I've wondered about this too. I've noticed pollutants in emissions are measured in PPM - parts per million air molecules in the exhaust. Not in parts per distance traveled. So transportation efficiency (emissions per distance traveled) gets you nothing (volume of air ingested decreases with higher efficiency), and combustion efficiency (more energy produced per cylinder detonation) actually increases PPM even though in practical terms it would be offset by needing to fire the cylinder fewer times to get the same amount of work done. Meanwhile being able to run a lean mixture makes passing these emissions tests a breeze. Heck, you could rig up a bypass to feed intake air straight into the exhaust stream (probably illegal) and drop your PPM to near-zero.
e.g. My 3.0L V6 diesel truck cruises at 65 MPHat 1550 RPM. My 3.2L V6 gas car cruises at 65 MPH at 1800 RPM. 7% higher engine displacement, 16% higher RPM, so 23.9% more airflow volume at the same speed. So even if the diesel put out 23% more PPM than the gas engine, it would actually be emitting less pollutants per mile traveled. The difference is even more pronounced at higher speeds or loads. The diesel can hit 80 MPH at 1900 RPM, while the gas engine will be up around 2400 RPM. 35% higher airflow.
Foxconn is a tech manufacturing giant. It makes a lot of things, including laptops for HP, phones for Apple, games consoles for Sony, and its workers so depressed it has to install suicide nets.
That was fake news. The suicide rate at Foxconn was lower than that of the U.S. at the time of the spike in suicides. The Foxconn suicide myth spread and persists for the same reason other fake news spreads and persists - the people spreading it want to believe it's true, and thus pass it on without first vetting it with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Except in this case the people spreading it are journalists in the mainstream media, whose job it is to review these stories with a critical eye before publishing them. They want to believe factory workers in developing nations were being exploited by western corporations and thus were more prone to attempt suicide, so they recklessly published these stories perpetuating the myth, and still do. Foxconn installed the nets to try to make the Western media shut up, not because there was a greater suicide problem there than anywhere else. I have no love for Apple or Chinese assembly line labor, but this is one criticism they don't deserve.
That's probably it right there. AFAIK the streamed PBS shows do not include ads, so they're identical to the downloaded version. In that light, PBS probably isn't a good way to test the effect of streaming on sales, since a lot of the people opting to stream PBS probably just don't want to bother with downloading and saving the video first. While purchasers of, say, shows available on Hulu might be trying to avoid the ads.
In fact, try as I might, I wasn't able to find these purported paid download version of shows on the PBS website; only DVD and T-shirt sales. There are free downloads of some older episodes, but I could find most of their library only as a stream. There was one Frontline episode I really wanted as a permanent downloaded copy and was willing to pay for, but I wasn't able to find any way to download or buy it except as non-HD DVD. I ended up downloading a copy someone had put on YouTube.
Not that video. The "genuine" Apple charger turns out to be counterfeit, and not much better than the cheap generic charger. You're only going to be able to tell it's crappy if you're an electrical engineer who's dissected these before. (I took 2 EE courses in undergrad so understood most of the terminology he was using, but his rant about it being terrible was Greek to me.)
This related video shows the insides of a genuine charger. Jump ahead to 9m 40s if you've already seen that first video showing the innards of a crappy charger.
Pricing their video service over cellular implies that the cost of the cellular hop is zero, and that the expense of transmitting the video to the viewer is all in the Internet link. Since their own video service is hosted locally, there is no Internet bandwidth consumed, and thus the price should be zero (which was what Netflix offered these guys for free on their landline ISP service and they turned it down). For a market economy to function properly, the minimum pricing has to reflect the expense incurred by the seller.
I can understand zero rating as a temporary promotional measure (e.g. streamed video doesn't count against your cap for the first 6 months if you use our service). But making it the standard price is equivalent to dumping to try to kill off competition. Especially if they're using revenue from other sources to subsidize this service, like say, extra money they're collecting from Netflix in contravention of Net Neutrality.
A friend of my sister's worked there and gave us a tour when we visited. He showed us their vault room where they kept all their videotapes. It wasn't very big, so I asked him since there were so many different sporting events going on every day, how long did they save the recordings of these events. He said most of the stuff (local sports, lower-interest stuff like non-Olympics track events, etc) they only kept for a month or two. Pro sports were kept at least a year, longer for more important games. Playoff finals and particularly notable games, they'd keep indefinitely. But most of the "memorable" events could be boiled down to just a few highlight clips (e.g. a world record-breaking long jump).
A shocking amount of stuff gets erased or tossed out simply because there's no space to save it (or need at the time). If you think about everything everyone does every day, it's a mindboggling amount of material which is produced daily, So it's inevitable that a lot of it is going to be lost (hopefully with a summary or end result saved). You have to be obsessive/compulsive to want to save everything.
The thing that keeps Microsoft afloat is its Windows monopoly (and the Office suite and servers, but both are strongly tied to Windows as they have little presence elsewhere). Up until 10 years ago, the only threat to Windows was Mac OS which had been stuck at 5% market share for decades, and Linux for the desktop which lingered around 1%.
The last 10 years have seen two new entrants to the operating system market - iOS and Android. iOS still has a relatively small, but lucrative userbase. Android already matches if not exceeds Windows' installed userbase. A lot of people dismiss these as a "toy" OS for toy devices. But that's being ignorant of the march of technological progress. 30 years ago my primary computer was a desktop. 20 years ago it was a laptop that was nearly 2 inches thick. 10 years ago it was a notebook just under an inch thick. Today it's a half-inch thick ultrabook, but about half my screen time is on my phone and tablet.
