Microsoft already has that covered. Students and teachers can use Office 365 for free. It's like a drug - the first hit is free, and gets you addicted to an expensive lifetime habit.
At least with their old program (where a student could buy a standalone copy of Office for $5), you could continue to use it even after graduating.
The really stupid thing is that unless you're collaborating with someone on a document, you shouldn't be exchanging Word of Excel or Powerpoint documents. Those programs are for creating the document. Once it's created, you're supposed to print it out (to paper or a PDF) and distribute that to the people you want reading it. Emailing people the.doc file is like sending the source code to someone who only needs a copy of the executable, then telling them they need to buy a copy of the latest compiler to convert the source code into the file that they really need.
The strange thing is that those were from email addresses are in my contact list, and have been communicating with me for years.
Being in your contact list is not a white flag. A common tactic of spam malware is to send the contact list of infected person's PC to the spam author. They then spam everyone in the contact list using the owner of the list as the From: email address, precisely in the hopes that an email "from" someone you know is more likely to make it past your spam filter.
I suspect pole reversals are a consequence of the rotational axis of the Earth's core not being perfectly aligned with the minimum or maximum moments of inertia. When you spin an object around a different axis that the minimum or maximum moments of inertia, it tumbles - the rotational axis is not fixed, and drifts almost chaotically. Occasionally it will suddenly flip.
If correct, pole reversals are going to be unpredictable unless you can exactly measure the inertia tensor of the Earth's core and its rotation axis and rate. Good luck with that since it's under thousands of miles of rock and magma.
Anything else is fleecing the middle class to pay for the extravagance of the ultra rich.
The people who buy the products are the ones paying for the taxes. They're the ones generating the revenue for Apple, and a portion of that revenue is used to pay for taxes. For OECD nations, the purchasers are predominantly middle class people.
Your belief isn't entirely wrong. It's true in countries whose development has stalled at around $10k per capita. Those countries typically have a small group of extremely wealthy people who maintain their status not just by creating economic activity, but by preventing (via corruption) others from becoming wealthy. They maintain their big fish in the little pond status. In these countries, the ultra-wealthy can account for 50% or more of total income.
But the OECD nations (who predominantly have a GDP per capita in excess of $30k) are far beyond this stage. To reach OECD levels of economic efficiency requires you to pay the middle and lower classes more (or rather, pay them closer to the actual productivity they're generating). Henry Ford accidentally stumbled upon this when he paid his workers what was a then-unheard-of $5 per day. His workers were paid well enough that they could afford to buy the cars they were producing, which generated more work for them, which meant more workers were hired, which meant more of them could buy cars. which meant more work, etc. This feedback loop helped turn the U.S. into the world's top economy, and made Ford one of the richest men on earth.
As a consequence, the income distribution in OECD nations is skewed heavily towards the middle. For example, the ultra-rich in the U.S. (say, everyone making $1 million/yr or more, about 0.4% of the population) only accounts for 13% of total income. Even if you taxed them at 100% as Warren and Ocasio-Cortez would like to do, that would only be $1.36 trillion in tax revenue. Or just 33% of the 2018 Federal budget ($4.094 trillion). The percentage is even smaller if you include state and local government budgets (another $3.85 trillion). The bulk of income in the U.S. actually goes to those making $50k-$500k a year. Those income brackets accounts for 64% of all income in the U.S., or over $6.5 trillion. You have to tax those middle class to lower upper class people heavily if you wish to pay for the levels of government spending we currently have.
Google Photos gives you unlimited storage of photos up to 2048x2048 resolution. They also give unlimited storage of videos, though I can't find the current limitations. It used to be max 1080p and shorter than 15 minutes. Each Google account has 15 GB of additional storage for photos/videos which exceed these limits. And you can pay them for incrreased unrestricted storage.
If you have an Amazon Prime account, it includes Prime Photos which gives you unlimited storage of photos of any resolution, including a lot of RAW formats.
If you subscribe to Office 365, it includes 1 TB of cloud storage.
All three offer an app for your phone which will automatically backup new photos (and videos for Google Photos and Office OneDrive). I suppose you could try to abuse Google and Amazon's unlimited offering if you wanted; but most likely your ISP's bandwidth or data cap would be the bottleneck. Not the company's cloud storage capacity, which is measured in exabytes (millions of terabytes). Amazon actually has a trailer they can send you to copy 100 petabytes of data. That's 8333 years worth of data at a 1 TB/mo data cap.
The situation is symmetrical. In a free service, both sides have the same power. At any time, you are allowed to quit using the free service and sign up with a different service. There is nothing the service can do to prevent you from leaving. Likewise, at any time, the free service is allowed to quit offering the service under its original conditions, and re-offer it under different conditions. And there is nothing you can do to prevent this.
