NHTSA says there are over 800,000 blind spot accidents in the U.S. every year, resulting in about 300 fatalities. That's why higher-end cars are coming with blind spot detectors now. Note that Japanese taxis mount the side mirrors on the front of the car to eliminate the blind spot. The image is smaller (boo hoo, you can't read the front license plate), but you can immediately see any vehicles in your blind spot. The taxi companies have found such a big improvement in safety due to those mirrors that they use them even though it looks dorky.
Everyone arguing that side mirrors are superior needs to come to grips wit the fact that unless you mount the side mirrors on the front of the car, they are simply not a very good solution to the problem. If cameras can eliminate the blind spot, they will be a huge improvement to safety. Any aesthetic or fuel consumption improvement is just gravy - the important thing is the safety improvement. Even the argument that camera viewscreen require a different focus distance can be addressed by mounting a mild lens in front of the display.
The "lower-level staff member" who helped set up Clinton's email server assisted the FBI in their investigation in exchange for immunity against prosecution. He knew how serious a breach of protocol this was, and took steps to cover his ass.
Private sector companies have competition (or at least the government tries to keep it that way). If they do something stupid, it gives their customers a reason to flee to the competition. Your company's very survival is at stake when an owner or executive flaunts security rules.
The government by definition has no competition. So there are no disincentives for flaunting security rules since the government can't cease to exist (well I suppose there's popular revolution, but those are few and far between). Because of the lack of such disincentives for government actors, you have to create your own in the form of laws governing behavior.
Jones' mistake is that he doesn't understand the economics. Most of the cost of paving a road is not the surface material, it's the labour and the equipment.
If the marginal cost of making a road a solar road is $x / Watt of installed capacity, and the number of Watt-hours generated over the expected lifetime adds up to a value of $y, and x > y, then the labor and equipment cost doesn't matter. It's never worth it.
You're demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding about opportunity costs and percentages which is all too common (and is a large part of how marketers exploit people's purchasing habits to upsell you). That if a cost of an option exceeds its benefit, that you can somehow make it worthwile by reducing its percentage share of the overall cost. i.e. When a product is 100% of the cost, it's not worth it. But if you add it onto another much more expensive purchase, it's now "only" 1% of the cost and that somehow makes it now worth it. Yes the percentage got smaller, but it's irrelevant. You're comparing against an absolute benefit, so you need to use the absolute cost to make a proper comparison. No those floor mats aren't worth $150. But add them onto a $25,000 car, and suddenly people will pay it because it only adds 0.6% to the price of the car.
You can argue that the cost of a solar road surface is reduced compared to plain panels because the people making the road would be doing the labor anyway, and that it's no additional work to lay down the PV material since (for installation purposes) it behaves similar to other material they're already using to make the road (I dunno, I haven't read up on solar roads). Or you could argue the PV material replaces some other material they're using to build the road, and so represents less additional cost than just the PV material alone. But you cannot argue that it somehow magically becomes worth it because you're tacking on a bunch of other costs (labor and equipment) which you would be paying for anyway.
Another crucial aspect here is that electricity cost is about 20-35 cents/kWh in Europe, while it's only 11.5 cents/kWh in the U.S. So a solar project that's marginally "worth it" in Europe can be a total money loser in the U.S. (unless you're in Hawaii).
A really clever system using a pipe buried undergorund to cool air, and a heated air duct on top of the home to draw air out, so the lower pressure would draw air through the buried pipe. The surrounding ground would cool the air as it traveled through the pipe, and when it came up in your home it would be substantially cooler than the ambient air temperature.
We're starting to adopt the same concept again in newer homes. Turns out dirt tends to stay cooler than the air in summer, and warmer than the air in winter. So you just bury a bunch of water pipes undergorund and use that as your heat sink/source for your heat pump. In summer it cools the home by pumping the heat underground into the dirt, in winter it heats the home by pumping the heat out from the dirt underground.
You can actually see that in one of the linked videos. The man filming (who seems to be more familiar with the system) keeps telling the driver that if she taps the brakes, the entire system will shut off and she will have to steer again. Afraid that she'll think tapping the brakes will only turn off the adaptive cruise control, while leaving the auto-steering operating.
It reminds me of Asiana flight 214, where the pilots changed the autopilot and thought the auto-throttle was still on, when in face the mode change and turned it off.
Water, sewer, and electric are easy because they're utilities. As a landlord, I only need to connect those up to one system and everyone is good to go. That's not the case for ISPs. Some are DSL, some are cable, some are fiber, some are WLAN. (The DSL is not a problem because it runs straight to the tenant's phone, and switching DSL ISPs is transparent for the landlord.)
