41,149 - suicide (21,175 of them by firearms, about 2/3 of all firearm deaths)
38,861 - accidental poisonings and overdoses (passed traffic accidents recently)
37,908 - (land) motor vehicle accidents (nearly 3/4 alcohol-related)
30,208 - accidental falls (mostly among the elderly)
16,904 - other accidents
16,121 - homicide (11,208 by firearms)
4,587 - Other undetermined events (281 by firearms)
3,391 - accidental drowning
2,768 - complications from medical and surgical care
2,760 - accidental fire
1,569 - water, air, space vehicle accidents
1,000 - other land transport accidents 516 - killings by law enforcement (usually by firearms) 505 - accidental discharge of firearms
15 - war
Now, compare that list to what you see the press covering. Suicides, drug overdoses, motor vehicle deaths, falls, drownings, medical complications, are vastly underreported. Firearms (which I've put in bold), air transport accidents, killings by law enforcement, and war/terrorism deaths are vastly overreported. (IMHO fires are reported about the right amount - fires make good video).
Roughly 2/3 of the firearm deaths are from suicide. But firearms account for roughly half of suicides. So you can make a pretty convincing argument that the people who shot themselves probably would've figured out some other way to successfully kill themselves if guns weren't available. So you shouldn't attribute these deaths on firearms.
That leaves the 11,208 firearm homicide deaths up for debate. Which certainly is a topic worth debating. But its importance falls far behind suicide, drug overdoses, motor vehicle accidents (mostly drunk driving), falls (this one is debatable since it's mostly elderly who are killed this way), and other types of accidents. As a whole, these things are 11.7x more likely to kill you than homicide by firearm.
In other words, firearms homicides comprise less than 8% of the shit in the shit sandwich. An objective, statistical approach to reducing the preventable non-disease death rate in this country would prioritize reducing these other causes higher than tackling firearms homicides. The overdose death rate in particular is very troubling, since it's roughly tripled in the past 15 years. This increase accounts for twice as many lives lost than would've been saved if we'd somehow managed to eliminate all firearms homicide deaths. Yet the press practically ignores this compared to firearms homicides.
Doing business in China is a balance of how much are you willing to pay off people and how much you stand to profit. The more you want to profit, the more of that profit you need to "invest" in the Chinese legal system. The Chinese don't see it so much as bribery as the do what they tend to call it "investments". People who sell products in China, need to be vested in the unique interest of China in order to sell their wares there. Or at least that's how the logic works that I've been explained
It's actually the same reasoning used to tax corporations in all countries, except "us" and "them" have been reversed so most people now find the concept foreign (no pun intended). The corporation is able to conduct business in the country due to its social and legal system, so it needs to "invest" in the interests of that country by paying taxes.
It sounds like fairness when it's a corporation you don't care about (them) paying those taxes and you're the beneficiary (us). But when it's "your" corporation being forced to pay and someone you don't care about and whose legal system you have no say in (the Chinese) is the beneficiary, the same thing sounds unfair.
"My money" does not exist in a vacuum. You get to live your life through the benefits of the rest of society.
I don't think you or Rawls quite understood what money is.
Once upon a time, people had to live on their own. They had to grow and harvest their own crops, hunt their own meat, tan and sew their own clothes, build their own shelters, make their own tools, treat their own injuries, etc. This was hugely inefficient because of the massive number of skills you needed to learn, and the rapid multi-tasking you needed to do to accomplish everything.
Then someone came up with the idea of trade. One person would specialize in growing and harvesting crops. Another in hunting meat. Another in making clothes. Another in making tools, etc. They would then trade what they made for what other people made. Specialization meant that you only needed to learn one skill, which meant you could learn how to do it a lot better than when you had to learn dozens of skills. You could also concentrate solely on that one skill instead of constantly being interrupted to attend to something else. This increase in efficiency led to a massive increases in productivity per capita.
You would then overproduce your specialty, and trade it with other people for the things they specialized in making. You trade your productivity for their productivity. Money was invented afterwards, to facilitate trades. If you were selling clothes but needed meat, and the guy selling meat didn't need clothes but did need tools, you would have to find someone selling tools who needed clothes in order to make the multi-way trade work. Money allows you to skip these multi-way trades - everyone just trades for one common denominator aka money. In other words, money is just a representation of productivity.
So you do not "owe" money to society just because you made it. The fact that you made money means that you already paid society - by contributing your productivity to society's trade of marketable skills. If you hadn't contributed to society, you wouldn't have made the money in the first place. In other words, the fact that you made money means you already paid for the benefit you derived from the rest of society. It is, in fact, your money - you gave away your skills, your productivity in exchange for it. That money is a direct representation of what you worked and toiled over to create. It is your money just as much as it was your clothes before you sold them.
The concept of taxation comes about when a society decides there are some things which should be made or done which would benefit everyone (or at least enough people that it's deemed worth doing). Roads, aquifers, a sewage system, etc. Each person then contributes a share of their earnings, their money (actually their income, which is a time flux, a first derivative of money), to pay for these things. Of course this was immediately abused by those in power like the nobility to turn taxation into a mechanism by which they could steal money from people doing productive work, so they could live in luxury without having to actually contribute any productivity of their own.
But absent corruption, this is the idea behind taxation. How much each person should contribute has and still is debated. Should everyone have to pay the same amount? Should those who make more pay more (after all someone who runs a trade caravan gets more use out of the roads than someone who uses it only to bring a wheelbarrow of apples to sell at the market)? Once you've made enough money to pay for your own survival needs, should any extra money you make be taxed at a higher rate? Or do those who fail to make enough money to pay for their own survival simply need to find a better trade which produces something other people want enough for them to make more money?
This is the way trademark law works. You must defend the trademark or risk losing it.
Citibank's trademark is for a reward points program. Their beef is with an AT&T Thanks program which, like the Citibank program, rewards loyal customers. So that aspect of trademark infringement (that the two names are for a similar product or service which could be confused) is satisfied. This isn't because AT&T is just saying "Thanks" as TFS claims.