The only way to prevent this is to pay for the service for a period of time specified in a contract. Payment constitutes consideration - something given up in exchange for receiving something - and thus creates a binding contract. So if you agree to pay for it for a year (with penalties if you fail to pay), you can lock in the terms and conditions for the duration of your service contract. That's why when a cellular carrier changes their terms and conditions, it releases you from any multi-year contract you may have signed up for. Most carriers instead opt to "grandfather" you in under the old terms and conditions for the duration of your contract to avoid this.
Without consideration, there is no contract, and neither side is obligated to maintain the original agreement terms in perpetuity. (Be careful of this if you let your apartment rent switch to month-to-month. That can be advantageous if you plan to move out in a few months. But if you're planning to stay, it means the landlord can kick you out and replace you with a different tenant. If you wish to stay for a long time, it is in your best interests to negotiate a year-long or multi-year lease.)
And in this case, the weakness will be linking the blockchain to the physical goods. Anyone can still crack open the container and steal oranges during transit. A drug smuggler can still swap a shipment of oranges with a shipment of drugs by switching the labels. And the delivery guy can still take a snapshot of your package on your porch as "proof" it was delivered, then load it back up into his van and take it home.
The "Do Not Track" setting has no legal authority. It was a marketing scheme (scam) by Microsoft to try to get people to switch back to IE. They could advertise that "our browser supports Do Not Track, while Chrome and Firefox do not," leaving out that it's completely voluntary - the website decides whether or not they want to respect your Do Not Track flag.
1) Crap web code, and specfically better educating the people that write it.
2) Javascripts crappy threads.
I don't think you fully understand what's going on. What happens is a web page with crappy javascript code demands a lot of CPU cycles. Windows says "Oh, this thread needs more CPU. Here you go." Other pages then get starved of CPU and load more slowly.
What this change will do is limit the max CPU any one web page can get in competition with others (e.g. when you put a slow-loading page in the background, and open a new tab to load a different page). That way if a site has crappy javascript code, only that site's pages load more slowly. The speed of other pages loading is less affected by the one page with crap code.
I think this is a great solution to address one part of the problem. I've been dealing with it (ironically mostly with Google's pages) with The Great Suspender extension. That disables background tabs after a few minutes being idle in the background. I was having a problem with the Google App pages sucking up too much CPU when they were doing nothing but sitting there in the background. It also deals with other pages like Amazon and CNN which stay active and auto-refresh every few minutes, presumably so you can instantly get the latest version of the page when you switch to the tab, instead of having to wait for a manual refresh. That idea works if you just put a single tab in the background for a while. But it completely falls apart if I leave a couple dozen Amazon product pages in background tabs while I comparison shop.
I'll still use the suspender to stop auto-refresh of web pages I may not view for hours. But this never-slow thing will be nice for immediately dealing with a recalcitrant page which sucks up so much CPU I have problems getting the browser to respond so I can kill the tab.
If they're running fiber to the end of your street, then it's stupid to run ADSL from there to your home. ADSL tops out at 24 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up. VDSL provides much more bandwidth at distances under 1 km. It's capable of hitting 300 Mbps down, 100 Mbps up over Cat 3 for extremely short distances. That's why some ISPs are using it for fiber in the street, with VDSL2 from the street to the home over existing Cat 3 wires.
What's more likely is that AT&T's marketing is trying to obfuscate the limited availability of their fiber network, by intentionally labeling everything (FTTH, fiber + VDSL, and ADSL) as "U-Verse". And you just happened to be in one of the ADSL areas.
As long as tethering is enabled on your mobile data plan, and you have the data to spare
This is a scam. You shouldn't have to pay to enable tethering on your mobile plan (unless you have unlimited data). You're paying for x GB/mo of data with your plan. It doesn't matter to the carrier whether you use that data on your phone or on a device tethered to your phone. x GB is x GB.
Charging extra to be able to tether to your phone is like a supermarket charging you one price for a carton of milk that you'll drink straight from a cup, but adding a surcharge if you want to use that carton of milk in a bowl of cereal. Milk is milk. As long as you're buying the same quantity of milk (using the same GB of data per month), the price should be the same no matter how you use it.
In my experience, Apple,Tesla, and renewables fans are the groups most likely to down-mod a post simply because it casts their fandom in a bad light, regardless of it making a good point. Your post said the notch was an undesirable feature, which to an Apple fanboy is a punishable offense.
Shareholders require profits, not growth. Growth is desirable because it's usually coupled with bigger profits, but is not necessary. In the absence of growth, profits can come from increased economic efficiency alone.
e.g. I own a dairy farm, you own a chicken farm. I have a refrigerator full of milk and would like something to eat. You have a refrigerator full of eggs and would like something to drink. The efficiency of our economics is improved if I trade some of my milk for some of your eggs. That is, eggs are more valuable to me than milk; milk is more valuable to you than eggs.
