I was gonna post a snarky reply agreeing with you. But upon researching it, they've just normalized the penalty to be the same as if you stole an actual DVD. Their penalty for theft is a fine and up to three years jail time. Unlike the U.S. where you have to steal a certain amount of property value before you can face jail time, India seems to have no such threshold.
I don't entirely disagree with your position on drugs (it has philosophical incompatibilities between it and the concept of democracy because of the loss of free will due to addiction, which need to be resolved). But having briefly done business in Chicago, the city has a massive government corruption problem. Various inspectors expected bribes to "overlook" minor faults which really shouldn't have resulted in citations (e.g. dead light bulb in unused warehouse space). Various permitting officials wanted bribes to "expedite" our applications so they wouldn't sit on the back burner for weeks or months.
Corruption drains money from legitimate economic activity, which ultimately depresses wages, reduces job opportunities, and increases prices. The poor are the most impacted by these consequences, and it helps keep them poor and in ghettos. I'm not saying this is the root cause of all their problems, but neither is the War on Drugs. The vast majority of problems have multiple causes. Afghanistan doesn't have an opium production problem simply because the price of heroin is high, but also because its economy is so shot it's nearly impossible to make a living any other way.
The only solution is to cut back on meat consumption
You're making the common mistake of comparing against a nonexistent zero base state. If people stopped eating meat, we'd still need to raise cattle. They provide lots of useful byproducts like lubricants, waxes, insulin, gelatin, glue, leather, etc. If we got rid of all cattle, we'd have to find other means of producing these things, which would incur other energy and material costs, perhaps higher than the costs we pay with cattle.
Even if you were able to find a zero net-cost substitute for all these materials, eliminating cattle would not necessarily decrease methane production. You have to consider the entire ecosystem, not just the cows. Without cattle, grasses would grow longer, die, and decompose naturally. Some of the byproducts of that decomposition are (drumroll...) methane and CO2. Remember, this is a closed-loop system. Just because that final step of breaking down the cellulose to extract the stored solar energy happens in a compost heap instead of inside a ruminant's digestive tract doesn't necessarily mean you've improved things.
They killed the Atom based Netbook / Nettop generation of PCs with updates to XP, too.
That was their standard embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. The first netbooks came with Linux running a GUI which let you browse the web, access your email, play movies, and play music. They sold better than expected so presented a possible threat to Windows' quasi-monopoly of the PC platform. So Microsoft created a cut-down version of Windows (7 Starter edition) which would run on netbooks. That got people to stop buying the Linux netbooks, in anticipation of buying one which could run Windows. That was the embrace step.
Once Windows was standard on netbooks and Linux on netbooks was a distant memory, they began adding memory-hogging features to it. That was the extend step.
Those features bloated the hardware requirements enough that in order to get decent Windows performance, people just started buying cheap laptops again instead of netbooks. Netbook sales began drying up. That was the extinguish step.
Of course that meant the market demand for a low-cost simplified web/media device was no longer being fulfilled. Microsoft was counting on that demand languishing unfulfilled as a way to "encourage" people to buy more expensive laptops with a full copy of Windows. The iPad blindsided them the following year by satisfying that demand.
The iPhone 4 at 640x960 wasn't that much better than 480x800 (Samsung even stuck with that resolution the following year with the S2). It just hit 330 ppi because it had a smaller screen than Android phones of the era.
The "retina" thing was pure marketing BS for what was a very practical technical decision: to make porting easier, just increase the resolution by 2x in both directions
It wasn't a practical decision, it was a stupid decision. Apple got it right with MacOS and Postscript - the display should be resolution-agnostic. The screen simply tells the OS its physical size, and the OS calculates the ppi and scales the display output so that an 8 point font is the same size on any screen, big or small, as it is on a printed page. It was one of the best decisions they ever made, and a large part of why Macs are standard in the publishing industry. With Windows, the size of your preview on the screen may or may not match the size when printed. Heck, even Windows 10 still has problems scaling fonts to an arbitrary size.
Then for some inexplicable reason, Apple locked the screen resolution in iOS to 320x480. Which was fine when all their model phones (or rather their single model) had a 3.5" screen (or 9.7" 1024x768 for tablets). But gave them the same Windows-esque scaling problems when they tried to market products with different size screens. e.g. An app UI which is fine on an iPad is a hair too small on the iPad mini. The whole problem stems from Jobs' insistence that a 3.5" display was "perfect" for a phone and no other display size would ever be needed. That was a stupid decision then and it's a stupid decision they're suffering from now.
Ironically, Android uses the scaling model Apple established with the Mac. Android has a hidden internal scaling constant set by the manufacturer (you can tweak it if you root your device) based on the size and ppi of the display. It scales the UI so the icons and fonts remain the same size across all Android devices with this constant set correctly. On my elderly parents' phones, I used to root it and tweak this constant so the icons and fonts are a bit bigger (there is now a separate font size setting).
What we need is a "reply to voicemail" function which will force the original voicemail sender to listen to their full voicemail first, before they can hear your reply. That will either convince them to keep their voicemails short and concise, or that this is a colossally bad idea because it destroys your ability to quickly random-access different parts of the message.
Linux has to wait for someone to win and then copy.
Android is Linux. It's what Linux is capable of if the developers of the GUI actually give a damn about making it easy for non-programmers to use. It's been simplified a bit too much for desktop use. But putting back what they stripped out should be a lot easier than having to develop it from scratch.
Like immortality, Android has achieved the market dominance Linux advocates have always dreamed of, just not in quite the way they wanted.
Be careful with auto-pay. I just ran into a huge drawback of these auto-pay systems when my credit card company issued me a new card because they thought the old card's number might've been stolen.
