This is one criticism I've had of USB. Under the guise of being user friendly, OS programmers have made the OS automatically do all sorts of stupid and insecure things when you plug something into the USB port. CD/DVD drives used to have the same problem (automatically running an executable off the disc) until it became such a common vector for malware that Microsoft finally disabled the autorun feature by default.
When you plug in a USB device, you should get a pop-up asking if you want to access it in read-only mode or read/write mode, and whether it should be active (can auto-install stuff and mess with the system) or passive (can't change anything about your system - you will have to select/install the drivers yourself). You can have a "let the OS manage this automatically" option for the computer illiterate, but it should not be the default, and should throw up a big warning about malware vulnerability and decreased security with that option.
Apple is rather unique in that people forget their failures while remembering their successes, or even incorrectly attribute otherpeople'sinnovations to Apple. For other companies, it's usually the other way around. That's why people joked that Jobs projected a Reality Distortion Field.
If there's anything kids these days are good at, it's taking common words and phrases we use in everyday speech and turning them into obscure undecipherable abbreviations for text messages.
iPhone 7 Plus has a pair of 12MP cameras that are able to take SLR-quality images. It offers bokeh capability
Bokeh is a function of the lens diameter relative to the subject distance (and distance of other objects from the focal plane). For a given scene, cannot be created any other way other than a physically bigger lens. You know the penumbra during an eclipse (the area experiencing a partial eclipse during a solar eclipse)? That corresponds to bokeh. There is nothing you can do on the ground to enlarge this area. It is purely a function of geometry. (Mathematically, it's the point distribution function of the lens.)
You can fake it in software. I've been saying for over a decade that two small lenses with some lateral separation should allow an algorithm to estimate distance and blur the parts of the picture outside the focal plane appropriately to simulate bokeh. But it's not real bokeh, it's a digital manipulation.
Where your toothpaste analogy fails is that it's easy to buy toothburshes and toothpaste separately. What if that weren't the case? What if toothbrushes only and always came bundled together with a brand toothpaste you didn't like to use? And the only way for you to buy a toothbrush was to also pay for the toothpaste which you'd never use?
I agree with this legal decision for desktops, but not for laptops. It's easy to to build your own desktop if you don't like any of the pre-built offerings with Windows pre-loaded. But it's virtually impossible to buy a laptop without Windows pre-loaded.
Vocaloids did this long before voice assistants. To be done properly though, the recording has to be done at a constant pitch, so it's easier to modulate it by computer later. "Harvesting" phonemes, diphomes, and polyphomes from pre-recorded spoken speech isn't as effective because you need to post-process it to remove the pitch change. (It should be noted that adding inflections to make it sound like spoken speech is a huge AI project in itself. Singing is a lot easier to synthesize because these changes in intonation and pitch are mostly pre-determined by the music.)
Because most of the idiots in the press (including popular online review sites) are enamored with Apple, and their reviews constantly criticize everything any other manufacturers do differently. Thanks to them we've gotten non-replaceable batteries, briefly lost the microSD slot, glass backs, and "premium" metal bodies which dent on impact instead of superior plastic which simply bounces back into shape. All so they can have sleek and shiny devices that feel good in their hands, instead of functional devices that are actually more durable despite how they feel.
Since at least the 1990s (when I first became aware of them). Basically the modus operandi is you found a school in some field where students can get college loans, preferably government-backed since a lot of the students aren't very credit-worthy. The students apply and are accepted into your school, pay their tuition with government or government-guaranteed student loans, and you "educate" them in the promised field. Net effect is you get the loan money, student gets the debt, and the government is on the hook for any debt the students can't pay back. You're effectively using the students to launder the money you're receiving from the government (they are listed as the recipient, not you).
The problem is this is the exact same MO as a legit school. There are supposed to be accrediting organizations which audit the schools' programs and confirm that they are legitimately teaching students marketable skills. But some of these accrediting organizations aren't very good and should've been removed from the authorized list decades ago. Basically the same problem that led to the housing bubble - the bond credit rating agencies which were supposed to investigate mortgage-backed investments (because the average investor/student has nowhere near the resources or skill necessary for a through investigation) shirked their duties and just rubber stamped them as low-risk when they were anything but.
It's ok to put a high-performance engine into your car. But you damn well better be sure the instruments and gauges monitoring that engine are working properly, lest it blow up on you.
It's the standard Press trope of hyping up a story by trying to make it sound like the smallest possible factor was responsible for all the huge consequences. (There's a word for this in other languages, but not in English. Basically the sense of unfairness you get when the consequences just do not "fit" the precipitating action.)