So when we trade milk for eggs, both of us come out winners (we both profit from the transaction). I give up undesired milk to gain desired eggs. You give up undesired eggs to gain desired milk. This is what they mean when they say economics is not a zero-sum game. The physical goods and services may be zero sum, but their value is positive sum (because the value to each participant is different). In other words, economics is not just about making stuff; it's also about distributing that stuff for maximum benefit. You and I can continue our milk and egg trade arrangement in perpetuity. It will continue to benefit us (profit us) even though there's no growth, and even if there's no change.
That computer is still needed whenever writing more than a tweet or two is called for.
PCs, tablets, calculators, smart watches, etc. are all computers. Their only difference is processing capacity (usually limited by heat/battery) and screen size (limited by desire to make the thing portable).
The only things stopping phones from replacing your PC (other than for high-power applications like gaming) are display size, difficulty of data entry, general processing power/storage, and operating system inertia (software written for only that OS). Processing power and storage keep improving, to where people's phones are already more than capable of handling most of people's computing tasks. PC-like data entry can be accomplished with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. And many phones can already be hooked up to an external monitor via HDMI (with some abortive attempts at a wireless display standard having already been tried).
So basically the only things preventing your phone from replacing your PC are hardcore 3D gaming, and the inertia of most PC-ish software being available only on Windows. The latter is rapidly eroding (Office became available on Android and iOS a couple years ago). Eventually your phone *will* replace your PC. And probably a smart watch or smart ring will eventually replace your phone (the display and input interface will be a separate unit which connects wirelessly, and can be upgraded/replaced separately like you would replace a monitor, keyboard, and mouse).
I think bitcoin is stupid, and eventually destined for a value of $0. But in winter, the mining cost is essentially zero. 100% of the electricity your computer uses to mine gets converted into waste heat. Except in winter you typically have to heat your home, that heat is useful instead of waste. So all mining does in winter is heat your home with your mining rig, instead of with an electric heater.
You order a delivery meal from a restaurant. A guy brings the food in regular restaurant bowls with regular utensils, not disposable. You eat your food. You put all the bowls, utensils, and waste food outside your door. The guy comes back later to pick everything up, and takes it all back to the restaurant which is better outfitted to handle mass dish cleaning and waste food disposal.
You're assuming the purpose of TFA is investigative journalism. To bring an important issue to the public's attention.
It's not. The purpose is to generate more page loads and thus more advertising revenue. So if inflammatory insinuations - like singling out kids who wear an Apple Watch, or speak with a "Europeant" accent - gets you all in a huff to where you click on TFA, then it's done its job. It's one of the reasons I'm not that critical of comments here from people who haven't read TFA. So many of articles are click-bait that I won't fault someone for using a too-stringent anti-click-bait filter and not reading TFA.
I think everyone's jumping on the wrong correlation here. Affluence is probably the key factor here, not education. These are people who can afford the extra medical expenses for their kids if they do happen to get sick. So they don't vaccinate them for whatever reason, knowing that they can pay for their treatment if they happen to lose that die roll. A less wealthy person might be wary of vaccination, but knows they can't afford to have their kids get sick, so that overrides their aversion and they go ahead and get their kids vaccinated. (Note that this implies the rate of vaccination would be lower if cost were not a factor, meaning that our education about the benefit of vaccination is even more of a failure than vaccination percentages would suggest.)
The correlation with education is probably just coincidental. Both A (don't vaccinate) and B (higher education) are caused by C (more affluent).
Yeah, I suspect that's what's going on with the hurricane path accuracy stat. Both today and 40 years ago, weather data from the affected region is very sparse (we have more weather buoys, but that's about it). The biggest difference is that today there are dozens of different models forecasting hurricane paths. Making it much more likely that one of them will get it right, and forecasters will be able to pat themselves on the back for correctly "predicting" the hurricane's path. This isn't necessarily a result of having better models. The more models you have, the smaller the margin of error. In other words, it will happen just from increasing the number of models, even if the individual models don't improve in accuracy.
I'd like to see that graph of improving hurricane track accuracy made using a single modern model (and no picking and choosing after the fact which model had the best results).
A town hall implies elected government officials with the power to institute change are present to hear citizen arguments. From what I can tell, only advocates for the right to repair were present (nothing against them, I'm one of them), no elected officials. That makes this a seminar or presentation, not a town hall.