Unfortunately, they deactivated my old card just before the auto-pay for my cable and phone bill was set to charge. They tried to charge the old card, and the payment failed. That's when I learned that these auto-pay systems will try to charge your card on the last day to pay your bill. My phone company was pretty cool about it and let me just pay it with the new card. But my cable company was a jerk about it and charged me a $25 late payment fee.
I searched and asked, but apparently there is no way to auto-pay before the due date, to give yourself some time before the due date to fix things if a glitch like this happens again. I've petitioned with the cable company to have the late fee removed since I've never made a late payment before, and in fact when I received a mailed invoice I usually paid the day I received the bill. But I may end up just going back to a mailed invoice with them and paying it manually since their auto-pay system is decidedly less convenient than a mailed invoice.
But to prove that's what's actually going on, you'd have to look at the pool of applicants Facebook got, sort them by how qualified they were, and compare to which ones they hired. Then look at the races of the hirees vs similarly-qualified non-hirees to see if there were statistical differences in the racial make-up of both groups. Simply comparing their hiree group with the general population is statistically and mathematically provably the incorrect way to do it.
And hiring quotas can't change the socio-economic barriers you're purportedly trying to mitigate. That has to be done much earlier in the process - at the education and upbringing stage. If you're building a cabinet which needs 1" screws, and the pack of 1" screws you bought has a mix of 1" and 3/4" screws, shrugging your shoulders and using the 3/4" inch screws in place of the 1" screws does nothing to reduce the number of 3/4" screws being produced. It just makes a weaker cabinet. You need to go back to the factory making the screws, and say "Hey, a bunch of your 1" screws are coming up short. You need to fix whatever problems are causing it."
The process of fixing these barriers does include discrimination, but only because the English language uses this same term for multiple things.
In Engineering, this is called a weighting function on a feedback loop to drive a system to reach a desired output level more quickly. But there are two crucial aspects to implementing it properly that aren't being done by the people currently advocating affirmative action:
The loop has to feed back to before the output function you're measuring is produced. As I explained above, this means your hiring quotas have to somehow lead to minority applicants being more qualified and thus more hireable. Educational quotas achieve that. So do economic assistance programs for the poor. But hiring quotas don't achieve that.
The weighting has to be temporary - you have to remove the feedback loop once you've achieved the desired output level. Otherwise you'll overshoot and go right past the desired target. Unfortunately, I have never seen an affirmative action program define when it will be removed. In the case of gender, it's caused significant overshoot with boys now lagging girls in all areas.
Whether they gave it out for free is irrelevant. Pokemon is trademarked. If Nintendo doesn't shut them down, that could dilute their trademark and result in a judge tossing out a real trademark infringement lawsuit Nintendo files in the future.
While I agree the classy thing for Nintendo to do would be to give them a $1 license for the trademark so long as the game is free and they let Nintendo's lawyers scrutinize it before release. But the fact that they didn't reach out to Nintendo before releasing the game would mean Nintendo sets a dangerous precedent by licensing them. Basically Nintendo would be implying that anyone can use their trademark, and so long as they're giving the game away for free they'll retroactively license it.
2002-2005 was right when Intel was being controlled by their marketing division. Prior to about 2004-2005, the easiest way to improve performance was to increase clock speed. Consequently clock speed was pretty much doubling every 1.5 years, and the public correlated clock speed with CPU performance. Intel's marketing division, with the backing of management, forced their engineering division to increase clock speed at all costs.
The resulting fiasco was Netburst and Prescott, which ran headfirst into the laws of physics. To reach higher frequencies required higher voltages. But CPU power consumption is proportional to frequency times voltage squared. Prescott ran too hot to yield the promised performance increases and Intel's CPU progress stalled. This resulted in AMD capturing the CPU performance crown (which is why the 64-bit instruction set is AMD64).
Intel was trying to do the same thing with XScale - increase clock speed at all costs. They ended up with a mobile processor which doubled the clock speed but didn't yield 2x the performance.
What ended up saving Intel's butt was their laptop division. High power consumption is death for a laptop since it reduces battery life, and laptops weren't as big a market back then. So Intel's laptop CPU engineering division hadn't been pressured by marketing to increase clock speed. They'd come up with a CPU based on the Pentium 3 which made improvements which didn't increase power consumption. The Pentium M allowed Intel to quickly recover from their stumble, and became the basis for the Core, Core Duo, and Core 2 Duo CPUs, with the lessons learned leading to the Core i CPUs we use today.
But there was no Pentium M-equivalent for XScale. They'd lost too much ground to ARM to play catch-up, so Intel ended up jettisoning the project and selling it to Marvell. Their new tack was to reduce the power consumption of the x86 (and eventually AMD64) CPUs enough to compete with ARM. You call it a waste of time, but they eventually did reach power-parity with ARM once they moved to 14nm (partly because ARM was still on 28 and 22nm). But by then the ARM ecosystem was well-developed (iOS and Android), and the fact that you could run x86 software (Windows) on Intel's offering didn't matter anymore.
It's because your ad business model is broken. How long will it take before you admit to yourselves that accepting random scripted ads from an insecure third party ad farm totally out of your control is stupid? Either vet the ads yourself (and accept responsibility if you let a malicious ad get through), or contract it out to a third party security service which does it for you.
Too hard you say? Here's a hint: If the only ads you allow are a static JPEG which clicks through to the advertising site, you've done your job. Newspapers and magazines got along just fine for over a century with static ads. Advertisers don't need scripting, and in fact they've demonstrated they're too immature to be given the power of scripts.
If you really dig into the numbers for the 2008 election when Obama became President, and the 2010 election with the Tea Party revolution, you'll find that support for the candidates within each party were about the same. It's just that in 2008, Republicans were dismayed by Bush's recession and an uninspiring nominee and didn't bother to vote, while Democrats were hyped up by Obama's charisma and voted in droves. In 2010 Democrats were dismayed at Obama's unkept promises and didn't bother to vote, while Republicans outraged at Obamacare voted in droves.