At that point, even if Citibank thinks the lawsuit is silly, they still have to file it. Once the court decides there is no infringement, both sides are safe. AT&T is free to call their program AT&T Thanks. And Citibank's ThankYou trademark is safe because they defended it
If they didn't file a lawsuit, someone else could start another rewards program named "Thanks" or maybe "[company_name] Thanks You." When Citibank sued them, they could point to Citibank's failure to defend their trademark against AT&T. The court could decide that that constituted Citibank abandoning the trademark.. Even though the possibility of that is extremely small, the fact that it's not zero means the trademark holder is going to play it safe and file a lawsuit against anything which could be considered a trademark violation.
The NOx and SO2 that "clean" coal plants emit are only a small part of the pollutants. The vast majority is CO2, which is the same per kWh for both a "clean" or "dirty" coal plant.
Since you obviously didn't read the link to my efficiency calcs, here they are again:
An ICE engine can hit about 30% efficiency. An automatic transmission is about 90%-95% efficient (pretty impressive considering it's just squirting fluid at a turbine).
Newer coal plants are about 40% efficient. Natural gas plants are about 60% efficient. Split the difference and go with 50%. Power lines are about 98% efficient. Real-world charging efficiency of the Tesla is about 80% (1/1.26 = 0.79). That is, 80% of the electricity from your wall socket goes into the battery, the other 20% becomes heat. I can't find any numbers for discharge efficiency, so let's call it 100% for now. And electric motor efficiency is about 90%-95%.
Tally it up and you get:
ICE: 30% * 92.5% = 27.8% efficient
EV: 50% * 98% * 80% * (100%) * 92.5% = 36.3% efficient.
If the discharge efficiency for the battery is also 80%, then the EV efficiency drops to 29%. For all intents and purposes the same as the ICE. Coal and gas plants are not "much more efficient" than ICE engines, and EVs are not "much more efficient" in using that electricity. (The EV is cheaper to operate because coal is an order of magnitude cheaper per Joule than gasoline.)
As for the other posts saying their EV is clean because they charge it with solar panels, you're not correctly accounting for opportunity cost. That reasoning only works if you got the solar panels installed only because you got an EV. If you were a conscientious environmentalist and would've gotten the solar panels installed even if you hadn't gotten the EV, then the extra energy consumption of charging the EV has to be made up by the grid.
State A (no panels, no EV): x kWh consumed by your home. Net power used from grid = x kWh
State B (PV panels): x kWh consumed by your home, y kWh generated by panels. Net power used from grid = (x - y) kWh
State C (PV panels and EV): x kWh consumed by home, z kWh consumed by EV, y kWh generated by panels. Net power used from grid = (x - y + z) kWh
So if your starting state is A, and you get the EV plus the panels only because you got the EV, then the net change in power you take from the grid is:
(state C) - (state A) = (x - y + z) - x = (z - y) kWh from the grid
And you can correctly state that your panels (y kWh) are providing electricity for your car (z kWh).
But if you were a good environmentalist and were going to get the panels even if you hadn't purchased an EV, then the net change in your power consumption from the grid is:
(state C) - (state B) = (x - y + z) - (x - y) = z kWh from the grid
And your EV's power consumption (z kWh) is entirely attributable to the grid, not to the panels.
All cars result in emissions. There is no such thing as a zero emissions vehicle, at least not with our current power infrastructure. We've just created a legal framework where blame for the environmental harm from generating the energy the EV uses falls upon the coal and gas plants which generate most of that electricity, instead of on the driver using the EV.
You can ignore reality and believe that legal fantasy if you want. Personally this whole EV craze seems to me to be putting the cart before the horse (no pun intended). If EVs increase electricity consumption faster than zero emissions power sources (nuclear, renewables) can be built up to provide it, the logical thing that's going to happen is that power companies are going to build more coal and gas plants to generate that additional electricity. So the additional electricity generated to power EVs is going to almost entirely come from coal and gas. And when you do that, EVs aren't really that much more efficient than ICE vehicles.
Squatter's rights apply to situations where the squatter has been expending resources (money, labor) to maintain a property in the owner's stead. You don't get a claim on a property just because you've been secretly living on it or using it. You must have actually expended resources to maintain it - stuff the owner should have been doing but was neglecting to do. The squatter's rights are compensation for the resources you've expended doing the landlord's job.
The market is really great at finding an optimal solution (or solutions) to a broad, unexplored solution space. That was the state Cable TV was in when it was first implemented. Nobody knew what was the best way to connect houses, what was the best way to branch nodes, how best to allocate frequencies to transmit channels, and (once on-demand TV and Internet service began) how best to allocate bandwidth between downloads and uploads. The choice back then was to waste a bunch of tax dollars on funded research to try to figure out solutions to these problems, with each person's biases and political pressure influencing the results. Or to throw the market at it, letting the bad ideas die by sheer economic unfeasibility. We needed to have lots of different cable companies back in the 1980s and 1990s.
Today, these problems have mostly been solved. Most Cable TV and Internet providers have standardized on the same solution for their networks (DOCSIS). And I think most everyone will agree that the end-game here is fiber to the home. That's a pretty good sign that the industry is ready to be converted into a utility - with the government providing the pipes, while private companies provide the content. So this move to a municipal fiber network is the next logical step.
You still need the ISPs though. How best to allocate shared bandwidth, most efficient way to interconnect multiple tier 1 and tier 2 networks with your ISP, negotiating deals with those upstream providers, whether bandwidth limits or monthly caps are the way to go, do you charge by GB of data consumed or use a flat monthly fee, etc. These problems all remain, and the solution space is cloudy enough that it's not at all obvious what's the best way to do each of these things. So you have the government provide the physical pipe as a utility, while private ISPs provide the content that flows through those pipes. And let competition filter out the bad ideas from the good.
