You have a deep misunderstanding of the math behind voting systems.
The U.S. has a 2-party system because its elections are plurality wins. If a dozen candidates run, the one with the most votes wins. Under a plurality system, the mathematically optimal solution is to consolidate and consolidate until there are just two choices. If you ignore this optimal solution, you get what happened in California - it had two Democrats running for Senator. During the primaries, there were two Democrats on the ballot and over a half dozen Republicans. The Republicans all split the conservative vote, resulting in the two Democrats getting the highest single shares of votes. Since only the top two vote-getters qualified, there was no Republican on the final California ballot for Senator.
Most of Europe uses proportional voting for parliament. If party A gets 30% of the vote, party B gets 25%, party C gets 20%, party D gets 15%, and party E gets 10%, those are the percentages of members of parliament each party gets. Contrast that with the U.S. system where either party A would win outright, or parties A and B would divvy up everything with parties C, D, and E excluded from any representation at all. This proportional voting is what allows more than 2 parties to exist.
Unfortunately, proportional voting is incompatible with the concept enshrined in the U.S. Constitution of each regional group of voters having "their own" representative - a Representative or Senator who answers directly to them. There are a slew of voting systems which preserve regional representation, while overcoming this 2-party optimal solution to representative voting. Several countries use them. Unfortunately, there is no perfectly fair voting system. But mathematically, the plurality-wins system the U.S. uses is among the worst out there.
Voting for Trump out of protest is like shooting your self in the foot to cure foot fungus.
The problem was, so was voting for Clinton because you didn't want Trump to win. When your only choice is between shooting your right foot or your left foot, suddenly the fact that it's a bad way to cure foot fungus becomes irrelevant.
I'm hoping we've reached a nadir in negative campaigning. That from this point forward, candidates will stop trying to make elections about why you shouldn't vote for the other guy (or gal). Because this race to the bottom has not been pleasant.
You're aware that Obama started off with Democrat majorities in both branches of Congress? Heck, he even had a fillibuster-proof supermajority for about half a year (which was when they pushed through Obamacare). The Republican majorities that thwarted Obama were a result of his actions, not in spite of. (I expect the same will happen to Trump in 2018 if he goes off the deep end, with Democrats re-taking the Senate and House.)
As for obstructionism, the Washington Post has a database of House and Senate members' votes which you can sort by how often they vote with their own party. I've had this debate numerous times and have sifted through the database as far back as the beginning (1991). The only real pattern which pops up is that the party in control (D or R) tends to vote along party lines more strongly, while the minority party members tend to compromise and vote against their own party more. This pattern holds regardless of which party controls Congress, and some of the so-called obstructionist Congresses actually had higher rates of compromise than others. Likely the claims of obstructionism are just cherry-picked data - someone upset that a bill didn't pass wanted to blame people opposed to it, rather than the content of the bill.
Just because you don't understand / disagree with certain policies doesn't make them irrelevant. Like Brexit, Trump's political policy positions appealed to lower income people whose jobs and economic situation had been made worse the past two decades by globalization. This is a traditional, if much-ignored, core Democrat group (blue collar workers). When they fled the Democratic ticket to vote for Trump, they won him the election. Contrary to the pundits who were trying to paint Trump as a racist, Trump won a higher share of the Black and Latino vote than Romney did in 2012. Because to these voters, his policy of protectionism mattered more to them than whether he was a racist.
I also suspect the polls showing Clinton comfortably ahead may have backfired. There was strong anti-establishment sentiment in both parties this election. Some people fed up with the establishment but who thought Trump was an idiot may have ended up voting for him as a protest vote, because the polls said Clinton was going to win anyway. If there's evidence this could have happened, we need to seriously consider banning polls for a week or two before an election. These things can influence elections. Back when professional wrestler Jesse Ventura was running for governor of Minnesota, a friend of mine said he was about to fill in the box next to his name as a protest vote. Then he thought to himself, "what if this guy actually wins?" and changed his vote.
You've been eating up everything the media (biased, even though they claim they're not) has been saying about Trump. I tried to warn people like you. Trump is not a right-wing extremist like the media has been trying to portray him to help get Clinton elected. He was actually one of the most politically moderate candidates running in the primaries. That's a large part of the reason the Republican party leaders were horrified he won the nomination. They wanted someone more solidly right-wing (which is why he selected Pence as VP - to mollify the party bosses).