After that, it's mostly inertia, with the incumbent having a high chance to be re-elected regardless of whether s/he's a D or a R.
The whole thing makes me wonder if voluntary democratic elections are really the best way to decide things. Maybe the totalitarian concept of forcing everyone to vote isn't such a bad idea.
The market reality is that mobile tech is still advancing quickly enough that if a company doesn't release a new model every year, people shopping for a new device will simply not buy their 1.5 year old model. So a 1 year release interval is going to remain the norm until the rate of technological advancement slows down. That's what happened with Intel. In the early 1990s, after 1.5 years your CPU was 2x slower than the newest and you felt compelled to upgrade. By the 2000s this interval had stretched to about 5 years. And currently it's about 10 years. This slowdown has correlated to a drop in annual PC sales - people don't upgrade as frequently because there is simply less to gain with a frequent upgrade. But with phones, the rate of advancement is still enough to make a compelling argument for upgrading every 2 years, 1 year if you're willing to pay.
If you have a problem with that, don't upgrade your phone every year. I used my Galaxy S for 4 years, then upgraded to a Nexus 5 which I'm still using (2.5 years). There's no law saying you have to upgrade every year. And it's arrogant and selfish to try to prevent people shopping for a new phone from getting the latest tech simply because you don't have enough self-control to resist buying this year's new model. That's the real issue here. Except it's Greenpeace, who believes everything is the fault of corporations. So rather than tell people they need to show some restraint and stop upgrading their phones so frequently, they word the survey such that the blame is on the phone manufacturers for releasing new models too frequently.
And the cost of electricity is about 70 to 80% less than the equivalent cost of a gasoline car per mile.
This is true right now because electricity use overnight is low, so the power companies charge lower rates. So if you're one of the few people with an EV, charging it overnight means you're paying discounted electricity prices. That's going to change if everyone gets an EV.
Current U.S. household electricity use is about 900 kWh per month. A Nissan Leaf is rated at 30 kWh/100 miles. Average vehicle miles traveled per household has been inching towards 60 miles (it dipped to 54 in 2009 - page 10). So driving those miles in EVs like the Leaf would result in about 550 kWh/mo of additional electricity consumption. Factor in charging efficiency (about 75%-80% from the numbers I've seen from Tesla and plug-in Prius owners), and it works out to closer to 700 kWh/mo. So adding an EV to the house will nearly double it's electricity use, with all of that additional consumption falling in the overnight period.
Currently, power consumption ramps up around 8 AM and peaks around 8 PM. An EV in every garage would invert that so the peak would occur overnight between 8 PM and 8 AM (certain industrial use which runs 24/7 keeps current overnight use around 67% that of day use). Consequently, electricity prices would go from being lowest overnight, to highest overnight. (This is also why the idea of using the battery in your EV to store up cheap overnight power for use during the day is never going to go anywhere.)
An EV is still cheaper to operate per mile than an ICE vehicle (because per Joule, gasoline is about 10x more expensive than coal). But instead of 70%-80% less cost per mile than an ICE, you're probably going to be in the neighborhood of 50%-60% less.
The yellow before green is more important in countries with a large proportion of manual transmissions. You need a little more time to get a manual car ready to go from a stop, especially on an uphill grade.
I don't subscribe to Nature so I can't read the article, but from the abstract:
We find that the energy requirements of 87% of vehicle-days could be met by an existing, affordable electric vehicle.
It sounds like they analyzed in terms of vehicle-days, not in terms of owned vehicles. The press "helpfully" converted this into "90% of vehicles" which is inaccurate. Yes, probably 90% of vehicles driven on any given day could be replaced by current EV ranges. But I'd guess probably 95% of vehicles can't be replaced by current EV ranges. See, the vast majority of cars are driven short distances nearly all days. But a few times a year they're called on to drive 200-500 miles in a day, for things like that drive to Grandma's for Thanksgiving, weekend trip to Vegas, etc.
If you applied the same type of analysis to car safety, you'd find that 99.99% of vehicle-days, seat belts don't protect you. And therefore it'd be ok to get rid of seat belts in cars.
The flip side of this is that vehicle-days is a valid metric if you can convince people to rent an ICE car for their few trips a year which exceed an EV's range. People erroneously think they've paid a lump sum for the car when they bought it, so driving it for that one long trip is "free" while they have to pay "extra" money if they rent a car. I've been trying for years to convince people that the cost of a car (as well as most other things) is a rate, not an amount. The cost of fuel, maintenance, and depreciation to operate a car is usually in the ballpark of 40-50 cents/mile (insurance drops out since it's mostly based on time).
So driving 500 miles (round trip) to Grandma's for Thanksgiving actually costs you about $200-$250 of expenses and depreciation. Renting an ICE car for those few long trips is very competitive. And you can use your EV as for the other 95% of days.
If you have anything that you need to keep away from prying border patrol eyes, leave it at home. If you need to access it while abroad, put it on your home computer, set up a VPN server on your router, and while you're abroad just VPN in and use remote desktop or VNC to access it.
The entire rights situation is very murky at the border because technically you're not yet on U.S. soil until you pass Customs and Immigration. The SCotUS has ruled multiple times that U.S. Constitutional protections do not apply outside of U.S. soil (which is why Bush put a prison at Guantanamo - it is a U.S. base but on Cuban soil).
If you try to play cute tricks with CBP like your encryption key thing, even if they let you in they'll probably flag your file in their database. From then on, EVERY TIME you try to enter the country again, you'll get to enjoy a 1-3 hour delay while they scrutinize everything about you because of the flag. A German friend of mine was dating a U.S. citizen so was visiting frequently and spending a lot of time here. One of the border guards suspected the dating was a cover story and he was secretly working in the U.S. and flagged him in the database. From then on, every time he tried to enter the U.S. it was a multi-hour circus as they put him into an interrogation room and questioned him. It finally ended when he married the girl and became a U.S. citizen.