Even if elected officials had been present, there's a saying about feedback to Congresscritters. That one hand-written letter is worth a hundred printed form letters. A printed form letter is worth a hundred voicemails. A voicemail is worth a hundred emails. And an email is worth a hundred clicks on a website poll. That is, the amount of effort put into relaying the message matters. Elected officials use the effort needed to gauge how important the issue is to you. If you can't be bothered to do more than clink on an online poll, it must not be very important to you. If it bugs you enough to compose (or copy/paste) an email, it must be somewhat important to you. If you're concerned enough to make a phone call, it must be important to you. If you're worried enough to print out a letter, put it in an envelope, stamp it, and drop it off in a mailbox, it must be very important to you. And if you're so concerned you'll hand-write that letter (to prove it wasn't a form letter), put it in an envelope, stamp it, and drop it off in a mailbox, it must be extremely important to you.
So even if this had really been an online town hall, attending via video conferencing will never have as much impact as physically attending a real town hall meeting. The ease and convenience so important to younger generations today end up watering down the impact of your statement to government officials. Hundreds of people attending a video conference will only convince a politician that a bunch of people spammed a bunch of forums telling people to attend and play it in the background while they played their XBox. Hundreds of people trying to squeeze into a town hall will convince a politician that this issue is really important to voters.
Would it solve the problem of Comcast throttling Netflix unless Netflix paid their extortion fee? Yes it would. But that problem is actually a just a symptom of a greater problem.
The real problem is that there's next to no competition among ISPs. If there were competition and Comcast throttled Netflix as a ploy to extort money from Netflix, Comcast customers who watched Netflix would simply cancel and sign up with a competing ISP. Comcast would be slitting their own throats with such a bone-headed move. We wouldn't need Net Neutrality. The only reason they have the gall to throttle Netflix, the only reason Net Neutrality helps, is because they have a monopoly or near-monopoly in most areas. They know their customers cannot flee to a different ISP, so they're free to do things which intentionally degrades the quality of the service their customers receive.
Why do Comcast, Verizon, et al have near-monopolies? Because the local goverments gave it to them. Often in exchange for service guarantees (e.g. to cover low-income areas) or financial kickbacks. The governments like it because it gives them control over the telecoms (who happily make campaign donations to retain their monopoly). The telecoms like it because the government gives them a monopoly so they can over-charge their customers (more than enough to offset the cost of they campaign contributions they have to make to maintain this arrangement). That is the real problem that needs to be fixed. Not only does it cause the problems Net Neutrality aims to fix, it causes a host of other problems like excessively high prices, excessively low data caps, poor repair service times, incentive money being spent on executive bonuses instead of improving the network, etc.
Net Neutrality is the politicians' way to have their cake and eat it too. They can pretend to be on the customers' side by striking a blow against the big, bad cable monopolies. But since the monopolies are government-granted, they retain control over those monopolies so the telecom companies continue to give campaign contributions to them. It just cements in place this terrible monopoly ISP system we have in place, by taking one of the biggest customer complaints off the table.
If you want to fix this, just rescind the government-granted monopolies. You don't even need national legislation to do this. Just elect people to your city or county government in favor of allowing multiple cable companies to compete in your area. Then it can't be countered just because some bozo gets appointed head of the FCC.
The problem is competition within Canada's telecom system is so lacking, it makes the U.S. (with its government-mandated cable monopolies and vertically integrated carriers preventing you from using devices sold by other carriers) look like paradise in comparison. I looked into getting a Canadian cell phone when I worked there for a couple years. It actually turned out to be cheaper for me to add the Canada roaming option to my U.S. cell phone plan. This is one area where Canada lags far behind the rest of the civilized world.
Even if there is rampant speculation, and assuming a 26-character alphabet, there are 1.46*10^11 domain names between two and 10 characters. If 137 million of these are registered, that means only 0.0001% of all possible domain names have been taken.
About a decade ago, I was trying to think of a domain name to register for a website. I wrote a short program to put together English phonemes to generate every possible pronounceable word (up to 7 letters).. Then I had the program do a whois database lookup for each fictional word as a.com domain, outputting a list of the unregistered domains. (Yeah, I'm probably part of the reason why ICANN now makes you solve a captcha before doing a whois lookup).
All the 4-letter.com domains were gone. Most of the 5-letter domains were gone too, and the few which weren't sounded horrible. Most of the 2-syllable 6-letter domains were gone. But there were lots of 3-syllable 6-letter domains still available. There were lots of 7-letter domains still available. So many that I killed the program part-way through (at domains starting with the letter 'f' if I remember). The list of available domains it was generating was becoming so long it would've taken me too much time to look through it, trying to find one that seemed decent.
Agreed that there's nothing surprising about this. I'm not sure what else submitter expected. "Apple announces it will not fix Facetime bug"?
I am sure people who hate Apple, because they were beaten up by a hipster a few years ago, will still fault Apple, and make them seem like a pile of idiots who cannot code themselves out of a paper bag.