Mobile isn't going to go away. Eventually it's going to eat the laptop and eventually desktop markets. Intel charges a fortune for their CPUs (about $100-$1000 vs about $5-$20 for ARM). As technology advances and ARM processors become more and more capable of performing everyday computing tasks, there will be less and less reason to spend an extra $100-$500 for an x86/x64-based "computer". And if x86/x64 dies, Windows dies with it. Microsoft knows it, and its shareholders know it.
That's why Microsoft worked so hard on Windows RT (basically Windows for ARM). That was their warning shot across Intel's bow that they had better do something to stave off the advance of ARM devices, or Windows was going to jump ship and abandon x86/x64 for ARM. It worked. Intel came out with some new extremely low-power CPUs which were almost competitive with ARM in power consumption but ran x86/x64 software, thus slowing ARM's encroachment into the laptop market (e.g. early Chromebooks were ARM, but they're now Intel). At least for now.
But the Intel can't keep it up forever. Their tax is very high per cm^2 of silicon compared to ARM. Eventually they're going to have to cut their prices, or ARM is going to win out. And if ARM wins, which OS do you think is going to dominate? Windows RT? Yeah neither do I. Which is why Microsoft's shareholders are so anxious that Microsoft do something, anything, to gain a foothold in the mobile (ARM) market.
The price was fine when GoPro was first starting out. Shooting underwater video (or even video where the camera might get wet, like kayaking) meant buying a video camera with a housing costing upwards of a thousand dollars.
GoPro took advantage of technological advancements shrinking the size of a quality video camera to something the size of a webcam, ditching videotape in favor of flash cards. That reduced the size of the waterproof housing needed, allowing them to make the whole thing for a few hundred bucks. That was a lot cheaper than anything else with that capability on the market at the time.
Their problem is that technological advancement has not stopped. Now other companies can make the same stuff they do for less than $100.
Getting quality footage is hard and gets in the way of the activity.
There's far better options online and most people would not care much to see yours because "awesome" stuff is like garbage these days.
I am not a hero and neither is 99.999% of people.
If you're buying something like a GoPro in hopes of shooting quality video and becoming in Internet star, then yeah there's a 99.999% chance you're going to be disappointed.
But if you're buying it to record family outings and personal events for sentimental reasons, it's actually a pretty good tool. Small, stays out of the way, and does a pretty good job for its size. The quality of the footage doesn't really matter when the footage is just to help your family reminisce about the activity later. If you want production-quality video of your outing, just hire a professional videographer to go along with you. Let him worry about all the gear, mounts, bags, repairs, batteries, dirt, and getting good shots.
Social media just seems new because for the first time, we have a raw, unadulterated, and referenceable window into the inner workings of the mob that is society.
In the past, if a mob decided to go out and lynch a black man, it was extremely difficult to piece together after the fact exactly how the situation transitioned from a curious crowd gathering to see a dead body, to a furious mob which was somehow convinced that this particular black man was the murderer who needed killing. Now we can analyze it after the fact, or even watch it as it happens in real-time from thousands of miles away.
This unpredictable, unfathomable aspect of the mob was always there. Even the ancient Greeks and Romans complained about it. It's just that for the first time, we're able dissect it after the fact to see how it works. A lot of the stuff the media is hyping as new is in fact as old as humanity. "fake news" = gossip. "going viral" = spreading rumor. "social media" = schmoozing. It just happens on computer networks now (where it's all recorded) instead of via word of mouth.
Although the malware has full remote access to infected devices, it doesn't appear to be stealing user data, but rather is content to go the click-fraud route.
Successful parasites do not kill their host - if they do that, they have to find another host. The successful ones minimize their impact on the host, using them as a free ride to other opportunities which they can exploit. Sometimes this even develops into a symbiotic relationship.
If the malware doesn't steal user data, the user has no incentive to detect and remove it. Much to the consternation of the ad networks which are the real targets. I wouldn't be surprised if the next step is for this malware to install patches to fix vulnerabilities in the OS, to prevent other less well-thought-out malware from being installed and eventually getting the frustrated user to wipe and reset the phone.
If you have a problem with millennials, look to the people who raised them like that.
In our defense, we had to deal with forced indoctrination into a philosophy of no-failure and no-discipline. Kids' soccer matches didn't keep score, and everyone got a trophy - even the losing team. And heaven forbid we spanked one of our kids for breaking one of the house rules. The kid tells his teacher about the spanking, and we'd be facing assault charges and CPS would try to take all our kids away from us.
We're sorry we couldn't better prepare you for the real world - where you'll get hurt if you break the rules, and you have to keep trying because you're going to fail a dozen times before you succeed.. But we weren't allowed to.
Most of the shaking during an earthquake happens at frequencies which most closely match the resonance frequency of a 3-story building. If you look at pictures buildings damaged in the Loma Prieta and Northridge quakes, you see most of the collapsed buildings were 3- or 4-stories. Those two were quakes which were just on the cusp of being strong enough to collapse buildings (in an area with strict earthquake building codes). It's harder to see this in larger quakes because they have enough energy to collapse buildings outside this height, and subsequent fires (or tsunamis) can wipe out buildings which survived the initial quake.
A smaller building, like 1-story, has a higher resonance frequency and just gets moved from side-to-side by an earthquake. A larger building like a skyscraper kinda just shimmies in place. It's only the 3-story buildings (and to a lesser extent the 2-story and 4-story buildings) which shake more and more the longer the earthquake goes on, and eventually fall apart. For a large skyscraper, you just have to make the support structures connecting the building to the ground strong enough to withstand this shimmying. Or decouple it entirely from the ground by mounting the building on flexible joints which allow the skyscraper to shake at its lower resonance frequency while the earthquake shakes at a higher frequency. (You can see in the test that the 5-story building has a slightly lower frequency than the input earthquake shaking.)