That was probably a random check. I used to live in Point Roberts so had to cross the border a lot (2-6 times a day). The border guard can send you in the line for a more thorough search if they suspect something, but every now and then the computer randomly flags you for a search. It happened to me twice in 2 years on the Canadian side, once on the U.S. side (which was half-hearted when they found out I lived in Point Roberts and was entering mainland Washington to do some shopping). (It's also happened once while flying into the U.S. from Europe - I had checked off nothing to declare, but the computer flagged me so they sent me over to Agriculture and opened up all my bags. The border guard was even apologized for the delay, explaining the computer randomly requires them to send people for a more thorough Customs search.)
They go through everything in your car. For me that was mostly stuff in the glove compartment and center console. Most of it was receipts for gas and fast food that I had never thrown away, but they read through each and everyone one of them one at a time. So I made sure to clean all that junk out of the car after my first search to reduce my wait if I was flagged again (my second random search only took about 20 minutes because of this). If you've got a Suburban packed with camping supplies, it's going to be a long and messy search.
In general, the wait to enter the U.S. is longer and the border guards stricter than when entering Canada.
The ability to mod down kills dissent. Not saying this is always a bad thing, but it's not always a good thing either.
Imagine if Google allowed people to mod search results the way slashdot does. Now imagine 98% of people who search Google for a HDD formatting problem are Windows users, 2% are Linux users. The Windows users search for their problem (without specifying OS as lazy people are wont to do), and they get a page of search results, one of which happens to address how to solve the problem in Linux.
If just 2% (1 in 49) of the Windows users is a jerk and downvotes that Linux result (even though it was their own fault they got that search result since they didn't specify the OS), that's enough downvotes to cancel out all the upvotes if 100% of the Linux users searching upvote the result. The Linux site gets a negative rating even if it's the most helpful and most useful site on the Internet, because a tiny fraction of the majority Windows users are idiots and jerks.
Or in slashdot terms, because of the modding system a minority viewpoint has to be proportionately better-written in order to rise up to the same +4 or +5 as a majority viewpoint. This is why other sites have resisted adding the ability to downvote. The results aren't necessarily better or worse, just different.
As for which system is most fair, i suspect that falls under Arrow's impossibility theorem, where if you use "common sense" definitions of fairness, you find that it's mathematically impossible to come up with a single system which yields a "fair" result in all situations.
Electricity in Europe is nearly 3x the price of electricity in the U.S. So they can charge a lot more money per kWh generated there while remaining competitive, to offset those pesky maintenance expenses and to pay for the construction of underwater power transmission cables.
Offshore winds off of Scotland, the North Sea, and Spain are much stronger and more consistent than anywhere I know of in the U.S. Land-based wind typically hits about a 20-22% capacity factor, offshore in the U.S. around 30%-35%. There are offshore wind farms off Scotland and in the North Sea hitting 65%-75% capacity factors.
It's not the voters' fault. Unfortunately, we use a plurality wins single vote system. The optimal solution for winning in that system system is two parties, each of which selects a nominee who is popular with 50.000001% of that party (i.e. just 25.0000001% of the entire voting population). Usually the most extreme 25.000001% of the population.
Basically, both parties are controlled by extremists, who do their best to steer the nomination process hard right or hard left. The further right one party goes, the further left the other party can go while still being virtually guaranteed that one of their nominees will be elected. And vice versa. The entire process effectively disenfranchises the middle 49.99999% of the voting population, leaving government in control of the fringe 25% whose nominee happened to win.
An instant-runoff voting system would put a stop to this, by making the nominee who best reflects the entire voting population (i.e. a centrist) most likely to win. But that's precisely why the two parties (or rather, the extremists who control the parties) will never allow it to happen while they control the legislatures.
Expense doesn't play into this. If it were too expensive, it simply wouldn't be built. That it's being built means customers are willing to pay for that expense, and it's worth doing.
First, you have to understand why this happened. It's unrealistic for a private company to string up cables or run pipes throughout a city. There's just too much private property, and it would take forever to negotiate for access rights with each property owner, never mind the few loonies who will never grant those rights regardless of price. In response, the government sets up easements - a narrow strip of land which slices straight through private property where service providers are allowed to string up cables or bury pipes. Legally the land remains the property owner's, but the government has the right to grant access to that land for certain limited purposes.
Once the government has the easement, they don't want to grant access to just anybody running a utility or cable company. That can result in unsightly and dangerous wiring. It makes more sense to select a single provider, and grant them sole rights to offer service for an entire area. That way you minimize the number of cables that need to be put up. But giving a single company a monopoly creates a lot of problems - you're stripping away a lot of the protection mechanisms that a free market provides (like lowering prices). So you create a public utilities commission which monitors consumer complaints about the service and has the power to require changes or institute fines. Many of them also have the power to view the company's internal accounting books and have to approve price increases before they can be rolled out. Along the way, the government also decided to add some other conditions, like requiring coverage of poor areas (otherwise unprofitable). In the somewhat corrupt city I used to live in, the government also required the cable company give them kickbacks ($x from each customer's monthly bill was sent to the city treasurer to pad the city's budget).
Why select a private company? Why doesn't the government build the cables? Because back in the 1980s and 1990s, we didn't know the best way to implement cable TV and later cable Internet service. Do you run the cables using a star topology? A ring? A grid? A combination of these? What sort of equipment do you use? How do you encode the signals? How much do you allocate to download vs. upload bandwidth? These are the sorts of questions the government is really bad at answering (government workers lack incentives to improve things), but the market is very good at answering. So different communities allowed different cable companies to implement different systems. The ones which didn't work so well went bankrupt. The ones which worked well thrived and grew, bought up the contracts for the bankrupt cable companies, and implemented their successful cable networks in these other communities.
