Well, atheism isn't a religion (which involves a lot of ceremony and ritual). But it is a faith - an irrational belief in something without proof. Atheism (belief that there is no deity) is based on the rationale that because you cannot prove a positive statement to be false, the burden of proof should be upon those purporting that the statement is true. Fine up to this point, but atheists take it a step further. In the absence of such proof, they believe the negative must be true.
That's a reasonable line of thinking if the only possibilities are true and false. False then becomes your base state, and only things proven true are then not-false. Simple and tidy.
Except it's wrong. Goedel proved with his Incompleteness theorems that all logical systems are incomplete. That is, not everything can be classified as true or false. Some things must fall into a third category - cannot be determined. "This statement is false." Is that true or false? It's neither. What exists in a black hole? I can say unicorns and dragons, you can say they don't. According to our understanding of physics, no information can escape from a black hole, and thus it's impossible for us to ever know which of us is correct.
So the correct base state is actually uncertainty. Experiments can only prove positive statements to be true, and only increase the likelihood that negative statements are true. So the logical, rational belief is agnosticism - uncertainty that there is a deity. A theist is certain there is a deity, but admits that his belief is based on faith. An atheist is certain there is no deity. But best case it's a faith - a belief without proof that the existence of a deity does not fall into this "cannot be determined" category, and thus must be false until proven true. Worst case it's a logical error because the atheist didn't know until reading this post that this third category always exists.
That's why Penn Jillette's analogy with stamp collecting doesn't work. He's incorrectly cast the analogy into something with only two possibilities - stamp collecting or not stamp collecting. The proper analogy needs all three possibilities. e.g. You're sampling random members of the population to find out if they collect stamp. So far nobody sampled as of yet is a stamp collector. The atheist thinks, ergo, there must be no stamp collectors in the population. The agnostic thinks it is still uncertain if there are stamp collectors. The theist believes there must be stamp collectors, even if one hasn't been found yet.
I'll point out it's this same reasoning which causes lay people not to trust the things scientists say. Because scientists who reason like atheists will state with certainty that something is false. Then some experiment shows otherwise, and they suddenly say with certainty that the same thing is true. Regular people have a hard time trusting scientists because they'll tell you one thing with certainty, then tomorrow they may tell you the opposite thing with certainty. And when pressed to explain the flip-flop, they'll say "that's just how science works." Which sounds terribly confusing, if not batshit crazy.
If instead you were to take the agnostic approach to explaining science, the process makes a lot more sense to lay people. First you simply say you're uncertain whether something is true or false. As experiments fail to prove that something, you say it's likely the thing is false but you still can't be certain. But then if an experiment shows that something is true, and you can say with certainty that the thing is true. (This is also why engineers tend to be religious more often than scientists. Engineers deal with uncertainties all the time in their work - they're unavoidable in real-life design tasks - and they're forced to make a best guess based on the data they do have. But scientists try to categorize everything as true or false, and abhor if not outright deny the concept that there are some things which can never be determined.)
The San Bernardino iPhone was too high-profile a case. If the NSA had cracked it for the FBI, then everyone would've known they could crack the iPhone's encryption. Apple would've immediately set about changing it, people with stuff to hide from the NSA would've immediately started adding an additional layer(s) of encryption on top, sources of intel the NSA was getting fro iPhones would've dried up. If the NSA could crack it, the last thing they would do is reveal they could. If you reveal it, that's the last time you get to use it. If you keep it secret, you get to use it over and over again.
So the "fact" that the NSA couldn't crack it for the FBI doesn't really tell us anything - that would've been their story whether or not they could crack it. Heck, for all we know, the NSA did crack it, and this whole story about the FBI paying some random hacker is a charade to cover it up.
That's what I'm trying to do too - tablets lying around the house as convenience devices to replace magazines, sticky notes, a pad of paper, etc.. But the problem is these tablets drain their battery in about a week even when not doing anything. Charging one tablet once a week is trivial. But when you've got a half dozen tablets and no easy way to keep track of all their charges at once, it becomes a chore. Turning them off isn't really an option because it takes about half a minute to turn them back on.
I'd really like a suspend feature like on laptops, where the battery can last a month (or three) when not used, but the tablet wakes up in seconds ready to use at the press of a button. As a bonus that takes care of all the stupid apps which insist on draining your battery even though there is no reason for them to be doing anything because nobody is using the tablet - they can't run if the device is suspended.
What's especially ironic is what the guy on the big screen (representing Big Brother) in the commercial is saying:
"Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives.
"We have created for the first time in all history a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests of any contradictory true thoughts.
"Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth.
"We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause.
"Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion."
It was originally a jab at the IBM PC (IBM was trying to keep it proprietary - its BIOS had just been reverse engineered in 1982). But right now the computer ecosystem which best fits the "garden of one pure ideology, secure from pests" description is iOS.
Doing a Google image search for "two black teenagers," "four black teenagers," and "five black teenagers" shows lots of pics with black teens hanging around (albeit a few mug shots are mixed in). It's only "three black teenagers" which shows mostly mugshots.
Also, most of the "white teenager" pics seem to be stock photos, not actual snapshots. So if there is a bias, it's probably that people looking for stock photos of teens tend to look for white teens (most of the non-mugshot black teen pics look like snapshots). Which could be racist, or could be a reflection of why they would want stock photos of teens. e.g. Maybe the black teen demographic doesn't respond as well to visual ads of generic teens hanging out, and instead respond better to ads with sports or music celebrities (who are disproportionately black)?
On an unrelated note, it's fascinating how often Google Image Search gets the number of people in a pic wrong. You'd think it would be super-accurate given they run facial recognition algorithms in Google Photos.
Just so Intel and AMD could sue them for everything they had for their software "violating" the copyrights on the x86 and AMD64 instruction sets. Unlike trademarks, you don't have to defend your copyrights to retain them. So Intel and AMD could sue Oracle, and only Oracle, for copyright infringement.
I see it as similar to the Chinese artificial islands thing. You can argue and fight with the idiot for decades about why he's wrong and shouldn't do what he's trying to do, or you can just let him have his way, allowing him to self-destruct from the consequences, then you can revert back to the common sense approach. In China's case, let them have their way and declare that artificial islands expand territorial limits. Then every other country on Earth can start building artificial islands just outside mainland China's 200 nm territorial limit. Since territorial limits from different countries are determined by the half-way point, that would reduce China's 200nm limit to about 100nm. Then you build another artificial island at 100nm, reducing their limit to 50nm. And so on until the only seas China can claim extend out just 12 nm from their mainland.