The main danger of building on landfill is, as you've alluded, that one section of the land underneath the building will liquefy more than others, causing the building to tilt. Not a problem for a short, broad structure like a warehouse, but a serious danger for a tall structure. If you're building a skyscraper on landfill, you're supposed to dig down deep enough to sink the building's supports into bedrock. That way your skyscraper is essentially built on solid ground, just that its lowest levels are underground surrounded by a bunch of landfill, instead of its lowest levels being the ground floor and basement. That the building is sinking indicates this wasn't done.
I don't want to belittle this because India is one of the places where solar actually makes sense. But even there its capacity factor is only about 20%. Compared to 14.5% for the continental U.S. and about 10% in Germany. Capacity factor is the ratio of actual electricity produced (after taking into account night, weather, angle of the sun, downtime due to maintenance, etc) to nameplate (maximum) capacity.
So while it's capacity is 648 MW, its average electrical generation over a year will only be about 20% that, or a more modest 130 MW. Electricity costs about 8 cents/kWh in India. So payback time (excluding operational expenses and interest on loans) will be
India is one of the better places for solar. (The 150,000 home figure seems a little screwy, since 648 MW / 150,000 homes = 4320 Watts, which is about 3.5x the electricity consumption of the average U.S. home. I suspect the 150,000 homes figure already took into account capacity factor, and is not "at full capacity" as TFA claims.)
They should be keeping copies of the archive in multiple locations, along with parity files which can be used to validate potentially compromised and reconstruct corrupted data. That way if one location goes down or is destroyed (fireshappen), you still have copies elsewhere. If one site gets hacked and the data changed, you can cross-reference the parity info with other sites to determine which is real and which is modified, and revert the changed data. Kinda like a worldwide ZFS or RAID 5.
Trump makes for a convenient excuse. But given that they're literally keeping snapshots of history, they should already be taking these steps just to safeguard the integrity of the data.
If you only listen to people who quit from working at company, of course you're going to hear it's a terrible place to work. If they didn't think so, they likely would still be working there.
To get a balanced view of what working at the company is really like, you need to sample (hear testimonials from) both people who quit working there, and people who are still working there. Maybe Amazon is evil incarnate. Or maybe the things they did are perfectly normal, it just tickled one of her pet peeves that wouldn't have bothered 98% of the population.
If the people still working there say it's a shit place to work, then you've got something worth reporting.
Taking it a step further, Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, heck even eBay are just hookup services. Their end form is going to be a stock market-like exchange. People place bids and offers on the market. The line (price) where the bids meet the offers is the fair market price.
e.g. You bid to pay $12 for a ride from your house in the north suburbs to a restaurant downtown. Historically pricing for this route has been about $12, so you figure that should get you an offer soon.. But unbeknownst to you, a ballgame in the nearby sports arena is just ending, resulting in a shortage of drivers. So the offers you're seeing are around $20. You have to decide if you want to wait until the pricing drops down to its historical norm, or if you want to withdraw the bid and place a new one at $20 so you can get a ride quicker.
The "cut" the hookup service takes should be on par with what online brokerages take - around $1 to $10 per "trade". This whole thing where they take a flat % is stupid, since the hookup service's costs are the same whether it's a $10 local ride, or a $200 ride across several states. Licensing and insurance should be managed by the government, just as it is for private vehicles. The only difference is that you should be able to check on a government website that the guy offering you a ride is properly licensed and his insurance is current (an online version of the driver ID placards in taxis). For bonus points, you can set up a system where for the safety of the driver and passenger, both use government-issued ID to mutually register their ride as occurring. The passenger is protected from a crazy driver who kidnaps them, the driver is protected from a mugger posing as passenger. If a crime occurs, it'll be on record who the other party is.
Yes the cost is big. But everything about nuclear is big, including the amount of power generated. Fukushima Daiichi consisted of 6 reactors:
#1 generated 460 MWe from March 1971 to April 2012, or 41.1 years
#2 generated 784 MWe from July 1974 to April 2012, or 37.7 years
#3 generated 784 MWe from March 1976 to April 2012, or 36.1 years
#4 generated 784 MWe from October 1978 to April 2012, or 33.6 years
#5 generated 784 MWe from April 1978 to Jan 2014, or 35.7 years
#6 generated 1100 MWe from October 1979 to Jan 2014, or 34.2 years
Multiply the generating capacity by the time in service and you get 165.7 TWh for reactor #1, 259.1 TWh for #2, 248.1 TWh for #3, 230.9 TWh for #4, 245.3 TWh for #5, and 329.8 TWh for #6. For a total of 1478.9 TWh.
Nuclear's capacity factor in Japan (ratio of actual electricity generated vs peak capacity) started around 46% in the mid-1970s, and had reached 79% by 2001. Assume a linear increase followed by it remaining stable from 2001-2014, and overall capacity factor over this timeframe (which conveniently breaks down into 26 and 13 years) is (26*(.46+.79)/2 + 13*.79) / 39 = 0.68.
So actual electricity generated by the plant would be about 1478.9 TWh * 0.68 = 1005.7 TWh. Round it down and call it an even 1000 TWh.
The average price of electricity in Japan is 26 cents/kWh. Yes the price was lower in the past, but we want the inflation-adjusted total value of electricity generated, so using today's price is valid.