His political beliefs aligned pretty closely with the American mainstream, not the skewed viewpoint the party faithful think is "normal" (either party). I warned you to take him seriously, but instead the press went off-topic onto witch hunts looking for any dirt they could come up with on him, while Clinton supporters got busy planning a transition into a Clinton Presidency. The only poll which seems to have got it right was the USC / Los Angeles Times poll, which tried to correct for how people who refused to answer polls would vote. Apparently with all the public lambasting of Trump going on in the media, a lot of Trump supporters weren't comfortable telling strangers (pollsters) that they were voting for him.
Early in the primaries, Sanders was really close to Clinton in elected delegate count - within about 10%-15%.. But all the media reported the delegate count including the DNC-selected superdelgates, making it appear as if Clinton had an insurmountable 40%-60% lead. That had the effect of discouraging potential Sanders voters from bothering to vote because the primary race was "already over", as well as swaying undecideds to not seriously consider Sanders because "he didn't have a realistic chance of winning."
One party deliberately manipulated their primary process to select the candidate the party bosses wanted, instead of the candidate the voters wanted. The other party grudgingly accepted the voters' choice of nominee even though the party bosses thought it was crazy stupid. The first party lost the Presidency. The latter party won it. Turns out listening to the voters' choice instead of the party bosses' opinions pays off in a democracy. Who'd've thunk it.
Hah. At least your minutes are always consistent. As an amateur astronomer, I have to deal with sidereal time. Basically each sidereal "day" is how much time it takes for a point in the night sky to be in the same location it was last night. It deviates from UTC by 3 min 56 sec every day - how much the sun "falls behind" in the sky relative to the stars each day due to the earth's movement along its circular orbit (read the wiki for a pictorial explanation).
That's a good trick question - "how long does it takes the Earth to rotate once on its axis?" Most people will say 24 hours. It's actually 23h 56m 4s.
Unfortunately some people, mostly in CA, decided they are willing to wait 30min to an hour every day just to get their $1-$5 worth of free electricity. That in turn caused congestion and people who were traveling long distances were annoyed having to wait, delaying their travels.
Actually, this is a problem that will need to be solved before EVs will become a viable replacement for long-range travel. 5000 chargers over 734 stations is 6.8 per station. At a half hour to an hour a charge, that's a maximum throughput of 6.8 - 13.6 cars per hour. Compare to a small gas station with just 4 pumps (2 hoses per pump). At 5 min per fillup (it's closer to 3 min, but let's pretend everyone walks in and waits in line to pay with a credit card), that's a max throughput of 96 cars per hour. If you replaced all ICE vehicles with EVs, you basically need 14 supercharger stations for every small 4-pump gas station (the shorter half hour charge only gives half range, so needs to be done twice as often). Now think of the number of gas stations located along major freeways.
It's tempting to blame the problem on the people tying up the supercharge stations for a free charge, but they're only highlighting a problem which will become the norm in the future as longer-range EVs become more commonplace. Current EV owners just haven't really felt it yet because there are so few of them relative to the number of supercharger stations. Either these charging stations will need to become massive (able to handle 100 cars simultaneously), or some radical new quick-charge method needs to be developed (e.g. battery swaps).
massive profits by a parasitic organization that is dedicated to preserving a monopoly through artificial scarcity.
Artificial scarcity and artificial demand. The traditional wedding ring is a simple gold ring. Has been for centuries if not millenia. De Beers paid Hollywood to promote the concept of a diamond engagement ring in movies in the early 1900s. It worked, and it's now ingrained into the public consciousness that an engagement ring is (incorrectly) a diamond ring.
So you've got an organization which has deliberately created artificial scarcity and artificial demand, trying to argue that natural diamonds are better. There's nothing at all natural about the unholy market they've created.
Games like Chess, Go, Tic-Tac-Toe always let both players see the complete world state. Armed with that knowledge, it's easy to be systematic and deterministic.
Games like Poker and Starcraft hide part of the world state from each player, forcing them to guess at the parts they can't see. That opens up the possibility of one player bluffing - leading the opponent down the wrong decision tree because he's fooled into thinking the part of the world state he can't see is different from what it really is. I don't think this is something an AI can "solve". Certainly one could optimize it, so that it becomes damn good at guessing when a certain player is bluffing or not. But put it up against a different player and all that "learned" experience becomes useless, or even counter-productive. Or even pit it against the same player who's aware he's playing against the AI which beat him last time, and he'll simply do something he would never normally do to throw off the computer. It's a difficult enough problem that in pretty much all commercial computer games with a fog of war feature, the computer is just programmed to cheat by ignoring the fog and seeing everything.