If we could backtrack far enough in chaos theory, the Press would go nuts with stories about how a butterfly flapping its wing in Texas wiped out the Eastern Seaboard with a hurricane. (Well, maybe not since that might get the public to start asking for a butterfly extermination program.)
All these codecs allow you to choose the bitrate, so efficiency is meaningless without a common basis for comparison. In this case it turns out they mean efficiency at the same video quality. But video quality is a completely subjective thing - how can you compare it in a reproducible manner? So I dug into how Netflix is deterministically measuring something subjective. That in itself is a pretty fascinating read.
tl;dr - they took subjective test results from showing video samples to people, then used machine learning to develop an algorithm which produced similar results.
I thought the mission performed poorly too, but your criticism is off-base. The surface gravity of the comet was several hundred thousand times less than Earth gravity. It wasn't like landing on Mars. It was like docking with the International Space Station, except without a docking adapter. Landing on a planet is relatively easy in contrast because you've got a huge margin of error by which you can over-thrust and still land successfully. e.g. On Earth, basically everything between 0 and 1g upward thrust will still slow you down, yet will not compromise your landing (cause you to lift back up) after you touch down.
When docking in zero-g or near-zero-g, you need to match velocities precisely - the margin of error is almost nil. That's why they went with the harpoon system - because docking is a damned difficult thing to do even when you have a docking adapter and a computer and human pilot right there giving real-time thrust correction inputs.
I expected more from the mission only because the Japanese pulled off an even tougher "landing" (the asteroid was about 1/300th the mass of the comet). That spacecraft however was designed as touch-and-go, rather than permanently landing ("attaching" is probably a better word at these low surface gravities).
You're probably thinking of the ridiculous amounts made by CEOs of the biggest companies (Fortune 500, S&P 500, etc). Yes they're mostly not worth it. But they only make up less than 0.02% of all businesses with employees (roughly 6 million). And only about 5% of all businesses employing 500+ people.
The media wants to make a story out of the poor-rich pay gap, so they cherry-pick the data which best supports their argument. While that data is relevant to the subset it's picked from, don't make the mistake of extrapolating it to the other 99.98%. Or even the other 95%. That's stereotyping and prejudice. Some people get all upset when you take a trait present in only 5% of, say, African-Americans and extrapolate it to the entire population. But are more than happy do the exact same thing when it comes to something like CEOs. You know that thing about CEOs being psychopaths? It's only 4% of them (vs 1% for the general population). Yet some people gleefully use that stat to justify their insults, prejudice, and bigotry against the other 96%.
It certainly would help to provide a basic income as long as people are free to work and earn extra money without loss of that basic income. There are a couple of difficulties as those that work in low paying jobs will resent people earning about what they earn without working.
That's only an issue if you use hard cutoffs like everyone seems to nowadays because they hated math in high school and don't want anything with a formula. e.g. We'll give you $500/mo in assistance, but the moment you make more than $1000/mo working, that assistance disappears. That creates a negative income gradient. At $0 wages, you're getting $500/mo. At $1000/mo wages, you're getting $1500/mo. At $1001/mo wages, you drop back down to $1001/mo. This discourages getting a better job or working more hours. The assistance either needs to be universal (everyone receives the same amount), or graduated (using a formula!) so it's slowly phased out as you earn more so the income gradient always remains positive.
There's also the issue where assistance scales with certain things under the control of the recipient more than the expenses. e.g. If you have 2 kids and are on food stamps, adding a third kid raises your expenses only $y/mo, but the food stamps you receive increases more than $y/mo. Thus creating an incentive for poor folks who can't afford to raise more kids to have more kids as an easy way to receive more money. The assistance has to scale in a way which discourages adding expenses, not creating more expenses as a way to get more assistance.
Finally there's the problem where the market tries to correct for the existence of a basic income (money for doing no work) by devaluing the basic income while simultaneously increasing the value of wages (money for doing work). The net effect is inflation - the value of the currency decreases (prices increase) while wages rise to keep pace. The $500/mo basic income decreases in value year-over-year (how quickly depends on the amount of the basic income - the closer it is to the average wage, the faster it devalues), while purchasing power from wages remains steady because of the wage inflation.
If you try to correct for this by increasing the basic income each year, you just increase the rate of inflation. If you try to fix that by fixing prices, you break the economy since production costs are now no longer allowed to be reflected in prices. So the only way to get it to work is to either limit it to a subsection of the population (i.e. it's not universal), or to make it a small fraction of the average income (i.e. it can't be a living income). You might be able to get it to work by bypassing money entirely, and distributing the basic income directly as goods and services. i.e. No more EBT cards - you get your assistance not as a money-equivalent, but as food directly from the food bank. There will be some leakage as some people e.g. sell their weekly allotment of canned foods rather than consume it, but as long as that leakage is a small fraction of the total it shouldn't have a large effect on the general economy.