It's not video per se which is the problem. You can splay out a video into a hundred snapshots, put them on a web page in sequence, and allow the user to quickly scan it and click on the scene where he wants to start watching. That's kinda what YouTube does by giving a small preview as you scroll the mouse over the video progress bar. If all you're looking for is a specific scene in a video, it's fairly easy to "skim" through it in this manner.
The problem is narrated audio, which is directly analogous to text. You can only speed up audio by about 2x before your brain's speech recognition hardware starts to have trouble converting it into words. So searching a 1 hour audio recording for the part you're interested in takes a really long time. Your brain is much quicker at processing images into words. A larger part of your brain is devoted to vision than sound. And even in AI text recognition has been much easier to solve than voice recognition. So it's much quicker to scan a transcript of the audio to find the part you want, than it is to search the audio itself.
If you're on Android Marshmallow, you can deny these permissions on a per-app basis. So give your GPS and fitness app permission to use your location, give your camera app access to the camera, but prohibit Facebook. If your phone hasn't yet gotten Marshmallow, this is probably the biggest reason you want to pester your carrier about hurrying up and releasing that update. It's been available to developers for over a year now, and unless you've got a very old handset it's inexcusable that a carrier hasn't rolled it out yet. (In an ideal world carriers wouldn't be allowed to sell phones, so we'd have competition to force phone makers to roll out these updates promptly. Most have within a month or two, it's the carriers who are dragging their feet - because they have no competition within their network they feel no urgency to roll out these things.)
Some apps crash if you prohibit certain permissions. But that's probably a good sign that you should uninstall that app (the developer isn't doing basic error handling). The only permission Marshmallow doesn't allow you to block is network access. But if you're rooted, it's trivial to install a firewall and block specific apps from using your data and/or wifi connection.
Most of that is cut and paste from the web site of the legal firm who represented the woman. Let's see how much of this I can recall from memory.
McFact No. 1: For years, McDonald's had known they had a problem with the way they make their coffee - that their coffee was served much hotter (at least 20 degrees more so) than at other restaurants.
McFact No. 8: A report in Liability Week, September 29, 1997, indicated that Kathleen Gilliam, 73, suffered first degree burns when a cup of coffee spilled onto her lap. Reports also indicate that McDonald's consistently keeps its coffee at 185 degrees, still approximately 20 degrees hotter than at other restaurants. Third degree burns occur at this temperature in just two to seven seconds, requiring skin grafting, debridement and whirlpool treatments that cost tens of thousands of dollars and result in permanent disfigurement, extreme pain and disability to the victims for many months, and in some cases, years.
The temperature of the McDonalds coffee machine specified in the lawsuit (195 F) was within the temperature range recommended by the National Coffee Association and Bunn, the largest manufacturer of coffee brewing machines sold in the U.S. 195 - 205 F.
The legal team for the woman surveyed temperatures of coffee machines at a half dozen restaurants nearby the McDonalds, and deceptively reported that temperatures at other restaurants were "as low as" 165 F. Which is a useless statement since one restaurant could've had a broken machine and the other 5 could've been serving coffee at a higher temperature than McDonalds and the statement still would've been true. This is classic tricky phrasing used by lawyers to mislead the jury. It's where the "20 degrees hotter" statement comes from. The adjective that belongs in front is "at most 20 degrees hotter," but because of the tricky way the lawyers phrased it people mistakenly think it's "at least". If their research had actually shown McDonalds was serving coffee too hot, they would've reported the temperature of all 6 other restaurants they surveyed, not just one.
McFact No. 2: McDonald's knew its coffee sometimes caused serious injuries - more than 700 incidents of scalding coffee burns in the past decade have been settled by the Corporation - and yet they never so much as consulted a burn expert regarding the issue.
Those 700 incidents were over a period of something like 13 years when McDonalds sold billions of cups of coffee. I number crunched the statistics once. If you lived 5 miles from McDonalds and drove there to buy a cup of coffee and took it home, you were more likely to die in a traffic accident than to scald yourself by spilling their coffee. If their coffee was too dangerous for the public, then so is every car on the road.
I want to say the figure was 18 billion cups of coffee served in that time, but honestly I don't recall exactly. If the 18 billion figure is correct, then those 700 incidents are equivalent to buying a cup of coffee at McDonalds every day, and spilling it on yourself once every 70,000 years. If anything, McDonalds should be getting an award for making a portable and minimal hot beverage container so safe.
McFact No. 3: The woman involved in this infamous case suffered very serious injuries - third degree burns on her groin, thighs and buttocks that required skin grafts and a seven-day hospital stay.
McFact No. 4: The woman, an 81-year old former department store clerk who had never before filed suit against anyone, said she wouldn't have brought the lawsuit against McDonald's had the Corporation not dismissed her request for compensation for medical bills.
Unfortunate, but ultimately irrelevant. The question isn't is hot coffee dangerous. Of course it is. So is hot tea,
Reading is an order of magnitude faster than listening.
Not if you have to mouth out the words you're reading and speak them silently in your head. That's the only explanation I can think of for someone holding an opinion like this.
But even if you can't read faster than you can talk, the pause, play, fast forward, and rewind buttons for video have to be accessed clumsily with a mouse or finger. With text, those functions are controlled directly and seamlessly by your eye muscles.
Hollywood doesn't want you to capture the video stream and save it to generate a digital copy of the movie, so the stream is encrypted. But obviously the computer doing the displaying has to decrypt it. With hardware players like Smart TVs and Rokus, the manufacturer just has to demonstrate that the decrypted stream is sent directly to the display with no chance for the user to intercept it, and Hollywood is satisfied.
Software players are tougher, especially if you're playing the movie in a browser. So Netflix, Amazon, etc. create an encrypted virtual machine in Flash or Silverlight which decrypts the stream, and sends the resulting video directly to the computer's display. That's the only way Hollywood will approve software streaming video players.