1000 TWh * $0.26/kWh = $260 billion worth of electricity produced over the lifetime of the plant. Even with the second-worst and most expensive nuclear accident in history, the Fukushima Daiichi plant still produced more value in electricity than the cleanup cost.
Now consider that the world generated 2731 TWh with nuclear in 2008. If you go with 20 cents/kWh as a global average electricity price, that's $546 billion worth of electricity generated by nuclear power each year. Add up the cost to clean up Fukushima ($200 billion), Chernobyl ($200 billion), and Three Mile Island ($1 billion). Amortized over the 37 years since the first of those accidents, the cost of cleaning up these nuclear accidents only works out to ($401 billion / 37 years) / (546 billion / 1 year) = 1.98% of the cost of electricity produced.
Basically, the cost of cleaning up nuclear accidents is just 0.4 cents/kWh.
More precisely, it's scroll, scroll, scroll. Ctrl-click to open a link in a new tab. Except you didn't hold down ctrl enough and the link opened up in the current tab. You hit back on your browser, and now you have to start scrolling from the top all over again. Whoever came up with the idea for infinite scroll web pages should be forced to go home and start his trip all over again every time his GPS tells him to make a turn and he misses it.
It's the selection of which person had the biggest impact on shaping world events for the year. That's why Adolf Hitler was PotY in 1938. Not because Time thought he was a great guy, but because his actions sent shockwaves throughout the world. (Stalin won in 1939 for signing a non-aggression pact with Hitler thus allowing WWII to grow into the behemoth it became, rather than nipping it in the bud with a two-front war against the Nazis.)
In that respect, Julian Assange is a braindead choice. He goes incoummunicado for 6 weeks and nobody notices - that's how unimportant he is to world events. Putin may be a good choice, especially if you buy into the Russia hacked U.S. election conspiracy. Arguably, he is the ideological figurehead of the current nationalism movement sweeping through many countries. Theresa May is an attempt to give credit/blame for the Brexit vote to a single individual - Brexit was arguably one of if not the biggest shocking event of the year. Kim Jong Un is in the running because he's managed to turn the most recalcitrant, unpredictable country on Earth even more recalcitrant and unpredictable. And while Trump's election was a big deal, he hasn't actually done anything (except win an election), and won't until late January 2017. This isn't the Nobel Peace Prize which you can win just because they think you're going to do big things.
Food poisoning. Actually, aside from long-term illnesses like the flu, that's what most of my legitimate sick days have been for. (Legitimate at an earlier job. My later employers just said we get 10 "personal" days each year to use if we're sick or just need the day off. That policy also eliminates the incongruity of people who got sick more getting paid more per day worked, and encourages people to stay healthy so they can use those "sick" days as extra vacation days instead.)
U.S. online sales in 2015 was $342 billion in 2015 The sum total of U.S. retail sales was $4.785 trillion in 2015 Yes online sales are growing. But they're still only about 7% of all retail sales.
I bought almost everything except groceries from Amazon and Newegg the last decade, but I'm finding myself buying more and more items from brick and mortar stores precisely for the reasons OP gives - counterfeit goods and easier returns. A big part of the reason I bought from Amazon was the no-hassle returns, but they killed that policy this year. Newegg is exempted only because their main warehouse and return center is 2 miles from where I work.
These guys have yet to learn that people are buying them not just for convenience and price, but because they trust that a big name like Amazon will stand behind the product they sell. If they're gonna mix their inventory with that of their third party sellers, well sorry I'm just gonna buy that item from a big name store whose inventory supply chain I trust. My Amazon orders are way down this year, my Costco purchases are way up (they have a great return policy). And I'm even buying stuff from Best Buy again.
If Clinton had won the Electoral College but Trump had won the popular vote, would you have taken the time to write up an op-ed outlining the flaws of the Electoral College, would you have protested in the streets, would you be demanding Trump be made President? If not, then you are simply being partisan, and your support for this is out of self-interest rather than truly wishing to improve the system.
Someone truly wishing to reform the Electoral College would be for such reform regardless of who won. If you truly believe a change is for the better, you support it even when it works against your own self interests. I think Merkley made a mistake dismantling one of the checks and balances the Founding Fathers put into the system to prevent a simple majority from having too much power, but I respect him for not changing his position even though he now finds himself on the disadvantaged side of his rule change.
(And if you're one of the people who believe Merkley's rule change was necessary because the Republicans were stonewalling in the Senate, the Washington Post keeps a database of how often each Senator votes with his/her party. Here are the stats for the 108th, 109th, 110th, 111th, 112th, and 113th Senates, spanning 2002-2015 with Senate control by both parties, covering both a Republican President and Democrat President. Click on the Party column to sort it by Senators most likely to vote for their party. You'll see it's actually the Democrats who most frequently vote as a block, and the Republicans who are more willing to cross the party line. The meme that Republicans refused to compromise was fake news spread by the mainstream media without any statistical evidence to back it up.)
As for them not asking for recounts in the states Clinton won, it costs millions of dollars to do a recount, you can hardly expect them to raise millions of dollars for an action that could only help their opponent.
It's statistically invalid to sample (count votes with some margin of error) all the states, then resample only a few states whose results were close to but not in the direction you were hoping for. In science, that's called data fraud. You're deliberately casting your selection bias onto the outcome. Same reason why it was invalid to recount only Miami-Dade county in the 2000 election. It's like rolling a 3d6 to generate your character's stats, then only re-rolling the lowest value die. That selection bias will skew the average higher, deviating from the true mean value the dice produce.