The mainstream press is enamored with Apple and has always cast the profit picture as Apple being normal, everyone else performing poorly. That's actually backwards. The average profit margin in the smartphone industry is not far off the average for consumer electronics (about 3%-7%). Everyone making smartphones is operating under the same economics as everyone making routers, or DVD players, or printers, or laptops. But you hardly see those industries chastised by the press for not making enough profit; in fact most people would consider them to be very healthy industries.
It's Apple which is the aberration, with a profit margin around 25% - about the same as high brand-name fashions. While they're very good at capturing the 5%-10% of the market which is clueless or doesn't care about their money as long as it's popular and looks good, you'll find most technophiles steer clear of their products due to either lacking functionality, or not providing enough cost-to-benefit ratio. Despite the praise lavished upon them by the press for their "innovation", they're not really innovators. They're actually near the bottom in R&D spending as a percentage of revenue. (Though to be fair, they've been increasing R&D spending considerably the last couple years.)
IBM........ $82b revenue... $5.2b R&D... 6.3% of revenue
Saumsung.. $196b revenue.. $14.1b R&D... 7.2% of revenue
Google..... $66b revenue... $9.8b R&D.. 14.8% of revenue
Intel...... $56b revenue.. $11.5b R&D.. 20.6% of revenue
Qualcomm... $25b revenue... $3.7b R&D.. 14.6% of revenue
Microsoft.. $87b revenue.. $11.4b R&D.. 13.1% of revenue
Apple..... $183b revenue... $6.0b R&D... 3.3% of revenue
Yes. That's sort of the point of a legal system. You can't just shit over the laws simply because you really really really want to.
"The people" apparently want it and now it has to go through parliament just like any other law "the people" really really really want.
You've got that completely backwards. The entire concept of a representative government is that the elected legislators represent the people. Instead of the people having to read up and vote on every minutia of legislation that comes up, they go on about their merry lives while the legislators they voted for take care of the legislative stuff in their stead as their full-time job.
If the people decide something in a direct ballot, then there's no representation needed. "The people" have decided. While parliament certainly should decide the details of how the people's will (Brexit) will be accomplished, any attempt by parliament to reverse the decision is indicative of a flaw in the representation process, not some technicality of legislative procedure.
The government exists to serves the people, and has power over the people only because the people consent to it. If the people say screw legislative procedure, we want this, that is their prerogative. They, after all, get to decide how their own government functions. (The only logical conundrum I've run across is whether the people can cast a democratic vote in which they give up the right to make democratic votes.)
Talk about trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip. Zynga (ZNGA) has been trading below $3 for most of its public existence, compared to its $11 IPO in 2011.
The whole point of using memory cards on a camera is so that when one card is full, you can quickly swap it out for a new one and continue shooting. If you've got two cards, you plug the second one into your laptop, start copying photos to the laptop, and go back to shooting. The copy will finish long before your second card is full, so when it does become full you can just reverse the process, format the first card, and go back to shooting. If this weren't the case, there's no need to use memory cards. You could just build 32GB or 64GB or whatever straight into the camera.
The only workarounds Apple leaves are:
you must carry enough memory cards to hold all the photos you'd shoot in a day, then waste time transferring them in bulk instead of transferring them while you continue shooting,
or you must always carry an external card reader with your laptop everywhere you take your camera,
or you need a second camera that you can use while you leave the first one next to the laptop transferring its photos wirelessly.
As for the card sticking halfway out, that's only true for lame laptop vendors who tried to save a few cents for a spring-loaded eject mechanism. Those leave the card sticking halfway so you can pull it out with your fingers (and to save a negligible amount of space inside the chassis). The better laptops have SD readers where the card goes fully inside when inserted. The only reasonable rationale I can think of for eliminating the SD card slot is to make your device waterproof. I suspect what's really going on is that Apple gave the SD Association an ultimatum while negotiating licensing fees, and when the didn't blink Apple had to remove the card slot to save face.
Solar received $4.393 in subsidies while generating 19 billion kWh in 2013 (tables ES4 and ES5). That's a subsidy of 23.1 cents/kWh. The average price of electricity in the U.S. across all sectors is only about 11 cents/kWh.
Solar is its own worst enemy. If it weren't for the massive subsidy it receives, it would only see fringe use in places like sailboats and mountaintop weather stations. Nobody has to try to slow solar down - it is in fact solar proponents who have to keep up these hugely disproportionate subsidies to make it appear competitive.