I can't speak for everyone. But I hate Apple because they take away your freedom of choice and expression, under the guise of trendiness and security.. In the early 1990s, companies tried to corral us into walled gardens for online access (GEnie, CompuServe, AOL; MSN was originally Microsoft's attempt). We fought hard to make the open Internet the standard for networked communication, where anyone could make any content they wanted available to anyone else in the world, without needing the approval from some corporate or government dweeb. It's painful to watch people naively give up those freedoms and willingly walk into walled gardens like iOS and Facebook because it's the cool thing to do and all their friends are doing it. (I'd include Google, except they at least try to make it easy to get your info in and out, like how you can use alternate stores to get Android apps, not just the Google Play store. So they're more like a garden with open borders.)
Maybe if the Cold War hadn't ended, things like the Berlin Wall would have remained to serve as a metaphor. So people would be more cognizant of what you're really giving up when you choose to live in a walled garden.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft already has that covered. Students and teachers can use Office 365 for free. It's like a drug - the first hit is free, and gets you addicted to an expensive lifetime habit.
At least with their old program (where a student could buy a standalone copy of Office for $5), you could continue to use it even after graduating.
The really stupid thing is that unless you're collaborating with someone on a document, you shouldn't be exchanging Word of Excel or Powerpoint documents. Those programs are for creating the document. Once it's created, you're supposed to print it out (to paper or a PDF) and distribute that to the people you want reading it. Emailing people the .doc file is like sending the source code to someone who only needs a copy of the executable, then telling them they need to buy a copy of the latest compiler to convert the source code into the file that they really need.
Being in your contact list is not a white flag. A common tactic of spam malware is to send the contact list of infected person's PC to the spam author. They then spam everyone in the contact list using the owner of the list as the From: email address, precisely in the hopes that an email "from" someone you know is more likely to make it past your spam filter.
I suspect pole reversals are a consequence of the rotational axis of the Earth's core not being perfectly aligned with the minimum or maximum moments of inertia. When you spin an object around a different axis that the minimum or maximum moments of inertia, it tumbles - the rotational axis is not fixed, and drifts almost chaotically. Occasionally it will suddenly flip.
If correct, pole reversals are going to be unpredictable unless you can exactly measure the inertia tensor of the Earth's core and its rotation axis and rate. Good luck with that since it's under thousands of miles of rock and magma.
The people who buy the products are the ones paying for the taxes. They're the ones generating the revenue for Apple, and a portion of that revenue is used to pay for taxes. For OECD nations, the purchasers are predominantly middle class people.
Your belief isn't entirely wrong. It's true in countries whose development has stalled at around $10k per capita. Those countries typically have a small group of extremely wealthy people who maintain their status not just by creating economic activity, but by preventing (via corruption) others from becoming wealthy. They maintain their big fish in the little pond status. In these countries, the ultra-wealthy can account for 50% or more of total income.
But the OECD nations (who predominantly have a GDP per capita in excess of $30k) are far beyond this stage. To reach OECD levels of economic efficiency requires you to pay the middle and lower classes more (or rather, pay them closer to the actual productivity they're generating). Henry Ford accidentally stumbled upon this when he paid his workers what was a then-unheard-of $5 per day. His workers were paid well enough that they could afford to buy the cars they were producing, which generated more work for them, which meant more workers were hired, which meant more of them could buy cars. which meant more work, etc. This feedback loop helped turn the U.S. into the world's top economy, and made Ford one of the richest men on earth.
As a consequence, the income distribution in OECD nations is skewed heavily towards the middle. For example, the ultra-rich in the U.S. (say, everyone making $1 million/yr or more, about 0.4% of the population) only accounts for 13% of total income. Even if you taxed them at 100% as Warren and Ocasio-Cortez would like to do, that would only be $1.36 trillion in tax revenue. Or just 33% of the 2018 Federal budget ($4.094 trillion). The percentage is even smaller if you include state and local government budgets (another $3.85 trillion). The bulk of income in the U.S. actually goes to those making $50k-$500k a year. Those income brackets accounts for 64% of all income in the U.S., or over $6.5 trillion. You have to tax those middle class to lower upper class people heavily if you wish to pay for the levels of government spending we currently have.
All three offer an app for your phone which will automatically backup new photos (and videos for Google Photos and Office OneDrive). I suppose you could try to abuse Google and Amazon's unlimited offering if you wanted; but most likely your ISP's bandwidth or data cap would be the bottleneck. Not the company's cloud storage capacity, which is measured in exabytes (millions of terabytes). Amazon actually has a trailer they can send you to copy 100 petabytes of data. That's 8333 years worth of data at a 1 TB/mo data cap.
The situation is symmetrical. In a free service, both sides have the same power. At any time, you are allowed to quit using the free service and sign up with a different service. There is nothing the service can do to prevent you from leaving. Likewise, at any time, the free service is allowed to quit offering the service under its original conditions, and re-offer it under different conditions. And there is nothing you can do to prevent this.