You want a fair recount, you have to recount everything. The premise is that something was wrong with the original counting methodology. Therefore you've corrected it, and need to apply that correction to all precincts/counties/states, not just the ones where the correct count would improve the results you want.
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I've wondered about this too. I've noticed pollutants in emissions are measured in PPM - parts per million air molecules in the exhaust. Not in parts per distance traveled. So transportation efficiency (emissions per distance traveled) gets you nothing (volume of air ingested decreases with higher efficiency), and combustion efficiency (more energy produced per cylinder detonation) actually increases PPM even though in practical terms it would be offset by needing to fire the cylinder fewer times to get the same amount of work done. Meanwhile being able to run a lean mixture makes passing these emissions tests a breeze. Heck, you could rig up a bypass to feed intake air straight into the exhaust stream (probably illegal) and drop your PPM to near-zero.
e.g. My 3.0L V6 diesel truck cruises at 65 MPHat 1550 RPM. My 3.2L V6 gas car cruises at 65 MPH at 1800 RPM. 7% higher engine displacement, 16% higher RPM, so 23.9% more airflow volume at the same speed. So even if the diesel put out 23% more PPM than the gas engine, it would actually be emitting less pollutants per mile traveled. The difference is even more pronounced at higher speeds or loads. The diesel can hit 80 MPH at 1900 RPM, while the gas engine will be up around 2400 RPM. 35% higher airflow.
That was fake news. The suicide rate at Foxconn was lower than that of the U.S. at the time of the spike in suicides. The Foxconn suicide myth spread and persists for the same reason other fake news spreads and persists - the people spreading it want to believe it's true, and thus pass it on without first vetting it with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Except in this case the people spreading it are journalists in the mainstream media, whose job it is to review these stories with a critical eye before publishing them. They want to believe factory workers in developing nations were being exploited by western corporations and thus were more prone to attempt suicide, so they recklessly published these stories perpetuating the myth, and still do. Foxconn installed the nets to try to make the Western media shut up, not because there was a greater suicide problem there than anywhere else. I have no love for Apple or Chinese assembly line labor, but this is one criticism they don't deserve.
That's probably it right there. AFAIK the streamed PBS shows do not include ads, so they're identical to the downloaded version. In that light, PBS probably isn't a good way to test the effect of streaming on sales, since a lot of the people opting to stream PBS probably just don't want to bother with downloading and saving the video first. While purchasers of, say, shows available on Hulu might be trying to avoid the ads.
In fact, try as I might, I wasn't able to find these purported paid download version of shows on the PBS website; only DVD and T-shirt sales. There are free downloads of some older episodes, but I could find most of their library only as a stream. There was one Frontline episode I really wanted as a permanent downloaded copy and was willing to pay for, but I wasn't able to find any way to download or buy it except as non-HD DVD. I ended up downloading a copy someone had put on YouTube.
Not that video. The "genuine" Apple charger turns out to be counterfeit, and not much better than the cheap generic charger. You're only going to be able to tell it's crappy if you're an electrical engineer who's dissected these before. (I took 2 EE courses in undergrad so understood most of the terminology he was using, but his rant about it being terrible was Greek to me.)
This related video shows the insides of a genuine charger. Jump ahead to 9m 40s if you've already seen that first video showing the innards of a crappy charger.
Pricing their video service over cellular implies that the cost of the cellular hop is zero, and that the expense of transmitting the video to the viewer is all in the Internet link. Since their own video service is hosted locally, there is no Internet bandwidth consumed, and thus the price should be zero (which was what Netflix offered these guys for free on their landline ISP service and they turned it down). For a market economy to function properly, the minimum pricing has to reflect the expense incurred by the seller.
I can understand zero rating as a temporary promotional measure (e.g. streamed video doesn't count against your cap for the first 6 months if you use our service). But making it the standard price is equivalent to dumping to try to kill off competition. Especially if they're using revenue from other sources to subsidize this service, like say, extra money they're collecting from Netflix in contravention of Net Neutrality.
A friend of my sister's worked there and gave us a tour when we visited. He showed us their vault room where they kept all their videotapes. It wasn't very big, so I asked him since there were so many different sporting events going on every day, how long did they save the recordings of these events. He said most of the stuff (local sports, lower-interest stuff like non-Olympics track events, etc) they only kept for a month or two. Pro sports were kept at least a year, longer for more important games. Playoff finals and particularly notable games, they'd keep indefinitely. But most of the "memorable" events could be boiled down to just a few highlight clips (e.g. a world record-breaking long jump).
A shocking amount of stuff gets erased or tossed out simply because there's no space to save it (or need at the time). If you think about everything everyone does every day, it's a mindboggling amount of material which is produced daily, So it's inevitable that a lot of it is going to be lost (hopefully with a summary or end result saved). You have to be obsessive/compulsive to want to save everything.
The thing that keeps Microsoft afloat is its Windows monopoly (and the Office suite and servers, but both are strongly tied to Windows as they have little presence elsewhere). Up until 10 years ago, the only threat to Windows was Mac OS which had been stuck at 5% market share for decades, and Linux for the desktop which lingered around 1%.
The last 10 years have seen two new entrants to the operating system market - iOS and Android. iOS still has a relatively small, but lucrative userbase. Android already matches if not exceeds Windows' installed userbase. A lot of people dismiss these as a "toy" OS for toy devices. But that's being ignorant of the march of technological progress. 30 years ago my primary computer was a desktop. 20 years ago it was a laptop that was nearly 2 inches thick. 10 years ago it was a notebook just under an inch thick. Today it's a half-inch thick ultrabook, but about half my screen time is on my phone and tablet.