That brings us to today. We're down to about a half dozen successful cable companies, all of whom use the exact same system (standardized to allow the use of the same cable boxes and DOCSIS cable modems across different networks). Looking towards the future, it looks like fiber to the home is the end game here. Now that the market has found the optimal solution and there are no foreseeable changes on the horizon, that's when it's time for the government to step in and take over and convert this into a utility. They should grant a cable maintenance contract to a single company which lays down and maintains the cable, but is not allowed to sell any content over those cables. They make all their money from the government contract. Any cable TV and Internet service provider is allowed to buy access to these cables f
Slashdot Mirror
Research has shown that between 48% and 70% of people will tell you their password in exchange for a bar of chocolate.
I was gonna post a snarky reply agreeing with you. But upon researching it, they've just normalized the penalty to be the same as if you stole an actual DVD. Their penalty for theft is a fine and up to three years jail time. Unlike the U.S. where you have to steal a certain amount of property value before you can face jail time, India seems to have no such threshold.
I don't entirely disagree with your position on drugs (it has philosophical incompatibilities between it and the concept of democracy because of the loss of free will due to addiction, which need to be resolved). But having briefly done business in Chicago, the city has a massive government corruption problem. Various inspectors expected bribes to "overlook" minor faults which really shouldn't have resulted in citations (e.g. dead light bulb in unused warehouse space). Various permitting officials wanted bribes to "expedite" our applications so they wouldn't sit on the back burner for weeks or months.
Corruption drains money from legitimate economic activity, which ultimately depresses wages, reduces job opportunities, and increases prices. The poor are the most impacted by these consequences, and it helps keep them poor and in ghettos. I'm not saying this is the root cause of all their problems, but neither is the War on Drugs. The vast majority of problems have multiple causes. Afghanistan doesn't have an opium production problem simply because the price of heroin is high, but also because its economy is so shot it's nearly impossible to make a living any other way.
You're making the common mistake of comparing against a nonexistent zero base state. If people stopped eating meat, we'd still need to raise cattle. They provide lots of useful byproducts like lubricants, waxes, insulin, gelatin, glue, leather, etc. If we got rid of all cattle, we'd have to find other means of producing these things, which would incur other energy and material costs, perhaps higher than the costs we pay with cattle.
Even if you were able to find a zero net-cost substitute for all these materials, eliminating cattle would not necessarily decrease methane production. You have to consider the entire ecosystem, not just the cows. Without cattle, grasses would grow longer, die, and decompose naturally. Some of the byproducts of that decomposition are (drumroll...) methane and CO2. Remember, this is a closed-loop system. Just because that final step of breaking down the cellulose to extract the stored solar energy happens in a compost heap instead of inside a ruminant's digestive tract doesn't necessarily mean you've improved things.
That was their standard embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. The first netbooks came with Linux running a GUI which let you browse the web, access your email, play movies, and play music. They sold better than expected so presented a possible threat to Windows' quasi-monopoly of the PC platform. So Microsoft created a cut-down version of Windows (7 Starter edition) which would run on netbooks. That got people to stop buying the Linux netbooks, in anticipation of buying one which could run Windows. That was the embrace step.
Once Windows was standard on netbooks and Linux on netbooks was a distant memory, they began adding memory-hogging features to it. That was the extend step.
Those features bloated the hardware requirements enough that in order to get decent Windows performance, people just started buying cheap laptops again instead of netbooks. Netbook sales began drying up. That was the extinguish step.
Of course that meant the market demand for a low-cost simplified web/media device was no longer being fulfilled. Microsoft was counting on that demand languishing unfulfilled as a way to "encourage" people to buy more expensive laptops with a full copy of Windows. The iPad blindsided them the following year by satisfying that demand.
Um, the iPhone 3 was a paltry 320x480 and 165 ppi. The Galaxy S (announced 3 months before the iPhone 4) was 480x800 and 233 ppi.
The iPhone 4 at 640x960 wasn't that much better than 480x800 (Samsung even stuck with that resolution the following year with the S2). It just hit 330 ppi because it had a smaller screen than Android phones of the era.
It wasn't a practical decision, it was a stupid decision. Apple got it right with MacOS and Postscript - the display should be resolution-agnostic. The screen simply tells the OS its physical size, and the OS calculates the ppi and scales the display output so that an 8 point font is the same size on any screen, big or small, as it is on a printed page. It was one of the best decisions they ever made, and a large part of why Macs are standard in the publishing industry. With Windows, the size of your preview on the screen may or may not match the size when printed. Heck, even Windows 10 still has problems scaling fonts to an arbitrary size.
Then for some inexplicable reason, Apple locked the screen resolution in iOS to 320x480. Which was fine when all their model phones (or rather their single model) had a 3.5" screen (or 9.7" 1024x768 for tablets). But gave them the same Windows-esque scaling problems when they tried to market products with different size screens. e.g. An app UI which is fine on an iPad is a hair too small on the iPad mini. The whole problem stems from Jobs' insistence that a 3.5" display was "perfect" for a phone and no other display size would ever be needed. That was a stupid decision then and it's a stupid decision they're suffering from now.
Ironically, Android uses the scaling model Apple established with the Mac. Android has a hidden internal scaling constant set by the manufacturer (you can tweak it if you root your device) based on the size and ppi of the display. It scales the UI so the icons and fonts remain the same size across all Android devices with this constant set correctly. On my elderly parents' phones, I used to root it and tweak this constant so the icons and fonts are a bit bigger (there is now a separate font size setting).
What we need is a "reply to voicemail" function which will force the original voicemail sender to listen to their full voicemail first, before they can hear your reply. That will either convince them to keep their voicemails short and concise, or that this is a colossally bad idea because it destroys your ability to quickly random-access different parts of the message.