The only way to prevent this is to pay for the service for a period of time specified in a contract. Payment constitutes consideration - something given up in exchange for receiving something - and thus creates a binding contract. So if you agree to pay for it for a year (with penalties if you fail to pay), you can lock in the terms and conditions for the duration of your service contract. That's why when a cellular carrier changes their terms and conditions, it releases you from any multi-year contract you may have signed up for. Most carriers instead opt to "grandfather" you in under the old terms and conditions for the duration of your contract to avoid this.
Without consideration, there is no contract, and neither side is obligated to maintain the original agreement terms in perpetuity. (Be careful of this if you let your apartment rent switch to month-to-month. That can be advantageous if you plan to move out in a few months. But if you're planning to stay, it means the landlord can kick you out and replace you with a different tenant. If you wish to stay for a long time, it is in your best interests to negotiate a year-long or multi-year lease.)
And in this case, the weakness will be linking the blockchain to the physical goods. Anyone can still crack open the container and steal oranges during transit. A drug smuggler can still swap a shipment of oranges with a shipment of drugs by switching the labels. And the delivery guy can still take a snapshot of your package on your porch as "proof" it was delivered, then load it back up into his van and take it home.
The "Do Not Track" setting has no legal authority. It was a marketing scheme (scam) by Microsoft to try to get people to switch back to IE. They could advertise that "our browser supports Do Not Track, while Chrome and Firefox do not," leaving out that it's completely voluntary - the website decides whether or not they want to respect your Do Not Track flag.
I don't think you fully understand what's going on. What happens is a web page with crappy javascript code demands a lot of CPU cycles. Windows says "Oh, this thread needs more CPU. Here you go." Other pages then get starved of CPU and load more slowly.
What this change will do is limit the max CPU any one web page can get in competition with others (e.g. when you put a slow-loading page in the background, and open a new tab to load a different page). That way if a site has crappy javascript code, only that site's pages load more slowly. The speed of other pages loading is less affected by the one page with crap code.
I think this is a great solution to address one part of the problem. I've been dealing with it (ironically mostly with Google's pages) with The Great Suspender extension. That disables background tabs after a few minutes being idle in the background. I was having a problem with the Google App pages sucking up too much CPU when they were doing nothing but sitting there in the background. It also deals with other pages like Amazon and CNN which stay active and auto-refresh every few minutes, presumably so you can instantly get the latest version of the page when you switch to the tab, instead of having to wait for a manual refresh. That idea works if you just put a single tab in the background for a while. But it completely falls apart if I leave a couple dozen Amazon product pages in background tabs while I comparison shop.
I'll still use the suspender to stop auto-refresh of web pages I may not view for hours. But this never-slow thing will be nice for immediately dealing with a recalcitrant page which sucks up so much CPU I have problems getting the browser to respond so I can kill the tab.
If they're running fiber to the end of your street, then it's stupid to run ADSL from there to your home. ADSL tops out at 24 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up. VDSL provides much more bandwidth at distances under 1 km. It's capable of hitting 300 Mbps down, 100 Mbps up over Cat 3 for extremely short distances. That's why some ISPs are using it for fiber in the street, with VDSL2 from the street to the home over existing Cat 3 wires.
What's more likely is that AT&T's marketing is trying to obfuscate the limited availability of their fiber network, by intentionally labeling everything (FTTH, fiber + VDSL, and ADSL) as "U-Verse". And you just happened to be in one of the ADSL areas.
This is a scam. You shouldn't have to pay to enable tethering on your mobile plan (unless you have unlimited data). You're paying for x GB/mo of data with your plan. It doesn't matter to the carrier whether you use that data on your phone or on a device tethered to your phone. x GB is x GB.
Charging extra to be able to tether to your phone is like a supermarket charging you one price for a carton of milk that you'll drink straight from a cup, but adding a surcharge if you want to use that carton of milk in a bowl of cereal. Milk is milk. As long as you're buying the same quantity of milk (using the same GB of data per month), the price should be the same no matter how you use it.
In my experience, Apple,Tesla, and renewables fans are the groups most likely to down-mod a post simply because it casts their fandom in a bad light, regardless of it making a good point. Your post said the notch was an undesirable feature, which to an Apple fanboy is a punishable offense.
Shareholders require profits, not growth. Growth is desirable because it's usually coupled with bigger profits, but is not necessary. In the absence of growth, profits can come from increased economic efficiency alone.
e.g. I own a dairy farm, you own a chicken farm. I have a refrigerator full of milk and would like something to eat. You have a refrigerator full of eggs and would like something to drink. The efficiency of our economics is improved if I trade some of my milk for some of your eggs. That is, eggs are more valuable to me than milk; milk is more valuable to you than eggs.