I'm asking because that Nature link only seems to be considering consequences of the loss of the species as a food source. What about some of the other possible consequences? Could these human-biting mosquitoes be filling an ecological niche, and without them could biting flies (which hurt like hell) end up filling the now-empty niche and exploding in population? Could Zika mutate into a different form which allows it to be transmitted by other mosquitoes, or even flies?
You can't just consider whether the rest of the ecosystem could survive the loss of mosquitoes. You have to look at how it would react to the loss.
The problem is, the aggressive charge/discharge cycle is what's giving these batteries a competitive energy density compared to other battery chemistry and other energy storage solutions.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and predict that the solution will be to partition the two reactants in the battery chemistry with something more than a 24 micrometer separator. Possibly even switch to a chemistry which doesn't require carrying around one of the reactants at all, and getting it from the air. You know, like gasoline needs oxygen from the air to release its energy, so as long as you keep it in a sealed tank a fire is virtually impossible.
Once upon a time, a city was considering expanding its subway system. To determine if this was a worthy use of public money, they decided to find out how many hours a week the average person rode the subway. The agency tasked with collecting these statistics thought about the problem. Asking random people on the street seemed like it would waste a lot of time since most of those people might not even ride the subway. Then they realized if they just asked people riding the subway how many hours a week they rode, it would neatly filter out the non-riders and dramatically simplify their job. So that's what they did.
When the city got the statistics, it said there needed to be 10x as many trains as they currently had. That obviously couldn't be right since the trains were only occasionally full. So what went wrong?
First, the statistical gathering method filtered out non-riders. This skewed the average (both mean and median) up, since they didn't have a bunch of "0 hours" in their statistics.
Second, asking people riding the subway gives you a time normalized sample, not a population normalized sample. Say only two people use the subway, one of whom rides it 1 hour a week, while the other rides it 10 hours a week. If you randomly hop onto the subway at any give time, you are 10x more likely to encouter the 10 hr/wk rider. Your statistics end up saying more about who is riding the subway at any given time, rather than how much each person usually rides the subway.
Likely, the only thing these HackerRank statistics are measuring is that there are just a lot more job opportunities for mediocre programmers in the U.S. and India. While there are fewer such opportunities in China, Russia, and Poland, so the few people who pursue programming careers there tend to be the cream of the crop. To normalize it, you'd have to survey to find out how many total programmers there are in each country, compare to their total populations, then assuming a normal distribution of "skill" for the entire population of the country, map each countries results to that distribution. Then for the countries where the number of people taking the test are overrepresented relative to the total population, truncate their distribution to match that of underrepresented countries. e.g. If, say, only 0.01% of Poland's population tried the HackerRank tests, while 0.1% of the U.S. population did, then you'd have to compare Poland's results with the top 10% of the U.S. results (0.01% of the U.S. population matching the 0.01% of Poland's population) to get an apples-to-apples comparison. But that's a lot of assuming and normalizing for me to be comfortable with using the data to draw conclusions.
I love The Twilight Zone, but Hollywood comes up with lots of cute but unrealistic stories because almost none of the people who work there came from STEM fields. There are problems which simply can't be solved by a Turing-complete machine. You see, Goedel's incompleteness theorems proved that any logical system is incomplete. There are always problems you can make within that system which cannot be resolved without abstracting your reasoning beyond that system. So until/unless the artificial intelligence folks actually succeed in creating a program which can "think" beyond its programming, there will always be problems which can't be solved by machines but can be solved by people.
So the jobs being replaced by machines are the simpler, more menial tasks which don't require this sort of creative thinking. The sensors at the doors which detect shoplifting don't always work. They're just programmed to sound an alarm if they sense a RFID tag being carried out. Sometimes the cashier forgets to remove the tag. Sometimes a shoplifter figures out a way to bypass the sensor (e.g. wrap the tag in aluminum foil). It takes a human security guard to analyze, judge, and respond appropriately to each of these situations which fall outside normal procedure and expectations. Not saying humans are perfect are what we do, but our ability to analyze situations which fall outside the scope of what we've been taught, judge how the operating guidelines we were taught would be applied to this new situation if it had been known about before-hand, and respond appropriately based on those extrapolated guidelines, is something machines cannot yet replace us at doing.
They didn't set out to make a partial upper deck. The original plan was to make it a full double-decker like Airbus eventually did with the A380. But given their deadline, they didn't think they could solve the problem of adding (safe) evacuation slides for passengers on the upper deck in time, so they settled for a traditional single-decker (which they already had experience designing, just needed to scale everything up to make it wider). The short blister on top for the cockpit was added to allow the cargo variant to have a swing nose so you could load cargo through the front, instead of through the side. So it's not really "copying" someone else's design when there's only one practical solution (the impractical one being putting the cockpit in the swing-away nose and designing all sorts of latches for the mechanical linkages between the cockpit controls to the plane's control surfaces).