This is why streaming video players drain your laptop's battery a lot faster than playing a local cracked copy of the movie, and why you need a Pentium-class CPU (used to be i3) to play 1080p Netflix or Amazon. Because the decryption is done in a software virtual machine, it can't take advantage of any video decoding hardware built into the device's graphics hardware - the CPU has to do everything. This is also why iOS got the Netflix app before Android. Apple only had a few iOS devices at the time, so Netflix could get the app approved as a hardware player. Android had hundreds of different hardware configurations, and the ARM CPUs weren't powerful enough to decrypt and decode the video stream in a virtual machine. So Netflix had to get Hollywood's approval one Android device at a time as a hardware player.
I'd make it the compensation should be whatever is necessary to bring your new salary up to your peak old salary + a certain % commensurate with increased value due to skills and experience gained. So if you used to make $100k, and the non-compete forces you to get a job flipping burgers for 2 years making $25k, your original employer should be on the hook for the $75k + (say) 15%. OTOH if you make $150k at your new job, then obviously the non-compete hasn't reduced your ability to find a new, better job. So your original employer shouldn't have to pay anything.
Expensive. Due to protests over their use, any launch with a RTG aboard undergoes extra scrutiny and requires additional studies before approval. You also need to have extra security to protect the launch site and payload from protesters.
Produce energy in the form of heat. This is good far from the sun where you need heat to keep your electronics from freezing. But closer to the sun you have the opposite problem, and you have to work hard to expel heat from the satellite. So closer to the sun, an energy source not based on heat is preferable.
Dangerous. I don't mean they'll burn up on re-entry and spread plutonium all over the atmosphere. The canisters which contain the radioactive materials have demonstrated they will survive re-entry intact in the event of a launch mishap or satellite de-orbit. The problem is after they re-enter, they're a powerful radioactive source in a cannister lost in some random location where anyone could potentially find it. That is not a good combination. Responsible use of RTGs near the Earth means doing a controlled de-orbit of the satellite (not always possible) so RTG lands in the deep ocean, or conducting an expensive search and recovery operation afterwards to find the RTG before thieves do.
Save the RTGs for the deep-space missions. There's plenty of solar energy in Earth orbit to power satellites (solar flux is nearly 2x what it is on the Earth's surface without an atmosphere to scatter and absorb sunlight, and the high launch costs mean you can afford the expensive high-efficiency panels). Batteries (to power the satellite during the 45 minutes it's in the Earth's shadow) can operate for a decade or more, which is about the time you start thinking of replacing the satellite anyway due to its technology being outdated.
That's the definition that's been redefined by people, corporations, and governemnts trying to hide their incompetence behind the veneer of law. Hacking = illegal. Here's the original definition
n. Originally, a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well.
n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed.
vt. To bear emotionally or physically. âoeI can't hack this heat!â
vt. To work on something (typically a program). In an immediate sense: âoeWhat are you doing?â âoeI'm hacking TECO.â In a general (time-extended) sense: âoeWhat do you do around here?â âoeI hack TECO.â More generally, âoeI hack fooâ is roughly equivalent to âoefoo is my major interest (or project)â. âoeI hack solid-state physics.â See Hacking X for Y.
vt. To pull a prank on. See sense 2 and hacker (sense 5).
vi. To interact with a computer in a playful and exploratory rather than goal-directed way. âoeWhatcha up to?â âoeOh, just hacking.â
Notice there's nothing about legality or authorization. That was all added afterwards by authority figures who didn't like people poking their noses into things they weren't "supposed to be" messing with.
I always figured the civilians were in charge to prevent an out-of-control military from going gung-ho into a fight they shouldn't be for social reasons. Not so the civilian could force the military to go into a fight the military was refusing to enter because they'd decided it was tactically and strategically unsound.
And it's indictable because she sent the override command through an unsecure server. Someone who hacked into that server could've posed as her and ordered the U.S. military to invade a country. Think about that. People are trying to draw parallels to Bush and Cheney who misrepresented if not fabricated evidence to convince the country to go to war. But at least they still had to convince the public and Congress that we should do go to war. HC's setup would've allowed an anonymous third party to send us to war, no Congressional, civilian, or public approval necessary.
Deduplication is hugely expensive in memory (have to keep a hash of every file on the drive in memory, since dedupe searches through hashes on disk are painfully slow) and CPU time (have to compare the hash of each new file written to every other file's hash). I played with it on my FreeNAS box, and the memory bloat and performance hit (80-100 MB/s writes turned into 5-25 MB/s writes) was completely unacceptable.
Deduplication makes sense when you've got multiple copies of large amounts of data (e.g. a file backup of hundreds of users' system drives with the same programs installed on all of them). But for single-computer use, compression works nearly as well or better, with much lower memory and CPU cost.
How about letting people drive away from the gas station without first having to remove the pump nozzle from their car?
The eject command forces the filesystem to flush any read/write buffers. It completes only when anything that's being written to the removable media or read from it has finished. So if you remove the media without first ejecting it, there's a risk that some data never finished writing and you have a corrupt file(s) on the media instead of the files you think you had, or something else the computer was doing which relied on reading data from the media either crashes or never completes. Every competent OS has had an eject command for removable media. The only way to avoid it is to eliminate read/write buffers. Which means your computer would have to completely freeze and block you from doing anything else with it until the read/write operation completed.
Of course, this could still be overturned if Trump wins and gets to override the pick for the next Justice, nevermind that a GOP congress plus Trump would be free to pass whatever anti-net neutrality legislation they want, or to replace the pro-neutrality majority of the FCC commissioners with a Republican one.
Historically, campaign contributions from the telecom industry have slightly favored Democrats (scroll to the bottom). And Hillary Clinton is by far the biggest recipient from that industry in recent years with 3.4x the money received by the second biggest recipient. Bernie Sanders is the third biggest recipient.
Or how he'll do what NASA doesn't know how to do (land such a large vehicle).