Note: I fully support renewables like wind and geothermal, which receives subsidies of 3.5 and 1.4 cents/kWh respectively. (And just for completeness, the subsidies for coal, gas, and nuclear are 0.06, 0.06, and 0.2 cents/kWh respectively.) But solar still needs another decade or two in the R&D stage before being rolled out to the masses like its proponents are currently trying to do. The current push is premature to say the least. I suspect that's what's really going on here - Tesla is trying to get a piece of the solar subsidy pie.
Not sure why pacemakers were given as an example. Aside from carriers locking down smartphones, the place this will affect most of the public is in printers with stupid kill-switches if they detect a non-authentic (i.e. 3rd party without the 1000x price markup) ink or toner cartridge.
That's actually too bad. Back in the 1990s when the government was trying to ban cable monopolies, some court decided that since cable, fiber/DSL, and satellite could all provide TV and Internet services to the same house, they competed with each other, And thus it was OK for DSL to be a monopoly, cable to be a monopoly, and satellite to be a monopoy. This is the entire reason it's still legal for local governments to grant a regional monopoly to a cable provider.
AT&T was treading on thin ice when it acquired DirecTV. If it had also acquired TW's cable division, that would've completed the unholy trinity - the aforementioned case would've become irrelevant since one company would've owned all three methods of providing TV and Internet service. And it could've been broken up again as a monopoly.
So basically we're paying 2x more for cable than 20 years ago, and getting 7x more content. Or in other words, the price per channel is less than 30% what it was 20 years ago. (Of course as you say, a lot of those channels are junk. So what we're paying per quality channel is debatable.)
Earthquakes are caused by massive amounts of energy built up by the movement of tectonic plates. Drilling for oil, geothermal drilling, fracking, etc. do not add enough energy to "cause" a quake, even through ground settling. They can trigger a quake to happen earlier than it would have naturally, but that's just releasing energy that would've been released at some time in the future as a natural earthquake.
Blaming earthquakes on drilling is like blaming the camel's broken back on the straw. The straw may have triggered the back to break, but it didn't cause it. All the other stuff piled up on the camel before the straw was 99.99% responsible for causing it.
I delivered pizzas as a part-time job when I was in high school. One particular area had a high black population. All the drivers hated delivering there and would try to skip out on the delivery (go to bathroom, take a break, etc), not because the customers were black, but because they didn't tip well. The same thing happened in another area which was predominantly white, but low income (also bad tippers).
Technically this still counts as a prejudice (pre-judging the customer as a bad tipper based solely on where they live). But it's one which is statistically correct most of the time rather than some of the time.
It also misses the bigger picture. How many women are going to trust that the guy they just met at the bar is telling the truth when he says he got the male birth control shot? Exactly. Nearly all women are going to insist on some other form of birth control that they can be sure of, making this a secondary form of birth control at best (at worst it'll be a way for guys who never got the shot to trick gullible females into having unprotected sex).
Even if this were 100% safe, the only real-world use this would see is among males wishing to avoid a paternity suit (or at least diminish the odds of one being successful). There might be some married couples where the female can accompany the male to the doctor's office to make sure he actually got the shot. But those cases would be better served with a vasectomy.
There's a third category - Unix programming gurus. OS X is a modified version of BSD Unix under the hood. You can pop open a terminal and use pretty much all the familiar unix command line tools. That's running underneath one of the best GUI shells currently available. If you're comfortable enough with Unix to be coding for it (web servers, databases, file servers, etc), you probably prefer Unix over Windows anyway. And the MBP becomes the best laptop available to you as a programming platform. Heck, you can even use the same laptop to do Windows programming because it uses x86/x64 processor which can either run Windows in VM or dual boot to it. And since you're likely test-running your compiled program in a VM anyway, it doesn't matter whether your dev machine runs Windows, Linux, or OS X.
At least that was the case until they destroyed it by replacing the function keys with that stupid touchstrip. The are no longer physical keys you can touch-type to access common IDE commands like search next, debug step, etc. You've got a completely flat strip which you have to look at to make sure you're hitting the right "button", forcing you to take your eyes off the code you're trying to write. Apple gave the "cool shiny" design people too much leeway, and they removed an important part of the keyboard for programmers. (They also lost the "use OS X for daily tasks, dual boot to Windows to play games" crowd, as lots of games also rely on touch-typing the correct function key. Not that there were many of these people left since the MBP GPUs are years behind other laptops.)