Android is Linux. It's what Linux is capable of if the developers of the GUI actually give a damn about making it easy for non-programmers to use. It's been simplified a bit too much for desktop use. But putting back what they stripped out should be a lot easier than having to develop it from scratch.
Like immortality, Android has achieved the market dominance Linux advocates have always dreamed of, just not in quite the way they wanted.
So feet is in fact the "correct" units to use here.
Be careful with auto-pay. I just ran into a huge drawback of these auto-pay systems when my credit card company issued me a new card because they thought the old card's number might've been stolen.
Unfortunately, they deactivated my old card just before the auto-pay for my cable and phone bill was set to charge. They tried to charge the old card, and the payment failed. That's when I learned that these auto-pay systems will try to charge your card on the last day to pay your bill. My phone company was pretty cool about it and let me just pay it with the new card. But my cable company was a jerk about it and charged me a $25 late payment fee.
I searched and asked, but apparently there is no way to auto-pay before the due date, to give yourself some time before the due date to fix things if a glitch like this happens again. I've petitioned with the cable company to have the late fee removed since I've never made a late payment before, and in fact when I received a mailed invoice I usually paid the day I received the bill. But I may end up just going back to a mailed invoice with them and paying it manually since their auto-pay system is decidedly less convenient than a mailed invoice.
And hiring quotas can't change the socio-economic barriers you're purportedly trying to mitigate. That has to be done much earlier in the process - at the education and upbringing stage. If you're building a cabinet which needs 1" screws, and the pack of 1" screws you bought has a mix of 1" and 3/4" screws, shrugging your shoulders and using the 3/4" inch screws in place of the 1" screws does nothing to reduce the number of 3/4" screws being produced. It just makes a weaker cabinet. You need to go back to the factory making the screws, and say "Hey, a bunch of your 1" screws are coming up short. You need to fix whatever problems are causing it."
In Engineering, this is called a weighting function on a feedback loop to drive a system to reach a desired output level more quickly. But there are two crucial aspects to implementing it properly that aren't being done by the people currently advocating affirmative action:
Whether they gave it out for free is irrelevant. Pokemon is trademarked. If Nintendo doesn't shut them down, that could dilute their trademark and result in a judge tossing out a real trademark infringement lawsuit Nintendo files in the future.
While I agree the classy thing for Nintendo to do would be to give them a $1 license for the trademark so long as the game is free and they let Nintendo's lawyers scrutinize it before release. But the fact that they didn't reach out to Nintendo before releasing the game would mean Nintendo sets a dangerous precedent by licensing them. Basically Nintendo would be implying that anyone can use their trademark, and so long as they're giving the game away for free they'll retroactively license it.
2002-2005 was right when Intel was being controlled by their marketing division. Prior to about 2004-2005, the easiest way to improve performance was to increase clock speed. Consequently clock speed was pretty much doubling every 1.5 years, and the public correlated clock speed with CPU performance. Intel's marketing division, with the backing of management, forced their engineering division to increase clock speed at all costs.
The resulting fiasco was Netburst and Prescott, which ran headfirst into the laws of physics. To reach higher frequencies required higher voltages. But CPU power consumption is proportional to frequency times voltage squared. Prescott ran too hot to yield the promised performance increases and Intel's CPU progress stalled. This resulted in AMD capturing the CPU performance crown (which is why the 64-bit instruction set is AMD64).
Intel was trying to do the same thing with XScale - increase clock speed at all costs. They ended up with a mobile processor which doubled the clock speed but didn't yield 2x the performance.
What ended up saving Intel's butt was their laptop division. High power consumption is death for a laptop since it reduces battery life, and laptops weren't as big a market back then. So Intel's laptop CPU engineering division hadn't been pressured by marketing to increase clock speed. They'd come up with a CPU based on the Pentium 3 which made improvements which didn't increase power consumption. The Pentium M allowed Intel to quickly recover from their stumble, and became the basis for the Core, Core Duo, and Core 2 Duo CPUs, with the lessons learned leading to the Core i CPUs we use today.
But there was no Pentium M-equivalent for XScale. They'd lost too much ground to ARM to play catch-up, so Intel ended up jettisoning the project and selling it to Marvell. Their new tack was to reduce the power consumption of the x86 (and eventually AMD64) CPUs enough to compete with ARM. You call it a waste of time, but they eventually did reach power-parity with ARM once they moved to 14nm (partly because ARM was still on 28 and 22nm). But by then the ARM ecosystem was well-developed (iOS and Android), and the fact that you could run x86 software (Windows) on Intel's offering didn't matter anymore.
It's because your ad business model is broken. How long will it take before you admit to yourselves that accepting random scripted ads from an insecure third party ad farm totally out of your control is stupid? Either vet the ads yourself (and accept responsibility if you let a malicious ad get through), or contract it out to a third party security service which does it for you.
Too hard you say? Here's a hint: If the only ads you allow are a static JPEG which clicks through to the advertising site, you've done your job. Newspapers and magazines got along just fine for over a century with static ads. Advertisers don't need scripting, and in fact they've demonstrated they're too immature to be given the power of scripts.
If you really dig into the numbers for the 2008 election when Obama became President, and the 2010 election with the Tea Party revolution, you'll find that support for the candidates within each party were about the same. It's just that in 2008, Republicans were dismayed by Bush's recession and an uninspiring nominee and didn't bother to vote, while Democrats were hyped up by Obama's charisma and voted in droves. In 2010 Democrats were dismayed at Obama's unkept promises and didn't bother to vote, while Republicans outraged at Obamacare voted in droves.
After that, it's mostly inertia, with the incumbent having a high chance to be re-elected regardless of whether s/he's a D or a R.
The whole thing makes me wonder if voluntary democratic elections are really the best way to decide things. Maybe the totalitarian concept of forcing everyone to vote isn't such a bad idea.