Mobile isn't going to go away. Eventually it's going to eat the laptop and eventually desktop markets. Intel charges a fortune for their CPUs (about $100-$1000 vs about $5-$20 for ARM). As technology advances and ARM processors become more and more capable of performing everyday computing tasks, there will be less and less reason to spend an extra $100-$500 for an x86/x64-based "computer". And if x86/x64 dies, Windows dies with it. Microsoft knows it, and its shareholders know it.
That's why Microsoft worked so hard on Windows RT (basically Windows for ARM). That was their warning shot across Intel's bow that they had better do something to stave off the advance of ARM devices, or Windows was going to jump ship and abandon x86/x64 for ARM. It worked. Intel came out with some new extremely low-power CPUs which were almost competitive with ARM in power consumption but ran x86/x64 software, thus slowing ARM's encroachment into the laptop market (e.g. early Chromebooks were ARM, but they're now Intel). At least for now.
But the Intel can't keep it up forever. Their tax is very high per cm^2 of silicon compared to ARM. Eventually they're going to have to cut their prices, or ARM is going to win out. And if ARM wins, which OS do you think is going to dominate? Windows RT? Yeah neither do I. Which is why Microsoft's shareholders are so anxious that Microsoft do something, anything, to gain a foothold in the mobile (ARM) market.
The price was fine when GoPro was first starting out. Shooting underwater video (or even video where the camera might get wet, like kayaking) meant buying a video camera with a housing costing upwards of a thousand dollars.
GoPro took advantage of technological advancements shrinking the size of a quality video camera to something the size of a webcam, ditching videotape in favor of flash cards. That reduced the size of the waterproof housing needed, allowing them to make the whole thing for a few hundred bucks. That was a lot cheaper than anything else with that capability on the market at the time.
Their problem is that technological advancement has not stopped. Now other companies can make the same stuff they do for less than $100.
If you're buying something like a GoPro in hopes of shooting quality video and becoming in Internet star, then yeah there's a 99.999% chance you're going to be disappointed.
But if you're buying it to record family outings and personal events for sentimental reasons, it's actually a pretty good tool. Small, stays out of the way, and does a pretty good job for its size. The quality of the footage doesn't really matter when the footage is just to help your family reminisce about the activity later. If you want production-quality video of your outing, just hire a professional videographer to go along with you. Let him worry about all the gear, mounts, bags, repairs, batteries, dirt, and getting good shots.
Social media just seems new because for the first time, we have a raw, unadulterated, and referenceable window into the inner workings of the mob that is society.
In the past, if a mob decided to go out and lynch a black man, it was extremely difficult to piece together after the fact exactly how the situation transitioned from a curious crowd gathering to see a dead body, to a furious mob which was somehow convinced that this particular black man was the murderer who needed killing. Now we can analyze it after the fact, or even watch it as it happens in real-time from thousands of miles away.
This unpredictable, unfathomable aspect of the mob was always there. Even the ancient Greeks and Romans complained about it. It's just that for the first time, we're able dissect it after the fact to see how it works. A lot of the stuff the media is hyping as new is in fact as old as humanity. "fake news" = gossip. "going viral" = spreading rumor. "social media" = schmoozing. It just happens on computer networks now (where it's all recorded) instead of via word of mouth.
Successful parasites do not kill their host - if they do that, they have to find another host. The successful ones minimize their impact on the host, using them as a free ride to other opportunities which they can exploit. Sometimes this even develops into a symbiotic relationship.
If the malware doesn't steal user data, the user has no incentive to detect and remove it. Much to the consternation of the ad networks which are the real targets. I wouldn't be surprised if the next step is for this malware to install patches to fix vulnerabilities in the OS, to prevent other less well-thought-out malware from being installed and eventually getting the frustrated user to wipe and reset the phone.
In our defense, we had to deal with forced indoctrination into a philosophy of no-failure and no-discipline. Kids' soccer matches didn't keep score, and everyone got a trophy - even the losing team. And heaven forbid we spanked one of our kids for breaking one of the house rules. The kid tells his teacher about the spanking, and we'd be facing assault charges and CPS would try to take all our kids away from us.
We're sorry we couldn't better prepare you for the real world - where you'll get hurt if you break the rules, and you have to keep trying because you're going to fail a dozen times before you succeed.. But we weren't allowed to.
Most of the shaking during an earthquake happens at frequencies which most closely match the resonance frequency of a 3-story building. If you look at pictures buildings damaged in the Loma Prieta and Northridge quakes, you see most of the collapsed buildings were 3- or 4-stories. Those two were quakes which were just on the cusp of being strong enough to collapse buildings (in an area with strict earthquake building codes). It's harder to see this in larger quakes because they have enough energy to collapse buildings outside this height, and subsequent fires (or tsunamis) can wipe out buildings which survived the initial quake.
A smaller building, like 1-story, has a higher resonance frequency and just gets moved from side-to-side by an earthquake. A larger building like a skyscraper kinda just shimmies in place. It's only the 3-story buildings (and to a lesser extent the 2-story and 4-story buildings) which shake more and more the longer the earthquake goes on, and eventually fall apart. For a large skyscraper, you just have to make the support structures connecting the building to the ground strong enough to withstand this shimmying. Or decouple it entirely from the ground by mounting the building on flexible joints which allow the skyscraper to shake at its lower resonance frequency while the earthquake shakes at a higher frequency. (You can see in the test that the 5-story building has a slightly lower frequency than the input earthquake shaking.)