The problem is the people bitching (the infantry on the ground - Army and Marine Corps) are not the ones deciding (Air Force brass). During WWII, warplanes were run by the U.S. Army Air Corps. Shortly after, a decision was made to separate it out into its own branch - the U.S. Air Force. Unfortunately, that separation removed a crucial feedback element from ground troops to close air support requirements. (The Army eventually got a concession to be allowed to fly its own aircraft for close air support, but only rotary wing craft. They're only allowed to fly fixed-wing aircraft for recon. That's why they have all those helicopter batallions.)
That's the reason the A-10 has been on the chopping block for nearly 20 years now. The USAF brass has been trying to kill it. They want shiny fighter planes, even though their job - their duty - in support of ground troops calls for scrappy brawlers like the A-10. They've been trying to get rid of it so when ground forces call for close air support, they can throw up their hands and say, "Sorry, not our problem, we don't have any assets that can do that." That would free them up to spend all their budget on planes they want to fly, not planes that they need to fly.
If they don't want the A-10, we should just give the A-10 squadrons to the Army. Bypass this whole stupid inter-services turf war.
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Unfortunately, proportional voting is incompatible with the concept enshrined in the U.S. Constitution of each regional group of voters having "their own" representative - a Representative or Senator who answers directly to them. There are a slew of voting systems which preserve regional representation, while overcoming this 2-party optimal solution to representative voting. Several countries use them. Unfortunately, there is no perfectly fair voting system. But mathematically, the plurality-wins system the U.S. uses is among the worst out there.
Lisa Simpson in 2020!
The problem was, so was voting for Clinton because you didn't want Trump to win. When your only choice is between shooting your right foot or your left foot, suddenly the fact that it's a bad way to cure foot fungus becomes irrelevant.
I'm hoping we've reached a nadir in negative campaigning. That from this point forward, candidates will stop trying to make elections about why you shouldn't vote for the other guy (or gal). Because this race to the bottom has not been pleasant.
You're aware that Obama started off with Democrat majorities in both branches of Congress? Heck, he even had a fillibuster-proof supermajority for about half a year (which was when they pushed through Obamacare). The Republican majorities that thwarted Obama were a result of his actions, not in spite of. (I expect the same will happen to Trump in 2018 if he goes off the deep end, with Democrats re-taking the Senate and House.)
As for obstructionism, the Washington Post has a database of House and Senate members' votes which you can sort by how often they vote with their own party. I've had this debate numerous times and have sifted through the database as far back as the beginning (1991). The only real pattern which pops up is that the party in control (D or R) tends to vote along party lines more strongly, while the minority party members tend to compromise and vote against their own party more. This pattern holds regardless of which party controls Congress, and some of the so-called obstructionist Congresses actually had higher rates of compromise than others. Likely the claims of obstructionism are just cherry-picked data - someone upset that a bill didn't pass wanted to blame people opposed to it, rather than the content of the bill.
Just because you don't understand / disagree with certain policies doesn't make them irrelevant. Like Brexit, Trump's political policy positions appealed to lower income people whose jobs and economic situation had been made worse the past two decades by globalization. This is a traditional, if much-ignored, core Democrat group (blue collar workers). When they fled the Democratic ticket to vote for Trump, they won him the election. Contrary to the pundits who were trying to paint Trump as a racist, Trump won a higher share of the Black and Latino vote than Romney did in 2012. Because to these voters, his policy of protectionism mattered more to them than whether he was a racist.
I also suspect the polls showing Clinton comfortably ahead may have backfired. There was strong anti-establishment sentiment in both parties this election. Some people fed up with the establishment but who thought Trump was an idiot may have ended up voting for him as a protest vote, because the polls said Clinton was going to win anyway. If there's evidence this could have happened, we need to seriously consider banning polls for a week or two before an election. These things can influence elections. Back when professional wrestler Jesse Ventura was running for governor of Minnesota, a friend of mine said he was about to fill in the box next to his name as a protest vote. Then he thought to himself, "what if this guy actually wins?" and changed his vote.
You've been eating up everything the media (biased, even though they claim they're not) has been saying about Trump. I tried to warn people like you. Trump is not a right-wing extremist like the media has been trying to portray him to help get Clinton elected. He was actually one of the most politically moderate candidates running in the primaries. That's a large part of the reason the Republican party leaders were horrified he won the nomination. They wanted someone more solidly right-wing (which is why he selected Pence as VP - to mollify the party bosses).