The market reality is that mobile tech is still advancing quickly enough that if a company doesn't release a new model every year, people shopping for a new device will simply not buy their 1.5 year old model. So a 1 year release interval is going to remain the norm until the rate of technological advancement slows down. That's what happened with Intel. In the early 1990s, after 1.5 years your CPU was 2x slower than the newest and you felt compelled to upgrade. By the 2000s this interval had stretched to about 5 years. And currently it's about 10 years. This slowdown has correlated to a drop in annual PC sales - people don't upgrade as frequently because there is simply less to gain with a frequent upgrade. But with phones, the rate of advancement is still enough to make a compelling argument for upgrading every 2 years, 1 year if you're willing to pay.
If you have a problem with that, don't upgrade your phone every year. I used my Galaxy S for 4 years, then upgraded to a Nexus 5 which I'm still using (2.5 years). There's no law saying you have to upgrade every year. And it's arrogant and selfish to try to prevent people shopping for a new phone from getting the latest tech simply because you don't have enough self-control to resist buying this year's new model. That's the real issue here. Except it's Greenpeace, who believes everything is the fault of corporations. So rather than tell people they need to show some restraint and stop upgrading their phones so frequently, they word the survey such that the blame is on the phone manufacturers for releasing new models too frequently.
This is true right now because electricity use overnight is low, so the power companies charge lower rates. So if you're one of the few people with an EV, charging it overnight means you're paying discounted electricity prices. That's going to change if everyone gets an EV.
Current U.S. household electricity use is about 900 kWh per month. A Nissan Leaf is rated at 30 kWh/100 miles. Average vehicle miles traveled per household has been inching towards 60 miles (it dipped to 54 in 2009 - page 10). So driving those miles in EVs like the Leaf would result in about 550 kWh/mo of additional electricity consumption. Factor in charging efficiency (about 75%-80% from the numbers I've seen from Tesla and plug-in Prius owners), and it works out to closer to 700 kWh/mo. So adding an EV to the house will nearly double it's electricity use, with all of that additional consumption falling in the overnight period.
Currently, power consumption ramps up around 8 AM and peaks around 8 PM. An EV in every garage would invert that so the peak would occur overnight between 8 PM and 8 AM (certain industrial use which runs 24/7 keeps current overnight use around 67% that of day use). Consequently, electricity prices would go from being lowest overnight, to highest overnight. (This is also why the idea of using the battery in your EV to store up cheap overnight power for use during the day is never going to go anywhere.)
An EV is still cheaper to operate per mile than an ICE vehicle (because per Joule, gasoline is about 10x more expensive than coal). But instead of 70%-80% less cost per mile than an ICE, you're probably going to be in the neighborhood of 50%-60% less.
The yellow before green is more important in countries with a large proportion of manual transmissions. You need a little more time to get a manual car ready to go from a stop, especially on an uphill grade.
It sounds like they analyzed in terms of vehicle-days, not in terms of owned vehicles. The press "helpfully" converted this into "90% of vehicles" which is inaccurate. Yes, probably 90% of vehicles driven on any given day could be replaced by current EV ranges. But I'd guess probably 95% of vehicles can't be replaced by current EV ranges. See, the vast majority of cars are driven short distances nearly all days. But a few times a year they're called on to drive 200-500 miles in a day, for things like that drive to Grandma's for Thanksgiving, weekend trip to Vegas, etc.
If you applied the same type of analysis to car safety, you'd find that 99.99% of vehicle-days, seat belts don't protect you. And therefore it'd be ok to get rid of seat belts in cars.
The flip side of this is that vehicle-days is a valid metric if you can convince people to rent an ICE car for their few trips a year which exceed an EV's range. People erroneously think they've paid a lump sum for the car when they bought it, so driving it for that one long trip is "free" while they have to pay "extra" money if they rent a car. I've been trying for years to convince people that the cost of a car (as well as most other things) is a rate, not an amount. The cost of fuel, maintenance, and depreciation to operate a car is usually in the ballpark of 40-50 cents/mile (insurance drops out since it's mostly based on time).
So driving 500 miles (round trip) to Grandma's for Thanksgiving actually costs you about $200-$250 of expenses and depreciation. Renting an ICE car for those few long trips is very competitive. And you can use your EV as for the other 95% of days.
If you have anything that you need to keep away from prying border patrol eyes, leave it at home. If you need to access it while abroad, put it on your home computer, set up a VPN server on your router, and while you're abroad just VPN in and use remote desktop or VNC to access it.
The entire rights situation is very murky at the border because technically you're not yet on U.S. soil until you pass Customs and Immigration. The SCotUS has ruled multiple times that U.S. Constitutional protections do not apply outside of U.S. soil (which is why Bush put a prison at Guantanamo - it is a U.S. base but on Cuban soil).
If you try to play cute tricks with CBP like your encryption key thing, even if they let you in they'll probably flag your file in their database. From then on, EVERY TIME you try to enter the country again, you'll get to enjoy a 1-3 hour delay while they scrutinize everything about you because of the flag. A German friend of mine was dating a U.S. citizen so was visiting frequently and spending a lot of time here. One of the border guards suspected the dating was a cover story and he was secretly working in the U.S. and flagged him in the database. From then on, every time he tried to enter the U.S. it was a multi-hour circus as they put him into an interrogation room and questioned him. It finally ended when he married the girl and became a U.S. citizen.
That was probably a random check. I used to live in Point Roberts so had to cross the border a lot (2-6 times a day). The border guard can send you in the line for a more thorough search if they suspect something, but every now and then the computer randomly flags you for a search. It happened to me twice in 2 years on the Canadian side, once on the U.S. side (which was half-hearted when they found out I lived in Point Roberts and was entering mainland Washington to do some shopping). (It's also happened once while flying into the U.S. from Europe - I had checked off nothing to declare, but the computer flagged me so they sent me over to Agriculture and opened up all my bags. The border guard was even apologized for the delay, explaining the computer randomly requires them to send people for a more thorough Customs search.)