To discourage and punish widescale commercial (for profit) copyright infringement. It's an abuse of the legal system to take those same laws made to combat commercial enterprises profiting to the tune of tens of thousands or even millions of dollars, and apply them to individuals violating copyright to watch a few movies for free. The penalty in the latter case badly needs to be revised to something like 3x the cost of the movie(s).
And why does this have a DMCA tag? The DMCA is a U.S. law, and this story is about a Canadian court decision.
Mainstream support for XP ended in 2009 - 5 years.
Extended support was available until 2014, but that basically means security updates, they keep the online help pages online, and you can pay them if you want their help troubleshooting something.
It looks like Microsoft guarantees security updates for 10 years, but stops other updates after 5 years. Google OTOH doesn't guarantee updates (security or otherwise) after 5 years, but so far has still been providing them. Six of one, a half dozen of the other.
Gonna reply to the anon responses here instead of one at a time.
False. Most terrible landlords change their brand name every 6 months.
Then don't rent from a landlord whose management company is 6 months old. A good landlord will usually be using a management company that's been around for decades, and has a long track history. A good landlord will be successful enough that he has multiple properties, and finds it easier to hire a management company to handle the day-to-day operations. If the landlord is running it all himself, he's more likely to own just the one property, which increases the risk to the tenant of getting a looney.
The reason renters have become very cautious is because (1) Landlords don't give a shit about the living conditions on offer (broken water, broken heating, animal and insect infestations, insecure buildings, illegal wiring, asbestos, etc)
Your and OP's statements are not contradictory. Both landlords and tenants need to be cautious about whom they get into a contract with. Ideally, the realtors who show the properties would do the legwork of background checks on both the landlord and the prospective tenant, since they're the ones in the best position to build up a database of landlord and tenant turnover history. But since that industry is a sham monopoly (uniform pricing) which charges a huge amount disproportionate to services provided, it's fallen upon the landlords and tenants to gather that information themselves.
OP is spot-on that landlords need to do background checks (not as extensive as in TFA, but some background checking) because laws have made it extremely difficult to get rid of a problem tenant. A contractor friend of mine would (in addition to his regular contracting work) buy a second home, fix it up, rent it out while he placed it on the market and waited for it to sell, then do it again. The third or fourth time he did this, he decided to skip the background check (his wife and kids pleaded with him to pay the $500, but he decided it was a waste of money). The tenant he ended up getting was a professional squatter. As soon as he'd been living there long enough to qualify under the state's definition of residence, he immediately stopped paying rent, and used every trick in the book (filing court papers on the last date, filing for every extension possible) to drag out the eviction process as long as possible. After more than a year with no rental income, my friend's savings had been drained, the bank foreclosed on both the rental house and his personal home, and his credit was ruined. (He'd bought a bigger personal home than he could afford with just his contracting work, since fixing up houses and selling them provided such a good profit. But with his money and credit tied up in the house occupied by the squatter, he couldn't buy another house to fix up.) He now lives in a rental apartment, and he's still working as a contractor even though he's getting close to 70 because he needs that income.
and (2) Even though landlords typically charge 50% of the typical tenant's net income, they still gouge for brand new things that aren't listed in the contract and were assumed to be free by all tenants after moving in (Air conditioning surcharge, extra costs for parking, etc).
1) For your own financial well-being, you should never pay more than 33% of your gross income as rent (or mortgage + taxes + insurance). If the only housing you can find exceeds 33%, then you are either looking in too expensive a neighborhood, or you need to be more aggressive in demanding higher pay before accepting a job. (For the income levels you're talking about, this is probably in the neighborhood of 40% of net income.)
2) Rents are determined by the market. If the rent is excessive, that means the demand for housing in the area is much greater than the supply, and it becomes "worth it" for developers to build more
The chances that you're going to use that app when not on a United flight are pretty close to zero. So just uninstall it after the flight. And Android began supporting multiple users with Lollipop. If you're that paranoid about an app getting access to your contacts, calendar, etc, you can just login as a new user and install the app. Then uninstall it when the flight is over.
From the airline's perspective, I can see why they'd want to put this sort of thing into a proprietary app. They don't want to put it on a standard streaming or network file server service because curious (and sometimes malicious) people like us would then immediately begin probing it, seeing what else we could do with it, what security holes they might have left open. This sort of stuff can be fun and games when your feet are firmly on the ground, but don't screw around with it at 30,000 feet. Yeah security problems in these systems need to be highlighted, but we don't need a demonstration with live passengers aboard.
Gasoline emits 8.887 kg of CO2 per gallon of gasoline, so that's 112.5 gallons of gasoline for one ton of CO2. At current prices, that's about $225 worth of gasoline, so this process is "worth it" in terms of recapturing CO2 produced by burning gasoline (basically stick a $1.42/gal tax on gasoline to pay for it).
Electricity generation results in 0.703 kg of CO2 per kWh (same EPA source), so that's 1422 kWh per ton of CO2. At a U.S. average of $0.115/kWh, that's $163.50 worth of electricity. So it would basically double the average price of electricity in the U.S. Still doable, although the similarity of the price means this is getting close to the break-even point where the energy cost to recapture the CO2 approaches the energy gained by producing it (by burning fuel) in the first place.
Cost of sequestration would have to be added on top of this though.
So if someone online is making a politician's life miserable by pointing out his lies and broken promises, they can track him down and toss him in jail on trumped up charges as a way to shut him up.
I'll invoke the dogfooding rule here. If the government thinks this is such a great idea, why don't they go first. Require every staffer, speech writer, letter responder, etc. to attach their real name to everything they write. Someone decides your tax return is wrong? He has to attach is real name to the report. Every trial balloon that's floated? Has to have the political manager's name attached. All politicians' votes must be recorded too - no more voice votes. Try that for 5-10 years and if they don't mind, only then should you try it with the general public.
But how popular will your app be if you try to distribute it on your own site and you have to tell users to go into settings and allow downloads from your website?