It's the same reason local governments granted cable monopolies - from a physical hardware perspective, it's not very practical to lay down a dozen different redundant cable networks throughout the town just so everyone can pick from a dozen cable ISPs. Likewise, it's burdensome for an apartment to provide a dozen different network connects for different ISPs on the off chance some of their tenants might use them. Especially if it's an older apartment whose "server closet" is just a metal box with a couple 110 blocks and a small DSLAM in it. Most older apartments (and hotels) use internal DSL from their phone box to the individual units precisely because it didn't involve having to install new cable (Internet runs over existing phone lines). And cable Internet works with a single provider because the entire building is rigged up branching off of a single coax cable. But in-building coax won't work with two cable ISPs unless you lay down two parallel coax networks.
I just finished installing ethernet to the individual units of the building I co-own (commercial property with a dozen tenants). It was a PITA installing new conduit, and for how much it cost I won't see a return on investment for over a decade. And I got it done fairly cheaply because I did it myself. If I'd hired someone to do it I'd probably be looking at a multi-decade ROI, plus we'd have to hire someone to occasionally manage/fix the switching hardware if I didn't know how to do it myself. (I would've loved to have gone the DSLAM route, but our phone junction box was outdoors with no room to add a DSLAM, much less multiple drops from multiple ISPs. So we partitioned a janitor's closet to make a "server closet" and pulled all the ethernet to there. We got lucky in that there was a crawlspace along the top front of the building where the electrical lines for the businesses signs run. I installed the conduit there, but it was not fun going through 1/8 mile of crawlspace on my hands and knees multiple times.)
For new buildings, I completely agree with you. Install conduit and ethernet from the get-go.
These types of stats are gathered using the user agent string in a http request, not from ads. StatCounter has an agreement with millions of websites to gather their site usages statistics (e.g. page hit counter) in this manner.
Linux on mobile platforms (Android) was underrepresented because of this. A lot of Android users deliberately modified their user agent string to report a desktop browser, so they would get the desktop version of websites instead of crippled mobile versions.
That's due to an often-unnoticed failure mode of HR. There are two possible hiring candidates (qualified, unqualified) and two possible HR actions (hire, don't hire). This creates four possible outcomes:
Visible outcomes:
Hire a qualified candidate. Everything is good here. HR gets commended for a job well done. Company gets a good employee.
Hire an unqualified candidate. Company gets a bad employee. HR gets yelled or fired for failing to do their job.
Invisible outcomes:
Don't hire an unqualified candidate. HR did their job here, but company doesn't know it.
Don't hire a qualified candidate. HR failed at their job here, but company doesn't know it.
The only way to see the invisible outcomes is to test HR by sending in a few eminently qualified resumes and fake (but talented) people to do interviews. Almost nobody does this, so HR lives in a bubble where only the visible outcomes matter. That means their strategy is to eliminate unqualified candidates at all costs, even if it means you also eliminate some qualified candidates. So if HR is supposed to fill a job which requires 2 years experience in a new technology, play it safe and ask for 5 years experience in that tech in the job listing. It doesn't matter that their shoddy listing eliminates all honest applicants competent in the technology. As long as the dishonest applicant they eventually hire is also competent in the technology, HR can only be commended.
I recently posted a similar review on Amazon, although mine was regarding a burglar alarm which connects to a server in China and has no encryption. To their credit, the manufacturer has not challenged the review.
You do not get credit for not doing the wrong thing. You get credit for doing this right thing. In your case, that would be addressing the flaws you uncovered, or at the very least thank you for uncovering them.
HP's financial calculator, first made in 1981 and still being sold despite being dog-slow by modern standards. My first calculator was an HP-15C (same form factor, scientific instead of financial functions) and there's something about that form factor which makes it very easy to "touch type" in data. It was by far my favorite to use compared to the 28C, 41CX, and 48SX I've owned since.
Dot matrix printers are still used in businesses which have to print onto carbon copy forms. e.g. Car sales invoices, where the generic form is pre-printed, but each sale has different particulars (vehicle type, VIN, price, buyer's name, address, etc), and the buyer signs, with the original staying with the dealer, one carbon copy going to the DMV, and the customer getting the third copy. Laser and inkjet don't apply pressure to the paper, so can't print onto the carbon copy sheets.
If you're going to argue fairness, then businesses deserve to vote in elections. No taxation without representation, right?
The stupid thing is, it doesn't matter whether you tax businesses or individuals. Businesses don't generate productivity - their employees do. A business is just a group of people agreeing to work together as a group. So all business taxes end up being paid for by people anyway. Via lower wages for employees, higher prices for customers, and lower dividends for stockholders. This misguided notion of "fairness" for business taxes places taxes on a whack-a-mole target where it's easily dodged or shifted onto unintended targets (customers and low-level employees). If you don't like rich stockholders making money from owning a share of a business, just tax rich people directly. Why would you ever think it's a good idea to instead tax the company they own, where they can shift the cost of those taxes onto anyone but themselves?
Well, the other aspect of it was that there just aren't many well-known dessert-type foods which start with K. Their name for it in beta was Key Lime Pie. And while I like key lime pie, I know many people do not. So they sought something with a more universal appeal, and KitKat bars fit the bill.
