If you manually type in a number or contact name from Hangouts' video call tab, it seems to work.)
The psychopath CEO study only found that 4% of CEOs are psychopaths, vs 1% of the general population. Since publication, that study has morphed into fake news that somehow the other 96% of CEOs are also psychopaths. If I called 93% of blacks criminals because 7% of them were in prison, I'd be exhibiting prejudice, racism, and non-critical thinking. Yet an even smaller percentage of CEOs test as psychopaths, and suddenly people think it's OK to assume every CEO is a psychopath.
(And if you're trying to bring up the recent Australian study which put the figure at 21%, don't bother. That too was fake news generated by people in the media wanting to perpetuate this psychopath CEO prejudice. The study found that 21% of supply chain managers strongly exhibited at least one psychopathic trait. This was the maximum score out of many groups of business professionals tested. The overall scores of these groups ranged from 3% to 21%. Unfortunately the press has gone so wild propagating the fake news version of this story (21% of CEOs are psychopaths!) that I haven't been able to find the actual paper using a search engine.)
That's because the left was critical of the drone program, and since they're the ones who cry racism their own criticisms are immune.
I'd say it's hyperbole that any criticism of Obama was condemned as racism. But it did happen pretty frequently. e.g. If you opposed his pro-abortion policies, you were a racist because you wanted to make it harder for low-income black women to get abortions.
That's the problem with overplaying the racism or sexism card. Play it too often, and the general public (not the press, which is predominantly left-biased so this falls in one of their blind spots) begins to see what's happening, calls your bluff, and votes for Trump. (Note: I did not vote for Trump. I'm just agreeing that people tend to try to cast ambiguous divisive arguments in terms of unrelated "safe" arguments like racism to try to Godwin the debate.)
Southern California isn't the best place for a subway. There are currently only two underground subway lines, and they came in vastly over budget - the Metro Red line's original cost estimate was $400 million; it was completed for $4.5 billion. It held the record for the most expensive civic construction project until Boston's Big Dig.
The reason is that SoCal is full of oil. If you visit, you'll see functioning oil pumps scattered around in random places. It bubbles out of the ground naturally in the La Brea Tar Pits, and into the surrounding ocean as underwater oil seeps. When they dug the first tunnels for the Red line, the workers returned the next day to find oil and tar seeping in through the walls of the freshly-dug tunnel. They had to stop construction until they could come up with new ways to hold back the seepage and insure it wouldn't become a problem in the future decades of subway operation. (The Big Dig was expensive because of similar problems, except with seawater seepage.)
Oh yeah, the earthquakes tend to be a problem too. Especially if your tunnel crosses over a fault line.
Despite being the rumored supplier for Apple's upcoming OLED phone displays, LG doesn't use OLED panels in their phones. Otherwise I would buy one in an instant. The Nexus 5 (LG-manufactured) I'm currently using is my first non-OLED phone in a while. And the screen glow from a black LCD at night drives me nuts. It makes it impossible to use the phone as an alarm clock (display always on) like I did my previous phones, because it lights up the entire room at night.
There were 3.78 billion packages delivered in the U.S. in 2013. Judging by the trendline we're probably over 4 billion by now. If 10 million were stolen, that's a theft rate of about 0.25%. FedEx reports a lost package rate of 0.55%, so they're actually losing more packages during delivery than are stolen.
125 million households in the U.S., so on average a house gets a package stolen once every 12.5 years. If you figure the average package value is $50, that's a cost of $4 per year due to theft. A small enough amount that most people would just shrug and let the retailer's/shipper's insurance take care of it rather than actively try to combat it.
The mailman who does my route has come up with a unique way to be lazy. If I get a package, certified letter, anything that needs my signature, he simply doesn't deliver it. The day before the USPS is scheduled to return the package to the sender (about two weeks), I get a slip in my mail saying the first delivery attempt was two weeks ago (on a day I was home because I work from home), no second delivery attempt was made, and that since I wasn't there on the third delivery attempt that day (also home), they will return the package/letter unless I pick it up at the post office that afternoon. Apparently all in an effort to avoid having to walk up to my door and ring my doorbell. I'm not sure why he waits until the last day to give me the notification slip. It's not like it saves him any work over giving it to me the first day.
i've spoken with his supervisors at the Post Office branch about it twice, but it's still happening. The last time he let a certified letter (signature required) with a $7000 refund check from my mortgage refinance sit for two weeks before notifying me I had to pick it up from the branch that day.
I built and installed a network-based security camera system at my office. Security cameras are one of the IoT devices which frequently seem to be in the news as having security flaws, so I figured I should check for firmware updates. One rolled out and I installed it on one camera.
It reduced the camera's operating resolution from 2048x1536 to 1920x1080. The whole reason I had bought that particular camera was for the 4:3 aspect ratio - that combined with the lens' focal length provided the exact coverage we needed in the area that particular camera was aimed at. I searched for a week for the old firmware, inquired with the U.S. manufacturer (probably a reseller for a Chinese manufacturer) but got no response. I was going to buy new cameras to expand the coverage anyway, so I ended up making sure one of the new cameras was 2048x1536. Then I moved the now-crippled camera to a different location and put the new 2048x1536 camera in its original spot. Fortunately I had been careful to test the new firmware on a single camera before rolling it out to our other cameras (we originally had four 2048x1536 cameras). But the three remaining cameras are still on their older original firmware.
I would love to be able to update devices like this with just security updates. But as long as manufacturers think it's OK to fiddle with functionality in firmware updates, you're forced to choose between risking network security or risking loss of functionality.
Suicide rates are up in many OECD countries over the last 10 years, many of whom have strict restrictions on firearm ownership. Several countries which ban or restrict guns have higher suicide rates than the U.S.. Also, it's predominantly males in the U.S. who opt for suicide by gun; females usually try to overdose or slit their wrists. Yet the ratio of male to female suicide rate is practically the same for the U.S. (3.73), UK (3.77), Germany (3.54), France (3.22), Spain (3.73), and Italy (4.0). Suggesting that guns are merely a tool of choice among male U.S. suicides, not an enabler of higher suicide success rates.
The U.S. is more diligent about collecting this sort of data and making it available to the public. So global trends tend to show up sooner in U.S. data sets. Not because the U.S. is special or atypical. Most of the OECD suicide stats I was able to find still date from 2011. It took quite a bit of searching to find that chart of suicide rates in non-U.S. countries up to 2013.
Lunch breaks are unpaid. This is a fine for not giving employees an unpaid lunch break as mandated by law. Not compensation for failure to pay them for time worked.
There are some miscellaneous aspects of it covering consecutive hours worked to make allowances for split shifts, but that's the jist of it.
A lot of people seem to think employers are out to squeeze every drop of life they can from their employees at the lowest wage possible. That might be true for some big companies or awful employers, but the vast majority of us (mostly small businesses) care about our employees. Having small details like break times laid down in law makes our lives easier too, since we don't have to stumble around in a legal grey area guessing what's acceptable and what's not. (That's the situation with illegal immigrants as workers. We're not supposed to hire illegal immigrants, but the government doesn't give us any tools to determine if someone is an illegal immigrant so that we can not-hire them. According to my lawyer, having acceptable copies of government-issued ID on file is enough. Except sometimes we get IDs which are fake, or worse, which might or might not be fake. You can get in trouble for hiring someone whose ID is obviously fake, and you can get in trouble for not-hiring someone whose ID is real. Which leaves you in a pickle when faced with an applicant whose ID looks like could be fake but you're not really sure.)