That's a limitation with Android's current security settings - not enough granularity for "unknown" sources, and binary (all or nothing) settings. If I try to sideload an app via USB or a website download, it should have a different setting than if I'm getting it via an app (a store). Right now there's only a single setting for both - allow "unknown" sources.
And the setting is binary. Either they're never allowed, or they're always allowed. There's no option to have it ask me if I want to let it install just this one time. I have to change the global settings to allow everything, install it, then change the global settings back to disallow everything.
Difference is an Android developer doesn't have to pay Google 30% if they don't want to. They can always release their Android app via a different store, or offer a direct download from their website. Heck, they can set up their own store if they want (as Amazon has done). They have to pay 30% only if they want to sell it in Google's store. This makes it exactly like the brick and mortar analogue, where the retail store takes a cut of the price where your product is sold.
But with Apple, the only way to distribute your app to users is via their App Store, where you have to pay the Apple tax (be it 30% or 15%). In any other industry, this would be an illegal market restriction. What if you could buy gas for your Ford car only from Mobil gas stations? Not for any technical reason, but because Ford said they needed to do it to insure the quality of the gasoline you put into your Ford vehicle?
But it's Apple, so people's eyes glaze over and their brain shuts down. Even Apple's argument that it "needs" to do it for security doesn't fly. They're responsible for securing their hardware and OS. If people want their apps secured, there should be multiple companies competing to provide that service. And the people can choose which of these protection services they prefer to use. Exactly like Google does - you can use their Play store and whatever screening/protection they provide, or you can use someone else's store, or you can choose to use a store which doesn't purport to offer any protection at all. In an ideal world, Google would have their own iOS store, and Apple would have an Android store, and other companies would have their own stores for both platforms. And whichever company provided the screening and protection services customers want most would end up gaining a larger share of the market. (Apps would also be interchangeable between stores too, like it doesn't matter if you buy your TV from Best Buy or Target, but that's another argument.)
The difference being that when left unattended, the photocopiers, printers, and people's fingers don't walk around under the command of someone halfway around the world, find secret documents, copy them, and mail them off to the person controlling them.
It sounds like they're going to do what the bank which holds my mortgage has done - eliminated all direct Internet access. Essential communications is maintained via email conducted through a relay, which strips out all suspicious attachments like zip files, Word docs, etc. PDFs are allowed, but based on what my loan officer told me, it sounds like any PDF sent to them is viewable only through a special app which lets them view it, but only sends the image to their computer not the actual PDF.
People think the USAF has a shiny toy with a pulse detonation engine. The sound has also been heard over Texas, New York, and the UK. I know the Daily Mail is a tabloid site, but in true MIB style they've got pretty comprehensive coverage of the topic, including an audio recording and pics of the contrail. The contrail pic is from Texas if I remember. There used to be a good article on that in AvWeek, but they put up a paywall.
If I remember, the sounds heard in Southern California in the late 1980s, early 1990s were sonic booms. People assumed it was the Space Shuttle landing at Edwards, except there was no Space Shuttle landing those days. Based on when and where people heard the boom and a little triangulation, I think best estimate was whatever it was was traveling around Mach 5-6. (One of the advantages of flying test flights in Southern California is that you've got this great big ocean you can fly over, so there are fewer witnesses to potentially see/hear your super-secret aircraft.)
We went through this in the 2000s with Toyotas and in the 1980s with Audis. I hear it happened earlier with Subarus (i was too young then). They lawyers call it unintended acceleration, to try to make it sound like the driver isn't to blame.
The auto manufacturers did a ton of research on it, and concluded it was pedal misapplication - people pressing on the accelerator when they thought they were on the brake. It's an innocent mistake (I've done it myself a couple times), but some drivers think they are perfect and refuse to admit they made a mistake, and hire lawyers to sue the car manufacturers. You have these people to thank for the gearshift interlock which prevents you from shifting out of Park unless you first press down the brake pedal. After Audi installed that, all the mysterious cases of "unintended acceleration" disappeared, and all the other car manufacturers added the same "feature" to protect themselves from stupid lawsuits.
In these unintended acceleration stories, the driver always says they were pressing as hard as they could on the brakes. That's because if they weren't doing that, people would blame them for not doing everything they could to stop the car. Here's the thing though. Unless your brakes have failed, your accelerator can never overpower your brakes. On a ICE vehicle, the brakes are simply more powerful - they can generate a bit over 1 g of stopping deceleration, while the engine can only produce about a half g of acceleration (0-60 mph in 5.5 seconds). Electric motors could in theory overpower the brakes, but only the Tesla S in ludicrous mode can exceed 1 g of acceleration (1 g is 0-60 mph in about 2.7 seconds). On hybrid/electric vehicles, there's usually a cutoff which prevents power from going to the motors if the brake is depressed.
So even if the accelerator sensor (which due to the serious nature of 100% uncommanded acceleration doubtless was designed to fail low and tell the car there's 0% depression if something goes wrong) gets stuck at 100%, you can overpower it by stomping on the brakes. And cars have 3 redundant and independent braking systems - hydraulic and mechanical linkages to the foot pedal, and an independent parking brake. So for these stories of unintended acceleration to be true, the sensor would have to get stuck at 100%, and all 3 independent braking systems (5 for hybrid/electrics - they add the aforementioned cutoff and regenerative braking) would have to fail simultaneously during the event, then all 4 (6) systems would have to mysteriously begin working properly again during later testing.
While the odds of this happening aren't zero, they are exceedingly small. It is much much much more likely the guy stomped on the accelerator when he meant to hit the brake.
That seems like a lot of work. The city I lived in just put up signs closing those streets to anyone except residents during rush hour, and passed a law allowing police to ticket people attempting to cut through those streets. Every rush hour, there'd be at least one police car who'd follow one random car turning into the residential street, to see if they went to a house or if they were using it to bypass traffic.
An umbrella insurance policy costs about $200/yr with a $1 million cap. It protects you against lawsuits not covered by home and auto insurance. This one might not qualify because he sold the printer, so it could be argued he was conducting business (which has different liability insurance). But if it was a one-time sale, it might be covered.