This is why the upper deck on the early 747-100 is a lot shorter than in later variants like the 747-400. The few upper-deck seats on the 747-100 were an afterthought, added more for novelty than for increased passenger capacity. The lower deck on the 747 already carried nearly 3x as many passengers as any other plane operating at the time. Boeing tried for decades to sell the idea of a full double-deck 747 to the airlines, but not enough of them would commit to them. So Boeing never bothered making it. When Airbus announced their plans for the A380, Boeing tried again to pitch a full double-deck 747, and again not enough airlines said they wanted it. That's why they didn't try to compete with Airbus on the A380.
Production of the A380 will probably soon cease, and its sales have just barely recouped its design costs. The 4-engine airliners like the 747, A340, and A380 are being eaten alive in the market by twin-engine airliners like the 777, 787, and A350 (2 engines are more efficient than 4). The disparity between A380 orders and deliveries is mostly due to airlines which placed orders but have asked to delay delivery or have refused receipt as they consider cancelling. Airbus needs to produce about 20-25 a year for the production facilities alone (i.e. excluding design costs) to operate without losing money. And right now they're scheduled to drop to 12 deliveries/year in 2018, so they'll probably wind up losing money on the A380 overall (the remaining 100 or so orders will probably be delivered at a loss, if they're not canceled outright). So it would appear Boeing's market analysis was correct that there wasn't enough market demand for a full double-deck airliner. It's a good thing the EU government guaranteed the loans Airbus took out to design the plane or this might've bankrupted the company. Competition between Airbus and Boeing is what keeps technology progressing and prices low.
This isn't like Atom, which used an entirely different core design. Core M (both Broadwell and Skylake) is just a regular Core i, with a lower TDP and clock speeds. Core M Broadwell limited Turbo Boost to a single core, but Skylake will Turbo on both cores. It seems to be using the i7 dual core design, since Core M has 4MB cache like the i7, instead of 3MB like the i5 and i3. Which is also why Skylake Core M beats out a similarly-clocked Skylake mobile i5 in certain short benchmarks - the benchmark isn't long enough for thermal throttling to kick in, and the 4MB cache beats out the 3MB cache.
Here's Rate of alcohol-related deaths. Eastern European countries top the list. Germany, France, Denmark Sweden, Norway, Finland, Austria, Poland, hell even Canada all have higher death rates than the U.S. Italy and Spain have much lower death rates.
Based on a quick perusal of these stats, I can't find any real pattern or correlation with consumption, minimum age, addiction, and death rate. The one interesting stat was that this is predominantly a white and Hispanic problem. Blacks and Asians are less than half as likely to binge drink. Suggesting either genetics or social culture is the distinguishing factor, since all of those people grew up and live under the same laws.
If you cheat on your taxes, then yeah you'd be subject to fines for past tax evasion. But if you followed the letter of the tax law at the time, and some time later the government decided the law was wrong and changed it, then no you wouldn't be subject to retroactive fines. At least in countries which prohibit ex post facto laws.
Unless you're limiting your purchases and employment to sole proprietorships or LLCs (which are pass-through tax structuress), everything you buy or anywhere you work is subject to corporate taxes.
OP is absolutely right. The fundamental currency is productivity, and only people generate productivity, so only people pay taxes. No matter where you shift the direct taxes, it's always people who'll be paying them indirectly. Corporations are just groups of people working together. So taxing corporations just discourages people from working together in oarge groups, instead encouraging them to work alone (sole proprietorship or LLC).
While I can see an argument for preventing corporations from becoming too large, trying to accomplish that via taxes seems really stupid.
When do you use tabs outside of the beginning of a line? The only time I've seen them elsewhere is when people are trying to align columns. And that's a problem with the editor not properly supporting column formatting, not a problem with tabs.
Any time tabs are solely at the beginning of a line, they always work for variable N sizes, just as OP says. The only time they don't is when someone tries to put spaces in between leading tabs (which turns the following tabs into not-leading tabs). I usually end up just writing a short script to convert leading spaces into an appropriate number of tabs when I get a piece of code written by someone who seemed to like single-space indents or overly-large indents and hard-coded it with spaces.
I agree with OP. Tab-challenged people either never learned how to use them properly and make up arguments to excuse their ignorance/misuse, or just want to force their formatting preferences onto other people. When I was a kid we used tab stops on mechanical typewriters (clips you put into the teeth of the track the platen rides upon). When word processors came along, the ability to instantly change the number of spaces in a tab and have the text auto-format to match the new tab size was a godsend.