Nougat works just fine though. O is the next letter without a well-known dessert (at least not that I can think of, aside from anything starting with Orange) which has an extremely popular trademarked brand - Oreo (Nabisco).
Everyone I've shown the video conference call feature of Google Hangouts has wanted to know how to get it working on their (Android) phone/tablet (you get it for free with Gmail). So it's not that 0.0% of people want this, it's that 0.0% of people want Skype as their platform for a lightweight function like text messaging.
Incidentally, Hangouts was integrated into Gmail on the browser in 2013. It's one of the nice spin-offs from their abortive Google+ attempt. The only catch is that Google lets the user choose how they want to set it up, and by default it only shows Hangouts chats. You need to mess with the options before it'll show Hangouts + SMS on both your phone and your computer. (It still seems to miss MMS.)
We can't "run out" of helium. Anything which emits alpha particles creates helium. Alpha particles are just helium nuclei, and when they bump into other atoms and steal the electrons they become proper helium atoms. These reservoirs are just places were radioactive decay underground generated lots of helium, and the rate at which the rocks let helium pass through is slower than the rate at which new helium is being created.
So unlike oil, this helium isn't just sitting there waiting to be tapped. It's slowly leaking out - it is one of if not the smallest molecule (smaller than H2) and can squeeze through just about anything. Even metal storage tanks will leak it. And once it reaches the air it's inevitably lost into space. The rate it's leaking out should be proportional to the amount of helium, so the most efficient use would actually be to deplete any known reservoirs, then scale back your use to match the rate at which the reservoir is being replenished. Think of the problem as how to maximize the amount of water you can put to use when your only storage tank has an unfixable leak at the bottom. The more water you try to store in the tank, the faster it leaks, and so the percentage of water you can actually use decreases.
Nearly all cameras have IR and UV filters. Without them, camera sensors respond to IR and UV light, and the colors in your photos end up looking different than they do to the eye. The efficacy and cut-off frequency depends on the filter and manufacturer, but it's not uncommon for far-IR to be blocked while near-IR is let through.
Anyway, this reminds me of the pattern of circles used on bank notes to prevent you from counterfeiting by simply putting currency on a color photocopier. Difference being this could be seriously abused by both governments and venues to prohibit camera use in areas where it is legally allowed. Like photographing a building designed by a famous architect. I'm hoping that's why Apple (who for all their faults is usually pretty end-user-friendly) is patenting it - to prevent someone else from developing and implementing the idea.
City laws prohibiting new development maintain the "desperate shortage" of housing. And city laws capping rents makes short-term rentals more lucrative than long-term rentals. The real estate markets were already fucked up there by those laws before Airbnb even existed.
The market wants to fix it by adding more housing units but is prevented by laws prohibiting development. This causes prices to increase, which normally acts as an incentive for more development. Since the city doesn't want that, it caps rents. This doesn't make the problem go away though. All it does is shift the problem from one of price into one of availability - a lot more people want to live there than there is available housing. This results in a larger population of people wanting to live there but unable to. Which leads to more people wanting to visit. Which leads to more demand for short-term rentals like hotels and Airbnb.
In other words, Airbnb is a symptom of meddling in the real estate market (by the local government). Not the cause as you're insinuating.
I run a small computer consulting/support business on the side. To date I've gotten 3 inquiries which were ransomware-related. (Might've been 4. The person's symptoms sounded like ransomware was in the process of encrypting his files. I told him to this and to immediately shut everything down and to contact me again for further steps, but he never did.) Meanwhile I've gotten dozens of inquiries about how to get "irreplaceable" data off dead hard drives or thumb drives, or which had been accidentally formatted, deleted, or overwritten.
Back up your data. Ransomware is the least of your worries. The media just reports stories about it disproportionately (like they do plane crashes and nuclear accidents). Even if ransomware didn't exist, you should still be backing up your data.
Efficiency may be pointless for watching an entertaining show. It is however very helpful for figuring out if a show is or will be entertaining. I go through a ton of anime at 1.5x to 2x speed (I can go faster on native English shows, but sometimes the translated subtitles don't exactly flow in English and it takes a moment to figure out what they mean), mostly to sample the first 1-3 episodes to figure out if it's something I'd enjoy watching. If it is, I'll watch the remainder at 1x to 1.5x speed (a lot of anime adds filler like a 3 sec static pic to establish the setting, so some speedup is helpful). If it isn't, I dump it and move on to the next one. This way I waste less of my time searching, more of my time watching shows I find entertaining.
What would be helpful is a dynamic speedup program or extension. If there's lots of action, dialog, or text (places in the file with a poorer compression ratio), slow down so I can take it all in. If there's nothing going on (i.e. film/show editor inserted it to pad out the show to make it fit the time slot), speed over it.