The Falcon 9's first stage weight is estimated to be about 25 tons when empty. That's the stage that returns to Earth (or sea) and lands.
The space shuttle weighed about 82.5 tons when empty. Mars' gravity is about 38% that of Earths. 82.5 tons * 38% = weight equivalent to about 31 tons. So aside from inertia, the practice Space X has been getting landing the Falcon 9 translates almost exactly into landing a space shuttle-sized craft vertically on Mars.
Agreed that radiation is a huge problem. I think oxygen generation and recycling water and waste materials are equally daunting problems (it's unrealistic to carry enough oxygen, water, and CO2 scrubbers for a 2.5 year mission). We've just begun tackling those issues.
The important figure would be number of violations per 100,000 packages shipped. Not raw number of packages in violation.
Number of times they got caught vs. the number of times they got away with it is mostly irrelevant. Since other people/companies shipping hazardous materials will probably have a similar ratio of times caught to times they got away with it. So you can just compare the easy-to-determine number of times caught per 100,000 shipments across companies, and that'll give you pretty much the same ranking order as the much-harder-to-determine number of times they got away with it per 100,000 shipments.
Obviously they'll be monetizing it by charging experts for the right to appear as an Office 365 recommendation. It costs Microsoft nothing to present these ads to Office users. So even if these ads annoy 99.9% of us, if just 0.1% respond and pay the advertised expert, it becomes "worth it" to them.
Given how Microsoft shoved a lot of the telemetry features of Windows 10 down the throats of Windows 7 and 8 users via updates, I'm going to be proactive and start turning off the "Give me updates for Microsoft products and check for new optional Microsoft software when I update Windows" option on all my computers with older versions of Office installed.
It's important to understand that both this incident and the France terrorist attacks were outliers. The availability of guns (or lack of) doesn't make a difference when you have a determined assailant(s). They will figure out some way to do what they want to do, whether it be by smuggling in guns or building alternate weapons (bombs).
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The thing is, most of the shit isn't from guns. CDC leading causes of death in the U.S., page 41. Skipping all the disease deaths we get:
41,149 - suicide (21,175 of them by firearms, about 2/3 of all firearm deaths)
38,861 - accidental poisonings and overdoses (passed traffic accidents recently)
37,908 - (land) motor vehicle accidents (nearly 3/4 alcohol-related)
30,208 - accidental falls (mostly among the elderly)
16,904 - other accidents
16,121 - homicide (11,208 by firearms)
4,587 - Other undetermined events (281 by firearms)
3,391 - accidental drowning
2,768 - complications from medical and surgical care
2,760 - accidental fire
1,569 - water, air, space vehicle accidents
1,000 - other land transport accidents
516 - killings by law enforcement (usually by firearms)
505 - accidental discharge of firearms
15 - war
Now, compare that list to what you see the press covering. Suicides, drug overdoses, motor vehicle deaths, falls, drownings, medical complications, are vastly underreported. Firearms (which I've put in bold), air transport accidents, killings by law enforcement, and war/terrorism deaths are vastly overreported. (IMHO fires are reported about the right amount - fires make good video).
Roughly 2/3 of the firearm deaths are from suicide. But firearms account for roughly half of suicides. So you can make a pretty convincing argument that the people who shot themselves probably would've figured out some other way to successfully kill themselves if guns weren't available. So you shouldn't attribute these deaths on firearms.
That leaves the 11,208 firearm homicide deaths up for debate. Which certainly is a topic worth debating. But its importance falls far behind suicide, drug overdoses, motor vehicle accidents (mostly drunk driving), falls (this one is debatable since it's mostly elderly who are killed this way), and other types of accidents. As a whole, these things are 11.7x more likely to kill you than homicide by firearm.
In other words, firearms homicides comprise less than 8% of the shit in the shit sandwich. An objective, statistical approach to reducing the preventable non-disease death rate in this country would prioritize reducing these other causes higher than tackling firearms homicides. The overdose death rate in particular is very troubling, since it's roughly tripled in the past 15 years. This increase accounts for twice as many lives lost than would've been saved if we'd somehow managed to eliminate all firearms homicide deaths. Yet the press practically ignores this compared to firearms homicides.
It's actually the same reasoning used to tax corporations in all countries, except "us" and "them" have been reversed so most people now find the concept foreign (no pun intended). The corporation is able to conduct business in the country due to its social and legal system, so it needs to "invest" in the interests of that country by paying taxes.
It sounds like fairness when it's a corporation you don't care about (them) paying those taxes and you're the beneficiary (us). But when it's "your" corporation being forced to pay and someone you don't care about and whose legal system you have no say in (the Chinese) is the beneficiary, the same thing sounds unfair.
I don't think you or Rawls quite understood what money is.
Once upon a time, people had to live on their own. They had to grow and harvest their own crops, hunt their own meat, tan and sew their own clothes, build their own shelters, make their own tools, treat their own injuries, etc. This was hugely inefficient because of the massive number of skills you needed to learn, and the rapid multi-tasking you needed to do to accomplish everything.
Then someone came up with the idea of trade. One person would specialize in growing and harvesting crops. Another in hunting meat. Another in making clothes. Another in making tools, etc. They would then trade what they made for what other people made. Specialization meant that you only needed to learn one skill, which meant you could learn how to do it a lot better than when you had to learn dozens of skills. You could also concentrate solely on that one skill instead of constantly being interrupted to attend to something else. This increase in efficiency led to a massive increases in productivity per capita.
You would then overproduce your specialty, and trade it with other people for the things they specialized in making. You trade your productivity for their productivity. Money was invented afterwards, to facilitate trades. If you were selling clothes but needed meat, and the guy selling meat didn't need clothes but did need tools, you would have to find someone selling tools who needed clothes in order to make the multi-way trade work. Money allows you to skip these multi-way trades - everyone just trades for one common denominator aka money. In other words, money is just a representation of productivity.