Asia: No you can't sue them. They already admitted guilt and paid the government a fine and compensation. If you were harmed by their actions, go collect your share of the compensation through the government's compensation program.
Western: Yup, they said they were guilty. Sue them for everything they're worth.
When you make it an incalculable liability to admit guilt, you shouldn't be surprised when people refuse to admit guilt.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one criticism I've had of USB. Under the guise of being user friendly, OS programmers have made the OS automatically do all sorts of stupid and insecure things when you plug something into the USB port. CD/DVD drives used to have the same problem (automatically running an executable off the disc) until it became such a common vector for malware that Microsoft finally disabled the autorun feature by default.
When you plug in a USB device, you should get a pop-up asking if you want to access it in read-only mode or read/write mode, and whether it should be active (can auto-install stuff and mess with the system) or passive (can't change anything about your system - you will have to select/install the drivers yourself). You can have a "let the OS manage this automatically" option for the computer illiterate, but it should not be the default, and should throw up a big warning about malware vulnerability and decreased security with that option.
Apple is rather unique in that people forget their failures while remembering their successes, or even incorrectly attribute other people's innovations to Apple. For other companies, it's usually the other way around. That's why people joked that Jobs projected a Reality Distortion Field.
If there's anything kids these days are good at, it's taking common words and phrases we use in everyday speech and turning them into obscure undecipherable abbreviations for text messages.
Bokeh is a function of the lens diameter relative to the subject distance (and distance of other objects from the focal plane). For a given scene, cannot be created any other way other than a physically bigger lens. You know the penumbra during an eclipse (the area experiencing a partial eclipse during a solar eclipse)? That corresponds to bokeh. There is nothing you can do on the ground to enlarge this area. It is purely a function of geometry. (Mathematically, it's the point distribution function of the lens.)
You can fake it in software. I've been saying for over a decade that two small lenses with some lateral separation should allow an algorithm to estimate distance and blur the parts of the picture outside the focal plane appropriately to simulate bokeh. But it's not real bokeh, it's a digital manipulation.
Where your toothpaste analogy fails is that it's easy to buy toothburshes and toothpaste separately. What if that weren't the case? What if toothbrushes only and always came bundled together with a brand toothpaste you didn't like to use? And the only way for you to buy a toothbrush was to also pay for the toothpaste which you'd never use?
I agree with this legal decision for desktops, but not for laptops. It's easy to to build your own desktop if you don't like any of the pre-built offerings with Windows pre-loaded. But it's virtually impossible to buy a laptop without Windows pre-loaded.
Vocaloids did this long before voice assistants. To be done properly though, the recording has to be done at a constant pitch, so it's easier to modulate it by computer later. "Harvesting" phonemes, diphomes, and polyphomes from pre-recorded spoken speech isn't as effective because you need to post-process it to remove the pitch change. (It should be noted that adding inflections to make it sound like spoken speech is a huge AI project in itself. Singing is a lot easier to synthesize because these changes in intonation and pitch are mostly pre-determined by the music.)
Because most of the idiots in the press (including popular online review sites) are enamored with Apple, and their reviews constantly criticize everything any other manufacturers do differently. Thanks to them we've gotten non-replaceable batteries, briefly lost the microSD slot, glass backs, and "premium" metal bodies which dent on impact instead of superior plastic which simply bounces back into shape. All so they can have sleek and shiny devices that feel good in their hands, instead of functional devices that are actually more durable despite how they feel.
Since at least the 1990s (when I first became aware of them). Basically the modus operandi is you found a school in some field where students can get college loans, preferably government-backed since a lot of the students aren't very credit-worthy. The students apply and are accepted into your school, pay their tuition with government or government-guaranteed student loans, and you "educate" them in the promised field. Net effect is you get the loan money, student gets the debt, and the government is on the hook for any debt the students can't pay back. You're effectively using the students to launder the money you're receiving from the government (they are listed as the recipient, not you).
The problem is this is the exact same MO as a legit school. There are supposed to be accrediting organizations which audit the schools' programs and confirm that they are legitimately teaching students marketable skills. But some of these accrediting organizations aren't very good and should've been removed from the authorized list decades ago. Basically the same problem that led to the housing bubble - the bond credit rating agencies which were supposed to investigate mortgage-backed investments (because the average investor/student has nowhere near the resources or skill necessary for a through investigation) shirked their duties and just rubber stamped them as low-risk when they were anything but.
It's ok to put a high-performance engine into your car. But you damn well better be sure the instruments and gauges monitoring that engine are working properly, lest it blow up on you.