The main danger of building on landfill is, as you've alluded, that one section of the land underneath the building will liquefy more than others, causing the building to tilt. Not a problem for a short, broad structure like a warehouse, but a serious danger for a tall structure. If you're building a skyscraper on landfill, you're supposed to dig down deep enough to sink the building's supports into bedrock. That way your skyscraper is essentially built on solid ground, just that its lowest levels are underground surrounded by a bunch of landfill, instead of its lowest levels being the ground floor and basement. That the building is sinking indicates this wasn't done.
I don't want to belittle this because India is one of the places where solar actually makes sense. But even there its capacity factor is only about 20%. Compared to 14.5% for the continental U.S. and about 10% in Germany. Capacity factor is the ratio of actual electricity produced (after taking into account night, weather, angle of the sun, downtime due to maintenance, etc) to nameplate (maximum) capacity.
So while it's capacity is 648 MW, its average electrical generation over a year will only be about 20% that, or a more modest 130 MW. Electricity costs about 8 cents/kWh in India. So payback time (excluding operational expenses and interest on loans) will be
($679 million) / (0.2 * 648 MW * 3600 sec/hour * 8766 hours/year * $0.08/kWh) = 7.47 years
India is one of the better places for solar. (The 150,000 home figure seems a little screwy, since 648 MW / 150,000 homes = 4320 Watts, which is about 3.5x the electricity consumption of the average U.S. home. I suspect the 150,000 homes figure already took into account capacity factor, and is not "at full capacity" as TFA claims.)
They should be keeping copies of the archive in multiple locations, along with parity files which can be used to validate potentially compromised and reconstruct corrupted data. That way if one location goes down or is destroyed (fires happen), you still have copies elsewhere. If one site gets hacked and the data changed, you can cross-reference the parity info with other sites to determine which is real and which is modified, and revert the changed data. Kinda like a worldwide ZFS or RAID 5.
Trump makes for a convenient excuse. But given that they're literally keeping snapshots of history, they should already be taking these steps just to safeguard the integrity of the data.
If you only listen to people who quit from working at company, of course you're going to hear it's a terrible place to work. If they didn't think so, they likely would still be working there.
To get a balanced view of what working at the company is really like, you need to sample (hear testimonials from) both people who quit working there, and people who are still working there. Maybe Amazon is evil incarnate. Or maybe the things they did are perfectly normal, it just tickled one of her pet peeves that wouldn't have bothered 98% of the population.
If the people still working there say it's a shit place to work, then you've got something worth reporting.
Editors at slashdot fail to do their job again. News at 11.
Taking it a step further, Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, heck even eBay are just hookup services. Their end form is going to be a stock market-like exchange. People place bids and offers on the market. The line (price) where the bids meet the offers is the fair market price.
e.g. You bid to pay $12 for a ride from your house in the north suburbs to a restaurant downtown. Historically pricing for this route has been about $12, so you figure that should get you an offer soon.. But unbeknownst to you, a ballgame in the nearby sports arena is just ending, resulting in a shortage of drivers. So the offers you're seeing are around $20. You have to decide if you want to wait until the pricing drops down to its historical norm, or if you want to withdraw the bid and place a new one at $20 so you can get a ride quicker.
The "cut" the hookup service takes should be on par with what online brokerages take - around $1 to $10 per "trade". This whole thing where they take a flat % is stupid, since the hookup service's costs are the same whether it's a $10 local ride, or a $200 ride across several states. Licensing and insurance should be managed by the government, just as it is for private vehicles. The only difference is that you should be able to check on a government website that the guy offering you a ride is properly licensed and his insurance is current (an online version of the driver ID placards in taxis). For bonus points, you can set up a system where for the safety of the driver and passenger, both use government-issued ID to mutually register their ride as occurring. The passenger is protected from a crazy driver who kidnaps them, the driver is protected from a mugger posing as passenger. If a crime occurs, it'll be on record who the other party is.
Yes the cost is big. But everything about nuclear is big, including the amount of power generated. Fukushima Daiichi consisted of 6 reactors:
#1 generated 460 MWe from March 1971 to April 2012, or 41.1 years
#2 generated 784 MWe from July 1974 to April 2012, or 37.7 years
#3 generated 784 MWe from March 1976 to April 2012, or 36.1 years
#4 generated 784 MWe from October 1978 to April 2012, or 33.6 years
#5 generated 784 MWe from April 1978 to Jan 2014, or 35.7 years
#6 generated 1100 MWe from October 1979 to Jan 2014, or 34.2 years
Multiply the generating capacity by the time in service and you get 165.7 TWh for reactor #1, 259.1 TWh for #2, 248.1 TWh for #3, 230.9 TWh for #4, 245.3 TWh for #5, and 329.8 TWh for #6. For a total of 1478.9 TWh.
Nuclear's capacity factor in Japan (ratio of actual electricity generated vs peak capacity) started around 46% in the mid-1970s, and had reached 79% by 2001. Assume a linear increase followed by it remaining stable from 2001-2014, and overall capacity factor over this timeframe (which conveniently breaks down into 26 and 13 years) is (26*(.46+.79)/2 + 13*.79) / 39 = 0.68.
So actual electricity generated by the plant would be about 1478.9 TWh * 0.68 = 1005.7 TWh. Round it down and call it an even 1000 TWh.
The average price of electricity in Japan is 26 cents/kWh. Yes the price was lower in the past, but we want the inflation-adjusted total value of electricity generated, so using today's price is valid.