His political beliefs aligned pretty closely with the American mainstream, not the skewed viewpoint the party faithful think is "normal" (either party). I warned you to take him seriously, but instead the press went off-topic onto witch hunts looking for any dirt they could come up with on him, while Clinton supporters got busy planning a transition into a Clinton Presidency. The only poll which seems to have got it right was the USC / Los Angeles Times poll, which tried to correct for how people who refused to answer polls would vote. Apparently with all the public lambasting of Trump going on in the media, a lot of Trump supporters weren't comfortable telling strangers (pollsters) that they were voting for him.
Early in the primaries, Sanders was really close to Clinton in elected delegate count - within about 10%-15%.. But all the media reported the delegate count including the DNC-selected superdelgates, making it appear as if Clinton had an insurmountable 40%-60% lead. That had the effect of discouraging potential Sanders voters from bothering to vote because the primary race was "already over", as well as swaying undecideds to not seriously consider Sanders because "he didn't have a realistic chance of winning."
One party deliberately manipulated their primary process to select the candidate the party bosses wanted, instead of the candidate the voters wanted. The other party grudgingly accepted the voters' choice of nominee even though the party bosses thought it was crazy stupid. The first party lost the Presidency. The latter party won it. Turns out listening to the voters' choice instead of the party bosses' opinions pays off in a democracy. Who'd've thunk it.
Hah. At least your minutes are always consistent. As an amateur astronomer, I have to deal with sidereal time. Basically each sidereal "day" is how much time it takes for a point in the night sky to be in the same location it was last night. It deviates from UTC by 3 min 56 sec every day - how much the sun "falls behind" in the sky relative to the stars each day due to the earth's movement along its circular orbit (read the wiki for a pictorial explanation).
That's a good trick question - "how long does it takes the Earth to rotate once on its axis?" Most people will say 24 hours. It's actually 23h 56m 4s.
Actually, this is a problem that will need to be solved before EVs will become a viable replacement for long-range travel. 5000 chargers over 734 stations is 6.8 per station. At a half hour to an hour a charge, that's a maximum throughput of 6.8 - 13.6 cars per hour. Compare to a small gas station with just 4 pumps (2 hoses per pump). At 5 min per fillup (it's closer to 3 min, but let's pretend everyone walks in and waits in line to pay with a credit card), that's a max throughput of 96 cars per hour. If you replaced all ICE vehicles with EVs, you basically need 14 supercharger stations for every small 4-pump gas station (the shorter half hour charge only gives half range, so needs to be done twice as often). Now think of the number of gas stations located along major freeways.
It's tempting to blame the problem on the people tying up the supercharge stations for a free charge, but they're only highlighting a problem which will become the norm in the future as longer-range EVs become more commonplace. Current EV owners just haven't really felt it yet because there are so few of them relative to the number of supercharger stations. Either these charging stations will need to become massive (able to handle 100 cars simultaneously), or some radical new quick-charge method needs to be developed (e.g. battery swaps).
Artificial scarcity and artificial demand. The traditional wedding ring is a simple gold ring. Has been for centuries if not millenia. De Beers paid Hollywood to promote the concept of a diamond engagement ring in movies in the early 1900s. It worked, and it's now ingrained into the public consciousness that an engagement ring is (incorrectly) a diamond ring.
So you've got an organization which has deliberately created artificial scarcity and artificial demand, trying to argue that natural diamonds are better. There's nothing at all natural about the unholy market they've created.
Games like Chess, Go, Tic-Tac-Toe always let both players see the complete world state. Armed with that knowledge, it's easy to be systematic and deterministic.
Games like Poker and Starcraft hide part of the world state from each player, forcing them to guess at the parts they can't see. That opens up the possibility of one player bluffing - leading the opponent down the wrong decision tree because he's fooled into thinking the part of the world state he can't see is different from what it really is. I don't think this is something an AI can "solve". Certainly one could optimize it, so that it becomes damn good at guessing when a certain player is bluffing or not. But put it up against a different player and all that "learned" experience becomes useless, or even counter-productive. Or even pit it against the same player who's aware he's playing against the AI which beat him last time, and he'll simply do something he would never normally do to throw off the computer. It's a difficult enough problem that in pretty much all commercial computer games with a fog of war feature, the computer is just programmed to cheat by ignoring the fog and seeing everything.
(Silly) Samsung promo video from 2014
Samsung to introduce foldable phones in 2017
The mainstream press is enamored with Apple and has always cast the profit picture as Apple being normal, everyone else performing poorly. That's actually backwards. The average profit margin in the smartphone industry is not far off the average for consumer electronics (about 3%-7%). Everyone making smartphones is operating under the same economics as everyone making routers, or DVD players, or printers, or laptops. But you hardly see those industries chastised by the press for not making enough profit; in fact most people would consider them to be very healthy industries.