Of course it's not protection in the sense of "make such abusive litigation tactics fail so sleazeballs don't try it." It's just protection in the sense of "I won't have to pay for the legal costs of defending myself." The insurance company will probably just pay the guy off to make him go away, thus guaranteeing he'll continue doing the same thing to other people..
Maybe not. Google has been pushing 2 factor authentication pretty hard. If you don't have it set, you're frequently sent to a page suggesting you set it when you login (either an app or verification sent by text to your mobile phone or email to an alternate address). And they throw in freebies like an extra 1GB or 2GB of Google Drive space if you start using 2FA (or if you already are, for running a security check once a year). They also send you an automated email or text notice if a new device has been used to login to your account (successfully or unsuccessfully).
Not only that but a consumer driven economy needs consumers. And those consumers need money. It does not matter whether what you want to sell is priced at 100 or at 10 if your potential consumer has nothing to buy with, and those that could buy already have bought.
Money is irrelevant to the equation. In fact if you try to route a UBI through money, it's doomed to fail. All you'll do is inflate prices to where stuff becomes unaffordable despite everyone getting a UBI, just like the widespread availability of student loans has inflated the price of college tuitions to where you can't afford if despite the loans. When you increase people's ability to pay (demand-side economic fix), prices just rise to compensate. It's like trying to climb out of quicksand by pulling one foot up, then putting your weight on that foot to pull your other foot up. Then someone says "let me help you" and pulls one foot up even further. The net effect is no change in your position, except you and the person trying to help did a lot more work for the exact same results.
Money is not wealth. Money is a bookkeeping tool we've invented to represent wealth. Actual wealth is productivity - the goods and services which are actually produced by the labor we do (or the labor the machines we operate do). As a representation of productivity, its value fluctuates to equalize the cost (in productivity) to produce something, and the value (how much productivity someone is willing to swap in exchange for it). If people you give people money for free (no productivity needed), then that decreases the value of money, leading to increased prices, but the wages of people doing productive things (working) rises in lockstep with those prices. So even though prices go up, wages go up the same amount, and the affordability of stuff remains the same if you're working.
Not so if you're receiving a basic income - since the amount of money you receive (for free) is fixed by some government decision, the amount of stuff you can buy decreases against this inflation. The market is literally adjusting prices and wages to represent the true amount of productivity that went into the money you're receiving. People who receive a UBI are affected because they aren't doing productive work, and the market adjusts prices to reflect that. People who do productive work and receive wages are unaffected because they're being productive, and the market adjusts their wages to offset the higher prices.
To make UBI work, you must decouple it from your market currency. Make it a supply-side fix, instead of a demand-side one like with student loans. You can allocate rations (government buys a bunch of food, gives everyone a card each month which entitles them to pick up x pounds of it from a distribution center). Or you can create a parallel currency which trades in only UBI goods (no steak and lobster dinners for sale). There will be leakage - some people will sell their UBI food ration for cash, or convert the parallel currency into the primary currency. But it won't be anywhere near as bad as if you just distribute UBI in your primary currency.
For a consumer driven economy you cannot accumulate the whole capital in the hands of a few, that does not work out. The net result is what we experience today, lots of capital available for investment and nothing to invest in because there is no viable business you could open, lacking the ability to sell to anyone because nobody who would buy can, lacking the funds.
That's not what happens. Since money is just the representation of wealth, if it becomes so concentrated that it actually impedes people's productivity, it doesn't stall the economy. What happens is the market sees that inefficiency and attempts to correct it - by creating a new form a money to add fluidity to trade. A black market pops up. At first it'll start with bartering and I scratch your back, you scratch mine
Because back in the 1980s computers booted to the BASIC command line interpreter/REPL. Nowadays, there is, more or less, no such thing. Closest similar thing most non-geeks will get to is a browser console, and while that is reasonable debugging tool for pros, it's not a similarly friendly programming tool for beginners.
Every copy of Windows has a command prompt which will let you write and execute batch files. Not that I'd recommend that as a way to learn programming, but most of the functionality is still there. Just not in a popular "language".
I think the bigger impediment is that users expect everything to be in an easy-to-use GUI nowadays, and aren't all that interested in writing code which will only run in a command prompt. (That and the switch from procedural to event driven programming drove everything up an abstraction level.)
Norway is the 10th largest oil exporter. So this is kinda like saying "I will not drive a petroleum-powered car anymore. Instead I will drive an electric car paid for by money I made selling petroleum to you so you can drive your petroleum-powered cars."
If they were really against oil as an energy source, they would stop drilling for it and selling it.
First time in, well, almost forever that that's happened. Yeah IBM gets a lot of patents, but they also spend a lot in R&D. Have done so since the beginning of the 20th century. In 2015 their R&D spending dropped to $5.2 billion, which dropped them out of top 20 R&D companies in the world.
Here's how the others mentioned in TFA stack up:
IBM........ $82b revenue... $5.2b R&D... 6.3% of revenue
Saumsung.. $196b revenue.. $14.1b R&D... 7.2% of revenue
Google..... $66b revenue... $9.8b R&D.. 14.8% of revenue
Intel...... $56b revenue.. $11.5b R&D.. 20.6% of revenue
Qualcomm... $25b revenue... $3.7b R&D.. 14.6% of revenue
Microsoft.. $87b revenue.. $11.4b R&D.. 13.1% of revenue
Apple..... $183b revenue... $6.0b R&D... 3.3% of revenue
Despite Apple's reputation among lay people as an innovator, they're really not. They don't use much of their income on R&D. This is their first year cracking the top 20 in R&D spending, and as you can see the percentage they spend on R&D trails far behind the others.
Even with 100mpg engines that cost almost nothing to fuel,
The problem is you vastly overestimate how useful 100 MPG is. MPG isn't a measure of fuel economy, it's the inverse of fuel economy. This has huge implications for fuel consumption and cost. Imagine you need to travel 100 miles.
See how each time MPG doubles, the fuel saved (and thus money saved) is halved? It's counter-intuitive, but the bigger MPG gets, the less fuel you save. That 50 MPG increase going from 50 to 100 MPG only saves you as much fuel as a 1.8 MPG improvement going from 12.5 to 14.3 MPG. Not 50/1.8 = 27.8x as much fuel savings as the MPG figure implies. The rest of the world uses liters per 100 km to avoid this skewed perception problem that the inverse causes.