1000 TWh * $0.26/kWh = $260 billion worth of electricity produced over the lifetime of the plant. Even with the second-worst and most expensive nuclear accident in history, the Fukushima Daiichi plant still produced more value in electricity than the cleanup cost.
Now consider that the world generated 2731 TWh with nuclear in 2008. If you go with 20 cents/kWh as a global average electricity price, that's $546 billion worth of electricity generated by nuclear power each year. Add up the cost to clean up Fukushima ($200 billion), Chernobyl ($200 billion), and Three Mile Island ($1 billion). Amortized over the 37 years since the first of those accidents, the cost of cleaning up these nuclear accidents only works out to ($401 billion / 37 years) / (546 billion / 1 year) = 1.98% of the cost of electricity produced.
Basically, the cost of cleaning up nuclear accidents is just 0.4 cents/kWh.
More precisely, it's scroll, scroll, scroll. Ctrl-click to open a link in a new tab. Except you didn't hold down ctrl enough and the link opened up in the current tab. You hit back on your browser, and now you have to start scrolling from the top all over again. Whoever came up with the idea for infinite scroll web pages should be forced to go home and start his trip all over again every time his GPS tells him to make a turn and he misses it.
It's the selection of which person had the biggest impact on shaping world events for the year. That's why Adolf Hitler was PotY in 1938. Not because Time thought he was a great guy, but because his actions sent shockwaves throughout the world. (Stalin won in 1939 for signing a non-aggression pact with Hitler thus allowing WWII to grow into the behemoth it became, rather than nipping it in the bud with a two-front war against the Nazis.)
In that respect, Julian Assange is a braindead choice. He goes incoummunicado for 6 weeks and nobody notices - that's how unimportant he is to world events. Putin may be a good choice, especially if you buy into the Russia hacked U.S. election conspiracy. Arguably, he is the ideological figurehead of the current nationalism movement sweeping through many countries. Theresa May is an attempt to give credit/blame for the Brexit vote to a single individual - Brexit was arguably one of if not the biggest shocking event of the year. Kim Jong Un is in the running because he's managed to turn the most recalcitrant, unpredictable country on Earth even more recalcitrant and unpredictable. And while Trump's election was a big deal, he hasn't actually done anything (except win an election), and won't until late January 2017. This isn't the Nobel Peace Prize which you can win just because they think you're going to do big things.
Food poisoning. Actually, aside from long-term illnesses like the flu, that's what most of my legitimate sick days have been for. (Legitimate at an earlier job. My later employers just said we get 10 "personal" days each year to use if we're sick or just need the day off. That policy also eliminates the incongruity of people who got sick more getting paid more per day worked, and encourages people to stay healthy so they can use those "sick" days as extra vacation days instead.)
U.S. online sales in 2015 was $342 billion in 2015 The sum total of U.S. retail sales was $4.785 trillion in 2015 Yes online sales are growing. But they're still only about 7% of all retail sales.
I bought almost everything except groceries from Amazon and Newegg the last decade, but I'm finding myself buying more and more items from brick and mortar stores precisely for the reasons OP gives - counterfeit goods and easier returns. A big part of the reason I bought from Amazon was the no-hassle returns, but they killed that policy this year. Newegg is exempted only because their main warehouse and return center is 2 miles from where I work.
These guys have yet to learn that people are buying them not just for convenience and price, but because they trust that a big name like Amazon will stand behind the product they sell. If they're gonna mix their inventory with that of their third party sellers, well sorry I'm just gonna buy that item from a big name store whose inventory supply chain I trust. My Amazon orders are way down this year, my Costco purchases are way up (they have a great return policy). And I'm even buying stuff from Best Buy again.
If Clinton had won the Electoral College but Trump had won the popular vote, would you have taken the time to write up an op-ed outlining the flaws of the Electoral College, would you have protested in the streets, would you be demanding Trump be made President? If not, then you are simply being partisan, and your support for this is out of self-interest rather than truly wishing to improve the system.
Someone truly wishing to reform the Electoral College would be for such reform regardless of who won. If you truly believe a change is for the better, you support it even when it works against your own self interests. I think Merkley made a mistake dismantling one of the checks and balances the Founding Fathers put into the system to prevent a simple majority from having too much power, but I respect him for not changing his position even though he now finds himself on the disadvantaged side of his rule change.
(And if you're one of the people who believe Merkley's rule change was necessary because the Republicans were stonewalling in the Senate, the Washington Post keeps a database of how often each Senator votes with his/her party. Here are the stats for the 108th, 109th, 110th, 111th, 112th, and 113th Senates, spanning 2002-2015 with Senate control by both parties, covering both a Republican President and Democrat President. Click on the Party column to sort it by Senators most likely to vote for their party. You'll see it's actually the Democrats who most frequently vote as a block, and the Republicans who are more willing to cross the party line. The meme that Republicans refused to compromise was fake news spread by the mainstream media without any statistical evidence to back it up.)
It's statistically invalid to sample (count votes with some margin of error) all the states, then resample only a few states whose results were close to but not in the direction you were hoping for. In science, that's called data fraud. You're deliberately casting your selection bias onto the outcome. Same reason why it was invalid to recount only Miami-Dade county in the 2000 election. It's like rolling a 3d6 to generate your character's stats, then only re-rolling the lowest value die. That selection bias will skew the average higher, deviating from the true mean value the dice produce.
You want a fair recount, you have to recount everything. The premise is that something was wrong with the original counting methodology. Therefore you've corrected it, and need to apply that correction to all precincts/counties/states, not just the ones where the correct count would improve the results you want.