So when we trade milk for eggs, both of us come out winners (we both profit from the transaction). I give up undesired milk to gain desired eggs. You give up undesired eggs to gain desired milk. This is what they mean when they say economics is not a zero-sum game. The physical goods and services may be zero sum, but their value is positive sum (because the value to each participant is different). In other words, economics is not just about making stuff; it's also about distributing that stuff for maximum benefit. You and I can continue our milk and egg trade arrangement in perpetuity. It will continue to benefit us (profit us) even though there's no growth, and even if there's no change.
PCs, tablets, calculators, smart watches, etc. are all computers. Their only difference is processing capacity (usually limited by heat/battery) and screen size (limited by desire to make the thing portable).
The only things stopping phones from replacing your PC (other than for high-power applications like gaming) are display size, difficulty of data entry, general processing power/storage, and operating system inertia (software written for only that OS). Processing power and storage keep improving, to where people's phones are already more than capable of handling most of people's computing tasks. PC-like data entry can be accomplished with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. And many phones can already be hooked up to an external monitor via HDMI (with some abortive attempts at a wireless display standard having already been tried).
So basically the only things preventing your phone from replacing your PC are hardcore 3D gaming, and the inertia of most PC-ish software being available only on Windows. The latter is rapidly eroding (Office became available on Android and iOS a couple years ago). Eventually your phone *will* replace your PC. And probably a smart watch or smart ring will eventually replace your phone (the display and input interface will be a separate unit which connects wirelessly, and can be upgraded/replaced separately like you would replace a monitor, keyboard, and mouse).
I think bitcoin is stupid, and eventually destined for a value of $0. But in winter, the mining cost is essentially zero. 100% of the electricity your computer uses to mine gets converted into waste heat. Except in winter you typically have to heat your home, that heat is useful instead of waste. So all mining does in winter is heat your home with your mining rig, instead of with an electric heater.
You order a delivery meal from a restaurant. A guy brings the food in regular restaurant bowls with regular utensils, not disposable. You eat your food. You put all the bowls, utensils, and waste food outside your door. The guy comes back later to pick everything up, and takes it all back to the restaurant which is better outfitted to handle mass dish cleaning and waste food disposal.
You're assuming the purpose of TFA is investigative journalism. To bring an important issue to the public's attention.
It's not. The purpose is to generate more page loads and thus more advertising revenue. So if inflammatory insinuations - like singling out kids who wear an Apple Watch, or speak with a "Europeant" accent - gets you all in a huff to where you click on TFA, then it's done its job. It's one of the reasons I'm not that critical of comments here from people who haven't read TFA. So many of articles are click-bait that I won't fault someone for using a too-stringent anti-click-bait filter and not reading TFA.
I think everyone's jumping on the wrong correlation here. Affluence is probably the key factor here, not education. These are people who can afford the extra medical expenses for their kids if they do happen to get sick. So they don't vaccinate them for whatever reason, knowing that they can pay for their treatment if they happen to lose that die roll. A less wealthy person might be wary of vaccination, but knows they can't afford to have their kids get sick, so that overrides their aversion and they go ahead and get their kids vaccinated. (Note that this implies the rate of vaccination would be lower if cost were not a factor, meaning that our education about the benefit of vaccination is even more of a failure than vaccination percentages would suggest.)
The correlation with education is probably just coincidental. Both A (don't vaccinate) and B (higher education) are caused by C (more affluent).
Yeah, I suspect that's what's going on with the hurricane path accuracy stat. Both today and 40 years ago, weather data from the affected region is very sparse (we have more weather buoys, but that's about it). The biggest difference is that today there are dozens of different models forecasting hurricane paths. Making it much more likely that one of them will get it right, and forecasters will be able to pat themselves on the back for correctly "predicting" the hurricane's path. This isn't necessarily a result of having better models. The more models you have, the smaller the margin of error. In other words, it will happen just from increasing the number of models, even if the individual models don't improve in accuracy.
I'd like to see that graph of improving hurricane track accuracy made using a single modern model (and no picking and choosing after the fact which model had the best results).
A town hall implies elected government officials with the power to institute change are present to hear citizen arguments. From what I can tell, only advocates for the right to repair were present (nothing against them, I'm one of them), no elected officials. That makes this a seminar or presentation, not a town hall.
Even if elected officials had been present, there's a saying about feedback to Congresscritters. That one hand-written letter is worth a hundred printed form letters. A printed form letter is worth a hundred voicemails. A voicemail is worth a hundred emails. And an email is worth a hundred clicks on a website poll. That is, the amount of effort put into relaying the message matters. Elected officials use the effort needed to gauge how important the issue is to you. If you can't be bothered to do more than clink on an online poll, it must not be very important to you. If it bugs you enough to compose (or copy/paste) an email, it must be somewhat important to you. If you're concerned enough to make a phone call, it must be important to you. If you're worried enough to print out a letter, put it in an envelope, stamp it, and drop it off in a mailbox, it must be very important to you. And if you're so concerned you'll hand-write that letter (to prove it wasn't a form letter), put it in an envelope, stamp it, and drop it off in a mailbox, it must be extremely important to you.