It's the standard Press trope of hyping up a story by trying to make it sound like the smallest possible factor was responsible for all the huge consequences. (There's a word for this in other languages, but not in English. Basically the sense of unfairness you get when the consequences just do not "fit" the precipitating action.)
If we could backtrack far enough in chaos theory, the Press would go nuts with stories about how a butterfly flapping its wing in Texas wiped out the Eastern Seaboard with a hurricane. (Well, maybe not since that might get the public to start asking for a butterfly extermination program.)
All these codecs allow you to choose the bitrate, so efficiency is meaningless without a common basis for comparison. In this case it turns out they mean efficiency at the same video quality. But video quality is a completely subjective thing - how can you compare it in a reproducible manner? So I dug into how Netflix is deterministically measuring something subjective. That in itself is a pretty fascinating read.
tl;dr - they took subjective test results from showing video samples to people, then used machine learning to develop an algorithm which produced similar results.
I thought the mission performed poorly too, but your criticism is off-base. The surface gravity of the comet was several hundred thousand times less than Earth gravity. It wasn't like landing on Mars. It was like docking with the International Space Station, except without a docking adapter. Landing on a planet is relatively easy in contrast because you've got a huge margin of error by which you can over-thrust and still land successfully. e.g. On Earth, basically everything between 0 and 1g upward thrust will still slow you down, yet will not compromise your landing (cause you to lift back up) after you touch down.
When docking in zero-g or near-zero-g, you need to match velocities precisely - the margin of error is almost nil. That's why they went with the harpoon system - because docking is a damned difficult thing to do even when you have a docking adapter and a computer and human pilot right there giving real-time thrust correction inputs.
I expected more from the mission only because the Japanese pulled off an even tougher "landing" (the asteroid was about 1/300th the mass of the comet). That spacecraft however was designed as touch-and-go, rather than permanently landing ("attaching" is probably a better word at these low surface gravities).
Median CEO pay is only $160k. That includes bonuses, stock options, etc.
You're probably thinking of the ridiculous amounts made by CEOs of the biggest companies (Fortune 500, S&P 500, etc). Yes they're mostly not worth it. But they only make up less than 0.02% of all businesses with employees (roughly 6 million). And only about 5% of all businesses employing 500+ people.
The media wants to make a story out of the poor-rich pay gap, so they cherry-pick the data which best supports their argument. While that data is relevant to the subset it's picked from, don't make the mistake of extrapolating it to the other 99.98%. Or even the other 95%. That's stereotyping and prejudice. Some people get all upset when you take a trait present in only 5% of, say, African-Americans and extrapolate it to the entire population. But are more than happy do the exact same thing when it comes to something like CEOs. You know that thing about CEOs being psychopaths? It's only 4% of them (vs 1% for the general population). Yet some people gleefully use that stat to justify their insults, prejudice, and bigotry against the other 96%.
That's only an issue if you use hard cutoffs like everyone seems to nowadays because they hated math in high school and don't want anything with a formula. e.g. We'll give you $500/mo in assistance, but the moment you make more than $1000/mo working, that assistance disappears. That creates a negative income gradient. At $0 wages, you're getting $500/mo. At $1000/mo wages, you're getting $1500/mo. At $1001/mo wages, you drop back down to $1001/mo. This discourages getting a better job or working more hours. The assistance either needs to be universal (everyone receives the same amount), or graduated (using a formula!) so it's slowly phased out as you earn more so the income gradient always remains positive.
There's also the issue where assistance scales with certain things under the control of the recipient more than the expenses. e.g. If you have 2 kids and are on food stamps, adding a third kid raises your expenses only $y/mo, but the food stamps you receive increases more than $y/mo. Thus creating an incentive for poor folks who can't afford to raise more kids to have more kids as an easy way to receive more money. The assistance has to scale in a way which discourages adding expenses, not creating more expenses as a way to get more assistance.
Finally there's the problem where the market tries to correct for the existence of a basic income (money for doing no work) by devaluing the basic income while simultaneously increasing the value of wages (money for doing work). The net effect is inflation - the value of the currency decreases (prices increase) while wages rise to keep pace. The $500/mo basic income decreases in value year-over-year (how quickly depends on the amount of the basic income - the closer it is to the average wage, the faster it devalues), while purchasing power from wages remains steady because of the wage inflation.
If you try to correct for this by increasing the basic income each year, you just increase the rate of inflation. If you try to fix that by fixing prices, you break the economy since production costs are now no longer allowed to be reflected in prices. So the only way to get it to work is to either limit it to a subsection of the population (i.e. it's not universal), or to make it a small fraction of the average income (i.e. it can't be a living income). You might be able to get it to work by bypassing money entirely, and distributing the basic income directly as goods and services. i.e. No more EBT cards - you get your assistance not as a money-equivalent, but as food directly from the food bank. There will be some leakage as some people e.g. sell their weekly allotment of canned foods rather than consume it, but as long as that leakage is a small fraction of the total it shouldn't have a large effect on the general economy.