........ $82b revenue ... $5.2b R&D ... 6.3% of revenue .. $196b revenue .. $14.1b R&D ... 7.2% of revenue ..... $66b revenue ... $9.8b R&D .. 14.8% of revenue ...... $56b revenue .. $11.5b R&D .. 20.6% of revenue ... $25b revenue ... $3.7b R&D .. 14.6% of revenue .. $87b revenue .. $11.4b R&D .. 13.1% of revenue ..... $183b revenue ... $6.0b R&D ... 3.3% of revenue
It's Apple which is the aberration, with a profit margin around 25% - about the same as high brand-name fashions. While they're very good at capturing the 5%-10% of the market which is clueless or doesn't care about their money as long as it's popular and looks good, you'll find most technophiles steer clear of their products due to either lacking functionality, or not providing enough cost-to-benefit ratio. Despite the praise lavished upon them by the press for their "innovation", they're not really innovators. They're actually near the bottom in R&D spending as a percentage of revenue. (Though to be fair, they've been increasing R&D spending considerably the last couple years.)
IBM
Saumsung
Google
Intel
Qualcomm
Microsoft
Apple
You've got that completely backwards. The entire concept of a representative government is that the elected legislators represent the people. Instead of the people having to read up and vote on every minutia of legislation that comes up, they go on about their merry lives while the legislators they voted for take care of the legislative stuff in their stead as their full-time job.
If the people decide something in a direct ballot, then there's no representation needed. "The people" have decided. While parliament certainly should decide the details of how the people's will (Brexit) will be accomplished, any attempt by parliament to reverse the decision is indicative of a flaw in the representation process, not some technicality of legislative procedure.
The government exists to serves the people, and has power over the people only because the people consent to it. If the people say screw legislative procedure, we want this, that is their prerogative. They, after all, get to decide how their own government functions. (The only logical conundrum I've run across is whether the people can cast a democratic vote in which they give up the right to make democratic votes.)
Talk about trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip. Zynga (ZNGA) has been trading below $3 for most of its public existence, compared to its $11 IPO in 2011.
The only workarounds Apple leaves are:
As for the card sticking halfway out, that's only true for lame laptop vendors who tried to save a few cents for a spring-loaded eject mechanism. Those leave the card sticking halfway so you can pull it out with your fingers (and to save a negligible amount of space inside the chassis). The better laptops have SD readers where the card goes fully inside when inserted. The only reasonable rationale I can think of for eliminating the SD card slot is to make your device waterproof. I suspect what's really going on is that Apple gave the SD Association an ultimatum while negotiating licensing fees, and when the didn't blink Apple had to remove the card slot to save face.
Solar received $4.393 in subsidies while generating 19 billion kWh in 2013 (tables ES4 and ES5). That's a subsidy of 23.1 cents/kWh. The average price of electricity in the U.S. across all sectors is only about 11 cents/kWh.
Solar is its own worst enemy. If it weren't for the massive subsidy it receives, it would only see fringe use in places like sailboats and mountaintop weather stations. Nobody has to try to slow solar down - it is in fact solar proponents who have to keep up these hugely disproportionate subsidies to make it appear competitive.
Note: I fully support renewables like wind and geothermal, which receives subsidies of 3.5 and 1.4 cents/kWh respectively. (And just for completeness, the subsidies for coal, gas, and nuclear are 0.06, 0.06, and 0.2 cents/kWh respectively.) But solar still needs another decade or two in the R&D stage before being rolled out to the masses like its proponents are currently trying to do. The current push is premature to say the least. I suspect that's what's really going on here - Tesla is trying to get a piece of the solar subsidy pie.
Not sure why pacemakers were given as an example. Aside from carriers locking down smartphones, the place this will affect most of the public is in printers with stupid kill-switches if they detect a non-authentic (i.e. 3rd party without the 1000x price markup) ink or toner cartridge.
That's actually too bad. Back in the 1990s when the government was trying to ban cable monopolies, some court decided that since cable, fiber/DSL, and satellite could all provide TV and Internet services to the same house, they competed with each other, And thus it was OK for DSL to be a monopoly, cable to be a monopoly, and satellite to be a monopoy. This is the entire reason it's still legal for local governments to grant a regional monopoly to a cable provider.