Also, while it's true that you can parse stuff much quicker if you convert it to a text file and read it (a much larger part of your brain is devoted to optical character recognition than to speed recognition), that mostly only works on documentaries and exposition like the news. A lot of the entertainment from fiction comes from how well the actor delivers the lines, so the timing and inflection of the spoken voice are important.
Safety engineers are pretty low on the totem pole in the auto design process. One of the safety engineers at BMW gave a guest lecture in my grad school structural engineering course. You'd think with a luxury brand like BMW safety would be a priority, but no. The artists do their thing first - they get to design what the car's shape will be like and where all the main areas like seating, wheels, trunk, etc. will go. Then the engineers who make the essential components like the engine and transmission have to figure out how to install their components into the shape and layout predicated by the artist. The safety engineer comes dead last. He's given a weight budget of x kg of steel, and has to decide where to put it to make the vehicle pass government crash safety tests, while staying within the bounds of the artist's body design and avoiding other already-designed components like the engine.
So the "morons who designed this" probably never had to take a basic course on ergonomic and safe design. They're free to design whatever the hell they wanted, and it was up to people who came after them to make it functional and safe. I suspect that's why the Teslas do so well on safety tests. They probably put the safety engineers higher in the pecking order, so they can actually put the strengthening beams and crumple zone in the optimal place, and it becomes the artists' and other engineers' jobs to work around these structural elements.
The problem isn't that it's a deviation from a longstanding interface. Sometimes a change results in a better interface.
The problem is that it's taking a gear selection process which previously provided two independent pieces of feedback (the highlighted gear letter and shift knob's physical position), and reducing it to just one piece of feedback (only the highlighted gear letter). If people's failure rate at reading the letter was 0.1%, and people's failure rate at detecting the gearshift position was 0.1%, then the two combine for a 0.0001% failure rate. Only one in a million times does the driver think the car is in park when it's actually in neutral. Eliminate one of these pieces of feedback and you've increased the rate at which people accidentally leave the car in park by 1000x.
Even something like using a light to highlight the selected gear is a design mistake. You've now added a new mode of failure - the LED could burn out or its power wire fray, leaving you unable to tell which gear it's in. Previous gear shift levers simply use a painted red line to highlight which gear is selected. There's nothing to fail there, unless the shift mechanism physically breaks or the car burns. You do not add new modes of failure just to make things appear fancier or more modern. KISS
It's not just tax preparation companies. EVERY company with employees uses this system to pay employment taxes (unless they pay a tax preparer to pay it on their behalf, then pay the tax preparer). About a decade ago, the IRS got rid of mailed employment tax payments. Companies must pay their 940 and 941 taxes (and a variety of other taxes) online via electronic funds transfer, either monthly or (if your payroll is big enough) semi-weekly. To login to the system, you need your EIN, your password, and a PIN.
The PIN is snail mailed to you during your initial application for online tax payments. For some stupid reason it takes nearly a month from your application to when you get your PIN in the mail. I screwed up and made a typo in the EIN in my initial application, and it took 2 months before I was able to figure out from the IRS what the problem was, submit new paperwork, and receive a new PIN. During that time, I couldn't use their online tax payment system to pay my taxes, and I couldn't mail them a check since they don't even have an address for that anymore. After a few calls to the IRS, the procedure they told me to follow was to send them the money as a wire transfer with my EIN in the comments and notes section of the wire.
It's slow, it's stupid, and (being a static 4 digit PIN) is not very secure. But it's a rudimentary form of 2FA. To confirm you're you, you need your username (EIN), something you know (password), and something you have (PIN mailed to your business address).
Most Americans would not need to actually file for taxes, the IRS already has all the data it needs
And therein lies the rub. The "IRS already has all the data it needs" because companies are submitting it via the same system you're saying they don't need. EFTPS tells the IRS how much was paid in total employment taxes, and the W-2 (W-3 from the company's end) filings with the SSA gives an employee-by-employee breakdown. They cross-reference the two together to confirm that the amount claimed as paid in the W-2s matches the amount actually paid. But to get into EFTPS, you need your mailed PIN. (The SSA has their own system, with a forced password reset after a few months of non-use.)
The whole system needs to be overhauled in one fell swoop.
While I agree with the white/blue collar angle, there's more going on here than that. Ideally a unified economy is most efficient. Same standards, same regulations, same processes, policies, etc. promotes efficiency. A business doesn't have to jump through a dozen hoops to sell their products in multiple countries, they just have to jump through one.
Practically, a big unified economy is highly unlikely to always develop the best set of standards, regulations, processes, policies, etc. There are just too many sub-groups (national governments, states, etc.) demanding to be pleased. You throw them a bone just to get them to shut up, and it creates red tape that's really unnecessary from the viewpoint of everyone else, but now they have to comply. Multiply that by a couple dozen countries or states and that's a lot of added red tape.