Switching from the SUV to a sedan gives you 57% of the fuel savings you'd get switching to a scooter. Switching from a SUV to a hybrid gives you 86% the fuel savings. You're giving up a huge amount of utility, passenger and cargo capacity, and safety switching to a scooter to eek out that extra 14% of fuel savings. (Switching from a sedan to a hybrid gets you 67% the fuel savings you'd get switching to a scooter.) In nearly all cases it's just not worth it, and purchase price becomes the primary reason to get a scooter. (Also counter-intuitively, this means that the best place to be putting hybrid engines is in gas guzzlers like trucks and SUVs. Econoboxes like the Prius are the worst place to put a hybrid - that's where you can save the least amount of fuel possible.)
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Well, atheism isn't a religion (which involves a lot of ceremony and ritual). But it is a faith - an irrational belief in something without proof. Atheism (belief that there is no deity) is based on the rationale that because you cannot prove a positive statement to be false, the burden of proof should be upon those purporting that the statement is true. Fine up to this point, but atheists take it a step further. In the absence of such proof, they believe the negative must be true.
That's a reasonable line of thinking if the only possibilities are true and false. False then becomes your base state, and only things proven true are then not-false. Simple and tidy.
Except it's wrong. Goedel proved with his Incompleteness theorems that all logical systems are incomplete. That is, not everything can be classified as true or false. Some things must fall into a third category - cannot be determined. "This statement is false." Is that true or false? It's neither. What exists in a black hole? I can say unicorns and dragons, you can say they don't. According to our understanding of physics, no information can escape from a black hole, and thus it's impossible for us to ever know which of us is correct.
So the correct base state is actually uncertainty. Experiments can only prove positive statements to be true, and only increase the likelihood that negative statements are true. So the logical, rational belief is agnosticism - uncertainty that there is a deity. A theist is certain there is a deity, but admits that his belief is based on faith. An atheist is certain there is no deity. But best case it's a faith - a belief without proof that the existence of a deity does not fall into this "cannot be determined" category, and thus must be false until proven true. Worst case it's a logical error because the atheist didn't know until reading this post that this third category always exists.
That's why Penn Jillette's analogy with stamp collecting doesn't work. He's incorrectly cast the analogy into something with only two possibilities - stamp collecting or not stamp collecting. The proper analogy needs all three possibilities. e.g. You're sampling random members of the population to find out if they collect stamp. So far nobody sampled as of yet is a stamp collector. The atheist thinks, ergo, there must be no stamp collectors in the population. The agnostic thinks it is still uncertain if there are stamp collectors. The theist believes there must be stamp collectors, even if one hasn't been found yet.
I'll point out it's this same reasoning which causes lay people not to trust the things scientists say. Because scientists who reason like atheists will state with certainty that something is false. Then some experiment shows otherwise, and they suddenly say with certainty that the same thing is true. Regular people have a hard time trusting scientists because they'll tell you one thing with certainty, then tomorrow they may tell you the opposite thing with certainty. And when pressed to explain the flip-flop, they'll say "that's just how science works." Which sounds terribly confusing, if not batshit crazy.
If instead you were to take the agnostic approach to explaining science, the process makes a lot more sense to lay people. First you simply say you're uncertain whether something is true or false. As experiments fail to prove that something, you say it's likely the thing is false but you still can't be certain. But then if an experiment shows that something is true, and you can say with certainty that the thing is true. (This is also why engineers tend to be religious more often than scientists. Engineers deal with uncertainties all the time in their work - they're unavoidable in real-life design tasks - and they're forced to make a best guess based on the data they do have. But scientists try to categorize everything as true or false, and abhor if not outright deny the concept that there are some things which can never be determined.)
The San Bernardino iPhone was too high-profile a case. If the NSA had cracked it for the FBI, then everyone would've known they could crack the iPhone's encryption. Apple would've immediately set about changing it, people with stuff to hide from the NSA would've immediately started adding an additional layer(s) of encryption on top, sources of intel the NSA was getting fro iPhones would've dried up. If the NSA could crack it, the last thing they would do is reveal they could. If you reveal it, that's the last time you get to use it. If you keep it secret, you get to use it over and over again.
So the "fact" that the NSA couldn't crack it for the FBI doesn't really tell us anything - that would've been their story whether or not they could crack it. Heck, for all we know, the NSA did crack it, and this whole story about the FBI paying some random hacker is a charade to cover it up.
That's what I'm trying to do too - tablets lying around the house as convenience devices to replace magazines, sticky notes, a pad of paper, etc.. But the problem is these tablets drain their battery in about a week even when not doing anything. Charging one tablet once a week is trivial. But when you've got a half dozen tablets and no easy way to keep track of all their charges at once, it becomes a chore. Turning them off isn't really an option because it takes about half a minute to turn them back on.
I'd really like a suspend feature like on laptops, where the battery can last a month (or three) when not used, but the tablet wakes up in seconds ready to use at the press of a button. As a bonus that takes care of all the stupid apps which insist on draining your battery even though there is no reason for them to be doing anything because nobody is using the tablet - they can't run if the device is suspended.
It was originally a jab at the IBM PC (IBM was trying to keep it proprietary - its BIOS had just been reverse engineered in 1982). But right now the computer ecosystem which best fits the "garden of one pure ideology, secure from pests" description is iOS.
Doing a Google image search for "two black teenagers," "four black teenagers," and "five black teenagers" shows lots of pics with black teens hanging around (albeit a few mug shots are mixed in). It's only "three black teenagers" which shows mostly mugshots.
Also, most of the "white teenager" pics seem to be stock photos, not actual snapshots. So if there is a bias, it's probably that people looking for stock photos of teens tend to look for white teens (most of the non-mugshot black teen pics look like snapshots). Which could be racist, or could be a reflection of why they would want stock photos of teens. e.g. Maybe the black teen demographic doesn't respond as well to visual ads of generic teens hanging out, and instead respond better to ads with sports or music celebrities (who are disproportionately black)?
On an unrelated note, it's fascinating how often Google Image Search gets the number of people in a pic wrong. You'd think it would be super-accurate given they run facial recognition algorithms in Google Photos.