So you do not "owe" money to society just because you made it. The fact that you made money means that you already paid society - by contributing your productivity to society's trade of marketable skills. If you hadn't contributed to society, you wouldn't have made the money in the first place. In other words, the fact that you made money means you already paid for the benefit you derived from the rest of society. It is, in fact, your money - you gave away your skills, your productivity in exchange for it. That money is a direct representation of what you worked and toiled over to create. It is your money just as much as it was your clothes before you sold them.
The concept of taxation comes about when a society decides there are some things which should be made or done which would benefit everyone (or at least enough people that it's deemed worth doing). Roads, aquifers, a sewage system, etc. Each person then contributes a share of their earnings, their money (actually their income, which is a time flux, a first derivative of money), to pay for these things. Of course this was immediately abused by those in power like the nobility to turn taxation into a mechanism by which they could steal money from people doing productive work, so they could live in luxury without having to actually contribute any productivity of their own.
But absent corruption, this is the idea behind taxation. How much each person should contribute has and still is debated. Should everyone have to pay the same amount? Should those who make more pay more (after all someone who runs a trade caravan gets more use out of the roads than someone who uses it only to bring a wheelbarrow of apples to sell at the market)? Once you've made enough money to pay for your own survival needs, should any extra money you make be taxed at a higher rate? Or do those who fail to make enough money to pay for their own survival simply need to find a better trade which produces something other people want enough for them to make more money?
This is the way trademark law works. You must defend the trademark or risk losing it.
Citibank's trademark is for a reward points program. Their beef is with an AT&T Thanks program which, like the Citibank program, rewards loyal customers. So that aspect of trademark infringement (that the two names are for a similar product or service which could be confused) is satisfied. This isn't because AT&T is just saying "Thanks" as TFS claims.
At that point, even if Citibank thinks the lawsuit is silly, they still have to file it. Once the court decides there is no infringement, both sides are safe. AT&T is free to call their program AT&T Thanks. And Citibank's ThankYou trademark is safe because they defended it
If they didn't file a lawsuit, someone else could start another rewards program named "Thanks" or maybe "[company_name] Thanks You." When Citibank sued them, they could point to Citibank's failure to defend their trademark against AT&T. The court could decide that that constituted Citibank abandoning the trademark.. Even though the possibility of that is extremely small, the fact that it's not zero means the trademark holder is going to play it safe and file a lawsuit against anything which could be considered a trademark violation.
The NOx and SO2 that "clean" coal plants emit are only a small part of the pollutants. The vast majority is CO2, which is the same per kWh for both a "clean" or "dirty" coal plant.
Since you obviously didn't read the link to my efficiency calcs, here they are again:
An ICE engine can hit about 30% efficiency. An automatic transmission is about 90%-95% efficient (pretty impressive considering it's just squirting fluid at a turbine).
Newer coal plants are about 40% efficient. Natural gas plants are about 60% efficient. Split the difference and go with 50%. Power lines are about 98% efficient. Real-world charging efficiency of the Tesla is about 80% (1/1.26 = 0.79). That is, 80% of the electricity from your wall socket goes into the battery, the other 20% becomes heat. I can't find any numbers for discharge efficiency, so let's call it 100% for now. And electric motor efficiency is about 90%-95%.
Tally it up and you get:
ICE: 30% * 92.5% = 27.8% efficient
EV: 50% * 98% * 80% * (100%) * 92.5% = 36.3% efficient.
If the discharge efficiency for the battery is also 80%, then the EV efficiency drops to 29%. For all intents and purposes the same as the ICE. Coal and gas plants are not "much more efficient" than ICE engines, and EVs are not "much more efficient" in using that electricity. (The EV is cheaper to operate because coal is an order of magnitude cheaper per Joule than gasoline.)
As for the other posts saying their EV is clean because they charge it with solar panels, you're not correctly accounting for opportunity cost. That reasoning only works if you got the solar panels installed only because you got an EV. If you were a conscientious environmentalist and would've gotten the solar panels installed even if you hadn't gotten the EV, then the extra energy consumption of charging the EV has to be made up by the grid.
State A (no panels, no EV): x kWh consumed by your home. Net power used from grid = x kWh
State B (PV panels): x kWh consumed by your home, y kWh generated by panels. Net power used from grid = (x - y) kWh
State C (PV panels and EV): x kWh consumed by home, z kWh consumed by EV, y kWh generated by panels. Net power used from grid = (x - y + z) kWh
So if your starting state is A, and you get the EV plus the panels only because you got the EV, then the net change in power you take from the grid is:
(state C) - (state A) = (x - y + z) - x = (z - y) kWh from the grid
And you can correctly state that your panels (y kWh) are providing electricity for your car (z kWh).
But if you were a good environmentalist and were going to get the panels even if you hadn't purchased an EV, then the net change in your power consumption from the grid is:
(state C) - (state B) = (x - y + z) - (x - y) = z kWh from the grid
And your EV's power consumption (z kWh) is entirely attributable to the grid, not to the panels.
All cars result in emissions. There is no such thing as a zero emissions vehicle, at least not with our current power infrastructure. We've just created a legal framework where blame for the environmental harm from generating the energy the EV uses falls upon the coal and gas plants which generate most of that electricity, instead of on the driver using the EV.
You can ignore reality and believe that legal fantasy if you want. Personally this whole EV craze seems to me to be putting the cart before the horse (no pun intended). If EVs increase electricity consumption faster than zero emissions power sources (nuclear, renewables) can be built up to provide it, the logical thing that's going to happen is that power companies are going to build more coal and gas plants to generate that additional electricity. So the additional electricity generated to power EVs is going to almost entirely come from coal and gas. And when you do that, EVs aren't really that much more efficient than ICE vehicles.
Squatter's rights apply to situations where the squatter has been expending resources (money, labor) to maintain a property in the owner's stead. You don't get a claim on a property just because you've been secretly living on it or using it. You must have actually expended resources to maintain it - stuff the owner should have been doing but was neglecting to do. The squatter's rights are compensation for the resources you've expended doing the landlord's job.