So small is bad. But really big is bad too. You want a balance between the agility of striking out on your own path, and the efficiency of large size. At 500 million people, maybe the EU has just gotten too big. I see similar signs from the U.S. (300 million people), where increasing polarization suggests different groups of people (not necessarily divided along state lines) seem to have different ideas for the best way to proceed, but are getting more and more upset at each other for forcing everyone to go either one way or another.
These differences of opinion on how best to proceed don't necessarily have to be along political lines. White vs blue collar is more or less an apolitical division. A country or union with single standards for both types of workers may not always be ideal. Whereas a country which focuses on manufacturing can prioritize policies important to blue collar workers, while a country which focuses on (say) finance can prioritize policies important to white collar workers, which results in less friction forming between the two groups.
Slashdot Mirror
NHTSA says there are over 800,000 blind spot accidents in the U.S. every year, resulting in about 300 fatalities. That's why higher-end cars are coming with blind spot detectors now. Note that Japanese taxis mount the side mirrors on the front of the car to eliminate the blind spot. The image is smaller (boo hoo, you can't read the front license plate), but you can immediately see any vehicles in your blind spot. The taxi companies have found such a big improvement in safety due to those mirrors that they use them even though it looks dorky.
Everyone arguing that side mirrors are superior needs to come to grips wit the fact that unless you mount the side mirrors on the front of the car, they are simply not a very good solution to the problem. If cameras can eliminate the blind spot, they will be a huge improvement to safety. Any aesthetic or fuel consumption improvement is just gravy - the important thing is the safety improvement. Even the argument that camera viewscreen require a different focus distance can be addressed by mounting a mild lens in front of the display.
The "lower-level staff member" who helped set up Clinton's email server assisted the FBI in their investigation in exchange for immunity against prosecution. He knew how serious a breach of protocol this was, and took steps to cover his ass.
Private sector companies have competition (or at least the government tries to keep it that way). If they do something stupid, it gives their customers a reason to flee to the competition. Your company's very survival is at stake when an owner or executive flaunts security rules.
The government by definition has no competition. So there are no disincentives for flaunting security rules since the government can't cease to exist (well I suppose there's popular revolution, but those are few and far between). Because of the lack of such disincentives for government actors, you have to create your own in the form of laws governing behavior.
If the marginal cost of making a road a solar road is $x / Watt of installed capacity, and the number of Watt-hours generated over the expected lifetime adds up to a value of $y, and x > y, then the labor and equipment cost doesn't matter. It's never worth it.
You're demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding about opportunity costs and percentages which is all too common (and is a large part of how marketers exploit people's purchasing habits to upsell you). That if a cost of an option exceeds its benefit, that you can somehow make it worthwile by reducing its percentage share of the overall cost. i.e. When a product is 100% of the cost, it's not worth it. But if you add it onto another much more expensive purchase, it's now "only" 1% of the cost and that somehow makes it now worth it. Yes the percentage got smaller, but it's irrelevant. You're comparing against an absolute benefit, so you need to use the absolute cost to make a proper comparison. No those floor mats aren't worth $150. But add them onto a $25,000 car, and suddenly people will pay it because it only adds 0.6% to the price of the car.
You can argue that the cost of a solar road surface is reduced compared to plain panels because the people making the road would be doing the labor anyway, and that it's no additional work to lay down the PV material since (for installation purposes) it behaves similar to other material they're already using to make the road (I dunno, I haven't read up on solar roads). Or you could argue the PV material replaces some other material they're using to build the road, and so represents less additional cost than just the PV material alone. But you cannot argue that it somehow magically becomes worth it because you're tacking on a bunch of other costs (labor and equipment) which you would be paying for anyway.
Another crucial aspect here is that electricity cost is about 20-35 cents/kWh in Europe, while it's only 11.5 cents/kWh in the U.S. So a solar project that's marginally "worth it" in Europe can be a total money loser in the U.S. (unless you're in Hawaii).
A really clever system using a pipe buried undergorund to cool air, and a heated air duct on top of the home to draw air out, so the lower pressure would draw air through the buried pipe. The surrounding ground would cool the air as it traveled through the pipe, and when it came up in your home it would be substantially cooler than the ambient air temperature.
We're starting to adopt the same concept again in newer homes. Turns out dirt tends to stay cooler than the air in summer, and warmer than the air in winter. So you just bury a bunch of water pipes undergorund and use that as your heat sink/source for your heat pump. In summer it cools the home by pumping the heat underground into the dirt, in winter it heats the home by pumping the heat out from the dirt underground.
You can actually see that in one of the linked videos. The man filming (who seems to be more familiar with the system) keeps telling the driver that if she taps the brakes, the entire system will shut off and she will have to steer again. Afraid that she'll think tapping the brakes will only turn off the adaptive cruise control, while leaving the auto-steering operating.
It reminds me of Asiana flight 214, where the pilots changed the autopilot and thought the auto-throttle was still on, when in face the mode change and turned it off.