They go through everything in your car. For me that was mostly stuff in the glove compartment and center console. Most of it was receipts for gas and fast food that I had never thrown away, but they read through each and everyone one of them one at a time. So I made sure to clean all that junk out of the car after my first search to reduce my wait if I was flagged again (my second random search only took about 20 minutes because of this). If you've got a Suburban packed with camping supplies, it's going to be a long and messy search.
In general, the wait to enter the U.S. is longer and the border guards stricter than when entering Canada.
The ability to mod down kills dissent. Not saying this is always a bad thing, but it's not always a good thing either.
Imagine if Google allowed people to mod search results the way slashdot does. Now imagine 98% of people who search Google for a HDD formatting problem are Windows users, 2% are Linux users. The Windows users search for their problem (without specifying OS as lazy people are wont to do), and they get a page of search results, one of which happens to address how to solve the problem in Linux.
If just 2% (1 in 49) of the Windows users is a jerk and downvotes that Linux result (even though it was their own fault they got that search result since they didn't specify the OS), that's enough downvotes to cancel out all the upvotes if 100% of the Linux users searching upvote the result. The Linux site gets a negative rating even if it's the most helpful and most useful site on the Internet, because a tiny fraction of the majority Windows users are idiots and jerks.
Or in slashdot terms, because of the modding system a minority viewpoint has to be proportionately better-written in order to rise up to the same +4 or +5 as a majority viewpoint. This is why other sites have resisted adding the ability to downvote. The results aren't necessarily better or worse, just different.
As for which system is most fair, i suspect that falls under Arrow's impossibility theorem, where if you use "common sense" definitions of fairness, you find that it's mathematically impossible to come up with a single system which yields a "fair" result in all situations.
Electricity in Europe is nearly 3x the price of electricity in the U.S. So they can charge a lot more money per kWh generated there while remaining competitive, to offset those pesky maintenance expenses and to pay for the construction of underwater power transmission cables.
Offshore winds off of Scotland, the North Sea, and Spain are much stronger and more consistent than anywhere I know of in the U.S. Land-based wind typically hits about a 20-22% capacity factor, offshore in the U.S. around 30%-35%. There are offshore wind farms off Scotland and in the North Sea hitting 65%-75% capacity factors.
It's not the voters' fault. Unfortunately, we use a plurality wins single vote system. The optimal solution for winning in that system system is two parties, each of which selects a nominee who is popular with 50.000001% of that party (i.e. just 25.0000001% of the entire voting population). Usually the most extreme 25.000001% of the population.
Basically, both parties are controlled by extremists, who do their best to steer the nomination process hard right or hard left. The further right one party goes, the further left the other party can go while still being virtually guaranteed that one of their nominees will be elected. And vice versa. The entire process effectively disenfranchises the middle 49.99999% of the voting population, leaving government in control of the fringe 25% whose nominee happened to win.
An instant-runoff voting system would put a stop to this, by making the nominee who best reflects the entire voting population (i.e. a centrist) most likely to win. But that's precisely why the two parties (or rather, the extremists who control the parties) will never allow it to happen while they control the legislatures.
Expense doesn't play into this. If it were too expensive, it simply wouldn't be built. That it's being built means customers are willing to pay for that expense, and it's worth doing.
First, you have to understand why this happened. It's unrealistic for a private company to string up cables or run pipes throughout a city. There's just too much private property, and it would take forever to negotiate for access rights with each property owner, never mind the few loonies who will never grant those rights regardless of price. In response, the government sets up easements - a narrow strip of land which slices straight through private property where service providers are allowed to string up cables or bury pipes. Legally the land remains the property owner's, but the government has the right to grant access to that land for certain limited purposes.
Once the government has the easement, they don't want to grant access to just anybody running a utility or cable company. That can result in unsightly and dangerous wiring. It makes more sense to select a single provider, and grant them sole rights to offer service for an entire area. That way you minimize the number of cables that need to be put up. But giving a single company a monopoly creates a lot of problems - you're stripping away a lot of the protection mechanisms that a free market provides (like lowering prices). So you create a public utilities commission which monitors consumer complaints about the service and has the power to require changes or institute fines. Many of them also have the power to view the company's internal accounting books and have to approve price increases before they can be rolled out. Along the way, the government also decided to add some other conditions, like requiring coverage of poor areas (otherwise unprofitable). In the somewhat corrupt city I used to live in, the government also required the cable company give them kickbacks ($x from each customer's monthly bill was sent to the city treasurer to pad the city's budget).
Why select a private company? Why doesn't the government build the cables? Because back in the 1980s and 1990s, we didn't know the best way to implement cable TV and later cable Internet service. Do you run the cables using a star topology? A ring? A grid? A combination of these? What sort of equipment do you use? How do you encode the signals? How much do you allocate to download vs. upload bandwidth? These are the sorts of questions the government is really bad at answering (government workers lack incentives to improve things), but the market is very good at answering. So different communities allowed different cable companies to implement different systems. The ones which didn't work so well went bankrupt. The ones which worked well thrived and grew, bought up the contracts for the bankrupt cable companies, and implemented their successful cable networks in these other communities.
That brings us to today. We're down to about a half dozen successful cable companies, all of whom use the exact same system (standardized to allow the use of the same cable boxes and DOCSIS cable modems across different networks). Looking towards the future, it looks like fiber to the home is the end game here. Now that the market has found the optimal solution and there are no foreseeable changes on the horizon, that's when it's time for the government to step in and take over and convert this into a utility. They should grant a cable maintenance contract to a single company which lays down and maintains the cable, but is not allowed to sell any content over those cables. They make all their money from the government contract. Any cable TV and Internet service provider is allowed to buy access to these cables f