Why? And in a related note, apparently only two mosquito species transmit Zika. Why?
I'm asking because that Nature link only seems to be considering consequences of the loss of the species as a food source. What about some of the other possible consequences? Could these human-biting mosquitoes be filling an ecological niche, and without them could biting flies (which hurt like hell) end up filling the now-empty niche and exploding in population? Could Zika mutate into a different form which allows it to be transmitted by other mosquitoes, or even flies?
You can't just consider whether the rest of the ecosystem could survive the loss of mosquitoes. You have to look at how it would react to the loss.
The problem is, the aggressive charge/discharge cycle is what's giving these batteries a competitive energy density compared to other battery chemistry and other energy storage solutions.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and predict that the solution will be to partition the two reactants in the battery chemistry with something more than a 24 micrometer separator. Possibly even switch to a chemistry which doesn't require carrying around one of the reactants at all, and getting it from the air. You know, like gasoline needs oxygen from the air to release its energy, so as long as you keep it in a sealed tank a fire is virtually impossible.
When the city got the statistics, it said there needed to be 10x as many trains as they currently had. That obviously couldn't be right since the trains were only occasionally full. So what went wrong?
Likely, the only thing these HackerRank statistics are measuring is that there are just a lot more job opportunities for mediocre programmers in the U.S. and India. While there are fewer such opportunities in China, Russia, and Poland, so the few people who pursue programming careers there tend to be the cream of the crop. To normalize it, you'd have to survey to find out how many total programmers there are in each country, compare to their total populations, then assuming a normal distribution of "skill" for the entire population of the country, map each countries results to that distribution. Then for the countries where the number of people taking the test are overrepresented relative to the total population, truncate their distribution to match that of underrepresented countries. e.g. If, say, only 0.01% of Poland's population tried the HackerRank tests, while 0.1% of the U.S. population did, then you'd have to compare Poland's results with the top 10% of the U.S. results (0.01% of the U.S. population matching the 0.01% of Poland's population) to get an apples-to-apples comparison. But that's a lot of assuming and normalizing for me to be comfortable with using the data to draw conclusions.
I love The Twilight Zone, but Hollywood comes up with lots of cute but unrealistic stories because almost none of the people who work there came from STEM fields. There are problems which simply can't be solved by a Turing-complete machine. You see, Goedel's incompleteness theorems proved that any logical system is incomplete. There are always problems you can make within that system which cannot be resolved without abstracting your reasoning beyond that system. So until/unless the artificial intelligence folks actually succeed in creating a program which can "think" beyond its programming, there will always be problems which can't be solved by machines but can be solved by people.
So the jobs being replaced by machines are the simpler, more menial tasks which don't require this sort of creative thinking. The sensors at the doors which detect shoplifting don't always work. They're just programmed to sound an alarm if they sense a RFID tag being carried out. Sometimes the cashier forgets to remove the tag. Sometimes a shoplifter figures out a way to bypass the sensor (e.g. wrap the tag in aluminum foil). It takes a human security guard to analyze, judge, and respond appropriately to each of these situations which fall outside normal procedure and expectations. Not saying humans are perfect are what we do, but our ability to analyze situations which fall outside the scope of what we've been taught, judge how the operating guidelines we were taught would be applied to this new situation if it had been known about before-hand, and respond appropriately based on those extrapolated guidelines, is something machines cannot yet replace us at doing.
They didn't set out to make a partial upper deck. The original plan was to make it a full double-decker like Airbus eventually did with the A380. But given their deadline, they didn't think they could solve the problem of adding (safe) evacuation slides for passengers on the upper deck in time, so they settled for a traditional single-decker (which they already had experience designing, just needed to scale everything up to make it wider). The short blister on top for the cockpit was added to allow the cargo variant to have a swing nose so you could load cargo through the front, instead of through the side. So it's not really "copying" someone else's design when there's only one practical solution (the impractical one being putting the cockpit in the swing-away nose and designing all sorts of latches for the mechanical linkages between the cockpit controls to the plane's control surfaces).
This is why the upper deck on the early 747-100 is a lot shorter than in later variants like the 747-400. The few upper-deck seats on the 747-100 were an afterthought, added more for novelty than for increased passenger capacity. The lower deck on the 747 already carried nearly 3x as many passengers as any other plane operating at the time. Boeing tried for decades to sell the idea of a full double-deck 747 to the airlines, but not enough of them would commit to them. So Boeing never bothered making it. When Airbus announced their plans for the A380, Boeing tried again to pitch a full double-deck 747, and again not enough airlines said they wanted it. That's why they didn't try to compete with Airbus on the A380.