Water, sewer, and electric are easy because they're utilities. As a landlord, I only need to connect those up to one system and everyone is good to go. That's not the case for ISPs. Some are DSL, some are cable, some are fiber, some are WLAN. (The DSL is not a problem because it runs straight to the tenant's phone, and switching DSL ISPs is transparent for the landlord.)
It's the same reason local governments granted cable monopolies - from a physical hardware perspective, it's not very practical to lay down a dozen different redundant cable networks throughout the town just so everyone can pick from a dozen cable ISPs. Likewise, it's burdensome for an apartment to provide a dozen different network connects for different ISPs on the off chance some of their tenants might use them. Especially if it's an older apartment whose "server closet" is just a metal box with a couple 110 blocks and a small DSLAM in it. Most older apartments (and hotels) use internal DSL from their phone box to the individual units precisely because it didn't involve having to install new cable (Internet runs over existing phone lines). And cable Internet works with a single provider because the entire building is rigged up branching off of a single coax cable. But in-building coax won't work with two cable ISPs unless you lay down two parallel coax networks.
I just finished installing ethernet to the individual units of the building I co-own (commercial property with a dozen tenants). It was a PITA installing new conduit, and for how much it cost I won't see a return on investment for over a decade. And I got it done fairly cheaply because I did it myself. If I'd hired someone to do it I'd probably be looking at a multi-decade ROI, plus we'd have to hire someone to occasionally manage/fix the switching hardware if I didn't know how to do it myself. (I would've loved to have gone the DSLAM route, but our phone junction box was outdoors with no room to add a DSLAM, much less multiple drops from multiple ISPs. So we partitioned a janitor's closet to make a "server closet" and pulled all the ethernet to there. We got lucky in that there was a crawlspace along the top front of the building where the electrical lines for the businesses signs run. I installed the conduit there, but it was not fun going through 1/8 mile of crawlspace on my hands and knees multiple times.)
For new buildings, I completely agree with you. Install conduit and ethernet from the get-go.
These types of stats are gathered using the user agent string in a http request, not from ads. StatCounter has an agreement with millions of websites to gather their site usages statistics (e.g. page hit counter) in this manner.
Linux on mobile platforms (Android) was underrepresented because of this. A lot of Android users deliberately modified their user agent string to report a desktop browser, so they would get the desktop version of websites instead of crippled mobile versions.
Visible outcomes:
Invisible outcomes:
The only way to see the invisible outcomes is to test HR by sending in a few eminently qualified resumes and fake (but talented) people to do interviews. Almost nobody does this, so HR lives in a bubble where only the visible outcomes matter. That means their strategy is to eliminate unqualified candidates at all costs, even if it means you also eliminate some qualified candidates. So if HR is supposed to fill a job which requires 2 years experience in a new technology, play it safe and ask for 5 years experience in that tech in the job listing. It doesn't matter that their shoddy listing eliminates all honest applicants competent in the technology. As long as the dishonest applicant they eventually hire is also competent in the technology, HR can only be commended.
You do not get credit for not doing the wrong thing. You get credit for doing this right thing. In your case, that would be addressing the flaws you uncovered, or at the very least thank you for uncovering them.
I thought that was GeoCities.
HP's financial calculator, first made in 1981 and still being sold despite being dog-slow by modern standards. My first calculator was an HP-15C (same form factor, scientific instead of financial functions) and there's something about that form factor which makes it very easy to "touch type" in data. It was by far my favorite to use compared to the 28C, 41CX, and 48SX I've owned since.
Dot matrix printers are still used in businesses which have to print onto carbon copy forms. e.g. Car sales invoices, where the generic form is pre-printed, but each sale has different particulars (vehicle type, VIN, price, buyer's name, address, etc), and the buyer signs, with the original staying with the dealer, one carbon copy going to the DMV, and the customer getting the third copy. Laser and inkjet don't apply pressure to the paper, so can't print onto the carbon copy sheets.
If you're going to argue fairness, then businesses deserve to vote in elections. No taxation without representation, right?
The stupid thing is, it doesn't matter whether you tax businesses or individuals. Businesses don't generate productivity - their employees do. A business is just a group of people agreeing to work together as a group. So all business taxes end up being paid for by people anyway. Via lower wages for employees, higher prices for customers, and lower dividends for stockholders. This misguided notion of "fairness" for business taxes places taxes on a whack-a-mole target where it's easily dodged or shifted onto unintended targets (customers and low-level employees). If you don't like rich stockholders making money from owning a share of a business, just tax rich people directly. Why would you ever think it's a good idea to instead tax the company they own, where they can shift the cost of those taxes onto anyone but themselves?
Well, the other aspect of it was that there just aren't many well-known dessert-type foods which start with K. Their name for it in beta was Key Lime Pie. And while I like key lime pie, I know many people do not. So they sought something with a more universal appeal, and KitKat bars fit the bill.