Just so Intel and AMD could sue them for everything they had for their software "violating" the copyrights on the x86 and AMD64 instruction sets. Unlike trademarks, you don't have to defend your copyrights to retain them. So Intel and AMD could sue Oracle, and only Oracle, for copyright infringement.
I see it as similar to the Chinese artificial islands thing. You can argue and fight with the idiot for decades about why he's wrong and shouldn't do what he's trying to do, or you can just let him have his way, allowing him to self-destruct from the consequences, then you can revert back to the common sense approach. In China's case, let them have their way and declare that artificial islands expand territorial limits. Then every other country on Earth can start building artificial islands just outside mainland China's 200 nm territorial limit. Since territorial limits from different countries are determined by the half-way point, that would reduce China's 200nm limit to about 100nm. Then you build another artificial island at 100nm, reducing their limit to 50nm. And so on until the only seas China can claim extend out just 12 nm from their mainland.
To discourage and punish widescale commercial (for profit) copyright infringement. It's an abuse of the legal system to take those same laws made to combat commercial enterprises profiting to the tune of tens of thousands or even millions of dollars, and apply them to individuals violating copyright to watch a few movies for free. The penalty in the latter case badly needs to be revised to something like 3x the cost of the movie(s).
And why does this have a DMCA tag? The DMCA is a U.S. law, and this story is about a Canadian court decision.
Mainstream support for XP ended in 2009 - 5 years.
Extended support was available until 2014, but that basically means security updates, they keep the online help pages online, and you can pay them if you want their help troubleshooting something.
It looks like Microsoft guarantees security updates for 10 years, but stops other updates after 5 years. Google OTOH doesn't guarantee updates (security or otherwise) after 5 years, but so far has still been providing them. Six of one, a half dozen of the other.
Then don't rent from a landlord whose management company is 6 months old. A good landlord will usually be using a management company that's been around for decades, and has a long track history. A good landlord will be successful enough that he has multiple properties, and finds it easier to hire a management company to handle the day-to-day operations. If the landlord is running it all himself, he's more likely to own just the one property, which increases the risk to the tenant of getting a looney.
Your and OP's statements are not contradictory. Both landlords and tenants need to be cautious about whom they get into a contract with. Ideally, the realtors who show the properties would do the legwork of background checks on both the landlord and the prospective tenant, since they're the ones in the best position to build up a database of landlord and tenant turnover history. But since that industry is a sham monopoly (uniform pricing) which charges a huge amount disproportionate to services provided, it's fallen upon the landlords and tenants to gather that information themselves.
OP is spot-on that landlords need to do background checks (not as extensive as in TFA, but some background checking) because laws have made it extremely difficult to get rid of a problem tenant. A contractor friend of mine would (in addition to his regular contracting work) buy a second home, fix it up, rent it out while he placed it on the market and waited for it to sell, then do it again. The third or fourth time he did this, he decided to skip the background check (his wife and kids pleaded with him to pay the $500, but he decided it was a waste of money). The tenant he ended up getting was a professional squatter. As soon as he'd been living there long enough to qualify under the state's definition of residence, he immediately stopped paying rent, and used every trick in the book (filing court papers on the last date, filing for every extension possible) to drag out the eviction process as long as possible. After more than a year with no rental income, my friend's savings had been drained, the bank foreclosed on both the rental house and his personal home, and his credit was ruined. (He'd bought a bigger personal home than he could afford with just his contracting work, since fixing up houses and selling them provided such a good profit. But with his money and credit tied up in the house occupied by the squatter, he couldn't buy another house to fix up.) He now lives in a rental apartment, and he's still working as a contractor even though he's getting close to 70 because he needs that income.
1) For your own financial well-being, you should never pay more than 33% of your gross income as rent (or mortgage + taxes + insurance). If the only housing you can find exceeds 33%, then you are either looking in too expensive a neighborhood, or you need to be more aggressive in demanding higher pay before accepting a job. (For the income levels you're talking about, this is probably in the neighborhood of 40% of net income.)
2) Rents are determined by the market. If the rent is excessive, that means the demand for housing in the area is much greater than the supply, and it becomes "worth it" for developers to build more
The chances that you're going to use that app when not on a United flight are pretty close to zero. So just uninstall it after the flight. And Android began supporting multiple users with Lollipop. If you're that paranoid about an app getting access to your contacts, calendar, etc, you can just login as a new user and install the app. Then uninstall it when the flight is over.
From the airline's perspective, I can see why they'd want to put this sort of thing into a proprietary app. They don't want to put it on a standard streaming or network file server service because curious (and sometimes malicious) people like us would then immediately begin probing it, seeing what else we could do with it, what security holes they might have left open. This sort of stuff can be fun and games when your feet are firmly on the ground, but don't screw around with it at 30,000 feet. Yeah security problems in these systems need to be highlighted, but we don't need a demonstration with live passengers aboard.
CO2 can be extracted from the atmosphere for about $160/ton.
Gasoline emits 8.887 kg of CO2 per gallon of gasoline, so that's 112.5 gallons of gasoline for one ton of CO2. At current prices, that's about $225 worth of gasoline, so this process is "worth it" in terms of recapturing CO2 produced by burning gasoline (basically stick a $1.42/gal tax on gasoline to pay for it).
Electricity generation results in 0.703 kg of CO2 per kWh (same EPA source), so that's 1422 kWh per ton of CO2. At a U.S. average of $0.115/kWh, that's $163.50 worth of electricity. So it would basically double the average price of electricity in the U.S. Still doable, although the similarity of the price means this is getting close to the break-even point where the energy cost to recapture the CO2 approaches the energy gained by producing it (by burning fuel) in the first place.
Cost of sequestration would have to be added on top of this though.
So if someone online is making a politician's life miserable by pointing out his lies and broken promises, they can track him down and toss him in jail on trumped up charges as a way to shut him up.
I'll invoke the dogfooding rule here. If the government thinks this is such a great idea, why don't they go first. Require every staffer, speech writer, letter responder, etc. to attach their real name to everything they write. Someone decides your tax return is wrong? He has to attach is real name to the report. Every trial balloon that's floated? Has to have the political manager's name attached. All politicians' votes must be recorded too - no more voice votes. Try that for 5-10 years and if they don't mind, only then should you try it with the general public.