The market is really great at finding an optimal solution (or solutions) to a broad, unexplored solution space. That was the state Cable TV was in when it was first implemented. Nobody knew what was the best way to connect houses, what was the best way to branch nodes, how best to allocate frequencies to transmit channels, and (once on-demand TV and Internet service began) how best to allocate bandwidth between downloads and uploads. The choice back then was to waste a bunch of tax dollars on funded research to try to figure out solutions to these problems, with each person's biases and political pressure influencing the results. Or to throw the market at it, letting the bad ideas die by sheer economic unfeasibility. We needed to have lots of different cable companies back in the 1980s and 1990s.
Today, these problems have mostly been solved. Most Cable TV and Internet providers have standardized on the same solution for their networks (DOCSIS). And I think most everyone will agree that the end-game here is fiber to the home. That's a pretty good sign that the industry is ready to be converted into a utility - with the government providing the pipes, while private companies provide the content. So this move to a municipal fiber network is the next logical step.
You still need the ISPs though. How best to allocate shared bandwidth, most efficient way to interconnect multiple tier 1 and tier 2 networks with your ISP, negotiating deals with those upstream providers, whether bandwidth limits or monthly caps are the way to go, do you charge by GB of data consumed or use a flat monthly fee, etc. These problems all remain, and the solution space is cloudy enough that it's not at all obvious what's the best way to do each of these things. So you have the government provide the physical pipe as a utility, while private ISPs provide the content that flows through those pipes. And let competition filter out the bad ideas from the good.
It's not video per se which is the problem. You can splay out a video into a hundred snapshots, put them on a web page in sequence, and allow the user to quickly scan it and click on the scene where he wants to start watching. That's kinda what YouTube does by giving a small preview as you scroll the mouse over the video progress bar. If all you're looking for is a specific scene in a video, it's fairly easy to "skim" through it in this manner.
The problem is narrated audio, which is directly analogous to text. You can only speed up audio by about 2x before your brain's speech recognition hardware starts to have trouble converting it into words. So searching a 1 hour audio recording for the part you're interested in takes a really long time. Your brain is much quicker at processing images into words. A larger part of your brain is devoted to vision than sound. And even in AI text recognition has been much easier to solve than voice recognition. So it's much quicker to scan a transcript of the audio to find the part you want, than it is to search the audio itself.
If you're on Android Marshmallow, you can deny these permissions on a per-app basis. So give your GPS and fitness app permission to use your location, give your camera app access to the camera, but prohibit Facebook. If your phone hasn't yet gotten Marshmallow, this is probably the biggest reason you want to pester your carrier about hurrying up and releasing that update. It's been available to developers for over a year now, and unless you've got a very old handset it's inexcusable that a carrier hasn't rolled it out yet. (In an ideal world carriers wouldn't be allowed to sell phones, so we'd have competition to force phone makers to roll out these updates promptly. Most have within a month or two, it's the carriers who are dragging their feet - because they have no competition within their network they feel no urgency to roll out these things.)
Some apps crash if you prohibit certain permissions. But that's probably a good sign that you should uninstall that app (the developer isn't doing basic error handling). The only permission Marshmallow doesn't allow you to block is network access. But if you're rooted, it's trivial to install a firewall and block specific apps from using your data and/or wifi connection.
The state will require the Prop 65 warning on every hot water tap now.
The temperature of the McDonalds coffee machine specified in the lawsuit (195 F) was within the temperature range recommended by the National Coffee Association and Bunn, the largest manufacturer of coffee brewing machines sold in the U.S. 195 - 205 F.
The legal team for the woman surveyed temperatures of coffee machines at a half dozen restaurants nearby the McDonalds, and deceptively reported that temperatures at other restaurants were "as low as" 165 F. Which is a useless statement since one restaurant could've had a broken machine and the other 5 could've been serving coffee at a higher temperature than McDonalds and the statement still would've been true. This is classic tricky phrasing used by lawyers to mislead the jury. It's where the "20 degrees hotter" statement comes from. The adjective that belongs in front is "at most 20 degrees hotter," but because of the tricky way the lawyers phrased it people mistakenly think it's "at least". If their research had actually shown McDonalds was serving coffee too hot, they would've reported the temperature of all 6 other restaurants they surveyed, not just one.
Those 700 incidents were over a period of something like 13 years when McDonalds sold billions of cups of coffee. I number crunched the statistics once. If you lived 5 miles from McDonalds and drove there to buy a cup of coffee and took it home, you were more likely to die in a traffic accident than to scald yourself by spilling their coffee. If their coffee was too dangerous for the public, then so is every car on the road.
I want to say the figure was 18 billion cups of coffee served in that time, but honestly I don't recall exactly. If the 18 billion figure is correct, then those 700 incidents are equivalent to buying a cup of coffee at McDonalds every day, and spilling it on yourself once every 70,000 years. If anything, McDonalds should be getting an award for making a portable and minimal hot beverage container so safe.
Unfortunate, but ultimately irrelevant. The question isn't is hot coffee dangerous. Of course it is. So is hot tea,
Not if you have to mouth out the words you're reading and speak them silently in your head. That's the only explanation I can think of for someone holding an opinion like this.
But even if you can't read faster than you can talk, the pause, play, fast forward, and rewind buttons for video have to be accessed clumsily with a mouse or finger. With text, those functions are controlled directly and seamlessly by your eye muscles.
Hollywood doesn't want you to capture the video stream and save it to generate a digital copy of the movie, so the stream is encrypted. But obviously the computer doing the displaying has to decrypt it. With hardware players like Smart TVs and Rokus, the manufacturer just has to demonstrate that the decrypted stream is sent directly to the display with no chance for the user to intercept it, and Hollywood is satisfied.