Nougat works just fine though. O is the next letter without a well-known dessert (at least not that I can think of, aside from anything starting with Orange) which has an extremely popular trademarked brand - Oreo (Nabisco).
Everyone I've shown the video conference call feature of Google Hangouts has wanted to know how to get it working on their (Android) phone/tablet (you get it for free with Gmail). So it's not that 0.0% of people want this, it's that 0.0% of people want Skype as their platform for a lightweight function like text messaging.
Incidentally, Hangouts was integrated into Gmail on the browser in 2013. It's one of the nice spin-offs from their abortive Google+ attempt. The only catch is that Google lets the user choose how they want to set it up, and by default it only shows Hangouts chats. You need to mess with the options before it'll show Hangouts + SMS on both your phone and your computer. (It still seems to miss MMS.)
We can't "run out" of helium. Anything which emits alpha particles creates helium. Alpha particles are just helium nuclei, and when they bump into other atoms and steal the electrons they become proper helium atoms. These reservoirs are just places were radioactive decay underground generated lots of helium, and the rate at which the rocks let helium pass through is slower than the rate at which new helium is being created.
So unlike oil, this helium isn't just sitting there waiting to be tapped. It's slowly leaking out - it is one of if not the smallest molecule (smaller than H2) and can squeeze through just about anything. Even metal storage tanks will leak it. And once it reaches the air it's inevitably lost into space. The rate it's leaking out should be proportional to the amount of helium, so the most efficient use would actually be to deplete any known reservoirs, then scale back your use to match the rate at which the reservoir is being replenished. Think of the problem as how to maximize the amount of water you can put to use when your only storage tank has an unfixable leak at the bottom. The more water you try to store in the tank, the faster it leaks, and so the percentage of water you can actually use decreases.
Nearly all cameras have IR and UV filters. Without them, camera sensors respond to IR and UV light, and the colors in your photos end up looking different than they do to the eye. The efficacy and cut-off frequency depends on the filter and manufacturer, but it's not uncommon for far-IR to be blocked while near-IR is let through.
Anyway, this reminds me of the pattern of circles used on bank notes to prevent you from counterfeiting by simply putting currency on a color photocopier. Difference being this could be seriously abused by both governments and venues to prohibit camera use in areas where it is legally allowed. Like photographing a building designed by a famous architect. I'm hoping that's why Apple (who for all their faults is usually pretty end-user-friendly) is patenting it - to prevent someone else from developing and implementing the idea.
Have you asked yourself why that's happening?
City laws prohibiting new development maintain the "desperate shortage" of housing. And city laws capping rents makes short-term rentals more lucrative than long-term rentals. The real estate markets were already fucked up there by those laws before Airbnb even existed.
The market wants to fix it by adding more housing units but is prevented by laws prohibiting development. This causes prices to increase, which normally acts as an incentive for more development. Since the city doesn't want that, it caps rents. This doesn't make the problem go away though. All it does is shift the problem from one of price into one of availability - a lot more people want to live there than there is available housing. This results in a larger population of people wanting to live there but unable to. Which leads to more people wanting to visit. Which leads to more demand for short-term rentals like hotels and Airbnb.
In other words, Airbnb is a symptom of meddling in the real estate market (by the local government). Not the cause as you're insinuating.
I run a small computer consulting/support business on the side. To date I've gotten 3 inquiries which were ransomware-related. (Might've been 4. The person's symptoms sounded like ransomware was in the process of encrypting his files. I told him to this and to immediately shut everything down and to contact me again for further steps, but he never did.) Meanwhile I've gotten dozens of inquiries about how to get "irreplaceable" data off dead hard drives or thumb drives, or which had been accidentally formatted, deleted, or overwritten.
Back up your data. Ransomware is the least of your worries. The media just reports stories about it disproportionately (like they do plane crashes and nuclear accidents). Even if ransomware didn't exist, you should still be backing up your data.
Efficiency may be pointless for watching an entertaining show. It is however very helpful for figuring out if a show is or will be entertaining. I go through a ton of anime at 1.5x to 2x speed (I can go faster on native English shows, but sometimes the translated subtitles don't exactly flow in English and it takes a moment to figure out what they mean), mostly to sample the first 1-3 episodes to figure out if it's something I'd enjoy watching. If it is, I'll watch the remainder at 1x to 1.5x speed (a lot of anime adds filler like a 3 sec static pic to establish the setting, so some speedup is helpful). If it isn't, I dump it and move on to the next one. This way I waste less of my time searching, more of my time watching shows I find entertaining.
What would be helpful is a dynamic speedup program or extension. If there's lots of action, dialog, or text (places in the file with a poorer compression ratio), slow down so I can take it all in. If there's nothing going on (i.e. film/show editor inserted it to pad out the show to make it fit the time slot), speed over it.
Also, while it's true that you can parse stuff much quicker if you convert it to a text file and read it (a much larger part of your brain is devoted to optical character recognition than to speed recognition), that mostly only works on documentaries and exposition like the news. A lot of the entertainment from fiction comes from how well the actor delivers the lines, so the timing and inflection of the spoken voice are important.