Production of the A380 will probably soon cease, and its sales have just barely recouped its design costs. The 4-engine airliners like the 747, A340, and A380 are being eaten alive in the market by twin-engine airliners like the 777, 787, and A350 (2 engines are more efficient than 4). The disparity between A380 orders and deliveries is mostly due to airlines which placed orders but have asked to delay delivery or have refused receipt as they consider cancelling. Airbus needs to produce about 20-25 a year for the production facilities alone (i.e. excluding design costs) to operate without losing money. And right now they're scheduled to drop to 12 deliveries/year in 2018, so they'll probably wind up losing money on the A380 overall (the remaining 100 or so orders will probably be delivered at a loss, if they're not canceled outright). So it would appear Boeing's market analysis was correct that there wasn't enough market demand for a full double-deck airliner. It's a good thing the EU government guaranteed the loans Airbus took out to design the plane or this might've bankrupted the company. Competition between Airbus and Boeing is what keeps technology progressing and prices low.
This isn't like Atom, which used an entirely different core design. Core M (both Broadwell and Skylake) is just a regular Core i, with a lower TDP and clock speeds. Core M Broadwell limited Turbo Boost to a single core, but Skylake will Turbo on both cores. It seems to be using the i7 dual core design, since Core M has 4MB cache like the i7, instead of 3MB like the i5 and i3. Which is also why Skylake Core M beats out a similarly-clocked Skylake mobile i5 in certain short benchmarks - the benchmark isn't long enough for thermal throttling to kick in, and the 4MB cache beats out the 3MB cache.
It's an interesting theory, but based on preliminary digging I did into it, the data doesn't back it up.
Here's Alcohol consumption per capita. The U.S. is towards the bottom (least) of the pack.
Here's Rate of alcohol-related deaths. Eastern European countries top the list. Germany, France, Denmark Sweden, Norway, Finland, Austria, Poland, hell even Canada all have higher death rates than the U.S. Italy and Spain have much lower death rates.
Here's a list of countries with the highest alcoholism rates. All have no drinking age or 18 year drinking age.
Based on a quick perusal of these stats, I can't find any real pattern or correlation with consumption, minimum age, addiction, and death rate. The one interesting stat was that this is predominantly a white and Hispanic problem. Blacks and Asians are less than half as likely to binge drink. Suggesting either genetics or social culture is the distinguishing factor, since all of those people grew up and live under the same laws.
If you cheat on your taxes, then yeah you'd be subject to fines for past tax evasion. But if you followed the letter of the tax law at the time, and some time later the government decided the law was wrong and changed it, then no you wouldn't be subject to retroactive fines. At least in countries which prohibit ex post facto laws.
Unless you're limiting your purchases and employment to sole proprietorships or LLCs (which are pass-through tax structuress), everything you buy or anywhere you work is subject to corporate taxes.
OP is absolutely right. The fundamental currency is productivity, and only people generate productivity, so only people pay taxes. No matter where you shift the direct taxes, it's always people who'll be paying them indirectly. Corporations are just groups of people working together. So taxing corporations just discourages people from working together in oarge groups, instead encouraging them to work alone (sole proprietorship or LLC).
While I can see an argument for preventing corporations from becoming too large, trying to accomplish that via taxes seems really stupid.
So... do they think the decision to be more Apple-like and eliminate the user-swappable battery is still a good one?
When do you use tabs outside of the beginning of a line? The only time I've seen them elsewhere is when people are trying to align columns. And that's a problem with the editor not properly supporting column formatting, not a problem with tabs.
Any time tabs are solely at the beginning of a line, they always work for variable N sizes, just as OP says. The only time they don't is when someone tries to put spaces in between leading tabs (which turns the following tabs into not-leading tabs). I usually end up just writing a short script to convert leading spaces into an appropriate number of tabs when I get a piece of code written by someone who seemed to like single-space indents or overly-large indents and hard-coded it with spaces.
I agree with OP. Tab-challenged people either never learned how to use them properly and make up arguments to excuse their ignorance/misuse, or just want to force their formatting preferences onto other people. When I was a kid we used tab stops on mechanical typewriters (clips you put into the teeth of the track the platen rides upon). When word processors came along, the ability to instantly change the number of spaces in a tab and have the text auto-format to match the new tab size was a godsend.
Asia: No you can't sue them. They already admitted guilt and paid the government a fine and compensation. If you were harmed by their actions, go collect your share of the compensation through the government's compensation program.
Western: Yup, they said they were guilty. Sue them for everything they're worth.
When you make it an incalculable liability to admit guilt, you shouldn't be surprised when people refuse to admit guilt.