That's a limitation with Android's current security settings - not enough granularity for "unknown" sources, and binary (all or nothing) settings. If I try to sideload an app via USB or a website download, it should have a different setting than if I'm getting it via an app (a store). Right now there's only a single setting for both - allow "unknown" sources.
And the setting is binary. Either they're never allowed, or they're always allowed. There's no option to have it ask me if I want to let it install just this one time. I have to change the global settings to allow everything, install it, then change the global settings back to disallow everything.
Difference is an Android developer doesn't have to pay Google 30% if they don't want to. They can always release their Android app via a different store, or offer a direct download from their website. Heck, they can set up their own store if they want (as Amazon has done). They have to pay 30% only if they want to sell it in Google's store. This makes it exactly like the brick and mortar analogue, where the retail store takes a cut of the price where your product is sold.
But with Apple, the only way to distribute your app to users is via their App Store, where you have to pay the Apple tax (be it 30% or 15%). In any other industry, this would be an illegal market restriction. What if you could buy gas for your Ford car only from Mobil gas stations? Not for any technical reason, but because Ford said they needed to do it to insure the quality of the gasoline you put into your Ford vehicle?
But it's Apple, so people's eyes glaze over and their brain shuts down. Even Apple's argument that it "needs" to do it for security doesn't fly. They're responsible for securing their hardware and OS. If people want their apps secured, there should be multiple companies competing to provide that service. And the people can choose which of these protection services they prefer to use. Exactly like Google does - you can use their Play store and whatever screening/protection they provide, or you can use someone else's store, or you can choose to use a store which doesn't purport to offer any protection at all. In an ideal world, Google would have their own iOS store, and Apple would have an Android store, and other companies would have their own stores for both platforms. And whichever company provided the screening and protection services customers want most would end up gaining a larger share of the market. (Apps would also be interchangeable between stores too, like it doesn't matter if you buy your TV from Best Buy or Target, but that's another argument.)
The difference being that when left unattended, the photocopiers, printers, and people's fingers don't walk around under the command of someone halfway around the world, find secret documents, copy them, and mail them off to the person controlling them.
It sounds like they're going to do what the bank which holds my mortgage has done - eliminated all direct Internet access. Essential communications is maintained via email conducted through a relay, which strips out all suspicious attachments like zip files, Word docs, etc. PDFs are allowed, but based on what my loan officer told me, it sounds like any PDF sent to them is viewable only through a special app which lets them view it, but only sends the image to their computer not the actual PDF.
People think the USAF has a shiny toy with a pulse detonation engine. The sound has also been heard over Texas, New York, and the UK. I know the Daily Mail is a tabloid site, but in true MIB style they've got pretty comprehensive coverage of the topic, including an audio recording and pics of the contrail. The contrail pic is from Texas if I remember. There used to be a good article on that in AvWeek, but they put up a paywall.
If I remember, the sounds heard in Southern California in the late 1980s, early 1990s were sonic booms. People assumed it was the Space Shuttle landing at Edwards, except there was no Space Shuttle landing those days. Based on when and where people heard the boom and a little triangulation, I think best estimate was whatever it was was traveling around Mach 5-6. (One of the advantages of flying test flights in Southern California is that you've got this great big ocean you can fly over, so there are fewer witnesses to potentially see/hear your super-secret aircraft.)
We went through this in the 2000s with Toyotas and in the 1980s with Audis. I hear it happened earlier with Subarus (i was too young then). They lawyers call it unintended acceleration, to try to make it sound like the driver isn't to blame.
The auto manufacturers did a ton of research on it, and concluded it was pedal misapplication - people pressing on the accelerator when they thought they were on the brake. It's an innocent mistake (I've done it myself a couple times), but some drivers think they are perfect and refuse to admit they made a mistake, and hire lawyers to sue the car manufacturers. You have these people to thank for the gearshift interlock which prevents you from shifting out of Park unless you first press down the brake pedal. After Audi installed that, all the mysterious cases of "unintended acceleration" disappeared, and all the other car manufacturers added the same "feature" to protect themselves from stupid lawsuits.
In these unintended acceleration stories, the driver always says they were pressing as hard as they could on the brakes. That's because if they weren't doing that, people would blame them for not doing everything they could to stop the car. Here's the thing though. Unless your brakes have failed, your accelerator can never overpower your brakes. On a ICE vehicle, the brakes are simply more powerful - they can generate a bit over 1 g of stopping deceleration, while the engine can only produce about a half g of acceleration (0-60 mph in 5.5 seconds). Electric motors could in theory overpower the brakes, but only the Tesla S in ludicrous mode can exceed 1 g of acceleration (1 g is 0-60 mph in about 2.7 seconds). On hybrid/electric vehicles, there's usually a cutoff which prevents power from going to the motors if the brake is depressed.
So even if the accelerator sensor (which due to the serious nature of 100% uncommanded acceleration doubtless was designed to fail low and tell the car there's 0% depression if something goes wrong) gets stuck at 100%, you can overpower it by stomping on the brakes. And cars have 3 redundant and independent braking systems - hydraulic and mechanical linkages to the foot pedal, and an independent parking brake. So for these stories of unintended acceleration to be true, the sensor would have to get stuck at 100%, and all 3 independent braking systems (5 for hybrid/electrics - they add the aforementioned cutoff and regenerative braking) would have to fail simultaneously during the event, then all 4 (6) systems would have to mysteriously begin working properly again during later testing.
While the odds of this happening aren't zero, they are exceedingly small. It is much much much more likely the guy stomped on the accelerator when he meant to hit the brake.
That seems like a lot of work. The city I lived in just put up signs closing those streets to anyone except residents during rush hour, and passed a law allowing police to ticket people attempting to cut through those streets. Every rush hour, there'd be at least one police car who'd follow one random car turning into the residential street, to see if they went to a house or if they were using it to bypass traffic.
An umbrella insurance policy costs about $200/yr with a $1 million cap. It protects you against lawsuits not covered by home and auto insurance. This one might not qualify because he sold the printer, so it could be argued he was conducting business (which has different liability insurance). But if it was a one-time sale, it might be covered.
Of course it's not protection in the sense of "make such abusive litigation tactics fail so sleazeballs don't try it." It's just protection in the sense of "I won't have to pay for the legal costs of defending myself." The insurance company will probably just pay the guy off to make him go away, thus guaranteeing he'll continue doing the same thing to other people..