AT&T was treading on thin ice when it acquired DirecTV. If it had also acquired TW's cable division, that would've completed the unholy trinity - the aforementioned case would've become irrelevant since one company would've owned all three methods of providing TV and Internet service. And it could've been broken up again as a monopoly.
Actually this one is pretty simple. In 1995, there were 139 cable programming services (channels). By 2002 there were 280. The current list is over 1000 channels (though a bunch are east/west variants of the same channel).
So basically we're paying 2x more for cable than 20 years ago, and getting 7x more content. Or in other words, the price per channel is less than 30% what it was 20 years ago. (Of course as you say, a lot of those channels are junk. So what we're paying per quality channel is debatable.)
Earthquakes are caused by massive amounts of energy built up by the movement of tectonic plates. Drilling for oil, geothermal drilling, fracking, etc. do not add enough energy to "cause" a quake, even through ground settling. They can trigger a quake to happen earlier than it would have naturally, but that's just releasing energy that would've been released at some time in the future as a natural earthquake.
Blaming earthquakes on drilling is like blaming the camel's broken back on the straw. The straw may have triggered the back to break, but it didn't cause it. All the other stuff piled up on the camel before the straw was 99.99% responsible for causing it.
I delivered pizzas as a part-time job when I was in high school. One particular area had a high black population. All the drivers hated delivering there and would try to skip out on the delivery (go to bathroom, take a break, etc), not because the customers were black, but because they didn't tip well. The same thing happened in another area which was predominantly white, but low income (also bad tippers).
Technically this still counts as a prejudice (pre-judging the customer as a bad tipper based solely on where they live). But it's one which is statistically correct most of the time rather than some of the time.
It also misses the bigger picture. How many women are going to trust that the guy they just met at the bar is telling the truth when he says he got the male birth control shot? Exactly. Nearly all women are going to insist on some other form of birth control that they can be sure of, making this a secondary form of birth control at best (at worst it'll be a way for guys who never got the shot to trick gullible females into having unprotected sex).
Even if this were 100% safe, the only real-world use this would see is among males wishing to avoid a paternity suit (or at least diminish the odds of one being successful). There might be some married couples where the female can accompany the male to the doctor's office to make sure he actually got the shot. But those cases would be better served with a vasectomy.
There's a third category - Unix programming gurus. OS X is a modified version of BSD Unix under the hood. You can pop open a terminal and use pretty much all the familiar unix command line tools. That's running underneath one of the best GUI shells currently available. If you're comfortable enough with Unix to be coding for it (web servers, databases, file servers, etc), you probably prefer Unix over Windows anyway. And the MBP becomes the best laptop available to you as a programming platform. Heck, you can even use the same laptop to do Windows programming because it uses x86/x64 processor which can either run Windows in VM or dual boot to it. And since you're likely test-running your compiled program in a VM anyway, it doesn't matter whether your dev machine runs Windows, Linux, or OS X.
At least that was the case until they destroyed it by replacing the function keys with that stupid touchstrip. The are no longer physical keys you can touch-type to access common IDE commands like search next, debug step, etc. You've got a completely flat strip which you have to look at to make sure you're hitting the right "button", forcing you to take your eyes off the code you're trying to write. Apple gave the "cool shiny" design people too much leeway, and they removed an important part of the keyboard for programmers. (They also lost the "use OS X for daily tasks, dual boot to Windows to play games" crowd, as lots of games also rely on touch-typing the correct function key. Not that there were many of these people left since the MBP GPUs are years behind other laptops.)
The problem is the people bitching (the infantry on the ground - Army and Marine Corps) are not the ones deciding (Air Force brass). During WWII, warplanes were run by the U.S. Army Air Corps. Shortly after, a decision was made to separate it out into its own branch - the U.S. Air Force. Unfortunately, that separation removed a crucial feedback element from ground troops to close air support requirements. (The Army eventually got a concession to be allowed to fly its own aircraft for close air support, but only rotary wing craft. They're only allowed to fly fixed-wing aircraft for recon. That's why they have all those helicopter batallions.)
That's the reason the A-10 has been on the chopping block for nearly 20 years now. The USAF brass has been trying to kill it. They want shiny fighter planes, even though their job - their duty - in support of ground troops calls for scrappy brawlers like the A-10. They've been trying to get rid of it so when ground forces call for close air support, they can throw up their hands and say, "Sorry, not our problem, we don't have any assets that can do that." That would free them up to spend all their budget on planes they want to fly, not planes that they need to fly.
If they don't want the A-10, we should just give the A-10 squadrons to the Army. Bypass this whole stupid inter-services turf war.