Safety engineers are pretty low on the totem pole in the auto design process. One of the safety engineers at BMW gave a guest lecture in my grad school structural engineering course. You'd think with a luxury brand like BMW safety would be a priority, but no. The artists do their thing first - they get to design what the car's shape will be like and where all the main areas like seating, wheels, trunk, etc. will go. Then the engineers who make the essential components like the engine and transmission have to figure out how to install their components into the shape and layout predicated by the artist. The safety engineer comes dead last. He's given a weight budget of x kg of steel, and has to decide where to put it to make the vehicle pass government crash safety tests, while staying within the bounds of the artist's body design and avoiding other already-designed components like the engine.
So the "morons who designed this" probably never had to take a basic course on ergonomic and safe design. They're free to design whatever the hell they wanted, and it was up to people who came after them to make it functional and safe. I suspect that's why the Teslas do so well on safety tests. They probably put the safety engineers higher in the pecking order, so they can actually put the strengthening beams and crumple zone in the optimal place, and it becomes the artists' and other engineers' jobs to work around these structural elements.
The problem isn't that it's a deviation from a longstanding interface. Sometimes a change results in a better interface.
The problem is that it's taking a gear selection process which previously provided two independent pieces of feedback (the highlighted gear letter and shift knob's physical position), and reducing it to just one piece of feedback (only the highlighted gear letter). If people's failure rate at reading the letter was 0.1%, and people's failure rate at detecting the gearshift position was 0.1%, then the two combine for a 0.0001% failure rate. Only one in a million times does the driver think the car is in park when it's actually in neutral. Eliminate one of these pieces of feedback and you've increased the rate at which people accidentally leave the car in park by 1000x.
Even something like using a light to highlight the selected gear is a design mistake. You've now added a new mode of failure - the LED could burn out or its power wire fray, leaving you unable to tell which gear it's in. Previous gear shift levers simply use a painted red line to highlight which gear is selected. There's nothing to fail there, unless the shift mechanism physically breaks or the car burns. You do not add new modes of failure just to make things appear fancier or more modern. KISS
The PIN is snail mailed to you during your initial application for online tax payments. For some stupid reason it takes nearly a month from your application to when you get your PIN in the mail. I screwed up and made a typo in the EIN in my initial application, and it took 2 months before I was able to figure out from the IRS what the problem was, submit new paperwork, and receive a new PIN. During that time, I couldn't use their online tax payment system to pay my taxes, and I couldn't mail them a check since they don't even have an address for that anymore. After a few calls to the IRS, the procedure they told me to follow was to send them the money as a wire transfer with my EIN in the comments and notes section of the wire.
It's slow, it's stupid, and (being a static 4 digit PIN) is not very secure. But it's a rudimentary form of 2FA. To confirm you're you, you need your username (EIN), something you know (password), and something you have (PIN mailed to your business address).
And therein lies the rub. The "IRS already has all the data it needs" because companies are submitting it via the same system you're saying they don't need. EFTPS tells the IRS how much was paid in total employment taxes, and the W-2 (W-3 from the company's end) filings with the SSA gives an employee-by-employee breakdown. They cross-reference the two together to confirm that the amount claimed as paid in the W-2s matches the amount actually paid. But to get into EFTPS, you need your mailed PIN. (The SSA has their own system, with a forced password reset after a few months of non-use.)
The whole system needs to be overhauled in one fell swoop.
While I agree with the white/blue collar angle, there's more going on here than that. Ideally a unified economy is most efficient. Same standards, same regulations, same processes, policies, etc. promotes efficiency. A business doesn't have to jump through a dozen hoops to sell their products in multiple countries, they just have to jump through one.
Practically, a big unified economy is highly unlikely to always develop the best set of standards, regulations, processes, policies, etc. There are just too many sub-groups (national governments, states, etc.) demanding to be pleased. You throw them a bone just to get them to shut up, and it creates red tape that's really unnecessary from the viewpoint of everyone else, but now they have to comply. Multiply that by a couple dozen countries or states and that's a lot of added red tape.
So small is bad. But really big is bad too. You want a balance between the agility of striking out on your own path, and the efficiency of large size. At 500 million people, maybe the EU has just gotten too big. I see similar signs from the U.S. (300 million people), where increasing polarization suggests different groups of people (not necessarily divided along state lines) seem to have different ideas for the best way to proceed, but are getting more and more upset at each other for forcing everyone to go either one way or another.
These differences of opinion on how best to proceed don't necessarily have to be along political lines. White vs blue collar is more or less an apolitical division. A country or union with single standards for both types of workers may not always be ideal. Whereas a country which focuses on manufacturing can prioritize policies important to blue collar workers, while a country which focuses on (say) finance can prioritize policies important to white collar workers, which results in less friction forming between the two groups.