Maybe not. Google has been pushing 2 factor authentication pretty hard. If you don't have it set, you're frequently sent to a page suggesting you set it when you login (either an app or verification sent by text to your mobile phone or email to an alternate address). And they throw in freebies like an extra 1GB or 2GB of Google Drive space if you start using 2FA (or if you already are, for running a security check once a year). They also send you an automated email or text notice if a new device has been used to login to your account (successfully or unsuccessfully).
Money is irrelevant to the equation. In fact if you try to route a UBI through money, it's doomed to fail. All you'll do is inflate prices to where stuff becomes unaffordable despite everyone getting a UBI, just like the widespread availability of student loans has inflated the price of college tuitions to where you can't afford if despite the loans. When you increase people's ability to pay (demand-side economic fix), prices just rise to compensate. It's like trying to climb out of quicksand by pulling one foot up, then putting your weight on that foot to pull your other foot up. Then someone says "let me help you" and pulls one foot up even further. The net effect is no change in your position, except you and the person trying to help did a lot more work for the exact same results.
Money is not wealth. Money is a bookkeeping tool we've invented to represent wealth. Actual wealth is productivity - the goods and services which are actually produced by the labor we do (or the labor the machines we operate do). As a representation of productivity, its value fluctuates to equalize the cost (in productivity) to produce something, and the value (how much productivity someone is willing to swap in exchange for it). If people you give people money for free (no productivity needed), then that decreases the value of money, leading to increased prices, but the wages of people doing productive things (working) rises in lockstep with those prices. So even though prices go up, wages go up the same amount, and the affordability of stuff remains the same if you're working.
Not so if you're receiving a basic income - since the amount of money you receive (for free) is fixed by some government decision, the amount of stuff you can buy decreases against this inflation. The market is literally adjusting prices and wages to represent the true amount of productivity that went into the money you're receiving. People who receive a UBI are affected because they aren't doing productive work, and the market adjusts prices to reflect that. People who do productive work and receive wages are unaffected because they're being productive, and the market adjusts their wages to offset the higher prices.
To make UBI work, you must decouple it from your market currency. Make it a supply-side fix, instead of a demand-side one like with student loans. You can allocate rations (government buys a bunch of food, gives everyone a card each month which entitles them to pick up x pounds of it from a distribution center). Or you can create a parallel currency which trades in only UBI goods (no steak and lobster dinners for sale). There will be leakage - some people will sell their UBI food ration for cash, or convert the parallel currency into the primary currency. But it won't be anywhere near as bad as if you just distribute UBI in your primary currency.
That's not what happens. Since money is just the representation of wealth, if it becomes so concentrated that it actually impedes people's productivity, it doesn't stall the economy. What happens is the market sees that inefficiency and attempts to correct it - by creating a new form a money to add fluidity to trade. A black market pops up. At first it'll start with bartering and I scratch your back, you scratch mine
Every copy of Windows has a command prompt which will let you write and execute batch files. Not that I'd recommend that as a way to learn programming, but most of the functionality is still there. Just not in a popular "language".
I think the bigger impediment is that users expect everything to be in an easy-to-use GUI nowadays, and aren't all that interested in writing code which will only run in a command prompt. (That and the switch from procedural to event driven programming drove everything up an abstraction level.)
Norway is the 10th largest oil exporter. So this is kinda like saying "I will not drive a petroleum-powered car anymore. Instead I will drive an electric car paid for by money I made selling petroleum to you so you can drive your petroleum-powered cars."
If they were really against oil as an energy source, they would stop drilling for it and selling it.
First time in, well, almost forever that that's happened. Yeah IBM gets a lot of patents, but they also spend a lot in R&D. Have done so since the beginning of the 20th century. In 2015 their R&D spending dropped to $5.2 billion, which dropped them out of top 20 R&D companies in the world.
........ $82b revenue ... $5.2b R&D ... 6.3% of revenue .. $196b revenue .. $14.1b R&D ... 7.2% of revenue ..... $66b revenue ... $9.8b R&D .. 14.8% of revenue ...... $56b revenue .. $11.5b R&D .. 20.6% of revenue ... $25b revenue ... $3.7b R&D .. 14.6% of revenue .. $87b revenue .. $11.4b R&D .. 13.1% of revenue ..... $183b revenue ... $6.0b R&D ... 3.3% of revenue
Here's how the others mentioned in TFA stack up:
IBM
Saumsung
Google
Intel
Qualcomm
Microsoft
Apple
Despite Apple's reputation among lay people as an innovator, they're really not. They don't use much of their income on R&D. This is their first year cracking the top 20 in R&D spending, and as you can see the percentage they spend on R&D trails far behind the others.
The problem is you vastly overestimate how useful 100 MPG is. MPG isn't a measure of fuel economy, it's the inverse of fuel economy. This has huge implications for fuel consumption and cost. Imagine you need to travel 100 miles.
12.5 MPG full-size SUV = 8 gallons
25 MPG sedan = 4 gallons
50 MPG hybrid = 2 gallons
100 MPG scooter = 1 gallon
See how each time MPG doubles, the fuel saved (and thus money saved) is halved? It's counter-intuitive, but the bigger MPG gets, the less fuel you save. That 50 MPG increase going from 50 to 100 MPG only saves you as much fuel as a 1.8 MPG improvement going from 12.5 to 14.3 MPG. Not 50/1.8 = 27.8x as much fuel savings as the MPG figure implies. The rest of the world uses liters per 100 km to avoid this skewed perception problem that the inverse causes.
Switching from the SUV to a sedan gives you 57% of the fuel savings you'd get switching to a scooter. Switching from a SUV to a hybrid gives you 86% the fuel savings. You're giving up a huge amount of utility, passenger and cargo capacity, and safety switching to a scooter to eek out that extra 14% of fuel savings. (Switching from a sedan to a hybrid gets you 67% the fuel savings you'd get switching to a scooter.) In nearly all cases it's just not worth it, and purchase price becomes the primary reason to get a scooter. (Also counter-intuitively, this means that the best place to be putting hybrid engines is in gas guzzlers like trucks and SUVs. Econoboxes like the Prius are the worst place to put a hybrid - that's where you can save the least amount of fuel possible.)