Software players are tougher, especially if you're playing the movie in a browser. So Netflix, Amazon, etc. create an encrypted virtual machine in Flash or Silverlight which decrypts the stream, and sends the resulting video directly to the computer's display. That's the only way Hollywood will approve software streaming video players.
This is why streaming video players drain your laptop's battery a lot faster than playing a local cracked copy of the movie, and why you need a Pentium-class CPU (used to be i3) to play 1080p Netflix or Amazon. Because the decryption is done in a software virtual machine, it can't take advantage of any video decoding hardware built into the device's graphics hardware - the CPU has to do everything. This is also why iOS got the Netflix app before Android. Apple only had a few iOS devices at the time, so Netflix could get the app approved as a hardware player. Android had hundreds of different hardware configurations, and the ARM CPUs weren't powerful enough to decrypt and decode the video stream in a virtual machine. So Netflix had to get Hollywood's approval one Android device at a time as a hardware player.
I'd make it the compensation should be whatever is necessary to bring your new salary up to your peak old salary + a certain % commensurate with increased value due to skills and experience gained. So if you used to make $100k, and the non-compete forces you to get a job flipping burgers for 2 years making $25k, your original employer should be on the hook for the $75k + (say) 15%. OTOH if you make $150k at your new job, then obviously the non-compete hasn't reduced your ability to find a new, better job. So your original employer shouldn't have to pay anything.
Save the RTGs for the deep-space missions. There's plenty of solar energy in Earth orbit to power satellites (solar flux is nearly 2x what it is on the Earth's surface without an atmosphere to scatter and absorb sunlight, and the high launch costs mean you can afford the expensive high-efficiency panels). Batteries (to power the satellite during the 45 minutes it's in the Earth's shadow) can operate for a decade or more, which is about the time you start thinking of replacing the satellite anyway due to its technology being outdated.
Notice there's nothing about legality or authorization. That was all added afterwards by authority figures who didn't like people poking their noses into things they weren't "supposed to be" messing with.
I always figured the civilians were in charge to prevent an out-of-control military from going gung-ho into a fight they shouldn't be for social reasons. Not so the civilian could force the military to go into a fight the military was refusing to enter because they'd decided it was tactically and strategically unsound.
And it's indictable because she sent the override command through an unsecure server. Someone who hacked into that server could've posed as her and ordered the U.S. military to invade a country. Think about that. People are trying to draw parallels to Bush and Cheney who misrepresented if not fabricated evidence to convince the country to go to war. But at least they still had to convince the public and Congress that we should do go to war. HC's setup would've allowed an anonymous third party to send us to war, no Congressional, civilian, or public approval necessary.
Deduplication is hugely expensive in memory (have to keep a hash of every file on the drive in memory, since dedupe searches through hashes on disk are painfully slow) and CPU time (have to compare the hash of each new file written to every other file's hash). I played with it on my FreeNAS box, and the memory bloat and performance hit (80-100 MB/s writes turned into 5-25 MB/s writes) was completely unacceptable.
Deduplication makes sense when you've got multiple copies of large amounts of data (e.g. a file backup of hundreds of users' system drives with the same programs installed on all of them). But for single-computer use, compression works nearly as well or better, with much lower memory and CPU cost.
How about letting people drive away from the gas station without first having to remove the pump nozzle from their car?
The eject command forces the filesystem to flush any read/write buffers. It completes only when anything that's being written to the removable media or read from it has finished. So if you remove the media without first ejecting it, there's a risk that some data never finished writing and you have a corrupt file(s) on the media instead of the files you think you had, or something else the computer was doing which relied on reading data from the media either crashes or never completes. Every competent OS has had an eject command for removable media. The only way to avoid it is to eliminate read/write buffers. Which means your computer would have to completely freeze and block you from doing anything else with it until the read/write operation completed.
Historically, campaign contributions from the telecom industry have slightly favored Democrats (scroll to the bottom). And Hillary Clinton is by far the biggest recipient from that industry in recent years with 3.4x the money received by the second biggest recipient. Bernie Sanders is the third biggest recipient.
The Falcon 9's first stage weight is estimated to be about 25 tons when empty. That's the stage that returns to Earth (or sea) and lands.
The space shuttle weighed about 82.5 tons when empty. Mars' gravity is about 38% that of Earths. 82.5 tons * 38% = weight equivalent to about 31 tons. So aside from inertia, the practice Space X has been getting landing the Falcon 9 translates almost exactly into landing a space shuttle-sized craft vertically on Mars.
Agreed that radiation is a huge problem. I think oxygen generation and recycling water and waste materials are equally daunting problems (it's unrealistic to carry enough oxygen, water, and CO2 scrubbers for a 2.5 year mission). We've just begun tackling those issues.
The important figure would be number of violations per 100,000 packages shipped. Not raw number of packages in violation.
Number of times they got caught vs. the number of times they got away with it is mostly irrelevant. Since other people/companies shipping hazardous materials will probably have a similar ratio of times caught to times they got away with it. So you can just compare the easy-to-determine number of times caught per 100,000 shipments across companies, and that'll give you pretty much the same ranking order as the much-harder-to-determine number of times they got away with it per 100,000 shipments.
Obviously they'll be monetizing it by charging experts for the right to appear as an Office 365 recommendation. It costs Microsoft nothing to present these ads to Office users. So even if these ads annoy 99.9% of us, if just 0.1% respond and pay the advertised expert, it becomes "worth it" to them.
Given how Microsoft shoved a lot of the telemetry features of Windows 10 down the throats of Windows 7 and 8 users via updates, I'm going to be proactive and start turning off the "Give me updates for Microsoft products and check for new optional Microsoft software when I update Windows" option on all my computers with older versions of Office installed.
You mean like France?
It's important to understand that both this incident and the France terrorist attacks were outliers. The availability of guns (or lack of) doesn't make a difference when you have a determined assailant(s). They will figure out some way to do what they want to do, whether it be by smuggling in guns or building alternate weapons (bombs).