So even if this had really been an online town hall, attending via video conferencing will never have as much impact as physically attending a real town hall meeting. The ease and convenience so important to younger generations today end up watering down the impact of your statement to government officials. Hundreds of people attending a video conference will only convince a politician that a bunch of people spammed a bunch of forums telling people to attend and play it in the background while they played their XBox. Hundreds of people trying to squeeze into a town hall will convince a politician that this issue is really important to voters.
Would it solve the problem of Comcast throttling Netflix unless Netflix paid their extortion fee? Yes it would. But that problem is actually a just a symptom of a greater problem.
The real problem is that there's next to no competition among ISPs. If there were competition and Comcast throttled Netflix as a ploy to extort money from Netflix, Comcast customers who watched Netflix would simply cancel and sign up with a competing ISP. Comcast would be slitting their own throats with such a bone-headed move. We wouldn't need Net Neutrality. The only reason they have the gall to throttle Netflix, the only reason Net Neutrality helps, is because they have a monopoly or near-monopoly in most areas. They know their customers cannot flee to a different ISP, so they're free to do things which intentionally degrades the quality of the service their customers receive.
Why do Comcast, Verizon, et al have near-monopolies? Because the local goverments gave it to them. Often in exchange for service guarantees (e.g. to cover low-income areas) or financial kickbacks. The governments like it because it gives them control over the telecoms (who happily make campaign donations to retain their monopoly). The telecoms like it because the government gives them a monopoly so they can over-charge their customers (more than enough to offset the cost of they campaign contributions they have to make to maintain this arrangement). That is the real problem that needs to be fixed. Not only does it cause the problems Net Neutrality aims to fix, it causes a host of other problems like excessively high prices, excessively low data caps, poor repair service times, incentive money being spent on executive bonuses instead of improving the network, etc.
Net Neutrality is the politicians' way to have their cake and eat it too. They can pretend to be on the customers' side by striking a blow against the big, bad cable monopolies. But since the monopolies are government-granted, they retain control over those monopolies so the telecom companies continue to give campaign contributions to them. It just cements in place this terrible monopoly ISP system we have in place, by taking one of the biggest customer complaints off the table.
If you want to fix this, just rescind the government-granted monopolies. You don't even need national legislation to do this. Just elect people to your city or county government in favor of allowing multiple cable companies to compete in your area. Then it can't be countered just because some bozo gets appointed head of the FCC.
The problem is competition within Canada's telecom system is so lacking, it makes the U.S. (with its government-mandated cable monopolies and vertically integrated carriers preventing you from using devices sold by other carriers) look like paradise in comparison. I looked into getting a Canadian cell phone when I worked there for a couple years. It actually turned out to be cheaper for me to add the Canada roaming option to my U.S. cell phone plan. This is one area where Canada lags far behind the rest of the civilized world.
About a decade ago, I was trying to think of a domain name to register for a website. I wrote a short program to put together English phonemes to generate every possible pronounceable word (up to 7 letters).. Then I had the program do a whois database lookup for each fictional word as a .com domain, outputting a list of the unregistered domains. (Yeah, I'm probably part of the reason why ICANN now makes you solve a captcha before doing a whois lookup).
.com domains were gone. Most of the 5-letter domains were gone too, and the few which weren't sounded horrible. Most of the 2-syllable 6-letter domains were gone. But there were lots of 3-syllable 6-letter domains still available. There were lots of 7-letter domains still available. So many that I killed the program part-way through (at domains starting with the letter 'f' if I remember). The list of available domains it was generating was becoming so long it would've taken me too much time to look through it, trying to find one that seemed decent.
All the 4-letter
I can't speak for everyone. But I hate Apple because they take away your freedom of choice and expression, under the guise of trendiness and security.. In the early 1990s, companies tried to corral us into walled gardens for online access (GEnie, CompuServe, AOL; MSN was originally Microsoft's attempt). We fought hard to make the open Internet the standard for networked communication, where anyone could make any content they wanted available to anyone else in the world, without needing the approval from some corporate or government dweeb. It's painful to watch people naively give up those freedoms and willingly walk into walled gardens like iOS and Facebook because it's the cool thing to do and all their friends are doing it. (I'd include Google, except they at least try to make it easy to get your info in and out, like how you can use alternate stores to get Android apps, not just the Google Play store. So they're more like a garden with open borders.)
Maybe if the Cold War hadn't ended, things like the Berlin Wall would have remained to serve as a metaphor. So people would be more cognizant of what you're really giving up when you choose to live in a walled garden.